Cuckoo Song (39 page)

‘He came home one evening to find his wife dead, her body looking, in his words, “drained”. The cradle was empty, and rocking vigorously as though it had just been kicked. He
heard the back door bang, and when he ran to look out he could see a white shape fleeing through the darkness. It was the size and shape of a tiny baby, but leaped with unnatural agility. It turned
for a second to look back at him, then vanished into the night. He says it was smiling.’

Trista was lost between despair and pity. Her hopes of convincing Mr Grace softly shattered.

‘What about the police?’ she asked.

‘I never wanted them involved in the first place,’ answered Piers, ‘but last night I argued with Mr Grace. I wanted to find the Architect and make terms; he said it was
hopeless. He told me he was taking matters out of my hands for my own good. He went to the police and now the investigation is beyond my control.’

‘Do what you can to stop them, Mr Crescent,’ Trista said bluntly. ‘Triss’s life probably depends upon it.’ She turned away from Piers and dropped swiftly from the
sill. Her feet struck the ground as lightly as pine needles.

‘Wait!’ shouted Piers as she sprinted for the back gate. ‘There are so many things I need to ask you!’

Trista did not linger for his questions, but plunged into the network of alleyways, racing through turn after turn. She had to find her way back to Violet and Pen.

The birds in every tree she passed were as restless as the breeze. Her distracted brain made out the words in their rasps and chirrups, and she realized that they were not true birds at all.
Glancing at a tree grey with beating wings, she thought she saw wizened, featherless faces leer back.

Traitor! Traitor! We
heard
you. Crescent’s little helper. Plotting against the Architect.

Wait till the Architect hears! Wait till we tell him what the thorn-doll said!

Traitor! Traitor!

There was a jubilant viciousness in the tone, as the last word was tossed to and fro between them like a child’s ball. Perhaps throughout her conversation with Piers, the bird-things had
been lurking in the eaves, their wicked, tiny ears sucking up every word.

With a massed, needle-thin shriek of derision, the winged shapes burst as one from every tree in the avenue, whirled around Trista until she felt the lid of the world might unscrew, and then
flung themselves up into the sky like reverse rain and were gone.

Trista felt chill. The bird-things would report back, and the Architect would know that she was not, after all, to be counted among his friends. The Architect, with his wild, tenacious rages and
his vindictiveness towards any who betrayed him.

But she had no time to think about that now – she had to find the others . . .

‘Trista!’

At the sound of her own peculiar name, Trista turned and was astonished to see Violet straddling her motorcycle parked at the edge of the main thoroughfare. Pen was standing up in the sidecar
waving both arms. Trista’s heart swelled with relief and love, and she ran over.

‘Are you all right?’ was Violet’s first question, her grey eyes earnest and concerned. Trista had been braced for an angry tirade and could do little more than nod.

‘Trista ran away!’ pointed out Pen. ‘Why isn’t
she
in trouble?’

‘Because it was my fault, not hers,’ Violet answered levelly.

‘How did you find me?’ asked Trista in a small voice.

‘Pen told me what happened,’ Violet explained, ‘so I guessed you would head back to the Crescent house to find something to eat. It’s what I would have done in your
shoes. Though that doesn’t mean it was a good idea. Quick – get in. We don’t want to be hanging around this close to Pen’s home.’

When Trista was back in the sidecar, Violet kicked down on the starter viciously, as if it had caused all their troubles.

Chapter 37

The Old Docks had not faded gently. They did not look sad, like the primly peeling paint of the Victorian bathing huts you sometimes saw in coastal towns where the tide of luck
had gone out. Neglect had given the Old Docks a dangerous air, like a half-starved dog.

Violet drew up on a riverside street where a drab chorus line of three-storey houses stared out across the water. For the last five minutes, the motorcycle’s roar had been punctuated by
occasional stutters, and this time as she killed the engine it died fretfully.

‘Fuel’s low,’ she muttered with a frown. ‘And the police may be watching out for me if I try to buy more petroleum.’

‘Why doesn’t Father stop them?’ demanded Pen. ‘Triss – you said he was on
our
side now! He
can’t
let them arrest Violet!’

‘He’s not in control any more.’ Trista could not bring herself to explain further. Piers’s harrowed face was still clear in her memory. ‘But perhaps he will try to
help.’

‘And he wasn’t angry with me?’ Pen asked.

‘No, Pen,’ Trista answered gently. ‘He wasn’t.’

‘Then I expect it’s a trick,’ Pen declared in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘He’s
always
angry with me.’

‘You’ve been missing for two days,’ Violet reminded her. ‘Perhaps he’s starting to forget how annoying you are.’

Even now that her hunger had been sated, Trista still shivered at the memory of her last conversation with Pen. The smaller girl, however, seemed to have shrugged off the whole episode.

Both Trista and Pen wore cheap headscarves to cover their hair, in the hope it would make them slightly less recognizable.

Trista was aware of a growing sense of unease as she looked around her. It was not just the down-at-heel area that was gnawing at her instincts, she realized. To her ears the breeze had a faint
dry buzz to it. The sky looked like china.

‘Is something wrong?’ Violet asked her quietly, with a frown.

Trista swallowed.

‘There are Besiders here somewhere,’ she whispered back.

‘Are those the boats?’ asked Pen in carrying tones, as she scrambled out of the sidecar and headed towards the water.

Some of the wooden jetties had not yielded to time and the waters, and still jutted out on to the river. Sure enough, moored to them and around them were a number of vessels. By far the largest
was a shabby-looking barge, the glass of its portholes fogged with grime. There were some open fishing boats, each with a solitary slender mast, and a number of small rowing boats.

Trista climbed out of the sidecar and hurried to keep pace with Pen, who was running for the nearest jetty.

‘Careful, Pen!’ she called. ‘The boards might be rotten!’

To Trista’s surprise, Pen gave her a shy glance and slowed, waiting to take Trista’s hand. Pen ignoring her, Pen shouting at her – these were easier to deal with than
Pen’s matter-of-fact trust.

Somehow the safety of another person, a smaller person, had been thrust into Trista’s hands. It frightened her. She wondered if mothers felt scared at having so much power over their
children. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they wished there was somebody to tell them if they were doing things wrong. She felt a sudden, unexpected sting of sympathy for the Crescent parents.

While Violet hid the motorcycle down an alley, Trista and Pen walked stiffly down the jetty, glancing at the boats. Trista tried to read the names painted on the sides, but the peeling paint had
obliterated each and every one. One boat appeared to be called the
Si--er Wy-m
. Next to it nestled the
Ch----r
and the
Wail--g Gh---
.

‘Where are all the people?’ hissed Pen.

‘I don’t know,’ Trista whispered back. The boats all had an abandoned look, like empty peapods. And then, all of sudden, one of them was not so empty after all.

There was an imperceptible moment of shift. It was like that instant where a patch of earth flutters and shows itself to be a brown bird, or a leaf twitches and becomes a lacewing. Somehow, in
the jumble of sun-bleached deckchairs, rope coils and old crates painted with curling slogans, there must always have been a man and woman sitting on the barge’s deck in plain view. Now they
stood up and became obvious.

Triss swallowed to smother her surprise. Pen gave a short, sharp squeak.

Neither of the strangers was young, but it was hard to be sure how old they were. Their skin was pale and greyish, with a tired, wet-weather look to it. Their hair was the colour of damp sand,
and something about their eyes made Trista think of oysters.

Both were wearing floor-length grey-brown coats that set bells ringing in Trista’s memory. After a moment she remembered the coat the Architect had worn in the room behind the cinema, and
realized that these coats were made of the same strange dull fabric. The other garments she glimpsed were
wrong.
The woman wore an old-fashioned plum-coloured dress with a bustle, like the
sort Trista had seen a grand lady wearing in a chocolate-box picture. The man had seemingly normal trousers, but there were brown ribbons criss-crossing up them, binding them to his legs.

‘Are we in Ellchester, pretty ladies?’ asked the man. A flock of passing gulls made his voice hard to hear, and Trista had to shake her head to clear it. She felt as if somebody just
behind her was whispering in her ear, telling her that the gentleman had actually said something perfectly normal, and that he did not have a smile like a sick wolf.

‘Yes!’ Pen declared with a boldness that told Trista she was frightened.

The woman’s gaze trickled down Trista’s face like cold oil.

‘The little one,’ she breathed, ‘is she yours?’

Again the imaginary whisper was busy at Trista’s ear, or rather inside her mind, telling her how charming and unthreatening the woman was.

‘She’s my sister,’ Trista answered as brightly as she could, while taking step after step backwards. ‘It is so nice to meet you, but we . . . have to go back to our
mother now.’

The two girls turned about and returned to Violet, steps brisk. All the while, the back of Trista’s neck tingled as she listened to sounds from the barge.

‘. . . such nice shin bones . . .’ she heard the woman whisper.

Trista and Pen clung silently to Violet’s sleeves as the couple approached them along the jetty, and then walked past, proceeding up the road with a careful, stilted gait. Violet glanced
down at the girls with a question in her eyes.

‘They’re Besiders,’ whispered Trista, once she was sure the pair were out of earshot.

Violet’s expression barely changed, aside from a pucker of tension at the corners of her mouth. She did not look over her shoulder at the strangers.

‘How can you tell?’ she murmured very quietly.

Trista stared at her. ‘Can’t
you
tell?’

‘They’re like bonfire guys come to life!’ hissed Pen. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

Trista dared a glance at the couple, who had come to a halt outside a tea room. The man seemed to be having some trouble working out how to use the door handle.

‘I think they’re doing what the Architect does to make people see him as handsome,’ she whispered. ‘It’s probably the same thing the bird-things do, so everyone
thinks they’re just birds. Lying to people’s minds without saying anything. But those two over there . . . I don’t think they’re very good at it.’

‘I had an odd feeling about them, but . . .’ Violet trailed off, frowning.

‘It’s as if they’re wearing a lie, but it doesn’t
fit
them.’ Trista tried to straighten her thoughts. ‘They haven’t buttoned it the right way,
so it’s baggy in some places and coming away in others.’

And maybe Pen and I can see through it more easily because we’ve had more dealings with the Besiders
, she added silently in her head.
I’m almost one of them, and
we’ve both been to the Underbelly. It’s as if we have a stamp on our passport.

‘Well, we can’t stand here in the street,’ muttered Violet, looking warily about her. She gave the tea room an appraising glance, then pulled off her gloves and strode
resolutely towards it, Trista and Pen keeping pace.

The tea room looked self-possessed but a little weather-worn. Celeste would probably have sniffed at it for being ‘plain’ and ‘frequented by all sorts’. Compared to the
pretty Lyons tea shops with their fancy cakes in the window, it did look a bit drab.

Violet pushed the door open, and the girls filed in behind her. They traipsed through the ground-floor bakery, then up the stairs to the first floor.

The tea shop itself had walls the pale colour of egg custard, interrupted by occasional paintings of nursery-book scenes where wispy fairies danced with mice. There were about twenty square
tables, two-thirds of them occupied. A couple of female staff in aprons hurried to and fro bearing plates of cake, and making ready the pots at the corner counter, with its row of great steel urns,
spotted with age.

A smell of cooking sausages made Trista’s stomach leapfrog. With a shock she realized that it was probably lunchtime. The day was seeping out of her fist like so much dry sand.

‘I’m
really
hungry,’ declared Pen in a half-growl, half-whine.

Violet chose a table in the corner by the window, so that they could keep a discreet eye on the street.

While Violet ordered crumpets and tea from the waitress at the counter, Trista cast a careful glance across the dining area. At a distant table she saw the mysterious couple from the boat, heads
stooped together in earnest conference. Then her eye strayed to the next table, and the next, and the next . . .

A twitch of the head that was too rapid, too hawk-like. A flash of silver in the eyes. A furtive licking of a jam knife with a long tongue. Boots that in shadow seemed to have toes . . .

‘What is it?’ murmured Violet, as she returned to the table.

‘Other Besiders,’ breathed Trista.

Violet nodded very slowly, taking in the information. ‘How many?’

‘Do you see the waitresses?’ whispered Trista. ‘And the two ladies eating bacon over there? And the old man in the worn-out hat, and the young man with the
newspaper?’

Violet nodded.