CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Careless Talk Costs Lives

Edie hit the pavement at the end of the pedestrian crossing and trotted downhill, turning right and heading under the dark railway overpass at the bottom of the slope. She saw the white triangular shape of the Black Friar pub beyond, jutting toward the Thames like the prow of a landlocked ship.

She stopped as a taxi slowed and turned past her, heading up the hill. When it had passed, she didn’t continue crossing the road. She just stood there, staring at the pub facade; not at what was on it, but rather at what wasn’t. The clock below was stuck at five to seven, but above it, where the statue of the Black Friar normally stood like a figurehead, was a blank plinth.

The Friar was gone, and the empty space stared back at Edie like a threat.

She’d been running all the questions she wanted to ask him through her head, trying so hard to imagine what he’d say, how he might help, how she might have to cajole him into doing so, so that the one scenario she hadn’t catered for was that he might not be there to ask in the first place. She also hadn’t thought how she might get into the pub if he wasn’t there to let her in, with his jovial laugh and jangling keys. Another car turned in front of her and splashed the curbside puddle across her ankles, jolting her out of her frozen state.

“Right,” she said, smacking her palm with heel of George’s shoe. “Right.”

She jogged across the road and under a railway bridge as a train rumbled ominously overhead. She rounded the point of the building and slowed, suddenly wary.

The door to the pub stood open, but the lights were off. As she approached it she saw two builders carry out a stack of planks and load them into the back of a white van double-parked near the curb. Edie flattened herself against the side of the building and went very still, concentrating on not being seen. Not being seen was a skill she’d realized she had very early on in her life. Sometimes she’d thought people were just ignoring her, but she’d later decided that they just found it hard to see her a lot of the time, and this was because she could, when she concentrated, be very still and unnoticeable. Once she’d noticed this was something she could do, she did it more and more, really putting a lot of mental effort into making herself invisible. She knew she wasn’t actually invisible, but she also knew that she had something that made people’s eyes slide off her as if she were covered in nonstick coating.

She waited for the men to go back inside the pub, then slid quickly up to the open door and pressed her back against the outside wall. She slipped the frosted circle of sea-glass out of her pocket and checked it. It was dull and unthreatening, no inner fire kindling within to warn of the closeness of danger. Edie slipped it back into her coat, and as she did so, she felt the heavy lump of the dragon’s head in the pocket of George’s coat bump against her thigh. She knew whatever had happened to make him disappear was bad, because he’d said that he would stay with her, and his word was good—and even if it wasn’t, he’d never have run off and left her wearing a coat that contained such a precious object.

Before she could think more about this, the builders came back out, knees buckling under the weight of a second, bigger stack of planks. They walked it right past her as she stood there, not breathing. As soon as the second man had passed her, she pivoted neatly and slipped inside the door, into the gloom.

The interior was much the same as it had been the last time she’d been there, still shrouded with drop cloths and littered with builder’s jumble. She heard the rear door of the van slam and feet heading back toward her. She lifted the edge of a drop cloth and bent double beneath a low pub table, flicking the cloth back into place to hide her. She held her breath again and listened as one man walked into the room. He picked up something that clanked like a toolbox, switched off the lights, and walked out again. She heard the door shut with the finality of a church door slamming, and keys turning in the lock. As she relaxed a fraction and breathed in quiet shallow breaths, she heard the hollow thump of the van’s side door closing and the noise as it drove off into the traffic on the main road beyond.

She still didn’t move for about five minutes, just crouched there in the darkening room behind the grubby canvas of the drop cloth, listening for noises made by anyone or anything locked in with her. When the complete absence of sound or movement from anywhere had told its incontrovertible story of emptiness and abandonment, she rolled out from under the table and walked purposefully toward the bar. The room smelled rank and overheated. It smelled of workmen and wet plaster.

She shrugged out of George’s jacket and put it on the countertop. She boosted herself up onto it, swiveled her legs over, and dropped onto the barman’s side in one decisive movement. She bent down and examined the cardboard boxes stacked neatly along the foot of the bar. She plunged her hand into the torn hole in the side of the one with pink writing on it and fished out a pair of prawn-cocktail crisp packets.

She was so hungry that she’d torn the first one open and was munching a mouthful of tangy potato shards into starchy shrapnel by the time she stood up again.

She closed her eyes and allowed herself the momentary pleasure of enjoying the taste and feel of eating. Then she got down to business.

“Okay,” she lisped through a full mouth, “come down here. We need to talk. . . .”

Nothing but silence answered her.

She opened her eyes and tipped the other half of the packet straight into her mouth. She chomped happily for a moment, clearing a passageway for her next words.

“Seriously. Don’t make me come in there after you. . . .”

Silence. She reached under the bar and came out with a bottle of ginger beer. She stuck it in the opener screwed to the inner wall of the counter and popped the cap without looking. She chugged a couple of mouthfuls and swilled the impacted potato wodge from the spaces between her teeth. Then she burped and smacked the heavy glass bottle onto the bar top.

“Oi. Tragedy. I need some straight answers.”

She made a point of not looking into the dark alcove beyond the three low arches to her right. To the trained ear it was entirely clear that this was where all the silence was coming from.

“I know you’re there.”

Silence. And then, just as she was opening her mouth to speak, another voice dodged quietly out from under the arches.

“No I ain’t.”

It was a cockney voice. Edie hid a smile by popping the second bag of crisps and pouring some of them into her mouth.

“Where’s the Friar?” she asked.

Now that it had leaked a voice, the silence seemed much more eloquent. It spoke of someone trying to find a way to avoid a straight answer, she thought.

A small throat cleared itself. “’E’s not here an’ all.”

“You’re both not here?”

“No. Yes. Er. Yes . . . only ’e’s more not ’ere than what I am. See?”

A tousled head of bronze hair poked into view at the top of one of the arches, hanging upside down; then a face dropped into view, the impish face of a street cherub carrying a mask, which a sculptor had carved into the distinctive features of Tragedy. His face was grinning and mischievous.

“I do now,” Edie said drily.

“You’re in a pickle.”

“Am I?”

“Biggest pickle in the barrel is wot I heard.”

“Heard from who?”

“Dunno.” He dropped to the ground and looked at her. He looked at the mask he held in his hand. He put it in front of his face and then took it away, grimace giving way to smile.

“You get all sorts in a pub. Keep your ears open, you pick up a lot of stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

He hid behind the mask again, and then half took it off, winking with the one visible eye. “‘Careless talk costs lives.’”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”

“‘Careless talk costs lives.’ You know.”

“No. I wouldn’t ask if I knew.”

“It’s what they say. What they used to say.”

“Who?”

“I dunno, do I? Them. Everyone. There was posters. We had one over there.”

“When?”

“In the war. You know. When they was dropping bombs and all that. In the wossname. The Blitz. You remember.”

She realized he was talking about the Second World War.

“The Blitz?”

He looked pleased. His little chest swelled in front of her, and he nodded enthusiastically. “There you go. You remember. We had the poster over there. You liked it.”

“I wasn’t alive during the war. Not that war.”

His eyes flicked left and right and then centered on her beneath a newly wrinkled brow. “Wasn’t you?”

She shook her head. “My mum wasn’t alive in that war.”

“I thought you . . .”

“I’m twelve.”

“Well, that don’t mean nothing. That’s older than me. I think. I mean, I think I’m not twelve. Not yet.”

He began to look confused.

“You look about ten. But then you’ll always be ten, won’t you?”

“Will I?”

“You will. Statues don’t get old. You’ll have been ten in the war like you’re ten now. But I wasn’t born, my mum wasn’t born. I don’t even think her mum was born. . . .”

The furrows on his brow curved and deepened. “But you liked the poster. I’m sure I remember.”

She shook her head. “I never saw any poster.”

He held her gaze for a couple of beats longer. “I thought you did. I—”

“I didn’t.” She cut him off hard. She didn’t have time to waste.

He looked offended and suddenly deflated. He twirled the mask in his hands and examined his feet. “Okay.”

His toe traced a pattern in the carpet. “It’s just that I seen so many things for so long that I get it all in a ball, you know? Like knots. It all gets tangled. Like, I think I remember stuff I ain’t supposed to have seen, and I seen things I ain’t supposed to remember. And that’s not even counting the stuff I definitely ain’t seen, don’t remember, and can’t forget. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I got so much stuff in my head, I can’t keep it all apart. It gets jumbled. It’s one of the things makes me feel like I’m made wrong, you know?”

There was a small gust of wind from behind her. It rustled a newspaper on a stool beside him. He reached out and caught the top sheet as it lifted off the pile. He held it as if surprised to find it there. Then he scowled intently at it and crumpled it into a ball. He kept it bunched tight in his hand and smiled hopefully at her.

The last time Edie had met Little Tragedy, he had been keen that she use her power, her ability to glint, to suck the past from rock and metal to touch him and see if she could sense if there was something wrong with him. She hadn’t touched him, but she could see there was something not right. She didn’t know if he had been made wrong, or made to be wrong, but his eagerness to be glinted, when every other statue shied away from the pain and distress caused when she touched them, had been one of the things that she and George had mistrusted about the whole setup of the pub and its threateningly cheery landlord. She thought Little Tragedy was a spit. The suspicion was creeping up on her that he might have a dual nature like the half-human, half-fantastical Sphinxes. Maybe he was taintish when he had the mask on, spit-like when he didn’t. So she didn’t answer his question directly. Instead she changed the subject, back to the reason she’d come back to the pub.

“Look. I haven’t got time to talk. I need to find the Gunner. And I need to find George. I don’t even know where to start, except with this one thing: what’s in the mirrors?”

He looked perplexed again. “What mirrors?”

She pointed to the two mirrors on either side of the arch he was standing in. They faced each other on the inside pilasters of the arch, and standing between them and looking sideways gave the impression that the reflections in the mirrors not only framed each other, but repeated themselves into infinity.

“Those mirrors. I need to know about the mirrors.”

Little Tragedy scratched the back of his head with the hand that still held the balled-up newspaper and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, avoiding her eyes. “Nothing. They’re just mirrors, yeah?”

Edie stepped toward him. He raised his eyes and smiled brightly, as if seeing her for the first time. Whatever look she had parked on her face clearly wasn’t returning fire on the smile, because his faded fast, dimming to a grin before curdling into a grimace and an awkward rise and fall of his shoulders.

“Just mirrors. Straight up, no messing. That’s all they are . . .”

Edie cleared her throat. The question she was about to ask was going to be so outlandish that she didn’t want to give it the chance of catching on something before it even got out of her mouth.

“Are they the kind of mirrors you can step into?”

“Do what?”

His head suddenly tilted and bobbed from one side to the other as he squinted up at her like a raccoon eyeing up a particularly complex trash can.

“There are mirrors you can step into, aren’t there? You said there were other places, other ‘heres.’ You said you could show me how to get to them.”

“Oooh, I never, what a whopper!”

Edie turned on him, hand clenched into a fierce and knobby fist. “The only whopper you’re going to get is when I lay one on you if you don’t straighten up and start telling me the truth. I want to know about the mirrors, because I think it’s to do with them, isn’t it? When we left here, I looked in, and it was all like this, hundreds of reflections of the same thing snaking off into the distance, all copies of each other, except for one thing.”

Her finger stabbed at the mirror. Little Tragedy flinched as her hand passed his shoulder, but his eyes followed the direction she was indicating.

“It’s not there now. I hoped it might be, but it isn’t. But it was. There was one slice that was different from all the others, and you know why?” asked Edie.

“No. I don’t want to know an’ all . . .”

He was backing into the shadows again. She could hear him nervously crumpling the newspaper ball in his fist. Her voice cracked like a whip, and he stopped dead.

“Tragedy! Stay there.”

She followed him into the gloomy nook.

“The rest of the slices were identical to each other, just getting smaller; but there was this one slice with a bowl and a knife lying on the ground. Only, that’s what I thought they were. Until I saw them again, later.”

Little Tragedy’s Adam’s apple bobbled up and down twice. His eyes slid around the room, looking for an exit. Or help.

“You saw them later? This bowl and knife whatsit?”

His Adam’s apple came up for the third time, as if it were drowning.

Edie nodded grimly. She knew from the unmissable awkwardness of his body language that she was on the threshold of something new, something powerful.

“I saw them again just after this evil bloke called the Walker pulled two little round mirrors out of his pocket and stepped into one of them. I saw them just after he disappeared into the mirror, taking our friend with him. Only, it wasn’t a bowl and a knife. It was the Walker’s dagger and the Gunner’s tin helmet. And they lay there on the ground, and these two little mirrors hung there in the air on either side of them for a moment, like a magic trick, with no one holding them. Then there was a little pop, and the mirrors and the hat and the dagger just sort of disappeared. So what I want to know, what I need to know is: are these the kind of mirrors you can step into? And if they are, how come I saw the hat and dagger lying there before it happened?”

“Er,” said Little Tragedy. “Well. Ah.” His eyes were sliding all over the room. “You should ask himself. He’s got the words. I only see stuff, really. Ask Old Black.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Ask him.”

“He’s not here.”

Tragedy looked at the newspaper crumpled in his hand. Then he placed it delicately on a tabletop. Edie flashed the memory of him catching the paper as it lifted off the pile in the gust of wind from the door, and only then remembered that the door was shut. Had been shut. Locked. Tight enough to keep drafts out.

Little Tragedy grimaced again, as if knowing what she was belatedly realizing.

“Er.”

The hairs on the back of her neck went up. Her hand reached instinctively for the warning glass in her pocket. The deep booming voice behind her froze her hand.

“The little imp is trying to say, ‘Yes he is.’”

She turned, knowing what she was going to see. She was nose to belly with the Friar himself, towering over her like a dark cliff face. And as her eyes traveled upward, she couldn’t help but notice that the previously jolly face was as cheery and welcoming as a black thundercloud in a cold dark sky.