Scotland Hard (Book 2 in the Tom & Laura Series) (8 page)

“He was dead when you found him?” Daisy asked.

“Deader than Moses.”

“Did you see anything else?”
Arnold
asked.

“I looked out of Charlie’s window when I heard a clatter outside and I swear to God that I saw Charlie’s ghost driving his cab, out of the yard and down the alley.”

Daisy wandered over to the mantelpiece and picked up an expensive looking top hat that rested upon it. It looked incongruous in this room, like a crown resting on a privy.

“Hey, you put that down, you little shiksa,” Manny said quickly. “That’s mine, I got that fair and square and it’s a nice bit of schmutter.”

Daisy had a strong feeling she had seen the hat before, not in reality, but in her dreams. She turned the hat over to look inside it and Manny leapt up towards her to try and retrieve it.

Arnold
jumped to his feet and placed himself between Manny and Daisy. Cam moved closer to
Arnold
to lend a hand if needed.

“Give it back to me, it’s mine. Charlie would have wanted me to have it, to remember him by.”

A label in the inside of the hat stated it was made by Wilkinson of Shaftesbury Avenue and a name was finely embroidered into it. The name in question was ‘James Saunders’. Daisy handed it to
Cam
who read the name without comment and passed it to Arnold who also read it before he gave the hat back to Manny.

“You found that in Charles Drake’s flat, didn’t you?” Daisy asked and Manny nodded reluctantly. “The man who left it behind killed Charles and he will be looking for it when he discovers it is missing. If he finds it with you, he will certainly kill you.”

“I never wanted it anyway,” Manny said, flinging the hat at Daisy.

“It might be best if you disappeared for a time,”
Cam
told the old man. He was looking frightened and
Cam
didn’t blame him. Manny was in great danger, as were they all if Saunders came back and made Manny describe them.
Cam
didn’t think it would take much effort to get Manny to talk about anything.

“It takes gelt to run away. Do I look like a rich man?” Manny said desperately.

Cam
took the five pound note she had hidden in her clothes and gave it to the man without a word. Manny looked at her as if she was a cross between an angel and a fool. He headed for the door and out of the flat. The heard him run down the stairs and out of the back door.
Arnold
leaned over the bed to look out of the window and watch Manny scurry out of the gates without a backwards glance.

“He’ll probably be on his way to
America
before the end of the day.”
Arnold
remarked and turned to glare at
Cam
fiercely. “At this rate, you’ll have given away a king’s ransom by the end of the day.”

Cam shrugged in embarrassment and
Arnold
face broke out into a grin. “I was going to do the same thing, if you hadn’t beaten me to it.”

Daisy hugged her friends before her face took on a serious look.

“We know who the traitor is, but that won’t help us much. Chances are that Saunders would create some lie to cover himself and Trelawney would believe him. Trelawney thinks the man is his best agent.”

“What do we do?”
Arnold
asked.

“We go to MM3 and wait for Saunders to come out of the building. Then we follow him back to his home to find out where he lives. When we get the chance, we break into his house and see if we can find a clue to where Tom and Laura might have been taken.”

“All right then,”
Arnold
replied straight-faced, “Just so long as it’s not going to be hard to do or anything.”

He had to run down the stairs to escape as both girls tried to hit him.

9.
  
Weapons

Charles Drake’s flat proved to be surprisingly close to MM3 Headquarters, which were situated on the banks of the
Thames
near to the Houses of Parliament. The three young spies followed signs to Charing Cross Station and gratefully deposited their suitcases in the Left Luggage Department. Despite their cases being small and light, all three had become tired of carrying them around.

There were several hostelries in the vicinity of the station. They found one that looked promising and
Arnold
went in first to check that it was a fit place for young women of repute to enter. They sat down to a meal of meat pie and ale and spent the time between chewing in debating exactly what kind of meat was in the pies. They were no wiser at the end of the meal than at the beginning, but at least they were full.

“I swear this is the furthest I have ever walked in one day,”
Cam
told her companions, who nodded in agreement. They were all feeling exhausted, as much from the stress of discovery of the top hat as from their physical exertions.

“What we are doing is incredibly dangerous,” Daisy pointed out unnecessarily. “We have no one guarding our backs if anything goes wrong. The only person Trelawney gave us to go to in an emergency was Saunders, and he is up to his neck in this whole thing.”

“We could go directly to Trelawney,”
Arnold
suggested. “Tell him about Saunders and then let MM3 take over.”

“We’ve been through this,”
Cam
said wearily. “If we go to Trelawney, he will not believe us. He will go straight to Saunders and Saunders will cover up all his traces. If we’re lucky, he won’t make an attempt to kill us for a year or two.”

“Saunders will almost certainly leave MM3 tonight and call a cab. Do we hire another and instruct the driver to follow that cab?” Daisy asked. “The driver would probably laugh in our faces.”

“Don’t come up with problems, come up with solutions.”
Arnold
quoted one of their headmaster’s favorite lines. Dr Fines had been man replaced with a doppelganger some time ago, so he might well have been quoting the words of an enemy.
Arnold
found himself lost in this strange train of thought and ignored the girls who were glaring at him.

“Well my answer is to get down to the Embankment and watch the Ministry doors,”
Cam
said decisively. “Is anybody else coming with me?”

Arnold
groaned and Daisy rose to her feet wearily. They followed
Cam
out of the hostelry and down to the imposing stone buildings that housed the Ministry of War and all its many departments.

Tom and Laura reached the Storage Room without incident. Tom turned to take them outside the house when Laura stopped and looked around the room as if searching for something.

“It’s this way,” Tom said in exasperation when it became clear that Laura was not about to follow him. “I thought you wanted us to get to the children as soon as possible?”

“I do,” Laura replied patiently, “However, more haste often means less speed, as my grandmother used to say.”

“My grandmother used to say
‘never bet on a black horse until May is out’
, but I have not made much use of it.”

“Aha! “ Laura said in triumph. She had found a porcelain candle holder with the stub of a candle in it. She pulled the candle out of the holder and cleaned the wax off the hole before putting the holder in her pocket. “Now we need to go to the library.”

“And what exactly is it that we are doing?” Tom asked in a strained whisper. He had set himself the objective of reaching the children and healing them and that was a risky enough task without Laura’s detours and desire for candle holders.

“We are preparing a weapon,” Laura told him, “The kind of weapon I can wield.”

Tom sighed and followed Laura across to the library. As he closed the library door behind them, Laura began looking through the books.

“Maybe this one, or this,” she said to herself as she pulled the books off the shelf and placed them on a reading table. If Tom didn’t know better, he would have suspected she was trying to locate a book on escapes.

Laura opened the first book in its middle and then discarded it. Having nothing more constructive to do, Tom replaced it on the shelf from which it had come.
The Works of Euclid
was its title, which meant exactly nothing to Tom.

“This one will do,” Laura informed the world in general. She rifled through the book and found what she was looking for on the last page, which she carefully tore out.

“I thought you couldn’t use paper that has been written on?”

“It’s not considered advisable, but this particular page is blank,” Laura told him absently as she examined another book. “However, I am beginning to wonder about the foundations of military magic. According to
Newton
, not one of those children should be capable of doing what they do. On top of that I have already broken several of the rules of Spellbinding all on my own.”

“You mean like the drawings you did of the two of us?” Tom asked and Laura nodded. Laura had drawn their likenesses using her Spellbinding power before they left for Hobsgate. The drawing of Tom seemed to have significantly increased his powers as a Healer, among other things.

“Spellbinding works by modifying the foundations of reality.
Newton
said that words must be written on paper and when someone like me writes them, we imbue the word with our magic to bind the change.”

“I’ve never really understood that.”

“Think of the ink on the paper as if it were a water pipe. Only imagine the pipe carries power instead of water. I write the words ‘Tom Merlin Carter will become a frog’ and I imagine you changing into a frog as I write. My power locks your transformation into the words on the paper.”

“I thought that you always had to write your spells in Latin?”

Laura sighed, sometimes boys were not very bright.

“That’s how I was taught to do things, but I know I can make a bind work in any language. The point is that the universe does not like things to be changed by Spellbinders and it objects most strongly to a human being transformed into a frog.”

“The initial change requires no power at all, but holding the change in place, even for a fraction of a second requires a lot. That power is contained in the ink on the paper. The more powerful the Spellbinder is, the easier the power runs through the ink.”

Tom thought about it. It seemed closer to how electricity worked than water.

“I see. Eventually the ink gets so hot from the power running through it that the paper bursts into flames and the transformation is undone.”

Laura grinned in delight. “That’s right. Using stronger paper and ink made from metallic salts gives the bind a considerable advantage. That’s why I am looking through these books for the ones made from vellum and I’m tearing out any blank sheets.”

“It makes me feel queasy when you do that to books,” Tom muttered. “It is as if you are desecrating a grave or something.” He winced as Laura casually tore out another sheet from a leather bound volume.

“That should be enough,” Laura said with satisfaction. “The point I am trying to get into your head is that, according to
Newton
, my drawings shouldn’t work. I have used them to do the opposite of what
Newton
claimed a Spellbinder does. I have used my power to keep things as they are, rather than change them. I suspect those drawings of you and I have lasted this long because I have been working with the universe rather than against it.”

“It’s all completely over my head,” Tom admitted. “However, if you have finished now, can we go to help the children?”

“Of course,” Laura said cheerfully, giving Tom a somber look. She was well aware that Healing took immense power and that he would be weak when he had healed the children.

They made their way out of the library without any trouble. They saw no one as they returned to the storage room and went through it to get outside.

It was late in the afternoon as they stepped out of the house and into a farmyard. They kept close to the crudely constructed brick outbuildings leading away from the house. Stables gave way to poultry huts and storage sheds. When they came to the end of the row, they saw a large clear area of grass with a duck pond at its centre and low buildings on the far side.

The pigpens were on the other side of the pond. They were going to have to go around the pond to get to them and hope that nobody spotted them while they were out in the open on the grass.

“Ready?” Tom asked and Laura nodded. Tom started running.

Tom reached the far side of the pond and ran over to a low brick wall where he could hide. He was breathing heavily from his exertions and it took him a moment to realize he was on his own. Tom felt panic rising in his chest. Laura had been right behind him a few seconds ago.

Trying to control his breathing to the point where he wouldn’t be heard a hundred feet away, Tom edged around the wall until he could see back towards the pond.

To his astonishment, Laura was walking around the pond looking down at the ground. Every so often, she bent down to look at something, before moving on again. He saw her pick something white from the grass and put it in her pocket before she strolled casually over to where he hid.

“What? Where? Why?” he spluttered as Laura stood close to him.

“Goose feathers, Tom,” she said, as if that explained everything. When he continued to look baffled, she decided to take pity on him.

“What are quill pens made from?”

“Goose feathers,” Tom admitted, feeling stupid. “But you could have been seen.”

“Anyone back at the house would need excellent eyesight to recognize me at that distance. Provided I didn’t look like a fugitive by running and diving for the nearest cover, they would assume that I was just another servant about her work.”

“Would you like to take over and lead this whole rescue thing?” Tom asked despairingly.

“But Tom, I thought I already was?”

It didn’t take long to find the children. They followed the sound of crying and moaning to their prison. The children were in a tiny red brick and lime mortar room. Someone had put thick iron bars across the glassless windows.

The door to the cell was made from planks of solid oak mounted on huge wrought iron hinges. The door was barred with a timber plank. It was the work of a moment for Tom to lift the bar so they could get inside.

The children lay on compacted dirt, face down and barely moving. Occasionally one of them would groan in pain. Stripes of blood had soaked through the back of their shirts and dried, gluing the material to their backs.

Tom reached over to touch
Alice
and Laura took his free hand in hers to give him what strength she could.

Healers were vital to the war efforts of the
British Empire
, and anyone showing the slightest Healer talent ended up in the army when they reached seventeen. That had been Tom’s fate when he first met Laura and only Trelawney’s position and authority had kept him from it. Since Laura had made her drawing, he had become the world’s most powerful Healer.

When Tom touched
Alice
, reality vanished around him. His consciousness slipped into
Alice
’s body in a manner that he could never describe. It seemed to him that
Alice
’s body became his universe. He could see the places in her body that pulsed red with damage, shone green with health and those that lay silent and black in decay.

Every other Healer in the world focused on a small chunk of someone’s body. The vast majority of Healers were limited to charming a wart off a nose or making a bunion lose its redness. The best Grade 1 Healer might cure consumption or cancer provided it was not too far-gone, but even they saw only the disease and not the patient.

For Tom, the patient and their ailments were one and the same. He had to cure everything that was wrong with them, because he could not truly distinguish one illness from another.

Alice
sighed beneath his hand as he knitted flesh together, reduced her bruises to a little soreness, cured the bladder problem she was not aware she had, and removed the cataracts that were beginning to form in her eyes. Tom staggered slightly under the burden of using his power. It was harder healing this child than it had been to cure a gunshot wound in a soldier, because most soldiers were, apart from their wounds, fit and well.