Devil's Food (14 page)

‘Being fluffy,’ I suggested. ‘A perfect match for Kylie and Gossamer.’

He accepted my amendment with a smile. ‘Exactly, ketschele. And then — there’s Lucifer. It’s hard to believe they are all from the same litter.’

‘Do you know, that kitten managed — somehow — to get himself shut into a locked wardrobe when Trudi was fixing my kitchen tap,’ said Mrs Dawson. ‘We only found him because he leapt up and got tangled in about a thousand empty coathangers. I had to find the key to get him out.’

‘A Shrödinger cat,’ said the Professor, a Terry Pratchett aficionado. He began to explain that cats, on discovering they were going to be used in thought experiments in which nine times out of ten they might be dead before someone lifted the lid, found a short way through time and space and emerged later, when the physicists had gone off for a drink, in an upstairs closet. Incomplete Shrödingers, he explained, didn’t quite make it back to the real world again and could be found inside locked wardrobes and curtain walls.

‘I think Mr Pratchett has it,’ said Meroe. ‘He’s very good on cats. And magic.’

‘And since that is my second glass of wine,’ I observed as Jon filled it again, ‘I think we might try to find out what we can do for our friends in return for this rather lavish entertainment.’

Mrs Dawson tapped the stem of her glass and called the meeting to order. She had remarkable presence, considering that she must have weighed six stone in a soaking wet army greatcoat.

‘Jon?’ she asked. ‘Kepler? Your advisory committee is ready to advise you.’

Jon seemed to find it hard to begin. He cleared away the cocktail food then signalled to Kepler, who brought a small heavy wooden crate into the room and put it, on a sheet of newspaper, on the table.

‘You know that we import things from all over the world. This has its problems. Some of the countries have nasty governments — in fact a lot of them do. Some of them have customs regulations, some of them have customs bribery of the brown envelope school, some of them just require us to sneak the stuff out while no one is looking.’ He was stumbling in his speech. Kepler took his hand. ‘We have always been utterly vigilant in case someone decided to use our goods, our packaging, to smuggle drugs. It’s only really a problem for our sort of organisation. We try to change people’s futures by giving them an opportunity to trade, to work. Most agencies just relieve the immediate threat. We try to insulate the population against future threats. Do you know what I mean?’

This was serious. Jon was flushed and pale by turns. He loved his charity dearly and something was clearly threatening its very existence.

We nodded. We knew what he meant. It was an old saying. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for the day. Teach him to fish and he’ll feed his family. Perfectly true nonetheless, though teaching girls to read was a main mission, because that was the best indicator of societal health. Or something like that. So I was told. I looked around. Everyone was worried. We all had the highest respect for Jon and his dedication.

‘Then someone at the depot dropped one of these crates. They come from India. Kep, can you open it again?’ Kepler produced a case-iron and levered. The lid screeched against the nails. Whatever it was it had been well sealed. Jon reached in though a fluff of wood wool and took out a remarkably ugly bronze pot. It was bulbous, with a horrible demon’s mask on it, talons for feet, and a matching lid which fitted snugly. Jon wrenched it off and turned the pot on its side. Dried leaves poured out onto the newspaper. My heart sank. Just like some smarmy little drug-dealing hooligan, I thought, spoiling it for everyone, dragging the name of all these admirable people into the mud. I caught Mrs Dawson’s eye. She was thinking the same. Daniel took a leaf, rolled it between his fingers, and sniffed.

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘This isn’t …’

‘Yes,’ said Jon. ‘That’s the strange thing. We instantly leapt to the conclusion that it was cannabis. But it isn’t cannabis. We don’t know what it is. We sent a lot off to the analyst but they say it will be months before we can get an answer. I thought I’d see if I could find one quicker than that.’

‘You want to ask Trudi as well,’ I said. I examined the leaves. They were long and dark green, a little like tobacco, smelling faintly of mould.

‘Not well preserved,’ commented Mrs Dawson. ‘You don’t think this might be some sort of Indian potpourri?’

‘No, because it doesn’t smell nice,’ said Kepler. ‘And it doesn’t seem to have ever smelt nice.’

I sniffed at a leaf. This was true. I had flirted with making my own perfumes for a while, and I knew most of the herbs which were used. This musty, old straw smell was not a fixative, like orris root, or a scent, like mint.

‘They just look like dead leaves to me,’ confessed Daniel.

‘Someone wants them,’ Jon told us. ‘We searched all the other bronzes from this maker and found two had already been stolen from the depot before we discovered that they had contraband inside them. We went through the rest of the container and nothing else was found. Just these demon pots. Five of them had leaves inside. Seven with the two missing ones. Which we later found, empty, in the car park.’

‘All the same leaves?’ asked Meroe, who had taken a napkin, damped several leaves with wine and was now unfolding it.

‘As far as I could tell, yes.’

‘This is a mixture,’ Meroe pronounced. ‘This is wolfsbane. This is nightshade. And those long leaves are thorn apple, also known as datura.’

‘Those names, Meroe …’ said the Professor uneasily. ‘They don’t sound auspicious.’

‘They shouldn’t,’ said Meroe, her mouth twisted in distaste. ‘They’re all deadly poisons. Come along. We’ve got to wash our hands right now.’

After we had put the leaves away and washed our hands, Jon leaned back in his chair and said helplessly, ‘This is insane! Why should anyone import poisonous herbs into Australia? Haven’t we got enough of our own?’

‘Certainly, though those ones don’t grow terribly well here. They would also be considered noxious weeds. And some poisons do have therapeutic effects, in small doses or for external application only. Think about digitalin, which regulates the heart.’

‘I take it myself,’ said the Professor.

Mrs Dawson agreed. ‘As you say, Dion, but thorn apple — if it’s the same thing I am thinking of — used to grow in the lanes in Kew when I was a child. I was always told particularly not to touch it. It had huge, long, faintly repellent trumpet flowers. White ones.’

‘Perhaps the Indian version is more potent,’ suggested Daniel.

‘Very probably,’ agreed Meroe. ‘Jon, I have a tale to tell about Corinna’s girls. Perhaps, in fact, Corinna ought to begin it.’

I gave the company a potted version of the maenad scene over the respective merits of Seth and whoever else it was, which had added such a lot of interest to Wednesday. Meroe described the girls’ subsequent collapse and our search, which had turned up dubious leaves packed in beige paper. I added the story of how the girls had obtained their supply.

Daniel grunted. ‘I’ve seen boys lying at death’s door while the nurses frantically try to find out what they’ve poisoned themselves with, and they say, “I bought a handful of pills from a bloke in a pub and took them all”. This must be the female equivalent.’

‘They really would rather die than gain weight?’ marvelled Mrs Dawson.

‘Much rather,’ I said. All right for her. She was born to be thin.

She picked up my tone. ‘All I ever wanted was a bust,’ she said. ‘Never got one.’ She looked meaningfully at my breasts. I conceded the point.

‘You are having the next pick-up watched?’ Daniel asked Jon and Kepler. It is his profession, after all.

Jon nodded. ‘Watched and filmed,’ he said. ‘Everyone is being investigated, but what do we investigate them for? Thank you so much,’ he said, standing up. ‘Kepler and I are very fortunate in our friends.’

We filed out. The Professor and Mrs Dawson were going out to dinner. Meroe vanished with several of the poisonous leaves for further tests. And I suspect I was even giggling as we tumbled down the steps, arm in arm, and ran straight into Starshine.

She had been standing perfectly still. Perhaps she was intending to call on me. Both of her hands were tangled in the fall of her grey-streaked hair and her eyes were hot, as though she had been weeping. But she was not weeping now and the glare she fixed on Daniel and me would have skewered an ox.

‘You … dare …’ she managed to say through her set teeth. I had recoiled into Daniel’s embrace in sheer shock. Now I stood up, drawing myself away from him.

‘Dare what?’ I asked loudly. My voice wasn’t altogether under my control but I suddenly felt stronger.

‘He is missing and you … dare … to laugh!’ she snarled.

‘Yes,’ I told her defiantly, ‘I dare. And I’ll keep looking for him, but you aren’t going to destroy this relationship, Jacqui. Go back to Therese now. I’ll call you when we find him.’

And she fled. She turned with a whisk of skirts and actually fled. No dog was ever so heartened as I when a bigger dog bought its bluff. I laughed again as she ran up the stairs.

‘See?’ said Daniel into my neck. ‘It’s true. Love conquers all.’

‘Or something,’ I agreed, took a deep breath, and went inside.

Daniel and I fed Horatio and settled amicably down to cook a couple of steaks, concoct a salad with the fairy leaves and make mashed potatoes. We had sworn off watching the news for the duration of the present prime minister, and listened instead to cheerful dance music which had kept a cold medieval hall rocking in the days when someone’s selection of leaves was all the medicine there was. We even stepped a few paces of the Known World Pavanne. Uniquely, Daniel does not get in my way in the kitchen — and I don’t get in his. These may be our most intimate moments. Lovemaking improves with practice, but this seamless dance we were weaving between fridge and sink and table and oven, that was grace.

We dined well. Daniel went to keep one of his shadowy appointments in the night world, and I put myself to bed. My own world had come back together, and I was pleased with it. But tomorrow, I realised, I would have to try to find my father again. The trouble with the real world, I thought as I fell asleep, is that it never just gives you one problem and lets you get on with solving it. There’s always something else. In my case, several something elses. Like juggling, I thought, and didn’t remember anything else until the alarm clock went off at four am and Friday announced that it was here.

Coffee, toast, feed Horatio, trackies, tray, down steps. Usual things. But pleasant because they were usual. Jason was working on a new muffin and the kitchen smelt of cooking fruit. Today’s soup was minestrone and the herbs were waiting to be snipped for the accompanying muffins. Good, strong, real smells, enough to banish night and hazard. An hour’s work and more coffee and everything was in preparation.

‘So how was dinner?’ I asked Jason.

He grinned. ‘Sweet!’ he exclaimed. ‘I was only there for an hour and a half and they were offering to send me home with a truckload of food.’

The management of the Violet House had seen Jason before, of course. I thought their offer was a wise one.

‘Jason,’ I asked tentatively—I didn’t want to arouse any bad memories — ‘if you were found naked and wet and half frozen, just crawled out of the river, where would the cops take you?’

‘Hospital,’ he said, snipping chives with scissors that moved faster than the speed of light.

‘And when the hospital let you go?’

‘Salvos,’ he said judiciously, measuring his handful of herbs. ‘The Salvos take anyone. Might not be able to find him a room, but they’d get him some clothes, a meal. This your dad we’re talking about?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘The hospital must have kept a record of him.’

‘Aren’t the cops looking for him?’

‘Possibly. He wouldn’t be a very high priority, you know. Grown man and all.’

‘And maybe he don’t want to be found.’

‘Maybe,’ I had to agree. My aged parent’s walk on the wild side was becoming a little extreme.

‘Daniel’ll know who to ask. Sister Mary too. They all know each other. They all swap clients. When they can’t find any place for them. There, that’s the famine bread done,’ he said, hauling the trays out of the oven and deftly avoiding the flat bar which seems designed to scorch the baker’s knuckles. ‘Wish I knew why it smells like sawdust.’

‘It does, doesn’t it? You sure you didn’t add any?’

He gave me a glare which mutated into a grin when he realised I was joking. ‘Nah,’ he drawled. ‘Must be the lentil flour. Now for something nice. Today’s other muffins are — ta da! — apricot delight. I’ve had the dried fruit soaking all night.’

‘Wonderful. I’ll get on with my rye bread,’ I said.

The Mouse Police, after their foray into the alley, had sidled back inside to lick their fur dry and contemplate a nice day’s rest before a vigorous evening’s mousing. The vats burbled and the dough hooks clicked. Peace.

Never lasts, though. The day dawned. The rain stopped. People arrived. Mrs Dawson, returning from one of her early morning walks, bought some pasta douro and a Jason apricot muffin. (He topped them with slivered almonds and they were gorgeous.) I asked her why she insisted on walking when the dawn was just breaking and whatever weather was around was at its worst.

‘I inherited a puritan conscience, dear,’ she told me, sniffing the steam from the bakery with surprising voluptuousness for a puritan. ‘So I go out for a mile walk, a mile at the minimum no matter the weather, and that assuages it for the rest of the day. I am then free to lounge, eat chocolate, go back to bed, read a stack of detective stories and lunch and dine in luxury. Not a peep out of it as long as I have performed my penitential walk. And it is a very good time to see the city unbuttoned, as it were — without its covers.’

‘But there are some very nasty things under those covers,’ I objected, thinking of some of the mentally afflicted homeless who might find Mrs Dawson a good target for begging or assault. She was tiny! And very noticeable indeed in her scarlet slicker and bright red boots. Even the most bleary sleeper-out would be able to see Mrs Dawson striding briskly across his path.