The Toymakers(103)

she whispered. ‘He hasn’t gone. He can’t have gone. Not now, not after all this. He’s coming back. Don’t give up, not yet …’

Something inside Sirius’s belly moved; the key had snagged on some tangle of wires. After a moment, the key slipped free once again – but, now that she knew what she was searching for, she knew how to find it again. Soon, the key was driving the motors. She felt them coming to life – and when, at last, the key would turn no tighter, she fell back, collapsed on to the cold shopfloor.

Beside her, Sirius lay still. His motors turned but he did not flicker, not even as if in a dream.

Cathy lay back, defeated. She did not want to sob and so she did not, but something sobbed inside her – for the end of Sirius, for Papa Jack lying cold in the ground, for the idea that she had not lost Kaspar today, but lost him in a thousand tiny moments ever since he returned; for the fact that she had not been able to save him, after all this time.

There was a thunder of footsteps. Somebody else was on the shopfloor. She looked up to see them running to her through a stand of paper trees. Emil crashed through the creeping vines, Mrs Hornung close behind.

‘We saw the doors open. The snow coming in. Cathy, is everything all right?’

Before she could answer, the bundle of fabric at her feet started to shift. Cathy looked down and, from between her legs, there rose a cross-stitch nose, two black button eyes. Sirius turned his head, his darned sock tongue lolling out as if desperate for water. Softly, his tail began to beat. He climbed ungainly to his feet.

Cathy gathered him up, clung to him as he lapped at her, leaving dust and dangling thread wherever he touched her face. She dug into her pocket and pressed the note into Emil’s waiting hand.

‘It’s Kaspar,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. He’s left us all behind.’





THE GHOST IN THE TOYSHOP



PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1924–1940


The man’s name was Lewis and – or so it seemed to Cathy – he was more interested in the patchwork rabbits proliferating on the shelf than the letter she kept pressing into his hands.

‘We’re here as a courtesy, Mrs Godman, and because my chief inspector brought his daughters here, once upon a while.’ Two other constables were somewhere in the aisles, trying to pull crinkled card berries from the paper trees. ‘I’m afraid that what you have there, in your hands, rather disproves your case. Your husband isn’t missing, Mrs Godman.’ He turned on his heel from the shelf and wiped his hand, in disgust, on his trouser. One of the patchwork rabbits, with precise derision, had deposited a patchwork pellet into his palm. ‘He just left. It’s there in black and white, and little we can do about it – in a public forum, at least. Listen, you have my sympathies. Before I was a copper I was a soldier, like the lot of us, and … Mr Godman wouldn’t be the first to walk out on his wife. If you had my job, why, you’d know some of the terrible things that can happen when a soldier comes home.’

Cathy said, ‘You don’t know my husband.’

‘We done some digging, Mrs Godman. All as a favour, you understand. He was a flamboyant man, your husband. That’s what his old soldier pals tell us. Up and down, up and down, that sort of fellow – and that can be the worst. And you knew, of course, what he was doing down at the veterans’ home? Down on the Strand with those music boxes of his?’

Cathy stopped herself before she replied. She had thought those music boxes a thing of the past.

‘Oh yes, his trips down there seem to have been quite the stir. Music boxes for all the veterans, things to make ’em feel young again. But you knew about that of course.’

The sergeant loped back into the half-moon hall, poked his head out of the door and peered up the snowbound mews.

‘And the dog, you say you found it out there?’

‘He must have followed Kaspar out, then lain down in the snow …’

‘What, and just froze to death?’

‘I wound him back up. He …’

‘I … see. One of your contraptions then, was it? Not quite real? Mrs Godman, you can understand where I’m coming from. You say the dog followed him out, and yet you still say he’s missing. Well, if a man leaves of his own accord …’

Cathy propped herself against one of the shelves. There was no use in arguing with somebody so blinkered, so instead she just nodded.

‘Might I ask you a … personal question, Mrs Godman? I’m told it has relevance, though Lord knows you’ll think I’m a ghoul.’

Cathy said, ‘If you think it will help,’ and noticed the man could not even look her in the eye.

‘When did you and your husband last have … there is no savoury way of saying this … relations?’

‘Is that a proper question, sergeant?’

‘Not improper, Mrs Godman. It may shed some light.’

Propriety says I ought to be ashamed, thought Cathy, ashamed to stand here, in front of this man, and even entertain his question. But, even in that place her mother tried to take her, Cathy had refused to feel ashamed.

‘I’ll answer, Mr Lewis, this one and nothing more. My husband and I were together on the night that he left.’

The sergeant nodded. ‘He was saying goodbye. You can be certain of that. It’s a thing with some men. One for the road, as they say. I’m sorry, Mrs Godman. Look, we’ll take a picture, if we may. We’ll open a file – all in the way of a favour, you understand.’