Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘But—’

‘Take care of each other.’ Violet turned to place her ear to the door, eyes closed as she listened. ‘And, Trista – good luck in the snow.’

Outside came a soft tumult of steps, then a thunder of knocks at a door, but not the one to which Violet’s ear was pressed. Trista guessed it must be the door to the ladies’ convenience. Of course it never occurred to them we would come in here.

‘Miss Parish?’ It was a male voice, polite, youthful and slightly out of breath. ‘If you would be so kind as to come out, we can avoid a scene.’

Violet’s mouth twitched with the shadow of a grin, her hand curled around the door handle.

‘Miss Parish?’ A different male voice, deeper, gruffer and a bit uncle-like. ‘At least send those children out. Then perhaps we can talk more calmly.’

A long pause. A sigh. Then the sound of the ladies’ convenience door being barged open and a clatter of boots on a tiled floor.

Violet’s reaction was instant. She flung open the door and leaped through it, closely followed by Trista and Pen. The two policemen who had charged into the ladies’ powder room turned in time to see Violet slamming the door behind them. She grabbed a chair from beside a neighbouring table, and wedged it under the door handle. The door jerked in its frame, and there was the sound of pounding fists and irate voices from the other side.

‘Run!’ she shouted.

Dozens of Besider eyes stared as Violet, Trista and Pen sprinted back through the tea room, knocking over chairs as they went. They all but tobogganed down the stairs, stumbling, slithering and bruising knees. The bread girls gaped as they raced down the aisle to the front door.

The young man with the newspaper was loitering outside, but was apparently not expecting the three of them to barrel out into the street. He tried to call out, and made a snatch for Pen, but Violet used her momentum to shoulder-charge him. Violet and the stranger hit the pavement in a sprawl.

‘Keep running!’ she shouted, elbowing her opponent in the head.

Trista grabbed Pen’s hand and kept sprinting, taking turns at random. She did not know where she was or where she was going. All that mattered was that they kept moving. The riverside kept appearing solicitously on the right, like an over-attentive nanny.

Her feet were silent, but Pen’s steps echoed with painful clarity. How obvious they were! Tell me, have you seen two girls running? They needed to hide.

‘There!’ she hissed, and pulled Pen over to one of the jetties, beside which a rowing boat bobbed. She clambered down into the boat and helped Pen in after her. Then, pulling at the underside of the jetty with all her might, she managed to drag the boat under it, so that they were hidden from casual view. There was a sodden blanket in the belly of the boat, which she pulled over them for good measure.

As they lay there gasping, trembling, listening, a familiar sound reached Trista’s ears. It was a guttural, rebellious rumble, the sound of a not-too-distant motorcycle engine throbbing to life.

‘It’s Violet!’ squeaked Pen in stifled excitement. ‘She got away! She got away!’

The motorcycle’s tune rose into a crescendo, accompanied by the percussion of running steps and shouted demands. A roaring ribbon of sound… and then a long screech of distressed rubber, and a sustained, painful rattle of impacts. There was a ting, tinkle, clatter of settling fragments, followed by a gouging silence.

The hush held its own for seconds, then gave way to a growing murmur of voices, a bubbling swell of concern and curiosity, punctuated by urgent shouts.

Trista lay in the bottom of the boat with her arms tightly around Pen, feeling as if all her bones had been turned to jelly. She could hear Pen making little hiccupy noises that sounded like sobs.

‘Violet…’ whispered Pen. ‘She crashed – she died .’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Trista said very quickly. She clenched her eyes tight, but that did nothing to shut out the deluge of imagined images. A body flopped over the bonnet of a car, or perhaps a broken windscreen with reddened shards… Just for an instant she hated Pen for saying aloud everything she was trying not to think.

But Pen was too little and miserable for her to hate. Instead Trista tried to take her few rags of hope and wrap them around the smaller girl.

‘Violet isn’t dead,’ she told Pen and herself. ‘She had a plan, and her plan wouldn’t involve being dead.’

Silence. Snuffle, snuffle.

‘What was her plan?’ asked Pen, her tone of misery tempered by a touch of reluctant hope.

Trista stared into the darkness of the blanket, desperately trying to make sense of Violet’s last words.

Good luck with the snow.

‘She decided to let them catch her.’ Trista blinked at the revelation, and clung to it. ‘She let it happen, so we could get away, and so they would put her in a police cell. That way she stays still… and the snow comes. Now hush, Pen, please hush! Or they’ll find us!’

For what felt like an age, there were sounds of running steps in the street and conversations in urgent tones. Occasional words and phrases were audible.

‘… ambulance…’

‘… two girls come by this way?’

At one point she actually heard several sets of feet walk out on to the jetty directly above them. Trista tensed, and even Pen’s snuffles became more muted.

‘Please take a moment to think, madam.’ It was the voice of the younger policeman, the one who had asked Violet to surrender. ‘The two little girls – where did they go after that?’

He sounded harassed and concerned. In an odd, distant way Trista felt sorry for him. She wondered if he had a nice face, and a wife who would be sympathetic when he got home after a hard day. At the same time she wondered what would happen if he found her, and whether she would have to bite him in order to get away.

There was a pause, and then the response came in a voice that sounded like the combined sobs of children in a distant cavern.

‘I remember quite clearly. They carried on running down the street – that way. Then they got into a car. A yellow car.’ It was unmistakably the drowned-looking Besider woman from the tea room.

‘I saw them too,’ insisted an unfamiliar voice which rasped like crab shells chafing against each other. ‘Definitely a yellow car. It drove away.’

‘Yes,’ agreed a hiss like sand seeping through an hourglass. ‘The girls are gone. Take your snooping elsewhere.’

Trista could hear the faint scratching of pencil on paper. She wondered how many of the Besiders’ actual words the policeman could hear with his conscious mind, or whether he was jotting down ordinary-sounding statements.

The Besiders were lying, to send the police off on the wrong trail. Why? They believed Trista was one of them, so perhaps they were protecting their own. Or maybe they did not want police paying attention to the Old Docks while it was full of Besiders.

To Trista’s enormous relief, the young policeman seemed to heed the eerily similar statements given by the witnesses, and his footsteps creaked off the jetty again. For a while she made out his voice asking the same questions of passers-by, then she heard him no more.

There were still many sounds of hubbub and inquisitive exchanges in the road above, however. Perhaps the Besiders would not turn them in, but there were plenty of ordinary people in the street, who would doubtless soon connect the policeman’s questions about two young girls with the missing Crescent daughters in the newspaper.

‘We have to stay here for now.’ Trista racked her brain, trying to form a plan. ‘We’ll wait for the snow. It’ll be easier to walk around without people spotting us when there’s snow.’