Page 36

“I’m not badly injured, thank you, Officer.” The man brushed at his filthy jacket, as if that might improve things. “My name is Dr. Gar. That’s G-A-R. Alan Gar.”

“You’re a doctor?” The policeman raised an eyebrow without slackening his hold on me.

“Medical.” Alan Gar nodded politely, as if we were at some formal occasion. “Currently on sabbatical. A one-eyed neonatal surgeon isn’t much use to anyone.”

I would have pointed, but handcuffs make that hard to do. “He’s got my sister’s hair band around his neck. She went missing last night.”

Well-spoken or not, doctor or not, Gar’s appearance was doing more to shape the officer’s opinion than any number of years at medical school could undo. “Where did you get that?” He indicated his own neck.

“This?” Gar reached up and fondled the band with long fingers and a sensuality that turned my stomach. I didn’t realize that I was going for him again until the policeman pulled me back. “I found it.” He turned his single eye on me. “In the rubbish.”

“I’ll need you to make a statement down at the station, sir.”

“About a head band?” Gar drew himself to his full height, which proved to be taller than the officer, even with his domed helmet.

“This lad was attacking you when I came on scene. He’ll be charged with assault.”

“I believe you misapprehend, Officer. So, before you apprehend our young friend here, I should elucidate. The boy and I were simply roughhousing. I offered to demonstrate some of the self-defense techniques I learned in the army. Sadly, my condition and R…the boy’s youthful vigor proved them to be no longer as effective as I had thought them to be. In any event, I won’t be making any statement. There are no charges to press. But I give you my sincerest thanks for coming to what you believed to be my rescue. My faith in the officers of the law—strong though it already was—has been further strengthened.”

The policeman’s grip slackened as his conviction—or at least his belief that he might get a conviction—waned. “What’s your name, son? And this sister of yours.”

I didn’t want Gar to know my name, but since he could change his mind at any moment, I cooperated.

“Frederick Archer. My sister’s Sophie. The home— She’s been reported missing.”

The policeman, Officer 47 according to his uniform, grumbled and started to give me a lecture as he hunted for his keys.

“I’m looking for something myself.” Alan Gar skewered me with that stare and the ghastly memory of the pit beneath the patch. “A misplaced rose…quite the prickly bloom. If you were to help me, Fred-er-rick, I might be able to help you…”

Officer 47, now with the key in the lock of my handcuffs, looked up sharply at this. “Do you know something about the missing girl’s location, sir?”

Gar smiled a sickly smile and shook his head. “No, no, not at all. I simply mean that I might lend my efforts to the hunt. I do tend to visit…shall we say, the seedy underbelly…of wherever I happen to be. So, who knows what might turn up?”

Once Gar had sauntered out of view around the corner, the officer released me with a variety of stern warnings and a final assurance that Sophie would turn up soon. He returned to the high street, where it has to be said I couldn’t remember having ever seen a policeman on foot patrol, and I was left standing by myself.

Sweaty, sore, and with my heart still beating too fast, I crossed the road and started back the way I’d come. I could reach the high street by a route that didn’t take me past the nutter, and then look for Sophie’s friends.

Something fluttered at the corner of my eye. I stopped. I had reached the bookshop, and though I had no plan to go in, I looked through the dusty window at the stacked—some might call it heaped—books. I thought I’d seen…I didn’t know what. Not that girl again? The cover displayed at the top of the bookstack where I thought I’d seen Rose showed an entirely different girl in a ball gown, bodice heaving. Twin Hearts by Eva Love—a romance. Another flutter. A sharp turn of my head caught her: Rose, staring out of the cover of a book where horses stood in the foreground and mountains reached for the sky in the distance, and there, as if she’d just run out of Little House on the Prairie, Rose, something urgent in her face. Only…it wasn’t her at all, now that I looked more closely. It was a grown woman, the heroine of a Western potboiler, The Wind from the East.

I scanned the other covers. No sign of her. I touched the bump on my head gingerly. Still sore as hell. The headache was still there too, only worse. Ineffectually punching Gar hadn’t helped any of my injuries.

“Rose…” I had to be hallucinating. Gar probably hadn’t even mentioned a rose.

I shook my head, slowly. It made no sense whatsoever, but it also seemed that Dr. Alan Gar had offered me a deal. A misplaced rose…Help me and I’ll help you. He had Sophie and was looking for Rose. At the very least, I should talk to Rose about what was going on. Not that I had any idea how to do that. Shouting at random book covers would get me sectioned and I’d be keeping Mother company in the nuthouse. Or, far more likely, I’d be ignored entirely and housed on the streets, with Al Gar as my neighbor under the nearest bridge.

Despite my objections, part of me understood that two opposite things were true at the same time. It was all nonsense—that was undeniable. But it was also my current reality.

I needed to find Rose. And certainly, if what had happened with the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland book was going to happen again, it would require some books, ideally that particular book, in a bookshop, ideally this particular bookshop.

Having made up my mind, I reached the door just as Olivia and Xavier’s grandmother emerged. She bustled through with the jerky energy that some old ladies have, white hair poking out from under a hat that had seen better days…probably in the 1960s.

“Why it’s the yoot again!” Her Brooklyn accent brought a hint of New York to Werton’s damp streets. “Good morning, young man.” She poked at me as if I were her own grandchild rather than some stranger she had met yesterday.

“Mrs….” I held the door for her while I hunted for her surname and manufactured a smile.

“Grandma Josephine,” she corrected me, and I felt instantly on the edge of tears. The little old woman barely knew me, and her familiarity felt like a kindness she knew that some part of me badly needed. “You all right there?” She peered up at me, concern in her shrewd, dark eyes.

“Still trying to find my sister.”