“She’ll take a good ten minutes,” one of the men said, turning to Wren with a friendly wink. “No need for you to hang about in the cold, kiddo.”
Wren thanked him and ran back to the Pavilion. Ten minutes would give her just enough time to fetch Cynthia.
She had decided right from the start that she would not tell Cynthia about her scheme. Cynthia was much too giggly and forgetful to keep a secret, and would probably have blurted out the whole thing to Mrs. Pennyroyal. But Wren had no intention of leaving her friend behind. While the Peewit was being fueled, she would slip into the dormitory where the girls slept, wake Cynthia as quietly as she could, and bring her down to the boathouse. By the time they got there, the yacht would be ready for takeoff.
Mr. Plovery used a novel lockpick that Shkin’s people had taken from the Lost Boys to open the door of the mayor’s private office. The office was in a tower room, with long windows reaching up toward a shadowy ceiling high above. The blinds were open and the moon shone brightly in, showing the antiques dealer Pennyroyal’s cluttered desk and the drawing by Walmart Strange behind which Pennyroyal’s private safe was hidden.
As he crossed the room, Plovery sensed a movement way up above him in the domed ceiling, and had the oddest feeling that he was being watched. He went cold with panic. What if Pennyroyal had got hold of one of those crab-camera things and was using it to guard his safe?
He almost gave up and ran, but the thought of his mother stopped him. With the money Shkin had promised him for the Tin Book, he would be able to move Mum into one of the luxury suites on the top floor of her nursing home, with a view of the parks at the city’s stern. He forced himself to stay calm. Pennyroyal wasn’t clever enough to set up a surveillance crab. And if he had, he would certainly have bragged about it to his dinner guests.
Plovery took the picture off the wall and set it down carefully against Pennyroyal’s chair. The circular door of the safe confronted him. He reached for the dial and turned it right, then left, then right again. On previous visits to the Pavilion he had often seen Pennyroyal open the safe, and had worked out the combination by listening to the number of clicks the dial made. Two-two, oh-nine, nine-five-seven… Calmly, carefully, he went through the sequence, and the heavy door swung open.
Inside the safe was a small leather case. Inside the case was the Tin Book of Anchorage. Plovery took it out, holding it reverently, for old things were his love as well as his livelihood. There was something beautiful, he thought, about the way that human handiwork could outlive its makers by so many, many years.
As he reached up to shut the safe, he sensed a movement behind him, and turned, and—
Wren was halfway to the dormitory when she heard the horrible, quivering scream. She squeaked and froze, then dived behind a nearby statue. The scream ended in a sort of gargling noise. The echoes faded into silence, and then the Pavilion began to fill with the sounds of doors opening and people shouting to one another. Lights came on. Glancing through the window beside her, Wren saw that light was flooding the gardens too: big security lamps flicking on, and guards running about with wobbling handheld lanterns.
That’s that, she thought, no chance of escaping now —and then felt ashamed that she was feeling sorry for herself when she should really have been worrying about whoever it was who had let out that dreadful shriek.
She left her hiding place and ran toward the dormitory. Halfway there, she turned a corner and cannoned into Theo Ngoni, coming up a side passage from the direction of the kitchens. “Oh!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard someone scream…” he said.
“Me too…”
“The whole house heard someone scream, my dears.” Mrs. Pennyroyal was striding toward them in her billowing nightie, like a ship in full sail. Wren jumped away from Theo, wondering if they would be punished for speaking to each other, but the mayoress just looked kindly at them and said, “It seemed to come from my husband’s part of the house. Let’s see what has happened.”
Wren and Theo followed obediently in her wake as she swept toward the larboard wing. Wren thought privately that it had been the sort of scream you hurry away from, not toward, but Mrs. Pennyroyal seemed determined to get to the source of the disturbance. Perhaps she was hoping that her husband had scalded himself on a hot-water bottle or fallen off his balcony and didn’t want to waste good gloating time.
They climbed the winding stairs behind the ballroom and passed the door to a little staircase that led down to the Cloud 9 control room; it was open, with worried-looking crewmen peering out. Lights were burning in the mayor’s office, and as they drew closer, Wren heard Pennyroyal’s voice, shrill and wobbly with alarm, saying, “The intruder may still be at large!” Slaves and militia were crowded round the open door, but they drew aside respectfully as their lady mayoress approached.
Pennyroyal was standing beside his desk, along with two officers of his guard. He looked up as his wife and her retinue entered. “Boo-Boo! Don’t look…”
Boo-Boo looked, and gasped. Wren looked too, and wished she hadn’t. Theo looked, and seemed quite undisturbed, but then he’d been in battle and had probably seen things like this before.
Walter Plovery lay on the floor beneath the open safe. He was clutching the Tin Book of Anchorage, and from the way that it partly hid his face, Wren guessed that he had been holding it up to try to protect himself. It had done no good. Something sharp had been driven through the breast of his evening robe into his heart. The smell of the blood reminded Wren very forcefully of her last night in Anchorage and the deaths of Gargle and Remora.
“Must have been a knife,” one of the militia officers was saying lamely. “Or maybe a spear…”
“A spear?” shouted Pennyroyal. “In my Pavilion? On the night before the MoonFest ball?”
The officers swapped sheepish glances. Like most of Brighton’s soldiers, they had signed up mainly for the uniforms—fetching scarlet numbers with pink trimmings and a lot of gold tassels. They had never expected to have to face dead bodies and mysterious intruders, and now that they were, they both felt a bit queasy.
“How did he get in?” asked one.
“There’s no sign of a break-in,” agreed the other.
“Well, I expect he took the spare key from the vase outside,” said Pennyroyal. “I keep a spare key there…”
The officers studied the body at their feet and nervously fingered the hilts of their ornamental swords.
“It looks to me as if he was trying to burgle Your Worship’s safe,” decided the first.
“Yes; what is that thing he’s holding?” said the second.
“Nothing!” Pennyroyal snatched the Tin Book from the dead man’s hands and thrust it back inside the safe, locking the door behind it. “Nothing of value, and anyway, it isn’t here; you didn’t see it…”
There was a thunder of fleece-lined boots on the stairs, and Orla Twombley burst into the room with half a dozen Flying Ferrets at her back. They carried drawn swords, and the aviatrix used hers to point at Wren. “That’s the girl!”
“What? I say…” Pennyroyal turned to peer at Wren.
“She came asking my lads to ready your sky yacht,” Orla Twombley explained, taking a menacing step toward Wren as if she thought it might be safest to run the girl through where she stood. “Had some cock-and-bull story about the mayoress here wanting the old sack of gas refueled so she could go shopping in Benghazi…”
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried Pennyroyal excitedly. “The girl was preparing her getaway! Once a burglar, always a burglar, eh?”