The Forever Man (W.A.R.P. 3)

An old enemy?

Maybe.

One of Box’s men?

No. Too soon to have set this up. Those guys were barely twenty-four hours out of the picture.

One of Garrick’s victims?

No. Garrick’s victims were precisely that: victims. They weren’t hunting down anyone, ever. Garrick was the man who had killed Jack the Ripper, for God’s sake. Out of jealousy!

Another witness from the WARP programme, then?

Possible. It seemed unlikely that someone from the future would care about some kid magician in the past, but ‘unlikely’ was a term in which she was fast losing faith.

Chevie found her free hand patting the Timekey that hung round her neck, underneath her clothes. There hadn’t been a peep out of it for days – it had doubtless been broken by the various treks across London and a dunking in the city’s delightful sewers – but if there was some future guy in that cell it could be that this was his endgame: get hold of the key and destroy it.

Funny how nobody from the future wants to go back there. Except me.

But did she really?

I don’t even know which future I would be going back to.

Social media and reality shows? Worldwide fascist empire? Or some blend of the two perhaps?

Whatever the future held, Chevie was determined to hold on to the key just in case she needed a way out.

If there’s a portal to go in. If there’s a pod at the other end.

It would take a dire situation to force her to jump into the wormhole with no sure way out, but she had to admit that dire situations were ten a penny in this century. It seemed to her that here all situations were dire and all smells uniformly terrible. Even the sweet smells were infected by what they tried to mask.

Speaking of terrible smells, they had arrived at yet another door, which was even blacker than the first and seemed to be composed of gathered shadows. The door was guarded by one of the foulest-smelling beings that Chevie had ever been unfortunate enough to sniff. With her eyes closed she would never have guessed he was human by his odour or the snuffling sound of his breathing. The sentry’s uniform seemed to have been cannibalized from those of dead soldiers from various campaigns and was topped off with a ridiculous Napoleonic hat, which might have been comical in another setting.

‘Broadband,’ said Nancy, saluting him with a dip of her pipe.

Chevie was surprised. Had Nancy just referred to this particular guard as ‘Broadband’?

Broadband acknowledged the pipe dip. ‘Back so soon, Nance. How’s the wheedle?’

Nancy whistled through the gap in her teeth. ‘Slow connection today, Broadband.’

‘Too many users,’ said Broadband. ‘They is congestin’ and stuff.’

Chevie blinked. Were they messing with her brain, or was her brain messing with her?

‘Broadband’s your name?’ she asked, suspicious of a wind-up. ‘How come?’

Nancy answered, as if the guard was too slow to remember the reason behind his own nickname.

‘On account of this prison vest he used to wear during the frosts. From up north somewhere. Had a broad band instead of the Newgate broad arrow. So, Broadband, ain’t it?’

Chevie puffed a sigh of relief. That was a perfectly acceptable explanation. Nobody was going crazy.

‘Broadband,’ she said with a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘What’s your download speed?’

The guard considered this seriously. ‘I can empty a cart in an hour or so, depending on me boots and gloves and whatnot. A barge takes a day on me lonesome. Less with a chum.’ He added to this information a nugget of wisdom. ‘I finds that a job is done quicker with more lads doing it.’

Nancy cackled and tapped Broadband’s forehead. ‘Smart. That’s what you is, dearie. Which is for why they puts you guarding the big-knob cells.’

Usually Riley and Chevie would have shared a chortle at this, but not today. In fact, Riley said not a word.

He hasn’t spoken, Chevie realized. Not since the outer corridor.

She glanced down at her friend. His pale face seemed to glow in the gloom, and the rough and tumble of the past few days had his hair sticking up in a hundred different ways.

Very Manga, thought Chevie. He’s ahead of his time.

But, in spite of all the life experience crammed into his fourteen years, Riley seemed very much a small boy, squeezing her fingers and staring at the cell door.

What must be going through his head now that he is finally about to be reunited with his only living relative?

In truth, the inside of Riley’s head was all a-jumble, with images and emotions falling over one another trying for the upper hand. It was more than his young head could process. At least Chevie knew about the future. At least she had some understanding of the past. Riley had been a wide-eyed ignoramus in the twenty-first century and now felt a stranger in his own time.

Ginger Tom will be my anchor, was the thought that finally broke through the maelstrom in his head. It was a good strong thought and he began to murmur it under his breath.

Tartan Nancy raised her eyebrow at this but made no remark, for she was used to unusual behaviour during the wheedle. One musty sea dog had taken to answering questions in the voice of a small girl, which had been most disconcerting. It was a good ploy, though; the screws couldn’t wait to see the back of him.

‘Shall we?’ she said.

Riley squeezed Chevie’s hand again and his fingers felt like a fistful of sardines so slick were they, but she held fast nevertheless – they had been through worse liquids together than honest sweat.

‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘I wanna see what’s so special about this Tom guy.’

Broadband pulled out a key on a cord from under his shirt and Chevie was about to do the same with hers and shout Jinx! but then wisely decided against it, as in her experience the sudden drawing of cylindrical objects around armed men often led to the draw-er getting shot.

Broadband slotted the key into a hole large enough for a mouse to creep through and twisted it two clunks anticlockwise.

‘Usual, is it?’ he said to Nancy.

Nancy did not speak money out loud, as was her custom with guards, who were technically not supposed to extort over and above what was on the warden’s price list. Instead she dipped her pipe twice.

Broadband shook his head. ‘Nah. Two ain’t enough for this one, Nance. That geezer in the shadows is giving me the willies. You wanna wheedle again today, it’ll cost you four sovs.’

With the flat of his hand, the guard barred the entrance to Tom Riley’s cell door until, with four dips of her pipe, Tartan Nancy agreed to the price of admission.

The Prison Term

The cell door did not creak like a prison door might in a penny dreadful, for this particular door was well used and the hinges were often greased with animal fat or lamp oil. This door opened into what might be called a premium cell, where the fate of special prisoners was decided. Previous occupants of the cell included a senior Romanov and even one of the House of Hanover, who had been led astray after a day at the races with a band of high-spirited Oxford chums and ended up in the hidey-hole.

But now the cell held plain old

Ginger Tom Riley, and Nancy Grimes could not help but wonder what was so special about this debtor that a premium cell had been rented for the wheedling.

In the old days, she thought, a debtor like this common-as-muck cove would have been dumped in the Stone Hall.

The door yawned open and there was a ghostly candle flicker on the wall that picked out soot-blackened masonry pitted by pocks and cracks. A sour smell oozed into the hallway; it was the odour of despair and persecution.

Either that or damp.

Nancy went through first, as was the protocol, and next walked Chevie, with her fists tightly curled and ready for fight or flight. Protect Riley was her prime objective. Generally Riley was more than capable of protecting himself, trained as he had been in the martial arts of master assassin Albert Garrick, but today her friend was distracted and not on tip-top form.

An elephant could sneak up on him right now, Chevie realized, and moved to position herself as a shield between Riley and whatever was in that room.

What was in the room was primarily layers of shadows and darkness, which were barely disturbed by the flickering arrowhead of candlelight.

As the newcomers’ eyes adjusted (some more slowly than others), they saw that their arrival brought the room’s total number of occupants to six, though one of the occupants had to be inferred from the rake of his boots, as not a detail of his actual person breached the wall of shadows beside the cage. Any sense of the hidden figure was gleaned from those boots, and from these came the impression that he was both rangy and spry – the first from the two-foot length of the knee-highs and the second from their splayed stance.

These impressions were stored by Chevie but not Riley, whose attention was utterly focused on the unfortunate prisoner in the cell’s cage.

‘Tom,’ he said. ‘Tom, it ain’t really you. Could it be you?’

Riley was thinking that it could indeed be Tom. The prisoner certainly sported the copper barnet that Riley remembered, and the face seemed similar to the one he sometimes glimpsed in his dreams, though the features were veiled by grimed blood and distorted by terror.