Fleeced (14 page)

Taking a deep breath she walked towards the door and took hold of the golden handle. Pushing the door open, she glanced back at the mannequins and jumped. Had their eyes moved? She stared at each hard face in turn, feeling frightened and silly, and reminded herself that they were only made of moulded plastic and as harmless as lemonade bottles.

Which I think, given who owned the shop, was just a tad optimistic.

XVI

J
UST
O
NE
F
AUN-ETTO

“I can still smell it,” said Aries, pushing his nose against Alex’s sandals. “Are you sure it’s not you?”

Alex pushed a rhododendron out of his face, searching the crowd, willing Rose to appear from the thronging street.

“Three hundred and eleven,” he muttered, “and it’s definitely not me.”

“Hmm.” Aries snuffled at Alex’s jeans. “You’re right.”

In fact, thought Aries, flaring his nostrils in the breeze, this new smell was quite different from what you’d expect a zookeeper who’d not had a bath since he’d left the Underworld to smell like. It was, he decided, much hairier. What makes a smell hairy is indeed a good question. Maybe it was rank like an out-of-sorts hamster or musty like a yak in a rainstorm. I don’t really know, but I do know that sheep have an awfully good sense of smell, and if
Aries thought it was hairy then it was hairy. And, what’s more, he didn’t like it.

“It smells grubby,” sniffed Aries, “with overtones of goat.” He nudged Alex with his horn. “I want to go!”

“Use the – three hundred and thirteen – bushes,” hissed Alex.

“Not like that!” said Aries. “I mean go
go
. As in
go away
!”

He stomped backwards out of the bushes, the boards at his sides and his copious rear pushing the branches sideways, so that when he stepped clear they all sprang back and slapped Alex’s legs.

“Ouch!” yelped Alex. “That hurt. Aries, I’ve told you before to be more careful. You always…”

But as usual, whenever Alex was getting grumpy, Aries wasn’t listening. Now he shrugged off the advertising boards and sniffed the air. There was a second, zestier smell, more like freshly sliced lemons. It was, he decided, as though something goaty had tried to hide its mangy smell under something fruity.

And failed.

Aries trotted back and tugged on Alex’s jumper.

“Get off!” said Alex, still rubbing his stung legs. “Three hundred and forty-two. You know a smell can’t hurt you.”

Aries sighed and slumped onto the grass. For a moment he considered sulking properly. After all, he had had the most dreadful morning, what with giant birds, ridiculous outfits and now, being stuck like a garden ornament in the middle of a
frog-heavy
park. However, at that moment, something somewhere started chugging nearby. Pricking up his ears, Aries turned his head and was surprised to see what appeared to be a funny-looking metal chariot, painted pink and green and blue, splutter to a halt on the path. A trumpet-shaped horn on its roof crackled into life, filling the air with a tinkle of music-box notes.

“Ice creams! Delicious ice creams!” said a voice. “Come and get yours now! Double helpings! Super creamy! Best in London!”

Aries peered harder at the vehicle, wondering if these
ice creams
were like the ones they used to sell in Athens: clay cones stuffed with crunched ice and sultanas. The painted ones on the chariot’s sides looked a lot tastier and he was sure they’d make him feel better.

“Mouth-watering flavours!” continued the voice. “Rum and Grazing!”

And no, I’m afraid it wasn’t interference on the loudspeaker.

“Grass-berry Ripple,” the voice went on. “With silage sprinkles. Mint Dock Dip and Meadowslippi Mud Pie!”

Aries rose to his hooves and shuffled onto the path, drooling.

“What are we waiting for?” he muttered to Alex.

“Hang on,” Alex called, stepping out from the bushes.

But it was too late and Alex could only watch as Aries clopped towards the van, licking his black lips, unable to resist flavours that sounded so delicious and unusual. Just like the ice-cream seller, as he was about to discover. Well, apart from the delicious bit.

Rose stepped into Seamed Desires feeling an odd mixture of fear and relief. Fear because she’d half-expected harpies to be perched on the glittering chandeliers that hung from the ceiling and relief because they weren’t.

Taking off her sunglasses she looked around her. Despite the creepy trio in the window, the shop appeared perfectly Bond Street normal: oceans of golden carpet, chaises covered in ruby-coloured silk and the sort of marble counter you find in foyers of grand hotels. In fact, the only strange thing was the rather odd smell. Musty and stale, for some reason it
reminded her of animal stalls. She walked across the room looking around her. Ballgowns glowed like blossom over the walls and hung in rainbow drifts behind carved alcoves; summer dresses were draped over the branches of stands carved to look like golden trees; all around the walls, shelves sparkled with gold and silver spiky-heeled shoes.

“Deception.” Alex’s voice floated back into her memory. “It’s what she’s best at.”

There was a chinking sound and Rose turned to see a slender woman, wearing the same black dress as the mannequins in the window, with a blue belt, walk through a glass-beaded curtain. She had a heart-shaped face and shiny green eyes tilted like a cat’s. Blinking, she smoothed her blonde hair, which was pinned up elegantly above her long neck.

“Good afternoon,” she said softly. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

Rose looked round awkwardly. “An outfit,” she said finally, turning to face the assistant’s fixed smile.

The woman was stunning, Rose decided, feeling a strange chill, not just sophisticated or well-groomed, but actually flawless. Weirder still, her skin was so taut that it didn’t even wrinkle as she smiled.

The woman blinked. “And the occasion?”

Rose’s skin prickled. She looked at the woman’s wide brow, her long nose, those sooty eyelashes.

“Occasion?” repeated Rose.

The woman tilted her head prettily. “For your Seamed Desires creation, of course.”

Rose bit her lip. “A, um, birthday party.”

“How lovely,” the woman replied. “I think we may have the very thing for you in our Junior Diva collection.”

Stalking on impossibly high heels she moved to a rail of dresses the colours of tropical fishes and slid each hanger along, glancing at each one in turn before sliding the next into its place. Rose followed her across the room, glancing at the gold-legged tables set around the room. The nearest was piled high with copies of
Vogue
magazine, with Medea’s picture on the top. Rose stared into the photograph’s grey eyes. Despite the warmth of Medea’s skin, they remained steely and cold.

“Is Medea here today?” asked Rose with a casualness she certainly didn’t feel.

Behind her, she heard a giggle. She was certain of it, or rather she thought she was, because when she turned round to look, there was no one else in the shop. Apart from the mannequins, that was, and she wasn’t about to count them as alive.

“Not today,” replied the assistant. She smiled at Rose, the light bouncing off her sharp cheekbones like sunshine on a glacier.

Rose tried to calm her nerves. Just because she was standing in a sorceress’s shop, she reminded herself, was no reason to start imagining ridiculous things, hearing giggles and feeling scared of an assistant. Although, if you’d asked me, I’d have said it was an excellent reason. Furthermore, I’d already be sitting on the next bus rumbling away down the street.

“Medea’s busy adding the finishing touches to Ms Praline’s dress for the premiere tomorrow night,” the assistant continued.

“Hazel Praline?” said Rose, for a moment forgetting her nervousness.

“Oh, yes,” the woman nodded brightly. She pointed to a framed photograph hanging nearby. “Ms Praline is one of Medea’s
special
clients.”

Rose stared round-eyed at the picture: Hazel Praline,
the
Hazel Praline, beamed back. Giggling, her hands hidden in her curtain of long blonde hair, she looked out at the camera whilst Medea knelt at her feet, her face obscured by folds of the dress’s skirt, the layers of taffeta so sugary pink and gauzy that it looked as though it had been spun from
a giant’s candyfloss machine.

The sudden clang of hanger against rail snapped her out of her reverie.

“How about this?” said the assistant, holding up a trouser suit.

And even though Rose was hardly in the mood to comment on fashion, she felt her jaw drop. The suit was beautiful. Cut from sapphire-blue cloth, its fabric fell like waves, rippling into wide-legged trousers, whilst its jacket was long and loose, edged with silver piping and fastened by silvery-pink buttons shaped like seashells.

“It’s gorgeous,” said Rose truthfully.

“Perhaps Miss would care to try it on?” The assistant pointed to the glass-beaded doorway leading to the back of the shop.

Sensing her chance to explore, Rose nodded.

“I knew you would,” smiled the assistant and led Rose through the beaded-curtain into a long corridor, spotlit on either side like a catwalk. Curtains to changing rooms lined one side of the corridor, whilst the other was a blank wall, hung with framed fashion awards. A door marked ‘STAFF ONLY’ stood at the far end.

Rose followed as the woman ushered her into a cubicle with a full-length mirror ringed with lights.

“I’ll leave you to it.”

The assistant smiled quickly, hung up the trouser suit and snapped the curtain closed behind her. Rose waited, staring back at her anxious reflection, until the woman’s footsteps faded away.

Then she stepped out again and hurried towards the door at the end of the corridor.

Alex had lost count.

If he had still been counting he’d have been up to eight hundred and seventeen.

Except he wasn’t.

Because he was now lying on the floor of the ice-cream van, trying to stop sliding into Aries’ bottom as the van sped out onto the street. It’s never great being kidnapped, but being kidnapped with a rolling ram is something else again.

“You and your ice creams!” muttered Alex as the van veered left, sending Aries steamrollering on top of him.

“Don’t go blaming me,” gasped Aries, paddling his legs in the air. “You always worry too much. How was I supposed to know that this time you’d be right? I was just a bit peckish.”

The van shuddered beneath them and Aries rolled the other way, crashing into a crate of cones
that that showered down on him.

“My head hurts,” he muttered, taking a nibble from a nearby cone. “Thanks for asking. And I can still hear that terrible noise.”

Now I expect you’re probably wondering how Alex and Aries ended up in such a mess?

Well, when Alex caught up with Aries and asked the ice-cream seller for a Walnut and Horsefly Whip on his behalf he discovered three things:

However, it was only as he was struggling against Fred’s crablike grip that he heard a tooth-
achingly-awful
warble of pipes and realised that the Cyclops was not alone. As the shrill squeal reverberated around him, he was horrified to see Aries freeze
rigid and topple over sideways to land with a soft thump on the grass. Panpipes, you see, immobilise sheep by turning them into sheepy statues with just a few terrible toots, making the animals so much easier to handle.

Alex squirmed, trying to free himself from the Cyclops, but such creatures are like walking padlocks and Alex had been snapped firmly around the arms. Resistance was hopeless and all he could do was watch from the ice-cream van as a faun – beautifully dressed, but a faun nevertheless – leaped out from behind a nearby clump of bushes.

“Good afternoon,” he said and bowed to Aries, lifting his hat to reveal two small horns. “I am Pandemic. How do you do?”

Of course Aries couldn’t reply. All he could do was lie there with his legs stuck out rigidly like an oversized ram-shaped piano stool.

With a malicious smile, Pandemic seized one of Aries’ horns and dragged him over the grass and, still playing a tune that would curdle milk, jammed him into the van on top of Alex.

Which is where they were now.

No Walnut and Horsefly Whip.

No flake.

And no hope of escape.

XVII

A P
RIVATE
V
IEWING

Rose took hold of the brass knob of the door marked ‘STAFF ONLY’, hearing the blood thump in her ears. Pushing, she was surprised at how easily the door gave, opening into a dimly lit space from which a flight of steps led up to another floor. Peeling off her flip-flops – hardly the footwear for spying and swiftness – she stepped inside and raced barefoot up the stairs. At the top stood a small landing and another door and for a moment she strained, listening hard, for any sound from inside. Nothing. Her nerves fizzling like sparklers, she opened the door.

The room was a sewing workshop. Dominated by a scarred wooden table, strewn with swatches of blue satin and scattered with dress patterns that fluttered like giant butterfly wings in the draught from the open door, the room was edged by bolts of cloth. Tall columns of fabric stood around the walls, unfurling pillars of satin and silk, voile and velvet, streaking the white-painted brickwork with colour.

The Scroll’s words floated back to her:

Rose felt her breath catch and looked around her. At the far end of the room stood a wardrobe and a low bank of cupboards, tucked behind a row of six tailors’ dummies draped with swatches of silver sequins and layers of dove-grey satin. For those non-tailors amongst you, tailors’ dummies aren’t like shop dummies. They’re headless, padded torsos fixed onto poles and bases, made for a tailor to fit the cut fabric around and tack quickly before sewing the seams up properly. Rose tiptoed past them and pulled open the doors of the wardrobe. It was empty, save for the musty smell of dust mixed with dry wood. Rose tapped against the wardrobe’s base to check for a false floor – she’d seen the odd spy film or two with her mother – and discovered it was disappointingly solid. Next she turned her attention to the cupboards, opening each in turn, crouching on her hands and knees to squint past pincushions and tangled tape measures to reach into the gloom for, well, for what she wasn’t sure. The Scroll had talked about answers. But there was no glint of fleece in here.

Sweat prickled her forehead as her fingers stretched to touch the cupboard’s back walls. Chunks of white tailors’ chalk and scattered sequins scratched
her skin. A reel of ribbon clattered onto the floor.

“Hopeless,” she muttered.

She sat back, feeling hot and disappointed, and leaned against the nearest dummy.

It moved.

She jumped as it tilted backwards, but intrigued, turned and leaned back a second time, pushing her weight against it, feeling the dummy lean back with her, creaking on its slender wooden pole. A thin scraping sound filled the room and Rose blinked as the panel of floor beside her slid backwards to leave a square gap. Beneath it, metal rails clanked either side of the new hole, sliding down as a staircase into the darkness pooled inside, clicking into place. Then the room fell silent again.

Scrabbling on all fours Rose peered down into the gloom, jumping as a row of wall lights flicked on,
click-click-click
, one after the other, illuminating the stairs and the room below.

Excitement overcoming her fear, Rose stood up and clattered down the steps to find herself in a large room whose brightly lit walls were covered with framed photographs and pictures. In the centre of the room stood a carved stone table, surrounded by matching stone chairs scattered with gold velvet cushions. An orange-coloured Greek pot, painted
with a gigantic black snake, stood on the table. It held a bottle of champagne beside a lone goblet.

Rose shuddered.

The place seemed ancient and more like an exhibition from a museum than something in modern London. Just right for an ancient sorceress, her mind prompted. The thought made her shiver. Turning, she saw a sprawling vine, dried and woody, stretching up from a bank of gravel set into the floor. Gnarled and craggy, the vine’s branches were brown with age and it looked, Rose decided, more like the sort of thing you’d see in a reptile house at the zoo, something for a lizard to hang off or snake to coil around.

Still, she realised, there was nowhere down here to hide a fleece. She turned back to the stairs and was about to climb back up to the sewing room when one of the photographs, of the many that lined the walls, caught her eye.

It showed a long, black open-topped limousine, with mini American flags flapping either side of its bonnet, rolling down a wide sunny street. Men on motorcycles were pictured, riding either side of the car in which four people sat. The camera was focused on the back seat at the man and woman sitting there, laughing and smiling, waving to the crowds. He was fair-haired, rugged and handsome,
wearing a grey suit, whilst she smiled prettily in a pink suit and a matching pillbox hat over her dark bob. Beside the picture was a hand-drawn sketch of the man’s suit, pencilled jottings about its fabric and lining and numbers that must have been the man’s measurements. The customer’s name was scrawled at the bottom: John F Kennedy.

Rose had no idea who John F Kennedy was but with the happy crowds on either side of the motorcade she knew it must have been a special occasion.

Intrigued now, she looked at the next photograph. It, too, had a framed sketch of a dress beside it. The photograph was of glamorous woman, with a shock of blonde hair, standing in a white dress, the same one in the sketch, her long legs exposed and teetering in high white shoes over a grate in the street. The grate must have been blowing air because the woman’s skirt was fanned out around her, frothing up like a wave, billowing up at the back as the woman tried hopelessly to hold it down in the front. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back, her short blonde curls framing her face, her red mouth laughing. The name jotted at the bottom of the sketched dress was Marilyn Monroe.

Rose recognised the person in the next photograph, an old rock star. Dark-eyed with a mass of curly hair, Marc Bolan wore a silver shirt and
a feather boa draped around his neck. She only knew who he was because her mum had liked his music. Even though he’d died years before Rose was born, when his car crashed into a tree, Rose had seen his picture enough times, staring out from her mother’s old record covers, to recognise him now.

As Rose walked past the pictures, the dresses became longer, the faces grainier, fainter in old photographs. But beside each one hung a sketch of the outfit the person in the picture was wearing.

Rose felt a chill ripple up her spine. These pictures were proof that Medea couldn’t possibly be twenty-six. Forensic proof, her mother would call it, although she’d usually be talking about dinosaurs and waving a prehistoric bone around her head at the time. Soon grainy newspaper cuttings gave way to pen and ink sketches on mottled paper and oil paintings, but still, each dress was drawn in the same confident style and the handwriting was identical.

Of course, had Rose been a little older and known a little more about the people in the pictures, and perhaps listened a bit harder to her history teacher, Mr Cartwright, instead of giggling about his trousers being too short, then she might have realised that these pictures were evidence of something else. Something far more sinister. However, Rose was
only twelve years old and I suppose Mr Cartwright really did have the brightest socks in the school, and since you can’t know everything at that age, no matter how clever you are, she was none the wiser.

But she was going to find out, and unfortunately through a much more devious teacher.

However for now she simply wandered along the third wall, drifting back through the years: here was Nelson, she recognised him from his statue in Trafalgar Square. White-haired and unsmiling, he was painted dressed in a dark navy coat, with one gold-ringed sleeve pinned to his jacket; in the next picture Marie Antoinette giggled, decked out in a dress as frothy as a cream gateau; here was Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, painted on the morning of her execution. Rose peered harder into the picture, feeling a twinge of something
half-remembered
. But, like an itch you can’t scratch, she couldn’t quite reach the thought. And besides, as her mind pointed out, neither looking at pictures nor racking her memory was helping her find the fleece.

Still, as she stepped back onto the bottom rung of the stairs, she couldn’t help feeling rather pleased with herself at just how much she had discovered. Aries and Alex would be so impressed. After all, while those two had been lolling around enjoying
the sunshine, she’d searched the workroom, found a disguised lever and opened up an amazing secret room. And, hadn’t it all been easy? In fact she was just on the brink of wondering if it’d perhaps been just a teensy bit too easy when the panel above the stairwell slid shut and all the lights snapped off.

A few minutes after darkness engulfed Rose, Amelia Smythe, the manager of Seamed Desires, turned the corner into Bond Street. She heard an ice-cream van tinkling behind her but thought nothing of it. After all, as an ex-model, she was rarely tempted by an ice cream since a vanilla cone might put a millimetre on her flat tummy. Now as she clicked along the pavement she was more concerned about opening the shop because, having been called away on an urgent errand by Medea that morning, the shop had been closed all day.

That’s right.

Closed.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Oh, dear.

Eager to open the shop, Ms Smythe hardly noticed the man in the dark suit and hat approach her as she opened up the door, mostly because she was too busy looking at the fourth mannequin in
the window, which was looking decidedly rumpled. Some of you might remember there being only three mannequins when Rose walked in and if so, I’m impressed. And grateful, since it makes it a little easier for me to break the news that this fourth mannequin was wearing a black dress with a blue belt and a blonde wig. She had a heart-shaped face and green eyes, tilted like a cat’s.

“Good afternoon!” the – ahem – man in the suit said to Ms Smythe whilst flashing a business card that she didn’t bother to read. “I’m here to collect the faulty roll of crêpe de Chine.”

“Crêpe de Chine?”

Ms Smythe frowned. She couldn’t remember any faulty material, crêpe de Chine or otherwise, but waved him into the shop. She didn’t have time to supervise him as he walked through the bead curtain into the back of the shop and down the stairs. Nor, since she was still fussing with the fourth mannequin, did she notice how bulky or indeed wriggly the roll he carried was as he left the shop.

A pity, really.