“I must warn you, Monsieur Colifichet has not slept in two days. The special project he has been working on is not going as well as he would like. There have been a few small, unforeseen problems.” Pierre opened the door.
“Allez-vous en!” Colifichet screamed.
*
Colifichet perched on a tall stool at a draughtsman’s table, hunched with a pencil and ruler.
He held his pencil in his right hand, Gabriel noted. Not his left.
Tidy workshop benches stored tools and glimmering little metal things. Weak white light slanted through tall windows. In the far corner, black cloth shrouded four or five tall, bulky forms.
“What is the meaning of this interruption?” Colifichet asked in French. He got down from his stool, fists balled, jaw unshaven, shirt untucked. “I told you that I was not to be disturbed under any circumstance. You again, Lord Harrington. Is this your nursemaid, perhaps?” He sent a scornful glance to Miss Flax in her dumpy disguise.
“Allow me to do the talking just this once,” Gabriel murmured to Miss Flax.
Miss Flax, uncharacteristically silent, nodded.
“They insisted upon coming to see you,” Pierre said to Colifichet. “They pushed me aside and forced their way in. I attempted to stop them.”
“That is not precisely the way I would describe it,” Gabriel said. Why was the apprentice lying? “It is about a trinket I happened to view today.”
“Trinket?” Colifichet massaged his eye sockets. “Pray, do not call the fruit of my labors a trinket.”
“A music box, then. In the house of Lord and Lady Cruthlach. Its toy dancer was in the form of Cendrillon, dressed in a miniature costume precisely like that in the ballet playing at the opera house.”
“Lord and Lady Cruthlach commissioned that music box—and, I must add, they are both quite, quite senile. I simply built it to their specifications.”
“Oh, indeed? When was this?”
“A year ago or more. I cannot recall. In fact, it was Pierre who built all but the interior mechanism of that piece.”
“Were either of you at all surprised when the ballerina’s Cinderella costume happened to be identical to that of the doll on the music box?”
Pierre’s eyes were empty.
Colifichet sniffed. “I pay no attention whatever to ballet costumes. My work concerns the stage sets. The rest—mmn!—it is women’s rubbish.”
“What of the fact that the music box figure resembles, to an uncanny degree, the murdered girl Sybille Pinet? I was told she worked as an artist’s model at one point. Did she model for you?”
“No. I do not use models.”
“That is rather difficult to believe.”
“Believe whatever you wish, Lord Harrington. I do not much care. As for the Cinderella figure on the music box, well, it possesses an insipid sort of beauty. A beauty with every distinguishing characteristic quite refined out of it until all that is left is a rather bland perfection. A living girl, with all of a living girl’s flaws, simply cannot compete with the cool perfection of art.”
“A pretty speech, Monsieur Colifichet, but quite beside the point. I’ll ask you directly: did you send a woman to steal a young lady from the house of the Marquis de la Roque-Fabliau today?”
“Mon Dieu, your accusations grow more and more curious. Do I appear to have any interest whatsoever in young ladies? Now, if you do not mind, I must return to my work. And you, Pierre—stay. We must get that leg just so. You, madame et monsieur, may show yourselves out—and perhaps peruse the shop before you go, hmn? You might find an automaton to amuse you—because you must be ever so bored if you are intruding in police business. Bonjour.”
*
Ophelia started down the gloomy corridor towards the front of Colifichet’s shop, but Penrose touched her arm and beckoned her in the other direction. A door at the end led out to a tight rear courtyard. Moss clotted the paving stones. Yellow walls rose five stories high, and clotheslines drooped from windows. Penrose studied the buildings.