I couldn’t nap after my phone call with Lock, despite my exhaustion. Lying in my quiet room, I couldn’t keep my thoughts from spinning until I sat up, dizzy and desperate for a distraction. I turned to maths first, timing how long it took me to solve problem sets, first in my head and then written out, to calculate how much time I wasted showing proof of work to my instructors. But for no known reason, instead of walking the steps of the equations, my thoughts kept replaying my earlier conversation with my father and, specifically, the way my father had threatened me to help get him out.
From out there, from in here, it don’t matter where I am. You’ll never see those boys again if you don’t help get me out of here.
He couldn’t have honestly expected that to work, which made me want to know why he’d said it—why he had wanted to see me at all. It felt like a waste of time for both of us.
Tired of hearing his voice in my head, I tossed aside my books and ran up the attic steps. If maths wouldn’t work, I would lose myself in training.
Aikido and Bartitsu are similar in that they are both about balance and focused power. But where Bartitsu is about disturbing your opponent’s equilibrium and taking advantage of every slipup, aikido is about using the force of your enemy’s attack to add to your own. Aikido is all about power, using everything you can steal from your enemy and exerting as little of your own as possible.
I had to wonder if that was why Mum chose aikido over all the other martial arts she could have learned. It was the perfect grifter’s art—if you do it right, you don’t even look like you’re fighting.
That morning I focused on the sword forms. I made it through maybe fifteen minutes of ever-shifting stances before I lost my balance to a misstep and tripped back over a stack of attic stuff, falling hard onto the plywood floor. A few old photo albums fell to one side of me and a metal box to the other. The box opened in the process, spilling out wads of tissue paper and something hard that clattered across the attic boards and plopped into the insulation.
I pushed the tissue paper back into the bottom half of the box, but one of the bundles was heavier than I expected. I unwrapped it and found a pile of fifty-pound notes in the center. ?Another heavy bundle had twenty-pound notes, then fifty-pound again, and the rest of the box was filled with torn, empty tissue sheets shaped like they had once held bundles of cash. In all, it seemed there had originally been thirteen bundles. From what I could calculate, the box had once held perhaps ￡50,000.
I crawled across the floor to retrieve the escaped object and found it was a bright silver multitool/utility knife. But when I pulled open the tools, where I expected to see blades, there were long, thin metal picks with odd shapes at the tips. It took me a minute to work it out, but in the end, I grinned and whispered, “Lock pick.”
I dropped the tool into the box with a clang, then felt around for the lid. It was heavier than it should have been, because of an ornate metal piece affixed to the top of it that was pewter and in the shape of a Celtic cross, with a circle that intersected the upright and crossbar. It had vines winding up the sides to weave through the pattern on the circle. All of that was odd enough, but it seemed like a ridiculously ornate box in which to hide money and a lock-pick tool.
With the box back in place, I flipped open one of the photo albums, which turned out to be a scrapbook. When I fanned through the pages, some old newspaper clippings fell out. The first had a picture of my dad holding his hand up, as if to block the press from taking pictures of him and a woman with curly hair who stood next to him. POLICE FIND KILLER, NO JUSTICE, read the headline. I skimmed the first paragraph, and apparently when he was just a constable, my father had managed to find the man who had murdered a child, but he was already dead. I vaguely remembered the case from my childhood, something about a boy’s body being found in a dumpster.
Another of the escaped clippings was about a girl who’d been drowned in an ornamental fountain at Hyde Park—the Joy of Life Fountain, just for some cruel irony. I flipped through a few more pages until I found a picture of a boy who looked to be about Seanie’s age. The accompanying clipping was mostly about Inspector Mallory, or Sergeant Mallory, as he was back then.
I started turning pages at random, wondering why in the world my mother would put so much effort into compiling something like this for my father. She didn’t seem the type to scrapbook at all, really. It seemed so out of character for her, but apparently this was just one more thing I didn’t know about Emily Moriarty. “Were you really that bored with your life?” I asked aloud, brushing my fingers over a program from the promotion ceremony where my father became a detective sergeant.
I closed the book with a shake of my head and reached for the photo albums that had once rested on top of it. Somehow, my little trip down memory lane had sapped all my energy. Even the slight effort it took to restack everything made me feel exhausted. Another escape abandoned, I went down the attic steps and headed toward my room, but my way was blocked by Freddie. He sat in the hall, leaning against my bedroom door, spinning his mobile phone on his knee like a top.