Cathy read it once. She read it twice. She forced herself to read it again, each time more agonisingly slowly than the last – but, if she had expected the words to evaporate and change, she was sorely mistaken. There they stayed, imprinted on the page just as they were imprinting themselves on her heart.
An hour passed, maybe more. But the clock had stopped ticking. The motors had wound down. She thought, perhaps, that she herself was winding down – until, with an enormous effort, she got to her feet. She marched to the mirror – and, god, but she looked old. Dry your eyes, Catherine Wray, she told herself, and choked when she realised the old name had already come back to her tongue. No, she reminded herself. Whether you’re a Godman or a Wray, you’re still you. And Cathy, you don’t cry.
Folding the letter neatly to place it in a pocket, she marched out on to the gallery.
He was not in his workshop, but she had known that already. She crossed the silent shopfloor, where no miniature locomotives hurtled along the aisles, no tramping could be heard between floorboards and shelf stack, and into the half-moon hall. She fumbled for a key and opened up the door, staggering out into the whiteness that had encrusted Iron Duke Mews.
The snow had fallen thickly last night. Drifts grew up the walls of the mews, burying the doors of the neighbouring shops. It had fallen too deeply to leave any footprints, but she hastened up the mews all the same: Cathy Godman, still in her nightgown, plunging knee deep with every step.
She had gone halfway when she stumbled. There was a mound in the snow, no doubt belying the cobbles underneath, and she pitched forward as she hit it. The snow cushioned her fall and for a time she lay there, breathing it in: the morning air, the stillness, the very last day of what she’d thought was her life. She watched as a pair of newspapermen crossed the end of the mews, but they did not look in so they did not see her lying there.
Nor did they see the frosted velvet and felt that had been unearthed when she stumbled.
Cathy saw it in the corner of her eye: indigo and tartan; a lolling tongue of darned sock. In an instant the numbness (surely so much more than the snow) to which she was giving herself had been swept away. In its place was fire that thawed every corner of her body. She plunged her forearms into the snow, scrabbled for purchase, shovelled handfuls away where she could not take hold. Then she heaved, until the tartan and felt was lying on top of the snow and she was staring down, down into the lifeless face of Sirius, the patchwork dog.
She brushed crystals of ice away from his cross-stitched nose. She pressed her face to his belly, listened for the whirring of his heart – but the mechanisms that drove him, that had driven him ever since Kaspar was a boy, had stopped. Her fingers fumbled for his belly, but nothing turned within. The key by which Sirius was wound was unnaturally still.
Cathy bore the dog up (how light it was, only cotton wadding and felt!) and carried it back along the mews, through the doors to the half-moon hall. There she spread its legs to see the tiny key protruding from the fabric on its underside. ‘Please,’ she whispered, and blew on her hands to warm up her fingers. Delicately, she started to turn.
The key caught, and she could feel the touch of the mechanism inside. Something clicked every time it revolved, but soon she came to know she was turning the key in thin air; it was not meshing with whatever contraption lay on the other side. She shifted Sirius around, petting him gently, making yet more promises as she worked. ‘It’s all right, boy,’
she whispered. ‘He hasn’t gone. He can’t have gone. Not now, not after all this. He’s coming back. Don’t give up, not yet …’
Something inside Sirius’s belly moved; the key had snagged on some tangle of wires. After a moment, the key slipped free once again – but, now that she knew what she was searching for, she knew how to find it again. Soon, the key was driving the motors. She felt them coming to life – and when, at last, the key would turn no tighter, she fell back, collapsed on to the cold shopfloor.
Beside her, Sirius lay still. His motors turned but he did not flicker, not even as if in a dream.
Cathy lay back, defeated. She did not want to sob and so she did not, but something sobbed inside her – for the end of Sirius, for Papa Jack lying cold in the ground, for the idea that she had not lost Kaspar today, but lost him in a thousand tiny moments ever since he returned; for the fact that she had not been able to save him, after all this time.
There was a thunder of footsteps. Somebody else was on the shopfloor. She looked up to see them running to her through a stand of paper trees. Emil crashed through the creeping vines, Mrs Hornung close behind.
‘We saw the doors open. The snow coming in. Cathy, is everything all right?’
Before she could answer, the bundle of fabric at her feet started to shift. Cathy looked down and, from between her legs, there rose a cross-stitch nose, two black button eyes. Sirius turned his head, his darned sock tongue lolling out as if desperate for water. Softly, his tail began to beat. He climbed ungainly to his feet.
Cathy gathered him up, clung to him as he lapped at her, leaving dust and dangling thread wherever he touched her face. She dug into her pocket and pressed the note into Emil’s waiting hand.
‘It’s Kaspar,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. He’s left us all behind.’
THE GHOST IN THE TOYSHOP
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1924–1940
The man’s name was Lewis and – or so it seemed to Cathy – he was more interested in the patchwork rabbits proliferating on the shelf than the letter she kept pressing into his hands.
‘We’re here as a courtesy, Mrs Godman, and because my chief inspector brought his daughters here, once upon a while.’ Two other constables were somewhere in the aisles, trying to pull crinkled card berries from the paper trees. ‘I’m afraid that what you have there, in your hands, rather disproves your case. Your husband isn’t missing, Mrs Godman.’ He turned on his heel from the shelf and wiped his hand, in disgust, on his trouser. One of the patchwork rabbits, with precise derision, had deposited a patchwork pellet into his palm. ‘He just left. It’s there in black and white, and little we can do about it – in a public forum, at least. Listen, you have my sympathies. Before I was a copper I was a soldier, like the lot of us, and … Mr Godman wouldn’t be the first to walk out on his wife. If you had my job, why, you’d know some of the terrible things that can happen when a soldier comes home.’
Cathy said, ‘You don’t know my husband.’
‘We done some digging, Mrs Godman. All as a favour, you understand. He was a flamboyant man, your husband. That’s what his old soldier pals tell us. Up and down, up and down, that sort of fellow – and that can be the worst. And you knew, of course, what he was doing down at the veterans’ home? Down on the Strand with those music boxes of his?’
Cathy stopped herself before she replied. She had thought those music boxes a thing of the past.
‘Oh yes, his trips down there seem to have been quite the stir. Music boxes for all the veterans, things to make ’em feel young again. But you knew about that of course.’
The sergeant loped back into the half-moon hall, poked his head out of the door and peered up the snowbound mews.
‘And the dog, you say you found it out there?’
‘He must have followed Kaspar out, then lain down in the snow …’
‘What, and just froze to death?’
‘I wound him back up. He …’
‘I … see. One of your contraptions then, was it? Not quite real? Mrs Godman, you can understand where I’m coming from. You say the dog followed him out, and yet you still say he’s missing. Well, if a man leaves of his own accord …’
Cathy propped herself against one of the shelves. There was no use in arguing with somebody so blinkered, so instead she just nodded.
‘Might I ask you a … personal question, Mrs Godman? I’m told it has relevance, though Lord knows you’ll think I’m a ghoul.’
Cathy said, ‘If you think it will help,’ and noticed the man could not even look her in the eye.