The Secrets of Gaslight Lane by M.R.C. Kasasian

Author:M.R.C. Kasasian [Kasasian, M.R.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781859742
Publisher: Head of Zeus

50

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Tracking Tigers

I HAD TO run after Sidney Grice. He was already past the desk and stalking through the front door on to the street, and I lost sight of him in the crowds, but then his cane rose above the sea of umbrellas, so terrifying to him, as he hailed a passing hansom.

‘What is the hurry?’ I panted as I caught up with him.

‘Thank heavens you are here,’ he cried and closed his eyes. ‘Now I do not have to look at them and, if I cannot see something, it cannot be seen to exist.’

I guided him to the platform and he climbed aboard.

‘Number 125 Gower Street,’ he called weakly to the driver and flopped back in his seat.

‘What on earth is the matter?’ I just had time to settle next to him when the cab set off.

‘It is too bad!’ my guardian cried, ‘Too bad. I spend my life seeking the truth. I track it like a Bengal tiger. I hunt it mercilessly and eventually I kill it – stone-dead truth with me posing, foot on its neck, looking magnificent in my solar topi and puttees. I hang it on my wall and wait for people to admire it.’

We bumped the side of a roadside stall but the driver did not stop and my guardian gave no sign of noticing.

‘I know you care about the truth,’ I assured him.

‘If only I only cared,’ he moaned. ‘It haunts me, March. It fills every waking second. When I think I am stalking it, it springs out on me. It prowls and howls in my dreams, this monster truth. Sometimes I hate it and yet I have loved it longer than I loved—’ He stopped.

‘Loved what?’ I hardly dared add, ‘Or who?’

‘Rabbit skins,’ he whispered. ‘There were rabbit-skin gloves in that handcart.’

Sidney Grice fell into a brooding abstraction.

‘But what has happened?’ I pressed him.

‘I have lost it, March.’ My godfather flopped. ‘I can neither see it nor smell it. I cannot find its spore. Where is it?’ He brought out his notebook, olive-green backed with multicoloured ribbons, and opened it to show me the tiny hieroglyphics, the lines, circles and squares, some cubed, the arrows sweeping round the pages, the block capitals of BLOOD POURED, plans of 1 Gaslight Lane with dozens of measurements pencilled over every surface, the word AMPHIBIAN diagonally up a page and then nothing.

‘But we have often had difficult cases,’ I pointed out. ‘You sometimes complain that they are not difficult enough.’

‘But usually I have so many ideas that I reprimand myself for not reining them in,’ he protested. ‘Stop it,’ he told the woman in the next hansom, who was drunkenly blowing him kisses. ‘You have an unsavoury periodontal condition.’

He brought out a blue polka-dotted handkerchief and folded it into the shape of a flower.

‘Perhaps you need to sleep on it,’ I suggested.

‘Rat traps, ratty-ratty rat traps,’ a man bellowed from the pavement, holding out a clumsy wooden box.

We squeezed through the stationary traffic and round a corner and speeded up.

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