Then he remembered nobody was after either of them right now; Custler probably didn’t even know Cyril was alive, let alone in the country.

A swift sizzle of nerves and elation turned his blood to seltzer: Cyril was in Amberlough, just up the highway in the weald. Cyril was alive and in one piece, and would be arriving in the city soon. He was the reason Aristide had come.

But he would rather swallow tacks than tell Custler that. So what could he tell her?

“I was afraid,” he said abruptly, the explanation snapping into place with the swiftness and clarity of his most perfect falsehoods.

It surprised her at any rate. “Afraid?”

Gratifying, how that always stunned folk. That Aristide Makricosta might feel the chill of fear like any other earthly creature.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “The LSI has clocked a little racket we had going with Porachin aid shipments and told us to cut off their biggest troublemakers in the north. I’ve pinned some people I don’t like to be on the wrong side of. And we’re looking for another stream of revenue. Are you satisfied?”

This put a slow smile across Custler’s face: a warm and greasy one that spread like melting wax.

“You know,” she said, “I heard things about you would raise the hairs on a hanged man. But I’m starting to think you’re just a crooked sculler like the rest of us. Damned good one, but a sculler all the same.”

CHAPTER

NINE

It snowed lightly the night before they left for the city, so that the drive south took them through an ashy landscape of ice-rimed empty fields, but by the time they arrived at Coral Street the weather had warmed enough to turn the snow to slush. Cyril, in a pair of borrowed gaiters, took the path to the front door slowly. Not because half-melted ice made it treacherous, but because he could hardly be sure it was real. He hadn’t been over the threshold of number twenty-four since he was in school.

“It’s not…” Lillian began, turning back to face him before mounting the steps. “Well. We were gone for a long time. And things didn’t go any better here than they did in the rest of Gedda.”

The damage wasn’t immediately apparent, in the vestibule. Even the front hall only looked a little bare. Pale patches on the wall showed where paintings had hung, but nothing was splintered or broken. The pineapple newel on the bottom of the staircase sent a shock of recognition through him: a sudden vivid memory of the slip of satiny wood beneath his hand, against his short pants; sliding down the bannister, hopping off, catching at the newel to slow himself before he fell.