Return of the Emerald Skull (6 page)

‘Why, you—’ Jug-Ears began, but backed away when he saw, by the look in my eyes, that I meant business.

‘All right, sonny, no need to fight. I'm sure Mr Lee's got enough to pay us both off …’

He stopped, his eyes narrowed again, and then a big stupid grin spread over the thug's oafish face. If it hadn't been for that gap-toothed grin, I'd have been a goner. As it was, I managed to half turn when the attack from behind came. It caught me a glancing blow instead of staving my skull in.

I was sent clattering to the floor, where I lay dazed alongside the tools of the thug's trade. Looking up, I saw that Jug-Ears had been joined by a small, ratty-looking companion in equally gaudy clothes. He must have slipped in behind me and felled me with a coward's blow from the ugly-looking cudgel he grasped in both hands.

‘Can't leave you alone for two minutes,
Fegg, without you getting turned over by a … a tick-tock lad!’

‘Sorry, but he snuck up behind me,’ Jug-Ears protested, retrieving his hat.

‘Well, now
I've
snuck up behind
him
, ain't I?’ said Ratface with an unpleasant smirk as he raised the cudgel above his head. ‘And he's going to get what's coming to him—’

‘And what would that be, gentlemen?’ came a soft, lilting voice from behind the counter.

I looked up to see a small, waif-like girl standing beside Mr Lee, her hands clasped at her front and head cocked demurely to one side. Despite the predicament I was in, I couldn't help noticing how beautiful she was. She had black plaits, milky skin, bright flashing eyes and the daintiest nose I've ever seen.

‘Run along, missy,’ Jug-Ears told her. ‘This is nothing to do with you.’

‘Oh, but I think it is,’ she replied sweetly.

‘Mei Ling, please,’ said Chung Lee.

But the girl simply smiled. ‘My grandfather and I are as close as’ – she held up her hand and crossed her first two fingers – ‘this! You have a problem with my grandfather, you have a problem with me! So I suggest that it is you two who “run along”.’

Suddenly Jug-Ears lost his temper completely. ‘I warned you!’ he snarled, picking up the leather cosh and swinging it at her head.

Mei Ling ducked, the smile never faltering for a moment. Jug-Ears swung the cosh again. This time Mei Ling jumped up onto the counter and stepped daintily to one side as the oaf brought the cosh smashing down onto the polished wooden surface. He howled with pain as the impact of the blow jarred his shoulder. Mei Ling looked down at him, smiling that broad, beautiful smile of hers.

‘I really think you should just leave,’ she said.

Mei Ling looked down at him, smiling that broad, beautiful smile of hers.

For a moment he stood there, a mixture of rage and confusion plucking his face in all directions. The girl winked. Outraged, the thug tried to grab her ankles. Instead, she leaped up, performed an effortless double-somersault in midair, and landed behind him.

Jug-Ears spun round, slashing and swiping at her with the cosh, joined this time by his rat-faced companion. Mei Ling avoided the blows of the cudgel and the cosh with another effortless leap, high in the air, over the glowing paper lantern, before landing silently at my side. I reached for my swordstick, but Mei Ling stopped me with a slight shake of her head and a delicate frown.

Instead, she turned and confronted Ratface and Jug-Ears, who were lumbering towards her, both red in the face and panting from their useless exertions. Mei Ling stopped them in their tracks with an unblinking stare and a raised finger. Then, from between her beautiful lips, came a soft, lilting hum – like
the drone of a dragonfly. She moved her finger from side to side and, like salivating guard dogs eyeing a bone, the eyes of the two thugs followed it.

‘Now, you're not going to hurt my grandfather,
are
you?’ she said softly.

‘No,’ they grunted in unison, ‘we're not going to hurt your grandfather.’

‘You're going to leave, and never come back, aren't you?’

‘Leave and never come back,’ they intoned, their heads nodding as she raised and lowered her finger.

‘Excellent,’ said Mei Ling, lowering her arm and clapping her hands together like someone wiping dust from their palms.

The two of them climbed slowly to their feet. Then, as meek and mild as a pair of whipped dogs, their tails between their legs, they laid their weapons down on the floor and shuffled across the room to the door. Ratface went out first, with Jug-Ears closing the door
quietly behind him as he brought up the rear.

As the catch clicked shut, it was as though a spell was broken. I turned to Mei Ling.

‘That was absolutely incredible,’ I said. ‘Amazing … How on earth did you do that?’

She smiled that beautiful smile of hers. ‘Grandfather doesn't approve. He calls it “showing off”,’ she said with a giggle. ‘He prefers it if I hand them an empty purse and tell them it is full.’

From the counter Chung Lee nodded, his paper hat wobbling, and held out a hand for the professor's laundry receipt. Getting to my feet, I sheathed my sword and handed him the piece of paper – only for Mei Ling to snatch it from my fingers with another delightful giggle.

‘The laundry can wait,’ she told me. ‘Are you the tick-tock lad I saw eating his lunch on the roof?’

I smiled. ‘The very same,’ I said. ‘Barnaby
Grimes. Pleased to meet you.’

I held out a hand, but Mei Ling ignored it.

‘And you want to know how I dealt with our unwelcome visitors just now?’

I nodded.

‘You must promise me something in return,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ I said, intrigued.

‘You must promise,’ she said with a tinkling laugh, ‘to tell me what you were eating … It looked absolutely delicious!’

or the next few days I set about my tick-tock rounds with renewed purpose. Turning out the contents of my bureau, I went to work in a fresh shirt and waistcoat each day. As I highstacked all over town, delivering parcels and documents, I brushed past sooty chimneys at every opportunity, rolled across countless dusty rooftops and dined carelessly on wharfman's stew. Soon I had a suitably impressive bundle of laundry – and I knew just where to deliver it.

Rising early three days later, I climbed out of my attic window and shinned up onto the
roof, eager to renew my acquaintance with the beautiful young laundress.

A watery, pale sun shone down through an early morning haze, and as I glanced up, I suddenly remembered the remarkable occurrence PB had been talking about excitedly all year. At the end of the summer there was to be an eclipse of the sun.

‘A full eclipse, Barnaby,’ he'd informed me, his eyes twinkling. ‘The first for ninety-eight years! Think about it, my boy. The sun completely extinguished. Day turned to night!’

Gazing up at the sun that morning, I realized that Mei Ling had banished any thought of the eclipse from my head. And just about every other thought, for that matter. As I crossed the rooftops, I could hear the familiar cries of the street vendors and market spielers plying their trade on the roads below.

‘What do you lack? What do you lack?’
the words echoed up through the smoky air.

‘Fresh milk by the ladle! Penny a dip!’ ‘Orchard apples, ripe and cheap!’ I was above the corner of Pettigrew Street and Leinster Lane when I heard the cry I'd been listening out for. Leaping from the gutter I was perched upon, down to the jutting window ledge below me, I performed a move the great Tom Flint had taught me a few years earlier – the Flying Fox, it was called; a tricky manoeuvre which involved a flagpole, an unbuttoned coat and a steady nerve. Seconds later, I landed on the pavement beside a portly pieman, a tray of steaming pies and pasties around his neck.

‘Two Stover's Specials,’ I said, and dropped a couple of coppers into his outstretched hand.

Back up on the rooftops, I paused briefly at the old Guildhall and surveyed the horizon
before setting off once more. The bell at the top of the Corn Exchange was chiming seven o'clock as I crossed Bowery Road, which marked the northernmost boundary to Chinatown. Fifty yards ahead was the green roof of the Lotus Blossom Laundry, its glazed tiles glistening with raindrops from the previous night's downpour.

The architecture of the building had been borrowed from the orient. Tall whitewashed walls were topped with a mansard roof, upswept eaves and undulating gables. Adjusting the bulging sack of laundry strapped to my back, I made my way across the rooftop, and was about to select a drainpipe for my descent when a mullioned window beneath the eaves opened and Mei Ling's head poked out.

‘Barnaby Grimes,’ she called over to me, her face breaking into a smile. ‘I've been expecting you. The water is just coming to the boil.’

Expecting me? I wondered. Water coming to the boil? How on earth could she have known I would visit at that moment?

My confusion must have shown on my face, for the next moment Mei Ling broke into a peal of laughter. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said. ‘And bring that bundle of laundry with you.’

I jumped across the gap between the two buildings and swung down over the eaves onto the sill of Mei Ling's window. She stepped aside and motioned for me to enter. I took off my coalstack hat, clicked it flat and entered a richly furnished salon.

The floor was of dark mahogany with intricate inlays of pale silver birch, and strewn with finely woven mats of seagrass. The walls were painted in white, red and gold, with emerald-green dragons writhing across their surface, and the huge attic room was divided into smaller sections with the aid of tall, double-hinged screens. Waist-high
vases, each one elegantly painted, stood on either side of the window and at the top of the stairs on black varnished pedestals, their glazed gold and turquoise surfaces glowing in the light cast by the pink and orange paper lanterns overhead.