Five minutes passed.
Ten.
“All right,” said Komako. “Let’s go get her.”
“Aren’t we supposed to wait for her to come out?” said Oskar. “Isn’t that what you said?”
She wiped the rain from her face. “Whose plan is this?”
“Yours?”
“Mine. And if you’d like to wait out here alone—”
“I don’t,” said Oskar quickly.
* * *
The inside of Albany Chandlers was very quiet, very dim. The front windows were greasy with soot on the inside and a rainy daylight came through poor and thin. The door shut with a clatter of its bell behind her and Komako stood a long moment, letting her eyes adjust.
The air felt close, unhealthy. A reek of tallow fat and oils and something sharper and meaner, like lye, burned her nostrils. Tall stacks of industrial candles beside the door, wooden crates sealed and stamped. Komako stepped cautiously forward, peeling off her gloves as she did so.
It was a narrow corner shop, with the clerk’s desk far at the back. Her eyes scanned the low ceiling, stained brown where the water had got in over the years. Gas sconces, turned weakly up, hung from the walls. When she could see better she started down a long aisle cluttered with tins and jars and stacks of ropes of all manner of thinness and she heard Oskar follow, his wet shoes squeaking softly. There was arguing from deeper in the shop. Two voices.
But neither belonged to Ribs. It was a man and a woman, old, married maybe. The woman sounded unhappy about something, affronted. Komako ducked her head as she neared but then, before she’d reached them, her eye caught on something under a shelf, and she froze. It was a wet cloak, neatly folded. Also a plain gray dress, a shift, a pair of very wet shoes.
Oskar crouched beside her, shaking his head. “She’s got undressed, Ko,” he whispered. “She’s gone and made herself invisible.”
“Brilliant.” Oskar’s real talent, she thought irritably, might be for stating the obvious. But if Ribs had stripped down it meant she might be anywhere. It also meant she must have seen something, heard something that required caution. She and Oskar should be wary.
“Oi! You!”
Komako looked up. An old woman in a leather apron and with a handkerchief tying off her hair was glaring down at her. She sounded English, not Scottish. A wooden spoon was gripped in one wizened fist. Her other hand was missing.
“What’re you lot sneakin round for, then?”
“We are not sneaking,” said Komako calmly, enunciating each word. She pulled her hood back off her face. Oskar did the same.
“Why, it’s a wee lascar girl, Edward,” the woman exclaimed. She was looking past them and Komako turned now and saw at the other end of the aisle, blocking their retreat, an old heavyset man in shirtsleeves. His beard was unkempt and stained by tobacco around the mouth. His hairy wrists were ringed black with dirt. “An if she don’t speak the Queen’s English!”
“Huh,” the man grunted.
Komako lifted her chin at the man’s name, ignoring the old woman’s remark. “Mr. Edward Albany?” she said. “That is you, sir?”
“Huh,” the man grunted again. His eyebrows came down in a suspicious glower.
“We’ve been looking for you, sir. We’re from the Cairndale Institute. Do you know it?” She watched his face to see his reaction but there was nothing, not a flicker of recognition. She turned back to the old woman but she too seemed to be waiting for Komako to say something more.
“Go on,” said the woman. “What of it?”
“Do you not make deliveries to the institute?” Komako said, suddenly uncertain.
Edward Albany frowned and peered helplessly over at the woman. Komako saw then that there was something childlike about him, despite his age. His other hand held several loops of wire and he hung them on a hook on one shelf, replacing them, and then he shrugged and shuffled off to another part of the shop. She could hear his heavy breathing even after he was gone.
Oskar was looking at her under lowered lashes, a question in his eyes. Ribs was nowhere.
“So what is it you’d be needin then, lass?” the woman asked, taking charge. “Deliveries, you say? We make aplenty of takeaways but only inside the city limits. It’s just the two of us here, you see. An we ain’t half what we used to be. Where did you say you was at?”
She’d drifted closer now and Komako could smell the lye and fat coming off her. Her one hand was scoured to the wrist and discolored and her other stump was raw-looking like meat. She had eyes yellowing with age or malnutrition or some darker illness and they wept slightly at the corners and Komako saw all at once that she’d been mistaken, that the woman’s gruffness was not unkindness. She was just poor, and had lived a hard life.