It did not help that the boy, Marlowe, the Amazing Shining Boy, was gone. Nor that Brynt seemed lifeless and depressed when she stood in front of the crowds. A bad business, he thought. Performers came and went, of course, though rarely did they break contract, and he’d never before lost a part of his show to a detective.
He made his way back through the dark to his tent, brooding, and dropped his cheroot into the mud and ground it out with his heel and then went in. He had already doffed his hat in the gloom when he felt something was wrong. There was a faint reek of soot in the darkness.
“Hello?” he said. “Is someone there?”
“Mr. Fox,” said a voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“These are my private quarters, sir,” replied Felix sharply. He wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. “You are here from the Daily Almanac, I presume?”
He sat at his desk and fumbled at the lantern until he’d lit its wick and then he closed the little glass door and peered up. The stranger was standing in the darkness beside the filing cabinet, his face wrapped by a black scarf. Felix swallowed, uneasy. He looked nothing like a small-town reporter. The man was tall, thin, wearing a long black coat or cloak, silk hat low at his eyes.
“Come, sir, state your business,” Felix added, suddenly irritable. He was tired; it was no hour for a person to call unannounced. He fidgeted with his collar. “I have a circus to manage, if you don’t mind. These are my hours of work.”
“You need not concern yourself with this evening’s performance, Mr. Fox. It has been taken care of.” The stranger’s voice was very soft, very low. He had an English accent. Before Felix could ask what the devil he was talking about, the stranger added, “You had a visitor recently, a man from England. Went by the name of Coulton, yes?”
Felix was starting to feel strangely short of breath. “Who?” he said. He looked for a glass of water but there was none.
“Coulton,” repeated the stranger. “A detective.”
“I never met anyone by the name of Coulton,” croaked Felix. His breaths were coming quick now, shallow. “Tell me, sir, is it smoky in here? Shall we step outside?”
“Do not lie to me, Mr. Fox.”
Felix got to his feet. He was feeling dizzy. “Forgive me, I just need some air—”
“Sit down.”
Shocked, Felix sat.
“You will answer my questions, sir.”
Felix felt suddenly afraid. He stared at the stranger. He didn’t know how, but all at once he understood it was the stranger’s doing, this asphyxiating, this choking off of his air.
“The detective,” the voice said again, patiently. “Frank Coulton. Tell me about him.”
“It was a woman,” Felix gasped. “Alice Quicke. Here. For Brynt’s boy.”
“Brynt’s boy?”
“Marlowe. Was working. Sideshow. For us.”
The stranger shifted in the darkness, nodding. “And what precisely did he do, this boy?”
Felix’s eyes bulged, his heart was thundering in his chest. “Nothing. He glowed. Blue. Like a lantern. Please, I never asked—”
“Tell me about the woman, Alice … Quicke. She took the boy?”
“To England. Yes. Halliday. His name. Was Halliday.”
“When did she leave?”
“Last week—”
“I’m afraid you’ve been lied to, Mr. Fox,” said the stranger calmly. “There is no Halliday boy. This child, Marlowe, has been stolen from you. He will be taken to a manor house in Scotland. The Cairndale Institute. They will do things to him there, awful things. I’d hoped to spare him that.”
Felix was scrabbling at his collar, pulling at his tie. The stranger had stepped forward now out of the darkness but somehow it still seemed to smolder up off him, as if ash were coming out of his clothes, out of his very skin.
“What I’d really like to hear, Mr. Fox,” he continued, “is everything you know about this boy. His age, what he looks like, where he’s from, who’s been caring for him. Everything. Leave nothing out. Could you do that for me?”
Stars were flaring at the edges of Felix’s vision. “Yes,” he gasped.
“Excellent,” said the stranger, coming closer. He sat in a chair facing the desk, folded one leg over the other, smoothed out his trousers. With each gesture a curl of black dust, like smoke, rose and dissipated into the darkness. “Let’s not waste each other’s time, then,” he murmured.