‘She’s grown.’
‘You remember her?’
‘Of course.’
Meggie noticed that Mo double-locked the door.
‘How old is she now?’ Dustfinger smiled at her. It was a strange smile. Meggie couldn’t decide whether it was mocking, supercilious, or just awkward. She didn’t smile back. ‘Twelve,’ said Mo.
‘Twelve? My word!’ Dustfinger pushed his dripping hair back from his forehead. It reached almost to his shoulders. Meggie wondered what colour it was when it was dry. The stubble round his narrow-lipped mouth was gingery, like the fur of the stray cat Meggie sometimes fed with a saucer of milk outside the door. Ginger hair sprouted on his cheeks, too, sparse as a boy’s first beard but not long enough to hide three long, pale scars. They made Dustfinger’s face look as if it had been smashed and stuck back together again. ‘Twelve,’ he repeated. ‘Of course. She was … let’s see, she was three then, wasn’t she?’
Mo nodded. ‘Come on, I’ll find you some dry clothes.’ Impatiently, as if he were suddenly in a hurry to hide the man from Meggie, he led his visitor across the hall. ‘And Meggie,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘you go back to sleep.’ Then, without another word, he closed his workshop door.
Meggie stood there rubbing her cold feet together. Go back to sleep. Sometimes, when they’d stayed up late yet again, Mo would toss her down on her bed like a bag of walnuts. Sometimes he chased her round the house after supper until she escaped into her room, breathless with laughter. And sometimes he was so tired he lay down on the sofa and she made him a cup of coffee before she went to bed. But he had never ever sent her off to her room so brusquely.
A foreboding, clammy and fearful, came into her heart as if, along with the visitor whose name was so strange yet somehow familiar, some menace had slipped into her life. And she wished – so hard it frightened her – that she had never fetched Mo, and Dustfinger had stayed outside until the rain washed him away.
When the door of the workshop opened again she jumped.
‘Still there, I see,’ said Mo. ‘Go to bed, Meggie. Please.’ He had that little frown over his nose that appeared only when something was really worrying him, and he seemed to look straight through her as if his thoughts were somewhere else entirely. The foreboding in Meggie’s heart grew, spreading black wings.
‘Send him away, Mo!’ she said as he gently propelled her towards her room. ‘Please! Send him away. I don’t like him.’
Mo leaned in her open doorway. ‘He’ll be gone when you get up in the morning. Word of honour.’
‘Word of honour – no crossed fingers?’ Meggie looked him straight in the eye. She could always tell when Mo was lying, however hard he tried to hide it from her.
‘No crossed fingers,’ he said, holding both hands out to show her.
Then he closed her door, even though he knew she didn’t like that. Meggie put her ear to it, listening. She could hear the clink of china. So the man with the sandy beard was getting a nice cup of tea to warm him up. I hope he catches pneumonia, thought Meggie … though he needn’t necessarily die of it. Meggie heard the kettle whistling in the kitchen, and Mo carrying a tray of clattering crockery back to the workshop. When that door closed she forced herself to wait a few more seconds, just to be on the safe side. Then she crept back out into the passage.
There was a notice hanging on the door of Mo’s workshop, a small metal plaque. Meggie knew the words on it by heart. When she was five she had often practised reading the old-fashioned, spindly lettering:
Some books should be tasted
some devoured,
but only a few