Caitlin Roesbuck and the Foil Men
Chapter One
Caitlin Roesbuck lived in an old hotel down by the sea, with her mother and father, and her uncle, who lived in the basement and only came up for tea.
She had brown hair, and blue eyes, and was nearly eleven. She had freckles in the summer, and a red nose in the winter. She wore a smile when she was dreaming, a frown when she was busy, and a look of polite indifference at all points in between.
Caitlin had a room at the very top of the hotel, with a window facing out to the ocean, and a thin little window seat where she could spend whole evenings watching the last embers of the sun dance on the waves. She had a bed, and a television, and too many toys to count in one sitting.
Her room was at the top of a very thin flight of stairs, with a pattern of creaks that Caitlin tried to avoid every time she walked down. If she stood on the last stair and listened hard enough, she could hear voices in all the rooms along the corridor, from number seven to number fifteen. There wasn’t a room number thirteen, although her parents kept a key with a big number thirteen carved on it to entertain the American tourists. If Caitlin was being a hard-bitten reporter or a post-Glasnost superspy, then she tried to pick up useful information on her way down for a glass of milk, but usually she only found out about people taking days off work, or going to conferences that their wives didn’t know about.
The old hotel was usually half-full, and even on slow days, was only half-empty. At checking-out time, if it was a weekend, or a holiday, Caitlin would wander down her thin little stairs, carefully avoiding the pattern of creaks, and take the elevator down to the lobby. There she would sit on a wicker chair, half-hidden behind a potted plant, and watch the guests on their way out. They nearly all stopped to say hello, even if they were busy. That was just the kind of person Caitlin was.
Not all of the guests left at checking-out time, of course. There was her uncle, whose name she knew, but never used. Not only did she think that ‘uncle’ was a little more respectful, but Caitlin rarely saw him. He had arrived out of the blue one winter morning, with a car full of oddments and a beard full of snow, had strode down to the basement in his Wellington boots, and never left. He had most of his meals down there, although Caitlin’s mother sometimes persuaded him to spend some time with the family. On those rare occasions, he would sit and sieve a cup of tea through his beard, with an expression on his face that spoke of both heavenly bliss and a pressing engagement. When he went back down to the basement, he would grasp the hand of Caitlin’s father in his big, meaty paw and say, with the air of man who was truly content: “Same time next week?”
Caitlin often wondered what he did, down in the basement, caught between the whistling and the sparks. Someday, she had promised herself, she would find out.
Another regular was Ms. Britten, a writer as thin and sharp as the pencil she wrote with. She had a firm, calculating face, which looked somewhat out of sorts with her wavy, tangled hair and fascinating taste in shoes. Apparently, she wrote murder mysteries, and nowhere was more conducive to thoughts of murder than the seaside. She ate all of her meals in the dining room, apart from when she had been seized by inspiration (which Caitlin thought sounded rather painful) and had to have her meals delivered to her bedside. Ms. Britten was always nice to Caitlin, and would sometimes dip into her latest advance to give her a large tip. Caitlin was, understandably, always ready to run errands for her.
Up on the second floor, in a room exactly as far away from the elevator as it was from the stairs, lived Mr Blofume. Mr Blofume had once been a famous radio star, with his voice broadcast far and wide, but one day his smoky, romantic tones had given way to a chesty cough, and he had been forced to leave. Apparently the sea air was good for his lungs, which was why he spent his retirement years sitting on an iron chair on the pier, blowing wistful rings of cigar smoke out to sea. Caitlin could always hear him before she could see him, for Mr Blofume panted profusely wherever he went, and his panting was always accompanied by the most colourful of complaints.
“Damn these accursed
lungs to the lowest echelon of Hell!” He would shout, climaxing his complaint
with a cough. “Why must I bear the damned misfortune of being placed precisely in the middle of this damned corridor? As if I
weren’t under enough strain!”
If Mr Blofume’s complaints became even more
inventive, Caitlin would do her best to remember the words so that she could
use them on people at school, or at least mouth them at herself in the mirror,
which made her feel powerful and grown-up.
Caitlin’s parents had offered several times
to move Mr Blofume to a room closer to the elevator, or to the stairs, but
Caitlin thought that Mr Blofume secretly liked having something to complain about. He always refused, ‘out of politeness,’ he said. Ms.
Britten told Caitlin that Mr Blofume’s opinions were once of great importance
to politicians the world over, and now that he didn’t have quite as many
opinions or as much contact with those who wanted to hear them, he had been
forced to fall back on his unmatched collection of insults, accumulated during
a life in the news.
When Caitlin wasn’t
at school, she was free to roam all over the hotel, and its grounds, which
amounted to a concrete yard out the front, and an overgrown walled garden out
the back. If Caitlin was a world-renowned basketball player, then she preferred
the frontyard. If she was hiking up the Amazon in search of lost cities, gold
and interesting friends, then she preferred the garden. Either
way, both were just big enough and rough enough for a girl who was almost
eleven.
Most of the time, Caitlin had herself just to
herself. Her parents were very busy with the running of the hotel, and the old
hotel itself was far from the centre of town, where all her schoolfriends
lived. Apart from when they came over for tea, which wasn’t
very often, Caitlin only saw them during the day. And
Caitlin’s mother and father were far too busy to give her a little brother or
sister to play with, which some days made Caitlin very relieved, and other days
a little sad. But she was rarely unhappy, because she
had a whole hotel to play in, when some people only had a house. On clear days,
or on evenings when the sun still hadn’t set, even
when it was past teatime, she was allowed to go walking along the seafront.
With the crisp tang of seaspray on the air, and the water whispering poetry
into her ear, she didn’t feel alone, or sad at all.
Besides, her father had said that it was only six years before she could learn
to drive, and, since Caitlin couldn’t even remember a
time when she was six, she thought that the time would pass quite quickly.
* * *
It was an overcast Saturday morning when the
first body washed up on the beach.
Caitlin had gone to the newsagents, just as she did every Saturday
morning, after watching cartoons since daybreak. She was heading home with both
arms clutched around a bundle of supplements when she saw the crumpled heap of
clothes.
Curious, and a little apprehensive, Caitlin
tiptoed closer.
The rest of the beach was empty, the sand smooth and pristine with the
recession of the tide. Even the seagulls were quiet, circling overhead but
keeping their opinions to themselves.
Walking closer, she could see that the heap
of clothes wasn’t a heap of clothes at all, but a man,
neatly and precisely folded in half. All around him, his blood had dyed the
sand a deep red, giving the grains the consistency of wet silk.
It
looks like Mars, Caitlin thought,
feeling faintly queasy. Like he brought back a little bit of Mars.
Biting back tears, she moved closer to the
body. The man’s head was tucked between his legs, facing the ground, so she
didn’t have to see his blank, staring eyes, but his hair was tangled with
plants from the sea; barnacles, seaweed and algae, all plaited together. Eric,
at school, had told her that dead peoples’ hair kept growing after they died, and that sometimes they sat up in the mortuary and
wondered where they were.
Caitlin wondered who the body had been.
At first, she thought that his bare skin was covered in a series of intricate tattoos, like her
grandfather, who had been in both the circus and the military, but looking more
carefully revealed that each of the marks was a tiny, razor-thin cut that had
been wrapped around his arms and legs. It looked as if he’d
walked through a cloud of tiny metal snakes, each one twisting about him;
rubbing, scratching and biting.
His skin was so pale, Caitlin thought. He had bled so much that there
was nothing left to give him any colour, just the half-hearted red-purple-blue
of wounds that had been unable to clot.
She paused above the body a few seconds
longer, as if paying her respects, and then ran home, letting the papers
scatter along the strand.
* * *
Caitlin was shivering, despite being wrapped in a towel and the embrace of her mother. She
should have been warm: there was a large fire blazing in the grate, and the
little hotel kitchen was full. All of the regulars, and most of the guests, had
come to hear the verdict of the police. Even her uncle had emerged from his
laboratory.
“I’m sorry you had to be the one who found
him, Caitlin,” the shorter of the officers said, under her breath. “Really I
am.”
Caitlin tried to give her a weak smile, to show that she was being
brave. She thought she might have managed a small grimace.
The officer gave Caitlin a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, before
turning to the assembled adults. “I’ve been on the phone to the station, and
they got word to the coastguard… but from what we can tell, this was just a
terrible… accident. The man your daughter found – well, apparently he jumped
overboard from a ferry in the
“Are you treating it as suspicious? Caitlin’s
father said, raising an eyebrow. “His death, I mean.”
“We’re not, no. Unfortunate as it sounds,
accidents like this do happen. It’s best not to dwell
on the specifics. We’ll… take it from here.”
“Are you sure? According to what my daughter
told me…”
As soon as her father involved her, Caitlin
began to tune out the conversation. She didn’t want to
hear what she had told him, in a breathless voice, in between sobs. Neither did
she want to hear another description of the man, just when she was beginning to
get him out of her head. She thought if she concentrated hard enough on the
drying rack above her head, or on the collection of novelty mugs above the
sink, she might be able to burn a new image over the top of the thing on the beach.
Then her uncle leaned in close; close enough that
not even Caitlin’s mother could hear what he said.
“It wasn’t an accident,” he whispered. “Not
this time.”
Caitlin’s eyes widened. “Then… what was it?”
His jaw set, and there was something steely
behind his eyes.
“The foil men have returned.”