The Mysterious Mr Wylie: Wonky Inn Book 6 Read online

  Then someone had come along and been able to sense the existence of Gorde’s Gimcrack even through a powerfully built magickal forcefield. We’d seen who that person was the previous evening, but we didn’t know why he’d taken the Gimcrack.

  But he wasn’t a petty thief, was he? No common or garden witch or wizard. He’d been somebody who had found something that they wanted.

  Somebody I had seen before, recently. In the present day. And now that I thought about it, he must have known me when we locked eyes …

  We had locked eyes.

  Suddenly I knew where I’d seen him before. “Suffering salted caramel!” I shrieked, and Florence whirled around in alarm.

  “Miss?”

  I jumped to my feet, my tea sloshing all over my plate, soaking my croissants.

  “I need to go and wake Silvan up.” He was going to be thrilled. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet. “Be a darling and make us some packed lunch please, Florence. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need some sustenance.”

  And with that I was spinning on my heel and heading for the top floor.

  It looked like I was travelling to London once again.

  “You know, I’m not especially welcome around here?” Silvan shifted uneasily. For the first time ever, I’d placed him in a situation that he wasn’t comfortable with. In fact, I’d never seen him look quite so uncomfortable. He had been more at home fighting The Mori in his night shirt than walking along the cobbles here in the narrow street between the warm cosy shops.

  “Relax. Surely no-one can take issue with you walking up Celestial Street in the daylight and minding your own business. It’s not like you’ve come here to steal…” I stopped dead in my tracks. “Wait, you haven’t ever undertaken any nefarious activities along here, have you?”

  “I can’t answer that question on the grounds that I might incriminate myself.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe you sometimes. We’re all one kind. All witches and wizards together, aren’t we?”

  “Tell that to The Mori,” Silvan muttered, and turned to walk back the way we’d come.

  I grabbed a hold of his sleeve. “Don’t go.”

  He paused, looking back at me, something knowing in his eyes. “Why? You can handle this by yourself, I’m sure.”

  “I have no idea what’s going to happen when I go in there. I know you don’t owe me anything.” I certainly had no intention of giving him any more money. “But…” I shrugged.

  “But?” Silvan leaned in to me, his face close to mine, holding my gaze.

  Crikey, the man could be so infuriating. What did he want? My first born?

  I pulled away slightly, oddly disconcerted, his proximity to me making me warm.

  “It’s up to you. You know?” I replied airily.

  “Oh.” He bit back a grin. “Well, in that case I’ll be off then. Seeing as I’m back here, I might as well head home and find out what Marissa is up to.”

  His attractive friend. The green-eyed monster kicked me in the stomach. “Whatever,” I snapped back.

  Silvan nodded. “Good seeing you again, Alfhild. Pop in for afternoon tea the next time you’re up here in The Smoke.”

  I watched him in disbelief as he strolled away. “It’ll be lovely to see you,” he called back over his shoulder.

  I growled at his retreating figure. Fine. Just fine and dandy.

  Feeling a little disconsolate, I walked a few steps along the street in the direction of The Half Moon Inn. I supposed I could nip in and see whether Wizard Shadowmender or anyone else I knew was enjoying a leisurely lunch in there.

  But that wasn’t how I’d envisaged what would happen today. I wanted to confront the person I thought I’d recognised in The Throne Room in 1983, in the here and now.

  But maybe I should just abandon my plan altogether. Perhaps there was an element of risk I hadn’t considered.

  But what of Mr Hoo?

  I spun about, ready to chase after Silvan and beg him to help me. Instead I collided with someone loitering directly behind me. I squeaked in alarm. “I’m so sorry! I do beg your pardon!” I pushed myself away, one hand on the man’s chest.

  Silvan.

  He’d come back.

  Our eyes locked. A moment of understanding passed between us, something I would deny afterwards. “Well?” he asked.

  I shivered. “I want…” I started to say. No. “I need you to help me. I’d like you to be with me.”

  Silvan offered me his dastardliest smile. “Well alrighty then. Let’s go.”

  Located next door to my solicitor Penelope Quigwell’s office at 14b Celestial Street, number 14 was a clock shop named Once Upon a Time. It had inhabited this space for decades. I’d paused outside the window many times, whiling away the minutes if I’d turned up early for Penelope’s appointments.

  Once Upon a Time was a large old-fashioned store. The wooden façade had been painted a classy dark green, and the lettering on the shop sign above the window had been picked out in green and red. A large gold clock face had been faintly embossed on the window. Peering inside you were struck by the sheer number of items the shop stocked. There were clocks and watches and timepieces of every size, shape, colour, make, brand, material and distinction.

  And most of them were ticking away merrily to themselves. I recalled the cacophony of noise during the one occasion I’d entered the shop, especially when the clocks had struck the hour while I’d been hiding. According to the clocks on display the time now was just after one. That was a blessed relief.

  A slight movement towards the back alerted us to the presence of the proprietor at the rear of the shop. We peered through the glass.

  I recalled the day, over a year previously, when I’d had to take cover inside, imagining that Penelope Quigwell was in league with my incredibly dodgy surveyor Charles Pimm. Back then, the shop owner had regarded me with knowing eyes. I remembered considering that look at the time, questioning it, wondering about his intentions. I’d expected him to challenge me, ask me what I was doing hiding among the grandfather clocks in his shop, but he had only offered a slight smile, a meaningful smile, then bowed and let me go on my way.

  Although I’d never really analysed that moment—after all I’d been up to my neck in other concerns at the time—it had always remained in the back of my mind. It had obviously struck a chord.

  “Doesn’t it remind you of that room in the planodome?” Silvan asked. “Up there in the cosmos?”

  I nodded. “It certainly bears a similarity.”

  He craned his neck to peer deeper into the rear, but it was difficult to see. The building was long and narrow, the shelves of clocks and freestanding timepieces prevented us from getting a clear view down the other end. Somebody was in there, but we couldn’t see whether it was our man or not.

  “Shall we go in?” I asked and Silvan nodded.

  I paused at the door, hesitating, then put my hand in my robes to pull out my wand. Silvan touched my arm lightly and stayed the intent. “No need to be all gung-ho. Let’s tread gently, shall we?”

  The bell above the door tinkled as I pushed it open, although how anyone would be able to hear it above the relentless ticking inside, I had no idea. The busy shop front was a tricky area to navigate, with items displayed on shelving in tall and narrow glass cabinets, or on pedestals. Baskets of keys and piles of cogs and springs otherwise littered the floor, too. We had to be careful where we were treading.

  I moved sideways, wary of sending anything crashing to the ground, but also scared the proprietor would spy us coming and run out the back way. Assuming there was a back entrance and he hadn’t already vacated the premises. I couldn’t immediately see him.

  As we rounded the final batch of display shelves, I spotted him. Dressed in a pink jumper with a banana yellow tie, and yellow chequered trousers, covered by grey robes that were open at the front, he made for an odd sight. His wavy sand colour hair was thinning on top, and he sported some kind of optical eye
piece jammed into his orbital socket. Sitting at a battered desk, he was scrutinising the innards of a small pocket watch, prodding at them gently with a minute pair of tweezers.

  “Just give me one second,” he called, obviously more aware of our presence than it had appeared. We came up behind him and watched over his shoulder.

  “Take all the time you need,” Silvan replied cheerfully, stepping around me so he could take a closer look at what the man was doing.

  We watched him work. He’d aged since 1983 of course. He had to be in his sixties now, but he looked well on it.

  “Nearly done.” A quick twiddle of the tweezers and the back of the pocket watch was clicked firmly closed. “There we are. Now what can I do for you?” He glanced up at us and for a brief moment looked puzzled. Then his face fell.

  “How do you do?” he asked.

  “We do very well, thank you.” Silvan replied and reached forward to pluck the stop watch out of the man’s hand to take a closer look at it.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” the little man said.

  “I expect you have. I’m Silvan. This is Alfhild. As you know, we’ve all met before, but we didn’t have enough time for formal introductions in 1983.”

  The man stood and shuffled towards us. “Paul Tiny,” he offered, in a thin worried voice.

  “Pleased to meet you, Paul.” Silvan offered his free hand and Paul, uncertain as to what to do held his own out. Silvan shook it warmly.

  “Do you recall where we met before?” I asked and Paul dropped his gaze to his feet.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  I nodded. “Would you care to explain what you were doing?”

  “I—” Paul regarded us with uncertainty, probably wondering what our motives were.

  “Only it would make things easier,” Silvan chipped in, sneaking in behind Paul and perching on the man’s desk. “I’m quite good at filling in the gaps, but Alfhild here has a rather overactive imagination. We should put her out of her misery, don’t you think?”

  Paul’s shoulders crept closer to his ears. I had a feeling he badly wanted the floor to open up and swallow him.

  “Please?” I prompted when I thought he would never speak up.

  He took a shuddering in-breath. “I… I… I never planned what happened. I was staying at the hotel—”

  “Whittle Inn,” I reminded him.

  “Yes. There. I was in my room and I located the very faint trace of a forcefield. I recognised that a binding spell had been used there and I was curious. It really all started as simple curiosity.”

  “Alfhild can understand that,” Silvan said. “She’s a pretty nosy individual herself.”

  Paul smiled at me uncertainly. “I started digging around. Scratched the plaster away and removed some of the wall below—it was just plaster and horsehair and small pieces of wood, nothing particularly solid. And that’s when I saw what I was dealing with.”

  “You broke down the forcefield?” I asked.

  Paul wrung his hands. “It’s a simple spell really, once a forcefield has been revealed. It’s quite easy to dismantle. If you don’t know the forcefield is there you won’t interfere with it.”

  “So, you broke down the wall and dismantled the forcefield, and then you removed something?” I prompted him again.

  Paul stared at us, wincing in fear. “I wouldn’t have taken it probably, but you guys turning up that way, at that moment… You startled me.”

  I wasn’t buying it. I instinctively knew he’d gone straight for the Gimcrack.

  “Which order do you belong to?” I asked. In all the time I’d been at the inn, nobody I knew had mentioned feeling or sensing a trace of anything in The Throne Room. How had this small, seemingly insignificant wizard been capable of locating the trace?

  “The Grand Order of Timekeepers,” Paul told me readily enough, and justifiably with a certain amount of pride. The Grand Order of Timekeepers were well respected.

  Silvan followed my train of thought, crossing his arms over his chest, still holding the pocket watch. “They’re not known for sensitivity to defensive or secretive magick, are they?”

  “No.” Paul acknowledged this. “But my mother was an aura. I guess I inherited quite a few of her innate skills.”

  I whistled. I’d heard of auras but never come across one. They were a rare breed of witches who could sense even the slightest change in atmosphere or a movement or electrical current or pulse of energy. Little more than a will-o-the-wisp in human form, they were so highly-sensitive they only tended to live a short lifespan.

  “She passed away when I was eight years old. My father was a lumberjack with the New Forest Order of Tree Witches, but he was an incredible craftsman too, and I wanted to be just like him. He didn’t want me to follow him into arboriculture, he wanted me to better myself, so after attending the Celestial Academy I applied to several orders—”

  “The Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards by any chance?” Silvan asked and Paul nodded, his face glum.

  “They turned me down.”

  “That can’t have surprised you. They’re one of the most secret of all orders,” I said. “The toughest to get into I would have thought. But The Grand Order of Timekeepers? That’s a pretty close second.”

  “Without the time travel though,” Silvan mentioned casually. “That must have stung a bit. If that’s what you were in to.”

  Paul looked between me and Silvan. “I didn’t know what I’d found,” he protested. “I liked the look of it. I was starting out in the business, and I was intrigued by anything that resembled a time piece.”

  “But you found out what it was?” I asked.

  “Afterwards.”

  I didn’t believe him. My instincts told me he was lying. “And?”

  “It was a Gimcrack. One of the original ones I believe. An incredibly superior model. It would fetch a pretty penny on the black market.”

  “What did you do with it?” I asked.

  Paul glanced around. “I broke it down. Some of the parts were quite valuable.”

  “Lies,” Silvan said. “Do you believe him, Alf? Look, Paul, I wasn’t born yesterday. If I knew something was valuable, I’d either keep it for myself or sell it on.”

  “So which did you do, Paul?” I asked, but he looked down at his shoes once more and refused to answer.

  Silvan, like a dog with a bone, leaned forwards. “Do you do a bit of time travel, Paul?”

  Paul cringed. “In this line of work, you get to know how to do it. I dabble a little. Just at weekends or in my spare time, you know?”

  “You don’t do it in the shop?” Silvan asked, and there was an air of menace in the words. Time travel would not go down well on Celestial Street. Maybe in Silvan’s neighbourhood it might.

  “Good gracious, no!”

  “You don’t take money from others who might want to time travel?” Silvan pressed the older man.

  “Certainly not!”

  Silvan clucked, his face a mask of disappointment. “Why are you lying to us, Paul?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” the little man protested, his face pale.

  Silvan flipped open the back of the pocket watch. “Of course you do. The thing is, that by itself, a Gimcrack won’t help you travel through time. It’s just a glorified calendar, and nothing else. Just like this little watch will tell the time and nothing else. There’s nothing magick or special about this thing.” He brandished the watch at Paul. “But with the Gimcrack, especially Gorde’s Gimcrack, it was the magick inside that was powerful. The thing that fuels the Gimcrack. And whatever that is, it’s not available to anyone—as far as I know—with the exception of the Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards.” He stood and crowded Paul, “And they do not give up their secrets lightly, my friend.”

  It was my turn to be confused. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m saying that Paul here recognised Gorde’s Gimcrack for what it was. A machine with some magick inside it that could be
harnessed for his own ends. Magickal essence maybe? I suspect that he’s been indulging in time travel ever since. Not with the Gimcrack itself, but with whatever magick he found inside it.” Silvan turned to Paul with a triumphant smile. “Am I right, Paul?”

  Paul glared at Silvan momentarily, but his face rapidly crumpled.

  “I get that this was a crime of opportunity,” Silvan said, his tone kinder now, more conciliatory. “But Alf and I have to do what’s right. We have to give what remains of Gorde’s Gimcrack, and the magick inside, back to the true owners.”

  “Those Chronometric Wizards?” Paul asked.

  I nodded. “It’s their property after all. Well, I assume Guillaume Gorde would have left the Gimcrack to them.”

  “You have to know I didn’t hurt that man,” Paul said.

  “We know. We’ve established that,” I told him, feeling sad for Gwyn once more.

  Paul scoured my face and nodded at me, his eyes knowing. “You hid in this shop once.” He did remember, then?

  “Yes. You saved me from a potentially nasty situation. Did you recognise me at the time?”

  He nodded. “I thought maybe you had come for me then, but you didn’t seem to know me. I have to admit I was relieved.”

  I laughed, breaking the tension. “Time travel is a peculiar thing. I didn’t know you at all. Finding out about the missing Gimcrack, and meeting William Wylie, the wizard looking for it, that was still part of my future.”

  I reached out and patted his arm. “Listen,” I said. “You did me a favour once, and I’m sure Silvan feels the same way I do. We can say you took the Gimcrack by accident when you were startled. Let us have it back and we won’t turn you in. I promise.”

  Paul hesitated. “What about the missing essence?”

  “How much is missing?” I asked in alarm. How much time travelling had this little man undertaken?

  “Not very much.” Paul led us through to the back room, a store room of sorts. Here the shelves were laden with the teeniest and most intricate cogs, springs, tools, screws and pins I had ever seen. Right at the back of the store was a filthy parcel shelf. Dozens of dusty boxes were piled haphazardly on it. He reached to the back, and with practised ease withdrew a battered cardboard box.