The Apothecary Page 0,24

died there. They took his body and then they punished him for it. Losing my own leg, I could accept. But I could not forgive what they did to my brother, a war hero. When he died, I decided to help your father.”

There was a silence while we absorbed the horror of this confession. The dance music jangled along.

“Help my father with what?” Benjamin finally asked. “Why did the Soviets want him?”

Mr Shiskin fought the urge to answer; I could see the muscles in his neck distend. There was a loud trumpet solo on the radio. “There are two other scientists working with your father,” he said. “They have come to London to take part in his plan.”

“Is Jin Lo one of them?”

Mr Shiskin was purple with the effort not to speak. “Please stop asking questions. I don’t wish to compromise your father. If he and Jin Lo have been captured, I am in grave danger from both the British and the Soviets. So is your gardener. And so are you. I beg you to stay away from my son.”

“But Papa, they can’t!” Sergei said. “We’re on the science team together!”

“There is no science team!” Mr Shiskin barked. “They lie to you!”

Sergei cowered for a moment, then said meekly, “Then they could join chess club instead.”

“Mr Shiskin, I need to find my father,” Benjamin said. “Tell us how to do that, or we don’t leave Sergei’s side. It’ll be science team practice all day long. And we’ll join chess club.”

Shiskin hesitated, but the combination of truth serum and blackmail must have been too much for him. “I don’t know where he is,” he said. “We are to meet in two days, at the Port of London. If your father is not there, we will be finished.”

“Finished how? And what’s the plan?”

Shiskin shook his head, reached into his pocket and produced a tiny capsule.

“Cyanide!” Benjamin said, diving to stop him. “No!”

Shiskin knocked Benjamin to the floor with one powerful arm. Then he put the capsule between his teeth and crushed it. “It is not cyanide,” he said. “You have read too many stories. It will only make me mute, for a time. I thought I would use it against the MGB and torture—not a boy and a pot of tea.”

“Just tell me why Soviet security would be interested!”

“I only want peace,” Shiskin said. “Just leave my boy al—” Then his voice vanished. There wasn’t even a whisper left. He couldn’t make a sound.

“Wait! I need to know!” Benjamin said.

The jitterbug ended, and silence fell briefly over the radio.

I heard a whimper from the corner. Sergei was sitting on the wet kitchen floor with his grandmother’s dented samovar in his lap and a devastated look on his face. His father was in danger, he was not a member of a science team, and still no one had come to his house, in three long years, as a friend. Another song started up.

Mr Shiskin all but picked up Benjamin and me by the scruff of our necks, propelling us into the hall, past the stairs and the hanging coats. He could be eloquent in silence: There was nothing mute about the way he deposited us outside like two bags of rubbish and slammed the door.

CHAPTER 12

The Return to the Garden

The one urgent thing we knew, from Mr Shiskin, was that the gardener was in danger and we had to warn him. The Physic Garden was closed for the night by the time we got to Chelsea, and the gate was padlocked. Benjamin made his hands into a sling for my foot so I could climb up onto the brick wall. I pulled him up after me, and we dropped down onto the grass below.

It was fully dark, and we walked straight for the corridor of green with the hanging flowers that led to the inner garden. The lushness of the plants seemed sinister in the dark, instead of verdant and springlike.

Under the carved Azoth of the Philosophers, we peered through the gate. A light was on in the gardener’s little house.

“Hullo!” Benjamin called.

“If he’s inside, he can’t hear us,” I said.

We climbed that gate, too, dropped over, and made our way towards the house. As we passed the sundial in the shadows, I thought it looked strange. The metal triangle that indicated the time was missing. It had been snapped off at the base. I touched the rough edge of unoxidised copper. “How could that happen?”

We both looked at the house. It seemed