Scar Night Page 0,69

press his advantage. “I don’t believe Carnival was responsible.”

This time the door swung wide and the ugliest face Fogwill had ever seen emerged from the shadows beyond. He stifled a squeal. The face—and yes it was a face, now that he got a good look at it—peered up and down the street then settled on him. It sniffed.

“You stink,” Mr. Nettle said.

Fogwill’s relief at stepping off the plank dissipated as soon as the door closed behind him. Inside, he couldn’t see a thing. For an awful moment he was afraid he’d made a terrible decision in coming here at all. If he was attacked by this lout, he would be quite unable to defend himself. Clay had warned him this man was known to be violent, and he was certainly no friend of the Church. What if Fogwill was stabbed? Or worse? God help him, he might even be ravished.

Then Mr. Nettle struck a flint, and an oil lamp brightened the hall. Standing in the narrow space edged by pulpboard and tin sheets, Mr. Nettle raised the lamp in one fist and regarded Fogwill sourly.

The scrounger was huge. In his ragged dressing gown, he stood larger than a fully armoured temple guard, blocking the narrow hallway like a pile of builder’s rubble. His features were as rough and ill-defined as the hewn stone before a sculptor began carving the details. His flattened nose had been broken and set crooked, and stubble as coarse as iron filings covered half his face, while bruises covered the rest. Red eyes ringed with dark shadows glared down at Fogwill.

From the tiredness in his eyes and the hollowness of his cheeks, the man looked like he hadn’t eaten or slept in a week. He looked finished. And he stank like a dungeon.

“This way,” Mr. Nettle growled.

The scrounger trudged further along the corridor, stepping over bundles of paper and boxes of bottles, then turning his enormous shoulders sideways to get past a stack of crates propped against the wall. The whole house shuddered as though it might fall apart at any moment. Nails jutted randomly from odd places where they had been used to patch scraps of wood and tin on to the walls. On closer inspection, Fogwill realized that the walls themselves had been constructed from junk. Here, one wardrobe door formed part of the side wall, while its twin served as part of the ceiling. There, an old mirror frame, the glass long smashed, filled a gap between two struts. Rusted pipes and broken ladders acted as joists to support this patchwork. Evidently Mr. Nettle was no carpenter. There wasn’t a straight join to be seen. And what was that? A shield? He recognized the design: a temple guard’s shield . Fogwill edged through the space with his hands close to his chest, careful not to touch anything. He tried not to think about rats.

Empty whisky bottles had rolled down the slope of the living-room floor to gather against a faded advertisement for Whitworth’s Honey Washing Oil—a product, Fogwill suspected, Mr. Nettle himself had never used.

The scrounger cleared some boxes from an old chair, and piled them on the rest of the junk behind. He grunted, “Sit.”

Fogwill perched gingerly on the edge of the seat, one of whose arm rests was nothing more than a splintered spike. This was not at all how he had imagined a scrounger’s house to look. He had expected something more like an antiques shop: solid furniture, rare objects rescued from the nets, to be restored and resold. Not just paper and bottles, tin cans, bundles of rags. True, there were one or two unusual items that stood out from the debris: a marble clock with one hand missing, clearly not originating from this part of town; some large brass cogs that could easily have come from the Presbyter’s aurolethiscope; several garish paintings of city scenes daubed on pieces of pulpboard nailed to the walls; but most of it was simply rubbish. It packed the room from floor to ceiling. How could someone live in this filth?

Mr. Nettle put down the oil lamp and folded his arms, waiting for Fogwill to speak.

The priest smoothed his cassock, the plain black one Clay had insisted he wear. “May I ask what your daughter did for a living?” he asked in his creamiest voice.

Mr. Nettle grimaced. Finally he said, “Painter.”

Fogwill cast his eyes over the paintings. “She painted these?” They were particularly amateurish. People actually bought these?

Mr. Nettle nodded.

“Excellent work,” Fogwill said