Neverwhere(87)

Hunter thought about this for a moment. “The last time it happened was about three hundred years ago. A couple of friends got into an argument over a woman, in the market. A knife was pulled and one of them died. The other fled.”

“What happened to him? Was he killed?”

Hunter shook her head. “Quite the opposite. He still wishes he had been the one to have died.”

“He’s still alive?”

Hunter pursed her lips. “Ish,” she said, after a while. “Alive-ish.”

A moment passed, then “Phew,” Richard thought he was going to be ill. “What’s that—that stink?”

“Sewer Folk.”

Richard averted his head and tried not to breathe through his nose until they were well away from the Sewer Folk’s stall.

“Any sign of the marquis yet?” he asked. Hunter shook her head. She could have reached out her hand and touched him. They went up a gangplank, toward the food stalls, and more welcoming aromas.



Old Bailey found the Sewer Folk with little difficulty, following his nose.

He knew what he had to do, and he took a certain pleasure in making a bit of a performance of it, ostentatiously examining the dead cocker spaniel, the artificial leg, and the damp and moldy portable telephone, and shaking his head dolorously at each of them. Then he made a point of noticing the marquis’s body. He scratched his nose. He put on his spectacles and peered at it. He nodded to himself, glumly, hoping to give the vague impression of being a man in need of a corpse who was disappointed by the selection but was going to have to make do with what they had. Then he beckoned to Dunnikin, and pointed to the corpse.

Dunnikin opened his hands wide, smiled beatifically, and gazed up toward the heavens, conveying the bliss with which the marquis’s remains had entered their life. He put a hand to his forehead, lowered it, and looked devastated, in order to convey the tragedy that losing such a remarkable corpse would be.

Old Bailey put a hand in his pocket and produced a half-used stick of deodorant. He handed it to Dunnikin, who squinted at it, licked it, and handed it back, unimpressed. Old Bailey pocketed it. He looked back at the corpse of the marquis de Carabas, half-dressed, barefoot, still damp from its journey through the sewers. The body was ashen, drained of blood from many cuts, small and large, and the skin was wrinkled and prunelike from its time in the water.

Then he pulled out a bottle, three-quarters filled with a yellow liquid, and passed it to Dunnikin. Dunnikin looked at it suspiciously. The Sewer Folk know what a bottle of Chanel No. 5 looks like, and they gathered around Dunnikin, staring. Carefully, self-importantly, he unscrewed the top of the bottle and dabbed the tiniest amount on his wrist. Then, with a gravity the finest Parisian parfumier would have envied, Dunnikin sniffed. Then he nodded his head, enthusiastically, and approached Old Bailey to embrace him and conclude the deal. The old man averted his face and held his breath until the embrace was concluded.

Old Bailey held up one finger and tried his best to mime that he was not so young as once he was and that, dead or not, the marquis de Carabas was a bit on the heavy side. Dunnikin picked his nose thoughtfully, and then, with a hand gesture indicating not only magnanimity but also a foolish and misplaced generosity that would, obviously, send him, Dunnikin, and the rest of the Sewer Folk, to the poorhouse, he had one of the younger Sewer Folk tie the corpse to the bottom half of the old baby carriage.

The old roof-man covered the body with a cloth, and he pulled it away from the Sewer Folk, across the crowded deck.



“One portion of vegetable curry, please,” said Richard, to the woman at the curry stall. “And, um, I was wondering. The meat curry. What kind of meat is it, then?” The woman told him. “Oh,” said Richard. “Right. Um. Better just make that vegetable curries all round.”

“Hello again,” said a rich voice beside him. It was the pale woman they had met in the caves, with the black dress and the foxglove eyes.

“Hullo,” said Richard, with a smile. “—Oh, and some papadums, please. You, um. Here for curry?”

She fixed him with her violet gaze and said, in mock Bela Lugosi, “I do not eat . . . curry.” And then she laughed, a lavish, delighted laugh, and Richard found himself realizing how long it had been since he had shared a joke with a woman.

“Oh. Um. Richard. Richard Mayhew.” He stuck out his hand. She touched it with her own hand, in something a little like a handshake. Her fingers were very cold, but then, late at night, at the end of autumn, on a ship out on the Thames, everything is very cold.

“Lamia,” she said. “I’m a Velvet.”