Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [30]
He took some blankets from the storeroom cabinet and searched for a slop bucket in the deep lower drawers. He couldn’t find a bucket so he pulled out the drawer and dumped that on the platform instead. It would have to do.
The two women hadn’t moved. Hana held her daughter and rocked back and forward.
Ianthe said, ‘I’m not going down there.’
Granger peeled off his gloves and let them drop to the floor. They were slick with brine and would have burned his captives’ skin.
‘Shush, Inny,’ Hana said. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘It’s thoroughly rotten. We won’t survive.’
Her mother hugged her more tightly. ‘We always survive.’
But Ianthe struggled out of Hana’s embrace. ‘There’s a starving man in one of his cells,’ she cried, pushing her mother away. ‘And a drawer for a loo. How can you say we’ll be fine when he treats his captives like that?’ She took a breath as if to scream. ‘The man in the boat told him to drown us!’
Granger stopped and stared at her, as helpless to respond to this sudden squall of teenage anger as he was to the words themselves. How did she know these things? She couldn’t have heard Creedy. She couldn’t be aware of the man in the cell.
Hana tried to restrain her daughter. ‘Inny, please . . .’
But Ianthe would not be pacified. She stood up, her leg-irons clattering, then picked up the chain and pulled it. The locking cuff rattled against the water pipe, but it would not yield. Suddenly she spun round to face her mother again, her face flushed and savage. ‘Who is he to you?’ she demanded. ‘Why do you look at him like that? He’s hideous. You can’t know him. You can’t!’
‘Inny—’
Granger felt his heart sink. ‘She’s psychic,’ he said.
‘No,’ Hana replied.
‘You hid her from the Haurstaf?’
The woman’s expression tightened with frustration. ‘No. You don’t understand.’
‘Do you know what they’ll do to you when they find out?’
‘She’s not like them, I swear. They can’t sense her. She—’
Ianthe cut her off with a yell. ‘Don’t you dare tell him!’
Hana reached for her daughter again. ‘Sweetheart, maybe it’s—’
Ianthe slapped her.
The sound of it snapped the argument to silence. For a long time Granger just stood there, listening to his own heart drumming in his ears. He didn’t know what to say. Ianthe was trembling, breathing heavily as she gazed vacantly down at her mother. Hana sniffed and rubbed tears from her eyes.
‘I’m not psychic,’ Ianthe said bitterly.
‘You’re untrained,’ Granger said, ‘unfocused.’
She snorted. ‘What difference does it make? You’ve already got it all planned out. Sell me to the Haurstaf, build yourself a proper jail. I don’t care.’
A proper jail? She’d slipped that remark in with admirable ease. He’d been thinking of selling her to buy a new boat, as she well knew. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of admiration for the girl. ‘Was that particular insight intended to convince me you’re not psychic?’
Her hands tightened to fists. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ She faced him and spoke with emphatic sarcasm, pronouncing each word as if he were retarded. ‘I don’t know what you are thinking.’
‘Then explain it to me.’
Ianthe sat back down on the floor beside her mother.
After a moment Hana clasped her daughter’s fingers in her own. Then she wiped away more tears and said, ‘Ianthe can see and hear things that other people can’t.’
‘That’s obvious enough,’ Granger said.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Hana said. ‘Psychics read thoughts, but Ianthe only sees and hears whatever is around her. Her senses are just like yours or mine, only better. A lot better.’
Granger frowned. ‘She heard Creedy whispering to me?’
Hana nodded.
‘And the man downstairs?’
‘Ianthe?’
The girl shrugged. ‘I heard him sobbing.’
Had Duka been sobbing? Granger hadn’t heard anything like that at all. He tried to think of a moment in which the starving man had made a sound that might have revealed his condition to the girl upstairs, but there