The Ability (Ability, The) (23 page)

“She doesn’t have anything to do with it,” said Chris.

“I just can’t understand why—what did you say?” said Sir Bentley in surprise, looking round at Chris.

“She didn’t have anything to do with it. I used the Ability when you were talking to her and checked. She hasn’t seen Cecil Humphries or Richard Baxter in years.
And she was at a racecourse having lunch with a group of ladies yesterday.”

Sir Bentley looked at Chris with a stern expression on his face. For a moment Chris thought he might be in terrible trouble, until Sir Bentley started chuckling.

“Quite unorthodox, Christopher . . . but brilliant. Well done,” he said, patting Chris on the head. Rex looked annoyed that he hadn’t thought of doing this himself.

“I wonder how she didn’t notice,” said Sir Bentley. “Your Ability must be incredibly strong—if she had heard the whisper of ringing in her ears, she would have blocked you immediately. Very impressive, young man.”

Chris smiled, proud of himself.

“This doesn’t, however, bring us any closer to solving the mystery of who is organizing these attacks,” said Sir Bentley, suddenly looking serious. “I’m afraid we still have work to do—what work, however, I’m still not sure. I have men watching everybody we think is at risk, but until something new presents itself, it seems like we’re back to square one.”

•  •  •

From the window of a hotel room opposite, Dulcia watched Sir Bentley leave the building with Chris and Rex and get into the car that was waiting for them. She was fuming.

“So, he thinks he can use the Ability to help him,” she said, having heard the entire conversation from Mortimer and Ernest, who were standing dutifully at her side, using their Ability to listen in on Sir Bentley. “We’ll have to speed up our plans; I can’t risk Bentley Jones finding out
anything. Our surveillance is over, boys; pack your bags. Tomorrow you will take care of Lady Magenta. There’s nothing we can do about the others; we’ll have to wait until the Antarctic Ball—it’s the only time that we know the rest of them will be in public. Hopefully, there’ll be enough distractions for us to carry out our work and get out before they notice us. In the meantime we’re going to have to tread with care. Don’t you dare ruin this for me.”

“Yes, mother,” said Mortimer and Ernest in unison.

At eleven o’clock the next morning, while Chris was sitting in his think tank being guided round a castle by Cassandra on an elaborate treasure hunt set in medieval times, Mortimer was walking into Astell’s of Knightsbridge, a boutique hairdressing salon in South West London. Inside the immaculate white surroundings, the buzz of mindless chatter filled the room as women, seated in two long rows of white leather chairs, discussed their forthcoming holidays and the latest celebrity gossip. Mortimer walked up to the gleaming, curved counter and took a sweet from the glass bowl.

“Yes?” said the receptionist, giving Mortimer a disapproving scowl.

“I’d like my hair cut, please,” said Mortimer.

“We’re not a children’s hairdresser,” said the woman dismissively, picking up the ringing phone. “Astell’s of Knightsbridge, how can I—”

Mortimer leaned over the counter and hung up the phone.

The woman glanced up at Mortimer with a look of astonishment. “What are you—”

Mortimer placed four fifty-pound bills on the counter.

“This should cover it,” he said. “Now, where do you want me to sit?”

The woman opened her mouth but was lost for words.

“Over there?” said Mortimer, pointing to an empty chair at the back of the room.

The woman thought for a moment, then nodded, taking the money from the counter.

“Good. I’ll have a lemonade,” said Mortimer, walking away. The receptionist watched as he took his seat and picked up a magazine in front of him.

Moments later, after a huddled whisper among staff, which Mortimer watched from the corner of his eye, a young woman dressed in a starched white uniform approached him.

“Hi, welcome to Astell’s of Knightsbridge,” said the woman, slightly apprehensively. “How can we help you today.”

“I want my hair cut,” said Mortimer to the reflection of the woman in the mirror in front of him.

“Do you have anything special in mind?” asked the woman, following her well-rehearsed script.

Mortimer shrugged. “No, whatever you think . . . just
take your time,” he said, looking over at the clock on the wall.

“Errmm, well, there’s not really too much to do,” said the woman, running her hands through Mortimer’s hair. “How about a trim, some highlights, and a side parting?” she asked.

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” said Mortimer, distracted, turning to watch as the front door opened and Lady Arabella Magenta and her enormous red beehive entered the salon.

“Lady Magenta, how
are
you?” said the receptionist loudly, with an enthusiasm that had been completely absent when she had greeted Mortimer.

“Yes, very well, thank you,” said Lady Magenta, as a team of staff suddenly dropped what they were doing and rushed over to attend to their best customer. One of the staff took the enormous fur coat that Lady Magenta was wearing from her shoulders as another fetched the special fennel tea that they kept in the back room especially for her and put the kettle on to boil.

“Your favorite seat is ready for you,” said one of the women, as another hairdresser hurriedly shooed a customer out of the chair behind Mortimer. The surprised customer, her hair wet and only cut halfway around, was dragged over to the back of the room, where she was sat on a plastic chair in the corner to wait.

Lady Magenta took her seat and gave clipped orders to the senior stylist, who was smiling and nodding frantically at everything she was told to do.

“. . . and don’t you dare leave a strand out of place. Understand?”

“Yes, of course,” said the stylist, gently removing the first of a hundred clips that kept Lady Magenta’s hair in place.

Mortimer watched attentively and paid no attention to his own hairdresser, until she eventually gave up trying to make small talk and attended to him in silence. Meanwhile Mortimer kept his eyes on Lady Magenta carefully as her enormous hair was flattened and each strand meticulously painted with a red dye before being wrapped in a mass of silver foils. Finally the last strand was twisted and folded into the foil, and a large dryer was wheeled over and lowered over Lady Magenta’s head. Mortimer watched the woman flip the switch, and through the noise of the salon he made out the whirring of the machine as it came to life. His eyes went blank and he stared intently, completely oblivious to everything else happening around him.

•  •  •

Lady Magenta felt the heat of the dryer intensify, and she settled back into her seat, as far as the enormous contraption on her head would allow her to go. The sound around her had been completely replaced by the loud humming of the machine on her head, and she took advantage of the relative peace to run through her checklist for the evening’s event.

Nails
, she thought to herself, looking down at her hands,
fabulous.

Dress . . . divine—thank heavens for Dior. Shoes . . . perfectly matched. Two million pounds’ worth of diamond necklace en route from De Beers. Marvelous. I look twenty-five,
she thought, rather optimistically. She looked up and studied her face in the
mirror in front of her and marveled at its silky smoothness, worth every moment of the painful acid that had peeled away her top layer of skin earlier in the week. She smiled widely at the mirror, examining the gleaming veneers that had been fitted on her teeth, which made them sparkle so white that they probably shone in the dark.

As she examined herself closely, marveling at her ability to have evaded looking her real age, she suddenly froze. Just under her left eye she noticed a dark spot, one that she could have sworn hadn’t been there earlier that day. She leaned forward as much as she could, dragging the dryer closer to the mirror, and saw, to her horror, that the spot was in fact a large brown mole. Lady Magenta gasped. She raised her hand up to her face to try to wipe it off, desperately hoping it was just a bit of dirt, but found that it was firmly attached to her face and, that even worse, there seemed to be
hairs
growing out of it, which appeared to be getting longer by the second. In a panic she started to pull them out, but the more she yanked at them, the faster they seemed to grow, and then, just as suddenly as that mole had appeared, another dark spot appeared above her top lip . . . and then another.

Lady Magenta stared at her reflection in the mirror, and her mouth dropped open in horror. As she did so, she felt something in her mouth. She spat it out into her hand in disgust and looked down. It was gleaming white. She looked back up and opened wide, and as she did so, the rest of the veneers on her teeth fell to the floor, revealing a row of dark-yellow, withered stumps that seemed to hang precariously from their roots. Lady Magenta slammed her
mouth closed and puckered her lips tight to try to hold them in place. She put her hand up to her face and looked around for help, but nobody seemed to have noticed what was happening to her. She was about to scream but was momentarily distracted by a pulling sensation, as if somebody were tugging at her face. She watched as the tight skin pulled away and drooped down into folds of baggy wrinkles, her eyes sunk deeper, and dark rings appeared around them. In a panic she pulled the dryer away from her hair and screamed.

“Aaargggh. Help Me!”
she yelled, as she watched the curlers in her hair drop out, one by one, with her hair attached.

“Lady Magenta! What’s wrong?”

“My hair! My face! WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?” she screamed.

“But . . . I can’t see anything . . . ,” said the stylist, confused, putting a hand on Lady Magenta’s shoulder to reassure her.

The last thing that Lady Magenta saw, before she passed out, was the image that was to remain in her mind for the rest of her life—the lined, withered face of a hideous old lady with a bald head.

•  •  •

Mortimer watched the staff gather around the collapsed body of Lady Magenta—who looked exactly as she had on entering the salon, only paler—and stood up quickly, his hair still wet. He ripped off the black apron from his neck and rushed out just as two large men Mortimer recognized as part of the team of bodyguards that had accompanied Sir Bentley the evening before rushed in.
They stopped in their tracks as they saw Mortimer and immediately matched the face to the photograph of the boy that Sir Bentley had instructed them to look out for.

“You!”
said one of the men, reaching out to grab Mortimer, but a sudden loud ringing in his ears shook him and he froze. Mortimer stared at the two men in turn and blanked out the surroundings around him.

“You are ready for sleep,” he said slowly. “You are so tired.”

The men both paused and stared at Mortimer vacantly, suddenly oblivious to the screams of the staff and the wailing of the approaching ambulance.

A minute later Mortimer slipped out of the salon and ran down the road as fast as he could, leaving behind him an unconscious old lady surrounded by a team of panicked staff and two large men curled up on the floor, snoring gently.

“This is absolutely disgraceful. How could this have happened?” asked the prime minister, pacing his office with a vexed expression on his face. Sir Bentley sat on the edge of the armchair and watched his former pupil pace the room.

“I don’t know what to say, Prime Minister; we had some of our best men watching her and she herself said that she would be able to block anybody that tried to use the Ability on her.”

“Yes, I remember a few detentions from pupils attempting to do that—I don’t understand how they managed to get past her block.”

“Well, we think the noise of the hairdryer must have masked the sound of the ringing. It seems whoever did this understands the Ability very well.”

The prime minister nodded solemnly. “I see . . . well, that makes sense. But what about security? What do they have to say?”