The Palace of Laughter Read Free

’em up. Make soup,” said the butcher. “Bones is all I got.” He shook open a paper bag and scooped a few handfuls of bones from the wooden pail, rolling the top of the bag shut and thrusting it into Miles’s arms. “Hold it underneath,” growled the butcher, “else them bones will fall out the bottom.”
    As Miles left the butcher’s shop, his bag of bones clutched in his numb fingers, the butcher called after him. “Shouldn’t of never left that orphanage. You’d’ve got properly fed there.”
    â€œI’d have got properly poisoned there,” Miles shouted back over his shoulder, “if I’d stayed much longer.”
    A pale sun hung low in the afternoon sky, and the sound of barking dogs carried on the breeze from the city pound. The smell of the butcher’s bones seeped from the soggy brown bag, making Miles turn his head to the side just to breathe clean air. “I can’t make soup from these,” he thought. “Even Mrs. Pinchbucket’s gruel would be better than that.” He stopped for a moment, shifting the weight of the bag in his aching arms.
    A smile crept over the boy’s face. If you knew Miles well (which few people did) you would have recognized that smile as the one that always appeared on his face when a plan was hatching in the back of his mind. The smile grew wider, and he turned to head for the pound, following the noisy barking of the mongrels of Larde.
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    The city pound was a narrow yard beside the police station, surrounded by a high red-bricked wall. Right now it was full of shaggy, limping, drooling dogs, the result of Mayor Doggett’s annual roundup of the town’s stray mongrels. The order had been telephoned to Sergeant Bramley, who had listened with his little raisin eyes screwed up in his porridgy face. Sergeant Bramley and his two trusty constables had dropped their official duties (searchingthe newspapers for evidence of crimes, especially in the crossword clues, and making hot sweet tea in a battered tin pot in case of emergencies), and had marched out purposefully into the street with a large net on a pole, and two big cloth sacks.
    The sergeant and his constables, who worked in a crack team of three, had rounded up the dogs of Larde and taken them into custody for the Good of Public Health. They knew the mayor’s fickle attention would soon turn elsewhere, and the dogs could be quietly released “back into the wild,” as Constable Wigge put it, and in any case it made a change from the crossword.
    The barking grew louder as Miles approached the pound. Thirty mongrels and more were in full throat at the sound of his footsteps and the reek of tasty bones carried on the breeze. Miles laid the bag carefully outside the pound, leaving the smell to creep over the high wall, and climbed the worn stone steps of the police station next door.
    The police station was small and cluttered and stuffy. It contained two old wooden desks, an ancient typewriter with several keys missing, a cast-iron potbellied stove, three very unhappy policemen and a little old woman with a green umbrella. The end of the umbrella was a dangerous metalspike, and its owner was waving this under Sergeant Bramley’s shapeless nose. She was yelling at him angrily, but what she could be yelling about it was impossible to tell. The pokey office was so full of the din of barking dogs that there was no room for any other sound. Indeed the old woman might have been barking herself and no one would have been any the wiser.
    Sergeant Bramley had his hand cupped behind his good ear. He was trying to lean close to hear the old woman’s words without getting the point of her umbrella up his nose at the same time. He turned and bawled something at Constable Wigge, but Constable Wigge could hear nothing, as his ears were plugged with soft wax from the candle on his desk. He was frowning at the crossword, trying to