Blood & Magic

by George Barlow

  “Lost.”

  “Lost? How exactly did you obtain it, this is a government held case now.”

  “An anonymous tip provided the footage, but the file was corrupted. We managed to retrieve this image.”

  “You do know the policeman that was stabbed as a result of that chase is currently critical in Intensive Care?” Nick said.

  “Why would he run if-”

  “Alex, I think you are missing the point. There will be an official investigation, if the man doesn’t pull through then I hope you appreciate the consequences.”

  “How were we to know-” Drew said, but Nick cut him off.

  “How dangerous the suspect was? If he really is the serial killer we are after, he is obviously very skilled at what he does. Did you honestly think uniformed officers would be enough?”

  “I didn’t think-”

  “No, you didn’t. Where have we got to with the potential drugs connection?”

  “Three victims have been found with links to ketamine usage, we are still looking into the rest,” Drew said. “We have found another lead though. The records of the victims appear to have been tampered with. How, I’m not sure, but there is something majorly odd going on. The paper trail suggests that all of the victims were involved with unsolved crimes. They-”

  “Police records cannot be tampered with detective, they are held in the most secure system in the country. Is that really what you call a solid lead? Paperwork is sometimes slow to make it to the system. The drugs link is the most promising channel of enquiry, I want you to run with this.”

  “But sir-”

  Nick cut him off once again and, like a hurt puppy, Drew backed down.

  “Follow the drugs, it will lead us to the killer. We need to get an ID for Alex’s suspect: you should talk to narcotics, see if it rings any bells with them.”

  Nick turned and walked out of the room.

  “Damn him,” Alex said, striking the desk with her fist.

  “Calm down babe,” Dimitri said.

  Alex glared at him.

  “Sorry,” Dimitri said.

  “Drew, what exactly did you find?” Alex said.

  “Nick said to go with the…”

  Alex shot Drew the same look she had just given Dimitri.

  “Okay, okay. On paper, all of our victims look to have been suspects in major crimes, weirdly though, never one investigated by anyone in this unit, but I suppose that’s nothing. According to the paper records, each victim looked to be the likely perpetrator, except nothing could be proven because of lack of evidence or a mistake in the investigation,” Drew said.

  “How many victims records have we looked through?” Alex said.

  “Four,” Drew said.

  “So we think someone has been taking justice into their own hands?” Dimitri said.

  “Yes, it-,”

  “Then the killer is whoever destroyed these records?” Alex said, cutting Drew off yet again. Sometimes she was more like her father than she intended.

  “Most likely, or the killer got someone to do this for them,” Drew said.

  “Can’t you tell that? On the computer?” Alex said

  “No, it’s not that simple. The records were deleted from the HOLMES database, so we have no electronic record of the incidents at all. You can’t just remove stuff from HOLMES, there is supposed to be a trail of everything. It means if someone deleted the files, they did it in a more sophisticated way than we can detect. We could give internal affairs a shout,” Drew said.

  “I don’t want to have to go through them. Does this mean we are looking for someone on the force?”

  “Not necessarily. A skilled hacker I suppose? Or someone with unrestricted government database access. Our killer and the scrubbing of this information could be unrelated, although if justice is the motive behind these killings, then I don’t think that someone within law enforcement or the prosecution service is a bad shout.”

  Alice. Could she be involved? If she was working with Byron, he could organise for records to disappear, surely? There didn’t appear to be any limits to his reach.

  “If we could get hold of a government terminal, with the right access, we could look at the archives and find the record. The government keep a backup of all electronic records, they use the data to analyse to trends and patterns in all sorts of things. I can make an application for access,” Drew said.

  “Who holds that data?”

  “The Department of Alternate Studies, which is some big Whitehall thing. Does more than just police records, but there is no chance of getting them to share it with us over the telephone, we need to make a request.”

  “And how long will that take?” Dimitri said.

  “A few weeks.”

  “I might know of another way."

  ***

  Alex was in her car and heading toward Whitehall before she could explain what she was doing. Dimitri had tried to join her, but she couldn’t allow him to accompany her this time. She felt like she was chasing a ghost and at last, through her relationship with Charlie, she had the upper hand. She just had to hope Charlie would agree to see her, they hadn’t spoken since the incident at the restaurant.

  Driving up to the gate outside the Old Admiralty Building, Alex gave her name, asking to speak to Charles Harper. The intercom went dead and she waited for a response, but there was none.

  With a rumble, the water in the bottle gripped in the cup holder rippled. Alex turned around in her seat and saw them: a mob of people forming out of the darkness, a mass of hooded jackets, bandannas covering faces as light from brandished flames shimmered as a haze in the distance. They were moving quickly towards her. Even if it was just a protest rally, Alex didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of it. She pressed the intercom again and again, all the time looking back to the oncoming crowd as chanting drowned out their footsteps.

  “Deliverance! Deliver us from repression, deliver us from segregation, deliver us from persecution!”

  The chants echoed along the road, the car rattling from the vibrations of the words.

  The doors to the complex opened and Alex pushed hard on the accelerator. The car propelled into the courtyard, screeching to a halt outside the front entrance. Charlie was already running down the steps to meet her as armed guards filled the courtyard.

  “Alex, what are you doing here?” Charlie said.

  “Who are those people?” Alex said.

  “You need to get inside.”

  Charlie took Alex’s hand and guided her up the steps and into the building.

  “What’s going on?” Alex said.

  “Protestors, why are you here?”

  “Protesting against what?”

  “Anti-government, it doesn’t matter.”

  “This is data research department isn’t it? What is there to protest about?”

  Charlie diverted them into an office and slammed the door behind them.

  “What happened to your face?” Charlie said, reaching for Alex’s cheek.

  “A suspect, it’s nothing. Look I need-”

  “I know we need to speak, but not now.”

  “No, I need-” Alex said, but was interrupted by a siren going off. She looked to Charlie and, for the first time since she had known him, saw fear in his eyes.

  “What’s going on Charlie, you look terrified? How could this place be attacked? It’s done up like Fort Knox and aren’t we right next door to the Ministry of Defence?”

  “It’s my fault they are attacking. Someone accessed my codes and our security systems were breached this morning. They got into our databases and have been trying to publish Government data to the internet all day. Looks like they are now trying a different tactic and coming straight to the source. I’m to blame for all this.”

  “How could they-”

  But Charlie was gone, running out of the room as the door closed behind him, locking with a deep clunk. Alex looked towards the desk, and the government terminal that sat above it. Ch
arlie's passwords had been used to gain access, but how could that have happened? He was more than careful… But he was forgetful. Charlie kept a list of all of his passwords at home locked up in their safe, that he used when his somewhat terrible memory failed him. What if he didn’t just store personal passwords there? Byron had organised lunch for the two of them, a predefined time when he could access the flat and be assured they wouldn't be in. The stupid meal that had ended their engagement and that Alex had agreed to. Byron never did anything without reason, that had been what he was after all along.

  But the terminal had been the reason she had come here in the first place and now she could access it, she could deal with her conscience later.

  Moving the mouse to wake the screen, Alex took a deep breath. All she needed to do was to work out what Charlie’s password was, find out the information she needed and then, get out of there.

  Five minutes later and another incorrect code, Alex began to doubt herself. Five characters, how difficult could it be? She knew him enough to guess this. Her birthday, his birthday, his mother’s name, his rugby club’s name, every single password she could transform into five characters all resulted in the same angry beep. Alex thought herself lucky there wasn’t an auto lockout feature, which was a little surprising for a big secretive government department like this.

  Alex let out a huff, this was ridiculous. Fiddling with her necklace, winding her fingers between the chain, Alex tried desperately to think of another combination, when the solution hit her.

  'T-O-P-A-Z'.

  Turning green, the password box faded out as Charlie's desktop loaded with a picture of Alex as the wallpaper. Alex opened the search functionality, a grey screen hiding her own picture as the cursor blinked eagerly. ‘Henry Fellows,’ she typed.

  Henry's picture flashed on the screen, the page filling with all of his government held information. Underneath the picture was a box with a crest inside, similar to the royal coat of arms, but with a dragon instead of a lion and, below it, the words ‘Inquisitor - First Class’. The only Inquisition Alex knew about were those from the crusades to remove witchcraft from the world and she very much doubted that this had anything to do with this, Henry didn’t exactly look like a witch hunter.

  She scrolled down the page and saw that ‘Mark Ford’ was listed as his father and next to it, a picture she knew only too well. Mark was the Greys Inn victim. After all this time she finally had a name for him. It was odd though, Henry’s paternal father was listed below as Harry Fellows. Which was right? Alex clicked on Mark's name, which opened a new record.

  At the top of the file were details of his murder, the crime scene photographs, statements and evidence, all available to her in a single click. In the corner of the screen was a tag that read, ‘Evidence secured by C. Harper, by request of Wade Oswald’.

  Evidence secured? Charlie had been the one to take the case from her? Alex found herself dumbfounded. How, and more importantly why, had the man she thought she knew done this? Was he a spy? Even intelligence officers tell their wives what they do, yet Charlie had said nothing. He had lived the lie, even when he knew his actions were affecting a case she was working on.

  Shouting erupted outside the office as orange light pulsed against the frosted glass. An explosion shook the walls, sending vibrations through the floor; a sign something very bad was happening outside. Alex wasn’t going to be safe here for long, but she had come here for a reason and she’d be damned if she left empty handed.

  Alex returned to the screen and opened the HOLMES Database Records. She brought up the first result that she knew had been tampered with, which loaded an identical record to the one they had on their system. Triggering the file history option, a window loaded showing the actions completed against the file. The third item down listed an associated case file, relating to the drug offence, as being deleted from the database. The person it showed as deleting the file made no sense… Frantically, Alex accessed the second victim’s record and checked the file history. The same name was listed.

  - Chapter 43 -

  And then they marched

  Henry took a black cab back to his father’s house, although he needed to get used to calling it his house. Mark was dead, his real mother gone years before and the people he called mum and dad, merely unwitting imposters chosen to protect him. No, that wasn’t fair, they had done much more than that. He hadn’t called them, he realised, since being told they weren’t his real parents. He had tried, picking up the phone and staring at it, not sure what he would say. To them, nothing had changed that past week, they knew nothing of the lies, the secrets. When they looked at him, they saw their son, but would he still feel the same about them? In every way, they had been his real parents, just not biologically. Yet, he hadn’t called them.

  Entering the dark house, Henry turned on every single light until he had cast away all the shadows. Even with harsh fluorescence coving every inch of the house, Henry found himself jumping at every creak of a floorboard or the howl of the wind against the windows. He climbed the two flights of stairs to his fathers room and sat on the unmade bed, looking around for some posthumous guidance. Two photographs were arranged on the bedside table and one, quite unbelievably, was of Henry at his graduation. It was weird to think that a man he had never met kept a photo if him, which he had acquired God knows how, beside him every night. If Henry had gone in for emotions, then he imagined it was quite heart warming, but he didn’t have time for that. Next to his own picture was one of a woman in her late thirties with auburn hair and a smile that contained so much happiness, he was amazed that it could be captured in a photograph. His mother perhaps, but how could he know? These were the only two photos to be found in the entire house, the two people that meant enough to Mark for him to keep. When Gabriel was better, and he would get better as he was far too stubborn to die, Henry would ask him who this woman was.

  Leaving the photographs behind, Henry wandered down through the house, finally finding himself in the living room. Nestling in the leather arm chair by the unlit fire, a cold draft encircled him as he stared out of the window onto the perfectly still street. What the hell had happened? His life had been simple and safe and, although he wasn’t always happy at that fact, it was how he coped. Sure, Henry had no purpose, no great goal, no need to exist, but while that had sometimes upset him, this new life was no better. His life now, and the life Mark must have led, was a million miles from safe and everyone he cared about was in danger simply for knowing him. Was this why Mark had tried to get him away, to protect him the only way he knew possible? He must have known Henry wouldn’t cope, but his plan hadn’t worked out and now his son was having to try and figure out how to find, and somehow stop, the man that had killed him.

  Henry picked up a handful of notes by his side, cluttered ramblings on the Grendal killer. Nothing he read was new to him, sprawled notes covering police reports and newspaper clippings. ‘Grendal is undetectable even to Inquisitors,’ Mark wrote, ‘to whom Grendal appears to have no reflection at all.’ So Henry wouldn’t even be able to see him coming with his powers, this whole thing just got better and better. Other notes described how Grendal was said to be almost invincible, linking to several historical papers citing fairy-tale hunting parties being savaged by his ‘inherent knowledge of physical magus’. That didn’t sound good either.

  “We have a distinct advantage though.”

  Henry turned, startled to see Tristan standing in the middle of the hallway, a large black sports bag by his side.

  “And what is that?” Henry said.

  “Normally Grendal hunts his victims, but tonight, we have the upper hand. Half of his power is his anonymity, I am not worried about facing him in combat.”

  “Mark didn’t last very long.”

  “No, but our odds are better.”

  The front door banged open as a group of people entered the hallway, led by a man Henry recognised.

  “Detective Superintendent,” Henry said.r />
  “I’m afraid we don’t come as well equipped as I would like,” Nick said.

  He pointed to a group men who followed him inside. By the way two transformed into human-jaguar style creatures, Henry took them to be R’Hard. The last to meet Henry’s gaze, transformed into something he hadn’t seen in person yet, but remembered from his training. The creature revealed had long extended limbs and a stone white face, eyes as black as opals and an inherent fragility about him. This was obviously what an Alesh looked like and, seeing one in the flesh, Henry understood the general disdain for them.

  “Some of us might even be armed, but I can’t condone that you understand,” Nick said, as the detectives around him peeled back their jackets to reveal an array of pistols.

  “Who are these people?”

  “These are my friends within the alternate world, all detectives with the police. I understand you know who the Grendal is. Tristan suggested you could do with all the help you can get,” Nick said.

  “Did you hear about Gabriel?” Henry said.

  “He will be fine, although you had a lucky escape,” Tristan said.

  “Lucky is definitely one way of putting it, I still can’t work it out,” Henry said.

  “Guess we can ask Grendal himself later,” Tristan said.

  “Only if you don’t kill him, we need to bring him back so we can-”

  “Stick it to Wade, I know. Slimy little git, things are gonna get messy after this.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Henry said. “He will pay for what he has done.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  The door to the house creaked open and, bounding in awkwardly, walked a familiar face. Jonathan, the Inquisitor Henry had met after his initiation with the council, stood with a goofy smile in a battered woollen trench coat that struggled to contain his broad frame and offered his hand to Henry to shake.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Jonathan said.

  “Thanks for coming, I didn’t know you were-”

  “Where the hell have you been?” Tristan said, cutting in.

  “Here to help you as much as I can,” Jonny said, ignoring Tristan.