by Guy Adams
As he thought about that first day, arriving on the doorstep of the Section 37 office, he thought of Tamar, who had originally opened the door to him and that soured his mood even further.
‘She’ll get there,’ said Shining. ‘Just give her time.’
Toby scowled at his superior. ‘Are my thoughts that obvious?’
‘Yes!’ Shining laughed and they continued their way along the street. ‘I can always tell when you’re thinking about Tamar.’
‘How?’
‘You take on a sort of beaten dog look.’
‘Lovely.’
‘I think it’s terribly sweet. Anyway, enough introspection.’ They cut past Piccadilly Circus. ‘What do you think about the matters in hand?’
‘The mobile phone is obviously some form of delivery mechanism, though God knows of what.’
‘Yes, the mobiles do seem key, don’t they? And the fact that they’re all destroyed afterwards is suggestive.’
‘Someone covering their tracks?’
‘Perhaps. Either that or it gives us an idea of the potency of whatever it is the mobiles are triggering.’
‘Some form of signal? Perhaps with a hallucinatory effect?’
‘I have no doubt that’s the line Fratfield is taking, the police too. Doesn’t explain the rain, though, does it?’
‘No. But then, what does?’
‘Brilliant isn’t it? About time we had something exciting to sink our teeth into.’
They entered Leicester Square, Toby tutting as he had to circumnavigate a group of tourists distracted by the questionable wonders of the M&M’s store. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.
‘To consult an expert,’ Shining replied, ‘though I’m afraid we’ve come at a rather awkward time.’ He gestured towards Leicester Place. ‘She’s performing at the Leicester Square Theatre.’
‘She’s an actress?’
‘She wants to be,’ Shining sighed. ‘She’s appearing in an acting showcase. One of those awful things where a bunch of actors strut around performing little set pieces in front of audiences of agents and casting directors. I was invited but I was determined to be far too busy to attend. As we need her help, however, it might be politic to show our support.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got an hour or so before it starts. Hopefully she’s here already.’
He pulled out his phone and made a call.
‘Cassandra, darling … Yes … Of course I am, in fact I … Yes … Well, I was wondering … Right … Of course … Yes … So is there any chance? … Right … Yes … Fine …’ He hung up.
‘She seems a quiet woman,’ said Toby with a smile.
‘Impossible. I’m no wiser as to her whereabouts now than I was when I started. Apparently, she had to go and do some breathing exercises.’
‘She does do it then?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Breathe.’
‘Very occasionally. That’s when someone else gets the chance to say part of a sentence.’
‘So, we have to wait an hour, do we?’
‘Afraid so. It should be worth it, though. For all her eccentricities, Cassandra Grace is an undoubted expert on the subject in hand.’
‘Which is?’
‘Curses.’
b) Leicester Square Theatre, Leicester Square, London
In a manner so lazy as to seem positively treasonous to Toby, the two officers pottered around the bookshops on Charing Cross Road while they waited for the show to begin.
While they were making no forward steps on the operation in hand, Shining did find a pile of cheap Modesty Blaise novels so he, at least, was happy.
They returned to the theatre and Shining announced himself to the woman behind the box-office window as Christopher Barclay.
‘And this is my colleague, Terry Nevill,’ Shining said. ‘I’m afraid he’s not on the guest list but I only heard he was flying over from Los Angeles this morning. He’s here to look into casting for the latest Cruise picture.’
‘Cruise?’ the woman asked, her eyes lighting up. ‘Tom Cruise?’
‘Tom-Tom,’ said Toby in a passable West Coast accent. ‘What a guy.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine if you go in,’ the woman said, reaching for her mobile phone and Twitter feed. ‘Do help yourself to drinks and canapés.’
‘Cool,’ said Toby. ‘I haven’t had a damn thing since a bagel at LAX.’
‘Do try to remember it’s the actors that are auditioning for a role,’ said Shining to Toby as they descended the stairs towards the basement theatre, ‘not you.’
‘You’re just jealous of my considerable talents,’ Toby replied.
The drink and canapés turned out to be lukewarm Cava in plastic cups and egg sandwiches. They helped themselves to both and sat down on the back row of the little theatre space.
‘If I could just give you the information sheets about today’s performers,’ said a woman who was wandering about the place in a state of panic. ‘Did you give your contact information to the box office?’
‘They know who we are,’ Shining assured her with a smile, taking the proffered sheets. ‘So good of you to invite us.’
‘Not at all,’ she replied, her eyes wandering towards the backstage entrance where a loud voice was explaining to anyone in Central London with functioning ears that she had lost her ‘cardboard mandibles’. ‘If you’ll just excuse me for a moment?’ she said and ran off looking tearful.
‘What’s this, then?’ Toby asked, flicking through the sheets. It contained the casting photos of the afternoon’s performers and space for the audience to make notes.
‘No need to worry about it,’ said Shining. ‘Nobody else will be.’
‘No, the important thing about maintaining cover is sticking to the details. If I’m supposed to be a casting agent, I intend to act like one.’
‘If we were doing that, we wouldn’t have turned up in the first place,’ said Shining.
A handful of other people trickled in. They all looked as if they didn’t really belong, eating their egg sandwiches with a guilty air.
‘When you organise these things,’ said Shining, ‘you end up with a room full of family and friends, all pretending to be someone terribly important as it’s supposed to be open to industry professionals only. And backstage, every actor looks at another actor’s mum and wonders if she’s going to give them their big break. It’s a bit miserable really.’
‘Well,’ said Toby, loudly, in his West Coast accent, ‘I think some of them show real promise. Look at the eyebrows on this kid, he’s got the makings of a star, I tell you.’
‘You’ve just made every male actor behind that curtain wet themselves, you awful bastard,’ said Shining with a grin.
Eventually the show started and they were treated to a procession of couples performing three-minute duologues from various plays. It was, for the most part, awful. Desperate actors hurling their biggest performances against the poky walls of the little room. Lots of standing up and walking purposelessly across the tiny stage in an attempt to look dramatic. There is nothing quite so sad as an actor fighting for your attention.
When Cassandra came onstage, Toby was surprised to see that she appeared to be dressed as a giant insect, pipe-cleaner antennae bobbing as she wrestled with her fellow actor in an apparent attempt to eat him. Ninety seconds later she had walked off proclaiming herself to be Queen of Colony Nineteen. After a few silent moments, her co-star crawled off on his hands and knees.
‘What the hell did I just see?’ whispered Toby.
Shining looked at his notes. ‘“A theatrical adaptation of Saul Bass’s 1974 film, Phase IV, written and directed by Cassandra Grace”,’ he announced.
‘Right.’
Toby stared in silence at the rest of the show.
c) Leicester Square, London
Once the show had finished, Cassandra burst into the auditorium trailing curly blonde hair and scarves.
‘We need to go,’ she told Shining. ‘If
I stay in this room any longer, I am likely to kill someone.’ With that she stormed back out again, and Toby and Shining were forced to jog after her, pushing their way past disappointed-looking actors who had been hoping to network with the only people in the building that looked like they might actually work in the industry.
‘I don’t believe it,’ one was heard to mutter. ‘You see that? They only went chasing after fucking ant girl. I think I’ll just retire.’
By the time they got on the street, Cassandra had bought herself a cup of ice cream from the Häagen-Dazs café and was shovelling it into her mouth where it vied for space with insults for her fellow actors.
‘They just don’t know real creativity!’ she was saying. ‘I mean … Ibsen? Chekhov? Do we really need to sit through more amateurs being miserable in Russian? I was engaging with the audience! I was offering something fresh!’
‘You certainly were, darling,’ Shining assured her. ‘It was a revelation.’
‘I’m wasted,’ she said.
‘On what?’ Toby muttered.
‘Oh,’ said Cassandra, suddenly stopping and pointing at him with her little plastic spoon, ‘I don’t even know you.’
‘This is my colleague, Terry,’ said Shining. ‘He started working with me about eight months ago.’
‘I see,’ said Cassandra, screwing up her eyes as if this would help her see right into Toby’s soul.
He tried to see beyond the frizzy hair and glasses, the layers of curiously mismatched clothes and the ice cream. He guessed she was in her late teens, early twenties. She seemed to be the sort of person who had yet to settle on the personality she was after so was going to try on all of them to see what might stick.
‘I like him,’ she said. ‘He’s nice. Terry’s a stupid name, though. What’s his real one?’
‘Don’t start,’ Shining told her. ‘You know how this works.’
‘Oh yes!’ Cassandra laughed, spinning around the square like a ballet dancer. ‘Spies and their silly games.’ She swooped in on Toby, put her arm in his and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘My name’s not Cassandra either.’ She looked at him. ‘You’ll probably fall in love with me in a minute, just give in to it, you’re only human.’
She turned to Shining. ‘Are we going for a drink then?’
d) The Moon and Sixpence, Wardour Street, Soho
They settled down in the Moon and Sixpence, Cassandra attacking a large Diet Coke with gusto. ‘I don’t like alcohol,’ she said to Toby, ‘it makes me all squiffy. So what are you working on at the moment, then?’
‘It’s a weird one,’ said Shining. ‘You’ll like it.’ He gave her a vague rundown of the details, avoiding names but listing the pertinent facts in the deaths of Sir James, Leonard Holley and Sonia Finnegan. ‘It seems to me,’ he concluded, ‘to bear all the hallmarks of a curse.’
‘Could be,’ Cassandra admitted, surprising herself with a burp after drinking her Coke too quickly. She laughed and then suddenly looked deadly serious again. She looked at Toby. ‘How much do you know about curses?’
‘Not much.’
‘Didn’t think so, you looked too vanilla for that sort of thing. The principle behind a curse, or hex, or execration is simple enough: you wish someone ill and so you put that illness on them. In practical terms, it’s obviously not that simple. Human beings can’t go around wishing the world into the shape they want. Otherwise,’ she scowled, ‘I’d already be at the RSC.
‘Theoretically, it is possible to alter the physical through conjuration but the effects are usually limited and the skill needed to achieve such a thing are beyond most of us. Beating physics up with words is like trying to knock a brick over by blowing on it. For curses to work they have to tap into something else.
‘For example, you can’t blow a building up by talking at it and yet an army captain can speak a few commands into his walkie-talkie, order up a missile and achieve the same thing.’
‘But the missile is doing all the hard work,’ said Toby.
Cassandra smiled. ‘Is it? The command, the desire, is coming from the army captain. If he hadn’t ordered it then the building would still be standing. The missile is just a tool, a means to an end. In magical terms (and philosophical ones for that matter), the power lies in the command not the method of execution.
‘Another important distinction: a curse is not a prayer. When casting a curse, it’s all about retention of dominance, you’re asking something to intercede, to act out your wishes, but you don’t want to concede power to it.
‘That said, to fall back on my terribly clever example, the missile can develop a mind of its own if the army captain isn’t careful. It’s a dangerous and complex business.’ She turned back to Shining. ‘From what you’ve told me, this could be a curse, yes. Or a more basic summoning.’
‘A summoning?’ asked Toby.
‘For that you’d need to talk to a demonologist,’ Cassandra said, grabbing at a menu. ‘Are we eating? I’m famished.’
‘I’m sure we can order something,’ Shining replied.
‘Just some nachos. Or garlic bread. Or maybe burgers. They do nice burgers. Or scampi. I like scampi. Funny little things, scampi. Have you ever seen one in the wild? I haven’t. I wonder if you can keep them as pets.’
‘What’s the difference between a summoning and a curse?’ asked Toby, trying to get things back on track.
‘Oh, well, they’re easy. A summoning is just calling on something. Invoking a force that then acts according to its own natural behaviour. It’s all about control again. In a summoning, the person calling on that force has no real control over what that force does, they just know that it will act in a certain fashion dependent on its usual habits. For example, if you unleash a lion in a field of sheep you can be fairly sure it’s going to end up with a belly full of lamb. If you put a lion in a fish tank you’re just going to end up with a lot of splashing and an angry lion. It’s all about knowing what you’re summoning. In fact,’ she smiled, ‘it’s all about choosing correctly from your menu.’ She handed the menu to Shining. ‘A double burger with bacon and brie with extra onion rings, southern-fried chips and plenty of barbecue sauce.’
She turned back to Toby. ‘But summonings are sloppy. And dangerous. To be avoided if possible. A curse retains the control. The person doing the cursing calls the shots.’
‘So how can we tell which this is?’
‘By asking an expert like me,’ she said, before throwing her hand to her forehead. ‘If only I could think clearly. I’m so terribly hungry. I think I may faint.’
‘I’ll order,’ said Shining, smiling. He looked at Toby. ‘Want anything?’
‘Of course he does,’ said Cassandra. ‘I’m not eating on my own. He’ll have a burger as well.’
‘Will he?’ asked Toby.
‘Of course you will,’ she replied. ‘Who doesn’t like burgers? Or scampi … or maybe a pie …’ She slowly reached for the menu again but Shining snatched it away.
‘I’ll order three burgers,’ he said, retreating to the bar.
Suddenly Cassandra grabbed Toby’s thigh. ‘You in love with me yet?’
‘Not quite yet,’ he admitted, backing away.
‘You’re only lying to yourself,’ she said, letting go of his leg. ‘It’s sad, really.’ She grinned and stared at him. ‘To live under such denial.’
‘No doubt I’ll succumb any moment,’ he said.
She inclined her head, thought for a moment, then shook it. ‘No. You love someone else. Oh Lord …’ She fell back in her chair. ‘I’m always the bridesmaid. Poor girl. It was a tragedy, that foolish little thing she called life.’
Rather than get involved in a discussion as to whether he loved anyone else, Toby decided to keep the talk on subject. ‘So how did you become an expert on curses?’
‘At school,’ she said. ‘Everybody hates me because I’m weird.’ She said it without expecting sympathy, to her it was a simple expression of fac
t and Toby suddenly felt sad for her. ‘I’m used to it now and, you know, to hell with them, but when I was at school it used to really hurt. I just wanted people to be nice. And when I gave up on that I just wanted them to feel as badly as I did. I’m not much cop in a fight so I looked into alternatives. I found one!’ She grinned. ‘You haven’t known real pleasure until you’ve seen an entire netball team sprout facial hair.’ She gazed into the distance, a dreamy look on her face. ‘I think Clarissa Hedges still needs to shave twice a week.’
Shining returned from ordering the food. ‘Done,’ he informed them. He looked to Cassandra. ‘So, what do you think?’
She sighed. ‘For it to be a curse there are certain obvious signs. Firstly a delivery method. Curses aren’t just spoken, you need to mark the victim out, plant a target on them. Usually this is by a written form of the incantation.’
‘The mobile phones?’ Toby suggested.
‘It would seem likely,’ Shining agreed.
Cassandra shrugged. ‘If someone has found a way of digitising hexes then they’re a better magician than I am. Curses don’t like being written down, they’re too powerful. It takes a strict methodology and control to even set pen to paper.’
‘The phones were destroyed.’
‘True,’ she nodded. ‘It does seem the most likely. It just worries me.’
‘The whole thing is worrying,’ said Toby.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but brilliant experts like me don’t like things to contradict their view of their subject. Digitised curses? That’s just freaky. I’ll be panicking about email attachments for months.’
‘So what are the other obvious signs?’ Toby asked.
‘Method of death. In a summoning you never know what you’re going to get. Demons are a weird bunch and terribly creative. I once heard of a man eaten by toads. I mean, that’s just sick … imagine!’ She began miming a toad eating people. It was like a sequel to her earlier performance, Toby thought, and just as disconcerting.
‘It must have taken ages too,’ she said, finishing her mime abruptly. ‘In a curse,’ she continued, ‘despite the fact that a third presence is becoming involved – the power that enacts the curse – the cause of death is usually something natural. There are exceptions but a hex spirit doesn’t usually kill directly, it encourages an external state where death becomes likely. It makes the world around the cursed person excessively hostile.’