‘The hell…?’ I gasped.
I lay there for a bit, gathering my senses until a nearby noise announced the arrival of my companions, splashing through an inch-deep puddle of rainwater.
‘Are you okay?’ asked Stronge, catching her breath.
‘I’ll live,’ I said. ‘Well, to a fashion.’
Frank helped me to my feet and I propped against him like a drunk at a pub urinal. I gave him a goosey and saw that he was wearing a blood goatee from the busted nose he’d been given.
‘Looks like we’ve both been in the wars, eh?’ I said.
‘What happened?’ asked Stronge, shouting to be heard over the hydraulic hiss of the rubbish lorry, which was busy emptying the contents of a bin into its rear end. The man operating the lifting mechanism was either oblivious to the drama that had unfolded, or utterly indifferent. I was willing to guess the latter.
‘Fucked if I know,’ I shouted back. ‘He had me on the ropes.’
My best guess was that the lorry must have spooked him. Why else would he have legged it when he did?
‘Did you see which way he went?’ Stronge asked, swiping a curtain of wet hair from her face.
‘I did, but it doesn’t matter. He’s long gone.’
She threw her hands up in frustration. ‘So that’s it? We’re right back where we started?’
‘Not quite,’ I replied, and used a finger to daub a long pink stripe along the back of Frank’s coat.
The killer was using makeup to cover blue skin.
Chapter Twelve: Listen to Your Nose
The makeup meant something. Only thing was, I had no idea what. I’d never heard of an Uncanny coloured blue, at least none that could even remotely pass for human. But there was one thing I did know.
‘This is a cocoon.’
We were back at the suspect’s overgrown apartment, picking through the wreckage. We’d searched the place top to bottom but found little of interest—some discarded clothes, a mildewed copy of Don Quixote that looked as if it had been dragged out of a canal, and a pistol that we didn’t need ballistics to tell us had been used in a murder—but the cocoon… that added a whole new slant to the proceedings.
‘So what?’ said Stronge. ‘What difference does it make now he’s gone?’
Frank tipped his head to one side, also confused.
I explained why it mattered. ‘The knife wound that eaves tagged him with was all gone, and I think this fixed it.’
I beckoned them over and they peered into the hollow the suspect had vacated. Among the mass of vegetation was a single cone-shaped purple flower positioned about waist-height, its petals stained red with blood.
Stronge clucked her tongue thoughtfully. ‘Okay, let’s assume you’re right and this thing patched him up somehow… why do you sound so happy about it?’
I smiled. ‘Don’t you get it? I dinged him with a hammer so now he’s going to have to heal all over again. He can’t come back here, which means he’s going to have to make a fresh cocoon.’
Stronge completed the thought. ‘Which means he can’t skip town.’
‘Biiiingo,’ drawled Frank, getting into the spirit of things.
‘He’ll need to find somewhere new to lie low and nurse his wounds,’ I said, ‘somewhere close to vegetation, and when he does, we’ll find him.’
‘How do we do that?’
I wasn’t sure exactly, so I pressed my fingertips together and hoped it made me look smarter than I felt. ‘We need to learn more about him. About his habits. And there’s really only one place left to look.’
Now this is a penthouse suite, I thought as we ducked the blue and white police tape and stepped into a hotel room large enough to have its own weather system. Slap bang in the heart of Mayfair and boasting a jaw-dropping view of Green Park, this place was not for the thrifty. This was for people who could afford to stay in a hotel room decorated with pictures that weren’t just cheap reprints. The art on these walls was specially commissioned and lit in a way that drew attention to their every brushstroke.
‘I’m telling you, this is a bullshit move,’ said Stronge, setting foot in a crime scene she already considered ice cold.
She didn’t like the insinuation that her people were incompetent. That the men in bunny suits she’d watched comb the room had missed something vital. But I’d insisted we re-examine the place. Stronge may have the Sight, but that didn’t mean she always knew what she was looking for. There was a chance I might spot something her and her people left behind. That I might sniff out some truffles the pigs hadn’t.
‘The place has already been tossed top to bottom,’ she went on. ‘If there was something here, we would have found it.’
‘We’ll see,’ I replied.
Frank blundered into the room after us, bursting through the police tape like a marathon runner crossing the finishing line.
‘Watch it, you lummox,’ I said, getting his attention before he stuck his size-twelves somewhere they didn’t belong.
He stopped just short of the pool of dried blood on the carpet at the foot of the bed, lit clearly by the chandelier above. Right by the puddle, a red splatter decorated the wall like some grisly accent piece. I watched Frank’s glassy eyes track from one to the other and saw his already colourless cheeks go a shade whiter. For a walking corpse, he was surprisingly squeamish.
‘Right then,’ I said, cracking my knuckles.
Arranging my fingers into the appropriate configuration, I untangled a knot of word-vomit and began an arcane invocation.
There are all kinds of magic. There’s primitive shamanic magic with funny dances and totems. Then there’s sophisticated, refined magic in the hermetic tradition, with carefully orchestrated rituals and finely-crafted symbology. They’re all different ways of doing the same thing: tapping into the aether, opening a trapdoor in the fabric of reality, dialling a phone number to another world.
‘Let’s shed some light on this situation, shall we?’
I lifted my arms like antennas to Heaven and unleashed the spell. A neon wind washed from my hands and flooded the room, bathing it in a heliotrope glow.
‘What did you do?’ asked Stronge, blinking, her teeth glowing white as a toothpaste salesman’s.
‘A little home-brew spell I knocked up. It’s sort of like the ultraviolet light your SOCO boys use, only with a bit more welly.’
Stronge took a closer look at our surroundings and saw what I meant. Fingerprints were visible to the naked eye and blood glowed violent and white, including smears and spots that hadn’t been obvious before. But the real trick of the spell—the cherry on the trifle—was that it highlighted psychic imprints no UV light in the world could have picked out.
‘Magic is everywhere,’ I explained, ‘and when we cut through it, we leave footprints.’
The evidence was plain to see. Blurred bodies traced through the room like acid trails—the victim and our perp, I assumed—crisscrossing the space, sometimes in tandem, sometimes apart, occasionally coming together in clumps where they’d remained static for a while. The figures were indistinct, unfinished, like plaster casts of the victims of the Pompeii eruption. Their faces were unidentifiable, their bodies lacking any real definition. There was nothing on show that could be used to form a definite ID, and yet the movements of the figures were clear.
There was a firmer imprint of the two bodies on the bed, relatively sharp, indicating that they’d remained in a fixed position for upwards of an hour. They weren’t engaged in anything salacious, though. They were curled up together on their sides, the killer playing big spoon.
‘Creepy,’ said Stronge.
The trails diverged after that. The bodies appeared to unfurl from their positions, then embarked from each side of the mattress and came together at the foot of the bed. After that, there was no telling what happened. The trail had come to an abrupt end. Any evidence of how the encounter between the killer and his victim concluded had been erased, suggesting a psychic explosion so vi
olent that it created a sort of metaphysical black hole.
‘What happened here?’ asked Stronge.
‘A bullet in the head,’ I replied. ‘That’s what.’
The spell I’d employed wasn’t perfect. Far from it. The imprints it revealed were vague and delicate and prone to being muddied. The trauma inflicted on my client in her final moments had unleashed a psychic cascade that obliterated every imprint in her locality, rendering the spell pretty much useless. Then again, the cause of death was already a dead cert. I’d already heard from the victim what happened to her, and seen the bullet hole with my own two eyes. What I needed was fresh evidence. Something the killer left behind that helped us track him down.
I snapped my fingers, terminating the spell and returning the room to normality.
I looked to Frank. ‘You wanna take a run at it, big man?’
He nodded and went down on all fours.
‘Now what?’ said Stronge, at her wit’s end with our shenanigans.
‘I told you: nose of a bloodhound, this feller.’
Frank went to work, crawling about the room, getting his snout into all the corners and crevices.
He sniffed the marble-topped honour bar.
He rubbed his beak over a tasteful floral arrangement set upon an expansive oval table.
He even got up on his tiptoes to get a noseful of the crystal chandelier.
‘I could really do without your fat-footed partner blundering all over the scene of a criminal investigation,’ said Stronge.
‘Just let the man work.’
And so she did. It went on like that for a while—Frank rooting around on his hands and knees while Stronge watched through splayed fingers, occasionally shaking her head and muttering profanities—but soon enough, something got my partner’s antennae twitching. He sniffed at the valance of the king size bed and followed it up to the luxury mattress, the tip of his bent nose trailing across the ruffled silk bedspread.
‘He’s wasting his time,’ said Stronge, crossing her arms. ‘My men already performed a fingertip search of that thing.’
But Frank wasn’t one for the light touch. He took the mattress in two hands, hefted it over his head, and hurled it through the room’s art deco window like a rock star of old.
‘What the fuck,’ cried Stronge.
‘Calm down.’
‘Calm down?’ She rushed to the shattered window so she could check the street below. ‘He’s lucky he didn’t flatten someone.’
‘Frank’s enthusiastic, that’s all.’
This wasn’t the first time Stronge had questioned our methods, and it wouldn’t be the last. And yet, as ever, Frank’s instincts were spot on.
There on the bedstead, no longer shielded by the mattress, was the object of Frank’s interest: a mysterious glowing bug. It was beating its membranous wings so furiously that it gave off a high-pitched drone, but despite its best efforts, failed to get airborne. From what I could make out, it had become tangled in the fibres of the canvas stretched across the bed frame, and couldn’t free itself.
‘See, I told you we should have given this place a once-over,’ I said, wishing I’d pressed the matter harder back at the café.
Stronge returned from the broken window to get a look. The bug was so tiny it was hard to make out, so she fired up her phone and framed the thing with its lens. I inspected the magnified insect on the screen and saw that it wasn’t an insect at all, or at least not one from around these parts. The creature had a skull-shaped head studded with eight eerily human eyes. Its cranium was affixed to a mismatched, semi-translucent body that looked like the kind of thing Kafka might have called, “A bit bloody much”.
Frank grinned at me, pleased with his find.
‘Not just a pretty face,’ I said, giving my doppelganger a playful cheek slap.
Stronge massaged the back of her neck. ‘What is that thing?’
‘I’ve got a better question: how the hell could you miss it?’ I asked, staring in wonder at the otherworldly beastie.
‘Hey, you didn’t catch it either,’ she shot back. ‘Frank’s the star player here.’
‘We’re a package deal, okay? His victories are my victories, and vice versa.’
Stronge did her fed-up nose-pinch thing again. ‘All right, enough. Let’s get that thing under a jar before it flies away.’
Frank went searching for a glass behind the honour bar, but evidently they’d been removed, most likely to be dusted for prints. Looking for something else he could use, he opened the mini-fridge and produced a miniature bottle of whiskey. He shrugged as if to say, Waste not want not, knocked back the contents of the bottle, then carefully captured the bug inside it.
It bashed against the walls of the bottle for a bit before it gave up and went for a lie down. The bug was out for the count. Whether it was the lack of oxygen or the alcohol fumes anaesthetising it, we couldn’t be sure, but Stronge thought it prudent to give the thing some ventilation. She took the bottle from Frank, located a corkscrew on a silver tray in the bar area, and used the sharp end to punch an air hole through the lid. She held it up so we could see the bug closer and the three of us gathered around to inspect it. Though we couldn’t see it breathing, it gave off a rhythmic pulse of light that told us it was still alive.
Whatever the creature was, it was more alien than insect, and just about hummed with supernatural energy. The killer must have brought it to the hotel with him, because it sure as hell didn’t belong there. Good old Frank. Even with a busted nose, he’d delivered the goods. Thanks to him, we had a piece of evidence that could give us a much better idea of what we were hunting. And once we knew what the killer was, we had a chance to figure out where he’d hang his hat next.
A sharp knock on the door announced the arrival of some very angry members of management. How Stronge explained away the defenestrated mattress, I have no idea. I was too busy thinking about our next move.
Chapter Thirteen: Sprite Night
In some ways, the most shocking thing about our visit to Legerdomain—the magic shop owned by my good friend/sometimes enemy, Jazz Hands—wasn’t what we learned there, but what we saw when we rocked up.
‘Is that...?’
Frank bobbed his head.
‘What?’ asked Stronge, confused. ‘What am I missing?’
Having not been to Legerdomain before, Stronge was failing to recognise the sheer madness of what we were witnessing.
Jazz Hands was dealing with a customer.
Not someone who’d wandered into the shop by mistake, or come inside to get out of the rain, but an actual, real life patron. This was a first, and no wonder—Legerdomain was a dank, uninviting pit sandwiched between an adult book store and an out-of-business jeweller. A gloomy rat hole so thick with dust that crossing its aisles felt like walking through the ashy aftermath of a volcanic eruption. And here was this man, standing at the counter with a grin on his face and his wallet open, making a cash purchase.
Jazz took the man’s item—a magic wand of the actual magic persuasion, not the kind stage magicians tap against top hats—wrapped it, and placed it in a brown paper bag. The satisfied customer then took his purchase, thanked her, and received a smile for his courtesy. That was the thing that really got me. Seeing a smile on Jazz Hands was like seeing a 360 degree rainbow: a once in a lifetime phenomenon.
The customer gave us a nod as he exited through the shop door, setting its bell tinkling. Across the counter, Jazz adjusted her spectacles and saw me. Immediately, her smile melted. I offered her what many describe as a smirk, but I prefer to call a slanting smile.
‘Bloody hell. Bit crowded in here, ain’t it, Jazz? You must have tripled your annual profits there, girl.’
‘What do you want, Fletcher?’ she groaned, raking a hand through her bird’s nest of greying hair.
I approached the till and placed a whiskey miniature on the counter, right next to the You Break It, You Bought It sign.
‘Do I look like I need a
drink?’ she asked.
The obvious answer was, “Yes, always”, but I kept schtum on that and stayed on point.
‘I need your help with something.’
Jazz looked right through me. This was something that I should be used to by this point, what with being a ghost, and yet when it occurred as a result of deliberate, scathing disregard, I couldn’t help but take it to heart. The surly proprietor of Legerdomain squinted across the shop floor and spied two figures lurking amongst the sagging cabinets leaning sideways under the weight of how-to guides, copies of Magicana Magazine, and stacks of snide playing cards.
‘Who’s back there?’ she demanded.
‘Oh, I forgot you two haven’t met,’ I said, calling Stronge over. ‘Jazz Hands, Detective Stronge; Detective Stronge, Jazz Hands.’
The two women shook hands as though it was a competition to decide who cared less.
‘Stronge here is an Insider, but she’s pretty new to the game, so go easy on her.’
The look on the detective’s face told me she wasn’t exactly thrilled by the introduction I’d given her, but before I could colour in the details, Jazz had moved on.
‘Is that who I think it is?’ she asked, her face brightening as she peered through the gloom and saw who else I’d brought along.
Frank came bounding over like a goofy golden retriever.
‘There’s my boy,’ trilled Jazz, giving him a tickle behind the ear. She clocked his wonky schnoz and frowned. ‘What happened here?’
‘Contretemps with a wanted killer,’ I explained. ‘Speaking of which…’ I gave the whiskey bottle a shake, agitating the glow bug within, but Jazz had already ducked under the counter.
‘Got something for you,’ she said, but she wasn’t talking to me.
When she stood up again she was holding a Tupperware box. She popped the lid and slid it across the counter to Frank, who snatched it up with a big dumb grin on his face.
‘What the hell is that?’ asked Stronge, holding her nose.
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 8