by Tim Lebbon
First things first—she would have to lose her tail.
* * *
The landline rang as she prepared to leave. She waited, tempted to answer but knowing it would probably be Lucy. Her best friend, her confidante, the woman who had been there for her through good times and not so good. The draw of speaking to Lucy was almost too strong to bear.
The call switched over to the answerphone, and she listened to the message as it was being recorded.
“Hey, it’s me. Just checking in. Any news from Vince? I’ve tried your mobile, too. Call me, yeah? Bit worried about you.” There was a pause, as if Lucy was thinking of saying more.
Then she hung up.
Angela released a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding, and went to the front door.
It was already warm outside. Someone shouted in a language she couldn’t identify, a car horn sounded somewhere out of sight, and a siren wailed in from the distance. A typical London morning. She shrugged her bag higher onto one shoulder, closed the door, and walked along the street.
There were several crows pecking at the spot where she’d witnessed the killing. A dark stain marked the scene, but little else. Angela didn’t pause to look too closely, though. She remembered the sickening sounds and the shocking animal brutality, and that was enough to speed up her pace. Soon she left her street, and five minutes later she was walking along the main shop-lined road toward the Tube.
She had no doubt that she was being followed. She suspected it was Claudette, as she hadn’t been in the car when Harry and Kris brought her home early that morning. She made no attempt to try and spot who was keeping watch on her. Doing so would make them more alert, and she didn’t want that. She wanted the opposite.
Angela had read so much about the minds and actions of criminals—books, papers, interviews, articles, research documents—but she had rarely incorporated any of it into her everyday life. Breaking into Vince’s secret apartment in South Kensington had been scary and exciting, her knowledge of lock picking gleaned wholly from her studies. Now she would attempt something new.
Phone in hand, staring at the screen as she walked, she entered a grocer’s store. She remained close to the front window so that she was visible from outside, selected a bag of crisps and a bottle of water, paid, nodded to the shop assistant, stood outside and dropped her purchases into her bag. Then she moved on, still staring at her phone. She’d brought up a news site and scanned the headlines for anything that might refer to what had happened the night before. There was nothing. No murder, no screams, nothing to remember the victim of violence. Someone else’s problem.
The next door she ducked into was a health food shop. She browsed shelves close to the front window to begin with, then moved deeper in.
“Help you?” the shop clerk asked. She was a cheerful young woman with dreadlocks and an open smile.
“Just browsing, thanks.”
“New York?”
“Boston.”
She smiled. “Never was great with accents.”
Angela returned the smile and picked up a basket, loading it slowly with dried apricots, quinoa, and some outrageously priced hot chocolate. She ambled to the counter and hovered there for a while, chatting with the clerk. A few other patrons milled about. She glanced at her phone a few times, reversing the camera view and holding it up so that she could look behind her. There was no one she recognised in the shop, and no sign of any observers out in the street.
“Don’t walk into a lamp post,” the woman said, handing Angela her change.
“Just waiting for an important message,” she said. The woman wore a peace sigil earring, a “One Life—Live It” tee shirt, and they could have been friends. She seemed genuinely nice.
Angela felt a sudden rush of emotion, a flood of desperation at what was happening to her life. She wanted to ask this woman for a coffee, not caring if it was taken the wrong way. She wanted to sit and talk to a normal person about mundane things.
“Hope he’s worth it,” the young woman said before attending to another customer.
“Yeah, he is,” Angela said as she turned away. She didn’t think the woman heard.
Emerging into sunlight, she turned left and sauntered along the pavement, staring down at her phone and only glancing up every few seconds. She did her very best not to look behind. Passing a boarded-up shop that had once been a tanning salon, she spotted a spread of graffiti that would have meant nothing a couple of days ago. One-Eyed Bastard. Probably a nickname. Some weird gang thing, perhaps. It sent a chill through her veins.
Someone bumped into her and apologised, then said, “Get with the real world, love.” Her heart leapt, but the man shook his head and walked on. He meant her phone, that was all. Get your head out of the digital world, love. One life, live it, love.
Angela felt her control slipping. Taking action was her aim today, not losing herself to the situation and letting it carry her along with its strange flow. She shrugged her bag higher on her shoulder and moved off, not looking around, trying not to appear paranoid. This was about putting whoever followed her at ease.
Two shops down…
The next one would be where she would take action.
She passed a Thai restaurant and smiled at a man cleaning the windows. She and Vince had eaten in there a couple of times, and she remembered that the toilets were downstairs. If it had a back door, she didn’t know where it was. Besides, it would look strange ducking into a restaurant this early in the morning.
Clothes shop. It sold second-hand items and she’d bought a coat there last year, but she remembered the bags of stock piled behind the counter. Blocking the corridors back there, perhaps.
Horns blared. Car engines grumbled, brakes squealed, cyclists whizzed by. The impersonal city was home to millions of stories, and now it was time to become the narrator and change her own.
The Big Two Café would be perfect. Independent, a nice coffee shop that also served pretty decent food throughout the day, she had used it quite a few times as an afternoon retreat.
“Morning, Michelle,” she said as she stepped through the open front doors.
“Miss Gough!” Michelle was short, wide, sporting a huge smile and a personality to match.
“Please, it’s Angela.” She rolled her eyes and looked around. A few people sat eating breakfast, most of them reading websites or messages on their phones. Get with the real world, she thought, laughing gently.
“Usual?” Michelle asked.
“No, large cappuccino today, and I’ll have a bacon sandwich, too. I’m just…” She raised her eyebrows and pointed toward the back of the café.
“Sure, just drop your bag to save a seat, we’re dead busy,” Michelle said, making Angela’s plan twice as strong when she added, “There, behind you! Window seat.”
A man and woman were just leaving, gathering papers and pushing past her without catching her eye, and Angela shrugged off her empty bag and placed it on one of the chairs. She leaned it against the window, easily visible from outside.
Her internal stopwatch began ticking.
She strolled casually toward the rear of the café, heart hammering. A corridor led past a wall display of the café’s famous patrons, a who’s who of reality TV stars, a pop singer from the seventies, and a couple of sports people who lived locally. She paused as if examining the photos, then turned into the narrow corridor, slipping out of sight of anyone watching from the street.
The toilets were to the right. She went left, passing the open kitchen door and seeing the chef busy with an array of breakfasts. The smells were tempting, but so was freedom. As she approached the door marked “Private,” she held her breath. If it was locked, she’d have to go back to her seat, finish breakfast, and make her move in the next shop.
The door opened. No alarms shrilled at her audacity. She entered a small, untidy office and closed the door behind her. Shrugged off her jacket and left it on the back of a chair. Rifled through the contents of a mess
y desk top scattered with old plates and half-empty mugs, found a rubber band, gathered her hair and tied it in a ponytail. There was another door across the office, and beside it a row of hooks. On one of them hung a loose, thin cardigan, on another a baseball cap. An unexpected opportunity. She took both, feeding her hair out above the cap’s clasp, pulling on the cardigan as she opened the other door.
In a narrow corridor piled high with cardboard boxes, she turned left and headed for a fire escape door. It was difficult to reach past the boxes, but it was blocked open with a brick. She couldn’t have asked for anything more perfect.
It was maybe a minute since she’d disappeared from view.
Her watcher—Claudette, Harry, or Kris—would hopefully give her a few more minutes in the bathroom before they started growing suspicious. Then another minute to enter the café, negotiate Michelle’s loud welcome, find their way back to the toilet. If she was lucky, there’d be someone locked in there, so maybe that would be another minute before the watcher decided to knock on the door, or perhaps break it down.
Seven or eight minutes. To be safe, bank on five.
Outside the door, the alley entrance was to the right, and beyond it the main street bustled. She hunched down low and scanned from the shadows, not seeing anyone she recognised. The narrow view showed only people flitting by in both directions, and vehicles crawling past.
To her left, the alley went deeper. This was where it might all fall apart. If there was no other way out, she’d have to leave onto the main street, and then it was all down to chance. Would her follower recognise her instantly in the cap and cardigan? Probably. They’d know what they were doing. Maybe they’d done it a hundred times before.
This was her first.
The alley smelled of rotten food, shadows defied the morning, water dripped from somewhere high up on her left, and Angela thought she heard something rustling around in a pile of scattered refuse. She kicked an empty takeaway carton and the rustling ceased. Whatever it was listened, cautious and alert as she passed by. Something else that wanted to hide.
She already felt far removed from the street, even though it was only thirty feet behind her. The sounds were subdued, the sun on her skin a fading memory. She rarely saw places like this. They were back of house, functional parts of the shops and restaurants in the area she knew so well. Anyone or anything could be hiding here.
The alley wasn’t wide enough for vehicles, but she passed several heavy plastic wheeled carts, a couple of them overflowing with black bags. Some were split, spilling packaging and cardboard to the ground. Others emitted smells she couldn’t identify, from corrupted things she could not see.
At first she thought it was a dead end, but then the alley jigged left and opened onto a much wider area, a chaotic courtyard where two vans, several cars, and a motorbike were parked, wheeled refuse carts stood in disarray, and the rear facades of a dozen buildings rose damp and dilapidated. A few doors stood blocked open, and from one of them she heard the tinny hiss of music, clashing pans, and voices raised in busy dispute.
She scanned quickly, looking for the way out.
A fox stared at her from a shadowy doorway across the large courtyard.
She froze, neck prickling. Trying not to move, she looked left and right for signs that anyone else was watching. She appeared to be alone. The whole courtyard felt out of time. Even the vehicles might have been abandoned here forever. It was a way station that people passed through but never really knew, and the fox was part of that hidden world.
The creature didn’t seem afraid. Angela had seen urban foxes before, but this one looked healthier than most. Its coat was a familiar auburn, not grayed by the city. It seemed well-fed.
It turned and trotted away, glancing once over its shoulder.
“Nothing to lose,” she muttered, and she started to follow. The creature was going the way she needed to go, away from the alley and along a canyon between buildings that led out onto another, quieter road.
Angela glanced at her watch. Five minutes had passed since she’d entered the Big Two Café. She started to jog. Her follower would likely be inside now, searching for her. She had to hurry.
Out on the road, she looked left and right. The fox had vanished. She smiled and shook her head. She was spooked, imagining things, seeing signs that weren’t there. She turned left and walked quickly. At the end of the street the road joined a busier one, and she jogged across, dodging cars and raising a hand in apology when someone honked.
Seven minutes. They’d be knocking on the toilet door now, perhaps even trying to break it down. Or they’d be out into the alley, the courtyard, then following her if she didn’t hustle.
Angela crossed another road and ducked into another alley, passing several motionless shapes sleeping beneath flattened cardboard boxes, their dogs growling at her. She emerged onto a canal towpath, followed it beneath a busy road bridge, left the path, crossed a small park, and only when she had successfully lost herself did she stop running, half an hour later and with very little idea of where she was and what she was going to do.
Reaching a small green set in a square of tall London townhouses, Angela sat to catch her breath. There was a prickle of excitement at what she’d done. She felt in control.
Something shifted to her left, caught by her peripheral vision. A fast shape, moving behind walls of foliage, startling chirping birds to the sky.
Angela stood. The small park felt empty, distant from the London sounds of motors, horns, and the plodding of feet taking everyone on a different journey. A moment ago the place had felt safe—but no more.
They can’t have followed me, she thought. It’s impossible!
Across a spread of untrimmed lawn, a fox emerged from behind a lush rhododendron bush. She couldn’t tell whether it was the same creature that she’d seen behind the shops. It stared at her, then darted away.
She couldn’t help thinking it had been watching her.
Gathering herself, breathing deeply, letting the anonymous sounds of the big city wash over her, she prepared to enact the next stage of her plan. She might have escaped Mary Rock’s followers, but she was adrift in a city full of strangers and strangeness. She had to find something to grab hold of, a secure point to grasp before her search for Vince could really begin. There must be others who knew of these creatures.
She needed someone else with an awareness of this fantastical new world.
The easiest way to find the nearest cyber café would be to access an app on her iPhone, but she had no idea how far Mary Rock’s reach extended, and she wanted to stay off the grid. She’d have to employ more basic search methods.
Pulling the cap down over her eyes, Angela left the park and started walking.
* * *
She found the café twenty minutes later, nestled in a narrow arcade between a laundromat and a Turkish food outlet. Inside it smelled of coffee and cleaning products.
She sat as far to the rear as she could, turning the screen so she could also face the door. Ordering coffee and carrot cake, she created an account using random numbers and letters and a made-up user name, then started searching the net. She used obscure terminology, worried that there might be filters set to scan for certain words used in tandem, such as “fairy in London” or “trade in relics.”
The first few searches bore no fruit. She scanned many pages concerned with mythological creatures—storybooks, blogs, Wikipedia pages, school websites. There were dozens of photographs of blurry, hazed shapes that might have been anything. She even read accounts by apparently clear-headed witnesses of big cats on the moors and other creatures living in the shadows. But nothing she saw or read rang true.
She shifted her search to the science pages. Cryptozoology was at the periphery of serious science, but there were articles in respected journals that addressed this unusual branch of biology. Even they dealt with known creatures, such as leopards in the mountains, or crocodiles in the sewers.
Then she foun
d a name. Dean Janowski. It appeared in several searches, always mentioned with a mocking lilt. He’d been a professor of palaeontology who seemed to have been derided and eventually shunned by his peers because of his outlandish studies and beliefs.
This had been a long time ago.
“Dean,” she said, because the name jogged a memory. “Dean.”
She sat up straight. Fat Frederick had mentioned a man called Dean. He’d called him a tramp and a fellow relic hunter.
Angela tapped in Dean Janowski’s full name. By then, her coffee was cooling and the carrot cake sat forgotten, but she didn’t care.
The website opened onto a brief, stark statement.
I’ll always take you seriously.
No time wasters.
When she hovered over the message, there was a hyperlink. She entered, and on the new page there was a phone number. That shocked her, but then she realised it was a mask number, often used online to disguise someone’s real number.
A set of headphones and a microphone hung on a hook beside the computer, already plugged in. Without giving herself time to think through what she was doing, she slipped on the headphones and dialed.
The phone rang several times, and she was just about to hang up when it was answered. She could hear someone listening. They said nothing, but she knew it was an active line.
“I saw a fairy,” she said.
16
There were those among the Kin who believed the safest policy was to hide, and not long ago Lilou would have agreed with them. It was what they did best, after all, and their survival depended on it. It had been that way for centuries.
She was one of the few who could hide in plain sight, although her presence was often felt, sensed, unsettling to some. Those Kin not so human in appearance or outlook had no option but to always exist in the shadows, but with Ballus once again in their midst, everything had changed.
Mallian wanted to go out and find Ballus, and perhaps kill him, and Lilou could see the sense of that. They had to take action. Not only because Ballus was an ongoing danger—he’d already shown that in his brutal murder of Sandri May, and others over the years—but because he was an even greater danger to Vince. If Ballus captured him, he would do everything, anything, to find out what Vince knew about her and the rest of the survivors.