by Emma Newman
By the time Max hobbled back from the kitchen with the coffee, she was collecting a couple of sheets of paper from the printer. “It used to be a farm, ages ago, but not anymore. The plot of land and the original house is listed in the Doomsday Book—how cool is that? There used to be a forge there too, but it’s not in commercial use. That might be what that outhouse was—it’s listed as being at the bottom of the hill.”
“You learned all this from Mr Google?”
“Max, you are adorable. Sort of. It was in the press a couple of years ago. Housing developers tried to buy the land but the owner refused, apparently. That owner is a Mr Ferran. Is that the name of the person you’re hoping to find there?”
Ferran? Max was certain that was one of the names for Lord Iron but it had been a long time since his Chapter briefing on the topic. “No. I’m looking for a Robert Amesbury.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “The only reference I can find to a Robert Amesbury in Bath is a police officer in the 1990s who won the George Medal for gallantry. Stopped a kidnapping, according to this. I can’t find anything else, and nothing tying him to that address.”
Now Max appreciated why Rupert had recruited her. “Thank you. That’s very helpful.”
“Have you seen Rupert?”
“No.”
“He hasn’t been in yet? I’ll get on with what he told me to do yesterday, then. Wanna take a look?” She did something unfathomable and the screen changed to show another map of Bath, this time the centre and its more familiar streets. “I’m making a map of the Fae-touched properties with a backend database that stores everything we know about who lives there, tied in with the sensors Rupert has already put around the city. When I’ve finished it, it’ll give us real-time information about whether they’re in Mundanus and doing anything dodgy.”
The gargoyle peered at it. “I thought you did English Lit.”
“I did. Everyone knows how to use computers now, though. This isn’t uni-level stuff. I did a project similar to this at school and whatever I don’t know about, I just Google or look on YouTube. When this is done and tested, we’ll roll it out over the whole country and then when something happens, we can direct you to the exact location. Much better than patrolling.”
The gargoyle was staring at her. “You’re like some sort of wunderkind.”
She snorted. “Nah. You’re just really out of touch. I’ll print out that map for you if you need to go and check that place out.”
Less than an hour later, Max stood at a gate at the edge of the field in the printed photograph. Behind him there was a row of new houses, and the field to the left was being churned up by diggers. By the look of things, once the development was finished, the field in front of him would be the only one left in that square mile.
The building shown in the photo was a ramshackle stone outhouse that seemed to grow out of the hillside. He could barely see it through the brambles that had grown between it and the edge of the field. There was smoke curling up from a corner of the roof, however, so he assumed someone was there. He opened the solid metal agricultural gate and trudged through the mud towards the building.
He could hear someone singing as he approached. He didn’t recognise the song, but the man’s voice was strong and tuneful. As he got closer, the building looked sturdier. The walls were made of stone and although some small stones had tumbled from a few places, the walls were so thick that it didn’t make much difference to the structure. Thick bands of iron had been attached as if to keep the rest of the stones in place, and it had a corrugated metal roof that looked like it had been nailed over old slate tiles. The smoke was coming from the top of a pipe protruding from the corner of the roof. There was only one window, tiny and covered in cobwebs, through which a warm yellow light shone into the dank January gloom.
Max went round to the other side of the building and found a door with peeling green paint and a horseshoe nailed to it. Even though the paint had seen better days, the huge iron hinges that also held the wood together were well oiled and rust-free. Max rapped on the door and the singing stopped. When the silence lingered, Max knocked again.
“Go away! Don’t want anythin’ you’re sellin’!” The voice was deep, with a broad, west country accent.
“I’m not selling anything.”
“Be off with yer!”
“I need to talk to you about the photos you gave to the journalist at the Bath Herald.”
“Piss and sawdust! Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about! Bugger orff!”
“Are you an amateur historian? Is that how you pieced it all together?”
“If you don’t get orff my land, I’ll call the police on yer!”
“But it’s not your land, Mr Amesbury.”
There was a pause. Max looked at the article Kay had printed out for him. The Robert Amesbury in the photo was dressed in a police uniform with gleaming buttons, smiling with pride as he accepted his medal. The voice coming from inside the outhouse sounded more like an irate farmer. “I’m assuming you’re Mr Robert Amesbury. The one who won the George Medal.”
There was the sound of a bar scraping across the door from the inside, and then it opened, just a crack. A man in his sixties with a shock of wild white hair and a beard squinted through it. “Who are you?” The accent wasn’t so thick this time.
“My name is Max. You gave some photos to a Bath Herald journalist and a feature was written about it.” He pulled the newspaper page from his coat pocket and showed it to the man.
The man’s eyes widened when he saw it. “I didn’t think she believed me.” He frowned at Max. “I told her to keep me anonymous. Fat lot of good that did. So what do you want?”
“I went to see her about one of the people in the photos. She couldn’t remember writing the piece.”
He was expecting confusion, but instead the man closed his eyes. “Not again. Wait there.” The door closed and was then opened again after a minute or so. “You’d better come in, then.”
Max entered to find the interior surprisingly warm. A fire blazed in a large hearth at the far side of the room, a huge set of bellows mounted next to it that had seen better days. There was a stone sink in the corner, a makeshift bed, and a few piles of clothes. The floor was nothing more than uneven flagstones with an old tea crate overturned and set in the middle of the room to form a table. The space was lit by several lanterns hung from hooks in the wooden rafters. On the far wall an old blanket had been hung up. Max suspected it had just been used to cover something up.
Amesbury dropped a wooden beam back into iron brackets on either side of the door to brace it shut and looked at Max, hands in his pockets. He wore several layers of clothes, all with holes and frayed edges, along with an old pair of boots.
“You won the George Medal for preventing a kidnapping. Did that case lead you to uncover the other people who’ve disappeared over the years, detailed in that article?”
“Now, just wait a moment,” Amesbury said. “I’ve no idea who you are. ‘Max’ isn’t much to go on. Who sent you? Are you with another paper?”
The broad accent was gone and Max could see it was just an act, maybe to keep the developers away. “I’m an investigator, Mr Amesbury. I’ve been working on disappearances from the city of Bath and surrounds for many years now. I was hoping we could work together on one of the groups detailed in the article, the trade unionists from the foundry on Walcot Street.”
“Long time ago, that one. Would’ve thought you’d be more interested in something recent.”
“I’m very interested in why the journalist forgot about an article she wrote days before. And why that didn’t seem surprising to you.”
“What sort of things do you investigate? Only disappearances?”
Max shook his head. “Anything unusual.”
“One of those Forteans, are you?”
“No. Am I right in thinking that you’re Robert Amesbury?”
He nodded. “I suppose you’re wondering wh
y I’m living here, seeing as I used to be one of the golden boys on the force.”
“I am.”
“I’d tell you, but you’d laugh in my face.”
“I definitely won’t, Mr Amesbury. Were you hoping someone would come forward with more information, or an offer of help?”
“Something like that,” Amesbury muttered.
“The article had a result, and that’s me. I suspect I can help you, but unless you tell me more, that won’t be possible.” He waited as Amesbury considered his words. “For what it’s worth,” Max added, “it isn’t the first time I’ve come across somebody who has forgotten something that just happened to them. And not just a misplaced memory. It’s like it never happened at all.”
“You can sit on that crate over there, if you need to,” Amesbury said, pointing to one partially buried by a pile of clothes. He went to stand near the fire, watching Max closely. “I haven’t told anyone this before. Not sure why I’m telling you, truth be told, but you don’t seem like the kind of man prone to flights of fancy.”
Max pushed off some of the clothes and perched on the tea crate.
“Years back, there was a girl at the university who played the piano. She was tipped to be the next big thing. She’d noticed someone following her around and reported it. No one did much about it. Then she just disappeared one day. She was due to play at a concert. Her parents travelled down from London to see her—they spoke to her that morning and she was excited—and then when the concert was about to start, the manager of the venue had to go out on the stage and tell everyone she hadn’t turned up. A couple of hours later I was called in.
“’Course it came out that she’d filed a complaint about someone stalking her, and it was suddenly number-one priority to find her. It was one of those disappearances that was bound to end up on the telly. Kids go missing every day, but the press like the pretty blondes. The fact that she had a musical career ahead of her was exactly the sort of thing those vultures like. So I gets to work and then my boss calls me in to the station. ‘Drop it,’ he says. ‘We know where she is, and she’s fine.’ I offered to call the parents, he said he’d do it himself. I thought nothing much of it.
“Less than a year later, another music student goes missing. I look into it. This lad was due to play a concert at the same place as the girl. Bit of a flimsy connection, seeing as there aren’t that many places to play in the city, but I took it to my boss as an avenue I was going to pursue. ‘Drop it,’ he tells me. ‘We know where he is, and he’s fine.’
“I went home that night, and I drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“I told myself it was just a coincidence. I told myself all sorts of crap to make myself feel better. I had a wife then. She wanted me to get promoted. Then a complaint comes in from another student about someone following her back to campus from town. I could see it happening all over again. She was a cellist. I went and interviewed her without telling my boss. I found out the next time she was due to go into town, and I told her I would follow her and see if I could see this stalker.
“I more than saw him. I stopped him taking her.”
Amesbury stopped, staring at the floor for a while before jerking towards the pile of logs next to him and heaving another one onto the fire.
“Want me to carry on?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a good listener. I don’t know what that man said to her, but he was like a hypnotist or something. He just went over to her, said something, and she was in this trance. I hit him over the head with my truncheon. Not the way it’s supposed to be done, I know, but I didn’t want to take any chances.”
As Max listened, he recalled the case Amesbury was talking about. It was one of the biggest failures of his Chapter ever documented; they suspected a parasite was involved but never identified who it was.
“I took the bloke into custody. I delivered him to the station myself, where he was checked over by a doctor and put in a cell. I wrote up the paperwork, filed it, and went home.”
“That’s what you got the medal for?”
“No. That was for something else. No, the bloke I hit over the head disappeared from the cells overnight. No one knew anything about him when I went in the next day. My report was gone. The student decided to change university the very next day. All total bullshit. I wrote it all up and I went to my boss, just stormed in when he was having this meeting, and told him I was filing a complaint against him. Then this man…” Amesbury covered his face with a grimy hand. “Then this man said, ‘Is this the one you were telling me about?’ and then…then…everything went to shit.”
“You somehow forgot it all happened?”
“More than that. I forgot everything. Who I was. Where I lived. When people told me I thought they were lying. I was sectioned. They thought I’d had some sort of psychotic break caused by stress. Stress! I know what stress does to people. It isn’t that.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Going on for twenty-odd years now. Lost my wife. Lost my job. Lost my place at the home they put me in when they did all those cutbacks. ‘Care in the community,’ they called it. I was on the street for a while. Then about three winters back I found this place. It was snowing and I needed somewhere warm. I came inside, put that beam down to keep the door shut, and then…” He shrugged. “Then I got better. Instantly. Like I was my old self again. But I stank and I was older and I had nothing. Nothing except my mind back.”
Max nodded. He’d been Charmed and something about this place broke it. The iron on the building, perhaps? It was a working theory, especially given his suspicion about the landowner, one that would need further investigation. “And then what did you do?”
“I won’t lie. I cried. A lot. My wife had divorced me over ten years ago, and I didn’t even realise. I ‘lacked mental capacity.’ She lives in Spain now. With some bloke she met on holiday. I tried to persuade her to see me again but she won’t. She gave me some money but I don’t feel safe anywhere but here. I thought you might be Mr Ferran coming to kick me off his land.”
“No. Do you have any theories about what was done to you?”
“Hundreds, but they’re all ridiculous.” He glanced at the blanket behind him. “I decided to do my own investigation. My old boss is still in the force. Much higher up now. And the disappearances are still happening. I started to make connections and…I thought I might be going too far. I was scared the madness was coming back. I needed to talk it through with someone, someone not in the force. I couldn’t find anyone who’d listen. I went to the paper, presented it all like a case. That lady loved it. Said it was compelling and that she’d run it. Now you say she can’t remember. She won’t be writing the rest of it up, then. I’m the only one who knows what really goes on in this city. And it all goes back over a hundred years. Someone here, some organisation or hidden group or something, doesn’t like troublemakers. Those trade unionists were some of the first. Five men disappeared one night and no one ever found out why. Oh, people think they were killed, but no one investigated. Or maybe they tried and were done in like me.” Amesbury frowned at him. “You’re not giving me anything here. You’re a strange one, if you don’t mind me saying. I’ve no idea whether you think I’m mad or not.”
“You’re not mad. I believe you,” Max said. “I need to look into a couple of things that might give you some answers. Can I come back to see you in a couple of days?”
“Yes! You really believe me?” He suddenly looked ten years younger. “But don’t tell anyone I’m here. Please.”
“I won’t. Thank you for your time, Mr Amesbury. I appreciate it.”
They shook hands. The joy of being treated with any respect seemed to cancel out any of the usual discomfort caused by Max’s lack of expression. He left Amesbury’s squat, listened to the beam being dropped back into place behind the door, and then hobbled off. He needed to speak to Rupert about the possibility of recruiting Amesbury, to Petra about whether Mr Ekstrand had ev
er told her about a Mr Ferran, and to the gargoyle about the way he was wasting time resting his chin on Kay’s desk, gazing at her as she worked.
13
The next morning, once everyone in the house was awake and warned about the impending demolitions, Sam took a sledgehammer to the cob wall that Eleanor had shown him the night before. He’d expected her to wait nearby and see what was revealed, but instead she asked if she could use the car and driver for a day trip. Wherever she planned to go, she certainly dressed well for it.
For old mud and straw, the wall was surprisingly tough, but the hours he’d put in at the forge paid off and he was able to gouge a good chunk out of the wall without breaking a sweat. Eleanor’s estimate was fairly accurate; it was about a metre thick and there was a space behind it into which he could poke his fingers. After a couple more wallops with the sledgehammer to open the tiny hole up, he struck something metallic.
The strike sent reverberations through him and the house. It felt like he was still vibrating long after the din had stopped. The housekeeper came and asked if everything was all right, and he sent her away with brisk reassurances, his heart pounding with the thrill of discovery. The vague pull he’d felt the night before had strengthened into something stronger, reinvigorating his excavation until he’d made a hole big enough to fit his head and shoulders through.
He grabbed the torch and switched it on before pushing it through the hole ahead of him. Then he climbed in, the wall thick enough to support his torso as he pushed himself through to see what was on the other side.
There was a gap of only a few centimetres between the inner side of the cob and what looked like a slab of iron. When Sam brushed it with his fingertips he knew, on a level deeper than he could ever hope to express, that the first Lord Iron had placed it there, that it was pure iron with only an infinitesimal amount of carbon and something else…manganese, yes, that’s what it was. The smith who’d trained him to use the forge told him that iron that pure was made in modern arc furnaces. Sam knew the slab had been there for hundreds and hundreds of years.