Something Rotten: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Ghosted Series Book 2)

by David Bussell

  The children’s home was about as miserable a place as you’d image. A joyless, armpit of a building full of second hand furniture and neglected people. A dumping ground for life’s unwanted things. Stronge approached the reception area with me by her side, invisible to the naked eye. She flashed her warrant card and told the portly caregiver manning the front desk that she had some information about a child in her care.

  Together, the three of us went to a stuffy, grey back office, where Stronge gave the woman the bad news about Mike (leaving out the stuff about him laying his hands on a dagger and going all Mini Brute). Meanwhile, I worked alongside Stronge, cushioning her directness and injecting the proceedings with some much-needed tact. It was a heartbreaking conversation all the same, and the half box of balled up tissues it provoked left me with no doubt as to the caregiver’s innocence.

  ‘How long ago did you last see Mike?’ Stronge asked, handing the woman another Kleenex on my instruction.

  ‘Yesterday,’ she sniffed. ‘Around lunchtime.’ She explained that she’d asked another of the boys after Mike’s whereabouts that evening and been told he was staying with a friend. We learned later that the kid had been covering for Mike, and not for the first time, though the place he was vanishing to was a mystery.

  I leaned across to Stronge. ‘Ask her what she can tell you about Mike. What kind of a kid was he?’

  Stronge parrotted my words at her.

  ‘He’s—he was—a lovely little boy… especially given all the stuff he went through with his parents. Oh, God, it’s so sad...’

  Stronge just sat there like some cyborg.

  ‘Show her some comfort,’ I said. ‘Put your arm around her. Tell her you’re sorry. Something!’

  Stronge huffed and leaned over to place a hand on hers, just for a second. ‘There there,’ she said, doing her best impression of a human.

  The caregiver smiled weakly through her tears. Once she’d finished sobbing, I gave Stronge her next cue. ‘Does she have any idea where he might have been going?’

  She didn’t. ‘We’re understaffed here and underfunded. The best we can do is give these kids a roof over their heads and a couple of square meals a day. We can’t watch them twenty-four seven.’

  ‘Had Mike been showing any signs of distress?’ Stronge asked, unprompted.

  ‘He was a quiet boy, but yes, he did seem to take a turn a few weeks ago. I asked him about it at the time but he said nothing was wrong.’

  Stronge was about to reply, but I cut her off. ‘Ask her if she knows what he was distressed about.’

  Forgetting herself, Stronge turned and looked me right in the eye. ‘Why don’t you ask her your bloody self!’ she snapped, fed up of being the go-between.

  The caregiver looked at her like she’d lost her mind. ‘Are you okay, Detective?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Stronge coughed, collecting herself. ‘Um. Mike. Do you know why he might have been distressed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman replied, still a little taken aback. ‘They get up to things on the outside. Sometimes they mix with bad elements. It’s hard to say.’

  I was about to offer another prompt but the look on Stronge’s face told me not to bother.

  ‘Are there places he went that you do know about?’ Stronge asked. ‘A favourite hangout maybe?’

  The caregiver thought on it. ‘Some of the boys liked to play at a scrap yard nearby. They weren’t supposed to, but they would anyway. That’s the only place I can think of.’

  She gave Stronge the address.

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ I told Kat, and got a covert nod back from her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she told the caregiver. ‘A couple of my officers will want to interview the rest of your children, but you’ve been very helpful today.’ She put a comforting arm around her, finally. ‘We’re very sorry for your loss.’

  13

  While DCI Stronge checked out the address of the stab victim, I followed up at the scrap yard.

  The lead took me to a patch of abandoned wasteland tucked behind the railway tracks running out of Chalk Farm Station. The area was enclosed by a high brick wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass. The chained side gate had fallen into disrepair though, and featured a hole that was easily large enough for a boy of Mike’s age to crawl through.

  Inside, I found a locked porta cabin nestled among tottering piles of rusting cars. The bank had foreclosed on the yard years ago, so there was no one around to stop me giving the place a recce. I spent a few minutes exploring the area, until eventually I found something out of place. It’s a wonder I saw it among all the junk, but across the far side of the lot I found a looped scrap of leather curled up on the ground. Half of a belt, child-sized. I looked above where it lay and saw something hanging from the bumper of one of the stacked cars. Buckled to it was the other end of the belt.

  ‘Christ,’ I muttered, looking from the noose to the gibbet.

  A voice came from behind me. ‘Who are you?’

  I whirled around to see the ghost of a young boy. He wore a raw ligature mark around his neck and his face was streaked with tears. ‘Mike?’ I asked.

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I’m here to help.’

  ‘He said the same thing,’ Mike replied. ‘The bad man. He said he wanted to help. Said he was my friend, but he was only pretending.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  The boy cast his eyes to the ground.

  ‘That’s okay,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have to answer that. Would you tell me how you got here though?’

  He stayed staring at his shoes.

  ‘My name’s Jake,’ I said. ‘I work with the police. That’s how I know your name.’

  ‘If you’re a policeman, where’s your badge?’

  ‘I don’t have a badge. I’m not a policeman, I’m a private detective.’

  ‘Like Sherlock?’ he asked, suddenly excited. ‘Like on the telly?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. Except I’m not played by Bumblebee Cabbagepatch.’

  He snorted; he was warming to me.

  ‘So, how did you wind up in this place?’ I asked. ‘The bad man you mentioned, did he bring you here?’

  ‘No!’ he replied, forcefully. ‘I… I came here to get away from him. For good.’ His eyes flicked to the belt in my hand. Jesus, he’d done this to himself. What had happened to make him want to do that I wondered, but I knew enough altar boys growing up to hazard a guess.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘And listen, you’re going to be alright, you hear me? No one can hurt you now.’

  ‘That’s because I’m dead, isn’t it? Like you.’

  It’s hard enough explaining the facts of unlife to an adult, let alone to a kid of twelve years old, but I did what I had to do. ‘You’re going to be alright,’ I told him. ‘I’m on the case now.’

  ‘The game is afoot,’ the kid said, quoting his favourite TV show.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, popping the collar of my jacket theatrically. ‘The game is afoot.’

  He smiled. ‘And the man in the hood, is he your Watson?’

  I felt my blood run cold. ‘You saw a man in a hood?’ Apparently the vampires had been telling the truth about their mystery caller.

  ‘He came here after I…’ again, Mike looked to the scrap of belt.

  ‘Was he a black man?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And he’s the bad man you mentioned?’

  ‘No, he’s my friend!’

  That definitely came out of nowhere. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He said he’d make the bad man go away. Forever.’

  He explained how the man in the hood had visited him after he’d put his head in the noose. How he’d come by and talked with him, saying he was sorry for the things he’s been through and that he was going to make things right. ‘After that there was only one of me,’ Mike added.

  I was puzzled at first, until we talked some more and I real
ised that he was talking about his body. The man in the hood had taken his corpse, just like he had Fergal’s, leaving only his ghost behind. ‘So, how did, um, the other one of you go?’

  ‘All by himself,’ he replied. ‘The man in the hood put him on the ground, then he whispered something in his ear and off he went.’ He mimed a soldier’s march.

  So, the Hooded Man was a necromancer. Someone with the power to re-animate the dead and make them perform his will. Who was he though? Who was this murderous puppet master, weaponising corpses? And what was his game? Why was he doing this? Had the mob contracted him to tie up some loose ends? Taken him on as their necromantic button man? And if they had, could I expect to see more walking corpses knocking people off on my patch? Both hits had been a success after all; what if this was just the start of something bigger?

  I had to move quickly before the Hooded Man struck again, even if that meant leaving a little boy to fend for himself in an abandoned breaker’s yard.

  ‘Can you be brave for me, Mike?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he sighed, sensing what was coming.

  I told him he had to stay here, at least for a little while. ‘It won’t be for long,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘And after that?’

  I smiled. ‘After that you can go see your mum and dad again.’

  Stronge called to tell me to meet her at the stab victim’s address. She said to bring a friend, which was code for, “Wear the meat suit.”

  ‘I’m not doing that Cyrano shit again,’ she told me. ‘Besides, I prefer your friend’s face to your ugly mug.’

  That hurt, I won’t lie. Still, I did as she asked and commandeered Mark for the job. I felt kind of bad about getting so much use out of the guy, but what was he really missing out on other than banging gullible women and running up huge champagne bills with his douchebag banker chums?

  I arrived at the address and presented my ID to the constables manning the front gate. A female P.C. took my driver’s licence and checked it against an access list to make sure I had business being there. The list would classify that I was joining the team as a “psychic consultant.” There was a reason for that. Before she gained The Sight, Stronge would summon me to a murder scene for the purpose of conferring with the victim’s ghost and discovering who their killer was. Given the inevitable presence of other law officers, the “psychic” tag handily explained away my wild leaps of logic as clairvoyance, whilst simultaneously doing away with the need for any pesky “credentials.” It didn’t exactly make me the most popular kid in class though.

  The P.C. saw my name on the licence and rolled her eyes back so far it’s a wonder she didn’t get a look at her own brain. ‘That way,’ she said, thumbing the door.

  I thanked her for her hospitality and stepped inside the house.

  The smell was the first thing that hit me. The smell of animal faeces, black mould and sour milk. Then there was the state of the place. All that was left of the hallway was a thin crease of floor between two great walls of junk: cardboard boxes wrapped in parcel tape, tin cans half-filled with congealed paint, and seesawing piles of dusty old novels. Whoever the guy was that lived here, he was the Smaug of hoarding useless old shit.

  I turned Mark’s body sideways and shuffled along the corridor to the lounge, where I found Stronge among a cluster of forensics officers. Surrounding them was yet more junk: Tupperware containers of old McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, a giant, novelty whiskey bottle filled with loose change, a nativity set from who knows how many Christmases ago, and an arrangement of creepy porcelain dolls judging us silently from their seat on the sofa.

  ‘It’s going to take years to sort through this stuff,’ Stronge muttered.

  Something hairy scuttled by my leg and I yelped as I left the floor by an inch or two. When I looked up again I saw the eyes of the forensics officers boring into me over the tops of their breathing masks.

  ‘I don’t think they like me,’ I whispered.

  ‘Of course they don’t,’ Stronge replied. ‘They’re men of science. You piss in the eye of that.’

  Fair enough.

  I changed the subject. ‘So, what are we thinking? I asked. ‘We thinking this guy was mobbed up too?’

  Stronge was mid-shrug when a female forensics officer appeared in the doorway. ‘We’ve found something, Detective. You’d better come take a look.’

  Following her, we picked our way up a flight of shoe-covered stairs to the landing, past a mountain of old machine parts and into a bedroom that was in even more need of downsizing than the rest of the house. It looked like a jumble sale that had fallen victim to a hurricane.

  ‘There,’ said the officer, pointing to a computer sat on a desk piled high with old drink cans and plates used as makeshift ashtrays. The machine was switched on, and displayed on the screen above its cigarette-scarred keyboard, an indecent image of a child. ‘There’s a trove of it on there,’ she added, sickened.

  I turned away from the screen. I couldn’t look at it.

  Kat had a stronger stomach. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess that explains what the vic was doing hanging around at a kiddie’s playground.’ She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and went snooping through the computer’s hard drive. After a couple of minutes of investigation, she tapped the screen and turned to me. ‘Yep, it’s what I thought.’

  She showed me a file marked “Cherub Club.”

  ‘A colleague working for the Child Protection Unit told me about this,’ she said. ‘He’s spent the last six months chasing this dirty mac brigade as part of a special crime squad called Operation Paladin. The club had a dozen members at least, trading pictures of minors like hard cash. His squad rounded them up and and booked them with conspiracy to distribute. All but one anyway.’

  The man in the hood had dealt out a little vigilante justice it seemed. But why bring little Mike into this?

  ‘Jesus,’ said Stronge, pulling away from the computer.

  She’d found another image. An image of Mike, unclothed, posed like no child should ever be posed. The background of the photo was a match for the lounge, complete with creepy porcelain dolls.

  ‘Turn it off,’ I said.

  I hated this case. Hated it. This isn’t what I became a P.I. for. I got into this game for the Sam Spade stuff. Stalking the mean streets, swigging scotch from the bottom drawer, late night calls from double-crossing dames with long gams. Not… this. Not porn rings and child molesters and dead kids. I’d take real demons over this any time. That's the kind of evil I want to be dealing with. The old-fashioned, biblical kind. An evil that parades around with horns on its head, stinking of brimstone, belching fire. Human monsters are so much worse. Human monsters don’t wear horns, they hide beneath the surface, silent and unseen, like snakes slithering under leaves.

  ‘Turn it off!’ I shouted.

  Finally, Stronge pulled the plug.

  I bet Stella Familiar never had to go through stuff like this. Trawling through a paedo’s sex dungeon and looking at pictures of naked children. No, I bet she was out there tossing fireballs at some interdimensional ne'er-do-well, having the time of her life.

  I put Stella out of my mind and returned to the job at hand. ‘They were connected,’ I said. ‘Mike and this piece of shit knew each other.’

  This had nothing to do with a mob hit. The kid and the paedophile had a past that didn’t involve gangsters at all. So, the whole mobster angle, was it just a red herring? Had the ex-Bratva on the Heath had his skull caved in for reasons other than his former gang affiliations? Was he connected to Fergal somehow, the overdosed runaway? Connected in a personal way? It didn’t seem possible, and yet I couldn’t rule it out until I’d done some digging.

  I went back to Fergal with a photo in my hand.

  ‘Do you recognise this man?’ I asked, pulling him into a side street and showing him the Russian’s picture.

  He gulped. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was just
after I arrived in London.’ He took a breath. ‘I was out one night. At a bar on Old Compton Street. There was this toilet stall with a hole in it and… well, you know…?

  Yeah, I knew, and it had nothing to do with playing the piccolo.

  I’d suspected Fergal might be gay. The witness I spoke to in the underground shanty town told me he’d never tried anything on with her, and I had a feeling there was more to that than him just being a gentleman. ‘Carry on,’ I said.

  ‘Okay. Well, I put it through the hole and he grabbed it. Hard. Too hard. Then he started... cutting.’

  Christ. ‘He had a knife?’

  ‘Yeah. I managed to get away though... but not before he... did some damage.’

  I remembered Fergal’s mutilated body on the mortuary slab and winced.

  ‘I wasn’t able to go after him,’ he said, ‘but I got a look at his face as he was legging it.’ He stabbed the photo with his index finger. ‘That’s him.’ Tears sprang up in Fergal’s eyes. ‘It all went wrong after that; I got on the scag, I lost my flat…’ he trailed off.

  So, I was right. Fergal and the Russian were connected after all, and not in a friendly way. And just like little Mike, Fergal had been given a chance at revenge from beyond the grave. His mutilator had been out on Hampstead Heath that night, up to his old tricks no doubt, and got more than he bargained for. The mobster angle had been a red herring after all. The connection between Fergal and the Russian had nothing to do with gang crime; it was a hate crime that joined their fates.

  So, a kiddie-fiddler stabbed in the back by a child he’d taken advantage of, and a gay-basher brained to death by a former victim. The corpses of the brutalised, reanimated and used to exact revenge. The Hooded Man was dishing out something more than justice. This was ironic justice. This was killing by design.