A Spookies Compendium

by David Robinson

  “Riot act,” Pete said. “I am sick of the way you people constantly try to walk away from business. Earlier today, some dipstick tried to top me, and someone else had a go at my partner.”

  “It wasn’t us,” Haz snapped.

  “If I thought it was you, any of you, you’d be in bits and pieces right now.”

  “Brennan …”

  “Shut it, Briscoe. I’m talking now, and you’re listening. If any of you interrupt me again I’ll rip your tongues out. I want the answers to some simple questions, and you’re going to give them.” He tossed the Loki badge on Haz’ table. “This thing keeps turning up like Chelsea chasing the Premiership title. Have you seen it before?”

  Haz picked it up, studied it, shook her head and passed it to Briscoe. He studied it with wide, interested eyes, and denied having seen it. Before she took it from him, Nag said, “I have. Gus used to wear one.”

  “The religions thing he was into. The Venerable Disciples of Loki,” Pete said. “That is their insignia.”

  “So what?” demanded Haz. “We don’t discriminate.”

  “I know you don’t, and I don’t care what god he prayed to. I want to know what you know about it.” He concentrated his stare on Nag.

  “Not much,” she admitted. “It was something to do with some Swedish god. I told you, he used to attend meetings. He said everyone needed a spiritual side, and that was his.”

  “What do you know about him before he came to England?” Pete asked.

  “Very little,” Haz replied. “He came over here when he was in his early twenties. He never talked about his homeland, other than to say he couldn’t go back there. He had some kinda personal trouble. We never found out what.”

  “This is important,” Pete said. “Did he say he couldn’t go back or he wouldn’t?”

  Nag shrugged. “Couldn’t, wouldn’t, what bloody difference does it make?”

  “A lot. If he couldn’t go back it might be for any number of reasons, but the most likely is the police were looking for him and it’s ten to one it was for terrorism charges. And on that score, I’d say his real name wasn’t Gus Nordqvist.”

  They could not have been more shocked if he had said that Nordqvist was the anti-Christ.

  “Terrorism? Are you out of your mind?”

  “No. I’m in my right mind for once.” He rounded on Briscoe. “Didn’t you run a check on this guy?”

  Briscoe nodded. “I asked around. They said there was no arrest warrant on him as far as they were aware. It did occur to me that he was using a handle, but I’m like you, a private individual. There’s only so far I can go. Nag loved him, so I left it at that.”

  Pete fumed. “A few hours ago, some joker, a member of this same sect, tried to put me through a car crusher.” Pete took the badge back and slipped it in his pocket. “I don’t know what his game was, but I think you, Nag, switched him off it. You gave him something the sect couldn’t. Love. You may be a selfish bitch, but you made him see the light. And they killed him for it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Andrea chewed her lip. “You were right. His real name was Gus Andersen, and he wasn’t Swedish, he was Danish. We got a DNA match.”

  Tucked into a discreet corner of the Bath Hotel, surprisingly empty for the Thursday before Christmas, Pete sipped at a glass of lager. “Wanted over there on terrorism charges?”

  She nodded. “He had a lot of form from his student days, mostly for political unrest. Inciting violence on demonstrations, civil disorder. You know the script.”

  “I do, but that’s not terrorism.”

  Andrea turned her glass round and round through her fingers. “A year before he showed up in this country, he threw a petrol bomb through the local Venstre party headquarters in Silkeborg, Jutland. The Venstre are the largest party in the Danish Parliament, a sort of liberal, right of centre group. Nordqvist, Andersen, call him what you will, was pissed at them for their drift away from traditional Danish values. He skipped the country, maybe to Sweden, Poland, or somewhere where he could get hold of forged papers. The next thing we know, he showed up here as Gus Nordqvist and latched onto Nag Lane.”

  “So Briscoe was right,” Pete said. “Without getting deeper into police departments, which he couldn’t do, there was no way he’d get a track on Nordqvist.”

  “Correct,” agreed Andrea. “There was one other interesting thing to come out of the DNA though.”

  “Go on.”

  She took a sip of vodka. “The Danish police are still working on it, but they’re tracing a family line and they figure his biological father was also wanted in Denmark for murder. But that was back in the seventies.”

  “Great. So we’ve found the son but not the father.”

  “Oh but we have.” Andrea pressed on in the light of Pete’s enhanced interest. “If the Danes have it right, his biological father was Michael Andersen, and he was the loopy headmaster of the Ashdalean before Norman Trent.”

  Pete was in the process of raising his glass to his lips, but paused. He put the glass back on the table. “Tell me more.”

  “Nordqvist was born in the late seventies. His mother, Sonje, insisted that he was the result of a one-night stand with some guy she met in a bar. Afterwards, she took the man’s name, Andersen. If Michael Andersen really was his father, if she really did have a fling with him, it all hangs together because we know that Andersen never married. Hence, no trace of a son over here. When the boy was three months old, there was a fight in that same bar, and Sonje’s boyfriend, Lars Magnusson, was killed. Sonje insisted Michael Andersen threw the fatal punch, but if it was, he’d already gone. Skipped the country. Our department dragged Andersen in for questioning a few days later and he swore that he was here, in Ashdale, at the time. Sonje Andersen said she could prove it and showed the Danes a badge Michael Andersen had left behind for his young son. From the Danish police’s description, it sounds like the same badge we found pinned to Danny Corcoran’s jacket the other night. Andersen insisted he had never seen it before.”

  “There must have been dabs on it,” Pete said.

  “Too many people had handled the badge, including the boy who had obviously used it as a teething ring. Eventually, our boys sent the badge back to Denmark. An immigration check revealed at Andersen had flown from Manchester to Copenhagen, but when he was confronted with that, he insisted that his passport must have been stolen, and a search of the headmaster’s lodge at the Ashdalean didn’t turn it up. He said he hadn’t used it for a year or more. And he had a sound alibi for his movements at the time of the murder. Norman Trent.”

  Pete’s eyebrows rose again. “You think Trent could have lied?”

  “A passport is easy to lose, Pete, especially if you don’t want it found, and Trent and Andersen were good friends.”

  Pete frowned. “That’s not what Sceptre says. And it’s not what Trent told Sceptre.”

  “Then Sceptre has it wrong,” Andrea insisted. “Throughout the last year of his life, Trent visited Andersen regularly at the Long Bank hospice, and later at Watersend.”

  Finishing his lager, Pete said, “I can’t see where all this is going, although it does give us a connection between the Ashdalean and Nordqvist. But why did he come to this country? I mean it’s not particularly favourable to terrorists and if I was on the run after planting a bomb, I’d choose somewhere well out of Europe.”

  Andrea shrugged. “I think he came to see his father? He was on the lam, remember, and if Sonje’s tale is true, then Michael Andersen had been on the run for years.” Andrea, too, finished her drink. “It’s all academic now, isn’t it? What matters now is finding Nordqvist’s killer.”

  “I think you’ve already found him,” Pete said. “Danny Corcoran.”

  “And I’ll go with that,” Andrea agreed, “but as you’ve already pointed out, when did Danny Corcoran do anything without being told to do it? When did Danny Corcoran do anything for a reason other than money? Someone put Danny up to it, Pe
te, and who had most to gain by getting rid of Nordqvist?” Andrea hastened to answer her own question. “Sonny Briscoe. That’s who. He was worried about the relationship between Nordqvist and Nag.”

  Pete shook his head. “There is another angle and it’s linked to the badge. Some kind of religious sect called the Venerable Disciples of Loki. That badge seems to be their insignia, and according to Sceptre, Andersen founded the movement. If he really was Nordqvist’s father, then Andersen may have left the badge behind as an open invitation to Nordqvist to come to England and join the VDL.”

  “And how does that link to his killing?” Andrea asked.

  He stood up. “I haven’t the foggiest, but I’ll keep my ear to the ground. In the meantime, I’d better get moving. Sceptre wants to borrow the car, and we’re running out of transport.”

  “Kev’s van off the road?”

  He gave her a wan smile. “It, er, had an accident.”

  *****

  Putting the car in gear, grinning savagely to himself, Green pulled away from the kerb and dropped in behind Sceptre.

  “Not here, Ginger,” he muttered to himself.

  The middle of a council estate was not the place to run her off the road. The streets were not wide enough and anyway there were too many nosy parkers behind the vertical blinds. You never knew who might be watching.

  She was driving Brennan’s car and it was a pity that Brennan wasn’t in it. Brennan had killed Danny. He had to pay for that. Frank Anders was another. All right, so the High Master had killed Frank, but it was Brennan’s fault. In fact, as Green’s slow mind pondered the prospect, there were a lot of things he would like to make Brennan pay for.

  “Filth.” Green wound down the window and spat out at the night, summing up his opinion of the police, Brennan, anyone who stood in the way.

  At the end of the Cranley Ring Road, Sceptre stopped, waited for a gap in the thin evening traffic and turned right. Green was right behind her.

  Western Avenue was one of those wide, semi-rural roads. Houses either side, sure, but there were large gaps between some of them, and then there was the open spread of Ashdale Country Park. No prying neighbours hiding behind curtains there. No curtains. No pedestrians, either. Not on a freezing night like this. No witnesses. Green laughed to himself. Another mile. One more mile, one little sideswipe and the bimbo would be another problem dealt with.

  *****

  “Madam.”

  Half a mind on her driving, the other half sifting the information she had come by during the day, Sceptre was startled when Fishwick’s voice materialised. “What is it?” her reply was tetchy; irritable.

  “I believe the car behind is following you, Milady. He was parked on the street outside your apartment for a long time. He only moved when you did, and he’s been close behind you ever since you left home.”

  “These are public roads, Fishwick,” Sceptre reminded him. “He’s perfectly at liberty to use it.”

  “I am simply concerned for your safety, Milady. There have been attempts of the lives of both Mr Keeley and Mr Brennan. I would not like to see one on you.”

  “I am grateful to you, Fishwick,” Sceptre said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes, Madam. Either Vali or Loki is hovering above the car behind.”

  “Oh dear.” Fishwick’s information was at once intriguing and worrying. “If he means harm, is it to us or to the driver behind?”

  “It depends who it is, Milady. If it Vali, I would venture that he is interested in the driver. If it is Loki, I think he may mean harm to you.”

  “Can you do anything to hold him off, Fishwick?”

  “If it’s Vali, I don’t understand why I should want to, Madam.”

  She clucked. “Taking the life of another human being is morally wrong, Fishwick, even if he has helped to take yours. It’s the precise reason we have laws and the police to enforce them. The courts are there to mete out punishment.”

  “Very good, Madam. I shall monitor events.”

  *****

  Green checked his speed. Forty. He was content to sit behind her for the moment.

  Old stone walls bordered the park. The kind of black granite blocks that would not simply collapse when a tin can car hit them. At her speed, it would jerk her head forward onto the wheel, then yank it back and break her pretty neck.

  He checked all his mirrors. One car. Too far behind to have any say in the matter. Across the dual carriageway there were vehicles coming the other way. Green was not concerned with them. By the time they could stop and cross the wide road, Frank’s body would be in the trunk of her car, he would be long gone and they wouldn’t even get his number. By midnight, this car would join the dark Ford and the black Beamer in the crusher at Frank’s yard.

  He kicked the gas and pulled out, accelerating rapidly towards Sceptre.

  Light shone from behind. Damn. That car must have been moving faster than he thought. He checked his wing mirror again. No. The car was still a good half-mile back. So where was the light coming from?

  “Vali.”

  It was not much more than a whisper and it came from over his left shoulder.

  “Vali.”

  Green felt his blood run cold. He’d heard that word before. The night they iced Nordqvist. But who was calling it now?

  “Vali.”

  Green stared through the windscreen and realised he was gaining ground on Brennan’s car. Soon he would be right alongside it. Trying to ignore the ghastly voice, he gripped the wheel tight.

  “Vali.”

  *****

  Fishwick fell into the rear of the car alongside Vali.

  “Now then, me old china, what …”

  With a power Fishwick had never experienced, Vali thrust him back out into the night air. He dropped back in and once more he was ejected.

  “Be like that, then. See if I care.”

  He hovered, watching as the car drew alongside the mistress’s vehicle. Concern for Sceptre uppermost in his mind, he leapt in beside her to steady the wheel of Mr Brennan’s car.

  *****

  “Vali.”

  It was louder now and the light was brighter, illuminating the interior of the car, as if someone had come behind him with headlights blazing. He checked the speedometer. Fifty-five and accelerating. The red lights of Brennan’s car rushed up on the nearside. He jerked the wheel hard left. The car swerved, rattled into Brennan’s but caught it only a glancing blow. Green’s car bounced off, out into the road. He let go the steering wheel. The car righted itself and carried on, its speed rising. Now 60, now 65. Green hit the brakes, but the pedal would not move. He tried to pull on the parking brake, but it was jammed. He snatched at the door release. Locked. He pulled at the interior release. It wouldn’t move.

  “Vali.”

  *****

  Sceptre clung to the wheel. She felt Fishwick’s spirit strength helping her keep the car moving in a straight line. She braked, the other car careened past, clipped her front wing, then righted itself and accelerated away.

  “Thank you, Fishwick, but I ordered you to stop it happening,” she said.

  “I tried, Milady,” Fishwick replied, “but Vali draws power the likes of which I’ve never seen.”

  “You mean he’s still in the car?” Sceptre demanded.

  “Yes, Madam.”

  “Get after him,” she ordered. “Stop him.”

  “I’m afraid, Madam, it may be too late.”

  Sceptre looked through the windscreen horror-struck at what was about to happen.

  *****

  The light was a blaze in the back seat, the voice a roar in his ear. Up ahead, the dual carriageway forked and on the apex stood the war memorial. The car’s speed hit 70. Green burst into tears crying for his long-dead mother. He snatched off his seat belt and it promptly snapped back on again. He turned his head and stared into the full horror of the light, a ghastly face, its mouth open in supplication, wraithlike hair straggling around once handsome feature
s.

  “VALI!”

  The voice did not come from that terrible mouth. It surrounded and reverberated through the car. Green screamed.

  The cold of the dead surrounded and enveloped him. Spectral hands gripped the wheel, phantom feet floored the accelerator.

  The war memorial hurtled at him. The car did not veer at the fork. Green held up his arms as if they would protect him. He cried out. With the speedometer reading 85, the car smashed into the concrete plinth. The nose was crushed, the windscreen disappeared in a shower of lethal shards, the rear end rushed in to fold the vehicle into a concertina wreck, and inside, Green was mangled, his bones shattered, neck snapped, blood streaking his dead face.

  *****

  Green’s spirit stared around. “Wassat? What? Where am I?”

  “Past worrying, me old mucker,” said Fishwick.

  Green looked down at his crushed body. “You … you mean I’m … I’m a goner?”

  “’Fraid so, chum.”

  Green’s energy form burned red. “Where’s that other … thing … the thing what did this.”

  “VALI.”

  The roar came from behind. Green turned to look and as he did so, the violent spirit hurtled in, smashed into Green and sent him careening through The Light.

  Fishwick tutted. “Are you done yet?”

  The spirit’s colour settled to a flickering amber. “Vali.”

  *****

  “Great. Just bloody great. There’s only the three of us now.”

  “Patience, Alec,” urged the High Master. “Three is enough. Did Ginger supply the uniforms?”

  “Yes. He did, but Master …”

  “Then all we need,” interrupted the High Master, “is to plant the charges. Three of us can do the job. I will handle it. It’s that simple.”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Minton. “These explosive leave traces. If the filth check Ginger’s car, they’ll find those traces, and where will they come then? Ashdale Construction and Ollie Henderson will point them at me.”