‘Most certainly. Hold out your hands.’ Bryant did as he was told, and Alma started winding some kind of hairy blue wool around them. ‘And it happens to the most vulnerable people of all: the young. Think of those young girls and boys entrusted into the care of priests who then abuse them. You can get rid of the physical effects, but it’s harder to heal the mind.’
‘It’s not just the young, Alma. Suppose someone wanted to make me believe I was about to die – do you think I could die because of it?’
‘What, you mean take your own life?’
‘In a way. Allow myself to be damaged.’
‘It’s possible.’ Alma unspooled the wool with practised ease. ‘If you’re feeling vulnerable. Is that how you feel at the moment?’
‘I’m not going to say yes, because then you’re going to tell me to come to church with you. I just feel – susceptible.’
‘You have to find more strength of will than the person who’s doing it to you,’ she said, watching her knots.
‘As ever the voice of reason,’ Bryant marvelled. ‘What if I’m not feeling strong?’
‘Then you need to talk to someone who’ll make you stronger.’
‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Bryant asked himself. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘You’d have to darn your own jumpers, for a start.’
‘Get this stuff off me.’ Bryant shook himself free from half a mile of unpicked angora and attempted to get out of the armchair. ‘I have to make a phone call.’
‘But I wanted to get this back in one piece tonight,’ Alma complained.
‘Perhaps you should give it back to the rabbit.’ Climbing to his feet, he searched around for his hat and coat, forgetting that he was still in his slippers. ‘Leave my dinner in the oven,’ he instructed, ‘and don’t wait up.’
32
THE UNHAUNTING
The Ladykillers Café was an amusing post-modern recreation of a 1950s English tearoom, with the added horror of the new century’s prices. Tea was served in witty pots, and the fairy cakes came with inverted commas around them. It had been started as an ironic pop-up but had settled down to become a neighbourhood institution, springing fresh-minted from the wreckage of the old, nicotine-stained King’s Cross. And it provided a pleasant respite from the surrounding bellicose pubs, especially as North London’s resident Grade II white witch rarely touched alcohol. ‘It dims my psychic abilities,’ she explained. ‘And it gets me plastered.’
Maggie Armitage favoured the colours of spring and tended to wear them all together at once, so that she looked like an upended flowerbed draped in costume jewellery. It was a look few women outside the witchcraft world could pull off. While queuing to pay for the teas she broke a necklace of gold beads, scattering them across the floor and down the stairs, which woke up a couple of the sleepier patrons and caught one unsteady old dear completely by surprise.
‘I can’t tell John about this, Maggie, he’ll think I’ve lost the plot even more than usual,’ said Bryant, ignoring the crash of china and examining the pastries. ‘Death is stalking me. I can hear his dry bones clicking in my shadow. I can feel him brushing against my heart.’
‘Are you sure your jumper’s not too tight?’
‘No, this is the pale horseman himself, charging up behind me with dirty great hooves.’
‘I can see the problem,’ Maggie agreed, peering up at the cake counter. ‘You’re haunted. I don’t mean by supernatural forces – it’s more of an infection in your soul. We simply have to unhaunt you. Do they have Battenberg?’
‘Over there, by the macaroons. How do you intend to do that?’
‘What, eat marzipan?’
‘No, unhaunt me. Is there a standard procedure?’
She thought for a moment. ‘We need to start in a place that has special resonance for you.’ They found a 1940s drop-leaf table and seated themselves.
‘We could go to the Nun & Broken Compass,’ Bryant decided. ‘I do some of my best thinking over a pint of Bishop’s Wellington.’
Maggie leaned forward on patched purple elbows. ‘I meant somewhere you’ve left your spiritual imprint. You haven’t been in your new flat for long enough to imbue it with psychic resonance.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. I’ve already blocked my bathroom sink. I was shaving the bobbly bits off my scarf.’
‘Be serious for a moment. You have been polluted with bad karma. Your mind can make you sick, Arthur. If you’re easily susceptible – and you are – you won’t just die from cancer, say, but from believing that you’re dying of cancer. You turn your cells against themselves. If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying.’
Bryant took a sip of his tea and grimaced at its weakness. ‘If this is about curing yourself with positive energy, you’ve got the wrong mug.’
‘Listen to me. I took part in a clinical trial in which around a quarter of patients in control groups – those given supposedly inert therapies – experienced powerful negative side effects. The severity of those side effects matched those associated with real drugs. Human suggestion is a powerful weapon, Arthur. Our lot suffered from something called “anticipatory nausea” because they were told they would. Around sixty per cent of patients undergoing chemotherapy start feeling sick before their treatment because they’ve been warned that’s what will happen.’
He pointed a finger at her. ‘It was you who told me to be careful of Mr Merry in the first place. You set me up to be wary of him.’
‘I know, and I blame myself for that. Whether he genuinely possesses powers or just uses various auto-suggestive techniques, I believe he can do real harm. I should never have told you so much about him. Clearly, he managed to get to you. What is it he made you fear the most?’
Bryant thought back. ‘He knew about something that happened when I was a child, something I never told anyone. I was locked inside a corrugated-iron air-raid shelter. I thought I was going to die.’
‘Narrow houses,’ said Maggie, nodding knowingly. ‘That’s what they used to call coffins. I presume he met you at the museum.’
‘Yes, in the restoration room for the undisplayed items.’
‘At the back of the ground floor? But don’t you see? It’s a coffin-shaped room! And I bet he was surrounded by crates.’
‘Yes, great oblong ones large enough to put a man in. The World War Two exhibition was playing next door. I could hear the fall of bombs and – and bricks collapsing. He offered me a cigarette from his case, which I thought was odd because there’s no smoking anywhere in the building.’
‘The crates, the cigarette case,’ she said, ‘more coffins. He’s done his research on you. Arthur, you understand how magicians use the power of suggestion and you still didn’t see what he was doing? Parlour tricks, that’s all they are, although in the right hands they can work astoundingly well. We have to counteract this. Where do you spend the most time?’
‘At the unit.’
‘Then we’ll go there and get you comfortable. I’ll put you into a light hypnotic state, make you a bit more predisposed to my treatment. It’s all right, I’m qualified. I took Magic and Psychology at Keeble College.’
‘I didn’t know you went to Oxford.’
‘No, this was Keeble Technical College in the Shetland Islands, but it still counts. I also came back with a degree in woodwork.’
They demolished the last of the cake and headed for the PCU.
‘We mustn’t tell Raymond you’re in the building,’ said Bryant. ‘He’ll have kittens. Actually, that’s an unfortunate phrase.’ He halted on the landing as several mewling black balls of fur trotted past. ‘Where are we going to do this? We can’t use my office, someone will find us.’
‘Even at this hour?’ asked Maggie.
‘There’s usually someone here until midnight when we have a case on.’
‘What about the attic?’ She looked up the darkened stairwell. �
�Isn’t that full of the stuff you couldn’t move into your new flat?’
‘I had nowhere else to store my automata, my bar billiards table or any of my Tibetan prayer wheels.’
‘Perfect,’ said Maggie, leading the way. ‘I’ve got everything I need in my carpet bag.’
‘We haven’t wired any lights up there yet,’ said Bryant, taking the stairs. ‘We’re not going to hold a séance, are we?’
‘No, I went off those after Daphne sent my mother’s Wedgwood out of the window during a table-tapping session. She doesn’t know her own strength.’
Armed with torches, they entered the attic and cleared an area next to Madame Blavatsky, her waxen features looming out of her glass case like a turbaned housewife. There were several other display cabinets, a group of dandified hedgehogs arranged in a cotillion, some coconut penis sheaths from the Watabili tribe and a stuffed weasel in a little bowler hat. ‘I’ve been meaning to throw those out,’ said Bryant, eyeing them from a safe distance.
‘We have to block the entrance to the room,’ Maggie explained. ‘So that nothing bad gets in. Or gets out.’ The pair shifted an old Welsh dresser over the floorboards until it stood across the attic entrance. Bryant was wiping his dusty hands on his waistcoat when he caught a strange look in the white witch’s eyes. She nodded silently at the wall.
In the space behind where the dresser had stood was revealed a large crimson heart, its flesh pierced by five silver arrows. Droplets of painted blood fell from the blades to the floor. Their torch-beams revealed other gore-drenched hearts and arrows painted all around the attic.
‘The Bleeding Heart,’ said Bryant, awed. ‘He’s been here. He’s marked his territory.’ He dabbed his forefinger at the wall and licked it. ‘Poster paint.’
‘It’s a way of making sure you do his bidding,’ said Maggie.
‘How would he know I’d come up here and see them?’
‘Oh, Arthur, everyone knows you come up here. There’s no time to lose.’ She withdrew a set of coloured chalks and began scratching a design on the floor that eventually resembled the sea-monster drawings from old marine maps.
‘Right, make yourself comfy.’ She found him a small folding stool and sat herself on a sparkly Moroccan cushion. ‘What we’re going to do tonight is very serious,’ she explained. ‘I have to make you confront the spectre of your own death. I’m not going to pretend it won’t be traumatic.’
‘So is this psychology or witchcraft?’
‘A bit of both, I hope.’
They began breathing exercises, then visualization techniques. Over the next two hours Maggie took her old friend back to that day on the bomb-site and reordered the event until it resulted in a different outcome. She used every mind trick in the book: neuro-linguistic programming, targeted rapport, unconscious communication, meditation, cold-reading, psychic transference and confirmation bias, with a hefty dose of auto-suggestion. She also tried regressive hypnosis to try and find out what he had done with her deep-fat fryer, which he had borrowed and never returned.
The experience was emotionally draining, and by the time it was over Maggie had turned quite pale and was experiencing the familiar gnaw of stomach cramps. She brought Bryant out of his trance, then rose unsteadily to her feet and crunched down two Nurofens.
‘People don’t understand what it takes out of you to do this,’ she said. ‘You probably won’t sleep tonight. Well, the proof’s in the pudding. How do you feel? Try to recall your childhood fears now.’
Bryant rubbed his face about, as if moulding his features into a new setting. His limbs felt curiously light, as if he was ready to run off down the road. ‘Do you know, I can still remember the whole thing,’ he said, ‘but why was I ever afraid? Nothing happened. I survived.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘I came out of that iron coffin and was taken home by the policeman. Home – that’s where the real troubles were for me.’
‘And what do you feel when you look down into that hole in the earth and think about the terrors of the night grave?’
Bryant closed his eyes, then snapped them open. ‘Nothing. Either a man is dead or he’s not. Premature burial is just a bogeyman used to frighten children.’
She permitted herself a smile of triumph. ‘Then I think you can consider yourself unhaunted.’
‘Maggie, you’re a genius. I don’t know why you didn’t do this for me years ago.’
‘Because you never told me about your past.’
‘There are things I don’t tell anyone, not even John. I feel sorry for those born into the information generation; they’ll never have any real privacy unless they choose to disappear completely. Me, I’ve half disappeared already. What a relief. But you should sit down, you look terrible.’
Maggie gave an uncertain smile. ‘No, Arthur, I’ll stay on my feet. If I sit, I’ll sleep for at least six hours.’
‘Is there anything I can I do for you?’
‘No, I’ll be all right once I get home.’
‘At least let me pay for a taxi.’
‘Darling, I’ve never taken a penny for my services. Although I do sometimes allow clients to provide hot tea and chocolate digestives.’
‘Then that’s what you shall have. And tomorrow, I’m going to take that charlatan Merry to pieces.’
‘You’ll have to be very careful,’ Maggie warned as they negotiated the narrow staircase down. ‘He’s still dangerous. I think that list of rules I gave you still holds, in spite of what you’ve told me. Mr Merry is a cold-reader. He can convince total strangers that he knows all about them. You mentioned apotropaic magic. I assume from this that Mr Merry thinks he’s creating some kind of occult master plan. He believes the raven’s wing can cast the shadow of death across the land. Whether it’s real or imagined, he’s still trying to bring about the fall of England, but from what you’ve told me about the new set-up you’ll need concrete proof to arrest him, and that’s rather hard to come by in our game. People have been searching for the truth for hundreds of years.’
‘I’ll find it,’ said Bryant. ‘But he can wait. The priority now is to find out if Romain Curtis was deliberately killed, and who shot Stephen Emes.’
‘So the cases are linked?’
‘Certainly. At some point they brushed against each other. One thinks of London as too vast for such connections, but it’s not, of course. Overlaid on the tube map are thousands of other maps joining people from every walk of life. At the interchanges are those who inhabit a dozen different worlds. Mr Merry is one such man.’ He grinned. ‘But I think he’s met his match in me.’
33
INFILTRATION
Early on Monday morning both investigations were restarted in earnest, but first Bryant wanted to find out how the Bleeding Heart had been painted in the PCU’s attic, and he had a pretty good idea.
‘I told you, I don’t bloody know what happened to him,’ said Dave, the remaining builder. Like most Turks Bryant had met, he seemed to get much better value out of the word ‘bloody’ than the English, flattening it into a properly foul cuss word.
‘Well, what happened to the other Dave?’ asked May.
‘He put his back out lifting some tellies off a lorry in Southend – nothing illegal – so the agency sent a replacement.’
‘And you can’t even remember his name?’
‘No, I don’t remember names without vowels, so I just called him Dave. He was going to sort out the electrics. He made some diagrams, then carried out some work. He was only here for the morning. Went for lunch; I didn’t see him again after that. The towel rail in the second-floor toilet is still live.’
‘What kind of work did he carry out?’
‘How would I know? He didn’t fix the electrics, but he was a bloody good artist. Showed me this painting he’d done and said he was going to make it into a mural. He signed off on it.’ The remaining Dave stabbed a hairy finger at a startled Raymond Land.
‘Some scruffy Herbert thrust a piece of paper in front of me,’ La
nd complained. ‘I sign things all the time.’
‘So you let a stranger walk in here and – God, what else did he do?’ asked May. Armed with the map Bryant had taken from Emes’s flat, the detectives headed for the second-floor staircase, closely followed by a contrite, hand-wringing Land.
They began their search in the bathroom with the live towel rail. Bryant couldn’t resist testing it – the way one does when a waiter tells you not to touch a hot plate – and got a few volts up his fillings. May tapped the wall. ‘This plaster’s fresh. Hang on a minute.’ He lifted a dreadful, dust-caked reproduction of Fragonard’s Les Hasards heureux de l’escarpolette from the wall and peered under it. At the centre was a tiny black dot.
‘I think we’ve been infiltrated,’ said May.
Land squinted at the device. ‘What is it, a camera?’
‘Of course not, you clothhead,’ said Bryant. ‘If it was a camera all it would see is the back of the picture. It’s a microphone.’
‘Why stick it in the bathroom?’
‘Because when the door’s open you can hear anything that’s being said in the corridor,’ said May. ‘And the door won’t shut properly. There are bound to be others.’
They split up and started examining the building room by room. Longbright found one under her desk. Bryant found one on his bookcase. Land found one glued to the back of the framed photo of his soon-to-be-ex wife. ‘She’s still betraying me even though she’s gone,’ he said miserably. ‘I’m lost. I don’t understand what’s going on at all. Why would this—’
‘Ne-cro-man-cer,’ said Bryant helpfully, breaking the word into easy syllables.
‘Why does he want to listen in on us?’
‘Because he knows we’re investigating him?’ May suggested.
‘Can we trace these things back to him and nail him that way?’
‘We can pinpoint their manufacture but not who they’re transmitting to,’ May replied. ‘Did you find anything that looked like a listening device in Emes’s flat?’
‘Nothing that I saw,’ said Bryant, ‘but I’ll check with Dan.’
Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart Page 23