She had to get her head back in the game.
Pierce pulled up on the end of the row of police vehicles clogging up the residential street. The address Taylor had given her was an unassuming, narrow terraced house, not much different from the streets of student housing she’d been driving through on her way to meet Doctor Moss. There was barely a front garden, only a scrap of grass beside the steps that led up to the weathered front door. A small square window at ground level revealed the presence of a basement, though concealing blinds blocked any view inside.
Nothing about this place hinted that it might have been the domain of a man who called himself a necromancer—which only made it more likely that Vyner had been for real. Fakes always operated with more flash.
But even if he’d had some true experience in the field, he’d clearly been quite shaken by yesterday’s events. They never should have left him on his own.
And it appeared that he had lived alone. The front door opened directly onto the living room, which had a functional fireplace and alcoves full of bookshelves. The shoe rack inside the door held only men’s shoes, all the same size at a casual glance. There might be a girlfriend—or boyfriend—but probably not a live-in one, and there was nothing in the slightly cluttered but relatively tidy living room to suggest the presence of children. Thank God.
“Where’s the body?” she asked a convenient uniform.
“Bathroom. Photographer’s up there now.”
Meaning she, as an extraneous RCU officer, would only be in the way. Vyner might have been called in on their case, but suicides weren’t their department unless there was a magical component to the death.
Even so, as she stepped through into the dining room beyond, she saw Dawson loitering by the staircase up to the first floor, with a restlessness that suggested he was either itching to take action or wishing for a cigarette. Probably both.
“Pierce.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased to see her. “They didn’t need to call you in on this. I can handle things here.”
“I prefer to be kept informed.” She pressed her lips together. “And clearly we should all have been paying this more attention. Why didn’t anybody take note of Vyner’s emotional state before they let him go off home alone?”
Dawson’s doughy face remained unmoved. “The man was a professional necromancer. We had no reason to think that he was going to top himself,” he said.
“There’s no such thing as a professional necromancer. I’ve been doing this job thirty years and it’s still a rare day when we come across something I’ve seen before. He wasn’t prepared.”
“And we can’t be prepared for every consultant’s emotional issues,” he said stubbornly. “There’s no predicting who’s going to turn out to be unstable.”
“Nonetheless,” Pierce said pointedly, “it’s our job to minimise any potential risks—”
She was interrupted by the footsteps of a young constable, descending the stairs with unusual haste. He looked around in search of his own superiors, but Dawson stepped up in their place. “What’s going on?”
Pierce doubted the PC had any clue who they were or why they were here, but he was still young and impressionable enough to assume any authoritative figure in a suit was probably important. More fool him.
“Pathologist’s just had a look at the body, sir,” he said. “He reckons the wounds are inconsistent with a suicide—looks like this bloke was murdered.”
UNFORTUNATELY, IT SEEMED the switch from suicide to a homicide investigation also bumped the RCU’s status from vaguely unwanted observers to turf invaders who had no business sniffing round an ordinary murder.
“Look, if it turns out a wizard did it, then we’ll call you,” said the local DI in charge, who’d miraculously turned up from wherever he’d buggered off to when his officers were dealing with what looked like suicide. “But it doesn’t take bloody magic to slit a bloke’s wrists and chuck him in the bathtub. Believe it or not, those of us without fancy specialisms do actually know how to investigate a murder.”
“This man was an RCU consultant,” Pierce reiterated, with a firm patience that was getting her exactly nowhere. “He was involved in a supernatural incident yesterday. It’s very likely his death is connected to our case.”
“Then our investigation will get to that in due time,” he said, with the kind of calculatedly obnoxious reasonability that could be deployed on members of the public without giving them grounds for a complaint. “We’ll have some people interview your people—take some statements, yes? But let’s not go getting things arse-backwards. We process the evidence here. Look into the nearest and dearest. Procedure,” he emphasized, and shook his head. “The problem with your lot is they always want to start with the most complicated explanation first. One funny-looking shape in the blood splatter and suddenly you’ve got magical sigils coming out your arse.”
It was clear she wasn’t going to win them any concessions here. Dawson’s backup probably wouldn’t have helped—would almost certainly have made things worse, if his performance yesterday had been any indication—but it still vaguely irked her that he’d apparently wandered off while she was arguing their case. Looked like his burning itch to take charge took a convenient hike when it came to the more tedious, thankless tasks.
She drew a breath, aware that unleashing a temper that wasn’t even wholly this idiot’s fault could only compromise their standing further. No need to trade wilful lack of cooperation for outright hostility.
“Fine,” she said, and hoped she’d succeeded in keeping at least some of the terseness out of her tone. “We’ll leave this one in your hands. Just keep us updated.” Not that they bloody would without repeated nudges to ‘remind’ them. She looked around again for Dawson, but didn’t spot him. “Let me just see where my colleague’s got to.” At least it would give her a chance to get a quick look around the property before they left.
Of course, the trouble with using her favourite ‘just within the rules’ ruses on her fellow police was that they knew and used them too. “Well, he’s not gone upstairs to look at the body, so there’s no need for you to head up there, is there?” the man said, folding his arms with a smug smile.
Pierce didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response, just moved back through into the dining room and glanced through the adjoining door. It led into the house’s tiny kitchen, and from the window she could see a neglected back garden: bigger than the pitiful scrap of greenery out front, but still not requiring more than a cursory glance.
No sign of Dawson. He hadn’t gone out the front, because she’d have seen him leave. Had he managed to sneak upstairs after all? She might be pleased at that show of initiative if she’d been at all confident he would actually share any information that he found.
Then her eyes fell on the door beneath the stairs, which her brain had automatically filed under ‘cupboard.’ It was standing ajar, and now Pierce remembered the basement window outside; she pulled it open to reveal a flight of wooden steps that ran parallel to the main staircase above. Rather than call down to Dawson, she descended the stairs after him.
The basement room below was relatively large, but made claustrophobic by the lack of any natural light. The one small window was covered by a blackout blind, and the ceiling was too low for hanging lights, several small recessed bulbs doing the job instead. They managed to brightly spotlight patches on the floor and yet still leave the corners thick with shadow.
Dawson was crouched by the remains of a ritual circle on the floor, drawn in neat chalked lines across the concrete. Stubs of candles sat in silver holders at points around it, as if they’d been allowed to burn down. One had been knocked over, spilling pooled wax across the floor; it could have been a fire hazard if there had been anything down here other than the bare concrete to burn.
The chalk circle was made up of multiple concentric rings, each filled with a different set of symbols. Pierce was no expert on ritual geometry, but she’d visited enough scenes
in her time to get a vague feel for the common themes. This design gave the impression of being cobbled together from multiple different sources: the symbols inside the protective rings mixed various runic alphabets with Greek letters, and even nonsense words in pseudo-Latin.
As she studied the Latin letters, her mind nagged insistently that something was wrong with the picture. It still took several moments of staring at the chalked inscription before she twigged: the letters were the right way up on the far side of the circle, upside-down nearest her.
The words had been written by someone on the inside of the circle.
“Vyner was inside the circle,” she said. “Not trying to summon something. Trying to protect himself.” From a danger that they’d left him exposed to.
“Or this ritual could have been his killer’s work,” Dawson countered. “This is a murder, not a suicide. There was no reason to suspect anybody would come after him. We did this by the book.”
“And maybe that’s the problem.” Pierce held his gaze. “RCU work requires more than just following the letter of the rules. The rules haven’t caught up to what we do.” It was pretty hard to codify a set of police procedures for a job that rarely meant facing the same thing twice.
“Can’t predict everything,” Dawson said, unrepentant. “I know your last big case went tits up, but there’s no taking the risks out of the job. Can’t take this kind of shit too personally.”
She might have said something undiplomatic at that point, but a creak of the floorboards up above reminded her that they’d already technically been kicked off the crime scene. Having a loud argument wasn’t likely to encourage the locals to tolerate them lingering. Instead, she jerked her head towards the stairs. “Ask them if they’re willing to let our people in to process the secondary scene down here,” she said. “If not, make sure they agree to send us copies of their photos.”
Bugger all chance of cooperation on the first and little of timely compliance on the second, but it bought her a few moments to linger. As Dawson headed up the stairs, no doubt taking the non-sequitur as a concession he’d won the argument, Pierce drew out her camera phone and snapped a few shots of the ritual circle. Nothing that they’d be able to use as evidence in court, but the odds of getting anybody convicted for drawing on a floor in chalk were stone cold zero in any case, regardless of what the pattern might be meant to do. At least she’d have her own photo record of the design to research and maybe pass on to Doctor Moss.
She’d be a fool to rely on the local police helping her do her job—and, she was becoming increasingly sure, it might not be too wise to bet on Dawson, either.
CHAPTER SIX
PIERCE HAD BARELY got back in her car to drive away when she had to pull over to take a call from Deepan. Apparently they’d had a break-in at a gallery in Halifax that matched the MO of a string of artefact thefts over the past few months: ritual mask snatched from the wall without any attention paid to the more valuable pieces on display. She left Dawson in charge of following up on Vyner’s movements—not without some misgivings—and went to join Deepan at the scene.
The Hemsfield Gallery of Ritual Antiques was a grand name for a poky little shop tucked in between a Chinese takeaway and an empty unit. At least the takeaway’s opening hours narrowed the window for the theft; it didn’t close until eleven, which made it unlikely their thieves would have risked striking much before midnight.
The break-in had been discovered when the owner arrived for work that morning, though the local police had been and gone before anyone had thought to put a courtesy call in to Ritual. Technically the local forces kept them apprised of any crime that might potentially have a magical component so the RCU could maintain a database; in practice, the notifications vanished into the endless drift of Post-it notes and print-outs to be dealt with ‘when we get a minute.’ Deepan must have been on the ball to link these seemingly trivial thefts together.
Not that any theft was ever trivial to the victim, of course. Pierce affixed the appropriate polite but not too cheerful smile and let herself into the shop, accompanied by the faint tinkle of the bell above the door. Deepan had his notebook out to interview a woman who must be the owner, twig thin and somewhere in her upper forties with stringy ash blonde hair and a multi-coloured blouse. She was flitting about checking and straightening things in a fit of nervous energy, though as the reports had said, there was little sign of disarray beyond what the forensics team had left behind them. She jumped at the sound of Pierce’s arrival.
“This is my boss, DCI Pierce,” Deepan introduced her before the woman could mistake her for a customer. “Guv, this is the gallery owner, Ms Hemsfield.”
“Oh, Sarah, please,” the woman said by sheer social reflex. She twisted the end of her wrapped scarf in her hands, obviously at a loss for further etiquette. It would be convenient if nervousness facing the police really was an indicator of having something to hide, but in Pierce’s experience, the innocent were apt to be just as twitchy as the guilty: they were less used to being questioned.
“Don’t mind me,” Pierce said, holding up a hand. “I’m just here to observe.” She nodded for Deepan to continue as she stepped back to take a glance around the shop. It veered more towards the ‘antique’ side of its name than the ‘gallery’ part, the small interior made claustrophobically closer by being crammed with all manner of objects. It had the inescapably musty scent of aging tat, not aided by the shelf of mouldering taxidermied animals that peered down at them with sightless glass eyes.
Pierce scanned the contents of the room with the eye of both a copper and someone who’d seen a few ritual artefacts in her time. That glass display case of jewellery was easily smashed: some gold and silver pieces in there that would have been easy to carry away. The bloody great candle holder in the corner looked like it was solid silver too—probably worth having despite the bulk. And that shelf of old leather-bound books in the corner, always an insatiable market for anything that looked like a halfway authentic occult text.
Deepan’s instincts were right on the money. Regardless of whether this theft was linked to the earlier series, this hadn’t just been an opportunistic smash and grab: this burglar had been targeting something specific.
“So you told the officers who were here earlier that the only thing missing was a wooden mask?” Deepan asked the owner.
“Yes... so far as I can see, yes.” Hemsfield looked faintly befuddled. “I don’t quite know why anyone would take it over the other pieces in the shop—it wasn’t the most impressive looking thing, and quite uncertain provenance as well. Possibly seventeenth century, but with no documented history, the value’s really a matter of what anyone’s willing to pay.” She gestured to a wall display of several hanging masks, next to a conspicuously empty hook. “There’d be much more of a market for something like these African masks, for example.”
“Do you have a photo of the mask that was stolen?” Pierce put in.
“Oh! Yes, yes, it’s on the website,” she said abruptly. “I should have thought... I should take that down in case someone tries to make an offer.” She fluttered for a moment. “Um, would you like me to—I can bring it up on the computer now, if you like. In fact, I can print you a copy, if the printer’s got ink in it.”
“That would be very helpful, yes,” Pierce said. And at least it gave the gallery owner something to do that made her feel like she was being somewhat useful. Pierce could sympathise with the frustration of being seemingly unable to do anything beyond waiting for something else to happen; it came up more than often enough in her job.
And it might come up here, given the lack of any obvious clues as to the perpetrators. She doubted they’d be so lucky as to have the local police come up with usable fingerprints, let alone a helpful match.
“Did you notice anyone hanging around the shop recently?” Deepan asked as the owner led the way up the narrow STAFF ONLY staircase at the rear. “Anyone behaving oddly?”
“No, no, not that I not
iced—not that I would,” she added, wringing her scarf apologetically as they reached the top. “Lots of people come in just to look, and of course it’s a small shop, it makes people awkward when there’s nobody in there but them and me... People quite often come in and go back out again. I wouldn’t notice.”
The private room at the top of the stairs was, if anything, even more stuffed than the shop below; boxes of bubble-wrapped antiquities were crammed in beside office supplies. Hemsfield leaned under the table to switch the computer on at the plug.
“Sorry, it’s terribly slow, this old thing,” she said, offering an awkward smile as it started up. “I don’t really use it that much—my niece does most of the website stuff for me.” She moved the mouse in a circle and peered at the screen. “Oh, is it installing updates again? Sorry... Always seem to get millions of the things every time I switch it on. I really don’t know what it’s doing half the time.”
Pierce looked around at the cramped environs of the upper room. “Was anything taken from up here?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure how anyone would tell.
“No, no, I don’t think so,” Hemsfield said. “I had a quick rummage around when I first came in—probably shouldn’t have, I know, fingerprints, but you don’t think, do you? I didn’t see anything else missing aside from the mask downstairs.” She turned back to the computer screen. “Ah, here we go. Now, let me just get the internet...”
Pierce shared a small, rueful smile with Deepan, who was perceptibly twitching with the itch to leap in and take over. Poor lad had ended up with more than his fair share of report-writing when he’d first joined the RCU, thanks to his inability to stand around and watch while her former sergeant made a hash of his painstaking two-fingered typing. It had stood him well when he’d taken the sergeant’s role himself—the first one she’d had who’d been promoted from within. The RCU didn’t generally have much luck with retaining people long enough for them to advance through the ranks.
Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) Page 5