But the weird stuff was in her past.
Even with Jerome and Neil, physical leftovers from that period of her life, in the flat, she’d almost convinced herself she didn’t live in that world any more. She had kept up with the inescapable growth of Derek Leech’s Earthly dominion, but tried to forget the strange devices at its heart.
Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps he wasn’t the Devil, but just an ambitious businessman. He had used magic in the past, but that was only trickery. Conjuring, not sorcery.
She tried and failed to convince herself.
“Mummy, look, I’ve made a monster.”
“Lovely,” she said to her son. “Neil, you’re on kid-watch and the phone. I’m out on business.”
Neil looked up at her and waved a cheery paw.
“I accept the mission,” he said.
She kissed them both and left the flat.
*
The address she had been given turned out to be a Georgian mansion in Wimpole Street. It stood out among perfectly preserved neighbours, showing signs of dilapidation and abuse. By contrast, with polished brass door-trimmings and blue plaques announcing the former residence of the great and good, the Mountmain house looked like a squat. Over the lintel was spray-painted DECLAN MOUNTMAIN, TERRORIST AND DEVIL-WORSHIPPER, LIVED HERE 1888–1897.
Maureen Mountmain, who answered the door herself, was tall and thin, with a strange red streak through snow-white hair. She wore long black velvet skirts and a tatted shawl over a leather waistcoat. Her neck and wrists were ringed with jades and pearls. Her face was stretched tight, but Sally didn’t see telltale face lift scars. As her shawl slipped, she showed a sparkling tattoo on her upper arm. There was a great strength in her but she lacked substance, as if every surplus atom had been sucked away over the years.
She wanted to ask Maureen how well she knew Derek Leech, and what their connection was, but that wasn’t the point.
She was hurried into the hallway, which stank of patchouli. The original wooden panels had been painted over with dull purple. Childish patterns, like the crescent moons and stars on a cartoon wizard’s conical cap, were scattered across the walls and ceiling. On a second look, Sally saw the painting-over extended to framed pictures which still hung, chameleoned, up the staircase.
“When she was little, Mimsy only liked purple,” Maureen said, proudly. “She can be very insistent.”
“Do you have any pictures of her?”
“At an early age, she heard about the aboriginal belief that photographs could capture souls. She would smash any cameras she saw. With a hammer.”
Sally thought about that for a moment. She wondered if Mimsy took her hammer with her.
“Any drawings or portraits?” she asked.
Maureen shuddered.
“Even worse. Mimsy believes art not only captures the soul but distorts and malforms it.”
“She’s very concerned with her soul.”
“Mimsy is extremely religious.”
“Did she attend any particular church? That might be a good place to start looking for her.”
Maureen shrugged. As Sally’s eyes got used to the gloom of the hall, she noticed just how distracted Maureen Mountmain was. Her pupils were shrunk to black pinholes.
“Mimsy rejects organised religion. She has declared herself the Avatar of the Ram. She hopes to revive the Society of the Ram, an occult congregation my family has often been involved with.”
“Devil-Worshipper and Terrorist?”
“Mimsy put that up there. She was proud of her heritage.”
“Are you?”
Maureen was unwilling to say.
Sally knew something had broken this woman. Deep down inside her, there was extraordinary resilience, but it had been besieged and eroded. Maureen Mountmain was a walking remnant. It was too early to be sure, but Sally had an idea how Miss Mountmain had been broken and who had done the deed.
“Might Mimsy be with her father? You live apart?”
Again, Maureen was unwilling, but this time she put an answer together.
“Mimsy doesn’t know her father. He is … unavailable to her.”
“If it’s not a rude question, do you know Mimsy’s father?”
For the first time, Maureen smiled. In her wistfulness, she could be beautiful. Sally knew from the flicker of wattage that this woman had once shined like a lantern.
“I know who Mimsy’s father is.”
She didn’t volunteer any more.
“May I see Mimsy’s room?”
Maureen led her upstairs. The whole first floor of the house was a ruin. Several fires had started but failed to take. A medieval tapestry, of knights hunting something in green woods, was half-scorched away, leaving the men in armour surrounding a suggestive brown shape. There were broken items of furniture, statuary and ceramic piled in a corner.
Maureen indicated a door smashed on its hinges.
“You say Mimsy left?” Sally asked. “You don’t think she was abducted?”
“She walked out of this house on her own. But she might not have been herself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She took with her a precious item. A keepsake, if you will. Something that was important once. It was her belief that this item communicated with her, issued orders. A large red stone.”
“A ruby?”
“Not exactly. The weirdstone is known as the Seven Stars, because of a formation of light-catching flaws which look like the constellation.”
Maureen dropped her shawl to show her tattoo. Seven blue eyes glinted in a green creature, also configured like the Great Bear.
“Is this jewel valuable?”
“Many might pay dearly for it. I certainly did, though not in money. But it’s not a thing which can be owned. It is a thing which owns.”
“Mimsy thought this jewel talked to her?”
Maureen nodded.
Sally looked around the room. After the build-up, it was a surprisingly ordinary teenager’s bedroom. A single bed with a frilly duvet, matched by all the lampshades. Posters of David Duchovny, Brad Pitt and some pretty boy pop singer she was too out-of-date to recognise. A shelf of books: thick occult-themed paperback nonsense—Flying Saucers from Ancient Atlantis—mixed with black-spined, obviously old hardbacks. Outgrown toys were placed like trophies on a mantelpiece: Turtles, Muppets, a withered rag doll.
She tried to imagine Mimsy. Long ago, before all the weirdness, Sally had taken a degree in child psychology. It was just about her only real qualification.
“Imaginary friends are projections,” she suggested. “Mimsy might have displaced onto the jewel, using its ‘voice’ to escape responsibility. It’s more sophisticated than ‘I didn’t break the vase, the pixies did’, it’s ‘I broke the vase, but I was obeying orders’.”
“Mimsy is twenty-seven,” Maureen said. “In her life, she has never made an excuse or obeyed orders. It is her belief that the jewel talks. I don’t doubt this is true.”
“A subjective truth, maybe.”
“You don’t believe that, Miss Rhodes. You know Derek Leech. You know better. There’s such a thing as Magic. And such a thing as Evil.”
Sally was off her balance. She had thought this was about a teenage runaway.
“Does she have a job? A boyfriend?”
“She can always get money from people. And she has lovers. None of them mean anything. Mimsy has only one emotional tie.”
“To you?”
“No. To the weirdstone.”
*
“Neil, pick up,” she told her own answerphone.
She was calling from her mobile, out in the open in Soho Square. Merciless sun shone down, but the dry air was cold.
Neil came on, grumbling.
“I thought you were answering the phone,” she said.
“Jermo and I were watching Thunderbirds.”
She let that pass.
“I need you to do some research, historical stuff.”
; One of Neil’s uses was trawling the Internet for ostensibly useless information. He had even been known on occasion to go physically to a library and open a book.
“Write these keywords down. The Jewel of Seven Stars, the Society of the Ram.”
“Dennis Wheatley novels?”
“One’s an object, the other’s a cult. And see what you can find out about the Mountmain family. Specifically, a fellow named Declan Mountmain from the late 19th century, and a couple of contemporary women, Maureen—must be in her late forties though she doesn’t look it—and Mimsy, twenty-seven.”
“As in Borogroves?”
“Mimsy. No, it’s not short for anything.”
“No wonder she ran away from home. Calling a kid Mimsy is semiotic child abuse.”
“There are worse kinds.”
She folded up the phone and thought. Mimsy’s father—whoever he might be—was out of the picture, supposedly. She’d accept that for now.
Unconsciously, she had come to the Square to make her call. It was where she had met Jerome’s father. Connor had been lolling on the benches with the other bike messengers, waiting for jobs to come in. He had been killed in a street accident, also near here.
She was reminded not to trust Derek Leech.
Mimsy, obviously, was a horror. But how much of one? Spoiled brat or Anti-Christ? She found herself aching for Mimsy’s Mumsy. Despite purple panels and hippie scent, and the timid dithering at the memory of her daughter, Maureen was a survivor. She wondered if she was looking at her own future in Maureen Mountmain.
Sally had a tattoo. A porpoise on her ankle. That didn’t make her strange. She had worked a case once with Harry D’Amour, an American private detective who was covered in tattoos which he claimed worked as a psychic armour. You needed armour for what was most vulnerable, and you couldn’t tattoo your heart.
“What’s up, Sal?”
Her ex-boyfriend sat down next to her. He wore Lycra cycling shorts and a joke T-shirt with a thick tyre track across the chest.
“Hello, Connor,” she said, unfazed.
“I’ve never thanked you for avenging my death,” he said.
He looked impossibly young in the bright sunshine. He had been nearly two-thirds her age. Now he was just over half her age.
“You look good,” he said.
“I dye my hair.”
“But just a little.”
“Just. You have a son. He’s a good kid. Jerome.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I thought you might not.”
“She’s a strange one, Sal. That’s why I’m here. Why I’ve been allowed to talk to you.”
“This is about Mimsy Mountmain?”
Connor looked sheepish. They hadn’t been together long and, baby or not, it wouldn’t have lasted. He had always been looking for an angle, less interested in a leg over than a leg up. But she was sorry he had been killed.
Jerome loved Neil—that was one reason Neil had lasted—but had grown up, like Mimsy, without a dad.
“It’s not so much Mimsy, it’s this rock thing. The jewel. You’re to mind out for it. It can cause a lot of trouble. Not just for you there, but for me here. For us here.”
“Where is here?”
“Somewhere else. You’d be able to explain it. I can’t. Sorry, Sal. Gotta rush.”
He stood up and looked around. She wondered if he’d come on his bike.
“Did I ever tell you I loved you?”
“No.”
“Funny that.”
He left. Sally wondered why she was crying.
*
When she got back to Muswell Hill, she heard the retch of the printer as she climbed the steps to her flat. After her ghostly encounter, she had spent an afternoon getting in touch with old contacts who knew something about what is euphemistically known as “alternative religion”. Though a few of them had heard of Declan Mountmain as a historical fruitcake, no one could tell her anything about his present-day descendants.
She let herself in, and found Neil and Jerome busy downloading and printing out. In the last few months, Jerome had gone from helping Neil with the computer to being impatient with the grown-up’s inability to get on as well with the machine as he did.
“There’s a lot of dirt, Sal-love,” Neil announced, proudly.
Sally hugged Jerome, surprising him.
“Gerroff,” he said, wriggling.
She laughed. She had needed contact with Connor’s flesh-and-bone offspring. It grounded her, dispersed some of the weirdness build-up.
“It wasn’t Dennis Wheatley,” Neil said. “It was Bram Stoker. He wrote a novel called The Jewel of Seven Stars. It was made into a Hammer Film with Valerie Leon.”
Like a great many men his age, Neil had encyclopedic recall of the bosomy starlets who appeared in the Bond films, Hammer Horrors, Carry Ons and Two Ronnies TV sketches of the early 1970s.
“You know Stoker based Dracula on Vlad the Impaler. He also based this Seven Stars effort on scraps of truth. It’s about an Ancient Egyptian witch who possesses a modern lass. There was, apparently, a real Jewel of Seven Stars, found in a proper mummy’s tomb. It disappeared after a breakin at the British Museum in 1897. Guess who was the number-one suspect?”
“Is this like Jack the Ripper? Pick an eminent Victorian?”
“No. It’s highly guessable. I’m talking Declan Mountmain, who was sort of a cross between Aleister Crowley and Patrick Bergin in Patriot Games. Half-mad warlock, half-psycho Irish separatist. He tried to blow up Lords, during a Gentlemen versus Players match. He had a nephew, Bennett, who was by all accounts even worse. He was in with the Nazis in World War II and was killed in Los Angeles while spying for Hitler.”
“No wonder Maureen’s off her head.”
“I’ve got a great jpg from a Hippie History website, of Maureen at Glastonbury in 1968. She’s got up as a fertility priestess, body-painted green all over and extremely topless. I had to send Jermo into the other room while I downloaded it.”
“I saw the rude lady,” Jerome piped up.
“Well, I tried to send him. Anyway, Maureen was not only the Wiccan babe of the Summer of Love but an early Comet knockout, one of Derek Leech’s first Page Three girls. Those shots will be on the Net somewhere, but you have to pay a fee to get them. Do you think Leech is this Mimsy’s father?”
She thought about it. It fitted together, perhaps a bit too neatly.
“There are other players in this. And the jewel comes into it somehow.”
“I’ve got a big cast for you, going back a hundred years, snatched from a lot of occult and paranoid conspiracy sites, the type you have to play sword and sorcery games to get onto. Some famous names. But there are interesting gaps. Names rubbed out of the record, like those Pharaohs who were so disgraceful that they were removed from history. I keep coming across these references to ‘the War’ in contexts that make me wonder which one is being fought.”
She looked at the sheaf of printed-out articles for a while, trying to piece it all together.
“It’s this bloody stone,” she said, at last. “That’s what’s wrong. In 1897, it supposedly disappears. Then it turns up in a treasure chest in Wimpole Street and waltzes off with Mimsy. But there’s this one tiny mention of it in the reports of Bennett Mountmain’s death in Los Angeles.”
“So he took it on holiday? Maybe it was a talisman of his devotion to the Führer.”
“But how does it come to Maureen, and Mimsy? In 1942, this Captain ‘W’ of the deleted name seems to have snatched it back for England. Or Egypt. Or Science. I think the jewel has been stolen back and forth between two crews down the years. The Mountmains and some other shower, the mystery ‘W”s bunch. The others mentioned only by initials. Mr. ‘B’ from 1897, even this ‘R.J.’ from the ’70s. We need more about the initials. Could you spend tomorrow on it? You might have to stir yourself to the British Museum and the Newspaper Library.”
“I’ll take Jermo to see the mummies.”<
br />
Jerome stuck his arms out and limped across the room.
“How does he know what the Mummy walks like, Neil?” she asked. “Have you been showing him your Hammer videos?”
“He gets it from Scooby-Doo.”
She playfully strangled him.
“So perish all unbelievers who defile the innocent minds of young children,” she intoned, solemnly.
They kissed and cuddled, and Jerome told them not to be soppy.
*
If a grown-up woman of twenty-seven wants to go missing and not be found, the legal position is that it’s very much her business. Here, the abandoned mother might be able to lay a charge of theft against the absconded daughter, but Sally now knew enough about the Seven Stars to realise accusing anyone of stealing it would result in a potentially endless series of criss-cross counter charges.
Mimsy had walked out of her mother’s house a week ago.
Finally, Maureen had coughed up an address book, with Mimsy’s friends marked by pink felt-tip pen asterisks. Sally spent two days making telephone calls. None of Mimsy’s “friends”—current worshippers, cast-off ex-lovers, bedazzled sidekicks or bitter rivals—admitted any knowledge of her.
But the drudgery was useful.
Everyone she talked with revealed, by their attitude, a bit more about the quarry. The impression Sally had already formed from Maureen was strengthening by the minute.
Mimsy Mountmain was quite a package. In her early teens, she’d made a million pounds as a songwriter. Sally remembered the titles of a few pop hits whose tunes and lyrics had vanished from her mind. Mimsy hadn’t needed to work since, but had published a series of slim volumes of poetry in an invented language.
At sixteen, she put a young man into a coma by battering him with a half-brick. The court returned a verdict of self-defence and she was written up, in the Comet among other papers, as a have-a-go heroine. Then, under less clear-cut circumstances, she did it again. This time, the cracked skull belonged to a married bank manager rather than an unemployed football fan. She did three years in Holloway, and came out as the undisputed princess of the prison.
Her ex-lovers were all standouts. Politicians, celebs, serious wealth, famous criminals, beauties and monsters. Some of them hadn’t come through the Mimsy Mountmain Experience without sustaining severe damage.
Dark Detectives Page 42