by Alexis Hall
Liberated from her aisle-walking duties, Julian sidled over to me and slipped her arm around my waist. “Having fun?”
“Are you taking the piss?”
She sighed with a level of showmanship you could only get if breathing was an optional extra. “Honestly, you can fight a killer filth monster in a sewer or face down a millennia-ancient vampire queen, but I take you to a party and you go all to pieces.”
“Moral of that story: don’t take me to parties.”
“But how else am I supposed to show off that hot PI I’m banging?”
“I can never tell if you’re trying to be nice or trying to be clever.”
“I’m trying to be nice.” She gave me a frankly smirky grin. “Being clever comes naturally.”
We made our way through the hotel into some kind of ballroom. The happy couple waited just inside the door, greeting the guests as we passed. I kissed Violet on the cheek, told her she looked lovely which, to be fair, she did. I kissed her wife—Melissa, I remembered from the vows—and she smiled at me. She had a pretty smile, a mix of fragility and intensity.
“Melissa!” Julian bounced up beside me and took her by the hand. “Congratulations. You look so wonderful today that I can almost forgive the many times you tried to murder me.”
Melissa’s eyes sparkled. “My memory isn’t what it was, but last time I checked you were beating me five to two.”
“Three of those hardly counted.” Julian turned to me. “Tell her, sweeting, when you drop somebody off a bridge, it’s only a murder attempt if there isn’t a river underneath it.”
I put my hands up. “You know, I’m sensing that this is more complicated than I want to get into. Also we’re holding up the line.”
“Hang on to this one, Jules,” said Violet, “she’s sensible.”
We moved away from the doorway and found our assigned table. A discreet carafe of blood sat at one place setting. I’d gone with the cauliflower and white truffle soup myself. The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze of speeches, slightly-too-fancy food, and dancing pensioners. I was honestly semi-tempted to corner Violet and compare dating-Julian notes. There were a bunch of things I’d have liked to ask and, while Julian had left not so much a string as a macramé bedspread of ex-lovers behind her, disconcertingly few of them were still alive and in a position to talk. But you can never pin down the bride at a wedding and, anyway, it would have been a slightly awkward conversation. So, Vi, how did you handle the way she tries to kill your former partners?
At some point, between the floofy meringue dessert that I ate for Julian and the coffee I was drinking very much for me, the woman I’d sat next to during the service joined us at our table.
“Your Highness.” She nodded coolly at Julian.
“Dame Claudia. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We’ve been meaning to check in for a while. Things very nearly got out of hand last year.”
I looked from Julian to the Dame and back to Julian. If I found out they’d shagged in the seventies, I was going home.
Julian quirked an eyebrow. “Do we need to have the who-can-snap-whose-neck-like-a-matchstick conversation again?”
“Simply a polite word, Your Highness. We give your council a certain leeway to handle matters as it sees fit. This policy has been effective for some time, but we can make things difficult if we have to.”
“Did you not see where I was going with the whole matchstick thing?”
Dame Claudia bowed her head. “I am but a humble public servant.” She stood. “This has been productive as always, Your Highness. Good to meet you as well, Miss Kane.”
I watched as she went back to mingle. Having been in this business a decade, I really thought I’d have got to the point where mysterious people stopped being inexplicably pleased to see me. Especially when I hadn’t told them my name. “Umm...” I said when I was sure she’d gone. “Do you mind explaining who the hell that was?”
“Intelligence. Six, I think, could be five. They do so blur together, don’t you find? Violet was with SOE during the war, then when Atlee shut them down in ’46, she was recruited into some kind of secret magic spy conspiracy. They’re still around and Dame Claudia is in charge these days. They mostly leave us alone.” Julian was uncharacteristically serious for about half a second. “Between you and me, sweeting, I’m in no great hurry to find out what would happen if they didn’t.”
The coffee came back around. It wasn’t great—it never is at this sort of place. It’s like there’s some kind of cosmic rule: the posher the hotel, the worse the coffee. But I drank it anyway because, hey, it was free. Then did what I usually did at big formal events: stayed in my seat, avoided small talk and refused to dance. We ducked out a little early. I was getting tired of dealing with people I’d never met, and Julian was getting tired of dodging her ex-girlfriend’s ex-employers. Plus I was feeling pretty crappy about Elise being in the office all day without me. She worked like a machine, but that was no reason to treat her like one.
Except when it came to paperwork. My principles only went so far.
We hit the limo and I asked Julian to take me to Bow Street. For all my grumbling, I’d been to worse shindigs. After all, I wasn’t on trial for anything and nobody was trying to kill me or suck me into another universe. By my standards, I was calling that a win.
The car pulled up outside my office and I kissed Julian goodbye, which...took longer than it could have. Then I fixed my suit, retrieved my hat, and went up to check on what I laughably called my business. It’d been a slow couple of months. And come to think of it, so had the couple of months before that. I really needed to find another insanely wealthy supernatural being with a corpse on its doorstep and a money-is-no-object approach to crisis management.
Pushing open the door—it still had Kane & Archer on the frosted glass, a state of affairs that had transitioned from apathy to policy—I found Elise sitting behind my desk. She was wearing a pale blue trilby and scribbling in a spiral-bound notebook. The chair opposite her was occupied by a slight, angular figure, androgynous and tousle-haired. They turned as I walked in.
“Kate.”
“Merchant.” Their real name was Sheyne, or so they’d told me last year. At the time, we’d been having something that might have been a moment in a snowbound faery realm in the back of a cupboard. In any case, they usually went by the Merchant of Dreams, and given the many weird taboos that governed faery crap, it seemed best to call them that in public.
“I have been robbed.”
Elise sat up and tipped back the brim of her hat. “It seems a relatively straightforward case. But it is my understanding that those mysteries which seem most superficially perplexing are often those that prove easiest to solve, since the very elements that render them obscure to the untrained eye in truth offer a wealth of anchor points to which the trained observer can affix their investigation.” What with being made of stone, Elise technically didn’t need to breathe, and that meant she didn’t need to pause for breath. Which made it difficult when she got enthusiastic about something. “Conversely, a crime with a simple and uncluttered narrative presents the investigator with few points of ingress. A simple crime could, consequently, have been committed by anybody.”
“Summary, Elise?”
She nodded. “Our client was tending their pawnbrokers in Seven Dials when three men burst in. They were armed with shotguns and wore stockings over their heads. They took only one item, a plaster bust of Napoleon that had been deposited six months previously by a Miss Corin Black. The bust was believed to contain a vial which itself contained a magical reagent called the Tears of Hypnos.”
“Oh, dicks, piss and bollocks.” I buried my head in my hands. The plaster bust of Napoleon had been the weird artefact Corin was looking for when we’d first met. The case had killed my partner and damn near ruined my life. Then the fucking thing had t
urned up again six months ago in connection to the wacky become-a-god ritual the evil vampire wizards were messing around with. Long story short, I’d never seen the Tears of Hypnos, or touched them, and didn’t really know what they were, but they had an annoying habit of popping up every now and then to shit all over everything I cared about.
“My understanding of these matters is limited,” Elise went on. “But our client assures me that it is unusual for people to be able to break the sanctity of their store. Normally they would”—she looked at her notes—“‘find their bodies twisted into blackened thorns and their souls entombed within the debtors’ prison in the realm of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter.’ That this did not occur suggests they had protection. Further, their guns were loaded with iron shot, which also implies foreknowledge and some preparation. It has been a day since the robbery. Our client has not gone to the police, since the mundane authorities are not equipped to deal with supernatural agents and because—” She read again. “‘They are riddled with vampire spies.’”
The Merchant of Dreams glanced my way. “That’s the shape of it.”
“And you’re hiring us to...?”
“Retrieve my property and leave the thieves to me.”
I rested my hip against my desk. I really needed to talk to Elise about taking my chair. “Getting stuff back I’m okay with. Letting you do whatever it is you do to people who piss you off, that’s on the wrong side of legal.”
“What if they aren’t human?”
“Three guys with stockings on their heads? Does that scream ‘otherworldly menace’ to you?”
The Merchant of Dreams made a sort of generically mystical gesture. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. And beyond heaven and earth there are more things still.”
“Tell you what. How about we focus on finding the thieves, and work out what to do about them when we know who they are?”
“Are you proposing a deal?” The Merchant grinned at me over steepled fingers.
I almost fell off my desk. “Oh, no, you don’t. Let’s get one thing crystal fucking clear. I’m happy to take this job. I’m happy to find your shit for you, but you’re going to sign a completely normal contract and pay me in completely normal money on a completely normal schedule. And there’ll be no deals, no bargains, no ‘I trade you my happiest memory for a handful of sunlight.’ We clear?”
“Oh, Kate,” said the Merchant, “why do you fight so hard against your heritage?”
I glared. “Because my heritage eats people and, near as I can tell, yours steals babies.”
The Merchant laughed. It was a deceptively pleasant laugh. The kind that said I am in no way secretly plotting your downfall. “Cash it is.”
“And not the stuff that turns to leaves when the sun comes up.”
“I would never have dreamed of it.”
“Then we’re good.”
Elise took the rest of the details, and I started the various bits of background work you needed to do if you wanted to track down a smash-and-grab. There’d be CCTV to sort out, witnesses to interview, and a whole lot of legwork. On top of that, there’d almost certainly be a police report—people didn’t bust into shops in busy commercial districts and leg it with bulky bits of ornamental tat without somebody calling the cops. I phoned around, looked through some databases and, after a couple of hours of finding not very much, Elise and I got in the car and made for Seven Dials.
Chapter Two
Bodies & Mirrors
The Merchant’s shop was one of those dodgy, green-fronted places with metal grilles permanently rolled down inside its dusty windows. It didn’t have much in the way of security and usually didn’t need it. The Merchant was a whole lot deeper into the faery bullshit than me, and inside their own realm they could screw you up so bad you’d wind up married to a bear on top of a glass mountain before you knew what hit you.
Elise had taken detailed descriptions of the robbers—in as much as you can get detailed descriptions of three averagely built men with their faces covered—which made it easy to get a lead on the way they’d gone. A good half-dozen shopkeepers had seen them making their getaway: they’d dashed out of the front door, crossed the road and jumped into the back of a white van. Nobody’d thought to take the registration and white vans weren’t exactly rare in the city, but the big advantage of living in a town with seven thousand CCTV cameras was that everything got caught on film at some point. I didn’t like relying on council footage, because it took forever to get hold of, but most shops and pubs had their own cameras these days and if you made enough of a nuisance of yourself they’d usually let you have a look. At least, my strategy was to make a nuisance of myself. As for Elise, she had this way about her that meant people got real helpful real quick.
Eventually, we found the van. Or at least we found a couple of places the van had been. We got it heading south down Drury Lane a couple of minutes after the robbery, coming off Waterloo Bridge a little while after that, then past a Tesco Metro and along the A302. Putting the whole journey together was a pain in the arse and took hours. Technically I had other options—the weird faery power I’d inherited from my mother would have let me track them by scent, or the wibbly magic equivalent. But it would also let her into my head and, after last year’s zany adventures in being possessed, I wasn’t really up for it. Plus these guys had been able to resist whatever the Merchant of Dreams normally threw at intruders, which suggested they had protection against that kind of thing anyway.
We spent the next day surveying carparks and garages in Southwark and finally tracked the van down to a multi-storey in Peckham Rye. By the time we found the actual vehicle, I was beginning to think giving my body over to a tireless spirit of the hunt wouldn’t have been so bad. Elise was, as far as I could tell, literally indefatigable. And seemed to genuinely enjoy the opportunity to explore the automobile storage facilities of South London, a detail I deduced from the way she said “I am so enjoying this opportunity to explore the automobile storage facilities of South London.”
I limped cautiously over to what we’d identified as the getaway van and peered through the side window. I didn’t see anything that looked like it would be useful. No handy maps with places circled on them or notepads saying 14:37—meet fence at safehouse on 23 Dontgetcaught Street. Well, bugger. I leaned against the door and lit a cigarette. Which I think was technically illegal, but fuck it.
Elise came to stand next to me. “I take your present activity as indicating your belief either that the case is solved and further action is therefore unnecessary, or that the trail has gone cold and further action is therefore futile. Am I correct?”
“Yeah, the second one.” There was still something bugging me, though. I hadn’t found any obvious clues in the van, but then I hadn’t entirely expected to. Honestly, I hadn’t expected to find the van at all—at least not neatly parked in a short stay carpark in Peckham.
“If you wanted to ditch a car,” I asked Elise, “where would you put it?”
“Would I be right, Miss Kane, if I were to suggest that you already have an answer to that question, and that my role in this conversation is primarily as a sounding board?”
“Okay, now I feel like a dick.”
“On the contrary, I am very interested in the process of investigation and am pleased to have the opportunity to learn from you.”
I tended to see myself less as a mentor and more as an object lesson. But it was honestly kind of nice to know somebody was getting something out of what I guess I could call my experience. I should probably have been less...more...just better to Archer. Except now it was too late for reasons of dead.
“The way I see it,” I said, “this place closes at half six. You don’t stick a van here if you want to keep it safe long-term, or if you’re planning to ditch it for good. Which means they were planning to come back her
e, and didn’t. Which means something went wrong.”
“What sort of something?”
“Couldn’t say. Got any thoughts?”
Elise beamed. “There are several possibilities, Miss Kane. Perhaps they were simply struck by moving vehicles on the way to wherever they were going. Perhaps they had arranged to meet with somebody, and that somebody betrayed them horribly. Perhaps they stumbled through a gateway into another reality and were unable to return. Perhaps...”
“Hang on.” I took one last drag of my cigarette and stamped it out. “Let’s go back to the horrible betrayal angle.”
“Do you think it plausible?”
“This thing we’re after...” I waved my hand, not quite sure how to explain. “It affects people. They wipe each other out for it. If this is going down anything like last time then there’s a good chance these guys went all Treasure of the Sierra Madre on each other.”
“I am afraid I am not familiar with the cultural artefact to which you are alluding.”
“Humphrey Bogart and a bunch of guys kill each other over a bag of gold dust. It blows away in the end. It’s all symbolic and shit.”
Elise lifted her eyebrows in mock outrage. “Spoilers, Miss Kane, spoilers.”
“Rosebud’s a sled, Darth Vader is Luke’s father, Sean Bean always dies. Now, how about we get back to the angry men with guns?”
“How do you feel we might best locate them?”
“We walk around until we find somewhere that looks like the sort of place something violent and permanent would happen to a gang of thieves.”