The Sun had set earlier. The streets were still lit by the long northern twilight, but darkness pooled around walls and cars. The evening street was symbolic of the second shadow London that had enveloped Rhian since she found Morgana’s brooch. A London of wolves, vampires, and witches who made real magic. A place where one false move could drop you into an Otherworld. A city where reality was a thin skin on a viscous pool of potential dangers.
Sometimes, she thought that she had never come round from the attack that had killed James. That she was really lying in a hospital bed full of tubes and wires like a character from Life on Mars. Maybe this was all a dream. Would she vanish when the doctors finally gave up on her and pulled the plug, or would her soul move on? To Heaven or Hell? Maybe she was already in Hell; it hurt too damn much to be Heaven.
She arrived early for her shift at the pub, as she needed to fill in her time sheet. Old Fred and Willie the Dog sat on barstools in their usual corner. They sipped interminable half pints of bitter. Sheila manned the bar—or should that be womanned? Rhian never could remember which bits of political correctness were currently in vogue. Her life flew below the radar of middle-class fads and fashions.
Sheila nodded to her when she swung up the countertop to enter the bar, but carried on cleaning glasses. It was considered a point of honor to clean up before one left, and Sheila’s shift was nearly over. Rhian went into the small back office and rummaged.
“Sheila, where are the time sheets?” she asked.
“No idea,” Sheila replied. “You had better ask Gary. He’s upstairs in his flat.”
Rhian mounted the stairs two at a time. They were narrow and steep, like you find in old buildings. At the top, she knocked on the door separating Gary’s flat from the public areas. After a short interval, he appeared, and she explained why she was there.
“Oh right, time sheets, I think I have some more somewhere,” Gary said vaguely.
She followed him up onto a landing where he opened the door to a small room and snapped on a light. The bulb hung naked on an old-fashioned cloth-covered electric cable. Stacks of cardboard boxes sat on unpainted wooden floorboards. The wall plaster had fallen away completely in places, exposing wooden batons. The latch on the wooden window was broken, the rope sash hanging down. The window had been nailed permanently shut. Rhian doubted if it could be lifted, even without the nails, as it was thickly painted over.
“This is one of the unliveable rooms,” Gary said, somewhat defensively. “But it is dry, so I store stuff in it.”
The room did smell a bit musty, but not damp. He carried on searching, shuffling boxes around. While waiting, Rhian was aware of a strange swishing noise coming from another room. It stopped abruptly with a crash.
“Oh no,” Gary said, and dashed out.
Rhian followed him into the next room, wondering why he was so alarmed. A large table on trestles filled the space. Models covered it, creating a miniature English scene: a village pub and a church, a canal, a small town, trees, and rolling green hills. There was even a small grass airfield with a little yellow biplane. She walked, fascinated, around the complicated model railway.
The little people had old-fashioned clothes, and the policeman had a bicycle. The cars were black boxes on spindly wheels or open sports cars, like an Agatha Christie story in miniature. That old duck in her garden must be Miss Marple and the rotund man on the platform must be Poirot—or possibly the Fat Controller. Though she could not see Thomas the Tank Engine anywhere. Even Frankie’s Mildred would be too modern for this diorama.
Rhian giggled, unable to help herself.
Gary appeared from behind the table holding a steam train and carriages like a mother holds her new baby.
“It’s okay, I think,” Gary said. “I set the speed too high and it came off the table, but it is the Flying Scotsman. I suppose I shouldn’t have left her running unattended.”
“Do you have a whistle and a peaked cap?” Rhian asked solemnly.
Gary colored.
“I suppose this does look like a strange hobby for a grown man,” he said.
“No stranger than other grown men’s hobbies,” Rhian said soothingly. “I knew a man who fought battles between miniature elves and dwarves.”
“Now that’s just silly,” Gary said with a grin.
“Then there’s stamp collecting, angling, flying toy planes, train spotting, slot cars, coin collecting, football, ferret racing, sword collecting, darts, ham radio, gun collecting, ufology, putting ships in bottles, paintball, metal detecting, beer mat collecting . . .”
“Okay, I get the picture,” said Gary, with a lopsided grin. “Men are weird, childish, and collect strange things.”
“Model railways are pretty tame stuff compared to extreme ironing,” Rhian said. “I think it’s the male competitive instinct. Ask a man to iron a shirt and you get nothing but foot dragging, but tell him its extreme ironing and challenge him to do it hanging upside down from Tower Bridge, and the poor sap can’t wait.”
“And the difference between men and boys is the cost of the toys,” Gary said.
They both laughed.
“I think model railways are cute, and it’s not likely to hurt anybody,” Rhian said in a conciliatory sort of way, remembering that Gary was her boss.
“I’m not so sure about that. This place has 1930s wiring, so one wrong move and phut,” Gary said, drawing a finger across his throat. “Have you noticed that the light switches are made of Bakelite?”
“What’s Bakelite?” Rhian asked, examining a switch. It was dark brown and bulky but otherwise unremarkable.
“Never mind, they stopped making it before you were born, Hell, before I was born.”
“That must have been a long time ago, then,” Rhian said, straight faced.
Gary looked at her suspiciously but forewent further comment.
Rhian took over from the taciturn Sheila and dropped back into the reassuringly unexciting business of barmaiding. After some debate, and a rigorous and extensive search through their pockets, Willie the Dog and Old Fred stumped up the readies for two more halves of ordinary bitter. A trickle of students passed in and out of the pub on their way between the college and digs.
“Would you like to come out with me?” a student asked, pocketing his change.
Rhian lifted her eyes from the till and looked at him. Actually, he wasn’t unhandsome if you disregarded the acne. It was nice to get a direct approach rather than a stupid chat-up line. She cocked her head one side and considered his request, thinking about Frankie’s advice. Maybe she should take him up on his offer? It was just an invitation for a drink, not a marriage proposal, but she couldn’t see where the relationship could go. Sooner or later he would meet the wolf.
“Thanks, but I am not quite ready for a relationship. I only split from my last boyfriend recently.”
The student grinned at her.
“Well, that’s a better response than everyone else has got,” he said.
“Everyone else?” Rhian asked.
“At uni, we’ve opened a sweepstake, and the first one to take you out wins.”
He winked and went off with his drink, leaving Rhian speechless. They’d opened a bloody sweepstake on her favours?
She was still fuming when the door opened to admit two large bald men with no necks and expensive suits that didn’t quite fit. One of them causally beckoned to her.
“Come on, Mister Parkes has decided to take you clubbing Up West and has sent us to fetch you,” the goon said.
“Up West” meant the West End of Central London, where the theatres, expensive restaurants and nightclubs were to be found.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know any Mister Parkes.”
“Everyone knows Charlie Parkes,” the goon said, “and I was telling you, not asking. Hurry up, Mister Parkes don’t like to be kept waiting.”
Rhian got it then—Charlie Parkes, the blagger who hung out with bent coppers.
“Tell Mister
Parkes that I can’t spare her,” Gary said, politely, putting a hand on Rhian’s shoulder.
Rhian had not heard him come down.
The two goons walked up to the bar.
“I haven’t got time for this, Hunter,” a goon said, putting thick, heavy hands flat on the bar. “Would you prefer to spare her or your fucking kneecaps? She’s going with us anyway, whatever condition we leave you in.”
“It’s okay, Gary,” Rhian said, a smile covering her burning fury at being treated like a whore. “I don’t mind going for a little ride with these nice gentlemen. I might find it quite interesting. So might they.”
The snarl she felt in the core of her being was the closest the wolf got to a laugh. It was amused, so things could get very, very interesting once they were outside.
“No, it’s really not all right,” Gary said.
Rhian saw his hand sliding towards a baseball bat he kept out of sight under the bar. She tensed, the wolf stirred. Things were about to kick off. She had hoped to do this outside on the dark street, where there were no witnesses.
Two hands casually moved the goons aside as if they were made of papier-mâché, revealing a tall, slim man in an ankle-length black leather coat. It should have looked ridiculously pretentious, but on him it was perfect.
“What do you want?” Rhian asked, wearily.
“Snow White, is that any way to greet an old friend and confidante?”
“Hello, Max,” Rhian said with resignation.
CHAPTER 12
REVELATIONS
Jameson knew he was close to home when the air stank of sulfur oxides and sewage, and the smog was so thick as to cause perpetual gloom. He coughed, and spat into the cobbled street to get the acrid taste out of his mouth. The alley was barely a couple of meters wide, and wooden houses overhung on both sides. Figures loomed as shadows out of the gloom and disappeared as quickly. The smog did not just smother the senses of taste and sight but also seemed to dampen sound like a thick duvet. He could just hear the clop of iron horseshoes on stone in the distance, but had no sense of the direction of the sound.
This was one of the most powerful Jungian psychoanals of the London Otherworld. The Dickensian rookery was an archetype not just of Dickens and other classical writers but a thousand modern books and films. Here stalked Sherlock Holmes, The Ripper, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and a vast supporting cast of blowers and broadsmen, chivs and chavs, dippers and dragsmen, jacks and judies, lags and lurkers, macers and mugs, palmers and pigs.
A woman in a bonnet and long ragged clothes sprang out of a doorway at Jameson. She had a straw basket in her left hand and something purple in her right.
“Buy some lucky heather, darling. A square-rigged toff like you needs his toll of luck in this manor.”
Her remaining teeth were blackened, and between them oozed breath that stank so badly as to overpower the general miasma. Jameson pushed past the woman without speaking and hurried after Karla. It was best not to interact too closely with the shadows of the Otherworld or you could be sucked into their reality.
Karla opened the wooden door of a lean-to in a small square and went in. Jameson followed. It was pitch dark inside until Karla opened an internal door and flooded a walk-in larder with yellow electric light. The next room was a kitchen with an old-fashioned gas stove, brightly colored blue Formica-topped storage units, and a floor covered with yellow tiles. Jameson had a shrewd idea where they were even before he opened the kitchen door.
He preceded Karla into an old-fashioned London pub dominated by a long mahogany bar. Pint mugs hung from the wooden screen over the bar, behind which was a mirror advertising Gordon’s gin. In its way, the Victorian-styled pub resembled a secular church. The screen separated the holy of holies where the priest officiated, from the seated punters beyond. Of course the priest was a barman and they worshipped other gods than the Biblical, but alcohol and nibbles still featured in the service.
“On the seventh day God rested and popped down the Blind Beggar for a swift half,” Jameson said to himself, as if chanting a litany.
“Can’t you come through the front door like anyone else, Jameson?” the barman asked, spoiling the analogy.
“Depends where I’m coming from, Henry,” Jameson replied.
Henry gazed at him sightlessly, eyes concealed behind a sepia-stained cloth tied around his head. The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel was ancient. How old, no one knew, but it probably started as a Roman fast-food bar on the London-to-Colchester road. By Medieval times it was a coaching inn, although the current building was Victorian.
The pub was named after Henry de Montfort, who had his eyes put out by the victorious Royalists after their victory in 1265. According to legend, Henry gravitated to Whitechapel and begged at a crossroads on the old Roman Road. He found fame as the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green. The story goes that a duchess nursed him back to health and bore him a daughter, Bessie, remembered in the name of a nearby road.
It was probably all bollocks. Just another London tale invented to entertain tourists in exchange for free drinks, but the barman was blind and he was called Henry. Which came first, the barman or the legend? Was Henry the Blind Barman an avatar of Henry the Blind Beggar? Who knows? In London, myth and history swirled together like a raspberry ripple.
Henry was not entirely human, but he never left the Beggar, so The Commission had no particular interest in him. Besides, the Beggar was useful. The walls between reality and the Otherworld stretched and distorted to the point of insubstantiality in this place. That was true all over Whitechapel, but the Beggar was a semi-stable halfway house between the worlds. That made it a useful place for meeting on neutral ground. Every so often the pub was raided by The Commission, often with interesting results.
It was no accident William Booth chose the street outside the Beggar to give the seminal sermon that kicked off the Salvation Army. Evil oozed out of the place like lava from the mouth of a volcano. By opening his preaching in such a place, Booth laid down a challenge to the forces of darkness. He made a declaration of total war. It was a bit like striding up to the castle of a robber baron and pissing on his portcullis, or attacking motherhood on Mumsnet.
Jameson was horrified to find himself sporting a collarless grey suit, zip-up ankle boots, and an original Beatles haircut. He felt bloody ridiculous. Karla looked rather fetching in a white hairband, silver babydoll mini-dress, and light purple boots.
He sighed, “The bloody swinging Sixties again.”
Through the window, Jameson could see an Austin Mini Cooper, gaudily painted lemon yellow. The blue, red, and white stripes of a Union Jack motif decorated its roof. The Beggar had a tendency to revert to the Sixties when in resting mode. That was when East End Ganglord Ronnie Kray topped George Cornell with a nine-millimeter Mauser in the bar. Cornell was an enforcer for the South London Richardson Brothers’ Torture Gang.
This seemingly trivial East End incident triggered events that brought down both gangs, ruined a number of political careers, and led to the biggest clear-out of bent coppers from the Met for a generation. Even the Head of the Sweeney, the Commander of the elite Flying Squad, was implicated. “Sweeney Todd” meant Flying Squad, in London rhyming slang. It is no exaggeration to say that events that night in the Beggar changed the lives of thousands of Londoners, creating a psychic shock that was imprinted on the brickwork.
“Be seeing you,” Jameson said to Henry.
“Don’t be in any hurry to come back,” Henry replied.
Karla and Jameson walked out of the Beggar into modern London. The Mini Cooper was still there, still lemon colored, but was a BMW mini with the Red Cross of Saint George and England painted on its roof. Tropes evolve, like everything else.
Jameson checked his mobile phone and waited while it locked on to a network. He touched an icon, which changed when it acquired a secure line.
“Randolph,” said a voice.
“Re our little problem, find out all you can about the Sith,
” Jameson said.
“I wondered where you had got to,” Randolph said. “What are Sith?”
“Try looking under Irish elves,” Jameson suggested. “And find out what information we have about an organization of suckers called Protectors. Supposedly they defeated and banished the Sith.”
“Protectors and Irish elves.” Randolph sighed. “I suppose it’s better than leprechauns.”
“I’m going home for a shower and a sleep. I’ll come in later.”
“Decent of you to grace us with your presence,” Randolph said, ringing off before Jameson could come up with a suitably crushing reply.
“I have a proposition for you, Snow White, so why don’t we have a little chat?” Max asked.
“My name’s Rhian. Snow White’s a character in a fairy tale.”
“Aren’t we all in a fairy tale?” Max asked, rhetorically.
“What’s your game?”
A heavy materialised at Max’s side. He looked more bewildered than angry, as if he could not quite believe what had happened. Max looked him up and down. The heavy obviously failed to impress Max, who turned back to Rhian.
“I’m talking to you,” the heavy laid a hand on Max’s arm.
This proved to be a bad decision. Max’s reaction was breathtakingly fast. He wrenched his arm free and backhanded the heavy across the face. Max did not appear to exert himself unduly, but the gangster flew across the room, only stopping when he demolished a table. Beer, glass, and wood exploded, an unfortunate customer going backwards over his chair, still clutching his newspaper.
The second heavy was clearly having problems dealing with the intellectual challenge posed by such an unprecedented situation. His face contorted with concentration as great as Einstein’s must have been when postulating Special Relativity, Darwin’s when struggling with evolution, or Harry Fox’s when he devised the Foxtrot.
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