Why Whitechapel, when he could have endowed Oxford, Cambridge, or one of the better London University colleges such as Imperial or UC? Any of those would have given him a seat at a much more prestigious top table. And why psychology as opposed to, say, economics, which would have been much more appropriate for a financier? It made no sense, which meant that the motivation was not obvious. Jameson poured himself another scotch with the mounting excitement. He was sure he had found a chink in an enemy’s otherwise impregnable armor. Whitechapel University merited closer study.
He fished out his phone to check his e-mails. Amongst the offers for introductions to broad-minded ladies, Canadian drugs, or techniques for enlarging his sexual organ, he found a message from Inspector Fowler. Jameson had asked him to run the name Rhian Jones through the police computers.
She had no criminal record nor was she suspected of criminal associations, although she had been the victim of a serious crime. He sipped his scotch and opened the attached file, not expecting too much. The police had funny ideas of what constituted serious crime, depending on the latest political initiative. He was surprised to read that she had been hospitalized in an assault that had also killed her boyfriend. Reading between the lines, rape was the likely motive.
She was the only survivor, the assailants apparently being ripped to pieces by a pack of feral dogs that had never been traced. It was, he supposed, not impossible for some domestic dogs given too much latitude to run free and form a pack. It happened not infrequently in lambing country like Wales. Farmers were legally permitted to shoot dogs straying onto their land. The girl had been bloody lucky to be unconscious when the dogs struck.
Jameson read the next paragraph twice just to make sure he had not consumed too much scotch. The attack had taken place in Ealing. A pack of feral dogs in suburban West London was about as likely as a street gang of bishops. Actually less likely, now he came to think about it.
Fowler had added a note. The detective sergeant who dealt with the case was an old mate, so he had given him a ring for the off-the-record story. Apparently a property speculator was trying to remove protesters off some land for development. It seems likely that he hired the gang to carry out the clearance and that they brought fighting dogs with them. Off the record, Fowler’s mate surmised that the dogs had turned on the gang in the excitement.
No further action was taken because the girl clammed up, probably preferring to forget what had happened to her. She was found naked, her clothes torn off. Plus no one was left to charge. The gang were all dead and the speculator’s corpse was discovered a few weeks later in a car park. Presumably one of his own dogs had turned on him. The animal was never traced, but, under the circumstances, little effort was expended and the case was closed.
Jameson closed his eyes, recalling the large attack dog at the gangland massacre in the scrapyard. He flicked through the file on the ExCel shambles to refresh his memory. As he thought, some witnesses talked of a dog attacking the “robot drone” before it exploded.
It seemed that where Miss Jones went, a fighting dog was not far behind. Karla would have detected if the girl was a werewolf or some other kind of daemon. She had to be human, which only left one possibility. Frankie had lied to him. The Celtic brooch wasn’t a protective spell, and Frankie hadn’t given it to Rhian. It was something old, from Wales maybe. It had infected the girl with daemonic possession. Karla wouldn’t have been able to detect that when Rhian was in human form.
He poured himself another scotch and reflected. His duty was to inform The Commission so that they could eliminate the problem. That meant eliminate Rhian Jones. But she didn’t seem to be berserk. She hadn’t harmed anyone, at least not anyone Jameson gave a fig about. Gangsters, gangers, and the bent businessmen that hired them were fair game as far as he was concerned. He had topped quite a few lowlifes himself over the years.
And the girl did have Frankie’s help, the witch being another consideration. Rhian was more than Frankie’s assistant. Jameson had not missed their close relationship, and Frankie did not have many friends.
He listened to the end of Mahler’s third, drinking scotch and remembering old times. Then, very carefully, because he was not entirely sober, he pressed the laptop’s delete-and-shred button.
CHAPTER 22
LONDINIUM
“Okay, toots, are you sure you don’t want to have a bath or rub yourself down with virgin olive oil?” the mobile asked. Or rather, the daemon on its front screen said, with a salacious grin and a wink. “You can use me to take a few photos.”
“Is that thing for real?” Rhian asked.
Frankie regarded the phone with distaste.
“I’m afraid so. I’ve tried turning it off but it won’t stay switched off. I should have paid more attention to Sefrina. You recall she used words like possess and contaminate as well as program. I just assumed it was geek jargon, but she meant them literally.”
“Five thousand quid is starting to look like a modest sum for having to put up with this,” Rhian said.
“How about you, cutie?” the daemon asked Rhian, sticking a 3D holographic head out of the phone to eye her up and down.
“How about I try turning you off by pounding you with a brick,” she replied sweetly.
“I’m too important,” it said smugly.
The phone stopped speaking but made a disgusting slobbering noise instead. Frankie placed it face down on the table.
“I suppose we ought to go,” Frankie said.
“Promise me you won’t take any risks,” said Gary, taking hold of Frankie’s hand.
“I’ll be fine,” Frankie said. “I’ve got my bag of magical tricks and wolf-girl at my side. What can go wrong?”
Gary looked unconvinced. He seized Frankie by the shoulders and held her tight, kissing her hard on the mouth. The phone groaned and made wet sucker noises while Rhian looked at the ceiling. She would have thought that Gary and Frankie could have restrained themselves at their age. It was bad enough putting up with that bloody machine, without a couple of randy geriatrics unsettling her stomach.
They took a taxi to the Museum of London since they were on expenses. Frankie had extracted their destination from the mobile. She wrapped it in a hand towel in her shopping bag to deaden any noises it might choose to make on the journey. Nevertheless, it did its best to embarrass them by screaming out muffled homilies such as “take me harder, big boy” and “I need to go wee wee.” The taxi driver examined Rhian and Frankie carefully in his mirror, but they gazed stonily and silently out of the windows. He seemed to decide that he was hearing things.
At the Museum they bought a couple of tickets for the Roman Fort Experience and waited for the tour to start outside. They leaned on a rail and looked down into sunken gardens overgrown with weeds and yellow buttercups at the exposed remains of the Old London City Wall. A tourist information board informed them that this had originally been the western fortification of the Roman Fort that had stood in the north west corner of Londinium. Only the lowest levels were original, the rest being medieval reconstructions on top of Roman foundations.
“The wall was six meters high and two point four meters thick. It ran for one point nine miles around the city,” Rhian read. “It was built in 110 ad. Apparently there are more sections exposed across the road in Noble Street.”
“Do tell,” Frankie said, less than bowled over.
The guide appeared, leading a small crocodile of tourists, including Americans in the inevitable baseball caps and Chinese with multiple camera gadgets festooned around their necks. The guide was a young blonde woman with an Oxbridge accent. Her badge indicated that she was a volunteer. Their ranks were traditionally made up of coffin dodgers finding something to do between stopping work and taking up permanent residence in a senile dementia ward. The girl probably had a good degree in history and hence was unemployable.
“Names in London often have ancient provenance. For example, in 1969, eight dog skeletons were unearthed from t
he Roman layer in the trench outside the eastern wall at Houndsditch. However, memory of the Roman fort seems to have completely disappeared until it was discovered during modern building works,” the guide said. She sounded bored.
“Typical of the English to remember their pets and forget their soldiers,” said a tourist in a Germanic voice.
Frankie and Rhian tacked themselves onto the group well to the rear. They tried to ignore muffled noises like a Brontosaurus breaking wind erupting at irregular intervals from Frankie’s bag.
The guide took them to the next batch of wall in Noble Street, a part that was much better preserved, with a turret at least five meters high.
“The difference between the Roman stonework and the later medieval is clear on this section,” said the guide. “Note that the Roman stone has a red tile layer.”
She walked across the well-maintained lawn to indicate the horizontal tile layer. Photoflashes bounced off the wall behind her.
“Only the outer skin of a Roman fortification would be dressed stone, with the intervening space filled with rubble and concrete. The tiled layer was to box off a section and provide stable foundations for next story. This design added rigidity, which was useful if you had a bunch of unruly barbarians hitting the wall with battering rams.”
She paused, waiting for laughter which failed to materialize.
“Now we will proceed to the remains of the fort’s westgate which is preserved underground. Please follow me through the medieval archway beside the turret.”
Frankie and Rhian dutifully obeyed, keeping station at the end of the crowd. A spiral staircase on the other side of the archway dropped them a level into a large vault that looked as if it had once been a cellar. It smelled dry and dusty like an old tomb. The floor had been removed and dug away to reveal foundations and brickwork. A recorded tour-guide spiel started up from hidden speakers somewhere in the roof. Spotlights lit up various sections in turn as the voice explained the meaning of the excavations. The illuminations gradually led the tour party around the vault towards the far side.
Frankie pulled Rhian behind a wall so that they were hidden in shadow. She waited until the tourists had left the vault by another staircase and they were alone before getting out the mobile. The light from its screen was their only illumination.
“Right, you’re supposed to be our guide, so guide us,” Frankie said to the daemon-face.
“Climb down there,” it said, sulkily.
“Oh great, I just knew it,” Frankie said, scrambling down into the excavation. Rhian followed, sliding the last few feet and trying not to think what it was doing to her Armani jeans. She wondered whether she could charge a replacement pair to expenses.
The daemon pointed silently ahead, towards the remains of one of the gate towers. It was slow progress as the floor was uneven and stonework projected randomly. Rhian caught more than one crack across the shin. Reaching the tower, they entered the ruins through a small ruined archway. A spiral staircase of stone dropped into the darkness.
“Go down,” the daemon said, so they did.
They went down and around in the gloom until Rhian had completely lost her bearings.
“I don’t understand how this could be here,” Rhian said. “We must be down to the upper tube levels by now.”
“Uh-uh, no tubes, we have left the real world behind. This is the Otherworld, Rhian. Can’t you feel it?”
Rhian felt tired, but otherwise normal.
“Shouldn’t we have passed through a portal or gate or something?”
“That’s the human way using magic. We are following a daemon path. Daemons can walk between the worlds and take attuned humans with them. Isn’t that so, phone?”
“Just get on with it,” the daemon replied.
They went deeper, until Rhian spotted light filtering up from below. Two more twists of the spiral and they emerged through a door onto packed earth beneath a large arch. Rhian blinked in the sunlight coming in from behind them, and gazed at herself in astonishment.
The Armani jeans and smart jacket had disappeared, replaced by a long, pale blue woolen dress belted below her breasts in a high waistline. It was fastened by a metal brooch on top of each shoulder. Under it she had a sort of off-white, long-sleeved chemise in linen that dropped to her knees. The clothes were bulky but not uncomfortable.
She looked at Frankie and did a double-take. The woman wore a sleeveless pure white silk ankle-length dress also fastened with shoulder brooches. A scarlet strip threaded with gold wire decorated the hem. She had a scarlet cloak fastened over her left shoulder and hanging off her right hip. Frankie’s hair was most un-Frankie-like. The style wound it up in a complex beehive held in place by a jeweled gold band at the front. Rhian noticed that the brooches fastening Frankie’s clothes were made of silver and studded with gems, while her own were cheap metal.
“Is there a problem, lady?”
The speaker was a man in a scarlet tunic. He had a broad leather belt around his waist supporting a sword in a brown leather sheath on his left side. The weapon looked functional rather than decorative.
Frankie held out her hand with the shopping bag, which still looked like a shopping bag. When Rhian failed to respond, Frankie said, “Splish, splosh, girl,” without looking at her.
Rhian took the hint and the bag.
“Not at all, Centurion, I was merely considering how much safer I feel protected by such well-built fortifications manned by such estimable soldiers,” Frankie said, lowering her head and fluttering her eyes. “One never knows when rebels may strike.”
“You needn’t concern your pretty head about the ghastly little Brits, lady. We’ve thrashed them so soundly that all they are good for is slaves.”
He nodded in Rhian’s direction, without taking his eyes of Frankie. The penny dropped. Rhian had assumed she was dressed as Frankie’s younger friend or maid because her clothing was inferior. It hadn’t occurred to her that she was slave to Frankie’s Roman lady. And as a Welsh girl she wasn’t ecstatic about the ‘ghastly little Brits’ tag. Bloody English, she thought, before remembering that the centurion was a bloody Roman. The English would be living in a bog somewhere on the continent. One pack of arrogant bloody imperialists was, she reflected, not unlike another.
“Well, I must be on my way,” Frankie said.
“If there’s nothing further I can show you,” the officer said reluctantly.
Frankie swept out from the arch. Rhian glanced around curiously before following her. The arch was a gateway, and behind them was a straight track to another gateway that was closed. To each side were two-story buildings with sand-colored walls and red corrugated roof tiles. The rest of the space was filled with one story, long narrow buildings in precise rows: barracks, she realised.
She hurried after Frankie, passing between two sentries who stood at attention holding Roman curved shields and spears. They had swords in sheaths on their right sides, but no helmets or armor. They were dressed in off-white knee-length woolen tunics.
One of them winked at her. He probably would have had a comment to make had the officer of the guard not been present. From the outside, the top of the gate was marked by alternating white and red stone to make an archway. The gatehouse was also a tower, with little square windows on the second floor. Each had its own decorated archway of alternating colored stone. The fort was intended to inspire shock and awe, not just by its strength but also by its sophistication. The “ghastly little Brits” in their wooden shacks would have seen nothing like it.
A sentry stood guard on the top battlements. He must have an amazing view all the way up the Thames to the west and to the hills that delineated the Thames basin. The same hills marked the boundaries of modern London. He leaned over, caught Rhian’s eye, and wolf-whistled at her. She stuck her nose in the air and turned away, reflecting that the behavior of the London male was unchanged over two millennia.
An earthen track ran due west from the fort. She was a little disappointed
not to see a famous Roman road. Presumably they had not yet all been built. She noticed a cluster of small white constructions about the size of a garden shed lining the track some distance away. Some were pyramidal and others like squat columns.
“Frankie, what are those?”
“Tombs of wealthy citizens. Roman law prohibited burial of corpses within city limits for hygienic reasons. That’s how archaeologists know that Roman cities were abandoned as going concerns long before English immigrants moved into an empty land. They found corpses were buried within the city walls.”
The Welsh tradition remembered English barbarians swarming over British land and had another explanation for the corpses.
“Frankie, why are we dressed like this?” Rhian asked.
“Because these are the clothes one would wear in Roman London.”
“I had Armani on and you wore British Home Stores,” Rhian said plaintively. “So how come I am the slave and you the lady?”
“Ah, I hoped you wouldn’t pick up on that. I suppose the answer is superior breeding,” Frankie said, with a smile. “You’re native British from the badlands to the west, and my ancestors were from within the Empire.”
Rhian let that one go.
“So why are you holding a very un-Roman mobile phone, and why didn’t the centurion comment?”
“It has no equivalent here, so for him it didn’t exist.”
“He noticed the plastic shopping bag,” Rhian said, raising it up to display its seventies psychedelic artwork.
“Yes, but he will have seen something more Roman-like. I don’t know, maybe a weaved basket or some such.”
Rhian digested this for a moment.
“Frankie.”
“Yes, Rhian?” Frankie said, somewhat tetchily.
“Why was he speaking English if he was Roman?”
“What makes you think he was?”
“What?”
Rhian replayed the conversation in her head. The centurion had suggested she was a “ghastly little Brit,” but he had used a single word. She focused hard. Britunculi, he had called the natives Britunculi. It seemed that language was mutable here and you heard the meaning, not the words.
Wolf in Shadow-eARC Page 35