“Said his landlady found him. Christ, his fucking landlady. Not even a girlfriend … Hell, boyfriend. Not even me.”
“Ollie,” Pete said, watching his meaty hands turn pink and white as he gripped the steering wheel hard enough to dent it. “This is not your fault.”
“He was my partner,” Ollie said. “I was meant to be looking out for him.”
“We don’t know the details,” Pete said. “Could have been anything. Could have slipped in the loo, completely accidentally.” Of course, the officers from Ollie’s own station, miles from the crime scene, wouldn’t be calling him if that were the case. Accidents that happened to coppers who worked CID, especially on an MIT, weren’t even always accidents. Connor had written off a few suicides in his day, gun-cleaning incidents, slip and falls, that sort of thing. Pete knew it and Ollie knew it, but offering him a ray of hope was just the thing to do.
McCorkle lived in Brixton, and Ollie crawled along Coldharbour Lane, past a mom-and-pop market and a pub, a café with its gate down for the night, and an upscale vintage shop.
“Place has changed a lot,” Pete said, to say something. Sitting with Ollie and yet being completely silent wasn’t natural. “My dad was in the ’81 riot, you know. First year on the job as a PC.” Ollie didn’t tell her to shut up, so she kept on as lights from patrol cars flared in the distance, gathered outside a pair of Victorian homes that had been chopped into flats, estate agent’s sign still hanging in a front window. “Never talked about it much. Imagine it bothered him, being an Irish kid forced to smash other kids with a truncheon unless he wanted to be done in himself. Think it put him off the job forever, in a way. He was never the kind of copper who talked about being the line, acted as if he were doing some great service.”
Ollie parked illegally near the phalanx of uniformed officers milling outside McCorkle’s flat, smaller bodies orbiting the two marked cars and the ambulance. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
Pete waited a respectful thirty seconds, until Ollie had found a plod who seemed to at least have enough brain cells to give him relevant details, before she joined him on the pavement. “What’s going on?”
“Trying to determine that myself,” Ollie said, hands twitching like he wished they were around the plod’s neck. “Listen, you—either let me in there or I’m walking over you. No real decision on your part.”
“Heath?” A tall figure wrapped in a blue coat cut through the uniforms and came to Ollie’s side. He was as trim as Ollie was wide, and together they cut an odd pair, even more so given the new bloke’s immaculate navy suit and shined shoes, even at the late hour. Dark curls slicked back from a high forehead, exposing delicate features, but Pete wouldn’t have crossed him. This one walked like the coppers Connor had detested—as if he were the sheriff of all he surveyed, protecting the villagers from the wolves.
“Who the fuck,” Ollie said, summing up Pete’s feelings, “are you?”
“DS Patel, from Lambeth,” the tall detective said, extending a hand. “I caught your man’s call-out.”
Ollie ignore the hand, so Patel turned it to Pete. “You’re Petunia Caldecott,” he said, snapping it back to his side when he recognized her. Pete was so used to the reaction from cops she barely let it rile her. Patel frowned. “Heard you went Section 8.”
“Do I look like I’m bloody Section 8?” Pete demanded. Patel considered, tilting his head.
“Felix Patel,” he said finally. “Pleasure’s all mine. I trust you’ll be fine to wait here while I allow DI Heath a look at the scene. Ask one of the plods to bring you a cup of tea.”
Pete opened her mouth, but she would have been speaking to air. Patel had already measured and dismissed her. His eyes were back on Ollie. “It’s bad, Heath,” he said. “I’m sorry to say it. Very bad.”
“I’ve worked MIT,” Ollie grumbled. “I can take it.”
“It’s not a murder,” Patel said, gently as he could. Pete watched Ollie’s face go from bulldoggish to kicked in the space of a breath.
“You sure you’re ready?” Patel said, putting a hand on Ollie’s shoulder. Ollie tucked his chin down into his collar, a gladiator tucking into armor and preparing to take a bad hit, and glared at the spot where Patel touched him. “Right,” Patel said. “Come along.”
“I’m coming,” Pete said. She moved to Ollie’s shoulder, so he could feel her there.
“You’re not a DI any more,” Patel said. “And even if you were, you’ve no jurisdiction on this side of the river. I’m doing DI Heath a courtesy for his partner’s sake.”
“For fuck’s sake, Patel.” Ollie’s voice was rough, echoing off the concrete entryway of the flat block. “She’s likely a Hell of a lot more well trained than your fresh-faced schoolboys here.”
Patel locked eyes with Pete for a moment, and she stared back, unblinking. She got it—Patel was a DS, probably looking to make his name. A cop suicide was a dodgy enough matter. If he let the Section 8 former DI wander around his scene, his halo would aquire a little tarnish.
Patel surprised her, though, by sneering and then nodding. He led them up the steps of the Victorian on the left, up another set on the inside, to the top floor. McCorkle’s flat was the entire attic, the grand house carved up into smaller spaces on the cheap. Fresh plaster hit Pete’s nose when they crested the stairs. McCorkle’s door stood open as the white moonsuited figures of crime scene techs went about their business within his living space.
Former living space. McCorkle wasn’t living there any longer, at least in his own skin. The moment Pete came within a few feet of his door, though, she could tell that something was still very much present in McCorkle’s flat. It started as vague unease, prickles like she felt before a storm broke over the city, all of the ions in the air cycling against her skin, and the pressure got faster and stronger as Patel lifted the tape for Heath, speaking to the crime scene unit but paying her no mind. Pete scrubbed at her forehead. She was just bruised a bit on her sixth sense, that was all. First the Hecate and then the lost library. She was uneasy being here, in the remains of the life of a man she hadn’t liked much in the first place. That was why she felt fingers on skin, the lightest of touches on her other senses, whispers through the Black just out of her hearing.
Patel stopped her at the tape and gripped her arm hard with a set of pincer-like fingers. “You touch anything, say anything—you sneeze while you’re inside this room—and you will need a team of specialists flown in from Norway to remove my boot from your arse.”
Pete looked at his hand on her, back at him, hoping the suggestion he should mind his personal fucking space came across clearly in her withering glare. “Don’t you worry, DS. I leave the brilliant deductions to Batman.”
“I know all about you,” Patel said, low. “None of that psychic bullshit, gone to a better place, messages from the back of beyond here. Heath’s lost his man and doesn’t deserve that.”
“I’ve got a message for you,” Pete said. “I know Ollie far too well to think he’d ever believe that shite, never mind want it. Now get your fucking hand off me or I’m not going to fucking smile about it.”
Patel grimaced, an abortion of the smug smile he’d no doubt been saving for the grand finale of Pete’s place-putting. “Heard about your temper. Figured they exaggerated.”
“Absolutely,” Pete agreed, as he let go of her. “Sweet as custard cake, me.” She didn’t pick up an impression from Patel, just a general sharpness, like he’d been made of metal and sealed off. Jack had said some blokes had more natural defenses against magic than others—the uber-normal, as it were. That was probably just as well. Patel wouldn’t embarrass McCorkle and by extension Ollie. He’d close it up quiet and quick, all the loose ends accounted for and the right paperwork filed, and the legend of Freddy McCorkle would become a ghost story to tell at closing hour down the pub.
“Oliver,” Patel said, at once all conciliatory smiles and low, soothing tones. “Let me take you through th
e timeline.”
Pete didn’t need the narration of Patel’s clipped private school accent. The blood told the story, and there was enough of it to paint every inch of her skin.
McCorkle’s body was in the center of the flat’s tight sitting area. The crime scene techs had put a plastic sheet over it, but one hand protruded, fingers splayed like a flower. A few inches away rested the kind of short, blunt all-purpose kitchen blade that held a serrated edge, also painted with blood spatter.
The biggest pool of blood was under the corpse, but an arterial spray had hit McCorkle’s sofa and dribbled down the front of his flat-screen telly, which was still playing a rerun of an international match between two countries whose flags Pete didn’t recognize.
“TV was on when first responders arrived,” said Patel. “Landlady came up to ask him to turn it down. She claims she didn’t touch anything, but, well…” Patel shrugged. “You know how little old women can be.”
Patel knelt down and twitched back the sheet. Pete saw Ollie flinch, but he hid it after a split second, his impassive, cowlike nonexpression in place. “One cut,” Patel said. “Pulled the knife all the way across before he passed out. Hit the carotid. I know it’s probably not a comfort, but he didn’t feel it for long.”
Ollie passed a hand over his face. “Forced entry. Something. Freddy wouldn’t just … wouldn’t just…”
“Not that we can see,” Patel said. “Of course, building’s not secure, and it is Brixton. But no, he’s been alone all evening according to his landlady. This was … this is unfortunate, Heath. I’m sorry.”
“I called him a twat,” Ollie said. “He’d misfiled some papers on the case we were working.”
“Heath, you really can’t look for blame or reasons in this sort of thing,” Patel said. “Trust me. It’ll drive you around the bend.”
Pete watched as Ollie visibly reined himself in, pulled up his spine, got back into the skin of the unflappable copper. “He wasn’t depressed, since I know you’ll ask. Wasn’t anything, really. Didn’t socialize much, always rushing off end of shift. I thought he had a girlfriend, or maybe he was gay and he didn’t want his new nick finding out…” Ollie hunched again, took a breath, and deliberately turned his back on the corpse. “I don’t know why this happened.”
“Can be anything,” Patel said. It was a line, but Pete was glad Ollie was too far gone to see that. “Don’t blame yourself, Heath.” He carried on with his guided tour of the scene, Ollie moving with jerky, numb motions beside him.
Pete turned her back on them, once Patel’s eyes were off her. The thread was still there, the tremble through the Black. McCorkle’s flat telescoped into a claustrophobic hallway that peaked into an A shape as the builders ran out of room next to the roof, closet on one side, bedroom and en suite on the other. The bedroom was still neat, free of blood, the bed crumpled on one side with a dent from McCorkle’s head still in his pillow.
Above the bed was a giant print, one of the generic street scenes of Paris you could buy from an IKEA, and the whispers in Pete’s mind rose to shrieks, from a great distance, across a vast and windy plain.
Not bothering with her shoes, Pete climbed onto the bed and grabbed the print by the edges, lifting it off the hook.
The blood was fresh enough that it gleamed in the low bedroom light, and it had dribbled down McCorkle’s bland coffee-colored walls in slow rivulets. The lettering was a bit bigger than Pete’s hand and she nearly fell at the onslaught of black magic on her senses. The message, though, was a simple one.
THE SERPENT BECOMES THE WORLD
CHAPTER 15
Patel was less than pleased with Pete’s discovery. In fact, she’d wager she’d never seen a detective from the Met get quite so volcanic, quite so quickly. She could still hear him cursing at Ollie in the other room, shouting at what a mess this was, since clearly he didn’t get up again after slitting his own throat and write us a fucking note. A uniform watched Pete with the stern glare of a young but earnest schoolteacher.
“Oh, calm down,” Pete told the plod. “Be grateful he’s not screaming at you, just because he can.”
“He’s a twat,” the officer said, clearly desperate for a sympathetic third party to relay that bit of information to. “Nearly got me fired last month because I had to go take a piss and left my partner alone at a perimeter.”
Pete looked back at the letters in McCorkle’s blood. She’d ended up here as a favor to Ollie, and the simple hope that if she tried hard enough to move on, to finish a job and find a bad apple without Jack, she’d be able to actually do it. To have closure.
But now … now they’d made it personal, and they’d killed someone to do it. Jack would never have let it go this far. He would have known what he was looking at the moment Carver’s body turned up in the museum. Wouldn’t have thrashed around in the dark for days and let McCorkle end up skewered. It had to be her fault. The necromancers who’d nearly happened on her at Wapping had decided to take a more direct route and reach her and Heath in one swift stroke. We know where you live. Even here, in the bosom of your copper’s sanctuary, you are not safe.
“You all right, miss?” said the constable. “Stuffy in here, ain’t it?”
“I’d murder a glass of water,” Pete said. “Could you be a love? If I go out there I think Patel’s liable to rip off my face and spit down my neck.”
The constable snorted a phglemy laugh. “Sure, miss. You wait here like he said though, yeah? I need this job.”
Pete sighed. If this was the caliber of soul populating the new, young Met, the criminal underworld should be throwing a fucking soirée.
As soon as the constable vanished into the en suite, Pete went for McCorkle’s drawers. She could explain McCorkle topping himself, miserable bastard that he’d been, but not the writing—word for word what Morningstar had read to her from his bloody book, hidden in a place that the crime scene techs wouldn’t have found for days, if not weeks—plenty of time for McCorkle to be filed as a suicide and the file to be pushed to the bottom of Patel’s pile. Plus there was the small matter of whoever had orchestrated this little abattoir choosing McCorkle in the first place. He had no history with occult crimes and even less history with the Black.
Morningstar could conceivably have had time to do it—he could have sent Dreisden and his razor after McCorkle—but she’d been in his study, within strangling distance, and he’d let her walk out again. Besides, Morningstar wasn’t about knives in the back. He was a shock-and-awe type, assaulting the wicked with the righteous fury of his own self-importance.
And neither Morningstar nor the Order explained the black magic. The necromancer who’d gone after McCorkle wanted something from her, had practically painted her name on the wall along with the phrase.
Pete didn’t put stock in prophecies, and for all she knew the phrase about the serpent was as well-known as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” among necromancers. There was a plethora of serpents in Revelation, even, the fan fiction of religious texts: And the dragon fought and his angels. Slithery things were all over magic texts, from Babylon to the Golden Dawn. But if the necromancer was reaching out to her with the tip of his blade, then what, exactly, was the message Pete was supposed to receive?
Jack would know. Pete tossed the drawers faster, hearing the water shut off and the constable begin his plodding return to the room. Jack would know, which was no bloody help to her, because the necromancer hadn’t reached for Jack. He’d reached for her.
The power in the flat was still up. Small ice picks in the base of her skull told Pete that magic was here, and her talent whispered to her to let it in. It would fill her up, consume her, drown her in power, but what a sweet death it would be, suffused with all the power the Black had to offer. Pete bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard. Pain could usually pull her back when things threatened to get hazy, and she yanked open the last door, hearing Patel snap a question at the plod and the plod answer—Just wanted a cup of water.
She’s a fucking menace and it’s a murder scene now, Constable. Get back in there.
Any other time, Pete would have been flattered that Patel held her in such regard, but now she was merely beginning to sweat. If anyone saw her, Patel would toss her in lockup. He was an intractable bastard and Ollie had already had to convince him not to arrest her simply for finding the writing.
McCorkle didn’t have much in the way of possessions—no box of keepsakes, no photos, not even an awkwardly hidden stash of porno.
The drawer refused to close when she shoved it back, and Pete rattled it, keeping one eye out for the constable. A gurney had arrived to take McCorkle on to the Lambeth mortuary, and she heard Patel snap an order before his footsteps started down the hall to the bedroom.
“Shit,” Pete hissed, jamming her hand into the thin space between wood and wall. That was one benefit of being petite—she could reach the tight spots. Pickpockets and coppers, Connor had said. The two trades that rewarded quick hands and devious minds.
Her fingers brushed a bundle attached to the underside of the wardrobe with DIY tape, and Pete snatched it. It was a plastic Tesco bag, wrapped round and round something that smelled like a cross between a dodgy restaurant and rotting orchids. When she touched the plastic, the Black flared again, a veritable flash flood of power cascading over and around her mind, clawing with small fractious fingers to be let inside.
Pete shoved the mess into her jacket, kicked the drawer shut, and leaped across the room to a sitting position on the bed, just as Patel burst in.
“I hope you have something damn impressive to say about all this, Miss Caldecott, because otherwise I’m going to arrest you right now.”
Pete looked up at him. Patel’s cheeks had flushed to a deep magenta, and his regal nose flared with every breath. She considered for a moment, keeping her arm clamped to her side to hold the bundle against her stomach. “Nothing comes to mind.”
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