by Mark Hayden
Lucy inadvertently changed our plans next morning by being hungover. Lloyd was up and out very early, but because Lucy needed longer, we were still in the kitchen when Kirk Liddington rang me. I didn’t recognise his voice at first.
Fae Klass was back, and a breathy contralto said, ‘That man who was found murdered this morning. He was one of the Count’s special friends. From the Well. Thought you should know. Bye, big boy.’ He’d gone before I could open my mouth to say anything.
‘Who was that?’ said Mina.
‘Tom, could you find out if there’s been a homicide overnight?’
‘That was Cinderella,’ I said to Mina while Tom called the South Lancs control room. ‘Trouble is, I don’t know whose glass slipper she’s wearing.’
Mina gave me a pitying look and pointed to Sheriff Morton. ‘You have been spending too much time with him. Lucy says his metaphors are tied in more knots than … I don’t know what. See? It’s infectious. I’d better go and find Lucy something to wear. Do you think I’ll be going back to London today?’
‘I doubt it. Will Marcia get angry?’
Mina gave a very Indian head-shake of uncertainty and headed upstairs. ‘Who knows?’ she called over her shoulder.
Tom had missed that, of course, and had a grim expression on his face. ‘A solicitor was found in his office this morning by the cleaner at a firm called Sadler & Robertson. They’re a big noise in a big building, right in the middle of Manchester. I’ve told them not to disturb the crime scene until MI7 have paid a visit. It’s a nasty one, I’m afraid, and that’s not all: the deed store was opened and locked again afterwards.’
‘How do they know?’
‘Because Scene of Crime have already discovered microscopic blood droplets on the carpet leading from the victim’s office to the deed store. The killers wore impervious boiler suits, which are great at stopping your trace evidence being left behind, but they shed everything you pick up everywhere, and there was a lot of blood.’
‘We need Mina on this one. And we need to trample all over client confidentiality.’
He hesitated. ‘Why Mina?’
‘She found the pack, didn’t she? If the Count has been hiding assets with this firm, away from the Princess, she’ll find it. They may have taken the deeds and wiped the client records, but there will be evidence somewhere on their systems. In a cross-referenced file, an email, a Post-it note, a spreadsheet.’
‘It doesn’t need just her, this is my speciality, too. Sod it. I’ll give her a hand.’ He looked troubled. ‘Is this what Noble Cause Corruption looks like, Conrad? Using your authority to conduct a search I wouldn’t otherwise have the authority to carry out?’
‘Think of the Victorian police force, Tom. There was no professional standards or internal affairs departments, but was every bobby corrupt? No, not by a long way. The King’s Watch is a bit like that, and Hannah is trying to bring us even more up to date.’
‘I need to have a long conversation with the former DI Rothman after this.’
What on earth was going through this poor man’s head? ‘I think that’s a given. She’ll definitely want to speak to you. After she’s vented her spleen in my direction.’
‘Do you want to come?’
‘Definitely not. Do you think Lucy would mind a visit to Tara Doyle’s place? I can drop her at Southport first.’
‘I think she’d jump at the chance.’
The girls appeared at that point, with Lucy now dressed in one of Mina’s old kurtis, Mina’s leggings and a pair of Evie’s trainers worn with two pairs of socks because they were too big.
It was one of Mina’s least favourite kurtis, a sort of washed-out salmon pink, and it did nothing for Lucy. I tried to keep a straight face. ‘We’re going to see Tara Doyle. She’ll appreciate that you’ve made an effort.’
‘Noooooo…….’
I could still hear the echo when I went to get my guns from the safe.
23 — Dangerous Company
It was only when Tom pulled onto the motorway that it became awkward. Having Mina Desai as a passenger while he drove to a murder scene was not something he’d ever thought would happen, bearing in mind that he’d first met her at the scene of two violent deaths, her husband’s and the man who’d killed him. From the hints dropped by that weird Gnome character last night, Mina’s capacity for inflicting grievous bodily harm had not been diminished by a spell in prison.
Of course, she looked a lot better than when he’d arrested her. When she’d lifted her head that day to look him in the eye, and he’d seen what had been done to her jaw, he’d nearly stumbled over the wording of the police caution.
And now here she was, sitting in his car (after moving the passenger seat to suit her tiny frame), and deeply embedded in this insane world of Gnomes, magick and fairies. No, not fairies he thought: the Fae. Despite the evidence of his own eyes, he was still waiting to be informed that it was all part of an elaborate conspiracy. Every time his rational, lawyer/policeman brain told him that it couldn’t be true, two feelings reared up and slapped him in the face. First, it was the death of that werewolf creature. She hadn’t just died, she’d disintegrated.
He’d seen the light go out in people’s eyes when they passed on and felt a connection to their soul. This was different. It was like standing next to the hull of a spaceship during explosive decompression: all the creature’s life blew out of her.
The second feeling had come when Evie Mason got in his car last night and touched her chest. A ripple of cold water had passed down his spine, and the impenetrable hedge around Clarke’s bolthole became a gateway, and he’d been sucked into Clarke’s world of madness. As the car had passed over the threshold, a little bit of him had been left outside, and he wasn’t sure which part that was. Perhaps he never would be.
Lloyd Flint was another mystery. On the surface, he looked like a short, working class lad. Sounded like one, too. And then he had given Tom a small disk and told him to wear it all times. It was something called a Persona, apparently, and Lloyd had said, ‘It will blur your Imprint from Sorcery and put you slightly out of phase. Makes you much harder to track, and don’t worry if it doesn’t feel magickal. It is.’
Tom hadn’t understood one word of that, but when it came to magick he was happy to trust anyone that Clarke trusted.
‘It was easier for me,’ said Mina.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘You were miles away, Tom. I don’t blame you at all. It was so much easier for me to accept the world of magick because I have felt Ganesh’s presence, and because I was more worried about my relationship with Conrad than what he was getting up to. It wouldn’t have made any difference if he told me that he was taking up professional morris dancing, I would still have been more worried about whether we were compatible.’
And that was another thing: their casual acceptance that there were many gods, and that some of them could text you. Every time he tried to wrap his brain around that problem, it slipped out from under him and he found himself thinking about how Lucy was coping.
Coping rather too well if last night were anything to go by. There was a bigger age gap between Clarke and Mina than there was between Tom and Lucy, but sometimes Lucy seemed to be from a different generation altogether.
Tom loved a pint of Guinness, and would have one every night if he had an excuse to go to the pub; Lucy could go for days without alcohol, and then let go completely, and when she let go last night, she seemed to have bonded with Mina in that easy way that women have. After the third bottle from the Deputy Constable’s cellar, Lucy had even started calling Mina Rani. In an ironic way, of course, but still…
‘You have two sisters, don’t you?’ said Mina, interrupting his reverie again.
‘Fiona and Diana, yes. Fi’s a GP round the corner from Lucy’s place in Southport. Lucy’s even helped out with childcare occasionally. She’s a natural when it comes to children. Having so many younger half-siblings, I suppose.’
‘You haven’t met Conrad’s family, have you?’
‘No. I couldn’t believe it when I found out what his mother had done for a living.’
He risked a glance at her, and he saw that quirky smile at the corner of her mouth, and the glint in her eye that made her so attractive, once you saw past her emotional reserve and the pointy nose that dominated her face now that her jaw was fixed. Did she even know how attractive she could be, he wondered?
‘We have another forty minutes,’ continued Mina. ‘You tell me what it was like growing up in an ultra-respectable upper middle class English home, and I shall give you an insight into Conrad’s life at Elvenham. It may help you understand him a little bit more.’
When they got to Manchester, Tom used his police badge to get as close as he could to the enormous Botham Tower, and he reflected that Mina had discovered an awful lot about his marriage to Caroline (now a distant memory), and all that he’d discovered about Mary Clarke was that she liked bridge. If Mina didn’t have a criminal record, she would have made an excellent detective, which was probably why the shadowy Establishment of magick had snapped her up.
The only sign that the Tower had hosted a grim murder last night was the scrum of journalists being corralled by the in-house security team to a corner of the plaza in front of the entrance. For all but the seventh floor, it was business/life as usual. After all, over 5,000 people either lived or worked in the Tower, and this wasn’t a terrorist incident.
Once through the revolving doors, things were more complicated. All visitors had to convince security that they had business inside, and Tom could see a police support officer by one of the lifts. He flashed his warrant card at the barrier and vouched for Mina. The guard greeted him respectfully. ‘Lift six has been commandeered for the police, sir, and all the others have been programmed not to stop at the seventh floor.’
‘Thank you.’
The PCSO saw him coming and brought up her clipboard. He showed his warrant card again.
‘That’s good,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You’re on the list. The official perimeter is upstairs. I’m just the bell hop, so you don’t need to be logged in.’ She made a sweeping gesture towards the open lift. ‘I’ll take you up, sir, ma’am.’
The override key was in the control panel lock, and the PCSO pressed to close the doors, then thumbed the 7 button. ‘Who’s the SIO?’ said Tom.
She named a detective whose name he’d only seen on paper, then said, ‘Tracey Kenyon is the Crime Scene Manager. I think she muttered something obscene when she heard you were coming, sir.’
Tom knew that the PCSO hadn’t seen the body, or she wouldn’t be quite so light-hearted about things, and that was the last thought he registered before Mina shoved him in the ribs and pointed to the indicator. They were about to flash past the seventh floor.
‘It’s the Octet,’ said Mina, reaching into her bag.
Tom went to grab his radio, and the PCSO just stared at the numbers 8 … 9 … 10 …
Mina got her phone out and actually slapped his hand away from the radio. ‘Won’t work in here. Get by the doors and cover me when they open.’ Her thumbs worked furiously for a second, then she spoke into the microphone. ‘Conrad, we are being attacked. Botham Tower. Somewhere above the … seventeenth floor.’
She pressed something else, then snapped the phone out of its rubber case and got down on all fours, like a sprinter in the blocks, and yanked off her sandals. The lift stopped at the twenty-first floor, and the PCSO got out her can of CS spray. She and Tom moved towards the doors, with Mina hidden behind their legs. As much as you can hide a woman in a lime green tunic.
He felt a weight press on his ears, and that running water trickling down his back again. He opened his mouth to ask about magick, and nothing came out. Not a sound. At that point, the doors opened.
It was like lineout in rugby. Both sides trying to jam themselves into the tiny space of the lift doors, and Tom felt like he’d jumped into a prop forward, a short unmovable mass of muscle wearing a gas mask. Like the slippery scrum half, Mina shot through a tiny gap. Tom was starting to feel giddy, and couldn’t put up much resistance when the Gnome pinned his arms to his side and lifted him off the ground. By God, they were strong.
Behind the Gnome, Mina played dodge with a woman in camouflage sportswear, a branded parody of Clarke and Karina’s combat uniforms. Mina didn’t try to fight, but she did manage to slide her phone along the tiled floor like a curling stone. The phone skittered across the tiles and out of sight, Mina’s attacker hesitated, torn between the phone and Mina. She opted for Mina, and grabbed her arm, twisting it up her back.
Tom was dragged out of the lift, as was the PCSO. In seconds, they were inside the hallway of a substantial apartment, and suddenly he could hear again. The Gnome span him round and slammed him into the wall. Before he could catch his breath, his hands were in restraints and light, female fingers were going through his pockets.
‘This one’s got magick,’ said the Gnome with a strong Northern accent. ‘Who the hell is he?’
‘Another one of the Witchfinder’s pawns,’ said a woman he couldn’t see. Her accent was as Irish as leprechauns. ‘I think we’d better take him, too.’
Tom had been relieved of his phone, radio and warrant card. And then everything went black when a hood was jammed over his head. The unbreakable grip of a Gnomish arm propelled him out of the flat, along the corridor and into another lift. As soon as they got to the bottom, the magickal silence descended again. Oh shit, he thought.
‘You’re mean,’ said Lucy. ‘It would only take me two minutes to run in and get changed. Two minutes. That’s all.’
‘Sorry about that. Just try not to think of her as an Instagram star. Look on her as a … I don’t know. As a villain from Doctor Who, or whatever it was that made you hide behind the sofa when you were a child.’
‘Mamma and Dad arguing, mostly. And the nuns at the scuola elementare. They’d have made any child hide behind the sofa. I still don’t get it. How can Tara Doyle be two hundred plus years old? I checked before, and her parents are in loads of her Youtubes. Did she make it all up? What about all the kids she went to school with? I even know a couple of them. Are they all…’ she waved her hand. ‘Are they all simulacra? Is that a real word?’
‘It is, and they aren’t. Tara Doyle is a changeling. I told you.’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘Okay. Fair enough. I told you last night. Perhaps I should have told you before you opened the grappa.’
She pressed her hand to her head. ‘Don’t remind me. So, you mean that the fairies…’
‘Do not use that word, Lucia!’
‘Oy! You’re not my dad. Only he gets to call me that. So, the Fae swapped a child for … but how can she be two hundred years old and be a baby? How does that work?’
I really did tell her all this last night, you know. Tom was paying attention; in fact I saw him reach for his copper’s notebook at one point.
‘The Fae have two choices in the mundane world: to live as adults, ghosting their way through it like the Count of Canal Street, or they can change places, usually with a sick child. Even by the standards of the magickal world, it is a bit gross. You don’t want to know the details, not with a hangover, and especially not the details of how Tara Doyle got her ovaries.’
‘Uerp. Oh, dear God, no.’ She held her hand to her mouth for a second, trying to keep the bile down. ‘But a child’s body?’
‘It’s called Reversion, and it’s supposed to be truly horrible. You walk into the Reversion chamber – which is made of cold-forged iron – as a thirteen stone man and you are carried out as a four stone girl, and the Hlæfdige clear up the mess.’
‘What was that word again? I’m half Italian, remember, not half German.’
‘Hlæfdige. Old English word from which we get lady. They are neuter Fae, a bit like worker bees. They look like women, but they’re not. Auntie Iris was one, in Kirk Liddington’s story.’
‘And how should I behave?’
‘How would you behave if you didn’t know who she really was?’
‘Like a total fan-girl. I might diss her on Twitter afterwards, but not to her face.’
‘Then don’t change a thing.’
‘Right. And you’re sure it’s safe to accept hospitality. Don’t the stories say that it’s dangerous to accept fair… to accept Fae food?’
‘It’s dangerous to refuse. Would you walk into her house with your phone on Record and shove it in her face?’
‘No!’
‘Then take what you’re offered. Literally. The one and only golden rule is to think very carefully about accepting a non-material favour.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, Lucy, would you like me to make that café owner in Cairndale sell to you at a knockdown price?’
‘That was the worst Scouse accent I’ve ever heard. Try that in Caffè Milano and you’ll get lynched.’
‘Duly noted. Here we are.’
I pulled off the coast road opposite the beautiful stretch of golden sands north of Liverpool and leaned out of the window to press the intercom. The gates opened immediately, sliding back on well-oiled runners. ‘Did you notice how quiet it was outside?’
‘I did. No paps or stalkers.’
‘That’s Wards for you.’ A few seconds later, I added, ‘And that’s what you get when you spend seven and a half million pounds on a new house.’
Lucy surveyed the Greco-Roman pile that squatted on the top of a slight rise, nearly a quarter of a mile down the drive.
‘This Reversion thing,’ she said, ‘Does it boil away their taste, too?’
‘The Fae language is so secret, we only know a handful of words, and one of them is bling. They more or less invented it. You saw Mina’s new bracelet, I presume?’
‘That was beautiful. This is just gross. I’m not a fan of footballer’s architecture.’
‘You and me both.’
We left Mina’s Volvo in a car park that most country pubs would consider too large and followed the statues of nymphs holding flaming torches to the entrance portico. A heavy in leisurewear stood ready to open the way.