by Maynard Sims
“Well, I think the last case we worked knocked the stuffing out of her.”
“It was nasty,” Harry said.
“And then some. We went in believing it was a residual haunting, which is just a playback of past events, no spirits involved, like pressing play on a DVD. Anne Boleyn in the Tower of London is a residual.”
“I know what a residual is,” Harry said. “I’ve encountered one or two in my time.”
“Right. The family who lived in the house in Horringer reported seeing a man walking through a wall in their living room, carrying a scythe. Vi did the research and found that the site their house was built on back in the 1970s was once a farm, and she extrapolated from that, that what they were seeing was probably the echo of a farm worker who had met his death while going about his business. And the records bore that out. A worker at the Maddox farm had died when he’d fallen into a combine harvester back in the 1950s. So we went to the house to confirm this and to reassure the family that there was nothing to be concerned about.”
“But Vi was wrong.”
Jason nodded. “It wasn’t a residual. It was an intelligent haunting. The spirit was very much real and knew we were there. It attacked us. I did a little digging when I came out of hospital, and it seems it was the spirit of Maddox himself. He’d discovered his wife was having an affair with one of the workers and killed them both with the scythe, buried his wife in one of his fields and threw the worker into the harvester, and then he hanged himself in the barn. All his rage was unleashed when Vi tried to get him to leave. I was badly beaten up, as was Vi, and she also sustained a slash across her back from the scythe that required fifty stitches. We were lucky to get out with our lives.”
“So it must have affected her.”
“Of course. She’s been a paranormal investigator most of her adult life and never been injured before. But that wasn’t it. The main reason she took it so badly was that she didn’t research the haunting properly. And she blamed herself for my injuries. I was in hospital for six weeks, and she didn’t visit me once. I don’t think she could face me.”
“And now?”
“We’re back on track. It wasn’t her fault. She was going on reports from the newspapers of the day. We went through them together and both agreed the haunting was harmless. I was as mistaken as she was and just as much to blame. I don’t think she’s quite back to one hundred per cent, but she’s getting there. Why do you ask?”
Harry leaned back in his seat. “I’m not sure. There’s something about this case that isn’t hanging right. I can’t quite make up my mind whether this stuff about Strasser is genuine, or whether Vi just wants us to find her niece.”
“Do you think Vi would lie to you?”
Harry shook her head. “I wish I could answer that. I honestly don’t know.”
“Then we’re going to continue this?”
“For the time being.”
“So have you picked your team yet? Are you going to introduce us?”
Harry gave him a weary smile. “This is it. You and me. We are the team.”
“Are you serious?”
“Until I know for certain that Strasser poses some kind of supernatural threat. If that proof comes through, I reevaluate the situation, but until that happens I’m afraid we’re just going have to work this up ourselves.”
“Vi won’t like it.”
“That’s why we’re not going to tell her,” Harry said.
Chapter Eleven
Harry opened the folder Jason had given him and sat looking at a photocopied photograph of a young, pretty, blonde woman. Violet wasn’t wrong. This could have been Alice’s twin sister. There was a slight difference in the shape of the nose, but the resemblance was fairly close. He read through the news clippings, and offered the folder to Jason.
He shook his head. “I read it on the Tube. What do you make of it?”
“Strasser—or should we start calling him Markos?—sounds like a nasty piece of work, and I can understand Vi’s desire to get Alice away from him.” He lifted the picture from the folder. “And he obviously has a thing for blondes.”
“So do I,” Jason said. “But I don’t go round abducting them and keeping them prisoner.”
“May I remind you that Alice walked out of a secure clinic of her own free will and, as far as we know, went back to him? What does that tell us about her state of mind?”
“You met her parents. I should imagine she left to avoid suffocation.”
Harry dropped the picture back on the desk. “Exactly. We could be dealing with nothing more than a case of teenage rebellion—a bit extreme, but all the facts in this case point to that.”
The telephone on his desk buzzed twice. An internal call. He picked it up. “What can I do for you, Martin?”
“Strasser,” Martin Impey said. “You asked me to dig. I have done. I’ve uncovered a few things you might find interesting.”
“We’ll be right down,” Harry said, cradled the phone and turned to Jason.
“My researcher has a few facts about Strasser…sorry…Markos.”
They took the elevator and five minutes later were sitting in Martin’s office.
There were three desks in the office One of them, the biggest, was Martin’s; the other two were occupied by his assistants. Martin introduced them to Jason. “Maggie and Christine, my right and left hands,” he said.
Jason had been shown to a seat and was staring with admiration at the bank of computer screens covering one wall of the office. Each of the desks had wireless keyboards, a computer mouse and flat screen monitor. “I’m impressed with the tech,” he said.
“Eyes and ears on the world,” Martin said with a grin. “We were upgraded last month after years of waiting. We have some powerful servers in the room next door. It gives us access to worlds I could only have wet dreams about before.”
“You’re a geek,” Jason said.
“And proud of it.”
“Well you know what they say: ‘The geek will inherit the earth’,” Jason said.
Harry rolled his eyes. “Martin, what have you got for me?”
Martin switched his attention. “Yes, right. Well, for starters, Erik Strasser isn’t really Erik Strasser. He’s really—”
“Anton Markos,” Harry finished for him and watched Martin’s face fall.
“You knew? Do you how long it took us to discover that?”
“I only found out myself last night. Too late to call you and let you know.”
“I suppose you know about his arrest in Greece and subsequent release?”
Harry nodded.
“How did you find out?”
“Vi Bulmer told me.”
Martin let out an exasperated sigh. “Vi bloody Bulmer. I might have known. The department spends a couple of million on this computer setup, and Vi achieves the same results with what, a bloody telephone?”
“She has an extensive network of contacts,” Harry said.
“And a very large and well-read library,” Jason put in. “Plus the fact that her brain is a huge repository of arcane and obscure details.”
“She’s a bloody witch,” Martin said with a smile. “Well, let’s have all of it. What else did she tell you?”
As Harry filled him in, Jason struck up a conversation with Christine Buckley, the younger and prettier of Martin’s assistants.
“Martin, do you have photos of all Markos’s victims in Greece?” Harry asked.
Martin leaned over his desk and started hitting his keyboard. “Screen four, Harry. To your left.”
Harry walked across to the bank of screens and stood in front of the fourth one along. A few seconds later the images of four young women appeared. All of an age. All pretty. All blonde. Anton Markos definitely had a preference. “Jason,” he called. “Take a look at these.”
Jason broke off his conversation with Christine and went across to where Harry was standing. “Over what period of time were these girls abducted?” Harry asked.
“Over a period of three years.”
“And the police did nothing during that time?”
“From the reports I read, no. Three of the girls were released during that period. All admitted being with him, all said they had been with him voluntarily. All had developed an addiction to heroin.”
“And the fourth girl?”
“She was still with him when they found her. Drugged out of her mind on crystal meth. He’d moved on from heroin by the time he took her. She wasn’t so adamant that she was there by choice. It was her evidence that the police based their case on.”
“Precarious.”
“Very. It took three months of intensive digging into Markos and his life, during which time they located the first three girls. With their identical stories that they’d gone with him voluntarily, the police had nothing but the fourth girl’s testimony. A week before the trial was due to start, the case fell apart. The fourth girl changed her story and said she’d been with him of her own free will. All the police could run with in the end was having sex with a minor. The legal age in Greece is fifteen. That girl there, the second one along, Alysia Carras, was only fourteen when Markos started having sex with her, so they proceeded to trial with that. But the case never reached the courtroom. It looks like palms were greased—pardon the pun—and the charges went away. Anton Markos was released and dropped off the face of the earth. At least, as far as I can ascertain.”
“And then he resurfaces in Germany as Erik Strasser,” Harry said.
“Indeed.”
“Anything else? Vi tells me he’s the high priest of a coven based here in the UK. Has she got her facts wrong?”
“Ah,” Martin said. “Yes and no. He does lead a group of quasi-religious nuts, but I wouldn’t describe it as a coven as such.”
“What would you describe it as then?” Harry said. He was growing impatient. He wanted something, anything that would show Violet Bulmer was telling the truth.
“They call themselves the Children of Hecate. It’s a cult who worship a Greek goddess of that name.”
“So witchcraft yes or no?”
“Yes and no. Are they Satanists, no; are they Wiccan, again no. But Hecate is the goddess of witchcraft and sorcery, so yes. If you were painting the history of witchcraft on a very large canvas, they’d probably occupy a tiny spot in the bottom left-hand corner. I really know precious little about them, and despite all this,” he swept an arm around the room, “so far, I’ve found out bugger all.”
Susan Tyler walked into her office and picked up the ringing phone. “DI Tyler.”
“Detective Inspector, it’s Duncan McBride,”
“Hello, Professor,” Susan said. She’d recognized the Scottish lilt to his voice before he introduced himself. “What can I do for you?”
“Could you pop along to the mortuary? I think I have something you’re going to want to see.”
“Concerning the body this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you tell me over the phone?”
“Yes, I could. But I think you’ll want to see for yourself.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
The mortuary was situated in the basement of University College Hospital. Susan had been there a number of times before, but visiting the place still filled her with dread. She wasn’t sure if it was the clinically spotless white tiles; the stainless steel tables, each with a drainage gulley; the sharp, antiseptic smell of the place; or maybe the banks of steel doors lining the walls, each a door to a refrigerated tomb. The presence of death freaked her out, and the experience of being here lived with her for days afterwards.
She pushed through the rubber entrance doors. McBride was there, his chubby form hovering by a stainless steel table. He was dressed in blue scrubs that barely contained his girth, his fluffy hair escaping from a blue scrub cap. Goggles were perched on his forehead and he wore latex gloves on his hands.
“Professor McBride,” she said as she entered the room.
McBride’s assistant was standing at a steel table holding another corpse, weighing something red on a set of scales that hung from the ceiling. Susan averted her eyes.
McBride turned to face her, his cheeks ruddy, his eyes large, magnified by the rimless spectacles he wore. In his hand was a long surgical knife, slightly curved. It glinted in the fierce overhead light. Duncan McBride looked like a slightly malevolent dwarf, a psychotic Doc from Disney’s Snow White. “I’m sorry,” he said in his soft Edinburgh burr. “I have a hectic schedule today, so I had to make a start. Come closer. You’re not squeamish, are you?”
Susan took a breath. “No,” she said. “I’ve seen dead bodies before. This isn’t my first postmortem.”
“That’s right, it isn’t,” McBride said. “You came down for that really nasty rape and homicide last year. I remember now.”
“What was it you wanted to show me?”
He stood aside, revealing the body of the girl they had recovered from the banks of the Thames. The only difference now was that she had a Y-shaped incision stretching from her pubis to her shoulders.
“I was just about to open her up. Want to watch? You’ll have to gown up, of course.”
“I’ll pass. What was it you wanted to show me, Professor?”
He looked a little disappointed. “Shame. I rarely get an audience—apart from Phillip here. And he’s seen it all before…many times. The novelty’s worn off now, hasn’t it, Phillip?” Phillip, his assistant, looked around at them, grimaced and carried on checking the scales.
“It’s this,” McBride said and pointed to the wound on the girl’s breast. “What do you make of that? Look at the shape.”
Susan leaned forward and looked at the wound.
“It’s deep, about six inches,” he said. “But the shape. Weirdest thing.”
“It’s a star,” Susan said.
“Yes, a star. Made by a knife with five blades. Five blades somehow joined together to make one weapon. I took a photo of the wound.” He walked across to the desk in the corner and came back clutching an eight-by-ten-inch color print. He handed it to Susan Tyler.
“When I first examined the body, I thought then that it had all the hallmarks of a ritual killing. The bound wrists and ankles, marks where the head was restrained, and now this.”
It not only showed a blown-up image of the wound, but McBride had taken a pen and connected the points of the star. She looked at the shape he had formed by joining them.
“It’s a pentagram,” she said.
“Indeed it is. Are there any covens active in the area?”
“Not that I’m aware.”
He looked disappointed again. “And then there’s this.” He pointed to a wound about three inches long, just above and to one side of the pubic bone—the crescent Miriam Jackley had pointed out to her at the riverside.
“Yes,” she said. “Miriam showed me earlier.”
“It was inflicted postmortem. The girl was dead when someone carved this into her. The shape of the stab wound, the crescent carving and the coin in the mouth indicate to me that there is an occult link to this. And you’re not aware of a coven operating around here?”
“I’ve had nothing across my desk suggesting there is.”
“And then there’s this. A small stamp on the back of her hand.” He lifted up the limp arm for Susan to see. On the back of the hand was a small, circular ink stamp.
“May I have a photo of this, and the wounds?”
“Of course,” McBride said. “Phillip, fetch the camera.”
Ten minutes later the photos were dropping into the printer’s collection tray.
“I wanted to s
how you firsthand,” McBride said, handing her the prints. “It might aid the investigation and help you find her killer.”
“How old do you think she was?”
“Sixteen. No more. Could be younger. Tragic. I hope you catch whoever did this.”
“Well, I’m going to try. Can I have a copy of your report?”
“Of course. I’ll get it sent over as soon as it’s typed up.”
Susan went back to her car and drove back to the station. She was starting to get a bad feeling about this case.
Chapter Twelve
“Vi, have you heard of the Children of Hecate?” Harry said. “It’s the name Markos’s followers give to themselves.”
“I’ve never heard that term used before.” Violet sat in her library, a pile of books stacked on the desk in front of her. She was still wearing her dressing gown. She hadn’t even showered yet. The email from her contact in Bremen had come in at seven, and since then she’d had her head buried in various textbooks and had been firing off emails to her contacts throughout the world. Personal hygiene had taken a backseat.
“How did you find out?” she said into the phone.
“Martin, here in the office. He and his girls were working on it all day yesterday, and again this morning.”
“So you’ve stopped doubting me?”
“Vi, I never—”
“Harry, you know better than to flannel me. I knew from the outset that I hadn’t convinced you, but I knew also that you would come round, once you’d dug a bit and discovered the facts for yourself.”
“Martin was right. You are a witch.”
“But a white one, Harry, not a black one. Never black.”
“So we’re moving forward. I was thinking of getting John McKinley to join the team.”
“McKinley? Do I know him?”
“You met him once. African American, tall enough to play for the Harlem Globetrotters.”
“Oh, John, yes. I remember. Charming man.”
“And a powerful psychic. I think we might need him.”
“I think you could be right. I got an email from my friend in Bremen. He’s found out why Markos was removed as CEO at Hematite Software.”