She sent Leon’s mother the keys to his flat that she had had cut, but cut more copies first. She sneaked in and went from room to room, as if she might soak up some clue. For some time each room was as she remembered it, down to the mess, even. She turned up one day and the flat was a shell: his family had taken Leon’s things away.
The police to whom Marge spoke, those to whom she could speak, still implied that there was little to worry about, or, as time went on, little they could do. What Marge wanted was to speak to those other, odder police visitors. Repeated calls to the Scotland Yard would not yield any confirmation that they existed. The Barons whose numbers she was given were none of them the right man. There were no Collingswoods.
Were they who they had claimed? Were they a gang of miscreants hunting Leon for some infraction? Was it from them that he was in hiding?
Her first day back her coworkers were sympathetic. The paperwork she dealt with was easy and not important, and though the hesitancy of her colleagues’ greetings was wearing it was also touching, and she put up with it. She returned to her flat in the same reverie that had taken over as her default mood since Leon disappeared.
Something troubled her. Some part of the city’s afternoon noise, the car grumbling, the children shouting, the mobile phones singing polyphonic grots of song. Repeatedly whispered, getting louder until she could no longer mistake it, someone was saying her name.
“Marginalia.”
A man and boy had arrived, appeared silently before she had her keys out. One was to either side of her front door, leaning with a shoulder to the bricks, facing each other with the door in between them so they boxed her in. The young staring boy in a suit; a shabbier, weatherbeaten man. The man spoke.
“Marjorie, Marjorie, it’s a disaster, the record company’s been on the blower, no one likes the album. Get down to the studio, we’re going to have to remaster.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t …” She stepped back. Neither boy nor man touched her, but they walked with her, in perfect time with each other and with her, so she remained corralled by them. “What are you, what are you …?” she said.
The man said, “We was particularly hoping you might be able to persuade that guitarist to stop by again, lay down some licks. What was his moniker? Billy?”
Marge stopped moving, and started again. The man breathed out smoke. She staggered backward. She wanted to run, but she was hobbled by normality. It was daylight. Three feet away people were walking; there were vehicles and dogs and trees, newsagents. She tried to back away from the man, but he and his boy walked with her, and kept her between them.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” she said. “Where’s Leon?”
“Well that’s just it, isn’t it? We’d posalutely adore to know. Technically I grant you it’s less Leon that we’re chasing than his old mucker Billy Harrow. Leon I’ve a sense of where he might be—lose some weight, Subby says; I can’t help it I says, little morsels like that—” He licked his lips. “But Billy and we was just catching up and then it all went fiddly. So. Where’d he get off to?”
Marge ran. She made for the main road. The two stayed with her. They kept up with her, moving crabwise, the boy on one side, the man on the other. They did not touch her but stayed close.
“Where is he? Where is he?” the man said. The boy moaned. “You must excuse my loquacious friend—never bleeding shuts up, does he? Though I love him and he has his uses. But he’s not wrong also; he raises an excellent point—where is Billy Harrow? Was it you spirited the lad away?”
Marge was gripping her handbag to her chest and stumbling. The man circled her as she kept going, ring-a-rosying with the boy. People on the street were staring.
“Who are you?” Marge shouted. “What did you do with Leon?”
“Why, ate him up, bless your soul! But let’s see who you’ve been chatting to …” He licked the air in front of her face. She shied away and screamed, but his tongue did not quite touch her. He smacked his lips. He breathed out, another jet of smoke, no cigarette in mouth or hand.
“Help me!” she shouted. People around her hesitated.
“See, it was easy to find you because of all the spoor dribbled between here and Leon-the-vol-au-vent, so I’d expect to …” Lick lick. “Not much, Subby. Tell the truth now, chicken, where’s old Billy?”
“You alright, love? You want a hand?” A big young man had approached, fists balled and ready. A friend stood behind him, in the same fight stance.
“If you speak again,” the shabby man said, not glancing at him, still staring at Marge, “or if you step closer, my lad and I will take you sailing, and you will not enjoy what’s under the mizzen. We’ll run you up a dress in taffeta. Do you understand me? If you speak we will bake you oh my god but the worst cake.” His voice was dropping. He whispered but they heard. He turned then and stared at the two potential rescuers. “Oh, does he mean it does he mean it we can take him you take the kid old flabby’s mine ready on the count of three only he does to be honest seem a bit lairy and et cetera. Want some cake?” He made a ghastly little swallowing laugh noise. “Take another step. Take another step.” He did not speak the last two words but exhaled them.
The birds still shouted, the cars complained, and a few metres away people were talking like talking people everywhere, but where Marge stood she was in a cold and terrifying place. The two men who had come to her aid floundered under Goss’s stare. A moment went and they retreated, to Marge’s horrified “No!” They did not leave, only stood a few feet farther away, watching, as if the punishment for losing their nerve was to spectate.
“Now if you’ll forgive that interruption …” And Goss licked the air around her again. Marge was clamped between the two figures as surely as if they actually touched her.
“Alright then,” Goss said at last, stood up straight. “I can’t get a snifter.” He shrugged at his companion, who shrugged back. “Seems not, Subby.” They both stepped back.
“Sorry to bother you,” Goss said to Marge. “We just wanted to check out whether you knew anything, you see.” She retreated. He followed, but not so close as before. He let her get away a little. She tried to breathe. “Because we’re so eager to find out what young Billy’s up to, because we thought he knew everything and then we thought he knew nothing, and then disappearing like that, we thought maybe he must know everything again. But I will be buggered if we can find him. Which”—he waggled his tongue—“means likely enough he has ways and means of not leaving his savour-trail. Wondered if the two of you had spoken. Wondered if you might’ve done a little magery-knackery-jiggery-pokery. I taste not.” Marge breathed in big shudders.
“Well, you mind how you go then, we’ll be on our way. Forget you ever saw us. It never happened. Word to the wise. Oh, unless if Billy does happen to give you a tinkle, do let us know, won’t you? Thanks ever so much, really appreciate it. If he contacts you and you forget to let us know, I’ll kill you with a knife or some such. Alright then? Cheers.”
Then, only then when the man and boy had, it could only be said, sauntered away, not until they had actually turned a corner and were out of sight, did the people nearby run to Marge—including the two who had aborted their rescue, ashamed-looking but mostly just terrified—and ask if she was alright.
Her adrenalin spiked and Marge shook and leaked a few poststress tears, and she was enraged with everyone there. Not one of them had helped her. Recalling Goss and Subby, though, Marge admitted to herself that she could not blame them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A DELEGATION OF FAT BEETLES WENT FROM PIMLICO BY WALLTOP and sub-pavement route to a workshop in Islington. They were ink-carriers, little slave things, experimental subjects imbued with temporary powers as part of a savant’s writing of an exhaustive volume of one school of magic, the Entomonomicon. The man’s writing was on hold, because, while individually they were as dumb as specks, the insects were collectivised under a gestalt field, were thinking like a b
rain, and were on strike.
Where they went birds circled in the air over the town hall. This unlikely flock—an owl, several pigeons, two feral cockatiels—were all familiars, high-ranking enough to be imbued with considerable portions of their masters’ and mistresses’ clouts. They were protesting where several particularly exploitative wizards worked, now struggling with ill-trained scab mannequins.
The idea was that under the stewardship of a UMA activist the coleopteric set would be a flying picket, would join the birds in their aerial circuit. It was reciprocation for the birds’ sympathy picket outside their own workplace the previous week. It had been a powerful symbol of solidarity: some of the strongest hexed assistants in the city feather-to-chitin with some of the weakest, predators avianly chanting alongside what would generally be their prey.
That was the plan. The press had been told to expect visitors. The UMA full-timer signalled to the circling birds that he would be back, and went to caucus with the newcomers. Around the corner in a tiny park, the beetles emerged from a crevice, little bullets of iridescent black waiting for their contact. They milled in leaf litter, gathered in an arrow shape as they heard footsteps.
It was not their organiser, however, who approached. It was a burly man in jeans and black boots, a leather jacket, his face covered by a motorcycle helmet. Waiting by the fence was another man dressed exactly the same.
The beetles, which had been waiting perfectly still, spread out a bit and concerned themselves with the mindless-looking business of insect life, as if they were just pootling around. But with growing alarm, the coagulate striker realised that the faceless man was bearing down on them, kicking aside the camouflaging undergrowth, raising his big biker boots, and bringing them down, right at them, too fast for them to scatter.
With each stamp tens of carapaces split and innards were pulped, and the aggregate consciousness ebbed and became a less sentient panic. The beetles scurried and the man killed them.
The UMA organiser turned the corner. He stood in the grey daylight, in the view of flaking Georgian facades, the prams and bicycles of passersby, and stared. After a horrified instant, he screamed, “Hey!” and ran at the attacker.
But the man continued his brutal mosh, ignoring the shout, murdering with each step. His companion stepped into the organiser’s path and punched him in the face. He sent him sailing, legs wide, blood arcing. The helmeted man grabbed him on the ground and punched him again and again. People saw, and shouted. They called the police. The two dark-dressed figures continued, one with a mad-looking murderous dance, the other to break the nose and teeth of the trade unionist, pounding him not quite to death, but so that his face would never ever look as it had done thirty seconds before.
A police car screamed in as the beating and the crushing concluded. The vehicle’s doors opened, but then there was a hesitation. The officers within did not come out. Anyone close enough could see the lead police shouting into a radio, listening to orders, shouting again, staying in the car and throwing up her hands in rage.
The two bikers backed away. In front of the aghast eyes of the locals, some demanding they stop, others ducking out of their sight, others calling the police again, the two men walked out of the garden and away. They did not get on any bikes: they walked, bowlegged and rolling like violent sailors, through the streets of north London.
When they were gone from sight the police emerged and ran to where the UMA organiser was breathing bubbles in his own spitty blood, and where the strikers were pasted into the earth. Two streets away, inklings of unease reached the avian picket. Their tightly controlled circuit became ragged, as first one then another scooted over the town hall roof to see what had happened.
They cried out. Their calls resonated in more than the conventional dimensions. So it was not very long until with a gust of presence Wati came speeding to the square. He tore into a plaster saint on the wall of a house.
“Bastards,” he said. He was guilty. His attention had not been fully on the action: he had become intrigued by the investigation into the names Dane had given him, the strangeness that underlay the city, the sheer unusualness of being unable to find what he wanted, here any sign of the missing kraken, from any statuette anywhere in the city.
He came too fast even for himself. His velocity skidded him out of the statue and into a Meissen shepherd boy on a mantelpiece on the other side of the wall. He bounced into a teddy bear, and back out into the statue again. He looked at the police and his comrade. If the officers even clocked the insect corpses, they did not think anything of them.
“Motherfuckers,” Wati whispered in the voice of architecture. “Who did this?”
The birds were still screaming, and Wati heard the siren of the ambulance as if it was joining in their cacophony. A quick fingering outreach: one of the cops wore a Saint Christopher, but the silver charm was almost flat, and Wati needed three-dimensionality to manifest. There was a beat-up Jaguar, though, just in earshot, and he leapt into the tarnished effigy at the car’s front. He stood, a motionless outstretched cat, and listened to the police.
“What the hell’s that about, ma’am?” the younger officer said.
“Search me.”
“It’s bloody criminal, ma’am. Just sitting there …”
“We’re here now, aren’t we?” the senior officer snapped. She glanced around. She lowered her voice. “I don’t like it any more than you, but orders are fucking orders.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ONE THING COLLINGSWOOD HAD ENJOYED IMMEDIATELY SHE joined the police—had been headhunted into the FSRC—was the slang. Initially it had been incomprehensible and delightful, nonsense poetry, all my ground this and his brief that, bird and the black and a bunce, monkeys and drums and nostrils, and the terrifying invocation of a snout.
The first time she had heard that last word, Collingswood had still not known how often she might meet, for example, composite guardian things put together by priests of an animal god (rarely), or invoked things that called themselves devils (slightly more often). She had thought the word a description, and she had imagined the snout Baron had been taking her to meet would be some insightful dangerous mandrill presence. The drab man who had simpered at her in the pub had been so disappointing she had, with a little motion of her fingers, given him a headache.
Despite that letdown, that police term always cast the shadow of a spell on her. On her way to meetings with informants she would whisper “snout” to herself. She enjoyed the word in her mouth. It delighted her when, as she sometimes did, she met or invoked presences that actually deserved the name.
She was in a coppers’ pub. There were countless coppers’ pubs, all with slightly different ambiences and clientele. This one, the Gingerbread Man, known by many as the Spicy Nut Bastard, was a haunt in particular of the FSRC and other officers whose work brought them up against London’s less traditional rules of physics.
“So I been chatting to my snouts,” Collingswood repeated. “Everyone’s freaking out. No one’s sleeping right.”
She sat in a beery booth opposite Darius, a guy she knew slightly from a dirty-tricks brigade, one of the subspecialist units occasionally equipped with silver bullets or bullets embedded with splinters of the true cross, that sort of thing. She was trying to get him to tell her everything he knew about Al Adler, the man in the jar. Darius had known him slightly, had encountered him in the course of some questionable activity.
Vardy was there. Collingswood glanced at him, still astonished that when he heard where she was going, he had asked to come.
“Since when the fuck are you into shit-shooting?” she had said.
“Will your friend mind?” he had said. “I’m trying to collate. Get my head around everything that’s happened.”
Vardy had been more distracted even than usual over the last several days. In his corner of the office the slope of books had grown steeper, its elements both more and less arcane: for every ridiculous-looking underground text was
some well-known classic of biblical exegesis. Increasingly often, too, there were biology textbooks and printouts from fundamentalist Christian websites.
“First round’s on you, preacher-man,” Collingswood had said. Vardy sat glumly and grimly, listening as Darius told boring anecdotes about standoffs.
“So what was the story with that guy Adler?” Collingswood interrupted. “You and him went at it once, right?”
“No story. What do you mean?”
“Well, we can’t find dick on him, really. He used to be a villain—he was a burglar, right? Never gets caught but there’s a lot of chatter about him, until a few years ago and all of it dries up. What’s all that?”
“Was he a religious man?” Vardy said. Darius made a rude noise.
“Not that I knew. I only bumped up against him the one time. It was a whole thing. Long story.” They all knew that code. Some Met black op, plausibly deniable, when the lines between allies, enemies, informants and targets were questionable. Baron called them “brackets” operations, because, they were, he said, “(il)legal.”
“What was he doing?” Collingswood said.
“Can’t remember. He was with some crew shopping some other crew. It was the Tattoo, actually.”
“He was running with the Tattoo?” Collingswood said.
“No, he was shopping them. Him and another couple of people, some posh bint—Byrne her name was, I think—and that old geezer Grisamentum. He was sick. That’s why Byrne was around. They were dobbing the Tattoo in it. Tattoo’d only been Tattoo for a little while, and they didn’t say, but they were hinting it was Gris who made him into it. All change, ain’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Vardy said.
“Oh, you know. Never the same friends, is it? All change now. Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”
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