‘I saw an injured fox,’ she said lamely.
William chuckled with a note of relief. ‘I thought you were going to tell me you’d seen someone hanging around or something.’
‘What sort of someone?’
He tapped her hand reassuringly. ‘No one, darling. Highgate is one of the safest suburbs in London.’
‘Not for Alix Graves, it wasn’t.’
‘No, but then it looks like his murder was an isolated incident. The police think it might have been connected to his business interests - you know, his record label and that Full Moon Festival he used to organise, they think it might have something to do with a shady financial investor. So I doubt that has anything to do with the area.’
William was smiling now, but April wasn’t convinced. There was something about the way her father was talking and avoiding her eyes.
‘But who would be hanging around here?’ she persisted. ‘Someone from another school or something?’
‘No, no, the schools in this area, Ravenwood, Highgate School, they’re far too posh for knife-wielding teens, darling.’
‘So what made you think there might be?’
‘Footpads and brigands are a bit on my mind at the moment,’ he said, tapping one of his books. April craned her neck - the top one was called
The Dark Victorian Age
. He shrugged. ‘Just a bit of research for the new book. Back in the Victorian period, London was an absolute cesspit of thieves and murderers cutting each other’s throats for a swig of gin.’ He paused and held up a finger as he noticed April’s look of distress. ‘But that was a hundred and fifty years ago, remember. They had no police force to speak of, people were incredibly poor and London itself was crammed into a few square miles around the City and Covent Garden. Back then, anything beyond the city walls was countryside.’
‘Even here?’
‘Well, yes and no. No: Highgate was a separate village built around the school; it’s been here for four hundred years. Yes: they chose to build the cemetery here because there was land and because the graveyards in London were overflowing and poisoning the water supply. Which is what this book’s about, more or less.’
April felt another chill. ‘Graveyards?’ she asked.
Her father leant back and looked up at the ceiling.
He’s avoiding my eyes again,
thought April.
What’s he not telling me?
‘A bit. It’s more about disease - plague pits and sewers and so forth,’ he said vaguely.
‘What, no monsters this time?’ she asked.
‘No, no monsters, darling.’ He laughed, but when he finally looked at her, his eyes were serious. ‘There’s no such thing.’
Chapter Six
There had been a time when April could lose herself in magazines. She would pore over red-carpet pictures and soak up celebrity gossip, then swap it with her friends as if they all personally knew the actresses and singers they were reading about. She would read the problem pages and horoscopes, half-believing that they had some sort of sound advice to give her about boys or exams or how to tell if you were a good kisser. Now she couldn’t even work up much excitement about a scandal involving an A-list actress getting caught necking with both girls and boys in a seedy Soho goth club. She threw the magazine down onto the bed and flopped back onto her pillow, staring at the ceiling. The digital clock by her bed said it was past midnight but April just couldn’t sleep. She was anxious, on edge, and there were endless things going around in her head. It had been a pretty weird day, all in all. A first day at school was traumatic enough, but seeing ... whatever it was she had seen was enough to keep anyone wide-eyed. She began to reach for her phone, but then stopped herself. Who would she call so late? She could go online, but where was the fun in that when she knew all her Edinburgh friends would be in bed or, worse, out having fun? She lay back and stared out of the window; the sky was almost purple and she could see the moon peeking through a gap in the rain clouds. She remembered how her dad had pointed to the night sky when she was little and said the man in the moon was watching her.
‘See?’ he would say. ‘He’s smiling at you.’ Tonight it didn’t look like the man in the moon was smiling. Tonight it looked like a sneer. April turned over and wished she could go back to those carefree days, back to when her dad had commuted to work every day and he and Mum had seemed, well,
in love.
April remembered it as a series of hazy snapshots: riding on her dad’s shoulders as he walked through wavy waist-high grass, or squatting next to a stream glinting in the sunshine, scooping tadpoles into a jam jar with a net. April smiled at those memories, however cheesy they now seemed. It was as if she had picked her childhood from a Laura Ashley catalogue. And where was her mum in these sepia photographs? Trailing behind in her wafty Pucci kaftans, her head covered by one of those huge bee-keeper’s hats, complaining about wasps and pollen and skin cancer. Back then, Silvia’s grumbles were only half-serious and her father would laugh along with her, joking that he would give her the kiss of life if a greenfly landed on her. April giggled to herself. They weren’t all bad, her parents, not really. Maddening, yes, frustratingly narrow-minded, but she supposed she did love them. Well, most of the time.
It kept nagging away at April, the way her father had reacted to her walking alone down Swain’s Lane after dark. There was obviously something about it that had worried him. What could it be? The only thing of interest on the higher part of Swain’s Lane was the gate to the cemetery; lower down it was all houses. Why would he be concerned about the cemetery? Perhaps it was something to do with this disease thing he was working on, or maybe the fox? She hadn’t seen many of them, but they were definitely wild animals and she was almost certain they were riddled with horrible germs. She shivered and looked at her hands. She had scrubbed them meticulously in the shower, but you could never tell what nastiness might be lurking there unseen. Suddenly, she felt itchy and uncomfortable. She jumped up and, pulling on her dressing gown, padded down the stairs to the kitchen. She knew her mother would have a little bottle of that antibacterial hand gel in one of the cupboards, although it was probably too late for her by now; she probably had listeria and scabies and things they hadn’t even discovered yet crawling all over her. The house was in darkness and, as she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes were drawn to the stained-glass arch above the front door. She hadn’t noticed it before. Lit up by the streetlight outside, she could see a picture of a deer being chased by hunters. It was an odd scene for such an urban house. Over the threshold of a country manor, perhaps, but here in the centre of London ... Then she remembered what her father had said earlier: it hadn’t always been part of the city, but it still seemed incongruous, wrong somehow. Seeing the glass up there suddenly made her feel exposed and unsafe, as if the front door was flimsy and insubstantial, unable to keep out whatever lurked in the dark. It was silly of course - the door was solid, and it was locked. Still, she shivered as she swung around the banister and trotted into the kitchen, opening cupboards and drawers looking for the hand gel, finding it and slathering her hands with the tingly green goop. Feeling a little better, she took a Diet Pepsi from the fridge and popped it open.
The last thing I need right now is more caffeine,
she thought.
I need something to knock me out
. Seeing her school bag, she picked it up and rummaged for the book Mr Sheldon had handed out in class.
Sci-fi homework, great,
she thought with an ironic smile,
perfect to send me to sleep.
‘Random Quest’, the story he wanted to discuss, seemed to be about a man called Colin who woke up after a laboratory accident to find himself in a parallel universe where the Second World War never happened. More importantly, his dead wife was now alive and married to someone else and he was married to a completely new woman called ...
Oh God, I was right first time
! April thought.
This is super-dull
. She threw it down and picked up
The Dark Victorian Age,
the book her dad had left lying on the side. Now this was more like it, she thought as she flicked through. It was full of tales of ladies in amazing dresses who poisoned their husbands and gangs of pickpockets fighting in the streets. As she turned a page, something fluttered to the floor. April smiled as she bent to pick up a passport-sized shot of her from a school-photo session when she must have been about six; her dad had been using it as a bookmark. She looked very cute with her long, thick hair - April had always had thick hair, even as a baby - and a gap where the Tooth Fairy had visited in the night. April felt a little embarrassed that her dad still thought of her as a little girl, but also pleased that he had held on to the photo for so long. She was just putting it back when she noticed a line on the page the photo was marking:
A memorable note was received on 16 October 1888. It accompanied part of a kidney alleged to be from a recent victim with the assurance, t’other piece I fried and ate it was very nise.
‘Ugh, gross,’ whispered April to herself.
Who is this
,
Hannibal Lecter?
Reading on, she discovered it was a chapter about various ‘sexual deviants’ from the Victorian era - most famously Jack the Ripper, the supposed author of the letter about the kidney. April read on for a while, unable to drag herself away from the morbidly fascinating crimes. Apparently Jack the Ripper had been running around London’s East End in 1888, which didn’t seem all that long ago, really. Her dad’s words came back to her and she realised what had been bothering her all this time: he’d said his new book had a connection to this area, and that Silvia definitely wouldn’t let her out if she knew about it. But not even
her
mother could use Jack the Ripper as an excuse to keep her locked up indoors. So what was going on? She walked down the hall to her dad’s study and gently closed the door behind her. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she hoped there would be something here to explain why her dad was so evasive about the nature of his book, and so jumpy about Highgate. April sat down at his desk: it was a tip. Piles of papers, stacks of books, Post-it notes stuck to every surface, all with scrawled lines like ‘Roman link?’, ‘Call FG, ask to find Ott. txt’, or ‘23-11-88—14.02.93 - signif?’ That made April stop: the last date was her birthday. In fact, Valentine’s Day 1993 was the exact day she was born. What other significance might it have? She opened his laptop as quietly as she could and winced; in the silent study, the whirring of the fan as the machine woke up sounded horribly loud. She glanced at the door, straining her ears for any sounds of movement, but the house was as still as before. She turned back to the screen. Much like his real desk, her dad’s computer desktop was a mess, crowded with files and folders, most of them with titles like ‘Myths’ or ‘Ancient Relics’, next to his work files: ‘
Scotsman
Features’ or ‘Human Trafficking Project’. She clicked on one: ‘Mythology’ held sub-folders labelled, predictably enough, ‘Greek’, ‘Roman’, ‘Norse’ and ‘Celtic’. It was all as she expected, apart from a folder with a strange jumbled title: ‘J-M569mp’. Clicking on it gave her a prompt window asking her to enter a password. She tried a few guesses, but nothing happened. She shook her head. Probably just porn, she thought, then immediately regretted allowing the idea into her head. ‘Eww ...’ she whispered to herself. ‘God, I’m going to need more of that green gel.’
Then she had a sudden inspiration. She went to ‘Recent items’ and pulled down the list.
‘Here we go,’ she said, scrolling down to a file named ‘Highgate’.
It popped open on screen. It was clearly still in note form: some bits obviously cut and pasted from elsewhere, some single random lines, all very jumbled. But there was one longer piece of writing headed ‘Foreword’.
There is a deep
,
dark evil within this city
...
‘Evil?’ she whispered.
... An evil so ancient, it is almost beyond the reach of history. Perhaps it has always been here; perhaps this darkness is the real reason men chose to settle on the banks of the great River Thames. This evil, however, is not some supernatural force lurking in the shadows. It is something far more mundane, much more everyday. It is its very ordinariness that makes it so dangerous and its universality that has kept it hidden for so long. It surrounds us still, cloaked in myth and fantasy. It has grown much more dangerous in this modern world where technology isolates us, playing into this contagion’s hands, allowing it to spread further and faster. However, it is today’s technology, today’s new ways of thinking and communicating, that may eventually defeat the evil, by exposing it to the light where it will turn to dust.