Her cynical views on the current state of the nation’s news media were not greatly helped when she turned on the TV over her takeaway and discovered they’d unearthed Christopher Tomb from whatever dark corner he’d oozed off into when his book dropped out of the bestseller lists. He still had the stupid goatee, his hair dyed a jet black that looked even more starkly false against an aging face liberally spackled with make-up to cover the lines. He was wearing a black turtleneck with what looked suspiciously like a red cape.
The caption at the bottom of the screen that read
C
HRISTOPHER
T
OMB—VAMPIRE EXPERT
added insult to injury. The only part of it that was actually true was the Christopher—she happened to know for a fact that the surname he’d been born with was Brown.
Of course, being a wanker who adopted a silly name to sell books was certainly not a crime, more was the pity. But she couldn’t help but feel that ‘spreading details of unsolved crimes, and fear-mongering nonsense’ probably ought to be.
He was spouting some complete bollocks right now, steepling his hands together with a piously thoughtful look as he gazed intently at the female interviewer. “It’s possible that the break in the seven-year cycle corresponds to the vampire’s hibernation phase,” he said. “Threes and sevens are both powerful numbers in occultism: ritual feedings at such intervals would allow the vampire to maintain its energy through many years of sleep.”
“Citation needed!” Pierce said out loud, waving her fork at the TV screen. She doubted it would have done her any good even if Tomb had been in the room; more than likely he’d have been able to produce a dozen spurious sources in a heartbeat, all part of a tail-eating chain of self-proclaimed experts who vouched for each other, not a trace of a reputable institution anywhere among them.
As if the bogus vampire facts weren’t enough, he went on to get in some digs about the police being underinformed about magic and needing to consult the experts. Pierce was quietly seething by the time she turned off the TV. She was half tempted to haul the smarmy git in for questioning, though she was honest enough to admit she had no good reason to.
And the hysteria he’d whipped up with that bloody book. Pierce had never actually read the thing herself; the few choice excerpts bandied about by the media had been quite enough for her tastes, and with Tomb quickly eliminated from their enquiries and the Valentine Vampire failing to return for the expected encore, pissing herself off by reading the rest of it had slipped down the priority pile. She supposed she ought to rectify that now, just in case this really was a copycat working off Tomb’s information. She was just scribbling a note to herself to pick up a copy tomorrow when it occurred to her that she might be able to get it as an eBook.
She could indeed, and thanks to a marketing department somewhere it was even half price at the moment. With a grimace, Pierce settled down with a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits to spend her evening
On the Blood Trail of the Valentine Vampire
.
To her annoyance, Tomb was actually quite an engaging writer, though he really should have been turning his skills to pulp thrillers instead of pretensions of journalism. The vivid descriptions of imagined rituals might have put a less hardy soul off her bourbon biscuits, but Pierce had a policewoman’s stomach and had long since learned to eat after—and sometimes even during—just about anything. On the other hand, Tomb’s depictions of the scenes where the bodies were found did more to cast her mind back through the years than reading over dry police reports, even with pictures attached.
In fact, they were rather
too
accurate. Where had he got all this detail about the arrangement of the bodies, their wounds and the clothes they’d been found in? Some of the specifics were wrong, but he still knew far more than the police had released to the public. Had Tomb somehow bribed or deceived his way into possession of one of the autopsy reports? Procedures in the ’eighties hadn’t been what they were now, and nor had anti-corruption measures.
Or maybe somewhere within that over-dramatised mishmash of dubious sources and unlikely encounters, Tomb actually
had
managed to track down someone with knowledge about the cult and its activities.
Pierce was beginning to think she might just haul the bastard in for questioning after all.
D
EEPAN WAS STILL
off on medical leave the next day, and Dawson had apparently elected to stay down in Nottinghamshire to follow the case from there—why ask her, she was only the bloody DCI—so she deputised Eddie to track down Christopher Tomb for her.
“That book has far more detail about the crime scenes than he ought to know—I want to speak to him about where he got his information from ASAP. But don’t arrange for him to come into the station,” she added as an afterthought. “Set up a meeting somewhere else.” There was a certain value in making people sweat with the intimidation factor of police station surroundings, but she wouldn’t put it past the man to find some way to wring a publicity stunt out of it. She didn’t want him claiming he was acting as a police consultant.
Gemma came in from the analysis labs waving a folder just as Pierce went to sit down. “Got some results from Ritual Materials, guv,” she said. “Simon identified some herbal residue taken from our burning barn as something called...”—she had to check the file—“cold smoke powder? He says the composition matches the mix sold by a shop called Trick Box in—”
“Bradford?” Pierce said along with her, reversing back out of the seat that she’d barely sat down in. “I know it well—and I’m pretty sure they’re up to their necks in
something
, even if it isn’t this. Let’s go and shake the place down and see what falls out.” Cold smoke powder was nothing illegal, but it did have its dodgier uses, and the owners of Trick Box had never impressed her as the sort to be overly conscientious about what their customers might be getting up to.
“Any joy tracking down the source of the animals?” she asked Gemma as they drove.
Gemma shook her head in frustrated apology. “None of the corpses retrieved from the fire were microchipped, though it’s possible the chips were just too damaged to scan properly. I was hoping we might be able to track down a source for the more exotic animals, but there’s no zoos or animal sanctuaries missing anything on the list, so it looks like we’re dealing with animals from the black market pet trade. The lynx was the most distinctive thing, but it was at ground zero for the magical blast, so there wasn’t much of it left.” She wrinkled her mouth. “Guess you had a pretty lucky escape there, guv.”
“Mm.” A timely reminder that, while animal sacrifices might not be high enough profile to get the superintendent’s knickers in as much of a knot as the Valentine Vampire case, the people responsible were still dangerously ruthless in their own right. If the RCU hadn’t been alerted to the possibility of a skin shop at work, it could easily have been a local Community Support Officer or even a curious neighbour who’d got to that altar and blown themselves up.
There were a lot of nasty ways that those with some knowledge of magic could prey on the unsuspecting public, so the RCU liked to keep a weather eye on any magic-related businesses in the region—never an easy task, since they tended to pop up and disappear as fast as dodgy market stalls, and often for pretty similar reasons.
Your two basic market openings in the occult field were either selling cheap, dubiously functional tat to the credulous, or dealing in one-of-a-kind artefacts that changed hands for hundreds and thousands of pounds. Dabblers didn’t like to spend and experts knew better than to risk cheaping out, so any shop that managed to stay open targeting the largely non-existent middle ground was, in Pierce’s view, best viewed with cynical suspicion.
Trick Box had managed to survive for the last eighteen months selling mid-range magical goods at knock-down prices, so someone either had deep pockets and a poor understanding of the sunk cost fallacy, or they were getting away with murder somewhere. Hopefully not literally.
“What’s our angle, guv?” Gemma asked her as they approached the shop, tucked away between a phone shop and a pawnbroker’s.
From her previous, admittedly brief, dealings with the staff of Trick Box, Pierce suspected that ‘explain the situation in a civilised manner and expect full cooperation’ was not going to be the answer.
“Don’t bring up any details of the case,” she said instead. “We’ll go in like it’s a standard inspection—I’ve got a couple of other outstanding cases I can rattle their cages over so they don’t know we’re after anything specific. I’ll do the talking; I’ve dealt with them before. You just keep an eye out for anything dodgy, especially if it looks like they’re trying to distract me from it.”
“Am I the muscle, then?” Gemma said with a grin.
“If you like. Do your best to loom.”
They pushed through the door, accompanied by the harsh blart of a cheap electronic buzzer. The inside was dimly lit, somewhat cramped and musty, as all such shops seemed to be: partly because of the nature of the goods they trafficked in, and partly, Pierce was sure, for the atmosphere. Nobody wanted to buy their magical paraphernalia from a place that looked like a computer showroom.
The owners of Trick Box had taken that philosophy to heart, and the shop had managed to look faintly grimy since the day it opened. Glass cases full of shabby-looking artefacts and books divided the space into tight aisles you’d be hard-pressed to squeeze a wheelchair down, and a sign above the counter read:
WE BUY: occult texts, magic items & ritual equipment (subject to verification)
. On the left side of the shop were racks of generic ritual equipment; on the right there were many tiny drawers filled with powders and herbs, like some kind of dubious magical Pick ’n’ Mix. A stand in the corner by the door held hanging packs of candles, chalk and other
ESSENTIAL SUPPLIES!!
There was no one in the shop this early in the morning aside from the woman behind the counter. Pierce recognised her as the owner, Helen Wilkes, a squat middle-aged woman whose solidly powerful build and stone stare would probably make most customers think twice about quibbling over the quality of service. She had a jowly face that seemed to be set into a perpetually sour expression, although that might just be the one she wore when the police showed up at her door.
“DCI Pierce,” she said, imbuing the title with all the welcoming warmth of the February frost outside. “What can I do for you?” She managed to heavily imply that the preferred answer would be ‘nothing.’
“Just come for a bit of a look-see,” Pierce said, leaning on the edge of the counter and doing her best to keep Wilkes’s attention as Gemma drifted off to inspect the merchandise. “You know we like to keep ourselves updated on what’s going on in the world of ritual retail.”
Wilkes sniffed. “Seems to me you ought to spend less time doing that and more on catching criminals.” She looked past Pierce to give Gemma a dismissive once-over. “Another new constable, is it?” she said with a faint curl of her lip. “You do go through them.”
Pierce bridled, but forced it down. She wasn’t the one supposed to be getting her cage rattled here—and Wilkes couldn’t know about Deepan or Leo.
Still, no point in beating about the bush. “Anybody come in recently asking for necromantic texts?” she asked, without further pretence of niceties.
“We don’t sell those,” Wilkes said flatly.
“Good for you. Anyone come in asking for them?” Pierce pressed.
“Not that I recall.”
Somehow Pierce doubted she’d have been able to recall it even if the customer asking had left five minutes ago. But this was just the preamble, routine follow-up on open cases that were probably too cold to have a chance of turning anything up. She switched streams. “What about ritual bowls?” she asked. “Anybody been in trying to fence one with a silver rim and a rose-and-thorns motif?”
“You’re welcome to go through all our receipts for pawned items,” Wilkes said, her tone saying she was anything but. “We keep scrupulous records, and we always check against the lists the police release of stolen items.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Pierce said. A poke about in the back rooms might turn up a few items that they ‘hadn’t got around’ to adding to said records yet, but that wasn’t the game she was after today. “What about cold smoke powder?” she said. “I know you sell that.”
“What if we do? It’s not illegal,” Wilkes said.
“Sold any recently?” Pierce asked.
“Sell a lot of it,” she said with an indifferent shrug. “No reason to keep track.”
“You ask people what they use it for?”
“Special effects, isn’t it?” she said, shrugging again. “Smoke with no fire. Amateur stuff. Adds a bit of pizzazz to your conjuring tricks.”
“Unless they add it to an
actual
fire, and then you get great billows of smoke from a source as small as a candle flame.” Which was a particularly handy trick for anyone involved in say, illicit spirit-raising rituals, where smoke was one of the more convenient ways to give form to the formless, but building a big enough outdoor fire to produce it in quantity tended to be indiscreet.
“Shop’s not responsible for off-label uses,” Wilkes said, unmoved. “You can smack someone over the head with a coffee table. Doesn’t make it illegal to sell coffee tables.”
Pierce smiled without humour. That was probably about as much cooperation as she was going to get, but then, she’d expected as much. “Mind if I take a look around your stock?” she asked.