Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (12 page)

Wilkes self-evidently did, but she was smart enough not to object. “Long as you don’t stay too long,” she said. “Having you lot in here puts the customers off.”

“I just bet it does.” She took her time drifting around the shop and examining miscellaneous merchandise before joining Gemma beside one of the glass cases in the centre, where she’d been hovering for some time. Pierce raised her eyebrows at her in silent question, and Gemma cocked her head subtly towards the upper shelf. It housed a number of medallions hung on velvet necklace stands, wooden discs about two inches across. Each was delicately etched with a stylised design of a different animal—a running hare, a hunting dog, a stalking cat—surrounded by an intricate double ring of runes. A handwritten sign in front of the stands read
Animal Spirit Charms: view the world through animal senses!

Smoke powder used in rituals to make spirits visible. A barn full of dead animals in cages. And a collection of animal spirit charms.

Very interesting.

She turned to look back at Wilkes. “These animal spirit charms in the case here,” she said. “Are they licensed?”

Unlike artefacts purporting to house trapped human spirits, it wasn’t necessarily illegal to own or sell animal spirit artefacts, provided they predated the current animal sacrifice laws or had been brought in from other countries prior to the import ban.

“Licensed antiques,” Wilkes said. “Got the paperwork right here if you want to see it.”

“Yes, I think I would,” she said. As Wilkes headed off into the back room with a long-suffering air, Pierce glanced at Gemma. “Anything else?” she asked in a low voice.

“Just these, guv,” Gemma said, faintly shaking her head. “Look at all the empty stands, though,” she added. There were five medallions in the glass case, but there were three other unoccupied necklace stands alongside them. “These cases are dead crowded—that’s a waste of display space. So either they sold the others very recently...”

“Or they were expecting to get more in,” Pierce said with a nod. Nice one. She turned back towards the counter as Wilkes came stomping out from the back room.

“Here’s all your papers,” she said, dumping them on the countertop with profound indifference. “Now, if that’s all, I’ve got a shop to run.”

“I’ll try to keep from getting in the way of your hordes of customers,” Pierce said. True, magic shops tended to do most of their trade in the evenings, but if the complete lack of customer interest the whole time they’d been in here was any indication, then it really was questionable how Trick Box could stay afloat.

But no doubt the shop accounts would be as unenlightening as this paperwork. Pierce studied a set of what looked like completely authentic licences for possession of Category C exempt spirit-bound artefacts, and probably were: she took a quick phone photo to track the licence numbers back, but wouldn’t be surprised if the trail terminated at one of several dodgy issuers they’d been trying to catch out for years. Still, always best to be thorough—even experienced criminals could have a moment’s carelessness, and it helped if the coppers on their trail didn’t do the same.

“Antiques, hmm?” she said, flicking through more forms that certified the charms’ alleged age—the evaluator had been vague, yet still somehow managed to be certain they predated any inconvenient laws. “They look pretty new to me.”

“Well-kept,” Wilkes said, perfunctorily; but then, Pierce didn’t suppose Wilkes gave a damn what she believed. “Bought them off a collector as a set.”

And there was the auction receipt; likely also a dead end, but Pierce conscientiously photographed it all the same. She’d like to seize the charms and all attendant paperwork to study in forensic detail, but the tenuous link of a legitimately sold batch of cold smoke powder and Wilkes’s obstructiveness weren’t enough to build a case on. The best they could do was follow up on serial numbers and signatures, and hope that this time Wilkes had been stupider than usual.

“If that’s all, inspector?” Wilkes said pointedly. Pierce doubted she’d got her rank wrong by accident.

“For the moment,” she said, keeping her frustration in check. “If there’s anything else that needs clearing up, we’ll come back.”

All her instincts said that Wilkes was up to something. The difficulty was going to be proving it.

CHAPTER TEN

“I
F WE’RE LUCKY,
they’ll panic and try to move those charms out quickly, or get in contact with whoever’s been supplying them,” Pierce told Gemma as they headed back to the car. “I want you to keep the place under surveillance—keep track of who goes in and what they come out with, both during and after business hours. I’ll call Eddie out here to join you.”

Ideally she would have used wholly fresh personnel whose faces Wilkes hadn’t seen, but she didn’t have them to spare with Deepan out on medical leave and Dawson off on a murder case. She’d win no friends by deputising assistance from the thin-stretched local forces on such an insubstantial lead; there was going to be trouble enough from Snow about the overtime if it didn’t turn up case-cracking evidence. But it was the best lead they had.

Back at the office, Pierce still had time before her meeting with Christopher Tomb, so she checked out the serial numbers on the paperwork. She wasn’t greatly surprised when it all came out legitimate, at least on the surface—Wilkes wouldn’t have handed it over so easily if it couldn’t stand up to inspection. They could chase up the issuers of the dodgy certificates, but without the spirit charms to hand, they couldn’t do tests of their own to prove that the details in the paperwork were false.

She did, however, have a snapshot she’d taken of the charms with her phone—nothing that could be used as evidence, but perhaps enough to fish for some opinions. She headed next door to the research department, poking her head into the Sympathetic Magic office in passing.

“Jenny—fancy a walk down to Cliff’s?” she said. “Easier to pick both your brains at once.”

“Ah, exercise,” Jenny said, stretching. “Almost as good as fresh air, or so I’m told by people who get out more. All right, hold on a mo.” She frowned at the file before her and, after a brief flurry of typing, pushed her chair back and stepped into the shoes she’d kicked off under the desk. The low heels weren’t enough to bring her up to Pierce’s height as they fell into step side by side. “How goes the vampire hunt?” she asked.

“Less well than it would if we could convince people we weren’t looking for vampires.” They’d already had numerous alleged sightings of giant bats and people reporting their neighbours for being pale and working the night shift. She sighed. “Too little bloody evidence, just like all the other times.” A serial killer case was big enough to get them rush work from regular forensics for once, but even with the advances in fingerprint-lifting techniques and DNA testing over the years, Nottinghamshire Police had yet to turn up anything of use from the scene. “I’m beginning to suspect our killers are less into gothic eveningwear and more into forensic overalls.”

“Well, if there’s no news on the vampire front, what did you want to pick our brains about?” Jenny asked as they arrived at Cliff’s lab. He looked up as soon as the door opened for once, no sign of the usual headphones in his ears.

Of course, the horse had already bolted out of that barn door, and she doubted more alertness on Cliff’s part would have stopped their evidence going walkabouts. The people they were up against were too brazen and too powerful to catch out with standard security measures.

Hence her ulterior motive in bringing Jenny in to speak with them, though she did have some police business to raise first. “Animal spirit charms,” she said, bringing her hands together. “What can you two tell me about them?”

Cliff gave a thoughtful frown. “Well, that rather depends,” he said. “What kind of charms?”

“This kind.” Pierce brought up the photo on her phone, and the others craned over to peer at it; reflections in the glass had obscured the details of the runes, but the shot at least gave an impression of the basic look of the things.

“Hmm.” Cliff rubbed his upper lip thoughtfully. “Well. Hard to be sure without getting my hands on them to examine them properly, but at a glance, they look like they’re single-use charms, probably activated by a specific touch or incantation. The circular pattern of runes is the giveaway: it’s effectively a containment circle, holding an inherent enchantment in check until the circle is broken.”

“And how would someone have gone about enchanting the medallions?” Pierce asked. “By, perhaps, performing some kind of blood sacrifice?”

“It would certainly be a viable source for the kind of magical energy required,” Cliff agreed. He shot her a look. “But that would, of course, be very much illegal.”

She matched the expression. “Our seller says these are licensed antiques, naturally.”

“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Cliff said, peering at the phone again. “The wood’s all wrong. And frankly, you’d be unlikely to see these made of wood at all, not if the enchantment was meant to be kept contained for any length of time—metal or carved stone would be more likely, perhaps bone.”

Pierce nodded, pressing her lips together. “That’s about what I thought, but you can’t hang a conviction on it,” she said with a sigh. Or prove that Wilkes had been aware that her so-called antiques weren’t the real deal. “And we can’t seize them to prove that they’re dodgy without evidence that they’re dodgy.” It would certainly be outside of the RCU’s budget to buy one of the things outright, in the unlikely event Wilkes would be willing to sell to them.

She turned to Jenny. “Animal senses from a charm—seem legitimate?”

Jenny frowned a little, pushing her glasses up. “Well, it’s possible, though most of the enchantments I’ve heard of rely on using some part of the animal carcass as a focus, like with shapeshifting skins. I suppose you could conceivably use a blood ritual to transfer the focus via the blood...” She shook her head. “This is really more Cliff’s area than mine.” Then she brightened and snapped her fingers. “Oh, but you know who you should ask? Phil Havers at RCU Oxford. He was always talking about writing a book on human-to-animal transformations.”

“Shit, Phil—yeah, should have thought of him.” Pierce gave herself a mental kick. Phil Havers was a former colleague of hers who’d transferred down south about eight years back; so far as she knew, his much-discussed book was no closer to materialising now than it had been when he left, but his magpie approach to gathering shiny-looking reference materials might be of some use.

She moved as if to leave, then with a pretence of casual afterthought: “Oh, and while I’ve got you both here, what do you say about grabbing a bite to eat after work? The rest of my team’s buggered off in all directions, and I had some ideas about using divination rituals to find enchanted objects that I wanted to kick around when we’re not on the superintendent’s time.”

Or more precisely, some ideas about Jenny using her knowledge of divination to help them find their missing panther pelt that she didn’t want to share in a room that secrets had already leaked from.

Cliff looked blank for a few moments before he seemed to catch on. “Ah, yes, I think I know what this is about,” he said nodding. “Yes, of course.”

Jenny blinked. “Well, I obviously missed my Illuminati meeting,” she said. “But colour me intrigued. Sure, I’ll be there, provided work doesn’t blow up in the meantime.”

“Ah, thank you, I hadn’t had anybody jinx my day yet,” Pierce said.

S
HE PUT IN
a quick call to Phil down in Oxford before it could slip her mind. “Phil! Not caught you hip-deep in intestines again, have I?” she asked.

“I should be so bloody lucky,” Phil grumbled. Pierce could swear his Yorkshire accent grew broader the longer that he spent down south. “Hip-deep in paperwork, more like. While your lot are off chasing vampire serial killers we’re playing hot potatoes with London on the world’s most doomed antiquities case. I swear every other bugger implicated in this one has an uncle in the House of Lords and plays golf with the Chief Superintendent.”

“You’re the one who left us for the glamour of the gleaming spires,” Pierce said unsympathetically. “I’d say you’re welcome to transfer back any time you like, but we’re all bloody brass and no constables up here as it is. I’m still sharing an office with the DI they tried to replace me with—I think somebody up there’s hoping I’ll blink first.” They couldn’t shuffle her off towards retirement if she refused to take a hint; so far they hadn’t pushed it, probably reasoning that at her age they could afford to wait her out.