It was hard to decide if it made her feel better or worse about calling on his aid that he was so transparently eager to assist, despite—or maybe because of—her warnings of the dangers. You didn’t work in Firearms because you liked a risk-free life.
“I might know somebody,” he told her. “Probably too small-time for the RCU’s attention, but she’s got a good rep for finding lost property and missing pets, and she helped a friend of my wife’s track down her ex.”
“Where is your wife, by the way?” Pierce asked, guilty conscience in full swing. Unlike her, Leo had a family to think of.
Though it seemed right now he was comfortable with not thinking too deeply. “Late shift,” he said. “If my contact can fit us in tonight, we can be out and back before she knows I was gone. I can tell her it’s confidential consultation work, but the less anybody knows, the better.”
“Yeah,” she said dubiously. It was probably true, but it still felt shady. This kind of sneaking about had never been her nature.
Leo, by contrast, seemed positively cheerful as they headed out to meet his contact. It seemed to bring a subtle new alertness to his features to have a mission to concentrate on, that intensity of purpose she remembered from field operations in the past.
The address that he supplied brought them to an ordinary-looking house in the suburbs, where the door was opened by a harassed-looking man in a rugby shirt clutching a toddler. He offered them a polite smile. “Ah, hello—you must be Kate’s seven o’clock.” He did his best to nudge a plastic trike out of the way of the door with his foot. “Um, do come right in. She should be with you in a minute.”
He guided them past a living room where two older kids were watching something noisy on the telly and into the kitchen, a small space rendered more cramped by a slightly too-large table and the high chair in the corner.
“All right, just take a seat,” he said, pulling one of the chairs out and removing a stuffed dinosaur from it. “Let me get all this out of your way...” He gathered up letters and piled newspapers from the table one-handed while the toddler against his hip squirmed and made increasingly urgent noises around his dummy.
“Sorry to show up at such short notice,” Pierce said, itching to assist him, but afraid she’d only bring the whole precarious process crashing down.
“Oh, the place is always like this, I’m afraid,” he said with a rueful grin. He bumped his way backwards out of the kitchen door with the papers held against his chest. “I’ll just go and get Kate for you now.”
Pierce breathed out as the door bumped closed behind him. Houses full of kids had never been her scene; one of many reasons she didn’t visit her sister more than she could help it. She caught Leo massaging his bad leg under the table as the two of them sat in awkward silence; she wanted to ask if it was all right after their visit to the prison, but didn’t think he’d appreciate her drawing attention to it.
Before the wait could stretch too long, the kitchen door opened again to admit a plump woman with crimped blonde hair and a chunky orange jumper. “Oh, hi!” she said brightly. “You must be Rose’s husband—it’s Leo, right?—and this is...?” She looked at Pierce expectantly.
“Claire,” Pierce supplied, not wanting to give her police affiliation away if her fame didn’t precede her. She’d been interviewed on the news more than a few times, but she doubted most people paid attention to the face, only the story.
“Claire,” the woman repeated with a friendly nod, and clasped her hands together. “Well, I’m Kate Winston, and this, if you squint very hard and apply a bit of imagination, is my office, so what can I do for you?” She pulled out a chair to join them at the table. “I understand you’ve got somebody that needs tracking down?”
“Yes.” Pierce decided they were better off giving minimal details. She retrieved the envelope with the hair that she’d collected. “I think this is one of his hairs, though it might be from his clothes.”
Kate raised her eyebrows, but asked no awkward questions. “Well, unless your friend’s a nudist, let’s assume his clothes are somewhere near where he is, eh?” she said, grinning. “All right—hair’s always a good place to start. Is he a blood relative of either of yours?” They both shook their heads. “Pity, that would have made it easier.” She clapped her hands together with a smile. “But nonetheless, we shall make do. Back in a jiffy.”
She nipped into the next room, and returned carrying what looked like a fabric-covered needlework box; she opened it up to reveal a collection of miscellaneous odds and sods that Pierce wasn’t sure she’d have taken for a magic kit without having been told.
Kate rooted around in the bottom of the box for a while before coming up with an acorn-shaped wooden pendulum on a length of knotted string, which she polished on the bottom of her jumper for a moment. “This was my grandmother’s,” she said, unscrewing the top to reveal a small chamber inside. “She taught me the art of pendulum divining, just as she learned it from her mother before her. Who apparently learned it from a slightly dodgy bloke named Bob she beat at cards, but still, it’s more or less a family tradition.” She grinned briefly, and held out a hand. “If I could have the focus?”
Pierce handed over the envelope with the hair somewhat reluctantly, wondering if this had been a big mistake. Kate used a pair of tweezers from her ritual kit to transfer the hair to the pendulum chamber and then screwed it shut. She let a foot or so of string play out and held the pendulum suspended over the table for a moment, frowning thoughtfully. “Hmm, yes, that feels like it’s got enough magical resonance... We should be able to get a good reading from that.”
Pierce tried not to let her scepticism show as Kate delved into the box again and pulled out first a sheet of cloth embroidered with sigils that she laid out like a tablecloth, and then an elastic-banded deck of what appeared to be children’s alphabet flashcards, complete with brightly coloured pictures of things like apples, balls and cakes.
Either she wasn’t very successful at containing her reaction, or Kate anticipated it: “Trust me,” she said, as she shuffled the deck of letter cards in her hands. “These things are just as good for divination as any set of ancient rune stones they try to sell you for six hundred quid on eBay.” She dealt them all out face down on the tabletop as if planning to play a memory matching game, set out a few crystals and other vaguely occultish knick-knacks at points around the arrangement, then took up the pendulum again. “All right. Do we have a name for this gentleman we’re looking for?”
Pierce hesitated, reluctant to give too much away, although nothing about this display was doing much to convince her this woman was in the pay of a dangerous conspiracy. She glanced over at Leo, but he was obviously prepared to follow her lead.
Oh, well: better to make a bad move attempting to achieve something than fail through timidity. “Maitland,” she said. “Jason Maitland. Or at least, that’s the name he gave. I’m not sure if it’s his real one.”
Fortunately, Kate didn’t question what kind of business they might be mixed up in that involved possible false names; maybe she was used to it, if her jobs often involved tracking down wayward spouses. “Doesn’t matter if it is,” she said. “What does real even mean, when we talk about names? A thing is what we call it. If he’s gone by that name, if people know him by it, then he’s linked to it. Now, if he doesn’t use it very much, it’ll be a less powerful link than a name he goes by every day... but every little helps.”
She began to twirl the pendulum in slow circles without further ceremony. “Right. Maitland, Jason Maitland...” she murmured to herself. “Where might you be?” She adopted a sing-song tone. “
Pendulum, swing your line, give us now some form of sign, seek the truth, circle round, tell us where what’s lost is found...
”
Playground doggerel, to Pierce’s cynical ears, but she kept her mouth shut as Kate continued to chant in a low murmur, eyelids falling closed. She moved the pendulum in slow, swaying circuits over the cards, passing over each in turn—until, above one of them, the pendulum gave a sharp jerk upwards as if the string had been abruptly yanked. Despite herself, Pierce leaned forward a little as Kate turned the card over to reveal a letter H, accompanied by a cheery little illustration of a hippo.
More passes, another jump of the pendulum and upturned card: A for apple. R for rainbow... Kate picked out five more cards by the same method before she made a final circuit with no visible twitch from the pendulum and set it aside with a sigh of released tension.
“Hardison.” Leo tried the sequence out aloud. Too neat and logical a collection of letters to be mere random chance, but it could still be done with a stacked deck or subtly marked cards: not even necessarily malicious or deliberate fraud, but a subconscious twitch towards a letter that ‘felt’ like it ought to go next. Like eyewitness testimony, simple divinations all too often fell prey to the human mind’s tendency to prefer a good narrative to provable facts.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Kate asked the pair of them expectantly, but didn’t look terribly troubled when they both shook their heads. “Well, never mind, that’s only the first stage of the divination. It might be the name of the house owner, of a business, perhaps from some kind of sign or billboard nearby...” This was starting to sound like the deliberate vagueness of cold-reading to Pierce’s mind. “Now we find the distance.”
The second divination involved tossing a number of carved wooden sticks and consulting a little book to translate the pattern, giving a distance of forty-eight miles, a result Pierce found even more dubious than the first. The finale that followed turned out to involve setting up a ring of candles. Specifically, tiny pink-and-white-striped birthday candles.
“Trust me, these are great for doing rituals,” Kate confided. “They don’t go out by themselves, and they don’t set off the smoke alarm.”
Apparently the RCU’s research specialists were missing a few tricks.
Kate laid a compass in the centre of the circle and set a collection of semi-precious stones around it in a star-shaped pattern mimicking the compass rose. She began to move the pendulum slowly from point to point, murmuring more simple rhymes. “
North to east to south to west, seek the object of our quest; west to south to east to north, show us which way to go forth...
” She spun the pendulum through an ever-quickening sequence until one of the candles around the ring abruptly puffed out, then another, then a third...
When only one lit candle was still left standing, Kate grinned and raised an arm to point in its direction. “All righty, then. If my readings don’t deceive me, your man is thataway.” She pushed the seat back and stood up. “Let me just grab you a map.”
Fifteen minutes later and they were back out on the road with a vaguely pinpointed region of the map and the name Hardison to guide them. They drove in relative silence, Pierce uncertain whether her professional opinion of that display—she’d pin it down as somewhere around ‘well-meaning but dubiously useful’—was even worth offering. It was a long shot, but they weren’t wasting any police resources checking it out, and it seemed pointlessly harsh to puncture Leo’s renewed sense of purpose with a reality check on facts he had to be aware of already.
Full dark had settled in by now, and once they left the A roads for narrow country lanes it became a rare event to pass another car. The only illumination aside from their own headlights came from the windows of the odd tiny village or isolated farmhouse.
Pierce was all too conscious of the futility of their search. They weren’t here with the full might of the police behind them, going door to door to ask questions of the neighbours with a squad of uniforms and authority on their side. There were two of them, one with a bad knee and the other running on too little sleep, following a lead too vague to give them any hope of spotting Maitland even if they parked outside his home address. What were they going to do, hope he looked out of a window at the right moment?
But conceding defeat had never come easily to her, so she continued to drive almost aimlessly, turning down each awkward little country lane and hoping something other than suicidal wildlife might jump out at them.
It was Leo who finally spotted something, stiffening as Pierce slowed for what she thought was a turning but then realised was just a private road. “That looked like a security fence,” he said. She started to slow down again, but he shook his head. “No, keep going. You can park behind those trees over there—if this is the place, we’re better off cutting across the fields on foot than driving right up to the gates.”
Once Pierce shut the headlights off, she could hardly see a thing; what little moonlight was on offer scarcely filtered through the cloud cover and trees. “What did you see?” she asked Leo.
“Not sure, but it looked pretty high-security,” he said. “Military, maybe, or a prison.”
“If they’ve built one around here, nobody sent me the memo.” Of course, it could just be some kind of business site, but the isolation and security pointed to something potentially interesting. Pierce still had her warrant card in her pocket; if they were wildly off-base and got stopped by some form of site security, it wouldn’t strictly be a lie to say they were looking for suspicious persons—though it could definitely get sticky if anybody followed it up far enough to speak with her superiors.
All in all, probably better to avoid getting caught.
They rounded the stand of trees and clambered over the low wall that bounded the fields. She heard Leo give a faint grunt as he dropped down on the other side. “You okay?” she asked. She could just about make out the motion of his nod.