Authors: Jennifer Fallon
‘Check again,’ he ordered into his radio, as he glanced around, wondering where the old man and the young woman were hiding. This was a big house, with lots of nooks and crannies. It was not inconceivable that they had gone to ground somewhere inside the house …
Another thought occurred to Pete. He reached for his radio but then decided to check out his hunch alone. Jack had a glasshouse out in the garden. Pete considered it a front to buy nitrates in case the old man decided to go back into the bomb-making business, but there was no evidence of that, just his own gut feeling, and the general dislike Pete had of anybody who cashed-in on killing people. He keyed the mike and then let it go again. It was only a glasshouse, which made it the worst place imaginable to hide. But Pete wanted to check it out. This was too important to leave any stone — or pot plant — unturned. Maybe he’d get lucky and discover Jack had been cultivating more than pineapples. A few drug charges might help if the accessory to murder charge didn’t stick, after Darragh’s confession yesterday.
He let himself out into the back garden. A gentle misty rain was falling, obscuring the glasshouse. He pulled out the uncomfortable radio earpiece and trotted across the lawn. As he neared the glasshouse, he realised there was a dim light coming from inside.
Pete should have called for backup at that point, he knew, but something held him back. As he neared the glasshouse, its walls misted with rivulets of rainwater, the nature of the light became clearer. It was candlelight.
Inside the glasshouse, someone had lit scores of tea-light candles and placed them all over the stepped shelves inside.
Pete raised his weapon and opened the door carefully — although given it was glass, anybody inside with a gun could have killed him long before he got the door open. He stepped inside; the warm loamy smell of the vegetation, mixed with the smell of urea and blood and bone fertiliser, was almost overpowering.
Jack was standing opposite the door, but he wasn’t paying any attention to Pete, who stopped at the entrance and took in the scene, not sure he believed his own eyes.
Laid out on the centre bench of the glasshouse was a dead body. Jack was standing there, looking down on it with tears silently rolling down his cheeks.
It was the old woman Pete had spoken to a few days ago, when he’d come here to ask about Warren.
She was not dressed like an old woman, though. She was naked, painted with blue woad, the symbols covering her limbs, her torso and her face, a mix of familiar Celtic designs and others he’d never seen before. Her arms were crossed over her chest. In one hand she held a carving knife, in the other, a small garden hatchet. Her thin, arthritic fingers clung to them like she was a knight laid out in state with his weapons.
The artwork on the old woman’s body was amateurish but meticulous. Someone had spent a lot of time and expended a great deal of effort preparing this body.
Beside the old woman lay a variety of items. There were more kitchen knives, a block of cheese, several jars of what looked like homemade fruit preserves, and various other food items arranged around the body. On the centre of her forehead, Pete noticed,
taking a step further into the glasshouse, someone had painted the same triskalion symbol that had — until so recently — graced the hands of Darragh and his twin brother, Ren.
Jack glanced up. It seemed he had only just noticed he had company.
‘She must have known for days,’ Jack said, wiping his eyes, as if embarrassed to be caught with such an obvious display of emotion.
‘Known what, you sick old bastard?’ Pete asked, pointing his weapon directly at Jack’s head. ‘That you were going to kill her?’
Jack smiled briefly. He didn’t seem bothered by the gun. ‘I didn’t kill her, lad. She died of old age.’
Given the state of the old woman’s body and the lack of any obvious wounds, Pete wasn’t going to argue about that now. ‘Whatever she died of, O’Righin, the old woman didn’t deserve to be defiled like this.’
‘Defiled?’ Jack seemed surprised. ‘Jaysus, she did this herself, lad,’ he said. ‘She was going downhill fast. Had been for days. Once the equinox passed with no sign of help from her own people, she gave up, I think. But she wanted a warrior’s burial. I tried to tell her they’d not let me leave her body lying about for days, or let me bake her in an underground oven in the back garden once she was ripe enough, but she was adamant.’ He gently moved a stray lock of grey hair from the old lady’s face, adding, ‘I found her like this about an hour ago.’ Jack glanced up then at a shattering sound coming from the house, as if he’d only just realised his house was being torn apart by the ERU. ‘They’ll be paying for anything they break in there.’
Pete lowered his weapon. ‘Tell me where I can find Sorcha, and I’ll stop them breaking things.’
‘You’re looking at her.’
Pete was tempted to raise his weapon again, pull the trigger and rid the world of this fool. ‘Really?
This
is Sorcha?’
‘In the flesh.’
‘You know, I bet it seemed like a grand idea, when you and Darragh and Sorcha came up with that ludicrous story.’ He moved a little closer to the bench and examined the body more closely. The woman seemed ancient. ‘But you’re forgetting, Jack, I’ve met Sorcha. And this isn’t her. You’re out by about … eighty years, I’d say.’
Jack nodded. ‘I met her the first time on September eighth,’ he said. ‘She looked twenty-five … thirty at the best. I know you’re not going to believe me, but I’ve seen her age, lad. Every single day since then.’
‘Sorcha helped kidnap an innocent girl and murdered a man for the crime of owning a car one of her accomplices stole, O’Righin. This woman wouldn’t be able to get out of her walking frame long enough to get into a heated argument, let alone slash the throat of a grown man and then escape over the neighbour’s fence.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Jack said with a shrug, ‘this is Sorcha. Aren’t there tests you can do now, that will establish that?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll be checking her DNA,’ he assured the old man. ‘And yours, too. If we find so much as a flake of dandruff belonging to you at Warren Maher’s place, you’ll be going down for murder, not just being an accessory.’
That got a rise out of the old man. ‘Me? An accessory to
what
, for feck’s sake? Killing the broker? You can’t pin that on me.’
‘Can and have,’ Pete told him. ‘Darragh’s confessed to everything. He admitted to ordering the killing. He admitted sending Sorcha to do it. And he admitted to your involvement in keeping Warren Maher quiet until Sorcha could get to him.’
Before Jack could answer, the glasshouse door shattered as the ERU burst in, weapons cocked, and trained them on Jack in a spray of red dots. The old man raised his hands in a gesture of surrender; however, his expression was anything but submissive.
The captain of the ERU team quickly scanned the small building before he turned to Pete. ‘You were out of radio contact.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, lifting the earpiece off his vest where it had fallen when he pulled it out. ‘I must have dropped it.’
The captain gave him a look that said volumes about what he thought of officers who lost radio contact for such a pathetic reason, and then he turned and ordered his men to take Jack into custody. He then fixed his attention on the old woman’s body, intrigued rather than disgusted by what he saw. ‘O’Righin did this?’
‘He says not,’ Pete told him, as Jack was cuffed and marched out of the candlelit glasshouse. The old man muttered some comment as he stepped over the broken glass of the door, and then he was out of earshot. For a fleeting moment, Pete felt sorry for the old man.
He would probably never see his bromeliads again.
‘There’s no sign of the woman Sorcha,’ the captain told him. ‘We’ve searched the house from top to bottom.’
‘According to Jack, that’s Sorcha right there.’
The man shook his head. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘My sentiments exactly.’
‘Who is she, then?’
Pete shook his head. ‘I have no idea. Last time I met her, she was introduced as the housekeeper’s demented aunt.’
‘She’s laid out like a warrior,’ the captain said. He pointed to the weapons clutched in each hand. ‘See … the weapons, the food … that’s meant for her journey into the otherworld.’
Pete stared at the man in surprise. ‘Are you telling me you think this woman thought she was some sort of pagan Celtic warrior?’
‘The symbols on her body are crude, but they’re unmistakable.’
‘I never realised you were such an aficionado of ancient Celtic mythology and symbolism, Mac,’ Pete said, rather impressed.
‘We all need a hob — Hang on.’ He put his finger to his ear, to better hear the radio message coming through, and then he turned to Pete. ‘You’re needed out front. Apparently the press has got wind of this.’
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ Pete said. ‘The paparazzi have a permanent camp set up next door.’
‘This isn’t the paparazzi,’ the captain said. ‘It’s your brother. So go out there and talk to him. He needs to be gone before the crime scene people get here.’
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Pete promised, and with one last glance at the curious old woman laid out like an ancient Celtic warrior, he turned and stepped out into the softly falling rain, wondering who she really was, why she would want to be laid out like that, and what the hell Logan wanted now.
‘My real name is Ingrid,’ Wakiko told Ren and Trása, as she ceremoniously poured their tea. She was kneeling in front of a low
honzen
table she had arranged for some of the Empresses’ servants to bring in. The tea ceremony, she had assured them in a whisper when she sent for the paraphernalia to serve them, was a polite and thoughtful act for an honoured guest. It provided her with a perfectly legitimate excuse to be here talking to them, should anybody — Ren assumed she was talking of the Tanabe — choose to question her about why she was fraternising with the
Matrarchaí
envoy. ‘At least, that was my name once. I hardly remember that girl now. But like you, I am not from this realm.’
‘You’re from a magical realm though,’ Trása said. ‘Aren’t you?’
Wakiko nodded, as she carefully laid out the charcoal fire she would use to heat the water for their tea. Ren had sat through a Japanese tea ceremony before, and knew it would take some time, and that it would be considered the height of bad manners to interrupt the ceremony. Wakiko, or Ingrid, or whatever her name might be, was a lot cannier than when she stood behind her daughters in public and appeared to grant their every whim.
‘My realm is quite different to this. In my reality, there were no Undivided and the Faerie kept to themselves.’
‘So what are you doing here?’ Ren asked, as Wakiko began to cleanse each of the tea bowls, her whisk, and the delicate ivory tea scoop in a precise order that only she knew, using prescribed motions that had probably been passed down from generation to generation for a thousand years or more. He wasn’t a fan of Japanese tea, or the laborious and complex ceremony that went with serving it, but it was buying them time and gave Wakiko something to focus on, so she didn’t have to look them in the eye.
‘When I was sixteen, I was recruited by the
Matrarchaí
.’
‘Recruited for what?’ Ren asked, as Wakiko began to spoon the powdered tea from the caddy into the tea bowl.
‘To travel to exotic realms,’ she said, with a faintly reminiscent smile. She poured the water into the bowl and picked up the tea whisk. ‘The adventure of being a rift runner was irresistible to a sixteen-year-old farm girl from Normandy.’ She looked at Trása, adding, ‘As I am sure you will agree.’
‘In my realm, the
Matrarchaí
are midwives,’ Trása said, clearly suspicious of Wakiko and her tea ceremony. ‘Not rift runners.’
‘They are both, little Faerie,’ Wakiko told her. ‘In your realm and mine. Their influence is felt across countless realms, both magical and mundane. Trust me, if you know of the
Matrarchaí
, you are dealing with the same organisation that recruited me and brought me to this realm.’
‘To do what?’ Ren asked again, accepting a bowl of thin tea with a bow. He took a sip and forced himself not to grimace. ‘Roam through as many realities as they can find, delivering babies?’
Wakiko smiled wanly and offered Trása a bowl, before carefully placing the lid on the tea caddy. ‘You would be horrified to learn how close to the truth that is, Renkavana.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Trása said, glancing at Ren with a look that seemed to imply she thought Wakiko a complete loon. Ren wasn’t sure he disagreed with that assessment.
‘They are not just delivering babies,’ Wakiko said. ‘They are delivering very specific babies.’
She paused, waiting for either Ren or Trása to get what she was telling them.
‘The psychic twins who become Undivided,’ Ren said, after a moment, a little alarmed by the implications of that statement. ‘They know how to find them.’
‘They are not finding them, Renkavana. They are breeding their own.’
Trása gasped.
‘And therein lies the
Matrarchaí
’s biggest problem,’ Wakiko continued. ‘Humans have no inherent capacity to wield magic. Not a drop of it. To wield the magic of their hated enemy, to produce the twins they require, they must
become
the enemy.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ Trása said, which saved Ren from having to admit the same thing. He put his tea bowl down and sat back on his heels, trying to decide if Wakiko was the answer to all their problems or the start of a whole new raft of them.
‘If you are human and you can wield Faerie magic, then you have Faerie blood in you,’ Wakiko said flatly. ‘It is as simple as that.’
‘So Chishihero was right? My brother and I are part-Faerie?’ Ren asked, not sure how he felt about such a revelation.
She nodded, topping up Ren’s cup of tea. ‘Almost pure
sídhe
, I’d say, to be as powerful as you are.’
‘I don’t feel powerful.’
‘That’s because you are ignorant of your full potential. Chishihero is not, which is why, when she first met you, she tried to kill you.’