Authors: Kate Griffin
“You go… to a book group?”
“Um. Y-yes?”
“For druids?”
“Oh, no! For feminists, mostly.”
Sharon’s voice was the slow see-saw of one trying to solve a difficult problem. “But… you’re a druid. And… also a feminist?”
“I don’t think you have to be either, or not be either, or be neither one nor the other, or not either or, in fact, to join.”
Sharon stared, a woman attempting to adjust her long-held views on another soul; then gave up and blurted, “So I figured we’d do more incisive-detective stuff, if you’re okay with that?”
“Of course, Ms Li. I packed a thermos, just in case.”
“Good!” She opened up her bag, fumbling among its mess of biros, notebooks and half-eaten sandwiches.
“Is… Miles joining us today?” asked Rhys, and felt a momentary flush of pride at how level his voice was.
“What?” Sharon mumbled, focused on her task. “… No. He’s doing the whole Alderman thing, trying to see if anyone got thrown into the river last night. And Kevin’s tucked up for the day, so it’s just you and me. That’s… okay, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes, Ms Li! I mean, of course it is, I wouldn’t want you to think that it’s not, which isn’t to say it would ever not be, not that I don’t like Miles because of course I do…” And here it came, the beginning of the sneeze. Rhys swallowed it back down so hard his ears popped.
With a great upsurge of paper and sandwich, Sharon pulled the object of her desire from the depths of her bag. “Ta-da!” she exclaimed, flourishing it aloft.
The document, folded down a dozen times, revealed itself when unfolded to be a map. Fully opened up, it proved too big for Sharon to hold without it sagging around the edge, even in her outstretched arms. Rhys helped her struggle with it as they tried to fold the thing into a manageable form.
This done, Rhys actually paused to look at the map. He saw a surface punctuated with coloured dots, and said, “Swift’s map?”
“Yup! Pinched it off his wall,” Sharon explained. “Which I know some people might call theft, but others would say is initiative. That’s the trouble with management. It’s all about some other bastard’s point of view.”
Rhys looked uneasy. Stealing was stealing, especially when the theft involved a semi-possessed, mythically empowered, almost undead sorcerer.
“So I was having a gander at it,” she went on. “And I figured that all the coloured dots probably meant something, and that maybe it would be dynamic and proactive,” – relishing the words – “to go and have a look at some of the places they marked. Also, I thought sitting around on our arses in the office, while technically what we’re paid to do, would be really uncool considering the whole missing Midnight Mayor/blood thing, and it’s good to get out and about sometimes, isn’t it? It’s like a staff away-day, only with death on the line!”
Rhys sagged. “Yes, Ms Li.”
“Don’t be like that – it’ll be fun!”
Hampstead. If you believed the signs in the window of the local deli, Hampstead wasn’t just a nice corner of a pleasant borough, it was a
Village
. A small oasis in the chaos of the city, a peaceful place where you need not visit the supermarket for your meat, nor wait at the chemist for your medicines, but where the happy butcher in his bright red apron would greet you by name as he carved up fillet steak for your consumption, and the pharmacist at the back of the apothecary beneath the masseuse’s lavender-scented rooms would offer discreet and well-informed conversation as she filled in your prescription. In Hampstead Village, mothers could sit outside the coffee houses while their babies slumbered in buggies designed like a space mission; freshly baked bread would be lined up on the rustic wooden shelves of the patisserie, the aroma of yeast wafting out on a warm breeze through the inviting open door. In Hampstead Village, crime was unseen, littering not tolerated and public transport a traffic annoyance that passed through, on its way to somewhere else. It was beautiful, clean, welcoming, friendly, quaint, historical, modern and, Rhys couldn’t help but feel, judging him.
“You can’t be judged by a borough,” said Sharon, as they wandered downhill past white mansions with iron arches above their gates where flaming torches had once burnt through the night.
“B-b-but boroughs do have a distinct personality.” Rhys dabbed at his nose, as the city spread wide beneath them. “Not just ethnically, I mean, though there are trends, but also financially, and based on employment and literacy and that. Which isn’t to say that a borough where more people can read will be
nicer
, just that if all these things happen together at once – ethnicity and money and everything – then maybe you do get a collective personality, see?”
“But why would a borough judge
you
?” demanded Sharon. “You attend a non-druidic feminist book group!”
She did have a point.
They took a turning towards the edge of the Heath. The houses became wider, grander, lower, and marked by the individual character of their original makers. A white-timbered mansion in a colonial style; a grand, orange-bricked building with a white portico and two cars parked out on a lovingly raked gravel crescent outside; a cluster of buildings painted the colour of ice-cream flavours in a posh Italian shop, 100 per cent organic and adorned by the front door with little signs declaring “Heath Lodge” or “Wildflower Cottage” as if, for this small set-back piece of street alone, the double-decker bus had never happened.
They stopped before one of these cottages of three bedrooms, two living rooms and a Mercedes, and Sharon examined her purloined map. “Okay,” she said. “We’re at a spot.” She looked up at Rhys, only to find that her expectation, which wasn’t great to begin with, nonetheless trumped the look on Rhys’s face. “Um… do druids do much communing with the secrets of the universe?” she ventured. “I only ask, because that might be, like, seriously useful in this sorta situation.”
“Not really,” admitted Rhys. “I mean, I’m sure at higher levels maybe some of the really good druids can. But usually we just make potions and commune with the natural environment, see? Which isn’t to say natural, not in the strict sense any more, but is more to say… the fixed environment, you know?”
Sharon’s face didn’t know, but Sharon’s voice proclaimed, “Ah. Okay. That’s… So I’m guessing you’re not having any great insight into why Swift put a red dot on this street on the map?”
Rhys looked around helplessly. “Maybe he was house hunting?”
A scowl flickered on Sharon’s mouth as she turned to examine the street. Bins for families of four or more; cars with an annual insurance value that probably exceeded her yearly rent; clean windows and professionally tended gardens; hedges neatly trimmed into either very solid, or occasionally mildly artful shapes, depending on how radical the trimmer was feeling that month. Trees, taller than the houses themselves, and more varied than the plane trees in the city landscape below. On one of them, some wit had slung a pair of shoes, while below, carved into the bark itself, J had declared undying love for P. A small, single-decker bus built for little old ladies and women with prams, hummed by on an electric engine, heading downhill towards the railway line, while overhead little white clouds puffed through a great expanse of pale blue sky above the Heath itself.
Sharon turned and took in all of this, then turned again and, growing faint around the edges as she did so, looked with a shaman’s eye. Flashes of things which had been, and things which might yet come, melted together and danced before her. Kites soared above the Heath, while clouds rumbled and rolled, promising rain at the picnic; cars blurred into a streak that stopped and started like a swollen snake as vehicles turned off in search of a place to park for the family’s day on the hill. A woman screamed at her husband, caught in an act of betrayal; an engine backfired in a burst of yellow-sooty flame. Music shimmered from an open window, swirled in clouds of steam from a radio standing near a boiling saucepan, and the smell of fresh rain bloomed on the hillside. Bracken swayed and flourished, shrank and withered with the seasons; trees put forth new leaves, then shed them in a firestorm of orange and red; and still the shoes hung upon the branch.
Sharon saw all of this, but as she looked and looked again she could see nothing that seemed unnatural. Her eyes passed over Rhys and even he, in allergic distress, had a glow, a luminescence more than just the natural warmth of blood, that hinted at his magical inclinations. She wondered how she would look if she could see herself in this shadow-place. Would there be anything even to see?
“I’m getting nothing,” she admitted, stepping back into the bright, hard reality of the street. “This would all be way easier if Swift had just left a note.”
“Apparently the Midnight Mayor doesn’t like memos.”
Sharon scowled. “Memos,” she asserted, “are a vital part of good office practice and management procedure. Keeping a record of events is essential in this age of litigation and complicated, multifaceted organisational operations!”
Rhys smiled wanly at this, and waited for Sharon to deflate. “At any rate,” she persisted, “that’s what I’ve heard… Right! Let’s go and look at another of Swift’s red dot things and maybe we’ll find a pattern… what are you doing?”
Rhys had his mobile phone out and was taking pictures, “Um… scene of the crime photos?”
“That’s… actually kinda a good idea.”
“Th-thank you, Ms Li, I thought it might help, see, as we’re doing this professional investigation, so we want to learn from professionals. I mean, I think it makes sense.”
Sharon patted him on the shoulder. “I think that all sounds very sensible.” Then, aware that she was still, technically, the boss, “Carry on!”
Chapter 17
Persistence Is Not Stubbornness
They visited six other dots on Swift’s map, scattered across Hampstead, Highgate and Haringey, and ended up in a small café in Wood Green. With a name like Wood Green, the place should have been a pleasant retreat of ivy-clad trees, maybe threaded with streams. What it in fact was, was a shopping mall. There was perhaps some small redemption in that the mall itself seemed confused about its social intentions and economic purpose. While it held the usual chain stores, advertising goods from expensive moisturiser to cheap DVDs, in its lower halls a sort of bazaar had sprung up, where ramshackle stores and trestle tables competed with each other to sell vivid fabrics off the roll, dubious electrical goods and brightly coloured spices shovelled out of great sacks. In the small local library, inserted by a ground-floor entrance, where a vending machine dispensed gobstoppers at 20p a shot, the shelves offered books in Punjabi, Bengali, Russian, Hindi and Hebrew for the literary local community.
Yet however varied the visitors to this part of the mall, the coffee served here was that brand of thin liquid known universally as bad. Sharon and Rhys sat in silence as the world tumbled by, and sought a way to consume their drinks without tasting them.
The day had been, as Sharon was forced to admit, disappointing. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel proactive – they’d done a great deal of walking and ridden a lot of buses – it was simply that, in the 150 or more photos Rhys had taken that day, not one had included anything you could call nefarious. The dots on Swift’s map had corresponded to scenes of ordinariness: neat terraced roads, quiet backstreets, and residential cul-de-sacs off well-ordered estates. They’d all been within easy reach of a bus, occasionally a little isolated, never overlooked by CCTV, and, from what Sharon could tell, about as remarkable as slate on an entire roof.
“Well,” said Rhys. “Actually…” he began again, then added, “I thought it went well, don’t you?”
Sharon looked at him in disbelief, and waited. Seeing her expression, at length he mumbled, “Maybe I can print up my photos, and we can see if there’s any pattern?”
Sharon nodded mutely. Pressing her hands around her mug of coffee, feeding on its warmth, for a moment she listened to the world passing by, to the voices of…
Come on for God’s sake we’ll be late!
and then yeah then I was like mate, you cannot fucking say that and he was like uh whatever?
three for a pound three for a pound you madam you you know you want three for a pound…
Are you sure you want that one?
Well, it’s your money.
Her eyes began to drift shut as she let the sounds wash over her, the high-speed babble of the schoolgirls playing truant from chemistry; the loud cry of the salesman making a hard sale to the wrong crowd, the snapping of the tired mother at her wailing child, the burble of the toddler who’s just discovered the wonders of the Postman Pat machine by the library door and wants another go, and the grumble of the old woman paying for her meal in nothing but two- and five-pence coins, laying them one at a time before the despairing gaze of the pie seller in her little steaming stall.
The sounds comforted her, warmed her. Sharon’s eyes drifted open again, and she managed a smile. “Righto, Rhys,” she said. “Let’s go bloody home.”
Chapter 18
“Home”, it turned out, meant the office.
There was paperwork to do.
Tea to make.
It was, Rhys recalled, Meeting Day.
He sat at his computer, hearing the printer creak and chug its way through printing out the photos from his mobile phone. Sharon fussed around, plumping up beanbags and putting out collapsible chairs. The two of them had recently got better at organising Meeting Days, falling into something of a system, down to working out exactly how many biscuits they needed for an average room of wizards, witches, magi and banshees. But Sharon’s request for a larger kettle still hadn’t been processed by head office, and much of Rhys’s function during each meeting was to stand over their small plastic job, topping it up and reboiling it for the supply of tea, coffee and herbal concoctions that were the members’ mainstay.
They began to arrive at 8.40 p.m., knocking on the already open door of Magicals Anonymous. Rhys had finished printing the photos of the day, and was pinning them up on the board when the first member arrived, a small woman with mousy hair who went by the name of Jess, and who had a problem with morphic stability, pigeons and domestic cats. A rap on a window looking into an overshadowed grey space laughingly called the back garden, announced the arrival of Sally, descending from the sky with a snap of leathery wing. It had taken Sally some time to stop coming to the weekly meetings of Magicals Anonymous under the protection of her chameleon spell, and the day she’d finally arrived without it, her banshee features clear for all the world to see, everyone had stood up and applauded her great courage and community spirit. Beneath the guise of perception-alerting magics, Sally had turned out to have a small, neat face, with tiny pinched-in nose and pasty, cream-tinted skin, entirely hairless but not, to Rhys’s surprise, repulsive. She never spoke, out of consideration for the eardrums her voice would shatter and the blood her scream could boil. But on those few occasions when she could be tempted to sample a biscuit, holding it gingerly between razor-black talons at the end of her great grey wings, the lipless flesh across her mouth would curl back to reveal huge spines of tooth, assuring anyone who looked upon them that the banshee was indeed a piranha of the sky. All of which, Rhys concluded, must contribute to Sally’s reluctance to attend the exhibitions of Impressionist art that were her chief interest and hobby, during daylight hours.