Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (18 page)

The man on the far right, I saw instantly, was clearly related to my boss. He had the same eyes and the same strong jaw. He
must
have been Trevelyan’s father.

He had his arm companionably around the shoulders of the next man in the frame, who looked the youngest of them all. He was a thin, gawkish-looking nerd with thick glasses. The photo had caught this guy halfway into a grin, which made him look even goofier than he would probably have appeared. Who was this then? The protégé of Vyvienne’s father?

The next man along, in the centre of the photograph, looked faintly familiar to me but I didn’t know why. He was a large solidly-built man, also wearing thick-rimmed glasses over heavy lidded eyes, and was sporting a very luxuriant and well-trimmed beard which covered half of his face. He was standing with his arms folded, centre-stage, smiling proudly out of the frame with his champagne glass tucked under his hand. He looked like the most senior of the five present, a proud father-figure with his close knit team around him.

Next along came as something of a surprise to me. I
definitely
knew
this
face. In this old photo, the man was younger, slimmer, and looked far less self-important than every other time I had even seen his face on the DataStream. However, there was no doubting that this was a floppy-haired, smirking version of Marlin Scott, the same super-rich businessman who my new best friend Servant Cloves would be schmoosing at his Mankind Movement fundraiser this evening.

There was no mistaking that hooked nose or clever eyes. Scott was a powerful figure in the industry. I hadn’t known he had a background in science but here he was, inexplicably, in the photo. He was an engineer, surely? What on earth was he doing drinking champagne with Trevelyan’s old man and the other guys, Nerdboy and Superbeard?

It was the fifth figure, however, which had really caught my attention. It was seeing this man that had made me cross the room and practically tear the picture off the wall.

That man standing next to Marlin Scott. He was young in the picture, grinning like the rest of them, clearly celebrating something and looking as caught up in the moment as everyone else. These five pre-war scientists, with their eyes bright as buttons, smiling out of their black and white world so distant from my own, enjoying a world without the Pale.

The young man on the far right, leaning on Marlin Scott’s shoulder and holding the champagne bottle cheekily just out of frame was younger in this photo than I was now. Twenty two maybe, twenty three? He was handsome, if a little thin in the face.

My hands gripped the photo so hard I almost thought the glass would shatter as I stared at him.

I hadn’t heard Griff come upstairs, didn’t look up when he entered the room or when he stood next to me, looking down curiously at the photo I was gripping.

“Hey, did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, scrutinising the picture. “Who are those guys?”

Beneath the photo, on the card mount, it read ‘
To my darling daughter Vyvienne, me and the rest of the team, raising glasses to a world without fear – Love, Dad.
’

I swallowed a couple of times before I could answer.

“I don’t know all of them,” I said, my voice sounding oddly tinny in my own ears, “but
this
guy
here? The youngish guy holding the bottle…?”

My finger jabbed the man on the far right of the science team as I looked up at Griff.

“That’s my father.”

21

I took the photograph with me when I left the house, dragging Griff behind me. I didn’t know what to think.

Why the hell was my father in a photograph with Trevelyan’s old man and the others? What the hell did it all mean?

I had decided the time had come to take action.

I checked my watch, it was close to 5pm now. The winter days were short and it was already dusk. It would be full nightfall soon.

“Where are we going now?” Griff asked as we climbed back into his car.

“You’re going back to work, handsome,” I told him, a steely look in my eyes. “But frankly I’ve had enough of this cloak and dagger crap. I want answers.”

I glanced over at him, his face lit by the dashboard in the deepening gloom.

“You can drop me … at the
library
,” I said with feeling.

22

The Bodleian Library is not just any old place. Maybe once, it was one of the great libraries of the whole world.

Built around an earlier private library back in the fifteenth century, it expanded and opened to our city’s noble scholars later in 1602. It is an ancient and venerable hall of knowledge. Its reading rooms have been home to many a famous mind over the centuries. Five different kings have studied here, forty or so Nobel Prize winners, twenty six of the old civilisation’s Prime Ministers, and more writers than you can shake a quill at. Oscar Wilde, CS Lewis, Tolkien…

My interest in the Bod this evening, however, was neither academic nor historical. I wasn’t hoping to rifle through its catalogue of millions of printed books and manuscripts in a handy motivational montage which might explain my current conundrum.

I was heading there, to the heart of old Oxford at the centre of the University, because it was here at the Bod where the wealthy Mankind Movement champion, Marlin Scott, was holding his evening fundraiser.

You could hire out rooms at the Library for private or corporate functions. Marlin Scott’s shindig was being held in the Divinity School, the University’s very first teaching room and its oldest examination hall.

It was a grand setting, which suited Scott. He wasn’t, if his public persona was anything to go by, one for understatement. I wanted to know what the geriatric saviour of our city, the man behind the construction of the wall, knew about my father.

“I thought your father was dead, Doc?” Griff said as we drove through the sleet and the gathering gloom.

“He is,” I replied. “He died in the wars. He was a field surgeon.”

The temperature was dropping and I was beginning to wish I hadn’t left my coat back in the lab.

“My mother died when I was born. The wars had already been raging for years, it was just me and dad. I was nine when he died. A skirmish out in Derbyshire, a town almost overrun by the Pale. He was part of an Evac Team, sent in to lift out any civilians still holed up there.”

“Something brought his helicopter down right in the middle of the Peak District, out in the wilds. Deep valleys up there, high moors. They disappeared off the radar. A Search and Rescue Team went out after them, of course.”

I rubbed my hands together in the cold, trying to coax some warmth into them.

“They found the crash site and the bodies, what was left of them anyway. The Pale had found them. They didn’t leave much behind to identify.”

“Jesus…” Griff muttered under his breath.

I glanced at him.

“Everyone lost someone in the wars. A whole lot of people just disappeared. I grew up here after he died. Safe behind Marlin Scott and the Bonewalkers’ magnificent wall.”

I smirked to myself. It sounded like a tribute band.

“And you had no idea that your father had worked with Trevelyan’s dad?” Griff pulled up near the Turf Tavern on Holywell, not far from the library.

“None whatsoever,” I admitted, shaking my head in disbelief. “I knew he had been a scientist before the Pale, before the wars started, but that was long before I was born.”

I glanced down at the photo on my lap in the dark car.

“I’ve never seen him look as young as he does here.”

I re-read the message from Trevelyan’s father to his doting daughter again. What the hell had the Development Team been? I had no answers. Trevelyan may have had them but she was gone. There was another source I planned to confront.

Marlin Scott himself.

Griff tried to come with me but I sent him away. He was clearly worried and asked me solemnly if I was in some kind of trouble. I admitted that I thought I was. There wasn’t much he could do to help, however, other than keep up the good work with the rats.

I thanked him for driving me around like a chauffeur, and promised solemnly that I would explain to him what the hell this was all about as soon as I could, asking him to check in on Lucy if he was headed her way, and then left the car and disappeared into the snowy night streets of New Oxford.

The Bod is an impressive building, quite monumental and utterly otherworldly in that way so common to my city. Oxford has always seemed fluid in time to me. The strange additions over the years, the salvaged buildings from other parts of Britannia, the sky-scraping glass needles of the new Northern Sector, these all just added to the feeling that this city was half in the present, half in the past, and another half somewhere on the other side of the looking glass.

Yes, I’m aware that’s three halves. I did tell you it’s an odd place.

The impressive, ancient exterior of the Bod was made to seem ever more eldritch tonight by the falling snow and with enormous spotlights casting a soft bluish glow over the outer walls. Large free-standing pennants bearing the logo of Scott Enterprises (a stylised portcullis if you’re interested) flanked the entrance, and there were many expensive-looking cars in the parking lot, with valets rushing here and there while guests poured into the building.

I didn’t have an invitation, of course, and I realised I was severely underdressed for such a grand high society gala. There were very official-looking doormen welcoming New Oxford’s great and good, and as I reached the steps to the main entrance, one of them gave me a look of alarm.

Come
on
, I thought, I didn’t look
that
bad. Okay, so most of the people around me were either in full tuxedos, evening gowns or a combination of pearls and mink stoles, but I didn’t exactly look like a derelict off the street from the south eastern Slade Sector.

I wondered if I looked like some crazy GO rights activist, here to ruin the fun of all the Mankind Movement supporters. Maybe I was hoping to throw a bucket of pig’s blood over Mr Scott, for being such an unashamed genetic bigot?

“I’m sorry, miss,” the doorman said while not looking remotely sorry, “but this is a private function, invitation only. I’m afraid I can’t allow you in.”

I stared past him up the steps into the warmly-lit building. There were crowds of people filing though the corridors inside, heading for the Divinity School. I could hear distant band music, upbeat swing drifting out into the dark car park.

“Do you know Veronica Cloves?” I asked him. He looked confused.

“Well, of course, Servant Cloves is one of my favourite DataStream hosts. Everybody knows her, but…”

“She’s inside,” I said curtly.

“I’m aware of that, miss,” he said in his patient yet no-nonsense tones. “However, if you’re a fan or a member of the press, I’m afraid you will have to approach her office directly at the Cabal Headquarters at the Liver Building over in the South Park Complex, same as everyone else. There’s no one giving autographs here tonight.”

He rocked slightly on his heels, fuelled by self-importance.

“As I said, miss, it’s a private function.”

“I know it is,” I said, shooting him my most withering look. “My name is Doctor Phoebe Harkness and I am working closely with Servant Cloves on internal Cabal affairs. I’m not asking for her goddamned autograph. I’m telling you to go and find her, and tell her I’m here.”

The doorman raised his eyebrows. He looked slightly uncertain but not entirely convinced.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have believed me either. I wasn’t even carrying any ID.

“Is there a problem?” said the person standing behind me, sounding bored but impatient to get inside.

The doorman looked past me as I seethed, but something on the doorman’s face, the look of abashed surprise, made me reconsider my initial impulse to turn and land a haymaker on whatever silver-spoon blue blood was irritated by my holding him up.

“Mr Scott,” the doorman blustered. “I’m so sorry, sir, I hadn’t seen you arrive. I was just explaining to this young lady that…”

I span on my heel. Mr Scott?

The figure standing behind me, with an entourage of six or so private bodyguards flanking him from a discreet distance and looking humourlessly stuffed into their tight suits, was not the elderly, hook-nosed industrialist I had been hoping for.

It was a young man in a smart tuxedo. His face was open and smiling, his complexion fresh and rosy-cheeked as though he had just come from a day punting merrily along the Thames. His floppy blonde hair was neatly parted, like a pageboy.

I recognised the neat, expertly placed medical stitch across his otherwise pretty nose.

I should.

It had been my head that had split it.

“Oscar?” I stammered.

The boy blinked at me a few times, clearly struggling to place my face. Then realisation dawned. I watched various emotions cross his face like clouds across the sun in quick succession: shock, horror, embarrassment, guilt, and finally, after a moment’s consideration, amusement.

“Oh my Lord,” he said, breaking into a grin. “Small world, isn’t it?”

He certainly hadn’t been this lucid last time I had seen him, but now he was bobbing on his shining heels and looking like a dashed decent chap.

He had in fact been smashed out of his head when we originally met, firstly by being used like a walking wine box by vampires, and then by myself. Literally.

“Mr Scott?” I burbled, staring at the boy shining back at me like a paragon of well-bred innocence. “He called you Mr Scott?”

“Oscar Scott, yes,” he held out his hand politely, as though he hadn’t tried to wrestle me to the floor the previous evening to stop me escaping his undead sugar daddy. “I don’t believe we were properly introduced. You look rather … different tonight.”

I took his hand, not sure what else to do, and fairly certain that head butting him again would not get me inside.

“You too,” I said.

He was a far cry from the submissive, dog-collar wearing groupie who had dry humped my back in Sanctum.

“Marlin Scott is my father,” he grinned by way of explanation. “I think I did mention something about it last night, but to be honest I was pretty far gone by midnight.”

He glanced around us, looking slightly abashed.

“I may have … overindulged a little.”

A
little
? I thought.

The doorman was looking from Oscar to me politely.

“You know this young lady, sir?” he asked.

“Of course,” Oscar shot him a winning, Head Boy grin. “She’s here as my guest, Glenn. For goodness’ sake, let us in.”

To my shock, Oscar Scott, playboy millionaire and erstwhile off-duty Helsing, linked my arm in a gentlemanly fashion and led me inside, dismissing the frantic apologies of the doorman.

Was this really the same boy from the club? He looked as wholesome and good-natured as a choirboy. Did he really not remember what had gone on at Sanctum?

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked under my breath, as he led us with the other guests down the long and highly decorated hallways of the Bod towards the main event in the Divinity School.

“Look, lady…” he hissed back at me. His voice was low and urgent, but he kept up the act of smiling and waving in greeting to several other people as though he were minor royalty. “… If you came here to blackmail me, you’ll get nothing but trouble, okay? Don’t think just because you happened to spot me out on the town that you can sell your story to the bloody tabloids because none of them will believe a word of it anyway. What are you anyway, some kind of paparazzo? I’m sick of your kind hounding me.”

I stopped dead in the hallway and stared at him.

“Do you really not remember what happened last night? I’m not here to blackmail you, you idiot. I didn’t even know who you
were
last night. I barely do now if I’m honest. I’m here to see your father on a business matter.”

Oscar’s manner changed. He seemed to sag with relief.

“Oh thank God,” he practically blurted. “I thought … well, never mind. You’re not gutter press then. Thank God for that.”

He led me on again, positively chummy now, my arm still linked in his as he leant in to whisper.

“I am really sorry but I honestly was so bloody bladdered last night, I don’t remember a darn thing. My head was like broken eggshells this morning, I don’t mind telling you. Were you feeling delicate too?”

He sniggered like a naughty child.

“Wild night though, with the fire and all? It was like being at a foam party, right? All those sprinklers … I think I remember that.”

He looked momentarily confused.

“Hey, did we dance together at some point?”

I blinked incredulously at him.

“Kind of,” I said flatly.

So he really didn’t remember. I wondered if it was drugs, the blood-letting, or some kind of mind control by the white spidery Gio. It could be a fun combination of all three for all I knew. Whatever the case, my shiny new friend had just bought me a ticket inside and I was going with it.

We entered the Divinity School itself to loud swing band music. The room was resplendent. There were balloon arches in gold and cream dotted about here and there in the massive hall, the official colours of the Mankind Movement.