The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (17 page)

32

Dunne wasn’t at the car when I went down. I crossed the road and dumped the sick bag in a bin. By the time I got back, he was there, sporting a cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he tucked the remainder of the packet into his jacket pocket.

‘Don’t tell Phyllis.’

That
was his wife’s name. ‘Don’t need to. She’ll smell it on you.’

Dunne produced a packet of mints from the other pocket and waggled them at me.

‘Sure, that’ll work.’

The car was old enough to still have the old crank-down windows. Dunne wound the window down, the cigarette dangling from his lip.

‘You know I haven’t seen my kids awake since the call-out? They’re asleep when I leave, and asleep when I get home. I get a snuggle at least, because the older three all climb into bed with us during the night. Which is nice. But it does mean that the four hours sleep I did have last night were spent hanging off the edge of the bed with one set of small feet in my face and another kicking my back. And no chance of a share of the duvet.’ He tapped ash out the window, then held the cigarette between index and middle finger and rubbed his temples with his thumb. ‘This whole thing is so screwed up, it’s driving me crazy. I still haven’t identified either of the bodies in the cars. I can’t even take samples from the moving one because it’s technically alive and we need its permission. And Benjamin Brannick! The boy has virtually no friends in London. There’s hardly anywhere he could have gone, but he’s just vanished. And I don’t even know if he’s dead or living dead. If he’s a murderer or a victim. And if he is dead, where’s the rest of the body? And if he’s alive? Same bloody question.’

With Per Ogunwale.
‘I don’t know.’ It was a lie, and in my mind I justified it by the difference it would make between Ben being captured and his turning himself in voluntarily.

Dunne gave me an irritated look. ‘I bloody well hope not. I know you Lipscombe lot like to keep things to yourself. In the name of... what? Client confidentiality? Some sense of retribution because the police haven’t always been nice to the non-humies?’

I flushed. ‘If you don’t want my help, don’t ask for it. Dying isn’t fun for me, you know. I want to find Ben Brannick as much as you do.’ And I did. I just wanted to find him first. I also wanted to keep him out of prison.

Dunne must have taken my red face as anger rather than guilt because he stared at me for a moment. Then he opened the car door and stubbed the remainder of the cigarette on the pavement. ‘Sorry, Viv. Just venting and you got caught in the crossfire.’

We drove back in silence.

33

Dunne dropped me outside the office a few steps from a group of protesters. Only one face on the pavement was unfamiliar, that of a woman armed with a notepad and the slightly exasperated air of someone trying to escape a social bore. One of the regulars gesticulated excitedly as he explained exactly what it was we were doing wrong. The others crowded round, interjecting whenever he paused for breath.

The journalist met my eyes as I passed. I suppressed a smile as I ducked into the lobby and waved at the security guard. Habi was bent over the desk, pointing out the necessary fields on a form to a client. I smiled at her as I went through reception but didn’t stop to chat.

The light on my phone blinked persistently. A neat stack of letters in my in-tray indicated the post had arrived. I bent under the desk and pressed the on button for my PC. I used a letter opener on the envelopes and sorted the contents as I waited for the computer to boot up.

Once online, I searched for Per Ogunwale and was directed to his website, which had the slick professional look of someone who’d hired a PR agency to set it up—big on quotes and waffle, and short on actual information. The ‘Contact Us’ button directed me to an online query form without phone number or address.

I backtracked and headed to Universe Mechanica, where I spent a few minutes typing search terms into the forums. The thread Obe had shown me had been started by someone calling themselves CyberOg. The attached avatar was a GIF of a Borg Captain Picard. My eyes slid down the thread. I googled acronyms and medical jargon as I went and made note of avatar names. The thread had generated a couple of babies, which I skimmed to the end. I opened up the diagrams and compared them to the photos of Ben’s wings on my phone. They looked the same, but comparing the severed wings to a diagram was pretty much useless.

A further search for Ogunwale came up with a lot of news stories and opinion columns but no way to get in touch with him. I didn’t read any of the articles. I was familiar with the story.

Per Ogunwale had been a promising young doctor—one of the youngest surgeons at St Thomas’s—when he made headlines for cutting off a fellow surgeon’s legs and replacing them with mechanical ones. The surgeon, a tech-head named Oriana Oxford, then did the same to Ogunwale. Both were struck off the medical roll despite their insistence that both operations had the full and informed consent of their respective patients and that only improvements had been made.

Ogunwale and Oxford immediately appealed through the courts claiming discrimination and finally won when it was decided their view on continuous self-improvement were tantamount to a religious one and the expulsion was discrimination. I hadn’t paid much attention to the story after that, but I recalled seeing an article in one of the Sunday papers detailing his desire to build and graft workable mechanical limbs.

I dug a bit further but came up empty-handed. Wherever Ogunwale was working now, they weren’t keen on advertising the fact. I wasn’t surprised. Some of the more right-wing papers were still getting mileage from the idea of a surgeon who didn’t understand that chopping off healthy limbs was a Bad Idea.

I tapped my fingers against my desk. Ogunwale had no immediate contact details online. I was about to pick up the phone and call Dunne when a half-remembered conversation surfaced in my mind.

Two years previously I’d helped a witch with a council housing issue, and I had the vague recollection that she’d said she’d met the machine man as part of a documentary on tech versus magic. I picked up my address book, found her number, and dialled.

‘He seemed nice enough,’ she said, when I explained who I was looking for. ‘Completely bonkers of course, but nice enough.’

The witch didn’t have a phone number for him, but she had met Ogunwale in his own home. I scribbled the address down on a sticky note. The directions were both precise and hazy, a remembered location two years old: go out of the tube station at Whitechapel, go left and walk along the road, can’t remember what it’s called, until you get to the tower block with the double blue doors underneath it, and his flat’s top middleish. It’s not the door painted pink with all the flowers, it’s the one next to the one next to that.

After a few minutes on Streetview, I identified the block as Digmore Rise. According to the weblinks, it was either a thriving den of crack-addicted street weasels or a friendly block of immigrant families and young city workers. It all depended on whether you lived there or were an estate agent trying to sell a flat. Two years ago, Per Ogunwale had lived in this block. It didn’t look like the kind of place anyone would want to stay if they had any choice, but I had nowhere else to look.

Darkness fell while I was on the tube, and I stepped out of Whitechapel station to exhaust fumes and the peppery stink of earth magic. The majority of Digmore Estate hadn’t escaped the spell that had destroyed much of Whitechapel. A glowing link fence split the estate into safe zones and the damaged area. Familiar yellow construction boards decorated the fence at regular intervals: ‘Warning! Thaumaturgical Damage. Entrance to authorised personnel only.’

The remains of the smaller buildings at the edge of the estate were still visible as sand-covered rubble. The heat and magic beyond the fence made the sand shimmer.

The spared Digmore Rise itself was the usual sixties-built concrete monstrosity, dotted with grey laundry-lined balconies and decorated with water stains and graffiti. The security door was wedged open with a brick, which was lucky because the buzzers were a tangle of wires and broken plastic.

Inside, piles of rubbish—beer cans, orange polystyrene takeaway boxes, plastic supermarket bags, and other unrecognisable detritus—lay across the open lift door, indicating it hadn’t been used in a while. Or rather it had been used but not for its intended purpose. Someone had crapped in one corner, and the whole thing reeked of piss. I made a mental note to rinse off my trainers when I got home and put them in the washing machine.

A stairwell led off to the right. The bulb on the landing had burnt out or been smashed, and this, along with lack of windows, meant I had only just enough light to stop me stepping in the occasional suspicious puddle. I didn’t bother checking the first nine floors; the building had at least twenty, and my contact had said it was middle to near the top.

On floor ten, my calves aching, I pushed open the glass-fronted door to the corridor, which went off in both directions. From the structure of the building, I guessed it wrapped almost all the way around. The floor had once been carpeted, but only a little was left, rotted against the walls. Mostly it had peeled away to show the plain concrete beneath. The walls were an institutional green and daubed with graffiti. Not the arty kind, rather the sort of tags that are the human equivalent of a dog peeing on a tree.

I made my way round uninterrupted, and while there were plenty of comments and drawings on some of the doors, most lacking in creativity but big on emphasising the same improbable genitalia, there were no flowers, so I headed to the eleventh floor, where I didn’t have much luck either.

On the twelfth, I ran into a pack of four street weasels; just the right number to make harassing a solitary female an obligation in front of their pack mates.

‘Hey, sweet cheeks. How ‘bout a kiss?’

‘Smile, love, it might never happen.’

All four burst out laughing in that high-pitched way the weasels do, furry chins wobbling.

I ignored them, although my stomach had dropped the minute I’d seen them. I tried to walk past, but they blocked my way.

‘Don’t cha want to talk to us? We’re only being friendly,’ said the tallest. His grey fur was patchy and mangy across his pinched face. He gave me a smile that showed his teeth.

I decided to appeal to his helpful side. ‘Could you give me some directions? I’m looking for the flat that’s got a door painted pink with flowers.’

‘I can show you something pink.’ More high-pitched giggling. This comment came from the smallest and skinniest, whose shaved cheeks and forehead indicated he’d tried to pass as human recently.

‘No, thanks,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t come alone. I tried again to get past, and this time they let me, although not without an obligatory squeeze to my buttocks. Crude offers followed me up the stairwell, but fortunately the weasels didn’t.

Yuck, never mind the shoes, all of me could have done with an extra-hot spin-cycle.

I found the pink door with the flowers on the fourteenth floor. Someone had scribbled ‘Slag’ across the daisies with a black marker pen. Two doors along, the cheap council door had been replaced with a thick hardwood job, complete with three different types of lock.

A deep bass beat sounded from the other side. I knocked loudly, and when there was no answer, banged hard with my fist. The music switched off and I heard the sound of footsteps, then there was a moment’s silence as I assumed I was surveyed through the peephole. I smiled my most charming smile, and the door opened.

Even if pictures of Ogunwale hadn’t been splashed all over the papers, I would have recognised him immediately—most people aren’t eight feet tall or have that many wires poking out of their head. I looked down, but the famous cyberlegs were hidden under a pair of navy tracksuit bottoms.

Ogunwale frowned at me. ‘You here just to stare?’ His voice was unexpectedly high-pitched. A man that tall should rumble. I dug into my coat pocket and produced my ID card.

Ogunwale peered at it. ‘I was wondering when you’d turn up.’

I thought he hadn’t seemed surprised, but it wasn’t that easy to tell. I had heard the tech-heads used Botox to stop them moving while their bodies healed around them. Damned stupid thing to do—a lot of them ended up with brain damage. Of course it might be said that you’d have to be brain damaged already to let someone drill into your head without a really good reason.

He turned and walked into the flat. I took it as an invitation. I’m not sure what I was expecting, probably a cavernous dark space with green blinking lights and mechanical body parts strewn about like I was inside some messy Borg starship, but there were no limbs anywhere to be seen. And I did look.

The machine man had a taste for art deco, and the whole place was spotless except for a single white china cup of black coffee next to an open textbook, notepad, pencil, and a yellow highlighter on a solid wood coffee table.

The window and balcony were directly opposite the door I’d come in. The curtains were open, showing the contaminated city beyond. It gave off an unnatural glow and the occasional white spark.

‘Can I get you coffee, or tea?’ Ogunwale asked. ‘I’ve only got soya milk, I’m afraid. No dairy, I’m allergic.’

I accepted a tea, and he told me to call him Per. The cybergiant disappeared through a door to the left, then I heard clinking sounds and the whistle of a kettle.

The wall next to the kitchen was lined with a single enormous bookcase, double stacked with books. Most were science fiction, but there were a few medical texts thrown in. A closed netbook was wedged on the top shelf.

I settled down on the white sofa opposite the window. Per set the tea opposite me on the coffee table and sat down in an adjacent armchair.

‘How do you know Ben?’ I asked.

‘I grew up next door to Malcolm Brannick,’ he said. I remembered the old man with the dandelion hair I’d seen peeking out the window. He’d seemed familiar, and now I realised why. The son looked like the father. ‘Terrible thing that happened to him. The whole family must be devastated.’

‘Has no one else been in contact with you? Adam? The police? They’ve also been looking for him.’

He shook his head, ‘I haven’t spoken to either of them in years. Poor kid. I saw what happened to his wings.’

‘That hasn’t been made public.’

He looked at me like I was maybe a little dim. ‘Maybe not officially, but they’re online.’ He rolled up a sleeve to show a slim screen embedded into his left wrist. For all my misgivings, I had to admit he’d had a good job done. The skin around the screen was scarred but clean, a rare uninfected screen graft.

Pictures scrolled across the screen before stopping at a close-up of Ben’s wings stuffed into the bin. I wondered how the photos had ended up on the internet. Haddad would have the wobbling conniptions when she found out. I hoped Dunne wouldn’t tell her he’d let me take photos. She’d never believe it wasn’t me.

‘Anyway,’ Per said, ‘I would have talked him out of it.’

I stared at him without expression. ‘You think he did it himself? Why would you think he’d do something like that?’

‘Because he’s asked me to do it before.’ His huge shoulders lifted in a shrug, ‘It’s hard enough being a teenager without all the shit he has to deal with. Have you seen where he lives? He wanted me to do it, but I said no. I mean, I know it’s hard for him, but wings! To cut them off would be a travesty.’

‘You cut your legs off.’

‘Only because I could replace them with better ones. We haven’t made much progress on the wings front.’

‘I suppose that counts as a denial that you’re the one who did it,’ I said, going for the subtle ‘are you the one wot done it’ approach.

He shot me an annoyed look. ‘No, I didn’t. And if you have any doubt about that, you obviously know nothing about my work. I’m a surgeon, not a butcher. I wouldn’t do that much damage. And I certainly wouldn’t throw them away afterwards. Viable mechanical wings are bloody difficult. Ben let us x-ray him, and that helped enormously in giving us an idea how they work on a human, but all our prototypes aren’t even close to the organic stuff.’