The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (20 page)

38

New Scotland Yard is a tall and shiny new building near Westminster. The Metanatural Crimes Unit is not nearly so shiny. Due to the additional (and expensive) requirement for powerful anti-magic alarm systems and demon-proofed walls, the MCU is not only functionally attached to the Yard but literally attached too, taking the form of an ugly brick building tacked onto the back of the newer, brighter one.

The middle-aged woman behind the reception desk wore a pink suit and a blonde beehive as big as her head. I gave her my name and told her I was there to see Dunne. She nodded and the beehive wobbled.

Despite the fancy tech, the rest of the lobby was worn and grubby. Scuff marks dirtied the institutional green walls. Pamphlets spilled out of a metal rack on a side table next to a row of grey plastic chairs. I took the seat on the end. I’d had occasion to visit the MCU before, and every time but one I’d been there to provide an official report on the victims of one zombie or another. Now just sitting in the building was enough to make me queasy—not unlike sitting in a doctor’s waiting room knowing your pap smear is just minutes away.

A constable I didn’t recognise arrived within minutes. ‘Ms Brisk? DS Dunne’s not here at the mo, but he wanted you to come up.’

She used her ID badge to open the security door at the end of the corridor then stood back to let someone else through. That someone was Neil Brannick. He frowned when he saw me then pushed past.

The constable pointed down a long, carpeted corridor. ‘DC Little’s waiting for you in the Incident Room at the end.’

I walked to the end, but none of the rooms leading off contained Little. I turned back, but the constable was gone. I wandered the corridors for twenty minutes before I found him, all the while expecting someone to ask me my business and turf me out. But I needn’t have worried. The police appeared more interested in doing their work than bothering with a random stranger passing by.

Finally I found a door with a white label on which someone had hand-printed ‘Brannick’ in blue ballpoint. I opened it to find a multiple-use conference room in which a row of desks had been shoved towards the wall. Boxes and papers covered the desks. The opposite wall had a number of whiteboards with stuck-on posters and scribbles.

Little, in cat form, stood on a single desk in the middle of the row, sniffing at the contents of a red shoe box. His tail gave a little up-flip when he saw me. I recognised the gesture. It’s the same one Vinegar gives me when I’m home late and his dinner is delayed.

‘Hey.’

Cat-Little sneezed and blinked at me. He seemed to be waiting for something.

‘Oh.’ I turned my back. There was a clicking noise.

After some rustling, I heard, ‘Okay.’

I turned around. He was barefoot but wearing trousers and in the midst of buttoning the second button on his shirt.

‘Dunne’s out, but he forwarded me your email.’

‘What did he think?’

‘He swore a lot, but he’s requested DNA testing to see if the body’s related to the Comforts. So he seems to think it could be a viable theory.’

I stood up. ‘How soon will you know?

‘Few weeks.’ And at my expression, he said, ‘DNA tests take time. And now the forensic unit’s been sold off, they take even longer.’ He snorted. ‘Take longer
and
cost more. We’ve asked for it to be marked High Priority. So it’ll be a few weeks. If we’re lucky.’

‘What’s that?’ I indicated the shoebox.

‘Leslie and Alister Brannick’s death certificates. The accident report. All looks legit, but it doesn’t smell right. I was getting a closer whiff.’

‘And?’

‘And I have no idea why. It smells like paper and ink and a little bit of people, which you’d expect if someone had handled it. Are you sure it’s her?’

I nodded. I crossed over to the desk and reached out for the paper. ‘May I?’

‘Put some gloves on.’

I grabbed some from the box in the corner of the room and picked up the first paper in the pile. It was the little sheet people hand out at funerals. There was a black and white photo of Leslie and Alister Brannick on the front. It looked as if it was taken on holiday. Leslie had sunglasses on top of her head and wore a strappy white top. Alister, aged around three, gave the camera a shy smile. He had a gap between his front teeth, and the overbite that would become more prominent was already noticeable. I opened the sheet. There was no information inside other than three hymns: ‘O Great Redeemer,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ ‘Jerusalem.’

I put it back and looked at the next piece of paper. It was Alister’s death certificate. The cause of death was ‘Multiple Traumatic Injuries.’ It looked genuine to me, but what did I know?

‘Where did you get these?’ I asked.

‘They were in the house. Jillie let us have them. Saved getting a new warrant.’

I looked up. ‘How did she react?’

‘Difficult to say. She was pretty zoned out. I think she was on some sort of anti-depressant. I’m not sure she understood what was going on.’

‘Is that legal? If she doesn’t understand what she’s giving you?’

‘Whose side are you on? She said to take what we like.’

He had a point. I started to doubt myself. Maybe I was wrong. It could have been someone else in the suitcase, but it was entirely too much of a coincidence for them not to be connected.

The death certificate felt real under my fingers, but it couldn’t be. Someone had faked it. I couldn’t see how. It would have been hard enough if they were supposed to have died in the United Kingdom, but to do it in the United States? Whose bodies had been repatriated? It made no sense. I put the certificate back in the box.

‘I saw Neil Brannick on the way in,’ I said.

‘Hmm? Oh, he’s on the list of known soul craft practitioners.’

‘What?’

‘Self-reported. Apparently the man has a natural affinity for it. But Elior Services make their guys take random soul craft tests. Man’s passed them three times a year for the last twenty years.’

I thought of Adam’s reaction to finding out Ben had claimed to have had an older brother. ‘What about Neil’s son?’

‘What about him?’

‘That sort of affinity runs in families. Have you tested him?’

Little stared at me. ‘No, we haven’t. I’ll put him on the list. Top of the list.’

‘Put who at the top of the list?’ Dunne said. I looked up to see him leaning against the doorframe. Wrinkles marred his natty suit, and the dark rings under his eyes had deepened.

Little explained, and Dunne’s eyes narrowed. ‘Get him in here now.’ He turned to me. ‘Up for an autopsy?’

39

I knew Ruth Hedger by reputation, if not personally. She was a Canadian academic, specialising in soulcraft, and was in London for a conference. I’d been following both her professional and personal blogs for some time, hoping to cadge some information I could use to help Sigrid.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t learned anything from her professional posts that I hadn’t already picked up from her published academic papers, and her personal blog mostly detailed her journey undergoing sex reassignment, which was interesting, but not helpful.

I’d been intending to approach her online with a ‘hypothetical’ Sigrid scenario, but hadn’t quite worked out how to do so without making it obvious that the scenario wasn’t hypothetical at all.

A sliver of hope had appeared when Dunne smugly explained to me how he’d managed to persuade the specialist to take a look at the still-moving corpse they’d found in the second car.

In person, the professor was a head taller than me, with overlarge glasses that emphasised her grey eyes, and sleek shoulder-length hair the colour of milky tea.

Ruth’s eyes narrowed as she concentrated on the body in front of her. It lay on a plastic-covered table in Autopsy Room 2, leathery wrists and ankles strapped to the table—a legal precaution if not a necessary one.

There were only three of us in the autopsy room, if you excluded the poor soul strapped to the table, but it was still overcrowded. The building hadn’t been purpose-built to contain autopsies, and the room was an old janitor’s closet with taps and drains plumbed in from the lavatory next door. The janitor’s shelves remained, although pale green tiles had been placed on the walls around them up to the ceiling. Bottles and boxes labelled with chemicals and too many syllables double-packed the shelves.

Ruth reached out a hand and scraped a bit of skin from the corpse’s neck, then lifted it to her mouth. The scent of camphor filled the air as she swallowed. Beside me, I felt Dunne stiffen. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked a little green. For a man whose speciality was supposed to be people who ate other people, he could be remarkably squeamish.

‘Still alive but not a lot left,’ she said. ‘Maybe one or two percent.’ She bent down and sniffed at the body.

Dunne shifted his weight. ‘Is it dangerous?’

‘No, no. Nothing like that. Not any more than any other human anyway. What do you know about soul craft?’

‘Not a lot,’ Dunne said.

‘Just the basics,’ I said.

‘Well, there are a lot of applications. And all are nasty. The good news is that this was an enormous spell. There aren’t a lot of people who can do something like this.’

‘Why does the body look dead if it’s not?’ Dunne asked.

‘That’s standard for this type of soul magic. The first thing your practitioner did was use part of the soul’s power to cast a paralysis spell, so the victim couldn’t move.’

‘But it is moving,’ Dunne said. As if it heard him, the body on the table writhed against the cuffs.

Ruth put her hand on it, and it calmed. ‘There’s not a lot of soul left. The spell is winding down, becoming unstable. Then he or she cast another one so that the body would stay alive without sustenance over the years. It’s eating its own tissue. That’s why it looks dead. Finally, the practitioner used what was left of the soul to power a third spell.’

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘No idea.’

A thought struck me. ‘Can you undo the spell? Suck the soul back from wherever it’s gone, put the flow into reverse?’

Ruth turned her back to me and turned on the tap in the basin. She soaped and washed her hands before she answered. ‘Technically, yes, but I won’t. I have no idea what the purpose of the weaving was. It may have been something small, but I doubt it. This type of thing is usually done to alter reality or a perception of reality. You’ve heard of the butterfly effect? Reversing it probably won’t do much, but it could change life as we know it. I can break it off, but I won’t reverse it.’

I thought of all the trouble someone would have to go to to fake two deaths. A reality-altering spell, one so big it required soul magic to work, might do the trick. ‘I think I know what it was. And it’s not going to end the world.’

‘So you think. I don’t care if you’ve got evidence signed by God himself. I don’t reverse soul weavings. The risk is too great.’

‘What about the weaving itself? Can you track it to the source?’ I asked.

‘You mean the practitioner? Maybe. All weavings leave a signature, so, yes, I can identify that but I can’t track it back. If you bring me a suspect and put him in front of me and get him to perform a weaving, then sure.’ She grimaced. ‘Not very helpful, I know.’

I thought of Neil Brannick. Soul tests, like drug tests, are easily faked by someone with enough motivation. ‘What if I took you somewhere a suspect had done a recent weaving?’

Ruth thought about it, then she nodded. ‘That might work. If it was a big one.’

Dunne stared at the thing on the table. ‘Is it still aware?’

‘It depends what you mean by aware. Most of his soul has been eaten away. Soul is identity. The id. There’s something left there that sees us, but how much of what we’d term traditional brain function there is would be a matter of conjecture. He or she would have been completely aware at the beginning and then lost that bit by bit over the years.’

I gave an involuntary shudder. Someone had been locked in that car boot, alive and aware and completely immobile for years, powerless as their soul and body were nibbled away. The morning’s cornflakes shifted uneasily in my stomach, and my vision blurred. I managed to blurt out, ‘Excuse me,’ before I pushed past Ruth and stumbled out into the corridor.

I leaned against the wall and breathed deeply. Murmured voices, Dunne’s and Ruth’s, sounded from the door behind me, but I blocked them out. The fluorescent lighting overhead was too bright. I shut my eyes against the glare. Locked in a car boot for years—it made my own incarceration seem like an easy ride.

I took slow breaths and waited for the nausea to subside. A few minutes passed before I straightened and opened the door to the autopsy room.

Ruth gave me an appraising look that made me think they’d been talking about me. ‘Feeling better?’ she asked.

I nodded. I kept my gaze averted from the thing on the table. Better to think of it as a thing than a person.

‘Ruth was telling me she should be able to un-decompose it,’ Dunne said.

‘No, no. That’s not it at all. I can fill in the gaps. Make the body look alive again—a bit like the dentist topping up your teeth with enamel. It’s not real, but it makes a cosmetic difference and stops the decay. If you know what the body looks like, you may be able to get an ID.’

Dunne and I waited outside while Ruth performed the procedure. I was interested, but the reek of camphor was too much for my fragile stomach, and I think Dunne was just worried she was going to eat more of the body.

It took three cups of coffee, two trips to void my bladder, and a magazine before Ruth popped her head out. ‘All finished.’ She looked pleased with herself, a craftsman satisfied with a job well done.

The man lying on the table was young enough to still be called a boy. He lay awkwardly on the table, one shoulder higher than the other. His ribs showed on a skinny chest spattered with chest hair and a little acne. The pale hair reaching to his shoulders was the colour and texture of spider silk. Unfocused eyes rolled towards me, the irises so light a grey they appeared almost white. Drool dripped down the side of his mouth and pooled on the steel table.

I’d seen him before, but not in the world of the living. It was the man from outside the stone cottage. ‘Turn him over.’

Dunne put on a pair of gloves and rolled the skinny body onto its stomach. It had a pair of stubby wings no bigger than a dove’s.

‘His name is Drew Gillies.’ I frowned. ‘The charm you found on Ben’s wings belonged to him.’

‘Who is Drew Gillies?’

I described Annie’s flight to London and the boy who’d run away with her. The young man who everyone thought had gone on to live a human life and had cut off all ties from the winged out of choice. But instead had spent the last fifteen years locked in the boot of a rusty car.

Dunne’s face flushed with sudden anger. ‘You didn’t think to mention this to me?’

‘I haven’t had the chance.’

‘Don’t move.’ He disappeared through the autopsy room door and was back a minute later with Zee Haddad.

She glanced at the man on the table, then over at Ruth. ‘Excuse us.’ She took my arm and guided me to an empty interview room with a large two-way mirror. She led me to a chair, took the one opposite, and leaned her elbows on the table.

‘This has to stop.’

‘What does?’

‘You playing private detective. I appreciate your help on the zombie front, and with the soul magic, but you are not a police officer. I get that the non-human don’t always trust the police, but you don’t get to withhold evidence and expect us to be nice about it.’

‘I’m not withholding evidence. I just told you, didn’t I? And I had no idea that was Drew Gillies until I saw him.’

‘You knew the charm belonged to him. You didn’t think that was worth mentioning? You’ve gone out looking for Alister Brannick. This is a murder investigation. We are capable of working it out on our own. Do you have any idea how hard it is for the Crown Prosecutor to make a solid case when some amateur has been meddling? Defence solicitors love this sort of thing. I don’t want to find the piece of shit who’s behind this only to have him walk free because you fiddled with some vital bit of evidence and didn’t even bother to tell us.’

‘Oh for pity’s sake! I haven’t fiddled with anything.’

‘Haven’t you? How would I know? As of now, you are officially helping the police with their enquiries. I’m sending someone in to take a statement. And God help you if you leave anything off. And once that’s done, I want you to go home and stop playing at amateur detective. And from now on if Dunne asks you for anything, I want it to come through me first.’

You’re not the boss of me.
Something about being told off brings out my inner teenager, but annoying the police without a
really
good reason is never a good idea, so I just said, ‘Fine.’

Later I was a little sorry I hadn’t argued. They kept me there for over six hours.