The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (7 page)

12

The tall man sitting opposite Obe was in his early thirties, broad faced and solidly built with meaty arms and the kind of fair skin that always looks a little flushed. He wore his white hair shaved close to his scalp in a way that indicated it was done more to hide encroaching baldness than any sense of style. He wore a grey hoodie and a leather cuff with multi-coloured charms on his left wrist.

‘You must be Malcolm’s nephew. I’m so, so sorry.’ I said. Adam held out his hand. His palm felt warm and soft.

‘Thanks.’ His pale blue eyes scrutinised mine, which were still red-rimmed and puffy. His were clear, but the moment his hand left mine, it returned to his jacket where both hands bunched into fists.

Obe was burrowed as far back in his chair as he could be, the back of it wedged against the wall.

I dragged a chair in from reception and cleared a space on the floor. The NRTs had knocked a potted plant off the top of Obe’s filing cabinet and tracked the soil into the carpet. There were two mugs of tea on Obe’s desk. Obe picked up the one in a Spiderman mug and held it with both hands, warming his fingers. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘Harpies.’

‘Oh.’

Adam gave me an appraising look, probably as the realisation I wasn’t completely human dawned on him.

I ignored his suddenly speculative expression. ‘So the NRTs were here? I assume they didn’t find him.’

Obe’s lower lip wobbled like a toddler’s under his beard. ‘No. They just dragged me out like I was a criminal. I had to wait outside. This is my space. My office. It’s private. It’s not right, Viv. You’re not allowed to treat people like that.’

Beside me, I felt rather than saw Adam’s body stiffen. I thought of Jillie and little Finn. Yes, you were. It wasn’t right, but it was allowed.

Obe pushed a piece of paper towards me—some sort of warrant. I wasn’t an expert, but it looked legitimate. Malcolm’s computer, his address book. Miscellaneous files.

‘Miscellaneous?’

‘They took everything in his filing cabinet.’ Obe shook his head slowly. ‘Malcolm had client files in there.
Confidential
files. And they wonder why non-humans don’t trust the police.’ Obe rubbed his temple with a grimy finger. ‘They could have just asked nicely.’

‘Why did they even want them?’ Adam asked. ‘He’s not hiding in a piece of paper.’

‘To try to track the source of infection, for one thing,’ I said. ‘And because they found bodies at the house.’

Adam made a choking noise. ‘What?’

I described the parcels in the freezer and the bodies at the abandoned car dealer. Adam’s pale skin flushed redder and redder as I spoke.

‘There’s no reason to think the bodies in the cars have anything to do with Malcolm,’ Obe said in a small voice.

‘And the one in the freezer?’

‘They’re mistaken. It can’t be human,’ Obe said.

I didn’t think so. A cat’s nose was never wrong.

Adam’s long frame shifted in the chair. His legs were long enough that he couldn’t unfold them without hitting Obe’s desk.

‘My uncle would never murder anyone. They’re wrong about the meat. You watch. Soon as it’s properly verified in a lab, they’ll look a right bunch of numpties. And the dealership closed before I started secondary school. It’s been empty for a long time. Anyone could have dumped bodies there. I’m more worried about my cousin. If Uncle Malcolm...’ He broke off, looking for the right words.

‘If Malcolm loses control, Ben’s in trouble,’ I said for him. He didn’t meet my eyes.

‘Maybe Ben’s flying home?’ Obe suggested.

Adam shook his head slowly. ‘You mean to St Kilda? Over a thousand miles? In sub-zero temperatures? Carrying a full-grown man? Have you seen the boy? He’s skinny as a rake. I’d be surprised if he could go a half mile.’

‘Okay, maybe not,’ I said. ‘But what was he even doing in London? I thought he was supposed to go home on Boxing Day.’

Adam leaned back in his chair. The plastic wobbled under his weight. ‘He did. I took him to the airport myself.’

‘When was this? Did you see him get on the plane?’

‘No, I said goodbye at the gate,’ Adam said. He swore softly. ‘He can’t have got on the plane. I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t he? And if he wanted to stay in London, why not just tell me?’

Because he knew Malcolm was dead,
I thought. ‘What about Ben’s mother? Surely she noticed when he didn’t arrive?’

Adam picked up his mug of tea then put it down again immediately. ‘I don’t know. Annie would have called Malcolm, but he didn’t say anything to me. But more importantly, where the hell is he now?’

I thought about it. About what Haddad said. People tend to go to family when they’re in trouble. ‘Any other family?’

‘No. My grandparents are dead. I don’t have any siblings.’

‘What about your father?’

‘God no. They don’t get on. Dad would turn them both in in ten seconds flat.’

‘What about your mother?’

There was a moment’s silence, then Adam said, ‘My mother died of cancer when I was fifteen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘It’s okay. It was a long time ago.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘The only other person close enough to count as family is Jillie’s brother, but I’ve already called him. He said he hasn’t seen them, but I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not. He’s never been a big fan of my side of the family. He might hide Ben but not Malcolm.’

‘I know him,’ I said. Samson Comfort ran a day spa and holiday cottages for shifters. He put up the occasional vulnerable client when we couldn’t find an immediate refuge for them. ‘I’ll call him again. We’re on good terms. What about friends?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t think of anyone who’d take him in knowing he was dead. I’ve called all the mutual friends I can think of, but the only person Malcolm would even consider going to is Obe.’

We both looked at Obe. He shook his head.

‘What about Ben?’

‘He doesn’t have any friends,’ Adam said.

‘None at all?’

‘He’s only in London for two weeks a year, and he spends most of that reading.’

Obe frowned. ‘Malcolm sent him on one of the teen outreach programmes last week. He could have met someone there.’

We all looked at each other. Meet someone on a course, ask them to hide a dead father a week later. It was a bit of a stretch, but I didn’t have any better ideas.

‘We should have a list of the participants somewhere,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if Malcolm saved a copy to the main drive. Obe can pull in some favours, put the word out among our clients that if anyone sees anything they need to let us know.’

Before I had the chance to mention the favour I’d promised Haddad, Obe pulled at his beard and said, ‘Shouldn’t the police be the ones doing this?’

Adam’s face tightened. ‘You mean the people who just tried to
shoot
Ben?’

‘It wasn’t bullets. They use tranquiliser darts,’ I said.

‘So? That’s just as bad. If they’d hit him, a fall from that height could have killed him.’

I raised my hands, conceding the point.

Obe coloured. ‘I mean if we find Ben or Malcolm, and the police think we were trying to hide them, we’ll all end up in prison.’

Adam set his mug down on the desk hard enough that it cracked. I jumped. ‘That lot don’t know their arse from their elbow. They’re the ones who let Ben fly off. And if they’d have been any better at hitting a moving target, Ben would be
dead
.’

Obe visibly shrank back.

Adam sighed, and his shoulders sank. ‘I’m sorry. This whole thing is really freaking me out. What happens when they catch Ben? I know harbouring a zombie is a mandatory sentence, but Ben’s only fourteen. They’ll take that into account, won’t they? He’s too young to go to prison.’

Obe’s beard shifted as he gave a smile acknowledging the apology. ‘The age of criminal responsibility in England is ten. And the Necroambulism Act was designed to be draconian. There’s not a lot of wriggle room.’

I grabbed at a straw. ‘But there is some?’

Obe waggled his hand back and forth. ‘Not if they catch him. It’s a minimum five years. He’s under fifteen, so it would be a Secure Children’s Home first, then they’d move him to a Young Offenders Institution.’

Adam broke in. ‘So he wouldn’t be in with the adults. That doesn’t sound so bad.’

‘Yes, it would be,’ Obe said. ‘Malcolm and I did enough time in institutions. It would kill him to know his son is in one.’ The irony of his statement seemed to pass him by.

I said, ‘You said if they catch him. What if Ben turns himself in?’

‘Then the judge would have a lot more leeway in his sentencing. There’s precedent for avoiding a custodial sentence. There was a case in Birmingham a year ago where the defendant was given only a Youth Rehabilitation Order. Those circumstances were different, but the girl in that case was also harbouring a zombie, and I think we could make a legal argument.’

‘A YRO,’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’

‘If we got a sympathetic judge, and if Ben voluntarily gave himself up. That was the extenuating circumstance in the Appleby case.’

Adam looked at us expectantly. Obe explained what a Youth Rehabilitation Order was. They’d been introduced in 2008 as a flexible method to deal with young offenders. In a worst-case scenario, Ben would spend the next few years living under a curfew and jumping through behavioural programme hoops, but it was a hell of a lot better than prison.

We all looked at each other. There were a lot of ifs, but none of them would matter if the NRTs found Ben before we could find him and persuade him to hand himself in.

‘We’ve got plenty of contacts who wouldn’t speak to the police,’ Obe said. ‘Viv and I will call around, find out if anyone’s seen something.’

Adam nodded. ‘And me? What do I do?’

‘Well, do you have a pass for the lockdown?’ It hadn’t escaped my notice that Adam probably shouldn’t have been there.

‘Sort of. I nicked it off my dad to get here. He’s in thaumaturgical decontamination. It’s classed as an emergency service.’

‘Okay,’ I said slowly. ‘If you’re right about Ben not being able to fly far, someone might have seen them come down. You can do a door-to-door round Malcolm’s house. If the army stops you, just wave the pass. Tell them your sensors picked up possible magic spillage in the area. They won’t risk another Whitechapel just to send one man home.’

Adam nodded. ‘Fine. That works for me.’ He pulled a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. ‘I want a call the moment you hear anything.’

‘Of course.’

He stood up, and we shook hands again. Obe and I both breathed a sigh of relief when we heard the reception door close behind them. My stomach untensed, and evidently Obe’s did too because he reached for the stash of chocolate biscuits he kept in his top drawer. He offered me one. I took it. I was ravenous.

Ravenous. The thought brought up the image of the little cling-film-wrapped parcels in Malcolm’s freezer. The biscuit went stale in my mouth. I put the remainder on the desk.

‘Obe...’

He didn’t meet my eyes. ‘Malcolm didn’t kill anyone, Vivvie. I know him.’

He knew the human. Not the zombie. I opened my mouth, then closed it. Obe’s eyes were bloodshot, and his movements as he ate the biscuits were jerky, if controlled.

‘You better get calling,’ I said.

I shut the door gently on the way out. Obe would have to remove his blinkers about Malcolm soon enough, but I wasn’t inhumane enough to force him before he was ready.

13

London is built on the bones of its dead. They are everywhere, sunk into the depths and ground soil of the city. In the Square Mile you can hardly walk more than a few paces without stepping on someone’s grave. Most are long forgotten and long buried, and they are the reason London is filled with ghosts. The spirits of the dead can only set foot on hallowed ground; the spaces in between don’t exist for them. There are only two requirements for hallowed ground: someone must have died or been buried there, and there must have been a prayer said for the dead. The city is spotted with it, and the spirits jump through like holy hopscotch.

Ghosts are as common as rats throughout the city and about as popular. They’re also terrible gossips. You don’t have much else to do if you’re dead. If I was lucky, all I needed to do was find some ghosts and put out the word, with appropriate reward, that I was looking for a zombie.

I buttoned up my coat against the freezing air and pulled my woolly bobble hat down over my ears before I left the lobby. A single army truck was parked on the corner, but there were no soldiers in sight. A pair of elderly women scuttled across a pedestrian crossing further up the road.
Them. They’re going to be first to go...
That’s what Little had said. Them and me, it seemed. But I wasn’t planning on being out more than a few minutes, and Malcolm had only been gone a few hours. I was at a bigger risk of a fine. I checked again for the army, but saw no one official.

Rain drizzled down the back of my neck, and the small amount of morning sunlight had diminished even further, leaving a morning dark enough that you’d need a lamp to read your newspaper outside.

Two roads up from the office, sandwiched between a pound shop and a bookie’s, is the city’s worst chippy. The food is reasonable, but the building stands on one of the largest forgotten plague pits south of the river. It’s changed hands numerous times over the years, suffering from the aura that accompanies so many painful deaths and puts people off eating anything it produces. Shafiq, the current owner, has kept it going longer than most through sheer stubbornness. I looked both ways before crossing the street. The glass doors were locked. I tapped until he scurried over and flipped the latch. I slipped inside before someone could spot me and send me home.

‘Bloody lockdown,’ he said. ‘These things cost me a fortune. And I have to throw away a ton of food.’

It was probably a little early in the morning for fast food, but it would be rude of me to use the premises without buying anything, and I’d been up at least four hours earlier than I’d planned. That made it effectively lunch time. I listened to Shafiq complain while he scooped hot squashy chips into Styrofoam containers then added generous lashings of vinegar and salt.

I sat on the table closest to the wall, food stacked in a plastic bag at my side. Shafiq was gentlemanly enough to pretend he had something to do at the back of the shop.

I squeezed my eyes shut then opened them again, and the place was full of ghosts. Only one was a plague victim, naked and filthy, with black buboes hanging from her armpits and thighs in haemorrhoid-like clusters. She was a regular and the reason I wasn’t tucking in to the chips already. I didn’t get her. I knew what ghosts were: dead souls who hadn’t transferred from the living world to the dead one, but I’d never been able to figure out why someone would want to spend their afterlife as a plague victim instead of going on to whatever came next.

The rest of the room looked like a casting call for a BBC
History of Britain
production. I even spotted what looked like a Roman matriarch at the back of the room. Ghosts that old are rare. They tend to get bored after a few hundred years and move on. I was impressed. Whoever she was, she had staying power.

I rapped on the table with my knuckles and took care to make eye contact with each of the spirits in turn so they could be sure I was talking to them and wasn’t just some random crazy off the street.

They looked at me with interest. A few I recognised, but the majority were strangers.

‘I’m looking for a zombie. He’s probably with a winged boy. A live one,’ I said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d spread the word.’

‘What’s in it for us?’ This from a middle-aged man about forty years dead, judging by his suit.

‘You get to pick Saturday’s movies at the Graveyard Theatre.’ The theatre was built in West Norwood cemetery in the seventies by a sympathetic medium. It did nothing, but play movies on a loop. The ghost man looked interested.

‘Has to be PG,’ I added.

The ghosts looked at one another, and one by one they disappeared. My little spook army.

Obe was on the phone when I came in. He turned his head away when he saw me. I set his food on his desk and pretended I didn’t see his puffy eyes and damp beard, then shut the door quietly behind me. I trotted into my office and shut the door. The handset on my desk flashed red as I settled down behind my desk.

I pressed the button to recall my voicemail and put it on loudspeaker, grimacing when I heard the female voice say, ‘You have thirty-two new messages.’

‘Hi, Viv, it’s Marco from the
Times.
Give me a call.’

I pressed seven to delete, and half-listened to the next message, this one from someone at the
Sun
, before I deleted it. The media liked us, or at least they liked Malcolm. The Lipscombe Trust was respectable and good for a sound bite. But now he was just another story, and they were calling anyone who knew him. At least I’d never made my mobile number public. I was tempted to delete them all without listening, but I had about a half dozen callbacks due from solicitors or government officials on other cases.

My PC booted up while I ate my chips and listened to and deleted the voicemails. I got about halfway through before I got irritated and switched it off. I stuck a sticky note over the blinking light.

I spent the first few minutes searching social media sites. I’d feel like a real idiot if we turned the city upside down looking for Ben, and he’d posted ‘Hey X, coming round yours. Rozzers are after me, lolz’ onto someone’s Facebook wall. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’d forgotten that posting something online was a lot more public than shouting it out loud in the street.

I found six Ben Brannicks on Facebook; three had profile pictures that let me dismiss them out of hand, two were in the US, and the other had just the generic question mark for a picture and no friends. I did a quick scan of a number of other sites, but turned up nothing.

Malcolm had saved contact details for the Outreach Programme in the shared drive. There were over a hundred names on the list. I began dialling.

Two hours later, all I had was a bunch of nopes, a bundle of left voice messages, and an exchange of text messages from Adam Brannick letting me know he hadn’t had much luck either.

I spent ten minutes going through work emails and rearranging appointments where I could, then went to rummage through the remains of Malcolm’s office. It was next to mine and used to be the cleaning supplies cupboard next to the toilet. He’d been on holiday when we’d moved to the new building and hadn’t been around to fight his corner when the offices were allocated. The idea at the time was that we’d swap every now and then to make it fair, but Malcolm settled into his cubbyhole, and when I brought it up, he didn’t think it was worth the faffle of moving all his stuff.

The room was just big enough for a plywood desk covered in an oak-style veneer, a black vinyl swivel chair, and a filing cabinet. It had no window, and the light flickered a couple of times before it took.

With the exception of a couple of family photos, Malcolm’s desk was covered in toys—plastic dinosaurs, bobble-headed dolls, and plastic doodads. He kept his stationery wherever it had landed last. But that was where the mess ended because Obe had been right. They’d taken everything else. There was a large clear square where his computer had been. His filing cabinet drawers gaped open showing nothing but office detritus: scabby elastic bands and discarded staples.

I sat in his desk and pulled open the top drawer. It was filled with debris—Mars Bars wrappers, paper clips, dead pens, old lotto tickets, and a few crumpled sticky notes that I flattened. I was rewarded with nothing but random scribbles and the unsurprising information that Malcolm liked to doodle boobs and unrealistically large penises.

It had been a long shot. Anything of interest had likely been taken by the NRTs. I picked up a discarded box from the corridor and began filling it with Malcolm’s doodads. I had no idea if Jillie would want them, but I felt the need to do something. Even if it was just packing up the remains of his desk.

The family photos went on top. There were two, although I knew there had been three. The one of Ben was missing. The largest remaining photo was of Jillie and Finn, and looked like a professional shot against a blank backdrop. The smaller was of Malcolm’s first wife and son, and the reason he got drunk so often.

Leslie and Alister Brannick died in a car accident ten years before I’d met him, but their names were seared on my brain because they came up whenever Malcolm was drunk, which was at least twice a month. He blamed himself, even though he hadn’t been on the same continent when it happened. From what I understood, Leslie had stopped her car at a level crossing and a drunk driver had shunted into the back of them, killing them all instantly.

Malcolm blamed himself because Leslie was in the United States when it happened, and she was there because she’d left him after finding out about yet another affair. The guilt I got. It wasn’t his fault, but I got it. What I didn’t get was Jillie. Malcolm had had the photo of Leslie and Alister on his desk as long as I’d known him, and I knew it well, so when Jillie first walked in the door at that first office bash and I got a good look at her, my mouth dropped. Same red hair, same colour eyes, same nose.

I’d whispered to Obe, ‘She could be Leslie’s sister.’

Obe had whispered back, ‘She is.’

And so Malcolm’s reputation as office weirdo (never in much doubt) was cemented. Still, always nice to know there were people out there whose families were even more screwed up than mine.