Read The Secret Dead Page 3

5

  Malcolm fell, but he didn’t land. A dark shape dropped from the grey sky above him. One moment Malcolm was falling, the next he was blocked from sight completely. By a giant pair of wings.

  Next to me, Little drew in a sharp intake of breath, and someone in the crowd screamed.

  The wings twisted to show a skinny figure bent over double—Ben, one thin arm under Malcolm’s left armpit, the other scrabbling to establish another hold on his father. Malcolm hung to Ben’s legs, gripping his jeans. They struggled in the air, each trying to get a better grip on the other. Ben wobbled, and dipped, then rose again with effort. Malcolm stopped moving, and Ben stabilised. Malcolm murmured something, and Ben replied, but they were too high and too far away for me to make out the words.

  The boy let go of his father and straightened. At the same time, Malcolm changed his grip and hugged the boy’s legs tightly.

  The wings were huge, but the boy was skinny, fragile, and even high up the movement of the muscles in his back was visible as he struggled with the additional weight.

  Ben’s wings beat against the frigid night air. For the briefest time, all was quiet. Everyone stood silent and staring. Dunne appeared on Malcolm’s doorstep, with the head of the Necroambulism Response Team, Aaron Slender, behind him.

  ‘Trank the bloody thing! It’s got the zombie!’ Slender shouted.

  Two NRTs raced out from behind him. They knelt on the tarmac, pointing their guns upwards. They took their time—aimed, then fired. The guns made almost no noise, and the darts went wide.

  Ben stared at them, as if in shock. His face was pinched and angular, lacking any puppy fat or soft lines. His jaw was set, and his eyes huge and filled with some emotion I couldn’t quite identify. Something tightly controlled. Rage, or grief perhaps.

  Sweat beaded down the sides of his face with the effort of keeping them up in the air. Flashes flickered throughout the crowd as people pointed their mobile phones towards him.

  Malcolm raised his face and said something. Ben grimaced, and the great wings beat harder. Father and son began to rise, wings wrapping around them both with each beat. The huge wings flapped again, and again.

  The NRTs fired, but they were out of range, and once more the darts went wide.

  Within thirty seconds, Malcolm and Ben were tiny figures against the sky, then just a speck, and then gone, disappeared into the thick cloud layer.

  6

  The two NRTs who’d fired at the boy got to their feet. I couldn’t make out their expressions through their visors, but they seemed lost. Procedures dictated what to do if the zombie tried to run into the crowd, or took a hostage, or even if it tried to self-cannibalise, but not if it flew away.

  Slender stood open-mouthed. The NRT chief was a bulky man with a double mole under his nose that had the unfortunate appearance of a Hitler moustache. A vein twitched at the top of his forehead.

  The reflection of the Christmas lights on his face flashed red then green. ‘What the hell was that?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Ben. That was Ben.’

  ‘And what the hell is that when it’s at home?’

  ‘Malcolm’s son. He’s one of the winged people.’

  ‘Bloody hell. I thought they were all on St Kilda or Orkney or something.’

  I said nothing. Quite clearly Ben wasn’t on St Kilda, even if he was supposed to be.

  Slender shook himself, stalked over to the NRTs, and began directing them, his arms waving. The group split into four—one remained, and the others trotted off towards the police cars parked on the other side of the road. The constables parted the crowds, and the three cars disappeared. I shivered and stared up. There was nothing but thick grey cloud—no way to determine the direction Malcolm and the boy had gone.

  ‘This is so not good,’ Little muttered.

  He was right. This was not good. If Malcolm bit Ben... A normal zombie was dangerous enough, but a flying zombie? I wasn’t the only one who’d had the thought. At least half the crowd were looking up. They didn’t know Ben was still alive the way I did.

  Slender pulled out his mobile and dialled, jaw clenched. In the years he’d been in charge of the London Necroambulism Response Team, he had never lost a zombie.

  If the Prime Minister wasn’t awake, he would be soon and signing off on a State of Emergency declaration. Slender muttered into the phone, and somewhere in army headquarters I imagined someone pressing a red button and soldiers scrambling into trucks, ready to go before the ink dried.

  Overkill perhaps, but the reason Britain was one of the few countries to have never had a serious necroambulism outbreak.

  At the end of the road, one of the constables trotted over to one of the unmarked police cars and produced a loudhailer. ‘The city is in lockdown. Go home or to your place of employment immediately, whichever is closer. Failure to comply may result in a fine or incarceration. I repeat...’

  I didn’t think the instruction applied to me anyway, but then Dunne trotted over. ‘You can stay put. We’re going to need you later.’

  ‘Will do.’

  He nodded, then turned towards the house. The cat followed him in.

  I pulled my phone out my pocket. Malcolm was dead. I’d seen it for myself and couldn’t put off calling Obe any longer. I stood working the words around in my head, but no matter how I rearranged them, I couldn’t find a way to break the news gently. Before I had the chance to dial, cameras began to flash.

  NRTs appeared at the broken door. Little Finn wore miniature versions of the cuffs and rods that had contained his mother. The boy was alive but unconscious—darted and drugged as per procedure for under-twelves, a gesture fed to the public as simple humanitarian concern but one I knew had only been introduced because photographs of children going into hysterics didn’t look good on the front page. Saliva dribbled down the child’s chin, and he bobbed between the NRTs as if they were carrying a cooler bag of beers.

  Malcolm had a photo of Finn on his desk, but I’d never seen the child in the flesh. He had the same snub nose and rounded face as his mother, but he’d missed out on her bright frizzy hair. Instead he had the colour I thought Malcolm would have had as a boy—a mousy brown that would darken as he grew older.

  If he grew older.

  The child appeared uninjured, but Malcolm had been on the turn and I couldn’t see what was under Finn’s aeroplane pyjamas. The little boy disappeared into the back of the containment van. An NRT locked and bolted the back, and the engine started. The uniforms resituated the barriers so the van could leave. Its tail lights disappeared into the distance, and Malcolm’s family was gone. Show’s over, folks.

  The crowd dispersed slowly, nudged along by the NRTs and the police, unwilling to leave just because of a single loose zombie who’d already flown away. The looky-loos hanging out of the windows remained a little longer, until it was clear nothing more exciting was going to happen. Then they closed the windows against the cold air and went in to get their updates from the telly instead.

  I couldn’t put off calling Obe any longer. I scrolled to his number and put the phone to my ear. He answered after the first ring.

  ‘Vivvie?’ The tone was so plaintive, I knew immediately I was too late. He’d already heard.

  ‘I’m at Malcolm’s house,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘I saw you on the news.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have called earlier, but I wanted to be sure.’ I rubbed at my temple with my free hand. ‘Jillie’s not hurt though, and neither is Finn. Or at least they didn’t look it. They’re both on their way to quarantine now.’

  There was nothing but snuffling on the other end of the line.

  ‘Are you all right? Your place is closer than mine. The police are going to want the usual consultation, but I can come to yours straight after.’

  ‘I’m at the office.’ At—I took the phone from my ear and glanced at the time—six in the morning. I suppressed a groan. Without anyone in
the office to tell my workaholic colleague to go home, Obe’d likely been sleeping under his desk and living on nothing but fried chicken from the dodgy kebab shop down the road. He’d had food poisoning from them twice. When I’d called him on Christmas Day to pass on my wishes, the echo on the phone had made it clear he’d been on the toilet, but I was willing to bet he still hadn’t learnt his lesson.

  ‘I’ll come through to the office once I’m done. You need me to call anyone?’

  ‘I know I’ve had my ups and downs,’ Obe said. ‘Okay, mostly downs, but I’m not that fragile, Viv. I’ll be fine for a few hours.’

  We said goodbye, and I hung up. I tucked my hands under my armpits and wished I’d had the foresight to bring a pair of gloves.

  I clicked onto the BBC news app on my phone. Instead of the usual set of news stories, it linked directly to a big, yellow, framed warning: London Lockdown.

  I tapped through and onto the news. The cover picture showed Ben perfectly. My connection wasn’t great and it froze a few times, but I watched a video of Malcolm and the winged boy struggle to hold onto each other, take flight, then disappear, again and again.

  On Twitter, both the video and a still shot were already trending. Someone had taken a good photo of the two of them: Malcolm was in shadow, his back to the photographer, Ben’s wings bent slightly, his feet dangling just above a street lamp. The upper part of Ben’s face was in shadow, but his mouth was set in a straight line, turning down slightly at the corners. The lamp below him sharply highlighted the tendons in his neck.

  Ben had been on my mind over the holidays. Same as he was every time I saw him. He reminded me of myself at that age. We were both bookish. We both had a parent who just didn’t get us. And we were both the youngest of a dying race.

  In my case I wasn’t that concerned about the decline of the hags. Every other hag I’d met was either mean or crazy. Or, in most cases, both. Stereotypes breed for a reason, and I understood the wicked witch one all too well. Would I have tried to save my mother if she’d zombified? I wasn’t sure. Maybe that made Ben a better person than me, or maybe just a dafter one.

  It occurred to me that it was the last time I’d likely ever see Malcolm. And I’d called him an arse. And the last time I’d seen him alive I’d called him an asshole. If he was still alive, I wouldn’t have felt bad about it.

  The cold was making my nose stream. I pulled a tissue out my backpack and blew noisily.

  I was always last in. The NRTs cleared the house first. The photographers and Scene of Crime Officers followed the NRTs, then the investigators and the police sniffer, and finally me. I shivered. The cold was beginning to seep in under my coat.

  Three police cars remained on the street. One was occupied. The woman inside was familiar, but I didn’t know her name. She was busy filling out the top page of a pre-printed pad. I walked over and tapped on the glass. She looked up and rolled down the window, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘Any chance I could wait in the car? It’s brass monkeys out here.’

  Her eyes slid to the warts on my neck, and she wrinkled her nose. She shook her head, muttering something about health and safety, and rolled the window back up.

  An uncharitable word came to mind. It had only been ten years since the restriction on non-humans joining the police was lifted. Attitudes had changed, but not by enough. I lifted my hand to knock again, then thought better of it. She had no obligation to let me in, and I had too much pride to beg. I settled for a dirty look and the thought of the pleasure it would give me to write a snotty email to her boss.

  If I was lucky it wouldn’t be a long wait. One of the most dangerous misconceptions about zombies was that decapitation destroyed them. It didn’t, but it meant that every few years someone was bitten because they thought the head was safe. Without fail, they hid the head while they tried to figure out what to do. And when the bitten person then reanimated, the NRTs got to play hide and seek for any remaining body parts. You’d be surprised at the number of places a disembodied head can fit.

  7

  It was another hour before Dunne beckoned to me from the remains of Malcolm’s front door. I surfaced from my thoughts to find the crowds had gone and only a few police remained to guard the street. I mounted the steps and entered with some trepidation, but only Lego crunched under my boot. There were no gnawed limbs or chewed craniums. No blood or suspicious stains either.

  The front door opened directly onto a small living room consisting of a sofa covered in a patchwork throw, two matching armchairs, a coffee table with a storage box of toys under it, and a large flat screen TV. A stack of some of the meaner gossip magazines sat neatly on the end of the coffee table, the top cover pointing out celebrity cellulite by ringing the offending bits in bright red. A pine tree, streaked with silver and gold tinsel, stood in the far corner. The chimney had been bricked in and painted over, but the mantel remained, and I recognised Malcolm’s long service award at the end of a line of framed family photos.

  The place hadn’t been tidy before the NRTs had come in—too many toys for that—but now everything was covered in a fine dusting of white powder, and muddy boot prints covered the white carpet.

  I reached inside for that part of me that sensed the dead, and the house filled with decaying bodies, one close enough to touch. I reached to the right and pushed the curtain aside only to see a dead fly on the window sill.

  If there were any body parts in the house, they weren’t in here. But then only foolish zombies leave their evidence in sight of the front door where the gas man can see it.

  I sniffed the air and picked up the twin smells of pine needles and fried onions, along with a sharper underlying antiseptic scent—bleach. It might not mean anything. Maybe they’d just cleaned the toilet.

  Detective Inspector Zee Haddad appeared in the doorway leading to the rest of the house. ‘Forensics are done in here. We can use it. Have you got a minute, Vivia?’

  Dunne’s boss was a werebee and one of the few senior officers to be open about her nature. Things had gotten better for the metanatural in the police over the last decade, but with the exception of people hired directly for their abilities, like the sniffers, most kept their non-humanity strictly under wraps. Open prejudice might not have been acceptable any more, but that didn’t mean it was gone. Haddad was the tiniest woman I knew, short and round and impossibly quick for someone with such short little legs. She lived in a hive in West London that I’d always been curious about, but the bees were notoriously private and my curiosity remained unsated.

  She sat on the sofa, pulled a leather-backed notebook from her handbag, and uncapped a pen. ‘Sit, Vivia. Please.’

  Despite Haddad’s casual manner, I nodded and sat with care, my brain not on red alert, but at least on pale yellow. Senior police officers never sit you down at the beginning of an investigation just because they’re feeling chatty.

  Little slumped into one of the armchairs opposite, one leg flung over the armrest. It gave out a puff of white dust. He adjusted his seat, then pulled a stuffed lion from underneath him and dropped it casually on the floor beside the chair.

  Haddad watched him with calm eyes. She said nothing, but I knew the moment I was gone, he was going to get a bollocking on the correct way to behave in a victim’s home. Dunne gave me a sympathetic smile, then disappeared through the doorway to the rest of the house.

  I liked the bee woman, but she reminded me a little of one of the scarier teachers I’d had at primary school. Zee Haddad looked nothing like Mrs Norman, but they had the same penetrating eyes. Every time Haddad opened her mouth I expected to hear, ‘You better tell me the truth, young lady. Did you actually do any studying for this test or were you just being lazy?’

  I blinked away the memory of the scary Mrs Norman and told myself not to be an idiot.

  Haddad gave me a smile. ‘I wanted to ask you about Malcolm Brannick. I understand you worked together.’

  ‘Yes, he was press officer. Yo
u may have spoken to him on the phone a few times,’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I only really know you.’ Her eyes drifted to the photos on the mantle. ‘When’s the last time you saw Mr Brannick?’

  I gave her a brief description of Malcolm’s last day at work, the little he was actually there.

  Haddad nodded and made a note. ‘When you saw him, did you notice anything unusual? A stiff way of walking? Too much aftershave?’

  Malcolm always wore too much aftershave. ‘He wasn’t dead. I know a dead body when I see it, even if it’s still walking.’

  Haddad’s shoulders relaxed visibly. Other people might have missed a dead man walking, but not me. ‘Of course you would. It was just a standard question.’ Malcolm couldn’t have been dead more than six days, and that would make her job much easier and likely less distressing.

  ‘What about infection?’ she said. ‘Brannick’s not on the Register. His wife’s not on it either. Are you are aware of any... contact with carriers?’

  Contact. Ha! A delicate way to put it. If Malcolm wasn’t bitten, then he’d had the dormant version and reanimated after he died of other causes. He wasn’t on the Register, which ruled out in vitro transmission. That left only one way he could have become infected—via STD.

  ‘Malcolm is... was a real tomcat. Or at least he thought he was.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t know any carriers he might have been involved with. The only one I’m aware of that he even knows is Patricia Stull. She comes into the office now and then, but Malcolm can’t stand her. Always calls... called her “that stinky old baggage.”’

  Haddad nodded. She knew Patricia Stull. Everyone did. She scribbled something in her notebook, and I pitied whichever poor constable got landed with the job of trying to piece together Malcolm’s sexual history.

  Haddad’s eyes flickered to the family photos above the mantel. ‘What about Malcolm’s son? You didn’t think it worth mentioning the zombie had a son who could fly before they scarpered?’ The question I’d been dreading.

  ‘I didn’t know he was here. He wasn’t supposed to be. He always goes home to his mum on Boxing Day.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  Little said, ‘St Kilda. All the winged people live on St Kilda.’

  Haddad shot him a look. ‘I wasn’t asking you.’ Little didn’t seem to notice.

  Should’ve got a dog. ‘He’s right. Ben lives on St Kilda. He comes down once a year to spend time with his dad, but he was supposed to be home by now.’

  ‘Any idea where they went?’

  ‘No.’

  She gave me that Mrs Norman look again. I was telling the truth, but something about that look made me feel guilty.

  ‘And what can you tell me about Malcolm’s family?’

  I met her eyes, confused. ‘I don’t really know them, but you’ve got them. I saw Jillie and Finn go into the van.’

  She didn’t roll her eyes, but her expression indicated she really wanted to. ‘Not them. Other family. Zombies tend to run to family when they’re in trouble. Do you know where Malcolm’s parents are? If he has any siblings? We can find out, of course, but the sooner the better.’

  I relaxed slightly. ‘He has one brother, Neil. Their parents died when they were young. I don’t think they’re close though. He’s probably closer to our legal advisor at the Lipscombe, Obediah Miller. They were all in foster care together. I’m not sure about anyone else. Malcolm and I worked together, but we weren’t friends.’

  ‘Someone said he was married before. Was that the winged boy’s mother?’

  ‘No, Malcolm’s first wife died in a car accident years ago. Ben’s the result of an affair. His mother is in St Kilda. I don’t think she’s left there in years.’

  ‘All right, then.’ Haddad snapped her notebook shut then stood. ‘In that case, it’s time to find out if your colleague ate anyone. We haven’t found any body parts yet, but as you know, that might just mean he ate the lot.’ She pointed at the dust-covered sofa. ‘The Scene of Crime Officers are done in here. Stay in this room. We’re still doing a final sweep of the rest of the house.’

  I nodded and lifted my backpack off my shoulder. I rummaged until I found a cheap plastic coverall and a hairnet. I wasn’t usually gone long enough for my body to get all oozy, but I found it was better to be prepared.

  ‘You don’t mind if I watch, do you?’ Little asked.

  I glanced at Haddad. She shrugged and said, ‘Not at all.’

  I pulled out a piece of folded plastic sheeting and draped it over the sofa. Haddad might have said it was fine, but I’d learnt the hard way that the Scene of Crime lot didn’t like people dying all over their crime scene. I shook out a plastic-lined paper bag, then put it on top of the magazines.

  ‘You okay if I don’t wait?’ Haddad asked. ‘I’ll be in and out though.’

  I was pleased to hear it. I woke once with a black marker moustache and rings round my eyes. My body was vulnerable while I was dead. I didn’t like anyone fiddling with it. Haddad wouldn’t have much patience with such shenanigans.

  I nodded and pulled out a small plastic container filled with a brown watery liquid. I screwed the top off, then dipped my finger in and smeared the liquid onto my bottom lip.

  Little’s nose wrinkled, and his bottom lip curled. ‘Urine?’

  ‘No. Maybe. Probably. It’s river water.’

  ‘How does that help?’

  I glanced at him. The smirk had gone. The cat was genuinely interested.

  ‘It’s for grounding. I don’t need it, but it helps. The underworld is big. No, huge. Ginormous. And it’s not grounded in time or space. Everywhere and everyone that is and will ever be is there.’ I screwed the cap back on the vial. ‘Everyone makes a fuss about blood in magic. Blood is important, but blood is mostly water. Water’s ultimately what supports life. A lot of things about the underworld are a myth.’

  ‘Like the three-headed dog,’ Little said.

  ‘No, he’s real.’

  ‘What about Hades?’

  ‘He’s real too. More of a gangster than a god and not as powerful as he used to be. Anyway, the River Styx is real, and it’s linked to every bit of running water on earth. Water from the Thames grounds me to London, to this place. I don’t need it, but I find it makes it easier to find the door back.’

  I reached up to my neck and felt for the key I kept on a chain around my neck. It was there, skin-warmed and solid under my fingers. I sunk into the sofa and made myself comfortable, letting my body relax completely. I closed my eyes.

  Little said, ‘You smell different.’ He sounded surprised.

  I nodded without opening my eyes and began the process of journeying to the underworld.

  My body shutting down was an odd feeling. It wasn’t painful, but it was unpleasant—kind of like when being drunk and knowing you’re lying still but your body still feels like it’s too heavy and sinking into the bed while the world spins around.

  Fortunately, it didn’t take long. I was dead within a minute.

  8

  I scrambled to my feet before the sofa could disappear. The underworld mirrored the living one, but no one would mistake the two unless they’d taken a vast amount of mind-altering drugs.

  There was no one in sight—no dead person to anchor the place to a particular time. The room shimmered, and the colour of the walls flickered from white to blue to stripy green wallpaper. There was the briefest hint of trees, and then they were gone again. The furniture shifted, changed, blinked out and in again.

  Souls moved around, but the newly murdered tended to hang about for at least a week at the kill site before they got over the trauma enough to move away. If anyone had died at Malcolm’s hands, it hadn’t been in this room.

  I listened. I’d made the mistake the previous year of racing through the house to get the job done before my body decomposed enough to make going back really uncomfortable and had run into a ghost zombie. The house had been a nest of four rotters, b
ut none of us realised there had been five originally. The creatures had turned on one of their fellows and consumed him completely when their intended live victim escaped.

  That zombie thought he was still in the living world, and he tried to take a bite out of me. I still woke up in a cold sweat sometimes over the close call.

  I lifted my fingers to my neck and felt the reassuring twist of chain and the key against my skin. It’s said you can’t take it with you when you die. That’s not true. You can take the stuff that’s important. Grave goods have been part of the human funeral experience for millennia, and for good reason. It’s the instinct that makes you put your Nan’s engagement ring in with her, along with her favourite photo of your Granddad. Your head tells you it’s ridiculous, that they’re only going to rot or burn. Your heart knows better. The things that are truly important go along. The only exception is clothing. Most of the dead turn up clothed, even if they had no feelings about that particular shirt or pair of jeans. I don’t know why. My guess? The basic human urge to cover up.

  I opened the front door and peered out. The row of terraces flickered, interspersed with forest. When the road was there, it was paved with coffins. The dead blinked in and out as they went about their business. A car drove past, shifting from blue to silver, from Mercedes to Toyota.

  Water lapped at the end of the road where the police cordon had been. Beyond, into the horizon, there was nothing but sea. On schedule, a boat the size of the QE2 slid into sight. My vision wobbled as the underworld adjusted space to make the enormous ship fit on the suburban street. The recently dead crowded the railings, pointing and taking photos. The boatman stood at the front, a giant wheel beneath his slim fingers. I waved, and he tipped his hat.

  In many ways, the underworld fit traditional expectations. As I said to Little, there was still Hades, the three-headed dog, and the boatman who’d row you across the Styx for a penny.

  Except sometimes the Styx was the Thames, or the Mississippi or the Amazon, and the boatman accepted payment in sunflower seeds or cat hair or a favourite memory or whatever the soul happened to think was really important at the time. The boatman’s name was Charon, and he was the only thing that didn’t change. Everything else and everyone else changed, shaped by the changing thoughts of the dead, most of whom didn’t even know they were dead. They kept going as if life had never stopped, populating their little worlds with not-real versions of their family and friends, even going to work day after day, working out their unresolved issues through a death dream until they were ready for whatever came next.

  I looked up and saw a few flying figures. All were human. People don’t stop dreaming about flying just because they’re dead. In the distance, I made out the solid form of a minotaur.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I jumped. I turned to see my sister grinning at me. She was completely naked, her skin pale and freckled, her blonde hair plastered to her scalp. Water trickled down her body and pooled at her feet. At least she was human-shaped for once. My sister was one of the few exceptions. She knew she was dead.

  ‘You came to visit,’ Sigrid said.

  ‘Actually, I’m working.’

  Her face fell. ‘You’re always working. You never come just to visit me.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I will. I promise.’

  ‘You always say that.’ Sigrid flickered and disappeared. A short sharp pain dug into my chest. I reached an arm out, but she was gone.

  ‘It hurts to see you, Siggie,’ I said to the empty space where she’d been. I swallowed and considered going after her, but once again, she would have to wait.

  I turned back into the flickering house and took a deep breath, then crossed the room and went through the door at the far end, bypassing the stairs. I found myself in a large kitchen with a sky-lighted extension. At the end of the extension, seated at a farmhouse-style table, was the most obese woman I had ever seen. Ratty hair draped her shoulders and disappeared into folds of flesh. The flickering slowed then stopped, anchored by the woman’s presence.

  She was eating, and by the remains of food around her, she had been doing so for some time and would continue to do so for even longer. She took a bite of a sandwich. A piece of cheese fell out and was swallowed by her cleavage. Something about her felt familiar, but I’d never seen her before.

  Even so, her obesity wasn’t the most remarkable thing about her. A small green snake with a soft blurry look—a projection of her consciousness—was wrapped around her neck. It was an odd shape, more of a ribbon than a tube. The tip of its tail curled above her left ear, and its head was hidden somewhere in her cleavage. I looked closer. No, not hidden. Its mouth was clamped to her nipple—breastfeeding.

  The serpent raised its head and said, ‘What are you looking at?’

  I raised both my hands in a ‘nope, nothing’ gesture. I didn’t know what had happened to the fat woman, but she clearly hadn’t been eaten by zombies—not enough blood. She picked up a jug of water and gulped it down.

  I began to back out the room, but something slammed into my back and knocked me down onto the tiled floor. It raced towards the fat woman.

  I pulled myself to my feet to see a dead girl on a yellow bicycle. She raced around and around the kitchen, up the walls, over the ceiling and down again, through the table, and around and around again. Her legs pumped so fast they were a blur. The fat woman ignored her.

  A slit in the cyclist’s neck reached from one end of her throat to the other, and blood flowed from it, dripping to the floor. She was in her early teens, round faced, and round bodied in a Lycra cycling outfit that accentuated every bulge. She wore no helmet, and her brown hair was tied back into a tight pony tail. There was a square piece of paper fastened to her shirt with safety pins. My eyes crossed as I tried to read it as she whizzed around.

  I felt the wind on my face and smelt her sweat when she zoomed past me. I turned to see her racing frantically up and down the stairs before she disappeared into a door at the top of the landing. I followed.

  Photographs of Malcolm’s family lined the stairs. Older paintings flickered in and out of view: a ship on a rough sea, stern-faced Victorians, some crocheted wall hangings of cats.

  At the top of the landing, I went left into what appeared to be Malcolm’s bedroom. The wood-framed bed was messy and unmade, a white shirt and pair of socks tangled in the sheets. A pile of magazines and a coffee mug with milk scum sat on a dusty bedside table next to it.

  The girl raced around Malcolm’s bedroom, faster and faster. The bicycle clipped the edge of the bed and disappeared from view before blinking back.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  She nodded as she went past.

  ‘Can I ask you some questions?’

  The girl gave me a polite little shake of the head and a smile, as if I were a stranger who’d stopped her on the street to ask for money, then raced out.

  The room blurred, and a blue-cushioned headboard replaced the wooden frame of Malcolm’s bed. The plain white paint on the walls changed to mottled wallpaper. A dead man lay in the bed, a cup of tea at his elbow and a Dick Francis novel in his hands. The woman in curlers next to him was another not-real projection, although her snoring was loud enough. The dead man paused, lay down the book and dug a finger into his not-real wife’s ribs. The not-real woman coughed and rolled over. They were much too relaxed to have been zombie fodder. My guess was previous owner of the house, but I made a mental note of their descriptions anyway.

  I crossed the landing and into the second, smaller bedroom, which was more unstable. Mostly it was a young child’s room, but it alternated: a study, an older child’s bedroom, then a double mattress on the floor lit only by a single flickering gaslight and accompanied by the stench of damp.

  The young cyclist didn’t notice the changes. I’m not sure she noticed anything other than the walls. She cycled up one, over the hanging bare light, and down the other side.

  I stayed in the doorway.


  ‘I’m Vivia Brisk.’

  The cyclist smiled politely. ‘Berenice.’

  ‘And your surname?’

  Her face darkened with suspicion. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘So I can fill in the form.’ The attention span of the newly dead is shorter than a politician’s promise. It’s not worth bothering with detailed explanations. I’m lucky if they can follow a sentence to its end.

  ‘Oh. It’s Nazarak. N-A-Z-A-R-A-K.’

  ‘Date of birth?’

  She answered, but I didn’t hear because of the wings. A thousand wings all flapping at once. The room darkened as misshapen bodies blocked the moonlit window.

  Some of the dead are angry, most are confused, but this wasn’t the dead. There were other things here.

  Feathers squashed up against the glass, followed by a very human-looking face—a harpy. The normally docile creature bared its teeth at me and hissed. Others crowded round it, looking just about as unfriendly as the first.

  ‘What’s got you in such a flap?’ I said out loud, not really expecting an answer. They might have had human faces, but I’d never heard one speak.

  Berenice paid them no attention. She cycled down the room once more, then headed back down the stairs.

  The harpies screamed as one, a high-pitched squeal that made me clap my hands to my ears. The first one I’d seen began to headbutt the window. It cracked. Blood trickled down its forehead, but it didn’t seem to notice. Fury filled the brown eyes staring into mine. It headbutted the window again. The others jostled and fought beside it to get in.

  I reached out and ran my hand over the bedroom door, but it didn’t feel right.

  I sped down the stairs. There was no door between the kitchen and the living room. The back door in the kitchen flickered. Cheap wood, then metal. It wasn’t right either. Leaving the underworld is not as easy as getting in.

  Glass crashed as the harpies broke through the windows and flooded the kitchen. A hand-sized shard of glass flew through the fat woman’s head. She took another bite of her sandwich.

  One of the creatures landed on the table, its human face thick with dirt except for the white tear tracks down its cheeks. It bared its teeth at me.

  I ran out the kitchen and raced to the front door. Talons grabbed my hair from behind, and a line of heat hit my face as its claws tore my cheek. It screamed again. I scrabbled at my neck for my key, pulling it so hard I broke the chain.

  I pushed the key into Malcolm’s front door, and it changed to cheap hardboard, painted with red-brown varnish and covered in children’s stickers, a single cat flap at the bottom.

  My door.

  I twisted the key in the lock and shoved open the door back to the world of the living.

  9

  Air flooded my lungs. I gasped and sat up. It was the sitting up bit that made me bang my head into Little’s as he leaned over me.

  White sparks hit my eyelids. I fell back against the sofa. I reached out to my left and pulled the paper bag to my mouth. I hadn’t eaten so there wasn’t much to come up.

  My left eye pulsed against the lid. All the liquid in the hollow spaces of my body pulsed in turn, wanting out. I used the bag again, then lay back, wiping my mouth with a tissue. I don’t mind being dead—the underworld has great entertainment value—but reverse decomposition is no fun at all.

  The longer I was dead the worse it was, but as long as I came back within three hours, when rigor mortis set in, I recovered quickly enough.

  When the nausea had faded enough for me to risk opening my mouth, I said, ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Your cheek slashed open by itself. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Little’s voice was just a little too high-pitched.

  I reached up and felt a groove, slippery with blood, about three centimetres across my left cheek. It ached under my fingers. Deep enough to be nasty, but not enough to need stitches.

  ‘Take my hankie.’

  Something touched against my hand—cloth. I hoped it was clean, but I took it anyway and held it to my bloody face. My cheek throbbed.

  ‘Seriously, what was that?’

  ‘Harpies.’ I opened my eyes a crack and fought another surge of nausea. I lay back on the crinkly plastic and took deep breaths.

  ‘What?’ Little asked.

  ‘Creatures of the underworld,’ Dunne said. I opened my eyes a crack to see him perched on the edge of an armchair. Haddad was nowhere in sight. ‘Body of a bird, face of a woman. I thought you said they usually ignore you.’

  ‘They do. Usually.’ I swallowed. There was a lump in my throat the size of a boulder, but without all the lovely smoothness. Harpies were attracted to sites of great torment, and I hadn’t seen a flock that size for some time. A single murder would normally attract one or two, but a flock that big? And that aggressive? Nothing I’d seen in Malcolm’s house explained their presence or attitude. I swallowed again and breathed out heavily through my mouth.

  ‘She doesn’t look very well,’ Little said.

  ‘She’s just been dead. Give her a few minutes.’

  ‘She doesn’t look like she’ll be able to walk, and I’m not carrying her.’

  It took a second for my brain to catch up. Walk where?

  ‘She’ll be fine. Just wait,’ Dunne said.

  I pulled myself into a sitting position and successfully managed not to throw up. I rubbed at my face. The memories were already beginning to fade, like a particularly odd dream. I started talking before they disappeared entirely. ‘There was one woman and a girl.’ I searched my memory. ‘And one dead man.’

  ‘Causes of death?’ Dunne asked. He’d undone the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie. He tapped his pen rapidly on top of his notebook.

  I reached for the memory, but it was washing away like all other dreams.

  ‘The girl’s throat was cut.’ I described her as best I could. I rubbed my temple. ‘Her name was... Bernice. I think.’ In my mind’s eye, I saw the girl’s mouth spelling out her surname, but the letters were lost. ‘She was the only one who looked like she’d had a violent death. She was riding a bicycle. Wouldn’t keep still.’

  That also matched violent death. Murdered souls tended to concentrate on one thing—anything—to stop them thinking about what had happened to them. Another memory returned. ‘Oh, there was a snake!’

  ‘Death by snake? Different.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I frowned. Dunne knew better than to distract me while I was trying to hold on to the memories.

  ‘Sorry, go on.’

  ‘The woman had been dead for a while.’ Was she holding the snake? Why did I think the snake had said something? I couldn’t remember. ‘The man was older. No reason to think it wasn’t natural causes. It felt like an old death.’

  I closed my eyes, reaching for more detail, but nothing else came to mind. ‘That’s all I remember.’

  Dunne finished scribbling. ‘That’s very helpful. You know the drill...’

  ‘If I remember anything else, I’ll let you know.’ I took the blood-soaked handkerchief away from my face and balled it into my fist. ‘Sorry, I’ll get you another one.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Little said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better.’ I said, and I was. I still had the shivers and my head felt like a truck had driven through it, but I was better enough to give Little a closer look. His pale skin was almost white, and his demeanour had changed. Instead of lolling about, he sat on the edge of the sofa, left leg jigging against the edge of the seat.

  I looked from one to the other. ‘What happened? What have you found?’

  Little glanced at Dunne who said, ‘We’re not sure, but I’d like your opinion.’

  Not sure? Either someone was dead or they were not. Zombie or not. They had a sniffer to tell the difference. The only thing I could do that they couldn’t was identify who any scrap of meat might have been. Curiosity tickled my brain.

  I stood up
and wobbled.

  ‘You need help?’ Dunne asked.

  I shook my head. ‘Give me a minute.’

  I held the back of the sofa until I was sure I wasn’t going to fall over, then followed them out of the room unsteadily.

  The living room led into a small landing with a steep staircase. I followed them past it, and into a kitchen with a sky-lighted extension an exact replica of the one I’d seen in the underworld.

  To the right of the kitchen was a large cupboard where the space under the stairs was walled off. It contained a large chest freezer pulled halfway out the cupboard door, the lid propped open with a frozen loaf of bread. A white-coated Scene of Crime Officer was in the process of pulling out cling-wrapped packages of pale meat. They weren’t labelled, which wouldn’t surprise anyone who bought their meat from an independent butcher, but I didn’t need Little’s sniffer nose to tell me it was human. His face did that. It drained of blood. He looked away, and I couldn’t help but remember the cat was still a newbie despite his big mouth.

  ‘Is that—?’ I began, but Dunne interrupted me.

  ‘This way.’

  Little nodded. I looked back at the cling-wrapped parcels. ‘Human,’ he whispered to me. ‘With something else mixed in, but it’s sure as hell not beef or pork. No bones though. No skull, or rib cage.’

  I nodded. The lack of bones didn’t surprise me. Zombies tended to boil and smash their meat, then eat the bones first to remove the most obvious evidence. Malcolm, you asshole.

  Dunne led us through the back door of the kitchen into a garden choked with waist-high nettles and overgrown butterfly bushes.

  The garden was ablaze with white floodlights and under cover of one of those white tents designed to keep off the rain and stop nosy neighbours snapping pictures for the tabloids. Fat brown slugs inched their way through the mud, showing yellow innards here and there where police boots had stomped on them. My boots sunk into mud up to the laces.

  At the bottom of the garden, the wooden fence had decomposed enough that it was just a few sticks in the mud demarcating the boundary of the Brannicks’ garden from what looked like an overgrown concrete parking lot.

  White-suited figures swarmed over it. I followed Dunne and trudged through the break in the fence. The concrete parking lot belonged to what appeared to be an abandoned car dealership. It was an inverted L-shape, the shorter portion with the sales building facing the road on the other side, and the longer part tucked away to run along behind the row of houses.

  The police lights were stark, and they’d extended the white tent to the lot, but there were still deep pockets of shadow. Despite the buzz of cops coming and going and the bright lights, there was still something eerie about the lot: a forgotten place suddenly exposed.

  I became aware of someone’s eyes on me and looked up to see Haddad frowning at me from a line of rusting cars parked against a graffiti-splattered wall. Butterfly bushes pushed their way through the back seats, and strands of dead flowers hung out smashed windows.

  The car in the middle was missing its front half and so rusty it was impossible to tell the original colour. Haddad had been in the process of bending over the open boot and prodding at something with white-gloved fingers when she’d spotted us.

  Aaron Slender stood beside her, stiff and arms folded, his brow furrowed. He unfolded his arms when he saw me. His eyes flicked to the scratch on my cheek. ‘What is she doing here? This is meant to be a secure site.’

  Dunne looked uncomfortable. ‘I thought she could take a look.’

  ‘What for?’ He turned his attention to Haddad. ‘Did you approve this?’

  She stared daggers at Dunne, but nodded her head, unwilling to show dissent in front of the NRT chief. Slender looked from one to the other.

  Dunne raised his eyebrows. ‘Vivia’s been at a crime scene before. She knows not to do anything stupid. Besides, she knows about the weird dead stuff. And this is weird dead stuff.’

  Haddad still didn’t look happy, but she indicated the boot of the car with a gloved hand.

  I peered inside. An unzipped hard plastic suitcase lay on top of other detritus. Neatly curled into the case was a mummified yet unmistakably human form, rendered black by decay and decomposition. It wore jeans or some other type of thick trousers, and fibres remained from a shirt but they were black and gunky like the rest. The suitcase lid was damaged and covered in the same black muck as the body. Long thin grooves like tiny railway tracks were scraped along the top of the suitcase lid, along with tufts of hair.

  I couldn’t figure how the body had fit into the suitcase. Even with the body dried and shrivelled, it fit like tuna in a can. There was no way the body at full weight should have fit, even with someone sitting on it and struggling with the zip. Of course, the sum total of my forensic experience came from watching CSI, so I didn’t discount the possibility there might have been an obvious explanation flying over my thumping head.

  Little was watching me intently. ‘Pick anything up?’

  ‘Like what? You mean the way it fits in the suitcase?’

  He gave me a disappointed look. I released the part of me that recognised the dead and scrutinised the corpse again, but it just looked like a dead body to me. A bit strange, but still dead.

  ‘This is a waste of time,’ Slender growled. He hadn’t once looked me in the eye.

  ‘It’s worth another opinion,’ Dunne said. Slender grunted.

  Haddad pointed at the end of the row of cars. I walked over, careful where I put my feet. The others followed. She opened the closed boot of a rusty box-shaped Golf and stepped back.

  Inside was another curled-up corpse, desiccated and unidentifiable as to gender or age, but this one wasn’t in a suitcase. It looked as if it had just been dumped in the rear of the car. A blanket that might have once been plaid covered the lower half. Like the other body, this one lay in a black soup of decomposed tissue. I leaned down to get a closer look.

  It moved.

  I yelped and jumped back. Slender barked out a laugh.

  The neck vertebrae slid, and the leathery skull turned its empty sockets towards me. What had been someone’s hand lifted up slowly as if it was an enormous effort and stretched up towards me. One of the finger bones fell off and landed on the stained blanket.

  Slender put his hands in his pockets. He looked amused. ‘Source of the infection right here. And it’s been disturbed recently. Saves us a lot of time and trouble.’

  The dead creature was still scrabbling at us—if you could call taking around five seconds to close and open your fingers scrabbling. I was aware of Little’s gaze on me as if he were waiting for something.

  I bent closer to the body. It didn’t smell dead. I reached out and touched the leathery index finger.

  Slender smacked my hand away. ‘Bloody hell, you idiot! Do you want to spend the next two days in quarantine?’

  I closed my eyes and reached inside for that place that sensed the dead. The body wasn’t there. Odd. A horrible suspicion clamped my mind. I opened my eyes again, bent closer, and sniffed. There it was. A scent like camphor. Soft, but definitely there. To Little, it must have been overwhelming.

  Horror clenched my stomach. The cold air suddenly felt much colder.

  ‘This one’s not dead,’ I said. ‘It’s still alive. It’s not a zombie.’

  ‘Told you,’ Little said. He looked smug.

  Slender pointed at the desiccated corpse. ‘Seriously? Its organs are rotted away. Maybe it’s some kind of new zombie.’

  ‘No. No, it’s not. I’m a death witch. The one thing I can do is tell if a body is dead. That one’s not dead.’ Nausea rose up through my stomach. ‘Besides, I can smell its soul.’

  ‘So?’ Slender said. ‘Zombies have souls. That’s the whole point. Soul stuck in dead flesh.’ He rubbed at the moles under his nose.

  ‘You can’t normally smell souls,’ I said. Little nodded vigorously beside me. ‘Not in the living. Not in zombies. This body?
??s soul is leaking. It’s a bit like how you would normally only smell blood if someone’s bleeding. The soul’s been damaged.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Haddad asked.

  Realisation dawned on Slender’s face. ‘Soul magic.’ His hands clenched into fists. His nose wrinkled as if he’d smelled something a lot more disgusting than two corpses.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said.

  Haddad turned away suddenly and walked off. A few seconds later, I heard the sound of her being sick.

  Soul magic was incredibly rare. Magic or any kind of thauromancy requires power from somewhere. Most spells are drawn from the elements—earth, air, fire, water—but there is a fifth option: the soul.

  It’s impossible to use magic to harness the power of the soul without destroying at least part of it, and it’s one of the few crimes to carry an automatic life sentence.

  I reached out again and touched the thing’s index finger. This time Slender didn’t stop me. He turned away.

  At my touch, the thing that looked like a corpse stopped moving. Its eye sockets turned to mine. I shivered.

  Haddad returned, wiping her mouth. She still looked a little green. ‘Why does it look dead if it’s alive?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Haddad bent down to the thing in the boot and touched it with a gloved finger. The skull opened its jaw and closed it as if it were trying to tell us something. She blinked slowly, trying to gain composure. ‘If it’s still alive, is it aware?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. I’d guess the soul of whoever this is, is being used as a power source to maintain some sort of spell, but this is far outside my area of expertise.’

  Slender’s eyes shot to mine. ‘I should hope so.’

  Haddad shuddered. I’d never seen her so rattled. ‘And when the body stops leaking, when there’s no soul left? What happens to the spell?’

  I considered my words carefully. ‘I don’t know. I guess it would depend on the spell’s function. If the spell has served its purpose, then that would be it. If the practitioner wanted to keep it going, he’d have to find a new victim. Kind of like putting in a new battery.’

  ‘What about the other body?’

  ‘That one’s just dead.’

  Haddad straightened. She gave me a weak smile. ‘Autopsy’s going to be a bitch. The coroner hates corpses that move.’

  Slender threw up his hands. ‘Fine. If it’s not a rotter, that’s your department, not mine. I’ve still got one on the loose. At least one, and if he’s bitten that flying aberration then I’ve got a flying zombie on my hands. I’ve got enough to do.’

  Aberration. I ignored it, but I didn’t miss the look the cat shifter and the werebee gave him.

  10

  The tube was in lockdown and I didn’t have a car, so I asked Haddad if I could get a lift to the office so I could check on Obe.

  ‘Fine, I’ll get DS Little to take you, but there’s a condition. Brannick must have gone to someone, and chances are that’s going to be someone dumb enough to think talking to the police is worse than risking the zompocalypse. I know what the metanatural community are like. No one wants to talk to us.’ She grimaced. ‘They won’t even talk to me. You’re Lipscombe. They’ll trust you, and I know you’ve got the contacts. All I want you to do is put the word out.’

  That sounded fair to me. The cat seemed less than impressed at being offered out as a taxi service, but he took the car keys and walked out to the street without a backwards look.

  I left Haddad hissing something into Dunne’s ear, and because they both kept looking in my direction, I assumed it was about me. Light drizzle settled on my hair and face. My stomach was still turning over, half post-death and half from the stench of the corpses. I’m used to the stink of death, but I’ll never like it. I lifted my face to the sky, grateful for the fresh air.

  The water soaked into my skin and made the harpy scratch ache. Are there bacteria in harpy claws? They didn’t look too clean. On the other hand, that might imply bacteria went to heaven. Or hell. And which would spending eternity stuck under the claws of a harpy be? I rubbed my eyes. It was a thought better suited to the tail end of a bottle of wine.

  I followed Little to a white Vauxhall. He pressed the key ring, and it beeped twice as it unlocked. I climbed in and was assaulted by the chemical reek of a lemon-scented car freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. The sickly stench permeated even the smell of sick in my nose, and the nausea rose again. I pushed the button to roll the window down.

  Little started the car, turned the heating up to the max, then pressed the button on the driver’s side to roll my window back up. I didn’t have the energy to argue. I’ve never met a cat who liked the cold.

  The constable at the end of the road moved the cordon so we could get through. Away from the disapproving frown of Haddad, Little perked up a little. ‘Hey, if you can go to the underworld, can you bring people back? That would be cool.’

  ‘No.’ I tried to put a sense of finality into the word, but the tone flew over Little’s head.

  ‘Have you tried?’

  ‘Dead is dead.’

  ‘Not for you.’

  ‘The lines of the dead aren’t meant to be crossed. I’m different. Anyone else, and you risk breaking something you really don’t want to break.’ I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes, but the cat still didn’t get the hint.

  ‘You know I’ve never seen Slender that angry. Still... flying zombie. They’re going to have to get some really big nets. Or’—he grinned, showing all his teeth—’they could recruit pigeon shifters to peck him down.’

  I smiled, despite myself. ‘Now you’re just being silly. The pigeons would never collaborate with the Met.’

  He laughed, then fell silent.

  The streets should have been deserted, but Londoners have never been good at obeying rules. Little stopped at a pedestrian crossing for a couple of students breaking the lockdown. They hadn’t been the first we’d seen, but he raised a single finger from the steering wheel and pointed it at them.

  ‘Them. They’re going to be first to go if the zompocalypse starts. Hell, they’re young and fit. They’ll get away after the first bite and end up being the ones who fuel it. Idiots.’

  We drove the rest of the way in silence. The last time I’d seen this was the last time a zombie got loose—a fourteen-year-old girl who’d been sheltered by her family. That had been under Slender’s predecessor, and the reason there’d been a job opening shortly after. It hadn’t been a bad time for me at least. I’d stayed in, doors locked and curtains drawn, and had a box-set marathon. Of course, the clean-up afterwards had been less fun.

  She’d infected another five people within the week, and all the little zombie dominoes had tumbled until the NRTs had to dump fifty wriggling corpses into the pit. Once infection starts, it spreads quickly.

  I couldn’t rid my mind of the image of all those neatly wrapped freezer parcels, and my thoughts kept shifting back to the dead girl on the bicycle. Her face had dimmed in my mind, but I could still feel the her of her—the slightly sweaty scent, her bulk, and the distracted way she’d brushed my question off. She had died violently, and recently. Without evidence to the contrary, the human meat in the freezer had to be her.

  The bodies in the cars were a whole other problem. There was no reason they had anything to do with Malcolm or his family, but I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. And soul magic? The thought turned my stomach.

  Malcolm was out there somewhere and getting hungrier. Unless he ate soon, he would lose it completely, and that’s when the risk of zompocalypse was at its highest. All it took was for him to go savage in a crowded place. He’d be unlikely to be able to kill anyone, but he’d be able to get a few good bites out of the crowd before he was subdued. And how many of the bitten would just hand themselves in? To be thrown away as a living corpse? Never to see their loved ones again? Not enough.

  I wanted to call him a f
ool and a jerk, but ultimately I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t also have run. The zompocalypse might be a scary thought, but it seemed a lot better when you considered what happened if the NRTs got hold of you.

  11

  The army stopped us twice before Little thought to stick a blue light on the roof, and by the time we pulled up outside the Trust offices, the sun was just visible overhead, a lighter grey disc in the grey clouds.

  I exited onto the wet pavement and grabbed my backpack from the back seat. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Little leaned over and pulled my door shut.

  The Trust had started life in the mid-nineteenth century as a charitable concern funded by the Lipscombe family, whose money came from cotton mills in Lancashire. Originally, the Trust handed out small sums enabling ‘respectable non-human persons’ to buy an apprenticeship or set up in trade, but sometime over the years, we’d stopped handing out money and started dispensing advice.

  The charity currently occupied the top two floors of a fifties-built office block in East Croydon. We shared the building with a stationery company and an operation that claimed to get you compensation for work-related injuries. We’d been in the new premises for four years. I didn’t miss the old place. It had been bigger and more spacious but had been located on the site of an old poorhouse, and I’d never grown used to the dozens of little ghosts, dead from malnutrition, cholera, or worse, who haunted the corridors. The building was now owned by a hedge fund. I’d heard their fortunes had taken a turn for the worse since they’d moved in, and I couldn’t help wondering how much was down to poor morale.

  We’d initially occupied all five floors of the Croydon building, but as we gradually ran out of money, we’d also gradually run out of people. At least three out of four desks were empty, although there was the occasional piece of evidence that someone had once sat at them—a coffee mug, a pen holder, a few photos left behind. In some ways they were the lucky ones—a redundancy package and time to find a new job. I’d been paid late two months in a row, and I wasn’t sure how much longer the Trust was going to keep going. We had plenty of stationery at least. The Pen People gave us freebies in exchange for letting them store supplies in our excess office space.

  I cupped my hands to the glass door, but the security guard who usually sat behind the desk was missing. Likely he hadn’t left home before the lockdown had been declared. I slipped round the back of the building, keyed my code into the box, and took the stairs up to the fourth floor.

  A large orange sticker plastered onto the door indicated the NRTs had already been there looking for Malcolm. I pushed it open.

  Reception was empty, but a familiar voice drifted down the corridor, and the light was on in Obe’s office. An additional shape through the clouded glass indicated he had a visitor. The door opened, and Obe poked his head out.

  ‘Viv! I wasn’t sure you were going to be able to make it in.’ He came out all the way, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘I got a lift.’

  Obe wore a threadbare jumper with a reindeer on it and brown corduroy trousers—the same clothes I’d left him in before the Christmas break. By the smell of him, it wasn’t a wash and rewear. He didn’t look well either. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot. He chewed on his bottom lip as he looked at me. It made his beard look like a small sea creature rolling in the surf.

  It struck me that with Malcolm gone it would be up to someone else to give him the biannual hygiene talk and gently remind him about the need to shower frequently, using both soap and shampoo. Maybe I could get Donna and Habi to agree to draw straws.

  Anyone else I would have given a hug, but Obe didn’t like being touched. Instead I nodded towards the glass door. ‘NRTs?’

  ‘No, they’ve gone. It’s Adam.’

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Malcolm’s nephew. Neil’s son.’

  ‘Give me a few minutes to wash up and I’ll be with you.’

  ‘Okay.’ He offered me a cup of tea, but I refused. My stomach was still a bit queasy.

  I pushed the door open to my office. The NRTs had been in there. The filing cabinet had been moved a few inches away from the wall, and the cushion on my chair had been shoved to the floor, presumably when one of the black-suited men had checked under my desk.

  I grabbed the toiletry bag and change of clothes I kept in the bottom drawer. The clothes that had been clean when I’d put them on only hours earlier now felt soft and greasy, and I didn’t need a cat’s nose to tell me my skin and hair still carried the scent of decomposition and sick.

  I stripped down in the disabled toilet that also functioned as First Aid Room and storage space. I washed my hair using soap from the dispenser, then rinsed it under the tap, using the hand dryer to dry it. My hair felt rough and frizzy under my fingers, and I made a mental note to bring some proper shampoo and conditioner into the office. I grimaced. I could still smell the faint odour of puke, but at least the scent of cheap soap was stronger. I brushed my teeth then grabbed the first aid box and dug out antiseptic ointment and some sticking plasters.

  I wiped my face with a damp flannel, careful around the harpy scratch. Foundation came off my skin in tan streaks. Malcolm’s voice popped into my head. ‘You should wear makeup more often, Vivvie. It makes you more feminine. You know, less intimidating.’

  The memory took me by surprise, and I barked out a laugh. For the first time in five years of washing makeup off a post-death face, I had the sudden urge to reapply it. Malcolm was dead. He’d never irritate me again. I’d never have to hassle him for another overdue press release. He’d never tell me another off-colour joke. I flipped the seat down on the toilet and sat heavily, face in hands, teeth clenched. I began to sob.

  But then the memory of Malcolm’s dead face was replaced with the image of small cling-film-wrapped parcels. How old had the girl on the bicycle been? Fifteen?

  I wiped at my eyes with the heel of my hand. My chest tightened with anger, and it washed away the sense of loss. Teeth clenched, I cleaned and disinfected the harpy scratch, feeling only rising rage at the idiot I’d been forced to share a workspace with for five years.

  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 NRT
s 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.

  14

  By six p.m., neither Obe nor I had any more information, and Adam had called to say he was packing it in for the night. Transport for London was still in lockdown, so Obe drove me home to Sydenham through eerily quiet streets that should have been packed with post-Christmas bargain hunters but instead had just enough scurrying lockdown dodgers that we made it home without being stopped. There was no parking, so Obe doubled parked, leaving the engine running as I retrieved my backpack and bag of dirty clothes from the boot.

  ‘Say hello to the old man for me.’

  ‘Will do.’ I opened the door and put one foot out. ‘Obes?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I grimaced, embarrassed. The journey had been something of an ordeal smell-wise. Any thought of making anyone else draw straws flew out my head. ‘You really need to have a shower and put on some clean clothes. Sorry.’

  ‘Sure, Viv,’ Obe said absently. He waved at me as he drove off.

  I fumbled for my keys and had to jiggle them in the lock a couple of times before it clicked. I shoved the stiff door open with my shoulder and stepped inside.

  The house wasn’t mine. It belonged to my mother. It was old, beautiful, and spacious with high ceilings, original oak floorboards, and huge sash windows with window seats. But there was also the mould in the bathroom, rot in the flooring, and antique plumbing that made me worry the whole house was going to collapse every time I flushed the loo.

  The stink of decomposition filled my nostrils. I picked my way through the hall with care. The man I called my stepfather and whose name I had inherited had never got the hang of... well, hanging stuff up or throwing it away, or washing anything. Dried mud littered the hallway where he’d tracked it in.

  ‘Stan?’

  No answer.

  The living room was empty, but the TV was on. I switched it off. Back in the hall I dodged Stanley’s tool bag then a toppled stack of National Geographic magazines that never got read but I wasn’t allowed to recycle and made it to the kitchen without tripping over anything. I opened the window above the sink. Cold, fresh air flooded in. He’d been downstairs. Milk and butter stood on the kitchen counter along with oil splashes from his daily fry-up, and dirty dishes filled the sink. There was an overflowing ashtray on the kitchen table. I checked the cooker. All the dials were in the correct ‘off’ position.

  In the little alcove where we kept the washing machine, I opened the door of the front loader and emptied the bag of death clothes into it, added soap, and switched it on. I put fresh food in the cat’s bowl and replenished his water, then I crossed the landing and pushed the door open.

  Sigrid was in bed, but she wasn’t asleep. I sat in the armchair next to her bed and watched her hold a conversation with an invisible someone. She was upset, but I couldn’t tell what about. Her voice had an accusatory tone, but it was low and she whispered as if arguing in a church or a cinema.

  Siggie’s ancient cat, Vinegar, lay in a round, black puddle at the end of the bed. He raised his head and yawned at the sight of me, then went back to sleep.

  Sigrid had been given many labels over the years: brain damaged, severely autistic. They changed over the years as medical diagnoses advanced. They were all wrong. Sigrid’s problem was that she was dead. Her body just didn’t know it.

  My sister died when she was fourteen, and while her body was revived, her soul stayed in the underworld. Her mind wandered the underworld, and her body copied the actions of her spirit in the world of the living.

  When I’d told Little I couldn’t bring people back from the dead, I’d lied. I just couldn’t do it right.

  ‘I’m going to fix you, Sig. I promise,’ I said. I just have no idea how.

  I knelt beside the bed, pulled the duvet down a little, and kissed her forehead. She smelt like sweat and sugar.

  She was wearing the same clothes I’d left her in, black jogging bottoms and a T-shirt with a tube map
on it. The shirt was dirty. I checked her nappy. It was fat with urine but no faeces. She hadn’t been bathed or changed. I got a clean nappy and clothes out of the cupboard, and cleaned her up. The underpad on the bed was still dry. At least the nappy hadn’t leaked.

  Sigrid was the older by two years and had been toothpaste-advert pretty as a child and just as chirpy. As an adult she should have been blue-eyed, buxom, and beautiful, but instead her cheeks were sunken, her eyes were red-rimmed, and her short blond hair stuck to her head in sweaty tufts. She had been the pretty one, and I was the skinny, dark grump—the beneficiary of our mother’s hag genes that had passed Sigrid by. Now she wasn’t much more than a body to be cleaned and maintained, and I was... just a bigger, skinny, dark grump.

  I got council-provided care for a few hours a week, paid for a few more, and the shortfall was met by a neighbour who watched Sigrid in return for me checking on her dead husband a couple of times a month, making sure he was still behaving himself. I turned down the dial on the thermostat, left the room quietly, and headed upstairs.

  Three doors led off the landing. All were open, including the one to my bedroom, where a broken lock dangled from the door. I grabbed the lock, and it came off in my hand, rough where the bolt cutters had cut it in two. I pushed the door open tentatively, but everything looked the same as it always did.

  The oak floor smelled like cleaning products. The bed was made, and the mattress was so soft that the outline of my body was still clearly visible in it.

  I closed the door behind me and hung my backpack from the hook on the back. I turned around slowly. He’d been in here. In my sanctuary. None of the books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that took up all but one of the walls were disturbed. The wardrobe door was closed. The blinds on the window made a perfectly straight line at the top. I shut the door behind me on the way out. I popped my head into the other rooms, but Stanley wasn’t in his room or the spare.

  I followed the stairs upwards and slowed as I approached the attic. The stink of damp and rot became stronger, as did the scent of flowers, and the steps underneath my feet creaked and bent.

  Soft light spilled from the door at the top of the landing. The electricity at the top of the house was switched off—too much damp and too many leaks—so he used an old portable gas lamp.

  Stanley was asleep in the far corner, in an armchair covered with fitted plastic sheeting. One corner of his yellow-stained moustache had unfurled, giving him a lopsided look.

  And in the middle of the room lay the sharp reek of decomposition that was my mother. If I ever wondered what I’d look like after ten years dead, this would be it.

  15

  I was the type of child who had a lot of uncles growing up. I have no idea who my father is. I asked my mother once, and she told me she didn’t remember. Stanley was the only one who ever stuck around. I don’t think there was ever a romantic relationship between the two of them, but Stanley believes her claim that she’s a god. She’s not. She’s just been around long enough to think she is.

  For Stanley, the war ended in 1916. He was seventeen and had been recruited to one of the Tunnelling Companies on the basis that his father had been a coal miner.

  ‘That was bloody daft,’ he said once when he was minded to talk about it. ‘I grew up in Limehouse and never knew the man. Still, if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have met your mum.’

  Once I found a sepia-toned picture of him in uniform. He was wearing a buttoned brown coat, a hat that looked too big for him, and a ridiculous black moustache. He was grinning, and his teeth were wonky. That was when I realised that Stanley had had a mole like a beauty spot just below his lower lip. I’d known his teeth were destroyed in the explosion: he has square false ones in dire need of whitening, but I hadn’t known about the mole. The bottom half of his face is a crosshatch of scar tissue.

  The explosion that destroyed his face wasn’t what killed him. The shell came later. Stanley drowned in a flooded tunnel. He died alone in the dark water, fifteen feet below ground.

  ‘It’s a bad way to go,’ he told me long after Sigrid drowned. ‘Your lungs are screaming for air and you’re desperate to open your mouth and breathe in, but you can’t. Then it gets too much and you do it anyway, and then you choke and choke but there’s only water.’

  His body lay in the flooded tunnel for hours, along with his mouse and the other two clay-kickers, until his company drained the water.

  It was the caged mouse my mother was interested in. She didn’t care much for the souls of drowning men—she’d seen enough battle deaths—but she’d been dead for centuries and this was the first time she’d seen them take so many mice with them. She wanted to know why.

  In the underworld, she pulled Stanley’s soul up out of the water and asked him. When he’d finished spluttering, he said: ‘It’s for the gas. The mouse sniffs out the gas.’

  Stanley had brought a not-real version of the battlefield along with him into the underworld: the shells, the gas, the new machine guns.

  My mother was curious enough that she decided to leave the underworld for the first time in centuries and take a look for herself. It had been long enough that she needed a guide, and so she took the man closest to her, as well as the mouse.

  Stanley’s mates didn’t expect to find two alive people in the tunnel, one of whom hadn’t gone in, but enough strange things had been found in the French soil that no one was too surprised. Stanley was put back to work and was hit by a shell two weeks later, which he survived.

  My mother spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner of war camp. She didn’t mind.

  ‘All very civilised,’ she said. ‘I was captured by the Romans once. They were a real bunch of bastards.’

  Stanley was diagnosed with a brain tumour at the age of eighty-nine and given a month to live. He didn’t make it that far and died for the second time a week after the diagnosis. Sigrid found him dead in bed when she brought him his morning tea. My mother shooed us both out, closed the bedroom door, and when it opened again, Stanley was alive. And stayed alive. He came back without the cancer that killed him, but with an unnatural talent for gardening. He was well over a century old now, but the man snoring in the corner of the attic looked no older than the day he’d come back from the dead for the second time.

  It may have come across as a little Norman Bates–ish to keep your mother’s dead body in the house, but at least we kept her in the attic and not the cellar. And of course, Norman Bates’s mother wasn’t a hag. That mother was never going to come back. Lucky Norman.

  My mother lay in a glass coffin in the middle of the floor. I would have picked something a little more solid myself, but it was Stanley’s choice. It was smothered in flowers that also lay in heaps on either side, so that the horror within was not entirely obvious unless you looked closely. I’d been trying to get Stanley to agree to give her a proper burial. I hadn’t much of a hope, but it would have been better than keeping her in the house. Burying her six feet under wouldn’t stop her from coming back to life, but a mouthful of dirt and the prospect of digging her way out of her own grave might be enough for the crazy old bat to think ‘bugger it’ and head back to the underworld.

  I watched Stanley’s chest rise and fall. He’d taken his teeth out, and they were sitting on his lap, looking like a wind-up toy.

  The stink in the room wasn’t just my mother. I’d been dead for a time too, and a quick wash in the disabled toilet wasn’t going to cut it. I’d come up the stairs raring for an argument, but watching Stanley sleep, and in the midst of the stench of death, the attractiveness of a good barney suddenly felt a lot less appealing than a long hot shower, but as I turned to leave a voice said, ‘Where have you been?’

  I turned. ‘Work, and then there was a necroambulist lockdown. You all right today? I see you’ve eaten.’

  ‘What do you care? Weren’t even here to make me a cup of tea.’

  I let out a sigh. ‘Stan, someone I know died today. I don?
??t want to have an argument.’

  ‘Who’s arguing?’

  I drew in a deep breath. I was. I was tired and I didn’t want to fight, but I had a bad habit of letting him get away with things because I didn’t like arguing. ‘Stanley, we’ve spoken about my room. I like to have a little privacy.’

  ‘Your room. It’s not your room. It’s your mother’s. The house is your mother’s. You’re not allowed to lock me out. I’m your father.’

  ‘No, you’re not, and Mum is dead. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I came home to look after you, and I’m happy to do it, but you need to respect my space.’

  ‘You didn’t come back for me. You came back for your idiot sister. And because you don’t have to pay rent. Your mother is going to be furious when she comes back.’

  I changed tack. ‘Maybe, but she’s dead now, and it’s disrespectful to keep her body in a box in the attic. You really don’t think she wouldn’t prefer a proper tomb? A nice old-fashioned one with angels and urns. That sort of thing.’ I wasn’t likely to sell him on it, but I sure as hell was never going to quit trying.

  Stanley looked down at my mother’s body. My heart gave a little lift. He was actually thinking about it for once.

  ‘And a nice big lock on the door so she can’t get out,’ I muttered under my breath. Or thought I had, because Stanley’s head snapped up, eyes furious.

  ‘Shame on you. She’s your mother, and you know she’s not really dead.’

  If she had been the loving, cupcake-making variety, it would have been a fair point, but she wasn’t. She was the ancient, powerful, and absolutely pig-shit crazy version. I didn’t want her in the house, even if she didn’t stink.

  ‘She’s not alive either. Live people don’t go mouldy.’

  ‘You would if you stayed under that long.’

  I gave up. ‘Fine. Keep the corpse, but I’m getting the lock replaced. Don’t remove it again.’

  ‘Or else what, you stupid girl?’

  ‘Or I’ll get my mother declared dead and sell this house. Siggie deserves something wheelchair friendly. You really don’t have to come with.’

  ‘You can threaten me all you like, girlie. The moment I go into a retirement home, someone’s going to notice I’m not getting any older. And then they’re going to ask questions about you. The world thinks hags can’t bring people back. What do you think the media will do when they find out that’s not true? They’ll never leave you alone. You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not.’

  Checkmate. I gave up. Stanley Brisk wasn’t my flesh and blood, but he was the closest thing to it. Neither of us had anyone else. ‘Just leave my room alone.’

  I didn’t stay to hear his response. I made sure the old man was clean and fed and looked after, but I was an adult now. He could sit and pay vigil over his rotting Snow White. I didn’t have to pretend to like it.

  16

  I sat on the edge of the bath and checked for emails while the tap filled the tub with steaming water. I had a few responses, but nothing of note. I clicked over to BBC News. They were showing the same clip of Ben flying off, along with a photo of Malcolm that looked like it had been culled from his passport. Updates came in every couple of minutes, but it was reaching the point where the reporters were starting to report on each other.

  I turned the tap off, then rubbed steam away from the bathroom mirror. The harpy scratch stung like hell where I’d rubbed antiseptic ointment into it, but it looked clean and lacked the raised red lines that indicated infection. I put my phone onto the towel and stepped into the claw-footed tub. I closed my eyes as the water lapped under my chin. A steady frozen draft from the warped window frame froze the top of my head while my lower parts broiled. The heat soaked into my bones. I could see most of them. My ribs stuck out like the back of an immersion heater, and my knees looked like someone had stuck a pair of ice cream scoops onto two rulers. I was doing too much dying. Every time I died, my flesh began decomposing, and every time I came back I threw up. My body was suffering for it. I’m vain enough that I wouldn’t have objected if I looked good, but I didn’t. I just looked sick. I needed to eat more, and die less. It shouldn’t be hard. I liked pizza and ice cream and chocolate, and all those lovely foods that are supposed to make you fat. All I needed to do was stop dying long enough for it to stick to the sides.

  The only dying I was contractually obligated to do was for the police, who only asked every few weeks. The problem was that every time someone asked me to freelance, I thought of Sigrid. Every extra bit of cash went into my escape fund. Stanley had been right about one thing. I couldn’t afford to pay rent. Or at least not rent and carers. I wasn’t quite sure I could afford a mortgage and carers either, but however I was going to get myself out of this hole, I knew I was going to need a lot more money than I had.

  The sound of my sister’s voice drifted under the door. I couldn’t make out the words, but by the shifts in tone and gaps, she was holding another conversation with someone who wasn’t there.

  Sweat streamed down the sides of my face, making it itch, and I wiped it with the side of my arm. Stanley made a little cash every now and then, selling the flowers he grew in the greenhouse out back, but he wasn’t willing to share any of his money on something like a carer. He came from a time when people like Sigrid weren’t expected to live very long, and he wasn’t willing to waste good money on someone who didn’t even notice whether she was clean or dirty.

  The only solution was to do more dying. I scooped shampoo into my hair and massaged it. The problem scooted round my mind on well-worn grooves.

  I scrubbed the dead off my skin with a nail brush, ridding it of all the greasy dead cells and stink until it tingled.

  I was just rinsing my hair when I felt the first inkling I was not alone, followed by a low wolf whistle from the end of the bath. The suited ghost from Shafiq’s chip shop was standing on the tiled floor. The dead man had no hormones to trigger any sort of reaction from seeing a naked me in the bath, but life habits die hard, and he was giving me a good ogle anyway. I resisted the urge to cover up.

  ‘Oy,’ I said. ‘At least have the decency to look at my face.’

  ‘Nothing but bones on you anyhow.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Found your dead man.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Putney Vale Cemetery.’ The ghost hopped from one foot to another.

  I frowned. ‘What’s with the skippety skip? I’ve died here plenty of times. It’s hallowed ground.’

  ‘Oh sure, oh sure,’ said the ghost. ‘That’s all that’s needed. Do you know how much hag magic is soaked into this place? It’s like being bitten by rats.’ He shivered. ‘Yeargh.’

  I got back to the subject of Malcolm. ‘What about the zombie? Has he lost it?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Still holding it together,’ the ghost said.

  ‘And the winged boy?’

  ‘Not sight nor sausage.’

  I reached over the side of the bath to where I’d left my phone on a towel. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Frank Sutton.’

  ‘I’ll let the guardsman know it’s your choice of film on Saturday. Just give him plenty of time to source it if you’re picking an old one.’

  ‘Nope. He’s got it. It’s going to be Grease all showings.’

  Jeez, I thought, what is it with ghosts and Olivia Newton-John? The dead man dissipated into the steamy air. I leaned back into the bath, which was cooling rapidly. Malcolm, but no Ben.

  It made what I had to do a little easier. Legally, there was no option. Failure to report the whereabouts of a known zombie was a minimum five-year prison term. Ben wasn’t there to complicate things, but my stomach still hurt a little as I dialled Dunne’s number. Malcolm and I had never got on, but he didn’t deserve the pit. No one deserved it, no matter what they had in their freezer, and it hurt a little that I’d be the one to send him there.

  Frank the ghost had said that Malcolm hadn’t l
ost it. Somehow that made it worse, that when they came for him he’d still know why and what was coming, but I had no other option. If I didn’t, others would die.

  I dialled Dunne with a sick feeling in my stomach that for once didn’t come from dying. When he answered, I passed on the information without hesitation. He didn’t ask how I knew, and I didn’t say.

  I lay back, closed my eyes again, and tried to relax, but my heart was thumping. When I started grinding my teeth, I gave up, washed up, and got out.

  The window frames in the living room were as warped as the one in the bathroom, so even though the heating was up to maximum, I put my pyjamas on, covered them with a dressing gown, and then dragged my duvet to the living room, where I sat cross-legged in front of the TV with the duvet over my head with just my nose and eyes peeping out.

  They’d drummed up some talking head on one of the twenty-four hour news channels, a professor from somewhere or other, whose necroambulist knowledge tended to the panic-ridden, which was probably the reason he was on. The interview was interrupted every few minutes by a public information broadcast advising Londoners that the city was in a state of emergency and everyone was required to stay home until further notice. I pressed the mute button, pulled my mobile from the dressing-gown pocket, and pulled up Obe’s number. He would be home and, I hoped, freshly laundered. I ran through scenarios in my head.

  Hey, Obe, just sent your oldest friend to the pit.

  Hey, Obe, got good news and bad news. Didn’t find Ben, but I did find...

  Hey, Obe...

  I put the phone back in my pocket like the coward I was. I stared at the TV for hours, but the headlines didn’t change. I fell asleep with bright yellow letters imprinted on my eyeballs: Lockdown.

  Slimy bodies shuffled through my dreams, bumping and snuffling in the dark.

  17

  I was woken by someone banging on the door. Stanley swore from somewhere upstairs. I shuffled, muffle-headed, to the door, my brain still streaming dreams of the dead.

  The banging didn’t stop until I drew back the lock and opened the door a crack to see Little’s puffy face. He wore the same suit he’d had on earlier, but it had become a little rumpled. ‘Constable Taxi Cab at your service. Don’t you ever answer your phone?’

  My mobile was a weight in my dressing gown pocket. I pulled it out to see it was ten past three. I had eight missed calls, and I remembered I’d put it onto silent.

  If they’d found Malcolm, they didn’t need me. Unless they’d also found Ben, and he was also dead. The wrong kind of dead.

  ‘Have you found them?’

  ‘Just Brannick. The boy’s still missing. Slender can’t make his mind up whether to lift the lockdown, and he’s too damn cheap to stump for a mini cab for you.’

  ‘What do you want me for?’

  The cat shook his head. ‘Zombie wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Malcolm? Why?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him. He won’t say a word to us. And he’s not got long left before he goes bonkers. Dunne wants a confession out of him before he loses it.’

  ‘Give me a minute. Wait here.’

  ‘It better be a quick minute.’

  When I turned, he followed me in uninvited. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Something really pongs in here.’

  ‘That would be my mother. You know, death hag. You’re welcome to wait outside.’

  ‘You still live with your mum? Nice.’ He glanced around at the mess on the floor, ‘Guess neither of you is the tidy type.’

  ‘Wait here. I won’t be long.’

  I headed to my bedroom, dressed quickly in jeans and a black jumper, then checked the contents of my backpack and added spare clothing.

  I went downstairs to find Little standing in the hall looking into my sister’s bedroom. I’d left the door closed. Sigrid lay on her back, her hands reaching down towards an area by her waist and up to her mouth in repetitive movements. There’s nothing quite like having to watch someone desperately eat an imaginary sandwich to make you want to give them a real one. I’d have to feed her before I left.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Brain damage.’ I squeezed past him into the room.

  ‘Liar. Brain damage doesn’t smell like anything, but she’s got a definite whiff of something weird. Dunno what though. Also smells like she’s had an accident.’

  I pulled back the bed clothes and checked. He was right. The problem with adult nappies is that firstly they are really expensive, and secondly, they aren’t as effective as they could be. It had leaked.

  I began to strip the bedding, including the washable underpad, and dumped it in a plastic tub I kept there for the purpose.

  ‘Can’t you get your mum to do it? Or’—he sniffed the air—‘the old guy upstairs? You said you’d be a minute.’

  Explaining why my mother and Stanley couldn’t help would take longer than just doing it. ‘If you’re not going to wait where I asked you to, you can help. There’s a wheelchair in the kitchen. Bring it through will you?’

  Little disappeared out the door, not so much willing to help as not wanting to get involved in the clean-up process.

  He wheeled it in through the door the moment I finished pulling a fresh shirt over Sigrid’s head, and at my request helped me wrangle her into the chair. I’d done it alone a thousand times, but she was heavy, and the extra pair of hands made it that much easier.

  I wheeled her into the kitchen and asked Little to feed her cereal while I sent Lorraine next door a text message asking her to check in on Stan and Sigrid in the morning.

  Finally I locked the door behind me while Little unlocked the car. It had sat cooling while we’d been inside, but the heat was still stifling.

  Little buckled his seat belt. ‘Seriously? That’s your life? Dying and cleaning up someone else’s shit?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said, even though it wasn’t. Maybe a big part, but not all. It was also none of his business.

  ‘And you’re single? No husband or boyfriend?’

  ‘Hah! I have enough people to look after.’

  Little gave me a look I didn’t know how to interpret. ‘I don’t think that’s the way it works. No wonder you’re so ratty.’

  ‘So, how come you joined the police?’

  Little grinned but let the clumsy attempt to change the subject pass. ‘Mostly to annoy my father. As you do. You know.’

  I thought of the decomposing woman in the attic. ‘That I do.’

  ‘It was a decent package. Pension and all. And a car, although I didn’t expect so many rules on when I can use it. You should think about it. You can’t earn much at the Lipscombe. And they’re trying to attract minorities. They like us. We tick boxes.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Dunne had said as much to me, but I wasn’t interested. I didn’t earn much, but I loved my job and I owed the Lipscombe. I wouldn’t have any job at all if it weren’t for them. Even the thought of extra cash for the escape fund wasn’t tempting enough for me to leave them.

  Little had learnt his lesson regarding the blue light, and the wet tarmac flashed azure at intervals as the light revolved. The army trucks had disappeared, but there was still hardly any traffic.

  Little glanced at me. ‘You know where we found him?’

  So Dunne hadn’t passed on the source of his information. I shook my head.

  ‘Putney Vale Cemetery. Right in the crematorium.’

  My heart skipped a beat. ‘What?’ I whispered.

  ‘The crematorium. Poor sap. Looks like he was trying to do the honourable thing. Slender pulled him from the coffin himself.’

  ‘Was he...’

  ‘Still conscious. Not burned though. Must have just gone in.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  Little grinned. ‘I know. I do feel sorry for the bloke in charge of the furnace though. We’ve got him down the station. He keeps making excuses, but he’s got no chance. You’re not allowed to burn people who are still capable of screami
ng, no matter how nicely they ask.’ He glanced over at me. ‘Hey, are you all right? Your heart is racing.’

  It was. It felt like it was going to burst out of a chest suddenly too tight.

  ‘I knew him,’ I muttered. ‘The thought of him burning alive is just a bit much.’

  Someone less self-absorbed than the cat might have picked up on the lie, but Little just made what he probably thought was a sympathetic noise and mercifully fell silent.

  I laid my head against the headrest and took a deep breath. It had never occurred to me Malcolm might try to do the right thing.

  18

  Not long after I started working for the Lipscombe, a client told me a story about a job he did laying new water pipes in St Bartholomew’s Square, just outside the hospital. About four feet down, he encountered something odd—a layer of solid ash about eight inches thick.

  ‘It stunk so bad, I couldn’t keep working, but it didn’t bother none of the humans. You know what it was?’

  I shook my head. He was an ogre and I thought he looked pleased at my ignorance, but I was enough of a newbie that I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Zombie ash. It’s where they used to burn the rotters. Thousands of ‘em. Sometimes all bound up together all snappin’ and bitin’ at each other. Or sometimes just pleadin’ to be let go.’

  I’d looked into it afterwards, not quite sure he wasn’t just ragging the new girl. He wasn’t. For hundreds of years, zombies were burnt there in their thousands: gagged and bound to the stake, sometimes up to thirty or forty together. They were burnt until their bones were ash, every last shred of flesh devoured by the flames.

  And that was just the ones caught by the authorities. Britain has a long tradition of barricading the dead in their homes and setting fire to them—a neat method that avoids actually having to touch the dead, and an efficient one, assuming you stop the fire spreading. And, of course, assuming you are quite sure that the person you are burning is actually dead.

  The Metanatural Rights Act that legally recognised non-humans as people was finally implemented in 1964, and the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act of 1965 abolished the death penalty.

  It was only noticed afterwards that the two combined meant Britain wasn’t allowed to burn zombies anymore.

  There were a few court challenges, mostly funded by the families of the walking dead, but none stood up on appeal. The only thing that would have legally allowed zombie burning again was another Act of Parliament, and since being nice to zombies was never going to be a vote winner, I wasn’t expecting common sense to prevail any time soon.

  So somehow in the enlightened twenty-first century, we had reached the point in zombie management where going back to burning people at the stake seemed like a more civilised option. I’d heard rumours that crematoriums accepted the occasional altruistic zombie as customers, but I’d thought it was just that: rumours. Whether it was or not, it looked like that’s what Malcolm had tried to opt for. And I’d put paid to it.

  Whether a murderer or not, naughty or nice, any zombie nabbed by the NRT ends up in the same place: the Necroambulist Detention Centre, known to just about everyone else as the ZDC.

  The living dead used to be housed in the depths of the Tower, but London’s population is sky rocketing. Maybe one person zombified every six months at the turn of the twentieth century. Now it’s at least one a week. Most die in hospitals or hospices who have their own procedures for dealing with the newly dead—not that many people die at home anymore—so the NRTs, and me by association, don’t get involved, but there isn’t enough space to keep them in the Tower anymore. And that’s without it being a huge turnoff to tourists.

  Battersea Power Station was converted in the early nineties. I didn’t see it then, but I’d seen photographs. The pit, or Group Area as it was then known, was a nice idea powered by good intentions. It consisted of a huge open-plan space with a sleeping area—bunk beds cordoned off by lacquered Japanese privacy dividers—an entertainment area complete with comfy sofas with quilted throws, armchairs, some games consoles, a few big TVs, and a library so they wouldn’t get bored. A further dining area with dining-hall-style tables and stools was placed at the far end of the hall. Raw meat was lowered twice a day via a pulley system—all very humanitarian and not very well thought out.

  For one thing, zombies rot, so all the lovely quilts, armchairs, and bunk beds got icky very, very quickly. Also, the shambling corpses had little interest in playing Mario Cart. At dinner time they descended on the dining area and ripped and licked until there was nothing left, then they wandered off in search of other food. All other objects—the TVs, the sofas, the beds—were torn apart in case some tasty morsel was hiding inside.

  The last time I’d looked into the pit, there’d been a single small light left overhead so that all you could see was a hint of shambling bodies in the dark.

  There’d been some plan to install fluorescent lights high above the pit, dangling the electricians too high for the zombies to get them. Nothing came of it. The danger pay didn’t make it past the accountants and no one really wanted to look in there anyway. The pit featured in a lot of my nightmares.

  At first thought, it might have seemed insane to keep so many dangerous creatures within one of the most populous cities in the world. If they managed to get loose, London would be another Auckland in a matter of days, but it made sense if you thought about it. If there ever were a great outbreak, any government would want their zombie-stashing staff to be able to grab and dump as quickly as possible without worrying about them spending hours driving back and forth between an out-of-the-way dump site and outbreak central.

  Little turned the car into the parking lot and drove as close as he could, then stopped the car but left the engine running. Bollards and reinforced steel walls hid the reception from the road. He indicated the building with his head.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

  ‘Oh, no. Not going in there again unless I have to. I’m just the driver. It’s straight home for me. Shower and a crap, then straight to bed.’

  ‘God, TMI. You could have just said no.’

  Again, I couldn’t help but wonder if Little got on with his neighbours. The cat smirked as he drove off.

  Reception consisted of a single square room with two rows of cheap metal chairs set into the concrete floor. It had no visible reception window, just a big buzzer next to a sign that read ‘By appointment only. No Exceptions.’

  I pressed the buzzer. An automated voice told me to state my full name, address, date of birth, and National Insurance Number. I complied and dutifully turned my face to one of the caged security cameras.

  A minute later my name was announced over the intercom. I paced over to the single steel door and waited, again, while the camera verified I was the same person who’d requested entry. After a minute, the door slid upwards, and I scooted in. It slammed shut almost immediately after.

  The stink of the still-moving dead hit me immediately. The stench of a thousand decomposing corpses will challenge even the most sophisticated air conditioning and filtering system. I suppressed the urge to turn around and bang on the door and scream until they let me out.

  19

  All dead men look pathetic, but Malcolm took the cake. His lips, which usually had a rubbery look to them, appeared dry and cracked, and I was glad the glass barrier prevented me from smelling him.

  The cell was about seven feet by five. A single bed was bolted to one wall. When the time came and Malcolm lost the last vestiges of willpower and the ability to talk, the steel floor would begin to sink down into the depths of the pit. The stink and the moan from under the floor was unmistakable.

  A toilet and wash basin, another well-meaning but pointless touch, sat next to the head of the bed. If Malcolm had been so inclined, he could have touched the toilet seat with his nose without raising his head from his pillow. His skin was mottled, and he wore the same blue striped boxers he’d had on when he’d jumped. Clo
ser than I’d been at the house, I looked for signs of what had killed him, but there was nothing to be seen under the thick hair. He looked like a sick bear in pyjama bottoms.

  A handwritten index card stuck to the glass gave his name, date of birth, an estimated date of death as 26 December, and the cause of death: ‘Natural causes assumed. Visual inspection only. Autopsy refused.’

  I didn’t know how bad his eyesight had become. ‘Hi, Malcolm, it’s Viv. You wanted to see me?’

  At the sound he shot up and lurched towards the glass. Then, just as suddenly, he remembered himself and forced himself to sit down again.

  I took a step back despite myself. ‘Are you okay?’

  Despite possible rigor mortis, he managed to give me the sort of look the question deserved. ‘Jillie?’ The word was thick and slurred as if he were drunk and came out in a low rasp I had to strain to hear.

  ‘She’s still in quarantine.’

  ‘Finn?’

  ‘Same.’

  His cloudy eyes stared directly into mine. The eyes really are the window to the soul, and the bit of me that recognised the dead could see his was still in there and was scared. I looked away.

  Malcolm had told Dunne he wanted to speak to me alone, and the policeman was at least keeping to the letter of it. I had no doubt he was on the other side of the steel door listening to every word. If he could make out Malcolm’s rasp.

  ‘Malcolm, now’s the time to tell me what happened. Tell me where Ben is. I’ll make sure he’s looked after.’

  The dead man raised his eyebrows. The rest of his face didn’t follow. ‘He killed me.’ Even through the rasp, his tone was incredulous.

  ‘What?’ Whatever I had expected Malcolm to tell me, that wasn’t it.

  He echoed me. ‘What?’

  My eyes slid to the index card that said Malcolm had died of natural causes, even if I knew how little it meant. On an autopsy refusal, it simply meant there were no visible bite marks and no other obvious signs of death.

  The longer you’re dead, the more confused you get, but Malcolm seemed particularly slow. Of course he was never the brightest spark to begin with.

  ‘You said he killed you. Who killed you? Ben?’

  He stuck out the tip of a white, furry tongue and attempted to lick his lips, but death had halted saliva production along with everything else, and it made a scritch-scratch sound.

  He muttered something, but I couldn’t quite make it out. Not Ben. Ben’s brother, or Ben’s mother, or maybe even ‘other’. Surely not Ben’s lover? The more I turned it over in my mind, the less sure I was. Malcolm’s head drooped. He put his hands around his ears. For a moment he was still enough that he looked like he really was dead.

  ‘Malcolm, I can’t hear you. You need to tell me again.’

  The air is kept close to freezing in the ZDC for obvious reasons. I shivered, and Malcolm quivered with me but for entirely different reasons. He stayed where he was. I was impressed with his self-control. Then he seemed to shake himself out of it. He looked a little confused. He squinted at me. ‘Jillian?’

  I thought he’d have more time before his mind started fizzing. And when it went, it would go fast.

  ‘Malcolm, what happened? What did you want to tell me?’

  The sound seemed to rouse him. He raised his head and stared at me. And in his eyes, there was nothing left of him but the hunger. His body made a wet sound as it hit the glass, over and over again.

  20

  Considering how much they like to discourage visitors, it may seem a little odd the ZDC has a public canteen. However, due to a Health and Safety rule that never made much sense to me, you’re not allowed to bring food in, and starving your visitors isn’t polite. It’s not the most exciting place: folding tables, stale sandwiches, and coffee that clears your sinuses. Not much more than provision of the bare basics so the non-permanent inmates of the building are fed and watered.

  I sat at a table in the corner and ran a finger over the surface, leaving a greasy smear. A plastic cup of coffee from the machine heated my fingers. I’d run my eyes down the specials board but nothing appealed. The stench of the dead clung to everything in the building, and I didn’t want to eat anything that had spent any time in the place. The coffee didn’t count because nothing could survive in something so vile. I took a gulp and swallowed immediately so it came into minimum contact with my tongue.

  Dunne wasn’t as fussy. He returned to the table with a cup of tea and an egg sandwich.

  ‘Really? You can eat?’

  He stripped the plastic wrapping off the sandwich. The stench of the dead took on an eggy overtone. ‘Haven’t had a chance yet. Haven’t slept either. But I’m used to that.’

  Dunne and Mrs Dunne, whose first name I’d long forgotten and could no longer ask without sounding foolish, had four children under five. And according to Dunne, none of them slept. I made a sympathetic noise and pushed the plastic cup away. I wasn’t that desperate for caffeine.

  Dunne leaned across the table. ‘So? What did Brannick say?’

  ‘He said, “He killed me.”‘

  ‘What? Who? Did he say?’

  I shook my head slightly. ‘He muttered something I couldn’t make out, then he just lost it.’ I wasn’t quite prepared to pass on the fact I’d been asking about Ben at the time. It made no sense. Somehow Malcolm’s addled brain had got it wrong, and Ben was in enough trouble.

  Dunne sat back with a curse. ‘That just complicates things. He’s refused autopsy, but we were assuming natural causes.’

  ‘Have you tracked the source of infection yet?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. He spent most of the holidays at home, and no sign of bite marks. He was probably a carrier, but where he picked that up...’ Dunne stirred his tea with a plastic stick which he then licked and laid on top of the lid. ‘No sign of the boy either. You sure he was alive?’

  I nodded.

  He made a harrumphing sound. ‘Stupid kid. He risked the lives of every single person in the United Kingdom, if not the world. And for what? He’ll be looking at a custodial sentence for that little stunt. At least. The Crown Prosecutor’s already getting pressure from above to make an example of him.’

  ‘He’s just a boy. He made a mistake.’

  Dunne swallowed his tea the wrong way and began coughing. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I don’t throw away the key. I just bag ‘em and have to figure out the mess they’ve made. Thinking of which, remind me what Malcolm did at the Trust?’

  ‘He was press officer.’

  ‘Did he do talks with schools?’

  ‘He used to. Donna took those over a few years ago.’

  Dunne rubbed at his bald head as if trying to soothe his brain. ‘What about kids’ classes? You lot do those, right?’

  ‘We rent out the clinic room to other organisations when we’re not using it. The St Anguiculus Children’s Home uses it on Thursdays to hold dance classes for shifter street kids—the ones too stubborn or too old to stay at the Home. It’s a way to get them in and make contact and make sure they’re okay without scaring them off.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘We’ve got an art therapy class for children we run in conjunction with Social Services. It’s mostly those who’ve been through some sort of trauma, and the children work through their issues with painting and drawing. It’s been quite successful. But Malcolm doesn’t really get involved in any of them.’

  ‘What do you mean by “doesn’t really?”‘

  ‘The actual classes are run by teachers and therapists from outside the Trust. Habi arranges them and does all the paperwork. We take turns filling in for her when she’s off.’

  ‘When’s the last time Malcolm filled in for her?’

  I thought about it. ‘I’m not sure. You’d be better off asking Obe. He authorises all the holidays. Where’s this going?’

  Dunne pulled open the flap of his shoulder bag and pulled out a slim folder. He pushed it across the tabl
e to me. I opened to the first page.

  It was a photo of a girl printed on ordinary paper, so the image was slightly dulled. She had a round face and deep brown eyes. The shadow of a moustache covered her top lip. Above her eyebrows, I saw a thin but distinct ridge indicating a partial troll heritage. I recognised her.

  ‘This is her. The dead girl I saw in Malcolm’s house.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ The ridge hadn’t been there, but that wasn’t surprising. The dead don’t just shape their death world, they shape themselves.

  ‘Her name’s Berenice Nazarak.’

  That was it. The memory of her spelling it out returned.

  ‘She was one of your art therapy students.’

  I stared at the picture again. The girl’s eyes were accusatory. The date of birth stamped on the picture told me she was only fifteen. ‘Oh,’ I said.

  Dunne picked up the plastic stirring stick and tapped it against the side of his cup. ‘So he could have made contact with her there?’

  ‘I suppose so, but we take child protection very seriously. A lot of the children who come in have been...’ I paused to consider my words. ‘The term is “known to Social Services.” They’re vulnerable, high risk of abuse. Fran—that’s the art therapist—is pretty clued up. I can’t see that she would have let anyone—even someone in the Trust—get close to a child there without her knowing about it. Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘I’ve got an appointment this afternoon. How do the children get to the classes?’

  ‘They’re dropped off by their parents or foster carers. They have the class in the clinic rooms. Fran waits in the classroom and makes sure they’re collected at the end, and by the right people. She keeps a roster. Like I said, these are high-risk kids.’

  ‘Do you know if Malcolm ever joined the class? Or helped out?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. But you’d be better off asking Fran. He was in charge of a few classes years ago, but he doesn’t do them now.’

  Dunne looked uncomfortable. ‘Yes, I know. We put Brannick’s name into the system, and it flagged up an old complaint. Inappropriate behaviour at one of your classes. There were never any charges filed so I don’t have full information, but it looks as if one of the parents complained.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said quietly.

  ‘I’m also told he had a thing for unclean women.’ Dunne used his fingers to put little quote marks in the air around ‘unclean’. ‘I think the phrase used was “anything with spots or stripes”’

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I’d always believed Malcolm would stick it in a knothole if he thought no one was watching, but I’d never been interested enough to notice a pattern. I ran through a mental list of human women we saw in the office and realised I’d never seen him hit on any of them. Spots and stripes indeed. But Berenice had been fifteen. That was a whole other world of disturbing. It was also something new.

  ‘Women, not girls,’ I said. ‘He hit on anything that moved, but I never saw him try it with anyone underage.’ But even as I said it, all Malcolm’s distasteful jokes began to run through my head. Maybe they hadn’t all been jokes. I shuddered.

  Dunne gave me a sharp look. ‘I know how the Lipscombe works. Your clients don’t always trust the police, and I understand that. But you understand how this looks? Discreet clients, high risk children, fear of authority. It’s making all my internal copper alarms go off.’

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. The queasiness in my stomach wasn’t just from the smell of the dead. You always hear of people saying afterwards I thought there was something a little off about him. Was that going to be me? My mouth went dry. I tried to ignore the rising sense of dread.

  Dunne gave me a sympathetic look and swilled back the last of his tea. ‘I want you to speak to the dead girl again. See if you can find out what happened to her.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘On the house? I don’t know if I’ll be able to get Haddad to give me another sign-off.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dunne nodded. ‘Good.’ He gathered the photos and paper and dropped them into the file, then stood up.

  ‘One favour?’

  He raised his owl eyebrows.

  ‘Can I see Jillie? I want to check she’s okay.’

  Dunne hesitated, considering, then gave in. ‘Fine. But you tell me if she tells you anything.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I watched him leave. I did want to check if Jillie was okay, but she also might know where Ben had gone. Lying to the police was never a good idea, but Malcolm was already locked away. All that remained was to find Ben and get him out of the trouble he was in.

  21

  I found Jillie in a cell not much bigger than the one that held her dead husband, with Finn in the one next to her. The child was asleep, half on, half off the bed, arms straight at his side and feet on the floor.

  She sat on the bed and watched the boy sleep. She hadn’t been given any new clothes. Goose pimples covered her white skin, and she wore little more than the red hair that frizzed out around her head. Her fingers twirled and tugged at the ends of her hair. Red marks from the medical clamps were still visible on her wrists and upper arms. All my carefully planned questions went out the window at the sight of her. She looked broken.

  ‘You’re entitled to compensation, you know,’ I said helplessly. ‘They’ll pay for the damage to the house.’

  Her head snapped up at the sound of my voice.

  ‘I’m sorry about Malcolm,’ I said.

  Jillie’s fingers rubbed at the marks on her arms. She shook her head slowly. ‘They make mistakes on this sort of thing all the time.’

  I thought of the dead man attacking the glass, of his dull eyes and the feeling of wrongness that radiated from him. ‘Jillie, I’m sorry, but he is.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Supposedly you can tell, can’t you? I saw you at the house.’ She fell silent. Her red eyes considered me. She gave a short snuffling little laugh without any humour to it. ‘You know, Mal was really pleased when the Lipscombe hired you. Quite the coup.’

  I remembered that. He’d been too friendly in the interview, enough to make me a little uncomfortable.

  The little boy on the cot shifted and burbled in his sleep. Jillie’s eyes snapped to him. The boy sighed once, then settled. She drew in a deep breath.

  ‘He hasn’t woken up,’ she said. ‘Not once. And they won’t tell me what they gave him.’

  ‘It’s a tranquiliser. They’ll give him a fresh dose every six hours. He’ll be okay. It’s better than him being stuck in there unable to get to you.’

  ‘I suppose. What do you want anyway? I’m not going to tell you where Malcolm is. Even if I did know.’

  I shut my eyes. Dunne must have known Jillie hadn’t been told. Son of a bitch left it to me. I opened my eyes to see her watching me with an odd expression. ‘They’ve already got him.’

  She went very still. I knew her expression. I’d seen it on a hundred spouses in cells like this. She was racking her brain, desperately searching for the reason I would lie to her. She swallowed hard. Her hands gripped the metal supports of the bed.

  ‘I just saw him. They picked him up in Putney Vale,’ I said. ‘He asked after you.’

  ‘Of course he did.’ She started to cry. ‘They shouldn’t have taken him. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been able to help it,’ I said gently.

  She sobbed louder, shaking her head. I wanted to reach out and comfort her, but the glass barrier held me back. I waited helplessly while she got herself under control.

  ‘Jillie, do you have any idea where Ben might have gone?’

  She looked up. A line of snot ran down under her nose. She reached for the grey toilet paper tucked alongside the bowl, and tore off a piece. She blew her nose noisily. ‘They didn’t pick him up with Mal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She looked for somewhere to deposi
t the tissue. There was no bin, so she balled it up and threw it in the open toilet bowl. ‘Have you tried Neil or Adam?’

  ‘Adam’s out looking for him. I haven’t spoken to Neil yet. I’m thinking he may have gone to a friend?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘There must have been someone.’

  Jillie shook her head slowly again. ‘Ben had no friends. I’ve never seen a child so stuck in his own head. Mal was always trying to get him to come out of his shell.’

  Exactly what Adam had said. Perhaps we should have been thinking about abandoned places or homes where the owners were away. He could have broken in somewhere, but before I could ask, Jillie said, ‘Mal took him to some youth club a few times, but Ben never mentioned meeting anyone.’

  ‘Which one?’

  She shrugged. It gave her an air of nonchalance, but I could see her hands. They were shaking. ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t far. Mal took him in the car, but he was only gone ten minutes.’

  ‘Did Ben ever go out on his own?’

  ‘Sure, all the time. But he never went with anyone. He likes the museums, especially the Natural History Museum.’ She began to cry again. ‘Oh God, I hope he’s okay. He’s a sweet boy.’

  ‘Did you tell the police this?’

  She tore off another strip of toilet paper and blew her nose again. ‘They didn’t ask about that. They were more interested in Malcolm. “Where’s he been? Has he been alone at any time?” For God’s sake, it’s Christmas. He’s been with his family.’

  ‘So you didn’t leave him alone?’

  ‘Not really. I mean I went to the corner shop to get milk yesterday. And I took Finn out to the park for a couple of hours. He bounces off the walls if I don’t. Otherwise, I was home. And they kept on and on about the contents of my freezer, for God’s sake. As if that has any bearing on anything!’

  ‘Why? What was in your freezer?’

  ‘Nothing! I had some rabbit meat that wasn’t labelled. It was just wrapped in plastic, but they should have been able to identify that quick enough if they had a sniffer.’

  ‘Rabbit meat?’

  ‘Yes! Ben brought it down with him. He does a lot of hunting back home. Always brings something. Last year, it was this huge box of fish.’

  I changed tack. ‘Did Malcolm or Ben ever mention a half troll named Berenice Nazarak?’

  She looked blank. ‘No, never heard of her. Why?’

  ‘Just wondering. I heard DS Dunne mention it.’ It wasn’t quite a lie.

  Little Finn shifted again. Jillie’s attention swung back to him in a heartbeat. There was a wet patch on the bed where he’d been drooling. ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t know where Ben is. Or what’s supposed to be in my freezer. I just want my husband back. And my son.’

  She lay back on her cot and reached out for Finn. He was out of reach, but she laid her hands against the cool glass anyway and closed her eyes.

  ‘Jillie, I...’

  Her eyes snapped open. ‘I don’t want to talk about this anymore.’

  And in case I didn’t get the hint, she shifted. Her body blurred and elongated, and in place of a chubby, red-headed woman, a large brown snake lay on the bed. It lifted its head, and its tongue flicked the glass, eyes on the sleeping child. Then it closed its eyes and appeared to go to sleep.

  I watched her thoughtfully. Something else had just occurred to me. Why would a zombie with a freezer full of human flesh risk eating his neighbour’s cat?

  22

  I collected my backpack and mobile on the way out and endured the requisite medical exam with my eyes closed, grateful I wasn’t wearing my laundry day underwear.

  Outside, I breathed in the scent of the rain and the river, even the exhaust from the traffic. The rising sun gave the clouds a heavenly yellow glow, but the rain had started again, a fine drizzle that landed softly on my face, rinsing the scent of the dead away.

  The skin tingled on the back of my neck along with a sense of being watched. I turned around slowly. There were a dozen or so cars in the parking lot, but all appeared empty. A small river boat made its way up the Thames, and a train rattled somewhere in the distance, indicating Slender had finally made his mind up about the lockdown or had succumbed to pressure to downgrade the alert. Other than the train and boat, there was nothing moving, and nothing living, in sight. I shivered and tugged my woolly hat down over my ears.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, catching a signal after the ZDC restrictive zone: four missed calls from Obe, two voicemails, and two texts—one from Adam asking if I’d heard anything and another that told me Ben’s mother would be arriving in two hours. She’d been on the overnight train from Edinburgh when the lockdown was declared and had got stuck in Milton Keynes. I went online and found confirmation that the lockdown had been lifted, although the city was still on yellow alert—everyone was advised to stay home but it was no longer compulsory. Then I sent Adam an update via text message.

  He called me back almost immediately. I glanced at the screen and slid the little button on the screen to answer.

  ‘Did you see my uncle?’ he asked.

  I closed my eyes. ‘Yes. His mind’s gone. I’m sorry.’

  There was a deep intake of breath on the other side. ‘I suppose it was only to be expected.’

  I expressed my sympathies again, then told him what Jillie had told me, leaving out Malcolm’s odd claim. He killed me.

  ‘All right. I’ll start looking into youth clubs.’

  ‘I can do it,’ I said. There was silence from the other end of the phone.

  ‘It’s okay. Ben’s family. You have been really helpful but—’

  ‘I’m happy to help.’

  ‘Alright.’ He didn’t sound happy about it. But all I could think of was Malcolm’s mangled words and the one that might have been brother. Something was rotten in the family of Brannick, and I wasn’t going to be happy until I found Ben and knew he was safe.

  It was only when I hung up that I realised I hadn’t told him how Jillie or his other cousin were coping, and he hadn’t asked.

  I turned the phone over in my fingers, knowing I should return Obe’s calls, but then, cowardly yet again, I just sent him a quick text message—On my way to office now. Talk then—and put it back in my pocket.

  I managed to get on a Southern Rail train just as the doors were about to close. With the exception of a young man snoring softly in a table seat, the carriage was empty. I moved a pile of free newspapers from a seat, and sat, grateful for the sudden warmth. Ben had been wearing nothing but jeans and a thin shirt. The trains had stopped during the shutdown. No open shops, no running trains, no libraries. Nothing. There were no public places Ben could have gone to keep warm.

  Ben brought it down with him. Jillie thought the unlabelled meat was rabbit. It wasn’t. Was that why Malcolm had gone for the cat? Because he didn’t know Ben had killed for him? Ben clearly knew Malcolm was dead. It was the only reason he would have stayed in London, the only reason he would have been at the house, ready to rescue his father from the NRTs. He wasn’t a stupid kid. He would have known Malcolm wouldn’t have been able to keep control without human meat.

  The first time I met Ben he was five and sitting in Malcolm’s chair at the Lipscombe. I had said hello to him and he’d tucked his head to the side, as if too scared to even talk to me. The next year I got a smile and the next actual words, but even then all I ever heard was a returned hello and then pleases and thank yous when I offered drinks or biscuits. He never did anything other than sit quietly, drawing when he was younger and then graduating to reading as he grew older.

  Habi brought her nephew in sometimes and the kid ran around like a maniac, jumping on the furniture and using words I hadn’t heard before and was sorry I looked up after.

  That one I could imagine growing up to be a murderer. Ben, not so much. He was a nice, polite boy. I swore softly under my breath. The more I found out about this, the less I knew what was going
on.

  The train rattled over the rails, past streets where the post-Christmas shoppers weren’t paying much attention to the yellow alert, although the pedestrians seemed to be looking up a lot more than usual. Londoners will stay home if they face imprisonment and have a legitimate excuse to take the day off work, but a single maybe-zombie in a city of millions— meh. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle we’re not all dead and shuffling already.

  I exited at East Croydon and made my way to the office. The usual crowd of protesters were hanging about outside the building entrance. I ignored them and ducked into the greasy spoon next door, where I picked up two enormous cups of coffee. I’d been up since three—my eyeballs felt like they were beginning to dry out, and I hoped the coffee would relubricate them. On the downside, it likely meant I’d be popping to the loo for a wee every five minutes for the rest of the day. I considered a hot breakfast too, but the stink of the ZDC was still soaked into my nostrils and the eggy smell made my stomach contract.

  The protesters perked up a bit when they saw me and shook their posters. I pushed past them and used my pass to get through the barriers to the lifts.

  A handwritten sign was stuck to the reception door with sticky tape: Closed Due to Unforeseen Circumstances.

  Habi stood in the middle of the reception area, vacuuming the floor, a pile of stacked papers and a plastic tub of pens and paper clips on the desk beside her. She wore a black suit I hadn’t known she owned. She looked up as I entered.

  ‘Oh, Vivvie. Poor Malcolm, poor, poor Malcolm.’

  The hug was too tight, and she held on a few seconds longer when I tried to disentangle myself.

  ‘Have you seen him? Obe said you were at the ZDC.’

  I nodded and gave her a smile I didn’t feel. ‘He’s gone.’ Nothing left but snarl.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Habi picked up a mug of tea from her desk, peppermint to go by the sweet scent. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea. Chamomile. That’s calming.’

  ‘No, thanks.’ I loved the smell of flavoured teas, but they tasted like heated fruit squash. I held up the coffee in my hand. ‘I’m sorted. Is Obe in his office?’

  She nodded, and I made my way down the corridor. I tapped at his door, opening it without waiting for a response, my stomach in a knot.

  The blinds were down and the lights off, so that the white light of his computer screen made the few patches of pasty skin not covered by beard even paler. Obe’s exposure to the sun could be measured by how close he managed to park to the front door. I moved a small forest of old mugs aside to find space for his coffee.

  I breathed in. ‘I saw Malcolm. His mind’s gone. I’m so sorry.’

  Obe shrugged. ‘We knew that was going to happen. Look at this.’

  The knot in my stomach relaxed. I recognised this stage: research mode. The emotional explosion was coming later, but now Obe was firmly stuck in his own head. He turned the screen towards me. It showed a mock-up photo of Ben, his wings bleached white, a halo on his head.

  I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. I’d seen weirder stuff.

  ‘Oh, this isn’t just some random meme. This lot are serious. They think Ben’s one of the first signs of the apocalypse. A harbinger of some sort. Apparently his death will prevent the end of the world.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Apparently so,’ Obe said. ‘But they’re in Canada, so Ben probably doesn’t have to worry about them.’

  ‘Any local weirdos?’

  ‘You mean other than the Human Preservation Front? Because they’re loving this.’ Obe switched tabs to show a mock-up picture of a pair of mechanical wings. ‘Just this one. Weird, but I don’t know if it means anything.’

  The legend at the top of the website read ‘Universe Mechanica.’ I knew it. It was run by Per Ogunwale, a once promising surgeon who had been struck off the medical register for amputating his own legs. He now ran one of the bigger sites devoted to improving (their word, not mine) the human race. The locals spent a lot of time arguing about how to build better fingers or brains. It was all a bit Igor-ish as far as I was concerned. I thought my brain was just fine the way it was. On the other hand, some people I knew could have done with an improvement. Maybe once all their theories had been thoroughly tested and proved safe, I’d agree to an upgrade.

  I peered at the schematic. ‘They look heavy.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re struggling to find a way to get the strength and dexterity without the weight. The thing is some idiot has said Ben should give up his wings for research purposes. ‘Harvested’ is the word used.’

  ‘What? Why? The winged have been around for ages. Not a lot of them, but they should have more than enough information.’

  ‘Not really. The only real-life example for study was in the Natural History Museum, and they had to bury her after that court case last year. And you know what the winged are like. They keep to themselves. They’re not going to let some cybergeeks manhandle them for some daft theory.’

  ‘Huh. Do they sound serious about the harvesting thing?’

  Obe chewed on his lip. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. They’d have to find Ben first. I’ll contact the site admin, see if they think there’s anything to it.’

  ‘I’ll mention both groups to Dunne,’ I said, ‘but they’re probably just the usual internet crazies.’

  ‘Probably.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

  I pulled the chair out from opposite his desk and sat down. I measured my words. ‘Obe, did Malcolm ever have any allegations made against him? Dunne said—’

  ‘There was nothing to it.’

  ‘So there was something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Obe, you can’t keep that sort of thing quiet. If Malcolm—’

  ‘He didn’t do anything. He made some rude jokes. You know what he was like. They weren’t suitable for the age group. He didn’t touch anyone or suggest anything. He was just being stupid.’

  Now that I could believe.

  23

  Zombies run to family when they’re in trouble. Malcolm said something about ‘brother.’ Maybe Adam was right. Maybe Malcolm wouldn’t go near his brother, but family means more than people think. I had at least two hours before I was due to see Ben’s mother. It couldn’t hurt to look up Neil Brannick.

  If he was in thaumaturgical decontamination, the Lipscombe might have had dealings with him. I sat at my computer and switched to the ancient DOS-based programme that was the Lipscombe’s internal system and searched for Brannick.

  After my PC took a few minutes to think about it, it spat out two Brannicks: Malcolm and Neil. I put an X next to Neil’s name, waited, and was finally rewarded with contact details.

  He had a mobile number attached to his profile. I dialled the number, but it went straight to voicemail. I left a brief message and asked him to call me.

  The short profile indicated he worked for Elior Services. I googled them and called the number on their website. The receptionist on the other end huffed at me the moment she heard Neil’s name, and I got the distinct impression I hadn’t been the first one to call. I explained to her who I was and that I wasn’t media, and after a significant amount of buttering up, she finally offered to pass on a message but couldn’t guarantee when he’d get it. The magical interference on-site made it difficult to get through.

  ‘He’s at work now?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. I said I’ll pass on the message.’

  His brother had just died, and he hadn’t taken the day off work. Maybe he was the type of person who needed to keep busy to keep his mind off things. It fit with what I knew about their relationship. Malcolm had never had a good word to say about his brother, although now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the specifics. It was all ‘my bloody brother,’ ‘that asshole,’ or similar. I didn’t think Malcolm had ever told me what the man had done to deserve the epithets.

  I reached over and dialled Dunne’s number. I’d helped him out enough times. He could r
eturn the favour. A few minutes later I had the address of a magic spillage site in north London.

  I took the overland then the Northern Line, which was not only miraculously working, but I actually managed to get a seat and avoid any delays. Outside Hendon station, I followed the directions on my mobile GPS.

  Sometime while I’d been underground, the sky had changed from grey to the dirty yellow that means snow, but none was in sight yet, though it was still bitterly cold.

  I smelt the site before I saw it. The burnt-sugar stench of magic got stronger and stronger until, after about a ten-minute walk, I found myself outside a long row of white construction boards stuck with posters advising ‘Warning! Thaumaturgical Damage. Entrance to authorised personnel only.’

  Judging by the buildings on either side, the ones hidden within the hoarding were probably Edwardian terraces. Three of them, if the dips in the pavement indicated driveways.

  I strolled along until I found the door at the end of the boards and hammered on it until someone poked his head out.

  The head belonged to a bearded man in his early twenties: too young to be Neil Brannick. He leered at me, but there wasn’t much heart in it, just the requisite leer certain men give all women under sixty. ‘This is a restricted site, love.’

  I showed him my Lipscombe ID, introduced myself, and asked to speak to Neil. He disappeared behind the door for a moment, and I heard him shout, ‘Boss! Some bird is here for you. Not a reporter this time.’

  Neil Brannick turned out to be a greyer, wrinklier version of Malcolm, but where Malcolm was merely tall, Neil was a giant with the stooped shoulders and poor posture of someone who habitually ducked under doorways. ‘Yes?’

  His hard hat and coveralls swarmed with moving protective runes and sigils. His right hand held a cigarette, the other was withered into a claw, the fingers melted into too-smooth skin.

  I held out my hand. ‘Vivia Brisk. I’ve left a few messages for you.’

  Neil looked at my hand and ignored it. ‘I’ve already spoken to the police. I don’t know anything about what happened to Malcolm,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  He tried to push the door closed, but I was prepared and took a step forward and pushed it open with my hand. ‘Only a few minutes, Mr Brannick.’

  I could see him thinking. ‘Fine, but you’ll have to follow me around. I’m on a schedule.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, taking a step forward.

  It wasn’t the answer he was expecting. Most people would rather cut off a hand than voluntarily go into a thaumaturgically damaged site: at least then you’d know what damage was going to be done. Raw magic could do anything.

  Of course, if you were lucky, your hand might grow back.

  Neil sighed. ‘This is a damaged site, darling. It’s not safe for girls. You might not come out the same shape you went in.’

  ‘That’s okay, darling. I’ll take my chances.’ His face darkened. ‘I mean, I should be fine,’ I said, reminding myself I’d come here because I wanted information from him. Pissed-off people don’t tend to be helpful. ‘I always carry protective gear with me. Risks of the job and all that.’

  I pulled a battered robe from my backpack and draped it around my shoulders, its runes rippling as they detected stray magic in the air. The colours were faded after years of washing, and the end was frayed so it looked a little like I was wearing a raggedy old dressing gown—the type that you know you really should throw out but never will because it’s much too comfy. Despite its threadbare appearance, Neil was enough of a professional to be impressed. Impressed with the robe that is, not me.

  ‘And how much did that set the taxpayer back?’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to them,’ I said, not a little snarkily. ‘It was a gift.’

  It was, and if I ever got desperate, it’d sell on eBay for a fortune. I was tempted sometimes, but I’d rather be poor and human-shaped than a rich puddle.

  ‘Follow me.’ He splashed into the water.

  I did and sank into dank water up to my ankles. Too late, I looked down to see Neil was wearing a pair of knee-high rubber boots. He waded through the deep water, now almost to his waist. I thought I heard him snigger.

  Until today I would have bet that out of Malcolm’s family, Malcolm would have been the one I liked least. Turned out I would have been wrong.

  The ruins of the terraces were still there, and the shapes of the half walls gave me a rough idea of where they had been. Dark moss grew in the cracks between the bricks, in some places hiding them all together. A single double-story wall, hung with flowered creepers, remained in the middle of where I guessed the terraces had been. As I watched, the creepers grew, flowered, died, and grew back again like a nature documentary on fast forward.

  I sloshed through the water until I was standing beside Neil. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘Not sure,’ he said, pulling a cigarette from the top pocket in his overalls. ‘The neighbour on that side’—he indicated to the left with a nod of his head—’says his daughter was having a spat with the girl living in the middle. Prob’ly a curse got out of control.’

  ‘Any survivors?’

  Neil shrugged and mumbled a little as he lit the cigarette with a match. ‘We caught some cat-bear thing. The thauromancer’s having a go at it. See if it’ll shift back. The family on the right had a poodle, so it could be that.’

  Sweat trickled down my forehead, I wiped at it with one hand. I wanted to take off my heavy coat, but no way would I risk shifting any part of my protective gown.

  Neil strode further into the swamp and began giving instructions to a small group of fluorescent-jacketed workers who were trying to shift a lodestone into the middle of the zone. A small digger-loader stood a few feet behind them, mired in the mud.

  I raced after him, or would have if my feet hadn’t squelched with each step.

  ‘Mr Brannick, I need to speak to you about Ben.’

  ‘What about him?’ Neil turned his back against the lodestone and heaved. It didn’t budge.

  ‘Do you know where he might have gone?’

  ‘No.’ He stalked off through the water. I followed.

  ‘Are you sure? Anything you can think of might help. We’re very concerned about him.’

  ‘Uh-uh. You said you were Lipscombe?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So what’s wrong with you then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Neil snorted. ‘No one clean works for the Lipscombe.’ He stopped at a metal container painted with runes and pulled open the top, then gestured to the workers, who grabbed tools and sloshed back to tackle the lodestone again.

  ‘Your brother did. He was fully human as far as I know.’

  ‘Not for lack of wanting. Now he’s got something extra. Congratulations to him.’

  Having your body decompose around your still-thinking brain while you tried not to eat your family wasn’t cause for celebration in my book. I tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘But Ben—’

  ‘Ben’ll be fine. He might get himself into trouble but nothing he can’t get out of. The boy’s not right in the head. You mark my words, the kid’s feral and violent. He saved Malcolm from the pit, sure, but he wouldn’t let Malcolm bite him. I know what you’re thinking. “The boy’s fourteen. He’s so skinny, so little.” He’s not skinny, he’s wiry. There’s nothing but muscle there. And he’s tough as old socks. Annie lets him run wild up on that island. The boy hunts and kills and eats what he catches raw. He’s not some soft little city boy. You know how I know this? He killed Adam’s dog a few years ago. Ben was five and he skewered it with a garden fork. Had no idea what all the fuss was about.’

  The image didn’t fit with the one I had, but I couldn’t help thinking of the rabbit meat that was not.

  Something slithered over my shoe under the water. I tried not to imagine what it might be. Probably one of the previous inhabitants of the houses. Or the poodle. I thought
of the skinny back I’d seen behind the huge wings, and the quiet, withdrawn boy. I shoved Jillie’s words to the back of my head. Rabbit meat. She was wrong. Neil was wrong. I didn’t think Ben was dangerous, and I said so.

  Neil snorted again. ‘Well, you’re not going to last long in the big city.’ He turned away and made some sort of gesture at the workers struggling with the lodestone so that they let it fall with a splash into the water. He gave me an appraising look. ‘Not sure why you care so much. Let the NRTs handle it. Or are you one of Malcolm’s special friends?’ He flicked the end of his cigarette into the brown water. ‘So are you scaley or furry? Malcolm definitely had a preference for either one or the other.’

  More and more offensive. ‘Neither. Look, do you have any idea where Ben might have gone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please. I don’t have anything else to go on, and whether you like him or not, the boy is only fourteen and at risk from any nutjob out there.’

  Neil laughed nastily. ‘Good luck to them. The boy’s an abomination.’

  I gave up my attempt at being nice. ‘That’s an awful thing to say about anyone.’

  Neil turned to face me. His face was black with anger. ‘The boy is an abomination, and thinking that doesn’t make me a nutjob. It makes me someone who knows what the hell is going on in this country. You think I don’t notice?’ He jabbed a finger at my collarbone. It hurt more than I would have expected. ‘You think I don’t see? All this? I’ve spent my career cleaning up after you lot. You put this shit on the internet where impressionable girls can see it and think a little curse is a good idea. You make it all look so normal. Hell, you claim it’s normal to be an aberration, and the kids listen. They think it’s okay to be a demon.’

  Save me from the rabidly pro-human. I wondered how much his viewpoint coloured his view of Ben. On the other hand, normal children don’t kill dogs. Neil stopped and grabbed my arm. His crew was staring at me.

  ‘We’re finished with this conversation. Get out.’

  He pulled me through the manky water, and I let him. I didn’t think I’d get any more information out of him. I doubted Ben would have run to his kindly uncle Neil. Not if the boy had a jot of sense.

  Neil unlocked the site door, then lifted his arm to shove me through. I grabbed his arm before he could do it. Red hot anger coursed through me. I hate being manhandled. As far as I’m concerned you can believe what you like, just don’t be an asshole about it.

  I said, as politely as I could through clenched teeth, ‘Ben might be a danger to everyone in a few days if he’s been bitten. I doubt he would come to you, but if he does, you give me a call.’

  I offered Neil one of my cards. He ignored it, so I tucked it in his overall pocket behind his packet of cigarettes. Out of the corner of my eye, as I walked away, I saw him take it out of his pocket and drop it on the ground.

  Litterbug.

  24

  I took the train to King’s Cross to meet Ben’s mother, still fuming after my meeting with Neil, and uncomfortable in squelchy shoes and damp trousers. I then took two wrong turns before I found the right hotel and was in a veritable grump when I arrived.

  I’d like to say the hotel looked good when it was built, but some architecture looks rotten from the beginning. This was one of those: grey and grubby, the sort of place you went when you had no other options.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Ben’s mother. Other than Ben, I’d never met any of the other winged. Not many people had. I was aware they used the services of our Inverness office on occasion, but that was only when they couldn’t avoid dealing with the outside world. Mostly they kept to themselves on the island.

  Annie Laradus made me hold my ID up to the peephole and then back away so she could get a better look at me. Finally, a bolt scraped away from the door, and I got my first look at her.

  She was as crumpled as an old grey flannel left rolled into a ball to dry. Her mouse-coloured hair was scraped back, but frizzy split ends escaped and framed her face. If I’d seen her in the office, I would have assumed she was one of the occasional homeless who wandered in for a cup of tea and commiseration. Yet the woman in front of me couldn’t have been older than her early thirties because I knew she had been only eighteen when she became pregnant with Ben. She wore a large beige coat, with only the tips of her wings visible beneath the hem. To the casual observer, she would have appeared to have had a bad hunchback, and I wondered how much of her slump was deliberate.

  As I considered her, Annie’s pale eyes appraised me in return. I obviously came up wanting, but not because of my damp trousers that still stunk like swamp water and my trainers covered in mud.

  ‘I wanted a sniffer. You’re not a sniffer. You’re a hag.’ It took a moment for my brain to process the words. Her accent sounded almost Scottish, but it was Scottish with a drawl, as if someone had recorded a Scot and then played it on a tape recorder with dying batteries.

  ‘We don’t have one. It’s just me.’

  The crumpled woman sighed and held the door open just enough for me to get inside. I caught a whiff of old potatoes as I squeezed past her.

  ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Please.’

  The inside wasn’t any better than the outside, although the peeling burnt orange wallpaper might have been fashionable once. The room was small with a single bed, a cracked leather armchair, and a single square coffee table ringed with mug stains. A Metro newspaper with a picture of Ben on the front page lay on the table. An empty sandwich box sat next to it.

  Annie tottered off towards a kettle on the table beside a small chunky television.

  ‘Do you mind if I use the bathroom?’

  She shrugged, which I took as a yes.

  I changed out of my jeans and into the spare pair from my backpack but couldn’t do the same with my trainers. I rinsed the mud off under the tap. It didn’t make them that much wetter, but it was no longer obvious I’d just waded through a swamp.

  How unprofessional would it be to return to the room in socked feet? Too much, considering the woman was missing her son. I wedged my feet back into the wet shoes.

  There was a cup of tea in a plastic hotel mug waiting for me when I exited the bathroom. She hadn’t asked if I’d wanted sugar, but by the taste of it she must have spilled in the entire bowl. I took a sip and struggled to hold back a grimace.

  ‘Is it all right?’

  ‘Yes, lovely.’

  Annie perched on the edge of the armchair, her hands curled around an old mobile phone which she turned round and round in her fingers. Her nails were bitten down enough that the tips were swollen and red.

  I took the only other possible seat, on the narrow single bed. A stuffed canvas bag was wedged between the bed and the wall. It looked like one of Stanley’s—First World War army issue. It had never occurred to me the winged might have fought in the war, but thinking about it, I couldn’t see the government letting the opportunity for winged spies passing them by. I wondered how much the war had diminished what was already a tiny population, if it made a difference to their imminent extinction.

  Centuries-long persecution, combined with a physiology that lent itself to a high maternal death rate, meant that the remaining winged population were too few and too old to be a viable population. I recalled a documentary where they’d demonstrated the difficulty of getting a winged child through the birth canal. It was enough to make me shudder and want to clamp my legs together. As far as I knew, Ben was the only winged under thirty. They’d be gone in a couple of generations.

  The woman sitting in front of me was one of the last of her kind. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she needed consolation.

  ‘He’s in a lot of trouble, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was no way to cushion it. ‘We can help get him a good solicitor, and our legal advisor thinks if we can get him to hand himself in, Ben might be able to avoid a custodial sentence.’

  ‘Oh,’ she s
aid in a small voice. ‘I don’t think I can afford a solicitor.’

  I put the tea down on the scarred coffee table. ‘Don’t worry about that now. We can apply for legal aid. There might be someone willing to take it pro bono. We need to find Ben first. Let’s concentrate on that.’

  She nodded. Her fingers reached up to a cross around her neck and rubbed it in an unconscious movement.

  ‘Do you have any photos you can give me? The more recent the better.’

  She dug in her coat pocket and produced a small pack of Polaroids tied together with an elastic band. I flipped through them; each was a head shot of Ben against a stone wall. He was aged around only two or three in the first, then grew steadily older. In the last, he’d been caught in the middle of a teenaged eye roll. He looked like his father: dark eyes, sharp nose, wide mouth, although Malcolm was missing the mop of curly hair.

  ‘I take them every year on his birthday. I’ll want them back.’

  ‘I’ll make copies. When’s his birthday?’

  ‘Um, 4 November.’ Only just fourteen, then.

  ‘Does he have any friends in London he might have gone to?’

  I wasn’t surprised when Annie shook her head. ‘He’s only here two weeks a year. The only people he knows are Malcolm and his family.’

  ‘What about your family? Are any of the other winged in London?’

  She hesitated. Her washed-out eyes met mine. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really?’

  ‘None of the people like to leave the island. Ben and I are the only ones who do so regularly.’

  ‘But?’ There was a but. I could hear it in her voice.

  ‘There’s only one of us in London. He left the island years ago and never came back. He doesn’t keep in touch, and I wouldn’t know where to find him. Ben certainly wouldn’t.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Drew Gillies.’

  I made a note of the name anyway. A man with wings would stand out. It shouldn’t be too hard to find him.

  Annie’s little finger came up to her mouth, and her teeth made a little snick sound as she worried at the nail.

  I looked around for a coaster for the mug, but there wasn’t one. I placed it on the newspaper instead.

  ‘Annie, did Ben bring rabbit meat down with him?’

  ‘What?’

  I repeated the question, thinking it didn’t sound any less odd the second time round.

  ‘No, no, he didn’t. Jillie tore a strip off him last year because he brought a box of fish. Too smelly or something. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just trying to get an idea of his movements.’

  Ben had arrived two weeks before Christmas when Malcolm was definitely still alive, and Berenice Nazarak likely was too. If he’d killed her, he couldn’t have pretended it had come down with him. It would never last that long unrefrigerated. And Malcolm had certainly been alive when Ben had arrived. I tried to remember exactly what Jillie had said. Had Ben given it directly to her? Or had Malcolm told her that was where the meat had come from?

  I left Annie staring at the phone in her lap as if willing it to ring. I asked her if she wanted to join me in looking for the youth club Jillie had mentioned, but the winged woman shook her head.

  ‘This is the hotel I always stay in. I don’t want to be out if Ben knocks on the door.’

  I considered telling her not to open it. The chance remained that Ben had been bitten, but I didn’t think she would listen to me either way. He was her son, and she was going to open the door for him, ravenous dead or not.

  25

  King’s Cross isn’t as seedy as it used to be, but it still hasn’t quite been swallowed up by gentrification despite the millions of pounds poured into the regeneration of the station and the attached buildings and offices.

  I only saw two obvious prostitutes on the walk back to the station and didn’t get propositioned by a single street weasel. Maybe it was still a little early. Another decade, and the whole area would be nothing but chain coffee shops and anonymous offices. I couldn’t pretend to be sorry about the lack of addicts sleeping in doorways or desperate women selling themselves, but the relentless march of corporatisation made me think of my mother.

  King’s Cross used to be a village called Battle Bridge, and when the Romans sacked it, she was there and already thousands of years old. She’s the one who told me that the belief that the station is built on the site of Boudicca’s last battle isn’t true.

  My mother hated London. Or rather she hated the city as it is now. She’d lived most of her long life here, but she’d been dead too long. The city she returned to was unfamiliar and overcrowded. Occasionally something she recognised—a church, a monument—rose out of the strangeness like an iceberg, and then she’d get into one of her black moods. Sometimes I think the only thing that surprised me about her was that she didn’t choose to go back to death a lot sooner. I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn’t see the suited ghost until he was right in front of me.

  ‘Hey, Miss Boney.’ He waggled his eyebrows at me. ‘Just wanted to check you arranged my movie for Saturday.’

  ‘It’s all done.’

  ‘Good.’ He grinned. ‘Oh, by the way. There’s something following you.’

  I spun around. The road was busy. A group of tourists, loaded with oversized suitcases, waited at a bus stop. A bearded man in jeans and a hoodie walked towards me, seemingly paying attention to nothing but the McDonald’s burger he was eating. Further away, three teenaged girls giggled as they walked. Each had the same dark, glossy hair, straightened within an inch of its life.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Nothing human, love.’

  I stared down the road again, looking for non-humans. Two of the tourists had the cerulean skin of the water people, and one of the teenaged girls had an aura that suggested something other, maybe a potential witch. None looked the slightest bit interested in me. I turned back to the ghost, but he had gone.

  I looked up thinking that perhaps Ben had come to me, but there was nothing but lighted windows and dull sky. Finally, skin prickling, I walked on.

  I’d been up since three, hadn’t eaten in hours, and was starting to feel a little faint. I stopped at the first coffee shop I came to with free Wi-Fi, taking the reasonable stance that I wouldn’t find Benjamin Brannick if I fainted and fell in front of the Number 91 bus. It wasn’t the only reason. I wanted time to think and get Malcolm out of my head.

  The cheapest food was a wrapped shortbread biscuit. I went for that along with a coffee with plenty of sugar. Even a couple of quid saved on an overpriced sandwich was another couple of quid into the escape fund. Other than someone twittering at one of the PCs against the far wall, and a pair of teenagers with their bums half hanging out, the rest of the place was empty. I took a table next to the wall by the radiator and slipped out of my shoes. I flexed my socked feet; the heat began soaking into them immediately.

  Before I did anything else, I called home and spoke to the carer, who assured me Sigrid was fine. His shift ended at three-thirty. I looked at my watch. It was just past twelve. I was meeting Adam at one to check out youth clubs, so I had just over three hours before I had to be back.

  I booted up my laptop while I sipped at the blisteringly hot coffee. It burned my tongue, but the first sip went straight to my brain. One sip’s worth of caffeine couldn’t possibly wake you up so instantly, so I knew it was a psychological thing. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference: it was still good.

  Outside, the world was moving on after the lockdown. A group of tourists leaned against the window and argued about something on their map. A lone street weasel hung about near their rear, waiting for an opportunity to pick their pockets.

  Malcolm had said, ‘He killed me.’ It wasn’t ambiguous, but it might have meant nothing. Maybe it was the product of his brain turning to mush. But he had wanted to see me, had refused to talk to the police.

  Malcolm and I weren’t friends. I th
ought he was a first class wally, and he knew it. Out of all the people he could have insisted on seeing, I should have been at the bottom of the list.

  He killed me. If Ben had murdered his father, I could understand Malcolm not wanting to tell the police. It could have been some kind of accident and he didn’t want to get the boy in further trouble. But why me? Why not Obe? Okay, maybe not Obe. Surely he had someone closer to talk to.

  He killed me. Not Ben killed me. He killed me. Perhaps he meant someone else. Neil? I’d thought Malcolm had said something about a brother. Maybe it was not Ben, my brother.

  That didn’t make sense either. Malcolm didn’t have a scratch on him. He could have been poisoned, but I thought that should have left some sort of mark too. A purple tongue or swollen face or something. My knowledge came a little short. I’d never had cause to research poisoning methods. And Neil hadn’t been there. Which might make it something slow acting, that had been targeted at Malcolm so that no one else was affected. And that Malcolm knew who did it.

  Oh, stop it, I thought. This isn’t Agatha bloody Christie. Malcolm’s brain was addled. He didn’t know what was going on.

  I finished the coffee, then returned to the counter for another one.

  I still hadn’t spoken to Jillie’s brother, Samson. I’d left him a message, but he hadn’t rung back. I dialled his number again, but it just rang and rang then went to voicemail. I left another message.

  I needed to go about finding Ben logically and methodically. Adam was searching the hotels and going door to door. Obe was holding the Lipscombe Fort, and I’d put out feelers to every contact I had.

  Ben had participated in the Teen Outreach Programme. The queries I had sent out had come up with nothing, but Jillie said Malcolm had taken him somewhere else. It seemed like a long shot, but I didn’t have any other ideas.

  The Wi-Fi connection was erratic, but I managed to locate at least four youth centres within a mile radius of Malcolm’s house. None had websites, and one had lost its campaign to stay open. I only found one phone number—a mobile number that was no longer in use. I jotted the addresses down in proximity order. I sent Adam a text giving him the address of the first one.

  Next, I searched for Malcolm’s postcode and pulled up a map of the area together with the little pins that designate places of interest. A quick plug-in at the counter and a payment of 50p, and I had a print out.

  Almost no matter where you are in London, everything is built up closely, the houses packed on top of each other. Few spaces are like the old car dealership and unused for years – space is too valuable in a crowded city. If Ben had done three or four flying hops, it was still a lot of buildings and houses for Adam to search, but I was looking for arcades and malls, in case the youth centre didn’t pan out. I marked them on my map with red pen. I packed up my laptop and made my way to the station. There was no sign of the suited ghost or anyone else, but my back prickled all the way down the escalators.

  The first youth centre on my list was situated just off the high street in a shop front between a kebab place and a closed estate agent. The inside was hidden from public view by a set of dusty curtains. A pile of post and takeaway flyers was stacked against the glass door. I squinted and made out a postmark dated November. I scribbled a note on the back of a business card just in case and pushed it through the post flap.

  ‘Nothing here, huh?’

  I jumped. Adam was walking towards me. He wore black jeans, a black coat, and a black beanie over the remains of his hair. He looked like a big pasty ninja.

  I shrugged. ‘These places only last as long as the funding.’

  We checked my map, then started walking east.

  ‘So, I met your father,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘And how did that go?’

  ‘Not well. He threw me out.’

  Adam laughed, but there was no humour to it. ‘Don’t take it personally. He’s like that with everyone. He can be a bit of an asshole at times, but it’s been worse recently. And Malcolm being dead isn’t going to help.’

  ‘Why recently?’

  ‘He’s got a disciplinary hearing at work coming up, although he should be used to it. He’s always getting into fights. He’s been round the HR carousel a good few times.’

  ‘That bad?’

  He laughed. It sounded bitter. ‘Yeah, they’d have sacked him long ago, but he’s too good at what he does. He was the one who dealt with that water sprite in Brixton last year. If it wasn’t for him, half of London would still be swimming. He specialises in both water and earth.’

  ‘Rare combination.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop him getting the occasional black eye.’

  We fell silent. I had the impression Adam had told me more than he’d meant to, but I understood. When it came to family, sometimes you just needed to vent.

  ‘He said something about Ben killing your dog.’

  Adam grimaced. ‘Yes, that was nasty, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Ben did do it, but he didn’t know any better. You need to understand what it’s like up there. They live off fish, sea birds, and rabbits. Ben’s not like modern kids who don’t know where the packages in the supermarket come from. His stepdad had just started taking him out to hunt rabbits. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding.’

  I slowed to a stop in front of the second centre on the list. It was church affiliated and run in the hall of St Joseph’s, a Catholic church situated just off the main drag of the high street. It was a new brick building—spacious and airy—not like the one I went to growing up, which was ancient and smelled a bit like damp and old lady.

  My mother wasn’t a big fan of modern religion. She missed the old religions and was known to wax nostalgic about the days when blood sacrifice was the done thing. Although I suspect she may have done it just to annoy Stanley.

  The side door to the hall was open, so we let ourselves in. I gave out a friendly ‘Helloo.’

  Two middle-aged women were setting out chairs in the centre of the hall. Another shook out a large mat to go in the middle. The closest, a well-padded black woman in a print dress, gave me a friendly smile.

  ‘I’m afraid the Mummy and Me class doesn’t start until one-thirty, but you’re welcome to hang about and have a coffee while you wait.’

  I held up my arms like she was pointing a gun at me. ‘We actually wanted to ask some questions about your youth group.’

  She peered a bit closer, then looked at Adam. ‘Oh, you don’t have a baby, do you? This is what happens when I don’t put my glasses on. I’m so sorry,’ she said, as if accusing strangers of parenthood was a terrible faux pas. ‘I’m happy to answer any questions as long as you don’t mind watching me get the tea ready.’

  We followed her into a tiny kitchen area separated from the main hall by an open window. She turned on an urn big enough to cater for Hogwarts and began pulling mismatched mugs from a cupboard above the sink.

  She introduced herself as Linda. I told her my name in return and showed her a copy of the most recent Polaroid of Ben I had, the especially sulky one.

  ‘Bless,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t he look like he’s in a funk? Yes, I know him, I thought he was a hunchback until I saw him on the news. Boy never took his coat off. What’s your interest in this?’

  Adam leaned back against the kitchen counter. ‘I’m his cousin. We’re worried about him.’

  She didn’t turn around. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘We just want to find him to make sure he’s safe,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t that for the police to do?’ Linda started setting the mugs out on trays on a table just outside the kitchen.

  ‘No. Ben’s...’ I hesitated, not sure of the right word to use without being obvious. ‘I’m from the Lipscombe Trust. He mightn’t want to contact the police.’ I showed her my ID. She peered at it.

  ‘May I?’ she asked and held out her hand.

  I gave it to her, and she disappeared through a door to the right, presumably to make a phon
e call and verify my identity.

  Adam raised his eyebrows at me. I shrugged. Family doesn’t come with an ID badge.

  She was back within five minutes and handed my badge back. ‘Sorry, can’t be too sure. You never know what people want with the kids we have here.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Have you seen him recently? Or can you give me contact details for anyone he was friendly with? I’m hoping he’s gone to one of them.’

  Linda appeared to be thinking about it. I pulled my backpack off my shoulder and handed her a small pack of my cards. ‘If you could maybe just pass my contact details on to his friends... I don’t know if he had any particular friends.’

  She snorted and seemingly made up her mind. ‘He was probably friendliest with Andy, and Ben’s definitely not with him because Andy’s my son and I would have noticed an extra mouth at the dinner table yesterday.’ She leaned over the kitchen counter, opened the window, and shouted out, ‘Andrew, get in here!’

  Within a minute, a skinny teenaged boy, his face cratered with acne, appeared round the corner. ‘What?’

  ‘Not “what.” Yes, Mum.’

  The boy rolled his eyes, ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Have you seen your friend Ben?’

  The boy looked from me to Adam to his mother. ‘Why, who’re they?’

  ‘Never mind why. Answer the question.’

  Andy shrugged. ‘He was here last Wednesday when we had the table tennis tables up. I haven’t seen him since then.’

  ‘Do you know where he might have gone? Can you give me the names of anyone he’s friendly with?’ I asked.

  Andy looked to his mother again before answering, ‘He’s not that friendly with anyone here. Most of ‘em didn’t want to get too close in case he was a mutant. Maybe he went to his brother’s.’

  ‘His brother’s? Finn?’ That didn’t make a lot of sense.

  ‘No, his big brother. Oliver.’

  The expression on our faces must have been betrayed our reaction because Linda went pale. She put her hand on Andy’s shoulder. ‘Ben doesn’t have a big brother?’ We shook our heads in unison. ‘What brother, sweetheart? Did you get his surname?’

  Andy looked suddenly unsure. ‘No.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ Adam asked. His pale skin was flushed red.

  ‘Uh...’ Andy fumbled in his pocket and produced a mobile. He skimmed through photos until he found the one he was looking for. I took the phone. Adam peered over my shoulder.

  It was fuzzy, but showed Ben and an older boy playing table tennis. The ‘brother’ was aged around eighteen—tall and whip thin, with the tips of his brown hair dyed green. He was grinning, showing a slight overbite. His green eyes looked directly into the camera. I glanced at Adam. He shook his head.

  I got Andy to text us both the picture.

  We left them with my card and instructions to call if they heard anything. I turned back at the church door. Linda was hugging her son in a way that indicated she wasn’t going to let go for some time.

  26

  Adam grabbed my arm the moment I was out the door. ‘Do you have any idea who he was talking about?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer before he began to swear.

  A middle-aged woman pushing a stroller tutted at him. He glared at her.

  I mouthed an apology then pulled him back into the lee of the church out of the spitting rain. ‘Malcolm’s always been free with his oat sowing. Could be possible.’

  He pulled the beanie off his head. The charms on his cuff trailed across the brush cut as he rubbed his scalp with one hand. ‘I don’t think so. If some kid turned up claiming to be his son, I’d have heard about it.’

  ‘So maybe just a friend then.’

  ‘So why would Ben say they were brothers?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I could think of a half dozen reasons. The first was that a lonely boy who finally made a friend might want to make out that the relationship was a lot closer than it was. The only other reasons I could think of were a little more sinister.

  ‘Look, I better go. Thanks for your help.’ Adam didn’t wait for me to respond. He stalked off in the direction of the train station, his head down.

  I stood in the drizzle and watched him go. Not even an excuse as to why he needed to rush off. Adam Brannick wasn’t telling me something, but I had no idea what it was.

  I spent the next half hour looking into the final two places on my list but came up with nothing and had to rush for the train so I could catch Sigrid’s carer before he left.

  I squashed up in the carriage next to a swaying group of ogres who smelt a lot of beer and a little of sick and was profoundly grateful when they exited at Clapham Junction and I managed to get a seat.

  I like the train. Not in rush hour when you’re nose to armpit—I’m not insane—but in the quieter times in between. The rattle and the roar knocks out all inconsequential sounds, and if you sit still on your seat and close your eyes, it rocks you gently as you go along. Everyone is on their way somewhere. Everyone has something to do or something to see, their lives moving on in a small way or a big one, but ultimately they’re journeying through life a little at a time. I like the feeling of going somewhere even when I’m sitting still.

  At Sydenham, I left the hot confines of the crowded carriage and stepped out into cold air. The drizzle had turned to sleet, and it dripped down the back of my collar.

  By the time I got home I was soaking wet, and my fingers and toes were painful with cold. I caught the carer just as he was leaving, and he gave me a quick update. I said goodbye, closed the door behind him, then stripped off my wet clothes and dumped them into the washing machine. I grabbed a clean shirt and jogging bottoms from the dryer next to it. The cold felt as if it had leaked into my bones, and I made a mental note to eat something sugary or fatty before I went to bed. Anything to put a little blubber on my frame.

  When my phone rang, it took me a few minutes to locate it at the bottom of the washing machine, and I gave a silent thanks to the caller that they’d dialled before I had a chance to switch the machine on. The name on the screen was Samson Comfort. Finally.

  ‘Vivia. Sorry for not calling back. It’s been a difficult couple of days. I’m sure you can understand.’

  ‘Of course. My condolences about your brother-in-law.’

  ‘What? Malcolm? Ha! I really don’t give a shit about that old ballbag. This is the best thing that’s happened to Jillie in years. She’s upset now, but she’ll get over it.’

  Okay then. I got to the point. ‘Ben Brannick’s still missing. Do you have any idea where he is?’

  ‘No. I don’t see the boy that often. Last time I saw him was Christmas Eve over at Jillie’s.’

  It had been a long shot, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. ‘Thanks for getting back to me. Tell Jillie I’m thinking of her when you see her.’ I thought about what she’d said about the meat in the freezer. Had Ben given it to her, or had Malcolm? ‘Actually, there was something I wanted to ask her about.’

  ‘I’m picking them both up from quarantine tomorrow morning. They’ll be staying at mine. I’ll ask her to give you a call.’

  I thanked him, and we said our goodbyes. I put on a pot of coffee, then spent the next half hour on phone calls, to Obe, to Annie, to people I’d already called. No one had any new information or knew anything about a boy claiming to be Ben’s brother.

  The evening was taken up by feeding and cleaning up after my sister, who generated a ridiculous amount of washing for someone who didn’t even know she was alive. I completed it in a daze. Not even copious amounts of caffeine were enough to make up for being up so early and the emotional toll of the day, and I toppled into bed at eight. I was asleep before I could pull the duvet up around my shoulders.

  I woke in the dark to someone shaking me, accompanied by the smell of stale cigarette smoke and unbrushed teeth.

  ‘Vivia, I need a change of bedding.’

  I rubbed my eyes groggily. St
anley stood over me. He wasn’t wearing any pants. Skinny old man genitalia dangled centimetres from my face.

  ‘God, Stan. Do we need to have another conversation about boundaries?’

  He sniggered. ‘I’ve had enough of those, missy. I’ll have a cup of tea while I wait.’ He sat down next to me, indicating quite clearly who was supposed to make the tea. I groaned and reached for my phone to check the time. Four a.m.

  ‘Uh-uh. I’m not your live-in servant. If you strip the old sheets off, I’ll help you shift the mattress. If you say please. And you can make your own tea.’

  He grumbled, but stalked off upstairs. Because I’m a sucker and I really wanted a cup of tea anyway, I helped Stan with his bed while the kettle boiled, then took my tea back to bed with my laptop and a box of chocolates I’d received for Christmas. Sleet dripped down the window, and the cold air sneaking under the frame was fresh and exhaust free.

  I sat cross-legged in bed with the duvet around my shoulders and logged into the Lipscombe systems to check my email. There were a few email responses relating to other case files which I replied to, but nothing about Ben. There was one from Samson Comfort letting me know they’d be holding a memorial service for Malcolm on Thursday.

  I wasn’t quite sure where to look next. I’d drawn up a to-do list before I’d gone to bed, but it mostly involved going over the same ground. I checked the time on my laptop—five thirty. Forty-eight hours since Jillie and Finn had been taken away. As I sat in bed, they were likely going through their final medicals and being prepared for release.

  I took a last sip of tea and inspected the chocolate box. I’d eaten all the nice ones and was feeling a little sick. I ate another anyway.

  At seven, I reluctantly got out of bed to shower. The phone rang while I was rinsing my hair. I dried off, but before I had the chance to rub the steam off the screen and check for a message, it rang again. It was Dunne calling to tell me they’d found Ben.

  But not all of him.