Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (14 page)

“This is footage from the car dealership across the road from the gallery,” he explained. “This van went back and forth multiple times in the days before the thefts; it parked in the dealership for a while, but the driver never got out. I spoke to the salesman who was on duty at the time—he remembers the van, but he said he figured the bloke was just taking a phone call. Couldn’t get a good description out of him, and the camera angle’s all wrong to get a proper look at the driver.”

Could be suspicious, could be nothing. “Did you run the plates?” she asked.

“I did. They’re fake. But...”—he tapped a finger on the front window of the van—“see this here, on the dashboard?”

She squinted at the indistinct image. “Am I going to need to break out the old lady glasses?” she asked.

“No, because here’s one I blew up earlier.” He brought out another print-out, this one a marginally clearer expansion of the section of dashboard glimpsed through the front window. There was something lying on it, a book or a leaflet or similar; the text was distorted beyond readability, but there was some kind of symbol on the front, like a crossed question mark in a circle with three radiating lines.

“Can you get the image enhanced any further?” she asked.

“I asked. They told me off for watching too much bad TV.” He gave a wry smile. “This is, apparently, as good as it gets. But I thought that symbol rang a bell—the museum that had the goblet stolen described a similar maker’s mark on the base, though they didn’t have a picture. Figured I’d bring it down here, see what Documents made of it.”

“And we have come up with the goods!” a triumphant female voice rang out from behind the shelves. Pierce nodded in greeting as Fatima Shakoor hurried out to join them, a plump, moon-faced woman with a bright, cheeky grin. “Ta-dah!” She brandished what turned out not to be an ancient occult document, but a cheaply printed brochure that looked like something found in the ‘local interest’ section of a library.

“Took me a moment to find it, because I was looking in the wrong section, but here you go.” She flattened the brochure out on the table before them. “The Society of the Crooked Hook—one of your average dinky little occult societies where everybody meets up every Tuesday to play dress up and do some dancing around trees.” She waved a vague hand back towards the shelves. “We’ve got flyers for millions of them. And by millions I mean about fifty.”

“Anything to make this one stand out?” Pierce asked, scrutinising the leaflet. Sure enough, there was a picture of the symbol in question on the front, though it looked like a crude photocopy of something drawn in marker pen. She opened the folded pages to see a poorly reproduced photograph of a group of people clustered around a standing stone.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Fatima said with a shrug. She gestured to the leaflet. “That’s the only paperwork we have on them.”

Pierce turned the leaflet over, looking to see if it gave an address. It did, complete with a little hand drawn map. “Then I guess there’s nothing to do but pay them a visit for ourselves,” she said. “Right. Off we go to sunny Huddersfield, then.”

T
HE HEADQUARTERS OF
the Society of the Crooked Hook turned out to be a room above a shop with a homemade poster in the window promising Tarot readings. Not a likely looking centre of criminal enterprise, but it took all sorts.

Nobody answered the buzzer to help with their enquiries, but the manager of the shop below kindly furnished them with a telephone number for ‘Ron.’ Pierce waited for him to arrive while Deepan went off to canvass the staff of the surrounding buildings for any evidence of the white van.

Ron, when he eventually arrived, turned out to be one Ronald Halford, a nervous, earnest little man somewhere in his late forties, wearing a suit that strained around his burgeoning beer belly and a tie covered in cartoon snowmen.

He didn’t look like a criminal, or at least not the kind who climbed through museum and gallery windows in the dead of night. She’d learned early enough in her career that timid, mousy little men could still get up to all manner of vile activities, not least because nobody ever suspected they would have the nerve.

But her instincts said that Ron was not their man. He almost fell over himself apologising for the fifteen minutes it had taken him to arrive, over-explaining in the slightly frantic way she most associated with those who had too much of a guilt complex to get around to committing any of the crimes they feared being accused of. It could all be a spectacular act, of course, but without greater reason to suspect him, Occam’s razor ruled the day.

Halford let her in to the society’s base, which looked like any other shabby private clubhouse for a group with more ambitions than resources. The main room had a mismatched collection of furniture, probably assembled from whatever the members and their friends and relatives happened to have cluttering up their garages. The occult paraphernalia scattered about mostly seemed like cheap junk to her eyes: fancy candles, arrangements of crystals, lots of dangling beads and wind chimes and generically ‘ethnic’ art.

A pinboard in the corner held a copy of the society’s latest newsletter, seemingly more concerned with badgering members to make their contribution towards the Christmas meal and hawking somebody’s self-published book than any real occult activities. A few curling newspaper clippings, some group photos, and a slew of takeaway menus and flyers from nearby businesses took up the rest of the space.

There was a small cloth-draped altar at the rear of the room, but frankly, the centrepiece appeared to be the tea-making facilities in the corner. Ron fluttered around them uncertainly. “Um, can I get you anything to drink, er, detective? We’ve got tea, coffee... There are biscuits.” He brandished a packet of custard creams hopefully, like a pacifying sacrifice to ward off any harm.

Pierce had already seen at a glance that there would be little need to hang around, but she let him go ahead anyway. It would give him something to do keep him calm, and at least she’d get a custard cream out of it.

“None of the society’s members are in any trouble,” she said. There was always an unspoken ‘yet’ appended to such statements, but most people chose to be reassured by them anyway. “We’re just looking for some information in connection with one of our cases. Some paperwork with your group’s symbol was spotted inside of a van that we’re trying to trace. Can you think of any reason for that?”

“Oh. Oh, dear.” He peered at her over his teacup with worried, pale eyes. “Well, um, I really don’t think that can be any of our members. Let’s see, um, Jonathan drives a Volvo, and Lisa doesn’t drive at all—her hip, you see. Her husband usually drops her off, but he doesn’t drive a van, it’s an—oh, I’m not sure, is it a Peugeot or a Vauxhall? I can never remember which one’s which. But anyway, it’s quite a small car. And Alice... I think Alice still has her Mini, though she was talking about trading it in. Um...”

Pierce was fairly sure he’d have reeled off the full driving histories of the society’s roster of members if she’d let him. “So none of your members drive any sort of van,” she summarised.

“No. No, I don’t think so. Not one that I’ve seen—and I
would
have seen, I’m fairly sure. We all know each other quite well. Most of the society have been members for, oh, it must be over a decade now. More than that, I suppose, now I come to think of it.” He shook his head. “It still feels like the ’nineties were only a couple of years ago. Do you find that? It’s as if my sense of time stopped at the year two thousand.”

Pierce nodded and smiled along to what could be nervous rambling or just the man’s normal mode of speech. Either way, he was clearly going to need regular chivvying along, or they’d be here all afternoon. “No new members joined, recently then?” she said, taking a risk on dunking a custard cream; few things compromised your aura of authority quite like having to fish half a biscuit out of your tea with a spoon, but she managed to pull it off without disaster. “Say in the last six months or so?”

Ron shook his head ruefully. “No, sadly not. The kids, well, they’re not interested, are they? They’ve got all their iPhones and whatnot—they’re used to everything happening with a touch of a button. You tell them magic takes effort, you need licenses and training and it’s all got to be exactly right, and they don’t want to know. They just want, ‘point, bang, fireballs,’ and it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

“Thankfully,” Pierce said dryly. About the only defence they had against magical anarchy was the fact that ninety-nine percent of people who went in for ritual magic gave it up as a fiddly pain in the arse long before they managed to achieve anything measurable. Unfortunately, that did mean that the criminals they were left with were the ones with some patience and perseverance and attention to detail—all traits you preferred not to be facing in someone you were trying to apprehend.

She sat forward. “So, if, as seems likely, the van driver isn’t a member of your society, how do you think he might have come to have papers with your symbol on in the front of his vehicle?”

She didn’t pitch it as an accusation, but Ron still looked flustered. “Well, um, we do have a newsletter that Alice prints off: all our members get it, of course, and there are free copies in the library and at Crystal Village—that’s the, er, local shop that sells supplies for the craft.”

Pierce nodded; another lead they could check out, though she already doubted that either shop or newsletter would be of much interest to anyone with genuine occult knowledge. Assuming the thieves had any, of course: their motive in picking the particular set of artefacts they were trying to assemble was still hazy, but the lack of monetary value or recent paper trail argued against either financial or sentimental reasons.

“And of course, it’s not strictly our symbol in particular,” Ron added, almost as an afterthought.

“Oh?” Pierce raised her eyebrows at him over her mug.

“Er, no, it’s the mark of Francis Maundrell. He was a warlock who could talk to tree spirits—unjustly hanged for putting a curse on the local farmers here in 1675, or so my grandfather told me. He was the one who founded the society. Er, my granddad, that is, not Francis Maundrell, although we do try to continue in the spirit that we imagine his works—”

“1675?” she said. And a collection of stolen artefacts believed to be circa seventeenth century...

Maybe this visit hadn’t been a complete waste of time after all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

P
IERCE GOT A
list of the society’s members to follow up on, but she doubted it would amount to anything. Deepan’s canvassing of the local shopkeepers had proven similarly unenlightening; nobody had anything of note to say about the occult society—most were wholly unaware it existed—and none of them recalled seeing a white Ford Transit van hanging around. Not that they were likely to remember if there had been one: criminals made their choice of nondescript vehicles for a reason.

“Looks like this Francis Maundrell character is our best lead right now,” she said as Deepan drove them back to the station. “We’ll see if Documents can dig up anything more about him now we’ve got a name. If we can tie the stolen artefacts together, we may be able to anticipate the thieves’ next target, or what it is they’re trying to accomplish.”

Deepan nodded, then frowned a little as he made the turn towards the station. Pierce looked ahead to see what had captured his attention. “Oh, what have we got here?” she said. “New police vehicles?” Their car park appeared to have been colonised by a rather conspicuous green Volkswagen bus.

“It’s probably the druids back again, Guv,” Deepan said. “They’ve been bugging us for weeks—it’s coming up to the winter solstice, and they don’t have access to the stone circle they used to use for their rites because some company bought up the land.”

“That’s not our department, surely,” Pierce said as they paused at the car park entrance. A pair of young women dressed in white robes were climbing down from the bus in front of them, carrying placards. Bloody marvellous. “Tell them to get in touch with the heritage people if they’re worried about it being built on.”

“We did,” he said. “According to them, it
should
be a protected site, but it’s mysteriously not listed.”

“Well, even if that’s true, it’s still not a job for the RCU,” she said. Someone might well be greasing the wheels to have paperwork go missing and dodgy deals pushed through, but that kind of thing had been going on since time immemorial, no magic involved. “We don’t handle shady deals unless they’re pacts with demons.”