Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2) (7 page)

About,
not
from.
“Has he relapsed?”

“Er, not exactly, Guv,” he said, awkwardly. “Local police found him dead. Looks like a suicide.”

P
IERCE GROUND HER
teeth as she drove to the scene of the death, going back over all the decisions it was too bloody late to change now. Should’ve gone with her instincts and countermanded Dawson’s bad idea of trying necromancy, instead of worrying about departmental politics. Should’ve called a halt to the interrogation of Vyner earlier. Should’ve done more to see he was looked after in his vulnerable state of mind post-possession.

It was always easy to pick the best option in hindsight. But all the same, one ugly truth remained: they’d called him in to consult on a case, and now he was dead. This was the RCU’s fuck up.

It was tempting to lay it all on Dawson’s head, but the fact was the buck still stopped with her. She was the one in charge, and she could have overruled him.
Should
have overruled him. Probably would have, if she hadn’t been hesitant to rock the boat on her first day back on the job.

She had to get her head back in the game.

Pierce pulled up on the end of the row of police vehicles clogging up the residential street. The address Taylor had given her was an unassuming, narrow terraced house, not much different from the streets of student housing she’d been driving through on her way to meet Doctor Moss. There was barely a front garden, only a scrap of grass beside the steps that led up to the weathered front door. A small square window at ground level revealed the presence of a basement, though concealing blinds blocked any view inside.

Nothing about this place hinted that it might have been the domain of a man who called himself a necromancer—which only made it more likely that Vyner had been for real. Fakes always operated with more flash.

But even if he’d had some true experience in the field, he’d clearly been quite shaken by yesterday’s events. They never should have left him on his own.

And it appeared that he had lived alone. The front door opened directly onto the living room, which had a functional fireplace and alcoves full of bookshelves. The shoe rack inside the door held only men’s shoes, all the same size at a casual glance. There might be a girlfriend—or boyfriend—but probably not a live-in one, and there was nothing in the slightly cluttered but relatively tidy living room to suggest the presence of children. Thank God.

“Where’s the body?” she asked a convenient uniform.

“Bathroom. Photographer’s up there now.”

Meaning she, as an extraneous RCU officer, would only be in the way. Vyner might have been called in on their case, but suicides weren’t their department unless there was a magical component to the death.

Even so, as she stepped through into the dining room beyond, she saw Dawson loitering by the staircase up to the first floor, with a restlessness that suggested he was either itching to take action or wishing for a cigarette. Probably both.

“Pierce.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased to see her. “They didn’t need to call you in on this. I can handle things here.”

“I prefer to be kept informed.” She pressed her lips together. “And clearly we should all have been paying this more attention. Why didn’t anybody take note of Vyner’s emotional state before they let him go off home alone?”

Dawson’s doughy face remained unmoved. “The man was a professional necromancer. We had no reason to think that he was going to top himself,” he said.

“There’s no such thing as a professional necromancer. I’ve been doing this job thirty years and it’s still a rare day when we come across something I’ve seen before. He wasn’t prepared.”

“And we can’t be prepared for every consultant’s emotional issues,” he said stubbornly. “There’s no predicting who’s going to turn out to be unstable.”

“
Nonetheless
,” Pierce said pointedly, “it’s our job to minimise any potential risks—”

She was interrupted by the footsteps of a young constable, descending the stairs with unusual haste. He looked around in search of his own superiors, but Dawson stepped up in their place. “What’s going on?”

Pierce doubted the PC had any clue who they were or why they were here, but he was still young and impressionable enough to assume any authoritative figure in a suit was probably important. More fool him.

“Pathologist’s just had a look at the body, sir,” he said. “He reckons the wounds are inconsistent with a suicide—looks like this bloke was murdered.”

U
NFORTUNATELY, IT SEEMED
the switch from suicide to a homicide investigation also bumped the RCU’s status from vaguely unwanted observers to turf invaders who had no business sniffing round an ordinary murder.

“Look, if it turns out a wizard did it, then we’ll call you,” said the local DI in charge, who’d miraculously turned up from wherever he’d buggered off to when his officers were dealing with what looked like suicide. “But it doesn’t take bloody magic to slit a bloke’s wrists and chuck him in the bathtub. Believe it or not, those of us without fancy specialisms do actually know how to investigate a murder.”

“This man was an RCU consultant,” Pierce reiterated, with a firm patience that was getting her exactly nowhere. “He was involved in a supernatural incident yesterday. It’s very likely his death is connected to our case.”

“Then our investigation will get to that in due time,” he said, with the kind of calculatedly obnoxious reasonability that could be deployed on members of the public without giving them grounds for a complaint. “We’ll have some people interview your people—take some statements, yes? But let’s not go getting things arse-backwards. We process the evidence here. Look into the nearest and dearest.
Procedure
,” he emphasized, and shook his head. “The problem with your lot is they always want to start with the most complicated explanation first. One funny-looking shape in the blood splatter and suddenly you’ve got magical sigils coming out your arse.”

It was clear she wasn’t going to win them any concessions here. Dawson’s backup probably wouldn’t have helped—would almost certainly have made things worse, if his performance yesterday had been any indication—but it still vaguely irked her that he’d apparently wandered off while she was arguing their case. Looked like his burning itch to take charge took a convenient hike when it came to the more tedious, thankless tasks.

She drew a breath, aware that unleashing a temper that wasn’t even wholly this idiot’s fault could only compromise their standing further. No need to trade wilful lack of cooperation for outright hostility.

“Fine,” she said, and hoped she’d succeeded in keeping at least some of the terseness out of her tone. “We’ll leave this one in your hands. Just keep us updated.” Not that they bloody would without repeated nudges to ‘remind’ them. She looked around again for Dawson, but didn’t spot him. “Let me just see where my colleague’s got to.” At least it would give her a chance to get a quick look around the property before they left.

Of course, the trouble with using her favourite ‘just within the rules’ ruses on her fellow police was that they knew and used them too. “Well, he’s not gone upstairs to look at the body, so there’s no need for you to head up there, is there?” the man said, folding his arms with a smug smile.

Pierce didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response, just moved back through into the dining room and glanced through the adjoining door. It led into the house’s tiny kitchen, and from the window she could see a neglected back garden: bigger than the pitiful scrap of greenery out front, but still not requiring more than a cursory glance.

No sign of Dawson. He hadn’t gone out the front, because she’d have seen him leave. Had he managed to sneak upstairs after all? She might be pleased at that show of initiative if she’d been at all confident he would actually share any information that he found.

Then her eyes fell on the door beneath the stairs, which her brain had automatically filed under ‘cupboard.’ It was standing ajar, and now Pierce remembered the basement window outside; she pulled it open to reveal a flight of wooden steps that ran parallel to the main staircase above. Rather than call down to Dawson, she descended the stairs after him.

The basement room below was relatively large, but made claustrophobic by the lack of any natural light. The one small window was covered by a blackout blind, and the ceiling was too low for hanging lights, several small recessed bulbs doing the job instead. They managed to brightly spotlight patches on the floor and yet still leave the corners thick with shadow.

Dawson was crouched by the remains of a ritual circle on the floor, drawn in neat chalked lines across the concrete. Stubs of candles sat in silver holders at points around it, as if they’d been allowed to burn down. One had been knocked over, spilling pooled wax across the floor; it could have been a fire hazard if there had been anything down here other than the bare concrete to burn.

The chalk circle was made up of multiple concentric rings, each filled with a different set of symbols. Pierce was no expert on ritual geometry, but she’d visited enough scenes in her time to get a vague feel for the common themes. This design gave the impression of being cobbled together from multiple different sources: the symbols inside the protective rings mixed various runic alphabets with Greek letters, and even nonsense words in pseudo-Latin.

As she studied the Latin letters, her mind nagged insistently that something was wrong with the picture. It still took several moments of staring at the chalked inscription before she twigged: the letters were the right way up on the
far
side of the circle, upside-down nearest her.

The words had been written by someone on the
inside
of the circle.

“Vyner was inside the circle,” she said. “Not trying to summon something. Trying to protect himself.” From a danger that they’d left him exposed to.

“Or this ritual could have been his killer’s work,” Dawson countered. “This is a murder, not a suicide. There was no reason to suspect anybody would come after him. We did this by the book.”

“And maybe that’s the problem.” Pierce held his gaze. “RCU work requires more than just following the letter of the rules. The rules haven’t caught up to what we do.” It was pretty hard to codify a set of police procedures for a job that rarely meant facing the same thing twice.

“Can’t predict everything,” Dawson said, unrepentant. “I know your last big case went tits up, but there’s no taking the risks out of the job. Can’t take this kind of shit too personally.”

She might have said something undiplomatic at that point, but a creak of the floorboards up above reminded her that they’d already technically been kicked off the crime scene. Having a loud argument wasn’t likely to encourage the locals to tolerate them lingering. Instead, she jerked her head towards the stairs. “Ask them if they’re willing to let our people in to process the secondary scene down here,” she said. “If not, make sure they agree to send us copies of their photos.”

Bugger all chance of cooperation on the first and little of timely compliance on the second, but it bought her a few moments to linger. As Dawson headed up the stairs, no doubt taking the non-sequitur as a concession he’d won the argument, Pierce drew out her camera phone and snapped a few shots of the ritual circle. Nothing that they’d be able to use as evidence in court, but the odds of getting anybody convicted for drawing on a floor in chalk were stone cold zero in any case, regardless of what the pattern might be meant to do. At least she’d have her own photo record of the design to research and maybe pass on to Doctor Moss.

She’d be a fool to rely on the local police helping her do her job—and, she was becoming increasingly sure, it might not be too wise to bet on Dawson, either.

CHAPTER SIX

P
IERCE HAD BARELY
got back in her car to drive away when she had to pull over to take a call from Deepan. Apparently they’d had a break-in at a gallery in Halifax that matched the MO of a string of artefact thefts over the past few months: ritual mask snatched from the wall without any attention paid to the more valuable pieces on display. She left Dawson in charge of following up on Vyner’s movements—not without some misgivings—and went to join Deepan at the scene.