The Secrets of Life and Death (39 page)

‘Sorry to get you out so early, Professor. But we seem to have strange markings all over this scene.’

Felix tried to look as if he had never been in the area before, but a feeling of evil and death made him shiver inside his jacket. ‘Was it arson?’

‘We’re not sure. There’s no immediate evidence of accelerants, but the damage to the body was severe. Extreme, really, almost a complete cremation, like a gas leak or an industrial accident.’

‘There was a death?’

Soames took his arm and pulled him to one side. Felix could see a small crowd of people watching, being kept back by crime-scene tape and a couple of officers. One woman was sobbing in the arms of a female officer.

‘The mother’s turned up. We have been looking for a girl, Sadie Williams. This may be her.’

Felix wrapped his arms around himself. ‘So, how can I help?’

Soames pulled out his mobile phone. ‘I’ll get you clearer pictures, but we found these on the floor of the chapel.’

Squinting at the small screen, Felix could see charred and incomplete sigils, but recognised the fire elemental’s summoning circle.

Soames looked at the phone himself. ‘It’s a hell of a coincidence that two girls have ended up dead around these drawings.’

Felix squinted at them, then shook his head. ‘I’ll need to examine them more closely, of course, but these are quite different from the Dee symbols found on the girl on the train.’ He shrugged, handing back the phone. ‘It’s possible they are just a craze, maybe something to do with a band or a social-networking phenomenon. If this girl ran away from home, maybe she was squatting here.’

‘Maybe. Forensics are looking into a gas explosion, or some sort of fire following an attempt to heat the chapel or cook food. We’ll know better when the building is safe. Most of the roof has already come down, but the rooms at the back are still smouldering, and unstable.’ He met Felix’s eyes. ‘I was hoping you could slip a quick report regarding these markings in with your other report, keep department costs down.’

‘Well, I don’t see why not. Tragic case, sad. I’ll get a couple of my students on it. There may be a whole world of occult-like markings raging over the Internet that no one over the age of twenty would even think to look into.’

He turned to go, then looked back to the police officer. Soames was watching the sobbing mother with a grimace on his face.

Felix lowered his voice. ‘I was wondering. How do you know it was the Williams girl?’

‘We don’t, but we have DNA,’ answered Soames. ‘Blood and tissue was retrieved at the scene. A preliminary blood-group match, and height and weight estimates, say it’s likely to be the girl. It’ll take days to confirm it, of course, the remains are badly degraded by heat. There’s very little left of the body, even the teeth.’ He sighed. ‘Poor kid. She wasn’t even fifteen.’

Felix walked through the small crowd to his car, parked behind ranks of police vehicles. As he opened the door, he heard a voice behind him.

‘Wait!’

‘Excuse me?’

He turned, to see a short woman with red hair and Sadie’s heart-shaped face. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face puffy with crying. ‘Have you seen – did you see the body?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘I just need to know, if it’s her. My daughter, Sadie.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, looking around for someone to take care of her. ‘I can’t comment. You’ll have to talk to DI Soames.’

‘They won’t tell me anything.’ She gulped, sniffing back more tears. ‘I just want to know if she suffered.’

‘I’m sure whoever that is in there, they didn’t suffer.’ It was the best he could do. ‘They think it must have been instant, as far as I can tell. Please, go with the officer.’

She wrenched herself out of the hold of the policewoman, and grasped his arm. ‘And the other girl, the one on the train. Was she hurt, was she abused?’

He laid his fingers over her small hand, so like Sadie’s. ‘I can assure you that the other girl was well cared for, and had a very gentle death. I have no reason to think that she was abused in any way.’ This had the virtue of being true, he thought, but seeing the woman dissolve into wrenching sobs in the arms of the policewoman was still painful.

As he drove away, he could feel the sting of guilt at keeping her child’s survival from her. Although, as Sadie had not improved overnight, survival did seem a relative term.

Jack brushed the hair off her face as she sipped the coffee and ate a biscuit. The organic, fair-trade café had a few customers lost in their morning papers or taking advantage of the Wi-Fi. Pierce looked less scruffy than usual, but the waitress still had a pained look on her face as she took his order. He sat opposite Jack, his jaw moving, as if he was practising what to say.

‘Have a biscuit, Pierce,’ Jack said, pushing the plate over. She was too tired, too emotionally numb, to worry about his games.

He took one, frowned at it as if it might be a trap.

‘Just eat it.’ She sighed, sipped more of her coffee, and looked out of the window at the Christmas shoppers bustling by.

‘The kid in the chapel, that was the girl they wanted?’

She shrugged. ‘That’s all over now.’

‘I lost money, big time. This better not be hexed.’ He bit into the biscuit anyway.

‘I don’t think you would have lived to collect, honestly.’ She waved at the waitress to top her up, smiled thanks at her. ‘She was out of your league. Out of both our leagues. Old-style sorcery.’

‘So you said before.’ He nodded as the waitress brought his pot of tea. ‘This is all very civilised, Jackdaw. What do you want?’

‘I want to know if we’re still doing business.’ She shrugged. ‘I have other clients, but it’s handy working with you because you’re local.’

He stared at her. ‘You don’t trust me.’

She started to laugh. ‘Trust you? I thought we had an arrangement that you would try and get my merchandise for free, as often as possible.’

He grinned, baring his teeth like a terrier. ‘I do like our little … games.’

Her smile faded. There was something odd about his features, as if they had been exaggerated somehow, the nose too sharp, the eyes too small, the cheekbones high and heavy under projecting brow ridges. His hands, on the cup, seemed too large for his wrists.

‘What are you, really?’ she breathed, and for a long moment she thought he hadn’t heard her over the slurping of his tea. ‘Part goblin or something?’ She was only half joking.

‘I could ask you the same question.’ He flashed a look at her under bushy eyebrows. ‘ ’Cos you ain’t exactly human.’

‘I’m the dealer who keeps you in legitimate profit.’ She leaned back in her chair, watching him.

‘I’m your loyal customer, buying products for my clients, all legal and above board.’ He put his hand into his pocket and withdrew a piece of folded paper. ‘And they do have a bit of a shopping list.’

She took the greasy note, and spread it out on the table with just her fingertips. ‘God, Pierce, why does it stink? Have you got a couple of ferrets in there?’

He shrugged. ‘Best price for a good local customer?’

Most of the items were rare herbs, easily sourced from the cottage garden, and a few animal products like bone and hair. A couple of potions devised by Maggie, one for healing and one for protection. ‘I don’t know, a thousand?’

‘A thousand?’ His voice cracked with indignation. ‘Four hundred …’

It was good to be bartering with Pierce, away from the complications at the house. She let him ramble on, arguing the case item by item. She’d take six hundred, and he would pay it. She swung an amber pendulum gently under the table to check for spells, curses, hexes or traps, but for once, he seemed undefended. Here, away from the mundane world it was fun to have one foot in the magical, even as she mentally chanted the activation spell for the ‘speechless’ cookie. His words trailed away, and he glared at her. She smiled, finished her coffee, and nodded. ‘Six hundred it is, then. See you, Pierce. Enjoy the other biscuits, they’re all fine.’

She paid the bill on the way out.

Jack stretched her shoulders before tackling the stile into the copse. After a month of work, the cottage was being re-plastered and the windows restored before she and Ches could move back into it. Visiting it every day, and walking in the countryside, gave her a necessary relief from nursing Sadie. She was taking the opportunity to update the cottage’s Victorian lead plumbing and the pre-war wiring, so the events of the past were being exorcised by radios playing, men whistling and the smell of drying plaster and paint.

In the oak trees, a few sticks were being retrieved and remodelled into nests. Jack put out food every day for the half-dozen or so rooks that remained, and a handful of jackdaws that seemed to be keeping them company.

She delayed driving back to Felix’s house each afternoon, watching Ches delight in the smells of the winter animals criss-crossing the grass. McNamara had disappeared back into his organisation, and the only text from him had said he had been recalled to Rome. Báthory’s remaining ashes and bones had been interred in Sadie’s grave, in a ceremony attended by hundreds of well-wishers. Maggie was slower than usual but fighting for recovery. She helped nurse Sadie during each day, with Charley and Felix, if he wasn’t teaching. But in the evening, when she went back to town, and Felix returned from work, there was no escaping the consequences of what they had done.

Jack whistled for Ches, and he lumbered towards her, tongue lolling from his mouth. Being so close to death seemed to have slowed him down a little. He was often found lying on the thick rug in front of Felix’s open fireplace, whining until someone lit the coals. The cat had been picked up by Marianne but had returned the same day, apparently unwilling to leave the territory to the dog.

Marianne.

Jack had opened the door, a few days after the battle, still punch-drunk. She had a black eye, a yellowing bruise on the other side of her face, her short hair wet from a shower, and she was wearing old clothes of Felix’s. The woman – still Felix’s wife, she remembered – was taller than Jack, dark-blonde hair running down onto her tailored suit. She was beautiful, and had a warm smile.

Jack had felt like a ragamuffin child, even though Marianne was far too polite to say anything, other than to enquire after the cat. She, Marianne, had kissed Felix warmly on the cheek and exclaimed at his bruises and the scratches across his neck and face. Their explanation of a car accident seemed to satisfy her, but then Felix had led her into the kitchen and closed the door on Jack. She had seen the way he looked at his wife, as if no one else existed, and it made her feel hollow inside.

So she had retired upstairs to the bedroom where the comatose teenager lay, both arms swathed in dressings. The cuts didn’t bleed, but they didn’t heal either, the ugly tears in the flesh grey against red muscle underneath.

Every evening, Felix brought her food, failed to start a conversation, then retired to his study to work. She had become embarrassed by his presence, and by the mute unconsciousness of the girl. Finally, he had gone to the States for two weeks to teach. When he came back, it was as if they had lost the ability to talk to each other altogether.

As the weeks went on, Sadie’s face was retreating, her skull advancing, as she shrivelled from lack of food and drink. Roisin the seer was also a midwife and she helped them place a tube up Sadie’s nose into her stomach. For a while, they infused a little water into the child, but hours later Maggie could draw it back with a syringe, so they withdrew the tube and went back to researching her condition. Jack could remember, as a child, reading about some saintly nun who fell into a trance and didn’t eat or drink for years. She couldn’t recall how the story ended.

As she walked up the slope into the treeline, she could feel new energy flowing through her. Sadie’s sacrifice had been Jack’s gain, and she had argued that perhaps her own blood could help the child, if that energy was somehow transmissible. But Felix was adamant: if Jack was infected with some dangerous contagion, at least she could fight it. His research had taken him to websites and groups all over the world. Maggie was involved in that side of it, but Jack wouldn’t discuss it.

She called the dog to her side, and clipped the lead onto his harness. The walk back to the cottage was wintry, and a misting of fine rain blew into her face, but she no longer slowed down in the cold.

A beep alerted her to a message on her phone. She didn’t recognise the number.

‘Expert at Vatican suggests the blood that gave life could save girl. M.’

Blood that gave life. Jack, for a moment felt vindicated, maybe her own blood could be used … then it dawned on her. Blood that gave Sadie life. She ran back to the car.

‘Mrs Williams?’ Jack didn’t have to ask, the woman was the image of Sadie.

The woman pushed the door closed again without a word, but then paused. She opened it a few inches, staring past Jack at Felix.

‘You’re not press.’ Her voice was flat, as if all emotion had been burned away.

‘I’m Professor Guichard, we met—’

‘I remember. You were helping the police.’ Her eyes looked like they’d been scoured, they were swollen and raw, filling up with tears. ‘You know something. You know who killed my daughter. The police say it was an accident, but I know she wouldn’t …’

Felix hesitated, looking at Jack.

She reached out a hand, caught one of the woman’s. ‘Mrs Williams, we need to show you something. We think it will make you feel better. But we can’t let the press catch even a hint of this.’
Or the police.
‘Can you come with us? Would anyone be surprised or worried if you went out for a while?’

‘I can leave a note.’ Mrs Williams looked at them, clearly desperate for answers. ‘Come in. I’ll just say I needed to spend some time on my own. Let me get my coat.’

While she went off, Jack and Felix followed her in. The second-floor flat was a mess, a bottle of vodka open in the lounge, papers all over the floor. Photographs of Sadie covered every inch of the windowsill, with vases that scented the room with the bitterness of decaying flowers.