Weirdo (13 page)

Sean looked back at Smollet, whose eyes rested one more beat on Rivett before returning to Sean with a brief smile, nodding his assent. Sean got to his feet, feeling the tension between the two men, wondering which one of them was really in charge.

Detective Sergeant Paul Gray looked through the hatch at the girl he’d apprehended under the pier. She was sitting on the iron bed with a book in her lap, flicking through the pages without giving the appearance of taking anything in. Her left foot bobbed up and down frantically and she was chewing hard at her gum, constantly pushing her ragged hair out of her eyes. Trying to look tough, he supposed.

She hadn’t come in quietly, unlike the old pervert he’d been trailing. Like so many of his kind, he’d started snivelling the moment he was cuffed, and throughout his interview remained meekly acquiescent. Now he sat blowing into his hanky at the end of the cellblock, awaiting a lift to the magistrates in the morning.

This one had given no ground, except for her correct age, fifteen. She hadn’t been doing anything, she maintained, just going for a walk on the beach and what was the law against that? Unfortunately for her, rules stipulated that school children had to be kept at the station until a parent, social worker or head teacher could be informed. Once she realised she couldn’t just walk out again, she had exploded.
It had taken all of Gray’s patience to wheedle out her name and address; that and the duty sergeant’s suggestion that she be allowed to keep her precious book with her while she waited in the cells.

Roy Mobbs had close to twenty years’ experience on Gray. Said the surname Woodrow rang a bell with him somewhere. When Gray came back with the mother’s name, it triggered his powers of recall: he slapped a palm across his forehead and picked up the phone, got the name of her social worker from the girl’s headmaster instead. They were now waiting for a Mrs Sheila Alcott to arrive.

Corrine looked up from her book, realising she was being watched.

“D’you want anything?” Gray asked, trying to sound friendly. “Cup of tea? Coffee?”

She stared at him, surprise passing across her face. “Cup of tea would be nice,” she concluded.

She was seven years older than Gray’s own daughter.

“How d’you like it? Milk and sugar?”

Corrine nodded. “Two sugars, please,” she said. “You got any biscuits?”

Gray brought it into the cell himself. He was concerned, in the way of a father rather than a policeman, as to how she had ended up like this.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the mug from him and clutching it in both hands. Close up, her eyes looked like a panda’s, surrounded by smudged make-up.

“I found you these, and all,” Gray had filched a couple of custard creams, put them on a saucer. The girl demolished them in seconds, then slurped noisily at her tea. Skinny little thing, she was. Gray wondered when was the last time she’d been fed.

He glanced at the book she’d left face down on the bed. It was an old volume, bound in black leather, and adorned with gold-leaf etchings – a queen with a crown, a man on a camel, a dragon with outstretched wings – that resembled a medieval bestiary.

The Goetia
, he read,
The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, Clavicula Salomonis Regis
.

Was it some kind of history book? It hardly seemed likely.

Translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers
, he read on.
Edited with an introduction by Aleister Crowley
.

“What you now reading?” he asked, trying to think where he had heard the name Crowley before.

Black-painted fingernails immediately snatched the book away. “Why d’you care?” the mask of hostility came up over her features as swiftly as it had been dropped. “You in’t takin’ it. It’s a rare book, what was en-trust-ed to me,” she stumbled over the last sentence, like it was a line she’d had to practise. “I gotta keep it safe.” The biscuit saucer and tea mug now discarded, she clutched the tome across her chest with both arms.

“Hey, now,” Gray fought the urge to laugh, not wanting to seem to mock the girl. She had shown a certain cunning earlier this evening, but it was clear she had the emotional volatility of a much younger child. “I got no intention of taking it from you, I just in’t seen nothing like it before. Is it part of your school work, or something?”

Corrine’s expression shifted from aggression to puzzlement. “Noooo,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “But, I s’pose you could say I am learnin’ from it.”

“That’s good then,” said Gray. “What kind of thing?”

The girl tilted her head sideways and stared at him through narrowed eyes. “How to protect myself,” she eventually said.

All Gray’s feelings of amusement drained away. “Right,” he said. “Well, I can see …”

A rap on the door cut his sentence short. “Paul, you in there?” Roy Mobbs’ voice came through the hatch. “Social worker’s now here.”

“Right,” he said. “Better show her in, then.”

“Oh, fuckin’ hell!” were Corrine’s words of greeting to this news. She scrabbled up the bed until her back was against the wall, drawing her feet up beneath her. As Gray turned to open the door, he saw her shove her book underneath her grubby top and bring her arms down defiantly on top of it.

On the other side of the cell door stood a short woman with frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a brown anorak. She looked like she had just been disturbed from her gardening.

“Sheila Alcott,” she said, offering a red hand. “In there, is she?”

“That’s right,” said Gray. Sheila might have had the look of a rural hippy, but there was an edge to her voice that suggested the schoolmarm.

“DS Paul Gray,” he said, “pleased to meet you, Mrs Alcott.”

“I came as quick as I could,” Sheila said, concern in her watery blue eyes. “I’m afraid I live at the other end of the Acle Straight and I was up to my ears in compost when you called. I hope I haven’t kept you unduly.”

She took a spotted handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. There was a piece of straw sticking out from the tangled depths of her hair.

“I’ve been afraid this sort of thing would happen to Corrine before too long,” she went on. “Might I be allowed a few words with her, then?”

Gray was just opening his mouth to reply when a loud
female voice resounded down the corridor.

“Where is she, then? What you now done with my daughter, you bunch of old bastards?”

Gray looked up at the woman who stomped towards them, a blazing fury flashing in her coal dark eyes.

“Oh dear,” said the social worker. “You’ve found Mrs Woodrow, then.”

No one had summoned her, except, Gray thought, for the jungle drums that beat beneath the pavements of Ernemouth, the grapevine that seemed to exist between the walls and the stones in the places Mrs Woodrow’s sort hung out.

Though, she didn’t look how he would have expected. She wasn’t ravaged by the sins of her lifestyle with an emaciated figure, bad skin and lank, greasy hair. Instead, she resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor in black biker’s leathers, clouds of raven hair falling down around her shoulders.

“Where is the little bitch?” she demanded, pulling up on six-inch platform heels.

* * *

Corrine’s blood turned to ice as the screaming match began outside. She tried desperately to recall the things that Noj had started to teach her, the incantations she was supposed to say against her mother’s power. But the terror of hearing the old bitch’s voice and the thought of her getting her hands on the sacred book had turned her mind into a raging blank, like a television set left on after the last programme had gone off the air.

She hadn’t been supposed to take any of Noj’s books when she left his house this afternoon. But she had wanted to learn more quickly. Desperately, she pushed it further down her
waistband, hoping against hope that it would somehow go unnoticed.

Then something peculiar happened.

Noj’s eyes appeared in her mind, clear, green and focused. The static in her head dissipated as his voice poured into her ears, telling her what she should do. “Close your eyes, Corrine. A sphere of white light is around you. Can you see it?” Corrine nodded. Behind her eyelids, she conjured forth a shimmering ball of white light.

“Now watch as the light starts to blur, and takes on the colours and shapes of the room around you.” Corrine had the strangest sensation, as if she had started floating through the air. She could see the mousey-beige blanket, the green-grey paint of the cell walls and the mud-brown of the floor passing through her arms and down her body. All the sounds in the corridor outside disappeared as she felt the circle of light enfold her.

“Fade into the light,” she heard Noj say. “Fade into the light and disappear.”

She didn’t hear the door open, nor see the shapes of several people standing over her.

“She’s passed clean out,” said Sheila Alcott, gently lifting Corrine’s right eyelid.

“In that position?” Gray said. Corrine was sitting bolt upright.

“She’s catatonic,” Sheila spoke as one who had seen this sort of thing many times before. “We need to call an ambulance.”

* * *

Corrine woke up with a strange smell in her nose. Blinking rapidly, she tried to take in her surroundings. It took her a few
moments to grasp that she was in a hospital bed, and another few more to realise how she must have got here.

There was a brief moment of panic when she thought she had lost Noj’s precious book. But when she turned her head she could see it, sitting safely on top of the table by her bed. Her mother, the police and the social worker were all gone and everything was quiet – she wasn’t in a general ward but in a little room of her own. Sunlight slanted across the sheets from the blinds on the window.

That was when Corrine knew that magick really worked.

Sean arranged the mugshots on the table in front of him. Corrine’s known associates, arrested after Gray had caught her at the murder site, all subsequently released without charge. Their statements, paper-clipped to the back of the photos, attesting to the fact that one raid on Captain Swing’s public house had netted virtually the lot of them.

Familiar faces jumped out at him.

Marc Anthony Farman, 14, of 52 Regent’s Road, Ernemouth. Pupil of Ernemouth High School. Cautioned for truancy and underage drinking.

The pub’s current landlord, starting out as he meant to go on.

Shaun Terence McDonald, 18, of 23 Havelock Road, Ernemouth. Employee of Maples Poultry.

The man with the crutch and the friendly face. Then there was his mate Bugs, or to give him a formal introduction,
Harvey Matthew Bunton, 20, of 74 Scratby Road, South Town, Ernemouth. Employee of Locke & Co Transit.

The skinhead and the punk who had been playing pool the night earlier were, respectively, Kristian Kemper and Damon Patrick Bull, then both eighteen, of a shared address at 21A
St Peter’s Road and employed by the council as landscape gardeners. Which maybe explained the attention they paid to the foliage on their heads.

So, thought Sean, keying their details into his laptop, you are the old tribe.

Three hours into his excavation of Ernemouth’s records, he felt the first prickling of the old excitement, like a hound picking up a scent off the breeze. These faces in front of him were his first tangible leads back in time. He picked up the punk’s mugshot, heard Farman saying: “
That old sign was a bit corny, so Bully done a better one
…”

The youthful Bully bore a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle that he’d done little to tone down since.

Rivett had found all the files that matched with Sean’s list. But as hard as he stared at them, he couldn’t make out in any of their faces a suggestion of the one he had been most certain he would find – the girl with the tattooed hand.
Where are you?
thought Sean.
Who are you?

He drummed his fingers on the tabletop, opened up his email. One from Francesca, using a private Hotmail, rather than her work account, telling him that she had found a retired social worker who had once been Corrine’s caseworker and was about to pay her a visit.

Sean closed the message and swivelled in his chair. Down in the basement was a different world from Smollet’s streamlined station above. Alf Brown, who looked after the records from within a steel and Plexiglass podule, was another old-timer who must have been teetering on the brink of retirement, with a balding dome and drooping moustache, the stub of a pencil stuck behind his left ear.

The rest of the floor space was divided into cubicles with
corkboards, many of them sporting vintage crime prevention posters, curled and yellowing with age. The remains of the old incident room, Sean couldn’t help but think. Boxes of unfiled paperwork crowded the desktops, but only one young PC was inputting any of it, keeping his head down, fingers tapping steadily away.

Across from Sean, sitting at a vintage Apple Mac almost bigger than the desk it had been placed on, Rivett was clicking a keyboard, eyes running up and down his monitor. An old transistor, hidden somewhere within Alf’s chamber of filing cabinets, was tuned into Radio 3, the distant chimes of classical music adding a funereal air to the proceedings.

Sean wondered if it was always this quiet or if an exception had been made for his visit.

“Len,” he said.

Rivett turned his head. “Yes, detective?”

“You said you might be able to find me a number for Paul Gray?”

Rivett raised an eyebrow. “That’s right, I did,” he said. “Two ticks.”

He lifted the receiver, pressed a digit and said: “Oh, hello, Jan, it’s Len. Reckon you could find me a number for Paul Gray? That’s right. That’s the one. Thank you.” He scribbled something down on a Post-it note.

“There you go,” Rivett offered the number without rising, so that Sean had to get to his feet and walk across to him.

“That’s local,” said Rivett, “Sandringham Avenue. Over North Denes way.”

“Thanks,” said Sean, sitting down to dial. He was in luck. A man answered after the third ring, sounded cheerful as he repeated the number and then said: “Hello.”