by F. G. Cottam
‘It only happened at the graveside,’ Father Gould said. ‘It certainly didn’t happen prior to that, in the church.’
‘Though there was an atmosphere you thought strange there,’ Paul said. ‘So maybe not prolonged contact. Maybe contact that was second hand, once removed.’
Juliet said, ‘Can we exclude gravediggers?’
‘They weren’t present until after the service.’
‘So, one of the mourners,’ Juliet said.
‘Or one of your altar boys,’ Paul said.
‘I’ve brought the book of condolence with me,’ Father Gould said. ‘It’s in the boot of my car. That will furnish the names of the mourners, though not their addresses. There were six boys serving on the altar that day. One of them was aboard the Esmeralda. One of them is fishing with his grandfather in Ireland. I’d be very surprised if any of the remaining four is still in London. My parish is in Crouch End, which is pretty much unscathed. But the locale is deserted. I’ll be performing the sacrament of mass on Sunday. If the congregation is in double figures, I’ll be amazed.’
Paul said, ‘People have lost their faith?’
‘After the cathedral fires? What do you think?’
‘Things are happening where they are because the Almanac is there,’ Juliet said. ‘There’ll be an epicentre, I suppose, but the area affected spreads across Greater London. Give me the contact details of the altar boys who served that day. I’ve had a meeting already with the Met Police Commissioner. She’s a woman more than capable of diplomacy. It’ll be handled tactfully, I promise.’
‘No dawn raids?’
‘There’s been enough drama, Father,’ Paul said. ‘We just need to find the Almanac.’
Juliet said, ‘Going back to London when you leave here, Father?’
‘Why is that important?’
‘I’d appreciate a lift. I need to get to Kennington and the War Museum.’
The priest smiled. He said, ‘It used to be the lunatic asylum, you know. Bedlam. Except that all of London is bedlam now.’
FORTY
At midday on Friday, standing on tiptoe and straining her calf muscles to reach the front door spy hole, Dawn Jackson saw that the person who had rung their bell was a uniformed police officer. He looked to her a bit like a medieval knight, prepared to mount his charger and gallop into battle. He wore articulated armour to protect his limbs. He had on a stab vest. When he stood back to look in an upstairs window she saw there was a utility belt around his waist, equipped with a Taser and handcuffs and a baton and pepper spray. A radio-phone crackled in a Velcro sheath on the left side of his chest and he carried a helmet with a Perspex visor under his right arm.
They all looked like this, now. And Dawn knew why. They were on high alert because of the looting and rioters, what the TV commentators called the ‘feral gangs’ from the teen underworld taking advantage of current circumstances to exact fatal revenge in long-running feuds, mostly on sink council estates in the inner city. They were a disproportionately large section of London’s remaining population because the affluent inner-city dwellers had fled the former capital.
Dawn wasn’t in the inner city. She was in a rather grand house on a sedate street full of such houses in a genteel suburb. That was why the police officer was alone. That was why he wasn’t with half a dozen colleagues and a van at the kerb, with his baton drawn or his Taser out, or struggling to contain a slavering German Shepherd dog on a heavy chain lead.
At that moment, before opening the door, Dawn was very glad that she had got rid of her clumsily animate dead brother. She was relieved the police officer couldn’t see her dead grandfather waiting for the bus that never came in his piss-stained pyjama pants and soiled singlet by one of the upstairs windows. She was thankful that she had flushed away the last two survivors of the Great Terrapin Cannibal War down the loo and sneaked the foul-smelling fish tank into a skip outside an address several doors down from hers where presumably remedial work really was being done. The spell book was safely buried again in the back garden.
Thursday evening had been industrious for Dawn. All mundane enough, nothing fancy or downright miraculous, but therapeutic after the upsetting images of St Paul’s Cathedral flattened to a field of smouldering rubble.
There was other stuff she could do nothing about. There was the killjoy in the garden who came and went. But he tended to manifest mostly just before dusk, as though the effort of manifesting had taken him all day. There were the disconcerting mirrors, but Dawn could do nothing about the mirrors, except maybe try to pass them off as antiques, or an unusual hobby, if the police officer asked. And she was going to let him in, just as she had invited in the priest. She wasn’t going to ignore the knock. Dawn thought of herself as a grasp-the-nettle sort of girl. As well as being one who absolutely wasn’t on the spectrum.
She opened the door.
‘Afternoon, young lady.’
‘Only just.’
That made him frown and look at his wristwatch. An encouraging start, even if the watch itself was one of those cheap digital jobs.
‘Come in, officer,’ she said.
He showed her his ID. He told her he was Police Constable Richard Jones. That matched what it said on the laminated card he’d shown her. He shook hands with her, but she didn’t return the compliment by telling him her own name.
She tried to lead him straight to the study, but he paused in the hallway. He said, ‘I’m looking for Peter Jackson?’
And Dawn thought, You’ll be lucky.
‘Is he at home?’
‘He’s my brother. My granddad’s taken him on a fishing trip until the schools reopen. They’re in Ireland.’
‘So you’re Dawn Jackson. And you’re home alone.’
‘But like the boy in the film, I’m more than capable. Also, I’m fourteen, so no laws are being broken.’
‘Mind if I have a look around?’
Dawn didn’t like that question much. But she just smiled sweetly and said, ‘Be my guest.’
He headed for the drawing room and Dawn felt her heart flutter. That was where the mirror hung with the pale, beautiful lady wearing all the bling. It was positioned over a rather grand marble fireplace, stone veined in purple and green, which her granddad had told her had been quarried just outside Florence, in Italy.
The police officer walked around the room. Then he turned to the mirror and the bling beauty portrayed there. And he raised a hand and finger-combed a hair that must have been ruffled out of place when he’d taken off his helmet after ringing the bell. And Dawn realized that all he could see in the mirror was his reflection. The portraits were solely for her. Her next, slightly hysterical, thought was, Cash in the Attic. Along with a recently discharged Luger pistol.
But Constable Jones only looked around the ground floor. He didn’t have a search warrant, after all. It wasn’t as though Dawn had committed a crime. Well, not one anyone living or sentient knew about.
‘Is your brother contactable? Does he have a mobile?’
‘He does, but he left it behind.’
‘Isn’t that a bit unusual? Most youngsters are glued to their phones.’
‘That’s true, but it’s also true that adolescents are extremely forgetful. And Grandpa might have encouraged Pete to forget his phone. Might have incentivized Pete’s forgetfulness with a bribe. He likes solitude, my grandpa. That’s why he chose Ireland, where solitude is not in short supply.’
‘Do you know where they’re staying? Is there a booking confirmation with a landline contact number?’
Having felt neutral when she opened the door, Dawn was liking this police officer less and less. ‘Grandpa hired a camper van,’ she said. ‘They’re moving from fishing spot to fishing spot. A bit of sea fishing from a boat. A bit of freshwater from a river bank. All over, basically.’
‘And Grandpa doesn’t have a mobile?’
‘Doesn’t believe in them.’
‘I see.’
‘No fixed sc
hedule. They’ll just book with Ryanair on the day when school announces it’s reopening or they get fed up.’
He was watching her now with an expression she didn’t much like. She rather wished she hadn’t put the attic Luger back. Despite its age, that pistol worked a treat. But there’d be a rota at the station. People would know Constable Jones was here. Someone higher up had told him to come. He’d been ordered to do this. If she shot him, the trail would lead straight to her.
‘What’s this about, officer? What’s my brother done?’
He didn’t answer her. He took out a small spiral-bound notebook and wrote something in it and ripped off the page. He said, ‘As soon as you hear from your brother, or your grandfather, get them to ring this number without delay.’
‘I will.’
She was showing him to the front door, trying not to skip along the carpet with sheer relief, when he paused and looked her directly in the eye and said, ‘Has your brother recently come into possession of a book?’
‘Pete isn’t much of a reader. Not even comics. What kind of book?’
‘An old-fashioned book. An antique book, really. Probably bound in leather or vellum. Do you know what vellum is, Dawn?’
‘What they used to bind books with in the olden days?’
‘Exactly. This book is probably handwritten rather than printed using a press. Heavy, stiff paper pages. Probably coarsely textured by modern standards. Maybe scripted in Latin. Can Pete read Latin?’
‘My brother can barely read his name. He’d struggle with the text on a box of breakfast cereal.’
This wasn’t all that far off the truth. The latest iteration of Pete had shown zero interest in literature. Anyway, where she’d put him there were neither books nor the light to read them by.
‘That description ring any bells, Dawn? You strike me as a reader, with your very grown-up vocabulary. You’re a bright girl. Have you seen a book like that?’
‘I can say for certain that I haven’t. A book like you’ve described, even though I couldn’t read it, I’d hardly forget it. It sounds unique.’
The police officer said goodbye.
Dawn watched from one of the upstairs windows as he walked away. There’d be a colleague in a patrol car a discreet distance down the road. They travelled in pairs these days. It just wasn’t safe to do otherwise. The country faced two crises, one international and the other domestic, and Dawn knew that the reverberations, the Auguries from her use of the spell book, had created both of those.
She didn’t think Constable Jones had really been suspicious of her. He’d asked probing questions and they’d been inconvenient to have to bat away. But he’d only really been following a protocol. The questions had seemed aggressive and intrusive, but that was only because she had so much to hide. They’d been thorough questions, but they’d been routine.
The bigger inconvenience was that someone knew the spell book was being used. And they were actively trying to find it. Someone had believed bloody Andy Baxter’s graveside story about the unrestful dead. Peter hadn’t believed it, not at first – which was ironic, because moments after she’d killed him he’d personally treated her to a pretty good demonstration of the phenomenon.
They were going after the altar boys from that graveside episode. They might go after the priest. They’d go after the mourners. And when everyone except for her brother had proven their innocence, they’d be back asking for Pete again.
Was she worried? Yes and no, Dawn thought. It was entirely plausible for two inexperienced sailors to get into trouble in the volatile Atlantic waters off the west coast of Ireland.
When they came back, she’d remember that her grandpa had planned to fish with his grandson off the coast of County Clare, near the Cliffs of Moher. That was a hazardous spot, even in June. This cover story left the loose end of the camper van, but you could always infer that some of Ireland’s travelling community were responsible for its disappearance. Dawn didn’t much like pandering to prejudice, but sometimes you just had to do what you had to do.
FORTY-ONE
April 10, 1530
They are here, finally assembled. They are Lorenz Hood from the Austrian Tyrol, Tiberius van Vaunt from the Netherlands, Cordelia Cortez from Spain, Mary Nye from England and of course their infernal recruiter and leader, Gunter Keller from Lower Saxony in the Germanic lands.
Mary Nye is unprepossessing in appearance for all her apparent talents. Hood could be Keller’s brother, even his twin, given the commonality of their sour and arrogant expressions. But van Vaunt has the venerable air of a distinguished scholar and the Spanish countess Cortez carries herself regally and is a porcelain-skinned, swan-necked, raven-haired beauty. It is a cold beauty, though, in truth. A glance from her is a shard of ice through the heart.
I have put them in my own hunting lodge on the edge of Dartmoor, so they have spacious berths and all home comforts in an isolated spot behind a high wall. The gate is secured by a dozen pike-men hand-picked by the king from his personal bodyguard. Their loyalty is intense, their warrior spirit forged in battle and their silence on the matter of this singular duty guaranteed.
Henry is in Paris as a guest of King Francis. Matters have not always been so pacific between these two men or between our sometimes fractious countries. Today they are not only allies but victors; they are celebrating the success of their scheme to smoke out and expose the most powerful occultists of our time. And, over time, to end their mischievous lives in just punishment.
Emissaries have been dispatched in secret to each of their homelands to alert the authorities to their identities and their guilt. The finished Almanac will be the proof of this that condemns them. I am to take it personally on a progress to their homelands in a demonstration that will damn them.
These are powerful and dangerous people with an array of lethal skills. They will be weakened before they are seized and tried, probably, I am told, with doses of poison. This poison, skilfully measured and secretly administered, will debilitate each of them to the point that makes arrest possible without their gaolers or their judges being harmed by enchantment as they carry out their rightful duties.
Before the king departed Dover, I asked him why not simply administer a fatal dose of this deadly draft to each of them now?
‘Justice needs to be seen to be done,’ he said. ‘Their hangings or burnings when they have been judged and condemned are required as a public lesson to others not to dabble in the squalid mischief that so insults our Creator.’
I did not know our monarch, an enthusiast for matters theological, was also such an ardent student of justice. It seems to me he bends the law often to his own will. But that is a private thought and though this enterprise has made us close, his rule has taught me it would be most unwise to share this opinion with so capricious a ruler.
Even as I write, on the edge of the wilderness that horrid litter of magicians pool their arcane knowledge and formulate their spells. That they do so under my roof pains me greatly. They pollute the very place from which I have forayed on the hunt, run down my most prized trophies.
Hunting is one of the few pursuits that permit me some freedom from my melancholy meditations on the daughter we lost. Time has not healed the pain and nor have the passing months lessened my conviction that Keller is guilty of her murder. I now know with certainty that I will have my retribution, but that conviction brings no comfort either. I have paid an unpayable price in my service to the Crown. It is all I can sanely tolerate, and I only tolerate it at all for the sake of my lovely wife and noble sons.
They will be here, they say, for six weeks or so. Six seems a number close to their frozen hearts. They demand luxuries as well as the gold they are being paid. The finest wines. The choicest cuts of meat. Patiently matured cheeses. Fruit fresh and fully ripened. Bread baked daily.
Servants from my own household wait on them for a generous bounty from my own purse. These are people loyal to me and it seemed the most practical and safest way
to proceed. They are instructed to close their eyes and ears to what they see and hear. This only for their own security and safety.
There is a strange affliction of weather in the region for which I believe this ghastly coven responsible. There are sudden deluges of rain from a cloudless sky. There are noxious fogs that yellow the air and choke the breath and make travel on foot or horseback all but impossible. The nights are bright with lightning the colour of the coals in a blacksmith’s forge when the bellows blast at full strength. These jagged bolts paint the land crimson. It looks blood-bathed.
The animals too are behaving strangely. Deer stampede in panicked hordes. Birds fly in a black frenzy of feathers in flocks the size of which I have never in my life before witnessed. Their feathers fall as lazily and thickly as black snowflakes in these episodes and all light is eclipsed.
My dreams have been disturbed. I see a vast metropolis from some godless future flood and fall to ruin. I visit a house with outlandish furnishings were lives alone a little girl attired in strange garments. Last night I dreamed she stared out of a window at Gunter Keller, standing in her garden. The alchemist was not solid, as he is in the flesh. He had the faint fabric of an illusion. It was almost as though he was composed of nothing more solid than smoke.
The girl looks a little like my lost daughter. She has the same green eyes as Matilda. But there is a troubling callousness to her expression which I never saw on my daughter’s face. Nor would I ever have wished to.
It is as though this girl, though prettily featured enough, is unengaged with her world. It is not scorn, or disillusionment, or boredom. It is easier to describe as an absence of something. It is as though something has been abstracted from her. I cannot put it more honestly or plainly than that. And the resemblance to Matilda is not strong enough for the dream to have symbolic significance. I do not believe it to be a portent of anything. The irony is that were it not for my own experiences of the last couple of years, I would not be a superstitious man at all. I am by nature sceptical.
