“So, you know why I called?” she asked.
“Of course! Come and see me? I currently reside at Cambridge, but you probably know that. Have a cup of tea, some cake, tell me your troubles. Is Saturday afternoon good for you?”
***
“Nothing like a nice quiet drink.”
Detective Inspector Westall was being sarcastic. He was having nothing like a nice quiet drink. A central London pub early on a Friday evening was never less than crowded. By a minor miracle, Westall had found a table. The potential informant he had come to meet had just sat down with a pint of stout and a troubled expression.
Westall, used to sizing up people very quickly, judged him to be about forty, working-class, not too prosperous but well above the poverty line. If he’d been a betting man, Westall would have put money on the guy being a petty offender, if that. Not someone comfortable with major crime, but willing to stray a little over the line if the money was right.
“I prefer crowded places,” said the man, glancing around at a densely packed wall of backs and butts. “Less chance of being noticed, I reckon.”
“You may have a point,” conceded Westall. “Everyone’s conspicuous in a half-empty boozer. But what’s so important that you don’t want to be seen talking to a copper?”
The man started to speak, leaning forward, sneaking looks around at the noisy throng.
“I can’t trust the local coppers. They’re in his pocket.”
“His lordship, you mean?” asked Westall. “And you work on his estate, right? Some sort of gamekeeper?”
“Yeah, and general dogsbody on the estate—assistant keeper, there’s three blokes above me. It was all right at first—not too much work. They did some pheasant shooting, drag hunting, nothing fancy. Then things changed. We had to bring in deer, stags mostly—bloody expensive, that. But then we were told to stay indoors, they’d hunt them at night. That was weird, but we were getting paid extra to keep quiet about it—anybody who blabbed would get the sack, that was clear. It was okay for a few months, but then that boy died, and…”
Westall was not a lover of significant pauses in conversations.
“So, Lord Gonfallon was involved in Josh Barnett’s disappearance?”
The gamekeeper shook his head jerkily, took a long gulp of dark beer. Flecks of foam ringed his mouth, but he did not wipe them away. Westall noted this, concluded the man was far out of his comfort zone. That was often the case when people spoke to policemen, of course. But there was more to it than that. The man had a high blink rate, his face was sweaty, he kept shifting in his seat. He was either genuinely frightened or a brilliant method actor.
“It was not a disappearance,” the man said. “That lad died. We were told to go over the grounds carefully and pick up everything that might prove he was ever there. I saw blood. Lots of blood. We were told to cover it over with leaves. And we took the girl, the one who got hit on the head, we took her to the road so she’d be found outside the estate, miles away from where it happened.”
“What happened to the student’s remains?” Westall asked. “It’s not as easy to get rid of a body as it looks on the telly, you know.”
The gamekeeper stared at him, unblinking now.
“Buried, what was left of him. Just a few bits and pieces. He’d been ripped apart, torn limb from limb!”
Westall gave a skeptical snort.
“By what? His lordship got himself a pet tiger, now?”
“By wild animals!” the gamekeeper insisted. “That’s what they’re into now, I reckon. You hear this howling when the hunt begins. Then later, you find deer all torn up and mostly eaten. The lad was badly chewed up. Made me puke, it did. Now they’re talking about bringing in some new blokes, with stronger stomachs, to handle that side of things.”
The man leaned forward, lowered his voice so he was barely audible above the hubbub.
“Thing is, none of us have seen these animals—the ones that do the hunting! How is that possible? Gonfallon turns up with his fancy friends, and they have their fun, but there’s no cages on the estate, no extra meat brought in to feed ’em. Just this one cellar where none of us peasants is allowed to go. But I can’t figure out how they can keep a pack of animals in there. It’s giving me the creeps.”
Westall leaned back, checked his phone casually while he mulled over the story. He could think of no reason why someone would travel a couple of hundred miles to London to lie to him. But he was innately suspicious, and this story was a strange one. And it involved a very rich, very influential man.
“Why me?” he asked. “Why ask for me by name?”
Changing the tack of the conversation sometimes threw a liar off balance. It was also a question Westall wanted answered, though he suspected he already knew.
“I had to come to London anyway, and you were involved in that weird case,” said the gamekeeper, and Westall groaned inwardly. “The one where all those people just went up in smoke. You took a lot of stick for saying it was a mystery, that there was no solution. Inexplicable. Everyone knows that buggered up your career. You stick to your guns, I respect that.”
“SHC,” Westall said glumly. “Spontaneous Human Combustion. I wish I’d never bloody heard of it. Okay, so Lord Gonfallon’s pet wolves or whatever killed this student, and they covered it up. But if so, why didn’t these mysterious animals kill the girl who was with him, too?”
“How should I know?” grunted the other man. “Maybe she’s a fast runner, maybe she climbed a bloody tree! I told you, I don’t know what the beasts are! I only know a bunch of Gonfallon’s posh friends come down at the weekend. We get locked down, then afterward, we clean up the mess.”
To Westall, this was another point in the man’s favor. A liar has an answer for everything. An accomplished liar, anyway. And he had heard rumors over the police grapevine that the American girl had reported an animal attack. The local constabulary had dismissed it. But Westall wondered how much they had done to check the story. The budget of a small force like that would not run to a big search.
“Okay, so would you be willing to swear to any of this?” the detective asked, deciding to cut to the chase. “If not, this is just gossip. I can look into it in my own time, off the books, but a proper inquiry is what’s needed.”
“I would swear to it all on a stack of Bibles if you could protect me,” the man said. “I never signed up for this—it’s murder! And they’ve got a taste for it. That’s why I’m in London…”
The man stopped talking and stared past Westall’s shoulder. Abandoning subtlety, the detective twisted ’round in his seat. He saw no sign that they were being watched, but the gamekeeper was already getting up. In his agitation, the man bumped the small table, and beer slopped over Westall’s shirt and pants.
“Bloody hell, calm down!” he snapped, dabbing at the splashes.
His informant was already pushing through the crush of weekend drinkers, prompting a few insults from men and women as he shoved them and stepped on random toes. A disgruntled Westall decided to flash his ID as he followed.
“Police, please let me through.”
As often happened, the people willing to make way for a police officer were roughly balanced by the number who felt like doing the exact opposite. By the time Westall got out onto the street, his informant was out of sight. It was already dark, and a light rain was beginning to fall. The weekend crowd was thronging the pavements.
He’s got my number if he wants to contact me again, Westall thought. It’s been a long day.
He started to walk to Embankment Tube Station, then decided to live a little and tried to flag down a cab. After three minutes in the increasingly heavy rain, he gave up and resumed his walk to the underground. A blare of horns drew his attention, and a black van screeched around a corner ahead of him. He memorized a partial license plate without thinking. Then he heard women screaming and went into full copper mode, running toward the commotion.
He rounded the corner to find t
wo young women, one of whom was throwing up. Westall took in their black skirts and tights, flat shoes, white blouses and decided they were wait staff, out back for a smoke. Beyond them was a blind alley overflowing with garbage from bars, restaurants, and hotels. It took him a second to see what was wrong. The gamekeeper had been wearing a green waxed jacket and jeans. It was hard to be sure, now the fabric was darkened with so much blood.
Westall took a few paces closer and saw a yellow coil of guts glistening. The face, above the torn remnants of a throat, was familiar. The guy’s blink rate was zero now. Whatever had happened had been quick and brutal. Sighing, he took out his phone and hit speed dial.
Great. Another weird one, he thought.
Chapter 2
Cambridge. Tara had never been there but knew it was one of the two oldest universities in England. The dullness of the rail journey lulled her into a doze, so that, when she saw the place, it felt like waking into another century. Cambridge, seen from outside, looked like a festival of Gothic architecture in the middle of a lot of pleasant, if rather bland, countryside. She inevitably thought of Harry Potter. But as the train pulled into the station, she was returned to modernity, with its confusion of bright colors under the dull November sky.
She checked the large map at the station entrance, though she had already looked up the route to Saint Ananias College. The town was a patchwork of historic buildings and green spaces with improbable names like Midsummer Common, Christ’s Pieces, and her favorite, Butt Green. She smiled at the quirkiness as she traced out her path. St. Ananias was one of the smaller colleges, easy to overlook amid its more famous brethren, but she found it.
Cambridge was full of students at this time of year. In London, Tara had been one of millions and, sometimes, felt overwhelmed by the size of the city. Here, things were built on a more human scale, and she felt oddly at home. The weather collaborated with her mood by rolling away the clouds to allow a surprisingly warm sun to light up the town. She paused at times to gawk like a tourist. The beauty of the place relaxed her, and she felt grateful that it existed. This was the England she had imagined when she’d won a scholarship to London U, a place of solid, ancient traditions, beautiful buildings, a land of legend and history.
St. Ananias College consisted of a few ancient stone-built buildings around a central quadrangle. At the gatekeeper’s lodge, Tara explained that she had an appointment to meet Professor Mortlake. The woman behind the desk, who had seemed bored a moment earlier, perked up when Mortlake was mentioned. She looked at Tara with more interest.
“Do you like lemon meringues or profiteroles?” she asked, picking up a phone. “And do you prefer Assam or Earl Grey?”
“Erm—I’m not picky,” Tara said lamely. “I wasn’t expecting—well, this.”
“Okay,” said the woman, jabbing at buttons. “Professor? Yes, your student is here. Oh, sorry, your client. No, she’s not picky about the cake. Or the tea.”
The woman paused and looked Tara up and down.
“About average, I’d say. No, not obviously anyway.”
Tara felt herself blushing like a teenager and wondered what bits of her might be average. The woman said she was okay to go up and gave her directions, plus a little leaflet that included a map. The college dated from the 15th century, and the stairways were correspondingly steep and narrow. She reached the second floor of the medieval building and saw a row of doors, and a stained-glass window at the end of the corridor. Checking the names, she found Professor Mortlake easily enough and knocked.
“Come in!” came a muffled call from the other side of the oak-paneled door.
She opened the door to be confronted by another one. This took her aback for a moment, then she remembered reading about Cambridge—and Oxford—college apartments having two doors. She knocked on the inner one.
“Yes, keep coming in,” called the voice. “But slowly! Air traffic control is in its infancy at the moment.”
Intrigued, she opened the inner door. A small object buzzed past about a foot ahead of her. It was a toy drone, bright purple, complete with flashing lights. Mortlake stood in the middle of the room, frowning in concentration, as the drone swooped and hovered. He was clad in a turtleneck and jeans, with battered old sneakers. Tara felt a slight uptick of confidence in him.
“Take a seat, Ms. Pride,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll just land the starship.”
Tara sat in a big armchair by a small table laden with tea things and a loaded cake stand. She surveyed the mass of confectionery and could almost feel her arteries hardening. She looked at Mortlake again. He was tall, quite wiry, and showed no sign of a paunch. Either cakes were a rare treat, or he burned up a lot of calories, one way or another.
“There!” said Mortlake, with great satisfaction, as he parked the drone on top of a heap of books by an inner door. “Parked the little blighter. Sorry, I got a bit absorbed in that bit of research.”
He slumped down in a chair opposite Tara and gave her a lopsided smile. His face was not exactly handsome, but she could see an older woman getting there. Mortlake had intelligent eyes, a bit of boyish charm, and a general air of distracted untidiness that proclaimed him an academic.
“Research?” she asked. “Looked like fun.”
“Drones,” he said, leaning forward to lift the silver teapot. “Useful to check out unsafe areas in old buildings and give me eyes in the sky if I’m dealing with a wide area like woodland or, say, a lake. Milk? Or sugar?”
“Just a little milk, thank you,” she said. “You think you can track spooks with a drone?”
“Possibly, but in your case, I thought tracking dangerous beasts might be possible if we were, say, a mile or so away from them.”
“So, you do believe me?” she said eagerly.
Mortlake picked up her teacup on its saucer, handed it around the cake stand. Tara took it, examining the delicate porcelain with its gold banding. Mortlake gestured at the cakes.
“I need you to eat at least one to justify me tucking in,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just me, stuffing my face like a glutton.”
Tara picked up a profiterole and a paper napkin. It was all very civilized, no doubt intended to put her at her ease. Suddenly, she felt very hungry and wolfed down the pastry. Then, licking her fingers, she looked around the room. The books filling every shelf and piled here and there on the floor reminded her of her professor’s office. But this was Mortlake’s home—here, many lecturers still lived in the college, a tradition established long before the Renaissance.
“It is a mess, isn’t it?” remarked Mortlake, pausing in his demolition of a meringue. “I can never say no to a book or a mystery. Or a book of mysteries, obviously. Oh, and that desk supposedly once belonged to Sir Isaac Newton, but I have my doubts as to its provenance. Almost certainly a Victorian knockoff, but fakes can teach us just as much as the real thing sometimes. Now, why did you decide to contact me, a man who might well be a total charlatan?”
Tara laughed, taken off guard. He was clever.
“Nobody is doing anything to help,” she said. “The police gave up and decided Josh was just another missing person. I was told I was confused because it was dark and some wild dogs scared me. There’s no evidence Josh was killed. But I know what I saw. And besides, I’m curious about your card.”
She handed the pieces of card to him. Mortlake put them together and raised an eyebrow.
“Lonely? Just a nickname, not a cry for help. Lonely Jones is one of my contacts in that area. He seems to want credit for every client he sends my way. He sells old books and other interesting items, and we haggle over the prices. This,” he said, waving the bisected card, “gives him a little edge in negotiations. Or so he fondly imagines.”
“Why Lonely?” she asked.
Mortlake smiled at that.
“I take it you didn’t meet him? Not the most prepossessing character, and solitary by nature. But useful. He keeps his ear to the ground and obviously thought your story was pote
ntially interesting. He was right.”
Mortlake finished off an éclair and then sat back, teacup cradled in his lap.
“Mmm, so very delicious and so totally unhealthy! That’s what I call a proper English tea. Tell me what happened, in your own words, and leave nothing out. I mean nothing—no matter how trivial. Or embarrassing. Or ridiculous. I don’t care, it is all data. We’ll decide afterwards what is relevant.”
This, at least, was something Tara appreciated. A scientist never discounted any fact merely because it didn’t fit a preconceived view of things. She talked, her tea growing cold, and found herself being precise and honest. There was nothing official about this, no report that needed to be filed, and it liberated her. She kept talking until the Tara she was talking about was on the train to Cambridge, and then she stopped.
“Interesting,” said Mortlake.
There was only one cake left, a chocolate éclair.
“I think you’ve earned it,” he said, gesturing at the stand. “And it seems we have three possibilities. Some would say four, but I discount that you are lying. One is a pack of wild dogs, which seems absurd—where did they go? There are reports they attacked livestock, but normally, such dogs are dealt with very quickly. This time, nothing—none shot or captured. Hmm.”
Tara picked up the éclair, bit into it, and wiped leaking cream from her chin.
“The second option is insanity. A person may tell a bizarre story and believe it, but it has little or no factual basis.”
Tara braced herself for questions about her background, but Mortlake made a dismissive gesture.
“Third option is the most interesting—lycanthropy.”
He got up and started searching among his chaotic collection of books. He reminded her of some long-legged wading bird picking its way among rock pools. He plucked a few volumes from the morass of print and sat down again. As he did so, a phone rang, the tone unfamiliar. Mortlake put the books down beside the empty cake stand and rummaged down the side of the chair, recovered a phone.
Wolfsbane: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 1) Page 3
