Wolfsbane: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 1)

by David Longhorn

  “Poor chap. I’d say he was hit by a car, dragged himself over to the bush, and some wild animals worried at the corpse.”

  Lonely finally stopped leaning on the SUV and jabbed a finger at the lord.

  “You killed him, you evil bastard!”

  Gonfallon laughed, a casual sound with a hint of contempt.

  “A serious accusation!” he said. “And one with zero evidence. Or are you going to accuse me of tearing the poor chap apart with my bare hands?”

  “I have footage of you leaving the scene of the crime!” Mortlake said. “We get a look at your face.”

  For a moment, the aristocrat looked uncertain, but then he grinned.

  “I happened to be taking a little run to get the old circulation going. I suppose a magistrate might find me guilty of indecent exposure—if anyone complained. Which I don’t think they will. Sad to say, my run did not take me this far. Otherwise, I’d have spotted the poor chap.”

  He gestured casually at the corpse in the bushes. Then he cocked his head to one side.

  “Hark!” he said, cupping a hand to one ear. “Are those sirens?”

  In the distance, toward Wyebridge, red and blue flashing lights were visible against the ceiling of the low cloud. Mortlake knew how it would play out if he accused Gonfallon of any wrongdoing beyond shooting down the drone.

  “Are you going to tell them what you think you know about me?” taunted Gonfallon. “Or are you going to save it for my very good friend, the chief constable? He could do with a good laugh, his gout has been playing up lately.”

  “Murder is murder, and the killer will answer for it,” Mortlake replied angrily and walked back to his rental. Lonely was glowering at Gonfallon.

  “What a git,” said the book dealer. “And he’ll just keep getting away with it.”

  Mortlake started to contradict Lonely, but then stopped. He was not sure that the little man was wrong.

  ***

  Tara got the call that evening just after she got out of the shower. Mortlake described what had happened and forwarded the drone video but not the pictures of the victim. Tara sat in her room, hair still wet, damp robe wrapped around her, trying to process the information.

  “The scumbag!” she said. “He’s hunting people by day? Or did his hunting animals escape, or what?”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know,” Mortlake admitted. “But we can find out. Nil desperandum! We have only just begun to fight.”

  They talked some more, and Tara was genuinely grateful that someone was on her side. But she also felt drained of emotion. She could now foresee a future where nothing was resolved, where there was no Hollywood showdown with the bad guys and a neat denouement—here, Josh’s death, like that of the nameless victim at the roadside, was filed away and forgotten.

  “I’ll be in touch again soon,” Mortlake promised.

  “Great!” she said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “And anything I can do to help, say the word.”

  As soon as she’d ended the call, Tara realized that it was her lack of involvement that was depressing her as much as the lack of progress. She resolved to start digging into the background of Gonfallon and his rich friends on her own account. She had no idea where to start, but that had never stopped her when solving a scientific puzzle. It wouldn’t stop her now.

  ***

  “Shoes?” said Westall incredulously.

  “Shoes,” said the young constable.

  The day after the death near Wyebridge, the van had been reported stolen. The plates were the same as the ones from the van Westall had seen on the night of the gamekeeper’s murder. Now, the vehicle was conveniently burned out on waste ground on an industrial estate on the outskirts of London. The fire had been a reasonably competent job, but some cardboard boxes piled in the back had survived, albeit with smoke damage. Westall’s team, consisting of two uniforms, were poking about in the wreck.

  “Chukka boots,” said the other uniform. “Not my size, though.”

  She held up the burned boots by their laces, then chucked them back into the shell of the vehicle. Westall had put a few pieces of a confusing jigsaw together and found something totally unremarkable. A vehicle reported stolen in Wyebridge, some consumer goods that might be stolen, and absolutely nothing to build a case on.

  “Another day in the life of a public servant,” he sighed. “Okay, let the cleanup squad know about it. They’ll probably get round to it in a few days. Or in the New Year, maybe.”

  Westall took a picture on his phone and emailed it to Mortlake with a brief message. There was no way he could justify any kind of forensic analysis of the van. It had been nearby when a mysterious killing had occurred—but so had a hundred other vehicles. Perhaps traces of the gamekeeper’s blood might be found, but the odds were against it. Budget restrictions meant Westall had to pick his fights, and his current boss was loading him up with routine cases.

  Blind alley, he thought. If Gonfallon keeps his head down from now on, he might well get away with it. Whatever it is.

  His squad got back into their unmarked car and set off, back into the big city. Westall pondered Mortlake’s ideas and Tara Pride’s eyewitness account. Werewolves were even stranger than the cases of spontaneous human combustion he had investigated. But both defied known scientific laws. Both made no sense in the context of regular policing.

  The difference was that SHC seemed just that—spontaneous, with no clear malice or plan to it. This was something else. This was, Westall felt sure in his gut, the deliberate killing of human beings in the name of perverted sport. An idea that might make for a cheesy action movie had been carried out for real in his country. And Westall couldn’t even suggest it to his superiors because of the supernatural element.

  If it wasn’t just the homeless vanishing, I’d have a real team, he thought bitterly. If half a dozen members of the House of Lords vanished, it would be a national emergency.

  But Gonfallon had chosen his victims well. It was hard to keep track of the homeless. By definition, they had no addresses, little or no ID, and they moved around, vanished sometimes. Westall had done some digging and found five or six men whom London’s homeless charities had lost sight of in recent months. According to reports, the burned-out van had been in the areas those men frequented.

  The weakest circumstantial evidence, Westall thought. Weak as water. No judge would grant me a warrant on that, and they’d be right not to.

  He had one small consolation. It was heading into winter now, a fact underlined by the intermittent rattle of hailstones on the windshield. A drive by the London mayor’s office meant that most, if not all, of the rough sleepers would be off the streets, given temporary accommodation. It was not a perfect system and some would fall through the gaps. The burned-out van suggested that the hunting season had ended anyway.

  Unless, the detective thought, the bastard has another trick up his sleeve.

  Chapter 5

  “The English aristocracy have loved hunting for hundreds of years. But it seems that Rupert, the Eighth Viscount Gonfallon, has gone back to basics. I can’t see any other explanation. His lordship is a werewolf.”

  “And he’s not alone,” Tara reminded him. “He has friends. At least two evil buddies. A nice little gang of monsters.”

  Two weeks had passed since the roadside killing. The local police had drawn the predictable conclusion of a road accident victim chewed up by scavengers, species unknown. Nobody had come forward to identify the dead man, who had no ID. After a flurry of interest, the local press had moved on to more interesting stories than the death of a vagrant.

  Bob Westall had summed up the local cops in familiar terms: “You can’t fix stupid.” He had done his best to stir things up. He had suggested that the nameless man might have been abducted to serve as some kind of rural drug courier. Gangs had a proven track record of this practice, known as county lines. His superiors had asked him why he was meddling in another police force’s case and what possible lin
k there might be to a member of the House of Lords? When he told them the picture was unclear, they told him to focus on his own job.

  Lonely Jones reported back now and again from Wyebridge, and Mortlake duly passed his information to Tara. There was very little to report. It seemed that Lord Gonfallon had decided to lie low after the roadside incident.

  “Maybe the bastard caught frostbite in his more tender areas,” Tara suggested. “Running around naked like that.”

  “We can but hope,” said Mortlake. “But no, I think there’s more to it. I think he’s changed what they call, in all the cop shows, his MO. He came very close to being caught—and not in human form.”

  They were talking in Uncle Monty’s apartment at St. Ananias. Cambridge in winter had a certain frosty charm. Monty was even burning logs in a regular fireplace and had put up some decorations. But he never had a tree, as apparently Bigglesworth could not be kept from climbing them. At the moment, the black cat was sitting in the window, looking up at dangling tinsel with a speculative air. His owner was dozing, an empty glass that had held port wine in one hand.

  Tara sipped her tea and tried to resist a Bakewell tart, one of the many English treats on display. The winter was a hard time to keep your weight within acceptable parameters, and that went double for England. She had not been amazed to hear that Gonfallon was a werewolf. Instead, all of the parts of the puzzle had clicked into place. In a way, she had been relieved. Mortlake had confirmed that she was not crazy, and had not imagined the events of that night. The blurred aerial footage of Gonfallon running naked back to his refuge had made her angry, and even more determined to get even.

  “I did some research of my own,” she said. “Nothing fancy, just ‘know your enemy’ stuff. When fox hunting was banned, Gonfallon was one of the leading campaigners who tried to stop it. Claimed it would destroy England’s heritage. He even said it was treason and called for Tony Blair to be imprisoned in the Tower of London—ridiculous stuff. Maybe that’s where he got the idea to import something more exotic than foxhounds? He just went a bit loopy and said, ‘To hell with them, I’ll take blood sports to the max.’ Then maybe he was accidentally scratched or bitten and found out he liked wolfing out.”

  Mortlake mulled this over.

  “The simplest explanation is that he brought that poor girl to England to use her as… a carrier of the infection, if you like. He wanted to become a monster. Thought it would be fun. A jolly jape. If you’re looking for an example of decadence, that fits rather well.”

  Hailstones lashed the windows of the cozy apartment. Monty Carrington stirred, then resumed his peaceful doze. The two people who were awake looked out at the gathering gloom.

  “We’re better in here than out there,” Mortlake observed. “No fit weather for man or beast. Another cuppa? Slice of Battenburg cake?”

  ***

  “Oh God, the rain’s running down my neck!” said Nicky. “My knickers will be wet at this rate!”

  “Never mind that, love, we’re nearly in position!” retorted Phil. “The nearest cache is about twenty meters away, due nor’ nor’ east.”

  “Oh, sod your bloody treasure hunt!” she wailed. “I’ll never be dry again!”

  All around was the wilderness of Dartmoor, a fascinating landscape immortalized in the Hound of the Baskervilles, a fact Phil kept reminding her of. No matter how exciting it might be in a Sherlock Holmes story, Dartmoor today was not appealing. So far as Nicky could make out, it was a damp hellscape of rocky outcroppings, scrubby vegetations, and marshy ground. And of course, her husband had declared they should take a weekend break here. In December.

  “Definitely close,” Phil said, holding up his tracker.

  “I wouldn’t trust that gizmo to tell me the time,” grumbled Nicky. “It successfully led me up to my arse into a swamp. Wonders of the space age.”

  Phil sighed his patient husband sigh and pointed out that it was technically a bog not a swamp and she had only sunk up to her knees. Nicky almost lost patience, but then she looked at him eagerly waving the GPS around like a kid with a new toy. She could not remain angry at her husband for long. His enthusiasm was not always infectious, but it was hard to argue with.

  “Aha, looks like a cairn,” Phil said, pointing ahead.

  It did indeed. A small heap of stones stood at the top of a low ridge that was covered with gorse. They traipsed up the slope, and Phil examined the marker. It looked pretty feeble to Nicky, as if it had been cobbled together as an afterthought. She had seen some impressive cairns marking mountain tops or other landscape features. This one was a runt. Dozens of rocks lay around them at random, and she felt whoever had made the thing could have taken a bit longer.

  “Fascinating!” Phil said, putting the GPS back in his pack. “This is clearly the location. But where’s the cache?”

  “Maybe it’s Cache 22,” joked Nicky. “You know, like Catch 22? Where you can’t win? Witty play on words, right?”

  Phil sighed again and started to walk around the knee-high pile of stones. It was a very unexciting climax to their day out. The last weekend before Christmas and Nicky had finished work for the year. She had resolved to kick back and enjoy some major TV veg-out entertainment. But Phil’s geocaching buddies had started talking about a new, unusual mystery that had been set up on Dartmoor.

  “It’ll be fun,” Phil had said.

  He proved to be a true prophet. It had been fun for him.

  “So, what now?” Nicky asked, staring at the cairn. “We rummage around for whatever’s inside or underneath?”

  She was still a little vague about geocaching, a subculture that seemed to combine problem-solving with getting lost. Geocachers set each other puzzles that involved map references, which took them to further puzzles. Mostly, caches consisted of nothing bigger than a small plastic cylinder. A cache was supposed to contain a log—usually just a small piece of paper—so enthusiasts like Phil could proudly sign them, which Nicky found amusing. He was, as she had said more than once, like a little dog leaving a marker where other dogs had been. Occasionally, there were bigger containers with items like toys or trinkets. Geocachers got really worked up about those.

  So far as Nicky could make out, this latest adventure was because someone going by a pseudonym had posted a few enigmatic messages on a Reddit thread. This mystery man—Nicky found it hard to believe any woman would be so silly—had left a series of caches across Dartmoor. Because of the wintry weather, most of Phil’s pals had decided to leave it until the New Year. But Phil thought he had solved an anagram in the message that accompanied a set of map coordinates.

  “I reckon the cache might be inside it, or nearby,” he said, kicking the cairn. “First time I’ll have found anything this remote. I mean, we’re really in the wilds here, one of the last places in England with no cell coverage.”

  “Oh, joy,” Nicky said. “Let’s find the damn thing, then.”

  They began to poke around, with Phil reiterating the rules of the game. You couldn’t bury a cache or disguise it as something else—like a rock. It had to be easy to find, and mustn’t be put somewhere potentially hazardous, like on a cliff edge. And so on and so forth. Nicky had heard it all before but her husband always talked as if this was their first expedition.

  “I prefer when we’re in town,” she said. “You can follow a proper trail—I mean, between historic buildings. And there are pubs and cafés. And cabs to call when you get tired.”

  Phil prodded a gloved finger into a gap in the base of the cairn, found nothing, frowned.

  “Yeah, but out here we’re not in any danger of being muggled,” he pointed out. “The caches are bound to be all exactly where they were left.”

  Nicky still smiled at that phrase. “Muggles” was what cachers called people not in on the secret. You weren’t supposed to retrieve a container if muggles were watching because they might take it later and spoil the fun.

  “Yeah,” she said, glancing around at the bleak, uninhabite
d wilderness. “Not a muggle in sight. We are free to act weird to our hearts’ content.”

  They investigated some more, but there was no obvious sign of a cache. Sometimes, these were tiny—so-called “micros”, that were just big enough for a tiny roll of paper on which to put your initials. Micros were easier to hide in urban areas. But out here, there was no need for subtlety. Bigger caches were often old ammunition boxes or large Tupperware containers.

  “So why can’t we find this one?” said Phil, straightening up and wincing.

  “Back giving you trouble, old man?” Nicky asked. “I’ll rub it for you when we get home.”

  “Promises, promises.”

  Phil walked around the head of stones, kicked it in frustration. Nicky felt for him. Despite making fun of his hobby—despite never thinking of it as their hobby, not really—she knew he hated to fail. He had never had to record a cache as DNF, Did Not Find. Those three letters, uploaded to the group’s website, were a badge of shame.

  “Okay,” she said. “Maybe it’s not in the cairn. What else is around here? Apart from the bog waiting to swallow us both? Think like a nerd who hides stuff…”

  “Hides stuff where there’s nowhere to hide it!” Phil exclaimed. “This is it. The cairn itself is new, it’s not marking anything in particular. And look, if it had been here a while, there’d be some moss or other growth on the surface.”

  “I thought it looked a bit feeble,” she said, gesturing at the stones. “But… isn’t it against the rules to rearrange stuff like that?”

  Phil looked troubled for a moment.

  “I should report this, you’re right,” he said. “But in the meantime, let’s find out what’s inside.”

  Soon, Phil was tearing at the marker, flinging hand-sized stones left and right, while Nicky stood well back. She held her phone up and waved it around again, but got nothing. They were in a signal blackspot. For the first time, Nicky reflected, Phil could not instantly upload the details of his finding the cache, opening the cache, signing the log, closing the cache…