‘Bullshit.’ Neil snorted. ‘No one clean works for the Lipscombe.’ He stopped at a metal container painted with runes and pulled open the top, then gestured to the workers, who grabbed tools and sloshed back to tackle the lodestone again.
‘Your brother did. He was fully human as far as I know.’
‘Not for lack of wanting. Now he’s got something extra. Congratulations to him.’
Having your body decompose around your still-thinking brain while you tried not to eat your family wasn’t cause for celebration in my book. I tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘But Ben—’
‘Ben’ll be fine. He might get himself into trouble but nothing he can’t get out of. The boy’s not right in the head. You mark my words, the kid’s feral and violent. He saved Malcolm from the pit, sure, but he wouldn’t let Malcolm bite him. I know what you’re thinking. “The boy’s fourteen. He’s so skinny, so little.” He’s not skinny, he’s wiry. There’s nothing but muscle there. And he’s tough as old socks. Annie lets him run wild up on that island. The boy hunts and kills and eats what he catches raw. He’s not some soft little city boy. You know how I know this? He killed Adam’s dog a few years ago. Ben was five and he skewered it with a garden fork. Had no idea what all the fuss was about.’
The image didn’t fit with the one I had, but I couldn’t help thinking of the rabbit meat that was not.
Something slithered over my shoe under the water. I tried not to imagine what it might be. Probably one of the previous inhabitants of the houses. Or the poodle. I thought of the skinny back I’d seen behind the huge wings, and the quiet, withdrawn boy. I shoved Jillie’s words to the back of my head. Rabbit meat. She was wrong. Neil was wrong. I didn’t think Ben was dangerous, and I said so.
Neil snorted again. ‘Well, you’re not going to last long in the big city.’ He turned away and made some sort of gesture at the workers struggling with the lodestone so that they let it fall with a splash into the water. He gave me an appraising look. ‘Not sure why you care so much. Let the NRTs handle it. Or are you one of Malcolm’s special friends?’ He flicked the end of his cigarette into the brown water. ‘So are you scaley or furry? Malcolm definitely had a preference for either one or the other.’
More and more offensive. ‘Neither. Look, do you have any idea where Ben might have gone?’
‘No.’
‘Please. I don’t have anything else to go on, and whether you like him or not, the boy is only fourteen and at risk from any nutjob out there.’
Neil laughed nastily. ‘Good luck to them. The boy’s an abomination.’
I gave up my attempt at being nice. ‘That’s an awful thing to say about anyone.’
Neil turned to face me. His face was black with anger. ‘The boy is an abomination, and thinking that doesn’t make me a nutjob. It makes me someone who knows what the hell is going on in this country. You think I don’t notice?’ He jabbed a finger at my collarbone. It hurt more than I would have expected. ‘You think I don’t see? All this? I’ve spent my career cleaning up after you lot. You put this shit on the internet where impressionable girls can see it and think a little curse is a good idea. You make it all look so normal. Hell, you claim it’s normal to be an aberration, and the kids listen. They think it’s okay to be a demon.’
Save me from the rabidly pro-human. I wondered how much his viewpoint coloured his view of Ben. On the other hand, normal children don’t kill dogs. Neil stopped and grabbed my arm. His crew was staring at me.
‘We’re finished with this conversation. Get out.’
He pulled me through the manky water, and I let him. I didn’t think I’d get any more information out of him. I doubted Ben would have run to his kindly uncle Neil. Not if the boy had a jot of sense.
Neil unlocked the site door, then lifted his arm to shove me through. I grabbed his arm before he could do it. Red hot anger coursed through me. I hate being manhandled. As far as I’m concerned you can believe what you like, just don’t be an asshole about it.
I said, as politely as I could through clenched teeth, ‘Ben might be a danger to everyone in a few days if he’s been bitten. I doubt he would come to you, but if he does, you give me a call.’
I offered Neil one of my cards. He ignored it, so I tucked it in his overall pocket behind his packet of cigarettes. Out of the corner of my eye, as I walked away, I saw him take it out of his pocket and drop it on the ground.
Litterbug.
24
I took the train to King’s Cross to meet Ben’s mother, still fuming after my meeting with Neil, and uncomfortable in squelchy shoes and damp trousers. I then took two wrong turns before I found the right hotel and was in a veritable grump when I arrived.
I’d like to say the hotel looked good when it was built, but some architecture looks rotten from the beginning. This was one of those: grey and grubby, the sort of place you went when you had no other options.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Ben’s mother. Other than Ben, I’d never met any of the other winged. Not many people had. I was aware they used the services of our Inverness office on occasion, but that was only when they couldn’t avoid dealing with the outside world. Mostly they kept to themselves on the island.
Annie Laradus made me hold my ID up to the peephole and then back away so she could get a better look at me. Finally, a bolt scraped away from the door, and I got my first look at her.
She was as crumpled as an old grey flannel left rolled into a ball to dry. Her mouse-coloured hair was scraped back, but frizzy split ends escaped and framed her face. If I’d seen her in the office, I would have assumed she was one of the occasional homeless who wandered in for a cup of tea and commiseration. Yet the woman in front of me couldn’t have been older than her early thirties because I knew she had been only eighteen when she became pregnant with Ben. She wore a large beige coat, with only the tips of her wings visible beneath the hem. To the casual observer, she would have appeared to have had a bad hunchback, and I wondered how much of her slump was deliberate.
As I considered her, Annie’s pale eyes appraised me in return. I obviously came up wanting, but not because of my damp trousers that still stunk like swamp water and my trainers covered in mud.
‘I wanted a sniffer. You’re not a sniffer. You’re a hag.’ It took a moment for my brain to process the words. Her accent sounded almost Scottish, but it was Scottish with a drawl, as if someone had recorded a Scot and then played it on a tape recorder with dying batteries.
‘We don’t have one. It’s just me.’
The crumpled woman sighed and held the door open just enough for me to get inside. I caught a whiff of old potatoes as I squeezed past her.
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Please.’
The inside wasn’t any better than the outside, although the peeling burnt orange wallpaper might have been fashionable once. The room was small with a single bed, a cracked leather armchair, and a single square coffee table ringed with mug stains. A Metro newspaper with a picture of Ben on the front page lay on the table. An empty sandwich box sat next to it.
Annie tottered off towards a kettle on the table beside a small chunky television.
‘Do you mind if I use the bathroom?’
She shrugged, which I took as a yes.
I changed out of my jeans and into the spare pair from my backpack but couldn’t do the same with my trainers. I rinsed the mud off under the tap. It didn’t make them that much wetter, but it was no longer obvious I’d just waded through a swamp.
How unprofessional would it be to return to the room in socked feet? Too much, considering the woman was missing her son. I wedged my feet back into the wet shoes.
There was a cup of tea in a plastic hotel mug waiting for me when I exited the bathroom. She hadn’t asked if I’d wanted sugar, but by the taste of it she must have spilled in the entire bowl. I took a sip and struggled to hold back a grimace.
‘Is it all right?’
‘Yes, love
ly.’
Annie perched on the edge of the armchair, her hands curled around an old mobile phone which she turned round and round in her fingers. Her nails were bitten down enough that the tips were swollen and red.
I took the only other possible seat, on the narrow single bed. A stuffed canvas bag was wedged between the bed and the wall. It looked like one of Stanley’s—First World War army issue. It had never occurred to me the winged might have fought in the war, but thinking about it, I couldn’t see the government letting the opportunity for winged spies passing them by. I wondered how much the war had diminished what was already a tiny population, if it made a difference to their imminent extinction.
Centuries-long persecution, combined with a physiology that lent itself to a high maternal death rate, meant that the remaining winged population were too few and too old to be a viable population. I recalled a documentary where they’d demonstrated the difficulty of getting a winged child through the birth canal. It was enough to make me shudder and want to clamp my legs together. As far as I knew, Ben was the only winged under thirty. They’d be gone in a couple of generations.
The woman sitting in front of me was one of the last of her kind. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she needed consolation.
‘He’s in a lot of trouble, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’ There was no way to cushion it. ‘We can help get him a good solicitor, and our legal advisor thinks if we can get him to hand himself in, Ben might be able to avoid a custodial sentence.’
‘Oh,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I don’t think I can afford a solicitor.’
I put the tea down on the scarred coffee table. ‘Don’t worry about that now. We can apply for legal aid. There might be someone willing to take it pro bono. We need to find Ben first. Let’s concentrate on that.’
She nodded. Her fingers reached up to a cross around her neck and rubbed it in an unconscious movement.
‘Do you have any photos you can give me? The more recent the better.’
She dug in her coat pocket and produced a small pack of Polaroids tied together with an elastic band. I flipped through them; each was a head shot of Ben against a stone wall. He was aged around only two or three in the first, then grew steadily older. In the last, he’d been caught in the middle of a teenaged eye roll. He looked like his father: dark eyes, sharp nose, wide mouth, although Malcolm was missing the mop of curly hair.
‘I take them every year on his birthday. I’ll want them back.’
‘I’ll make copies. When’s his birthday?’
‘Um, 4 November.’ Only just fourteen, then.
‘Does he have any friends in London he might have gone to?’
I wasn’t surprised when Annie shook her head. ‘He’s only here two weeks a year. The only people he knows are Malcolm and his family.’
‘What about your family? Are any of the other winged in London?’
She hesitated. Her washed-out eyes met mine. ‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’
‘None of the people like to leave the island. Ben and I are the only ones who do so regularly.’
‘But?’ There was a but. I could hear it in her voice.
‘There’s only one of us in London. He left the island years ago and never came back. He doesn’t keep in touch, and I wouldn’t know where to find him. Ben certainly wouldn’t.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Drew Gillies.’
I made a note of the name anyway. A man with wings would stand out. It shouldn’t be too hard to find him.
Annie’s little finger came up to her mouth, and her teeth made a little snick sound as she worried at the nail.
I looked around for a coaster for the mug, but there wasn’t one. I placed it on the newspaper instead.
‘Annie, did Ben bring rabbit meat down with him?’
‘What?’
I repeated the question, thinking it didn’t sound any less odd the second time round.
‘No, no, he didn’t. Jillie tore a strip off him last year because he brought a box of fish. Too smelly or something. Why do you ask?’
‘Just trying to get an idea of his movements.’
Ben had arrived two weeks before Christmas when Malcolm was definitely still alive, and Berenice Nazarak likely was too. If he’d killed her, he couldn’t have pretended it had come down with him. It would never last that long unrefrigerated. And Malcolm had certainly been alive when Ben had arrived. I tried to remember exactly what Jillie had said. Had Ben given it directly to her? Or had Malcolm told her that was where the meat had come from?
I left Annie staring at the phone in her lap as if willing it to ring. I asked her if she wanted to join me in looking for the youth club Jillie had mentioned, but the winged woman shook her head.
‘This is the hotel I always stay in. I don’t want to be out if Ben knocks on the door.’
I considered telling her not to open it. The chance remained that Ben had been bitten, but I didn’t think she would listen to me either way. He was her son, and she was going to open the door for him, ravenous dead or not.
25
King’s Cross isn’t as seedy as it used to be, but it still hasn’t quite been swallowed up by gentrification despite the millions of pounds poured into the regeneration of the station and the attached buildings and offices.
I only saw two obvious prostitutes on the walk back to the station and didn’t get propositioned by a single street weasel. Maybe it was still a little early. Another decade, and the whole area would be nothing but chain coffee shops and anonymous offices. I couldn’t pretend to be sorry about the lack of addicts sleeping in doorways or desperate women selling themselves, but the relentless march of corporatisation made me think of my mother.
King’s Cross used to be a village called Battle Bridge, and when the Romans sacked it, she was there and already thousands of years old. She’s the one who told me that the belief that the station is built on the site of Boudicca’s last battle isn’t true.
My mother hated London. Or rather she hated the city as it is now. She’d lived most of her long life here, but she’d been dead too long. The city she returned to was unfamiliar and overcrowded. Occasionally something she recognised—a church, a monument—rose out of the strangeness like an iceberg, and then she’d get into one of her black moods. Sometimes I think the only thing that surprised me about her was that she didn’t choose to go back to death a lot sooner. I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn’t see the suited ghost until he was right in front of me.
‘Hey, Miss Boney.’ He waggled his eyebrows at me. ‘Just wanted to check you arranged my movie for Saturday.’
‘It’s all done.’
‘Good.’ He grinned. ‘Oh, by the way. There’s something following you.’
I spun around. The road was busy. A group of tourists, loaded with oversized suitcases, waited at a bus stop. A bearded man in jeans and a hoodie walked towards me, seemingly paying attention to nothing but the McDonald’s burger he was eating. Further away, three teenaged girls giggled as they walked. Each had the same dark, glossy hair, straightened within an inch of its life.
‘Who is it?’
‘Nothing human, love.’
I stared down the road again, looking for non-humans. Two of the tourists had the cerulean skin of the water people, and one of the teenaged girls had an aura that suggested something other, maybe a potential witch. None looked the slightest bit interested in me. I turned back to the ghost, but he had gone.
I looked up thinking that perhaps Ben had come to me, but there was nothing but lighted windows and dull sky. Finally, skin prickling, I walked on.
I’d been up since three, hadn’t eaten in hours, and was starting to feel a little faint. I stopped at the first coffee shop I came to with free Wi-Fi, taking the reasonable stance that I wouldn’t find Benjamin Brannick if I fainted and fell in front of the Number 91 bus. It wasn’t the only reason. I wanted time to think and get Malcolm out of my hea
d.
The cheapest food was a wrapped shortbread biscuit. I went for that along with a coffee with plenty of sugar. Even a couple of quid saved on an overpriced sandwich was another couple of quid into the escape fund. Other than someone twittering at one of the PCs against the far wall, and a pair of teenagers with their bums half hanging out, the rest of the place was empty. I took a table next to the wall by the radiator and slipped out of my shoes. I flexed my socked feet; the heat began soaking into them immediately.
Before I did anything else, I called home and spoke to the carer, who assured me Sigrid was fine. His shift ended at three-thirty. I looked at my watch. It was just past twelve. I was meeting Adam at one to check out youth clubs, so I had just over three hours before I had to be back.
I booted up my laptop while I sipped at the blisteringly hot coffee. It burned my tongue, but the first sip went straight to my brain. One sip’s worth of caffeine couldn’t possibly wake you up so instantly, so I knew it was a psychological thing. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference: it was still good.
Outside, the world was moving on after the lockdown. A group of tourists leaned against the window and argued about something on their map. A lone street weasel hung about near their rear, waiting for an opportunity to pick their pockets.
Malcolm had said, ‘He killed me.’ It wasn’t ambiguous, but it might have meant nothing. Maybe it was the product of his brain turning to mush. But he had wanted to see me, had refused to talk to the police.
Malcolm and I weren’t friends. I thought he was a first class wally, and he knew it. Out of all the people he could have insisted on seeing, I should have been at the bottom of the list.
He killed me. If Ben had murdered his father, I could understand Malcolm not wanting to tell the police. It could have been some kind of accident and he didn’t want to get the boy in further trouble. But why me? Why not Obe? Okay, maybe not Obe. Surely he had someone closer to talk to.
He killed me. Not Ben killed me. He killed me. Perhaps he meant someone else. Neil? I’d thought Malcolm had said something about a brother. Maybe it was not Ben, my brother.
The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) Page 12
