I climbed onto the cold leather seat, and the van started on the second go. Stan didn’t do as much landscaping work as he once did, but there was still the slight scent of sweat underneath the stronger smell of compost and the oil he used on his tools. I wound down the window and let the morning air in. It smelt heavy, as if snow was coming. I peered through the windscreen at the sky. The clouds were streaked pink and yellow. It only snows a couple of times each winter, and I hate it every time.
I reached forward and clicked on the radio to find Ben was the topic on all the talk radio stations. The single music station I tried had a flying theme. For about twenty seconds, I listened to some boy band warbling about how I make them feel like flying before I switched it off.
In a déjà vu moment, I turned into the road Dunne had given me over the phone and found it cordoned off by the Met with a police presence holding off a crowd of rubber neckers. I parked one road up and walked.
A single bored constable blocked the way. I showed him my Lipscombe ID card, but he just raised his eyebrows.
‘He’—the constable used his thumb to point out an elderly cybergeek in a Universe Mechanica shirt—’already tried that.’
‘He,’ I said, ‘is crazy. DS Dunne is expecting me.’
The constable pulled a walkie-talkie from his jacket and spoke into it, and a garbled voice that might have been Dunne’s came out. Listening through static must be taught at cop school. The constable shrugged at me and lifted the tape so I could duck underneath. Light flashed as someone took a photo of me. I turned to see a woman with a professional-looking camera and journalist’s ID pinned to her lapel. I don’t photograph well. I’ve always got my eyes closed and my mouth half-open. I hoped she wouldn’t publish it anywhere anyone I knew would see. The odds were probably on my side; pretty pictures sell better than ugly ones.
Something wet and very cold dropped onto my nose. The sleet matched my mood, and I muttered to myself as I walked down the road towards a single white forensic tent parked on someone’s driveway. The road was purely residential, with council maisonettes on one side and semi-detached fifties-built houses on the other. The house with the tent was the latter, painted a pale pink over pebble-dashing. A pair of constables eyeballed me as they made their way from door to door.
I opened the tent flap and stepped in with care. Ben’s wings were laid out on a separate piece of white plastic sheeting and were about a metre and a half from wing to tip. They were a combination of white and dirty grey with smears of brown blood at intervals. They ended in pink, jagged cartilage, white tendon strings, and globules of pink flesh.
Dunne stood at the other end of the tent with his arms folded. He looked up as I entered, and frowned. ‘What are the chances this isn’t him? That they’re from a pegasus or a pigeon shifter? Or someone else entirely?’
‘Much too big for a pigeon, and wrong colour for a pegasus,’ I said. ‘Pegs’re pure white.’
I glanced at him. Dunne looked worried. He bent into a squat and stared at the wings as if the answer was right there, then sighed and straightened. ‘Do you think he could have survived this?’
‘I have no idea. Winged physiology isn’t my area of expertise. I suppose a bird could survive having its wings cut off if it was done carefully.’
The two of us looked at the bloody, jagged edges. It hadn’t been done carefully. Someone had ripped them off or at least sawed at them with a bread knife.
Something blue caught my eye. I pointed. ‘What’s that?’
Dunne bent again and used a white-gloved hand to lift the thick cartilage. He flicked something around. I bent into a squat next to him to see three tiny blue beads threaded onto a leather thong wrapped around the long cartilage at the apex. Despite its distinctive decorative appearance, I couldn’t help thinking of the sort of tag used by scientists to track rare birds.
‘Is that his?’ Dunne asked.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know, but I only saw Ben for two minutes at the office. I wouldn’t have noticed if he was wearing it.’ I pulled out my mobile and tapped on the camera app. ‘Do you mind?’
He shook his head. I snapped a few photos from various angles, including a number of careful shots that showed the feathers, but left off the devastation at the ends. I took a close-up of the blue beads, checked I had what I needed, then put the phone away.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Old lady hears a noise round her bin this morning, thought it was scavenger gnomes, so she comes out with a water pistol. No kids, but the lid wasn’t closed, so she took a peek and called us.’
‘She didn’t see anyone? It must have taken at least a few minutes to jam them into the bin.’
‘She says not. No sign of any other body parts, but I’ve got constables going through everyone else’s bins. I’ve had to cancel bin collection this morning, so I’ve had six complaints from the public already. Oh, the joys of policing.’
I hadn’t taken my eyes off the wings. I focused on the bloody edges. The blood had congealed and gone hard. I pointed it out. ‘How long does it take to do that?’
He shrugged. ‘Not long, I guess. I’ll know more when we get them to the lab. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Berenice Nazarak. You promised you’d talk to her again.’
‘I will. I—’
‘I’ve arranged for you to visit her house. I’ve cleared it with her foster mother. She would have gone home by now, right?’
‘And Haddad? Have you cleared it with her?’
He avoided the question. ‘If you want to take a look for Ben in the underworld now, that’ll have to be on the house too. I won’t get sign-off for payment,’ he said. I didn’t miss the undertone of pleading in his voice. This was Dunne’s first big case. I could see the terror in his face that he might screw it up.
Die now and later? The idea didn’t appeal... but then Ben’s image flashed in my head, bent over his book, the shy smile. If he was still alive, he had to be badly injured. I couldn’t wait until later and look for him at the same time as Berenice. Not if my only reason was not wanting to get a little nauseous.
‘They’ll both be freebies. If you let me use your police car and keep an eye on my body,’ I said. I was doing a lot of them. My hand rose to my cheek. The harpy scratch was healing, but it still itched like hell.
Dunne smiled with relief. I noticed one of the constables giving me a dirty look as I pulled at the door handle of the car. This is going to get back to Haddad, whether he likes it or not.
I dug in my backpack for a paper sickbag, then lay on the back seat of the car with the bag on my stomach where it would be easily accessible the moment I came back.
Dunne snapped on the radio. ‘Do you mind?’
‘No,’ I said. I don’t notice anything when I’m dead.
28
I entered the world of the dead, and the heat hit. My neck prickled, and a line of sweat ran down my back. The semi-detacheds and maisonettes flickered in, but the preference of the dead was a row of Edwardian terraces opposite a field. A small, not-real boy raced past me chasing a football. Two dead women stood chatting at the gate to the closest house, dead since the thirties or forties by their clothing, one cradling a baby. The scene was familiar: an old Second World War bomb site. The more violent the death, the more likely it is the dead hang about.
I looked up and saw two figures gliding high above me. Neither flapped. They both soared like they were diving through water. I usually see fliers. Something about flying appeals to the human psyche. Flying when you’re dead is like flying in a dream. Sometimes you struggle to remember how it works, but you usually manage to get off the ground if you’re persistent.
If Ben were dead, he’d probably been killed close by. I couldn’t imagine a murderer going too far out of his way to dump the wings. Unless he didn’t want the police attention focused close to him. It was a lot of ifs.
This was the tricky bit. Finding someone in the death world is about as easy as finding th
em in the living one. You’ve got to have an idea where they are first.
‘Hi, Viv. You came back.’
My sister appeared in front of me, looking like any other dead person. She was dressed as the person I think she would have been if she had never died. She wore a yellow cotton sundress and flip-flops, her bright hair curled up neatly in a bun.
‘I warned you,’ Sigrid said.
‘No, you didn’t.’ I didn’t knowing what she was talking about. ‘Remind me what I’m being warned about?’
‘I told you.’
It’s probably some sort of psychological defence that makes the dead so annoyingly vague, but that doesn’t stop it being really irritating. Especially since Sigrid knew she was dead. She’d always taken a strong interest in the living world, but wouldn’t ever answer my questions about how she knew what she did. She wasn’t this annoying alive.
I tried another tack. ‘Do you know where Ben is? The boy with wings?’
‘Poor Ben.’ Siggie took my arm in hers. We walked together down the road, dodging the occasional ghost child at play.
‘Have you seen him?’
‘Poor old Ben,’ she said again.
I rolled my eyes. ‘Not helpful, Sig.’
We turned a corner, and I found myself on the high street. In the living world, the road we’d been on had led to more residential roads, but physicality was only an approximation. We were going wherever Siggie was leading.
The heat dialled down a few notches, but I was still sweating. The high street was busy, mostly with not-real people, but enough of the real dead threaded through the throng to support them.
I felt a sudden dampness about my toes. I looked down to see water trickling between my feet. The trickle turned to a flood, and water surged about my ankles. Around me the high street melted away into waves, and I was left treading water in the middle of a vast ocean, brilliant blue sky above. Siggie splashed past me, her tail slapping against the water as she dove deep into the green water. The water was warm, not bathwater warm, but warm enough that I felt comfortable.
She touched my arm, and my legs merged and lengthened. There was a sting at one side of my neck and then the other as gills appeared. ‘How did you do that?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘You did. You’re the one with the power here. I just borrowed some.’
A school of fish with human faces swum past, and I gulped salty water before I remembered that I really didn’t have to. As the gills flapped and my lungs filled with warm salt water, I had to fight the urge to cough, to spit it out. The surface was now high above me, the sun a twinkle on the water.
‘Come on,’ Siggie said, except she didn’t really. Her words were whale song, but I understood them perfectly, and when I answered, the death dream translated those words too.
We undulated through cooling water, past undersea cities and through deep ocean trenches that spurted hot jets that should have broiled us, until we surfaced next to a cliff thick with ocean birds and guano.
‘Up, up, up.’ Siggie pulled me by the hand. We burst out of the water like dolphins at a seaside show. We went higher and higher, and sometime in the rise up from the water, my feet reappeared so that when I finally came down and landed hard on a gravelly path, the stones cut into the balls of my feet, rather than flippers.
We were on an island. Cliffs surrounded the island, with a valley below. Siggie was nowhere to be seen. She’d led me here and disappeared.
An arctic wind blew in from the sea and bit through my wet clothes to my skin. The path I was on led downward, through scraggly trees and rough stone crevices pebbled with sharp stones and dotted with patches of dead grass. Since my only other option was jumping back off the cliff and into the water a few hundred feet down, I kept going. Some of it was walkable, but most I climbed in one way or another. By the time I reached the bottom, my arms and legs were covered with scratches, and my fingernails were bloody.
At the bottom of the cliff, I found a stone cottage, alone on flat scrubland. The roof, too, was stone, although covered in a thick green moss. Very little flickered or shimmered; this place hadn’t changed for a very long time. Only the scraggly vegetable patch outside flickered as plants grew, died back, and grew again.
Movement caught my eye through the cottage window, and a young man appeared in the doorway. It was low enough he had to crouch, although he couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall.
Stubby little wings sprouted from his back, so small they didn’t even reach the breadth of his skinny shoulders. The seagull grey-white of them matched his colourless eyes and hair. He wore a string of blue beads identical to the one on Ben’s wings. The man’s nose and cheeks were red with cold, but despite the biting wind, he wore nothing but a pair of green shorts.
He also wasn’t real. Some dead person was projecting him, although there was no one in sight. The not-real man got to his knees and began pulling weeds from the scraggly vegetable patch.
I had to bend almost double to get under the low lintel. Inside, the air was hot and stuffy and thick with the smell of wood smoke from a low-burning fire centred on the right-side wall. A large double bed with straw mattress occupied one corner on the left wall. A makeshift table with rough wooden chairs stood in the other. The only decoration was a large iron crucifix on the wall opposite the door.
Cast-iron pans and pots hung over the fireplace, and plates and mugs were stacked neatly on a shelf above them. Three wooden chairs were arranged around the fireplace. None would be out of place in the sort of country furniture shop that prided itself on its arty rustic look.
There were three occupants. One was a dead woman sitting on one of the chairs in front of the fire. She was old as sin with a face like a raisin and a head saved from being bald by a few scraggly long white hairs that lay limp over her ears. The others were a not-real Annie Laradus and a not-real Benjamin Brannick.
The not-reals appeared younger, and I realised that sometime before she’d become wrung out, Annie had had thick honey-coloured hair and creamy skin.
Not-real Ben was aged about six and was occupied with spearing small fish from a basket onto a metal spit one by one. His chest was bare, and his wings were tucked neatly against his back.
The language the old woman spoke was unfamiliar, although I understood it as well as if she were speaking English. It’s a skill I wish I could take into the living world—one much more useful than being able to drop down dead.
‘Bennie, love. You mustn’t worry your mama like that. Home before sunset’s the rule.’
‘I was tucked up in the cliffs, Granny. The puffins let me snuggle with them. I was fine. And you need to be early to get the best fish. The light’s wrong if I set out too late.’
The old woman reached out and ruffled the boy’s hair, and the scene reset itself.
‘Bennie, love. You mustn’t worry your mama like that. Home before sunset’s the rule.’
Ben began threading the same fish back onto the spit. I ducked outside. A scene from a life—one that had worried Ben’s granny enough that she relived it in her death.
The little cottage had felt very isolated. I hadn’t seen anyone else on my trek down from the cliffs, but a church bell began ringing. Stone cottages appeared in the mists. Endless streams of winged people emerged from each one, far more than would fit in the small rooms. Some had been dead a long time judging by their dress, but I was beginning to think that might not make much of a difference here.
Some gave me curious looks, others paid no attention. I got the impression I was watching a centuries-old ritual, one that had played out over and over again over the years. Despite the sudden crowds, no one stepped around another or stood back to let someone else pass. They’d all worked out an individual path, a dance worn neatly into the grooves of village life.
Something else struck me about the people. Many of them were old. This might not sound strange, but it was. People in the death world take on the face they think they had, not the
one they actually had.
The elderly fall more naturally into middle age. It’s unusual for them to keep their wrinkles and age spots. Most people think of age as something that happens to them, not something that is intrinsically part of them. The elderly winged didn’t look right either—more like someone prematurely aged in a bad movie. It wasn’t natural. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I had a suspicion. These looked like people who wanted to grow old but never had. I’d read that the life expectancy for the winged was low, but this was new to me. Maybe if I’d been dying a hundred years before the NHS and modern medicine it would have been more familiar. It was interesting, but the most important thing was that Ben wasn’t among them.
29
Dunne’s voice said, ‘Is he dead?’
I didn’t reply, but I did make a noise. I missed the sick bag and threw up in the footwell.
‘Oh, eeuw! Eeeuw! Jeez, I just had it cleaned!’
I scooped up the bag and held it up to my mouth, but it was too late. Everything that was going to come up had already. It didn’t stop me from dry heaving with an involuntary shudder that felt as if it started in my pelvis and rolled all the way up to my ribs. My bones ached, and pain pulsated through my brain.
The heat in the car was stifling. Dunne pressed a button next to his seat, the window next to me slid open, and freezing air hit my face. It helped. I lay back and waited for the queasiness to subside.
When I sat up, the forensic tent was gone, as were all the other police cars. There wasn’t a single constable in sight. The pavement was covered in a thin layer of sugar-like snow. My queasiness increased at the sight of it.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I had no evidence. Just because I didn’t find him didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but when I thought of the winged boy, I didn’t have that feeling that he belonged with the dead. My instincts had been wrong before, but not when it came to death.
‘How can he not be dead?’ Dunne asked. ‘Losing his wings must have been a major trauma. Are you sure?’
The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) Page 14
