Black 01 - Street Magic

by Caitlin Kittredge

  A clerk straight out of The Vampyre ruffled his Hello! magazine in annoyance when Pete came to reception. "Yeah?"

  "Could you tell me about the person staying in room twenty-six?" Pete said, trying to sound bright and official. It took more than a forced smile and a chipper tone to garner a reaction from the clerk, for he just grunted.

  Pete unfolded the note Oliver Heath, her desk mate at the Metropolitan Police, had handed her. "Grand Montresor, Bloomsbury by King's Cross. Room 26 @ 3 p.m."

  "Said he had information on the Killigan child-snatching." Ollie had shrugged, the gesture expansive as his Midlands drawl, when she'd questioned him. "Said that the lead inspector were to come alone, and not be late."

  Bridget Killigan. Six years old. Disappeared from her primary-school playground when her father was late fetching her. In normal cases Pete advised the parents to be hopeful, that children were usually found, that nothing would happen to their family. Because in normal cases, the child was snatched by a parent in a custody case or an older schoolmate as a prank, or simply said Bugger this and ran off on their own, only to be confounded by the tube system and get stranded in Brixton. Strangers took children in folktales, not Pete Caldecott's London.

  Even so, when the Killigan case came to Pete, she got that sink in her chest that always heralded an unsolvable crime. Bridget had no divorced parents, no creepy uncles. The girl had been taken by a figment with no ties to the world Pete could discover, and she knew, in the leaden and otherworldly way she just knew some things, that the only way they'd find Bridget Killigan would be dead.

  The clerk was giving her the eye, so Pete showed her warrant card. "Does the lift work?" she asked.

  The clerk snorted. "What d'you think, Inspector?"

  Pete sighed resignedly and mounted the stairs. She'd been meaning to get more time at the gym, hadn't she? One didn't become a twenty-eight-year-old detective inspector without spending every waking moment plastered to a case. At least, one didn't if one didn't want to endure the whispers about DI Caldecott the elder and how he'd worked for his position, he had, wasn't right how some young slip just waltzed right in…

  Room 26 matched all the other doors in the hallway, robin's egg blue, like a door in a dirty London sky. Pete lifted her hand to knock and then dropped it. She'd tried to ignore that knowing, of course. You couldn't know things you hadn't deduced with fact. The feelings of tight pressure behind her eyes, the whispers of the future echoing down the time stream to her ears—those things were stress, or low blood sugar.

  Not real. Had never been real. Maybe she'd had a good hunch a time or two, was all. She was good at her job. Nothing spooky about it.

  Pete lifted her hand again and knocked this time, firmly and thrice. "C'min," someone mumbled from behind the door. "'S open."

  "Not very smart in this city," Pete replied, knowing the best she could hope for on the other side of the door was a shifty-eyed informant who had heard some fifth-hand story about Bridget Killigan and needed a few quid.

  She turned the knob and stepped in, keeping her chin up on the off chance that it was a shifty-eyed axe murderer, instead. "I'm DI Caldecott. You wanted to speak about Bridget Killigan?"

  He was slouched on the sill, a lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip. The sun was low over King's Cross and it lit up the man's platinum-dyed hair, a halo over a dirty hollow-cheeked face.

  "Yes," said Jack Winter, exhaling smoke through his nose. "I did."

  He'd been bloody and still the last time Pete saw him. Eyes staring at the ceiling of another's tomb. Pete could only stare for a moment, and her heart fluttered as the two images of Jack overlaid one another, spattering blood droplets and pain across the living incarnation's face. He'd been so still.

  Younger, too. Bigger. A body gained from nights sleeping on a floor and fights outside the club after his sets. That was gone now. Jack was all sharp corners and creases. He flicked his ash on the sill and unfolded his long arms and legs, gesturing Pete to the bed.

  "Sit, if you like."

  Pete couldn't have, not if God himself commanded it. She was rooted surely as an old oak.

  Bloody and still. Dead.

  "You…" The word came out on a shiver. "You."

  "Yeah, I'm surprised a bit meself," Jack said, dragging on his cigarette like he was underwater and it was oxygen. "I mean, I rang asking for the inspector on the Killigan case and they give me your name. Almost said fuck it, then. You don't deserve the success."

  Pete finally managed to blink, to set the world right side up again and march ahead despite the thousand screaming questions ringing inside her skull. Jack Winter was alive. Right. On with it.

  "What do you mean by that?"

  He threw down the butt of his cigarette and stamped on it with a jackbooted foot. "You know bloody well what I mean, you fickle bitch."

  "I don't—" Pete started, but he cut her off, grabbing up an old leather jacket from the bed and shrugging it onto shoulders that showed their bones.

  "Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery," Jack cut her off. "I'd prefer five hundred pounds cash reward, but since you're a copper I know your heartfelt thanks will have to do."

  He went around Pete for the door, stamping his feet in a jerky stride like he was cold. Pete decided that her mind might be standing agape, but the rest of her didn't need to be. She caught him by the wrist. "Wait! Jack, how do you know that? Please."

  Please tell me why you've been alive all along and never breathed a word to me. Please tell me how you survived that day.

  He sneered. "Let go of me."

  Pete held on, and he wriggled in her grasp. "I just want to have a word, Jack—after twelve years, don't you?"

  "No," he said. "I told you what I needed to tell you, and now I'm off to the pub. Leggo, you bloody fascist!"

  He ripped his arm away and the sleeve of the jacket jerked back, revealing a miniature tube system of veins and punctures on his forearm. Numbness stole over Pete as she stared, until Jack glared and pushed his sleeve down again.

  "How long?" she asked.

  Jack shoved a cigarette between his lips and touched it with the tip of his finger. An ember sprang to life. "Like you bloody care."

  With a slam of the broken door, he vanished.

  Pete dialed MG at her commune in Sussex on her mobile when she left the Grand Montresor and hung up. She dialed her desk at Scotland Yard. Ollie picked up, but Pete rang off with him as well.

  What the bloody hell would she say? "By the way, that bloke who dropped dead in front of me when I was sixteen? Saw him today. Yeah. Gives his love."

  Ollie was ill equipped to offer advice, unless it was regarding Leeds United football or cheap minibreak destinations. MG already had enough reasons to think Pete was a raving nutter. After the graveyard, after Pete had started talking again a few weeks later, MG had screamed and slapped her and demanded to know what had happened to her boyfriend.

  I wish I knew, I really do, Pete had said, but it wasn't good enough. MG had never really trusted her again. She had been the one to introduce Pete to Jack, taken her to hear the Poor Dead Bastards play, so in MG's mind, where the universe rotated around MG, it was MG's fault that Jack was dead, and Pete's fault that she didn't throw herself on the same sword. Picking up and getting on with things was Da's way, and MG wouldn't hear of it.

  Pete leaned her head against the steering wheel of her Mini, and tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the wasted middle-aged man in room 26 with the memory she'd carried for a dozen years. She hadn't brought Jack to mind often. It was painful to think of even the first time she'd seen Jack, at Fiver's, torn up and bloody even though his set had just started. That image stayed with her, Jack screaming and bleeding and irrefutably alive.

  In the dreams that came in the twelve intervening years, the two pictures of Jack—alive and inanimate—blended, and Pete often found herself standing alone in the pit at Fiver's, being sung to by a dead man.

  P
ete's mobile rang and she jerked, dropping it between the driver's seat and the shift console. She swore as it continued to chirp and finally dug it out from the crevice. "DI Caldecott."

  "Where are you?"

  Pete held the phone away and checked the caller ID screen, terry (work) blinked in red letters. She took a breath and shoved everything that had happened inside the Montresor into the tidy bin she kept at the back of her mind for information too awful or real to process.

  "I was working and I turned off my mobile. I do have a job still, Terry."

  Terry drew in a breath. "You were supposed to be at the estate agent's to sign the sale papers at four."

  Pete turned the key in the Mini's ignition and the faulty dash clock flickered to life. Three forty-five. "Terry, there's no way I can make it in traffic," Pete said. "We're going to have to put it off until tomorrow."

  "Pete." Terry sighed. "Just because we're no longer together doesn't mean you can dispose of our communal property at your leisure. I want the flat sold by summer. I'm going on holiday to Spain and I don't want to deal with it."

  "God forbid I should intrude on your precious holiday," Pete muttered. "Because it's all about you, Terry. Isn't it?"

  "Pete," he said. "We bought the flat together, and we're no longer together, and I am going to get my money and wash my hands of it. That's all there is."

  Pete had nearly forgotten the patronizing tone Terry pulled out, the one that made her feel like a first-year recruit every time, but it came back to her in a rush. "Terry, I'm working," she snapped. "I don't have time for you."

  "That was always your whole problem," said Terry. After a moment a bleep told Pete she'd been disconnected.

  "And a fine afternoon to you, too," Pete muttered, tossing the mobile into the back seat. Terry had a job that began and ended at the same time every day. He never got blood on his shoes.

  He never saw people return from the dead.

  Pete gripped the Mini's wheel for a long thirty seconds before she felt steady enough to drive. She tried to blot Jack's face out and replace it with Bridget Killigan's, because the little girl was who she should be dwelling on. Not Mr. Risen from the Bloody Dead.

  Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

  "Bollocks," Pete said firmly, and pulled away from the curb.

  Chapter Three

  DI Ollie Heath was leaving for the day when Pete slumped at her desk in the warrenlike Homicide and Serious Crime division, and he stopped and folded his coat over his ample stomach. "You look a fright, Caldecott."

  "Ta muchly," Pete muttered.

  "Is it that tosser you were to marry?" Ollie asked. "I'm sure I could work up a traffic warrant or two if he's giving you trouble."

  "It's not Terry," said Pete. "Just… someone I knew, a long while back."

  "Unpleasant reunion?" Ollie said.

  Jack's eyes, a blue like the coldest part of a glacier, wide and staring, his skin and his platinum hair dappled in blood. Pete pushed, hard, against the flood of grief and other, darker thoughts that Jack's face stirred up. Thoughts that she'd put away for good, denied as hallucinations and dreams covering the ugly, bloodstained truth. "No. Just old, bad memories."

  Ollie patted her awkwardly on the shoulder a few times. Pete felt herself go stiff as a mannequin, and Ollie quickly drew back, his pudgy hand disappearing into his pocket. "Don't work too late, Caldecott. Can't find Bridget Killi-gan if you're dead from exhaustion."

  "Right. 'Night, Ollie."

  Ollie left without any further thought, home to his tidy flat and his cat and his telly. Pete wanted to follow him, but her flat would be cold. Too many ghosts were around her tonight for any sort of rest. Jack, MG, Terry, Da. Da would have known what to do. He would have known whether to trust Jack, if that man in the hotel was Jack. In the sharp glow of the Major Investigation Room and her computer screen, Pete found it easier to believe she'd dreamed it entirely.

  "Why did you come back to me?" she muttered, putting her hands on her desk and her face on her hands. Because she knew it was Jack. Pete had known things only a few times before—that storms were blowing, and that when the oncologist took the first X-rays of Connor's lungs that he was going to die. She tried to push her intuition back at every turn, because admitting the rightness of the thing would open the door to the very path Jack's reappearance was leading her inexorably down. To that day, the thing in the center of the stone tomb…

  "Stop it," Pete murmured, and only Jack's phantom voice answered her back.

  Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

  Pete sat up, rubbed her eyes, tried to fill out paperwork and ignore the heavy weight of certainty against her mind. Connor would have laughed at her, even at the end when he was strapped to an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day.

  "Bugger this," Pete muttered. She got her things and strode down the corridor to the rear exit, where the night air was still sharp and cold, real winter in the rain and the scent of the turning trees. Leaving the Mini in the lot, she walked for a time, going over all of the reasons why she shouldn't believe a word that came out of Jack Winter's mouth. He was dead, for a first. Untrustworthy even when alive, for a second.

  But when she shut her eyes, his face would not leave her, nor what he'd said.

  "I don't have anything else," Pete sighed into the air when she'd walked as far as she could before falling into the Thames. And if she wasted a few hours chasing Jack's dragons, she hadn't lost. Bridget Killigan had been missing for three days and it was as if the girl had become vapor. "I don't have anything else," Pete repeated, and at the late hour it made a bit of sense.

  Chapter Four

  At six a.m. silver bathed the street and cooled Pete's skin to the temperature of the air. The brick wall of the East Cemetery at her back prodded, keeping her from nodding off as she watched the plain black iron gates, locked up with a modern chain and padlock that jarred any sense of mystery right out of the scene.

  Ridiculous was more like it. She was too bloody sensible to be here, with four hours of sleep behind her, waiting for a promise made by the shade of Jack Winter.

  Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

  Pete stuck a Parliament in her mouth and lit it with an inhale of regret. Hadn't she promised everyone who mattered that she'd quit? A dozen times over, at least.

  But it was a hard morning, an autumn morning, and it was cold. Her jacket was too thin and she was rattled and everywhere she looked she saw bloody Bridget Killigan, six years old, grinning out from a school photo.

  The smoke rubbed her throat and Pete exhaled. She couldn't erase Bridget from the backs of her eyes any more than she could erase Jack. She couldn't stop seeing her face, feeling the seconds run through her fingers as days passed.

  Crying. Bridget was crying. Pete snapped her head up, the Parliament falling to the pavement. She stepped on it as she moved into the street, listening over the ever-present whisper of traffic, the slamming of doors from the block of flats nearby, a dog howling. She refused to believe she was so far gone that she was hearing phantom sobs.

  Crying, issuing from under a low-hanging tree with glossy leaves near the barriers that closed off Highgate Cemetery and divided the land of the living from the land of the dead. Senseless and wordless and filled with pain, it rose and wavered and mingled with Pete's own wordless exclamation.

  She shoved branches aside and saw Bridget Killigan hunched on the ivy with her knees pulled to her chin, sobbing softly but shedding no tears. She refused to look at Pete when Pete gathered her into her arms, and from what Pete saw never looked at anything with her white and staring eyes, ever again.

  "Shock," said Ollie when Bridget and her crying parents had been loaded into an ambulance and sent streaming away into thick morning traffic. "Poor bit's obviously had a time of it."

  Pete lit the fifth Parliament of the day.

  "That's not s
hock, Ollie," she said. "I've seen shock."

  Ollie shook out his tidy notebook with the blue cover, turning a new page because Bridget Killigan was found and there was no reason to open to her anymore. "Then what is it?"

  White eyes. Tearless and staring into forever. Pete took a long drag on the cigarette. "That? That was bloody haunted."

  Ollie shook his head, a forelock of ashen hair falling into his eyes. "Whatever it was, Caldecott, you'd better pull a marvelous story out of your arse as to how you found the kid. I know you're good but what you did here, that ain't good—that's witchcraft."

  Pete blinked. "What'd you say, Ollie?"

  "Witchcraft," said Ollie. "Ruddy magic, you going to the exact spot and finding the Killigan brat, even if she is too damaged to make heads or tails of what happened for us."

  Pete chewed on her lip and kept silent. If only Ollie Heath knew how eerily prophetic he could be at times. He was busy fussing with his collar now, putting himself in order, resetting the gears to begin a new set of problems and intricacies that new cases would bring. "Say," he said after a moment, "how'd that tip come out? The dodgy one I took over the phone?"

  "Oh, that," said Pete, stabbing her Parliament against the brick wall next to her and watching the smoke curl up from the dead ash. "That was nothing."

  Chapter Five

  In all her time, Pete would never know why she trusted Jack Winter. Why she'd put her faith in him time and time again, as a child and now, and why she willingly followed where he led. She'd had no earthly reason to go to Highgate, to think for one minute that his words were anything but the sputtering of junkie circuitry.

  But she'd gone. On nothing more than a feeling and a flutter in that dark cage where she'd locked up everything when Jack had died. Pete knew what Connor would have to say about that, and it was nothing that would put a spring in her step.

  The MIT room in New Scotland Yard, no longer housed in the halls of visiting monarchy but a chapel for the warriors who trod the tangled veins and arteries of London, was dark. Pete's desk lamp created an oasis, but it didn't reach far.