Weirdo

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Terry,” Rivett looked up as the waiter appeared with a trolley and placed white china plates bearing thick T-bones in front of them. As Terry spooned fries, mushrooms and tomatoes alongside the meat, an expression of carnivorous satisfaction settled across the former DCI’s features. “Proper job,” he said. The waiter put down a cruet set and bottles of sauce before he wheeled respectfully away.

  Sean watched Rivett reach for the HP and slather it liberally over his meal.

  “Looks good,” he said.

  “You won’t get no better in this town,” said Rivett. “Look at that,” he cut his steak and watched the blood flow out. “They say rare and that is rare. How often do you get that?”

  “Well,” said Sean, taking the tomato ketchup for himself, “it’s pretty rare.”

  “Ha!” Rivett looked delighted. “You’re like me, in’t you, boy? Always think with our guts first. We’re gonna be all right, I reckon.” He nodded, chewing with relish.

  It seemed obvious to Sean that here was a man delighted to be sprung out of the indolence of retirement, who needed a purpose as much as he did.

  “What else is in that file of yours, then?” Rivett waved a forkful of chips in its direction.

  “I’ve drawn up a list of witnesses to the original case I’d like to try and speak to,” said Sean, as he cut into his steak. “Or if you could help me track them down, I’d be grateful. If you’ve an opinion on anyone else you think looks likely, I’d like to hear that too.”

  “Right,” Rivett speared a mushroom and held it up as if assessing it as a potential fit. “Well, don’t you go worrying about my memory, I don’t need no microchips to keep that in order. Certain faces are already rising to the surface. Not very pleasant ones, mind, but then Miss Woodrow din’t exactly keep polite company.”

  Sean worked on his steak. Despite its generous size, it seemed oddly tasteless. He should have been starving by now, since he’d only had black coffee and a round of toast for his breakfast. But somehow his appetite was evading him.

  “What did happen to the mother?” he asked.

  “What you’d expect, really,” said Rivett, who had just about cleared his own plate. “She couldn’t stay round here no more, which come as a bit of a blow to her, seeing as she was a junkie with connections to all the local drug scum. After her house got firebombed she upped and went to Norwich, where she continued to ply her trade.” He looked down at Sean’s plate. “’Til she come across one punter who din’t take too kindly to her sideline in petty larceny and beat her to death with a tyre iron one night. Not that I would have made her for this, anyhow. She were one of them types always getting some other mug to do her dirty work, usually a member of our local motorcycle community. But, at the death, she din’t even have them left as friends. What’s the matter, boy, in’t you hungry?”

  “I don’t know why,” said Sean. “It’s delicious, but …”

  “Let me give you a hand.” Rivett’s fork bore down on his chips. “Waste not, want not.”

  Sean managed a few more mouthfuls of steak and a couple of mushrooms while his companion demolished the rest of his lunch around him.

  “Right, well,” Rivett wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I’ve had a word with the new gaffer and he’s made the old files available for us to look at. What I suggest we do now is go down the station with your list, introduce you to him and see what we can’t dig up.” He raised his hand to the waiter again. “Put that on my tab, will you, Terry?” He reached out his wallet for a fiver tip. “And that’s for yourself. That’s if,” he looked back at Sean, “you sure you don’t want no more?”

  “No,” said Sean, “I’m fine.”

  His stomach said the opposite.

  * * *

  Ernemouth police station sat behind the northwest end of the market square, a navy-blue hoarding over the first floor proclaiming that the Norfolk Constabulary were Working for you. Electronic doors opened in a whoosh to let them through and Rivett led the way to an open reception where a young man who scarcely looked old enough to shave wrote down Sean’s name in the log book and issued him a pass. Then they took a lift up to the first floor to Detective Chief Inspector Smollet’s office.

  “He’s our youngest ever DCI,” Rivett told Sean. “Was only in his short trousers when this case happened. But they rise up the ranks so fast these days, what with all them computers to help them.”

  He rapped on the door, scarcely waiting for an answer before he pushed it open.

  One look at Smollet and Sean divined the reason for the undercurrent of scorn in Rivett’s last comment. His successor had the appearance of everything that would be anathema to the old order. A neat, groomed, smoke-free appearance. An office decked out in Ikea minimalism. Flow charts on the wall behind him, a laptop in front of him and a PC to his right. A framed picture of the wife on his desk and an overpowering smell of cologne as he rose and stretched out a manicured hand to shake.

  Smollet’s tanned and blandly handsome face smiled a welcome as his eyes flicked appraisingly over Sean’s leather coat and cashmere V-neck.

  “Mr Ward,” he said. “Used to be with the Met, right?”

  Sean nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Right,” Smollet sat back down, indicating that they should take a seat. Sean took the chair nearest to him, but Rivett remained standing. “Len told me all about you. Has he been taking care of you?”

  “Very much so,” said Sean. “It’s good of you both to be so helpful.”

  “Not at all.” Smollet leaned forwards across his desk, steepling his fingers, glancing just above Sean’s eyeline at Rivett. “Anything you need that we can provide, we’ll do our best to accommodate. We in’t got nothing to hide here.”

  “He’s given us a list,” said Rivett, waving the folder. “I’d like to take it down to records, if that’s all right with you.”

  “I have a duplicate for you here, sir,” Sean reached into his briefcase and offered an identical file. “Just so as you know all the facts as I do. If there are any points you’d like to raise …”

  “Thank you,” Smollet took the folder and placed it to the side of his laptop. “I’ll go through it this afternoon and come back to you if I need any clarification. Len and I thought it would be best if he took you through the old case files first, seeing as he is considerably more familiar with them than I am. At this point, I’d just like to welcome you here. If you’re not happy with anything,” his eyes flicked up again for a second, “anything at all, you just let me know. My numbers,” he plucked a card from a stack by the side of his in-tray, “in case you don’t already have them.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Sean, reaching into his wallet to exchange one of his own.

  “And now,” Smollet got to his feet again, “I’ll leave you in Len’s capable hands.”

  He looked as if there was an unpleasant smell lingering under his nostrils that would disperse the minute the two of them left. Rivett seemed to concur, making for the door.

  “Can I just ask,” Sean said, remaining seated, “about the detective who made the original arrest. Paul Gray, I believe his name was. He still around?”

  Smollet looked towards Rivett, frown lines creasing his forehead.

  Rivett’s expression mirrored the one he had used on the steak. “Should be able to dig him up for you,” he said. “That’s one I know who in’t gone far. If you’d care to follow me?”

  Sean looked back at Smollet, whose eyes rested one more beat on Rivett before returning to Sean with a brief smile, nodding his assent. Sean got to his feet, feeling the tension between the two men, wondering which one of them was really in charge.

  14

  The Latest Craze

  October 1983

  Detective Sergeant Paul Gray looked through the hatch at the girl he’d apprehended under the pier. She was sitting on the iron bed with a book in her lap, flicking through the pages without giving the appearance of taking anything in. Her left foot bobbed up and down fr
antically and she was chewing hard at her gum, constantly pushing her ragged hair out of her eyes. Trying to look tough, he supposed.

  She hadn’t come in quietly, unlike the old pervert he’d been trailing. Like so many of his kind, he’d started snivelling the moment he was cuffed, and throughout his interview remained meekly acquiescent. Now he sat blowing into his hanky at the end of the cellblock, awaiting a lift to the magistrates in the morning.

  This one had given no ground, except for her correct age, fifteen. She hadn’t been doing anything, she maintained, just going for a walk on the beach and what was the law against that? Unfortunately for her, rules stipulated that school children had to be kept at the station until a parent, social worker or head teacher could be informed. Once she realised she couldn’t just walk out again, she had exploded. It had taken all of Gray’s patience to wheedle out her name and address; that and the duty sergeant’s suggestion that she be allowed to keep her precious book with her while she waited in the cells.

  Roy Mobbs had close to twenty years’ experience on Gray. Said the surname Woodrow rang a bell with him somewhere. When Gray came back with the mother’s name, it triggered his powers of recall: he slapped a palm across his forehead and picked up the phone, got the name of her social worker from the girl’s headmaster instead. They were now waiting for a Mrs Sheila Alcott to arrive.

  Corrine looked up from her book, realising she was being watched.

  “D’you want anything?” Gray asked, trying to sound friendly. “Cup of tea? Coffee?”

  She stared at him, surprise passing across her face. “Cup of tea would be nice,” she concluded.

  She was seven years older than Gray’s own daughter.

  “How d’you like it? Milk and sugar?”

  Corrine nodded. “Two sugars, please,” she said. “You got any biscuits?”

  Gray brought it into the cell himself. He was concerned, in the way of a father rather than a policeman, as to how she had ended up like this.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the mug from him and clutching it in both hands. Close up, her eyes looked like a panda’s, surrounded by smudged make-up.

  “I found you these, and all,” Gray had filched a couple of custard creams, put them on a saucer. The girl demolished them in seconds, then slurped noisily at her tea. Skinny little thing, she was. Gray wondered when was the last time she’d been fed.

  He glanced at the book she’d left face down on the bed. It was an old volume, bound in black leather, and adorned with gold-leaf etchings – a queen with a crown, a man on a camel, a dragon with outstretched wings – that resembled a medieval bestiary.

  The Goetia, he read, The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, Clavicula Salomonis Regis.

  Was it some kind of history book? It hardly seemed likely.

  Translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, he read on. Edited with an introduction by Aleister Crowley.

  “What you now reading?” he asked, trying to think where he had heard the name Crowley before.

  Black-painted fingernails immediately snatched the book away. “Why d’you care?” the mask of hostility came up over her features as swiftly as it had been dropped. “You in’t takin’ it. It’s a rare book, what was en-trust-ed to me,” she stumbled over the last sentence, like it was a line she’d had to practise. “I gotta keep it safe.” The biscuit saucer and tea mug now discarded, she clutched the tome across her chest with both arms.

  “Hey, now,” Gray fought the urge to laugh, not wanting to seem to mock the girl. She had shown a certain cunning earlier this evening, but it was clear she had the emotional volatility of a much younger child. “I got no intention of taking it from you, I just in’t seen nothing like it before. Is it part of your school work, or something?”

  Corrine’s expression shifted from aggression to puzzlement. “Noooo,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “But, I s’pose you could say I am learnin’ from it.”

  “That’s good then,” said Gray. “What kind of thing?”

  The girl tilted her head sideways and stared at him through narrowed eyes. “How to protect myself,” she eventually said.

  All Gray’s feelings of amusement drained away. “Right,” he said. “Well, I can see …”

  A rap on the door cut his sentence short. “Paul, you in there?” Roy Mobbs’ voice came through the hatch. “Social worker’s now here.”

  “Right,” he said. “Better show her in, then.”

  “Oh, fuckin’ hell!” were Corrine’s words of greeting to this news. She scrabbled up the bed until her back was against the wall, drawing her feet up beneath her. As Gray turned to open the door, he saw her shove her book underneath her grubby top and bring her arms down defiantly on top of it.

  On the other side of the cell door stood a short woman with frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a brown anorak. She looked like she had just been disturbed from her gardening.

  “Sheila Alcott,” she said, offering a red hand. “In there, is she?”

  “That’s right,” said Gray. Sheila might have had the look of a rural hippy, but there was an edge to her voice that suggested the schoolmarm.

  “DS Paul Gray,” he said, “pleased to meet you, Mrs Alcott.”

  “I came as quick as I could,” Sheila said, concern in her watery blue eyes. “I’m afraid I live at the other end of the Acle Straight and I was up to my ears in compost when you called. I hope I haven’t kept you unduly.”

  She took a spotted handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. There was a piece of straw sticking out from the tangled depths of her hair.

  “I’ve been afraid this sort of thing would happen to Corrine before too long,” she went on. “Might I be allowed a few words with her, then?”

  Gray was just opening his mouth to reply when a loud female voice resounded down the corridor.

  “Where is she, then? What you now done with my daughter, you bunch of old bastards?”

  Gray looked up at the woman who stomped towards them, a blazing fury flashing in her coal dark eyes.

  “Oh dear,” said the social worker. “You’ve found Mrs Woodrow, then.”

  No one had summoned her, except, Gray thought, for the jungle drums that beat beneath the pavements of Ernemouth, the grapevine that seemed to exist between the walls and the stones in the places Mrs Woodrow’s sort hung out.

  Though, she didn’t look how he would have expected. She wasn’t ravaged by the sins of her lifestyle with an emaciated figure, bad skin and lank, greasy hair. Instead, she resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor in black biker’s leathers, clouds of raven hair falling down around her shoulders.

  “Where is the little bitch?” she demanded, pulling up on six-inch platform heels.

  * * *

  Corrine’s blood turned to ice as the screaming match began outside. She tried desperately to recall the things that Noj had started to teach her, the incantations she was supposed to say against her mother’s power. But the terror of hearing the old bitch’s voice and the thought of her getting her hands on the sacred book had turned her mind into a raging blank, like a television set left on after the last programme had gone off the air.

  She hadn’t been supposed to take any of Noj’s books when she left his house this afternoon. But she had wanted to learn more quickly. Desperately, she pushed it further down her waistband, hoping against hope that it would somehow go unnoticed.

  Then something peculiar happened.

  Noj’s eyes appeared in her mind, clear, green and focused. The static in her head dissipated as his voice poured into her ears, telling her what she should do. “Close your eyes, Corrine. A sphere of white light is around you. Can you see it?” Corrine nodded. Behind her eyelids, she conjured forth a shimmering ball of white light.

  “Now watch as the light starts to blur, and takes on the colours and shapes of the room around you.” Corrine had the strangest sensation, as if she had started floating through the air. She could see the mousey-beige blanket, the green-grey paint of
the cell walls and the mud-brown of the floor passing through her arms and down her body. All the sounds in the corridor outside disappeared as she felt the circle of light enfold her.

  “Fade into the light,” she heard Noj say. “Fade into the light and disappear.”

  She didn’t hear the door open, nor see the shapes of several people standing over her.

  “She’s passed clean out,” said Sheila Alcott, gently lifting Corrine’s right eyelid.

  “In that position?” Gray said. Corrine was sitting bolt upright.

  “She’s catatonic,” Sheila spoke as one who had seen this sort of thing many times before. “We need to call an ambulance.”

  * * *

  Corrine woke up with a strange smell in her nose. Blinking rapidly, she tried to take in her surroundings. It took her a few moments to grasp that she was in a hospital bed, and another few more to realise how she must have got here.

  There was a brief moment of panic when she thought she had lost Noj’s precious book. But when she turned her head she could see it, sitting safely on top of the table by her bed. Her mother, the police and the social worker were all gone and everything was quiet – she wasn’t in a general ward but in a little room of her own. Sunlight slanted across the sheets from the blinds on the window.

  That was when Corrine knew that magick really worked.

  15

  I Blood Brother Be

  March 2003

  Sean arranged the mugshots on the table in front of him. Corrine’s known associates, arrested after Gray had caught her at the murder site, all subsequently released without charge. Their statements, paper-clipped to the back of the photos, attesting to the fact that one raid on Captain Swing’s public house had netted virtually the lot of them.