A Three-Book Collection

by M. V. Stott

  ‘Yes, yes, I had no choice!’

  ‘The way I heard it, you sold me down the river for money. Tacky.’

  ‘It was a lot of money.’

  Carlisle threw his head back and laughed, his shoulder-length black hair dancing as his howls echoed around the stone tunnel.

  ‘I hope you had time to enjoy your bounty young man, because now I am going to snap your neck.’

  With a flick of his wrist, the rope that bound the man’s ankles detached and coiled back into his hand. He opened his coat—the inside rippling and glowing as though the lining were fashioned from stars—and fixed the coiled rope to his belt.

  The man scrambled backwards, unable to rise, unable to escape. But he still had one card up his sleeve. A rumour he’d heard that might yet save his life.

  ‘You should be proud,’ said Carlisle, ‘most don’t make it as far as you did before they find my hands on them. You’re a nippy little whippet.’

  He flexed his hands, his mouth a red slash across his pale face.

  ‘I know where your artefact is!’ said the man.

  Carlisle stopped his advance, the corners of his mouth twitching down momentarily. ‘And what do you know of my artefact?’

  ‘I know three things,’ the man replied, his back resting against the brick wall of the tunnel, heart beating almost to the point of giving out as he looked up at the figure looming over him.

  ‘You have my curiosity, sewer-born. Please proceed.’

  ‘I know you want it. I know you lost it.’

  Carlisle raised an eyebrow.

  ‘And… and I hear a rumour that it has been found.’

  Carlisle reached into his pocket and pulled out a red apple. He polished it against the soft fabric of his purple coat, then took a bite. ‘Temptation,’ said Carlisle. ‘Like the snake to Eve in the Garden of Eden, you sit there, tempting me with juicy, sweet information. But as you can see, I already have an apple of my own.’

  ‘I don’t… what?’

  ‘What’s to stop me beating the information out of you then killing you anyway?’

  ‘Well… it’s not good manners…?’

  Carlisle chuckled and took another bite of his apple.

  ‘So? Do we have an understanding?’ said the man, rising slowly, his hands flat to the wall. ‘My life for the whereabouts of your missing artefact?’

  Carlisle took another bite of his apple, then bowed his head once in agreement. ‘Very well, you have my word. Tell me the location and I will not kill you.’

  The man felt a little relief wash over him. ‘It’s in Blackpool.’

  ‘Blackpool?’

  ‘Blackpool,’ he confirmed. ‘It is understood that your artefact is in the possession of a great magician.’

  ‘I see. And who fed you this juicy morsel?’

  ‘An eaves, who heard it from an eaves, who heard it from an eaves.’

  The man felt Carlisle’s eyes boring into him, interrogating him.

  ‘So? Are we good?’ asked the man.

  ‘Good enough. Congratulations, you live to scurry amongst the rats another day.’

  Carlisle tossed the apple into the air as he turned, caught it with his other hand, and walked away into the black.

  The man held his breath, listening to Carlisle’s footfalls as they drifted away and away, until he couldn’t hear him at all.

  His legs almost unhinged as the relief crashed over his body like an angry ocean wave against a crumbling cliff face.

  He’d done it. He’d crossed Carlisle, been caught red-handed, and survived. He felt like laughing. Instead he turned and ran in the opposite direction from where Carlisle had disappeared, feeling elated, until finally he could run no further and slowed to a stroll, heading for a sewer cover that he knew opened up outside his favourite pub, where he could drink long and hard to celebrate his good fortune.

  As he stopped beneath it and pulled out his tool to lever the cover open, his foot nudged something on the ground. The man looked down, expecting to see a stone, or the partially rotted corpse of a sewer rat. What he actually saw made his eyes widen and his stomach drop.

  It was a red, half-eaten apple.

  He felt the hands around his neck just long enough to realise that his life was at an end, then his neck was snapped and he crumpled to the ground.

  ‘One thing you should know about me,’ Carlisle told the lifeless heap before him, ‘I lie.’

  He placed his foot against the man’s head and pressed down until the skull cracked beneath the heel of his boot.

  4

  The office at Blackpool Central Police Station that Rita had worked out of for the last five years smelled like old pizza and fried chicken. Officers weren’t meant to eat hot food at their desks, but with the amount of hours they spent there—not to mention nights—it was more or less a daily occurrence.

  Rita flopped into her chair, her nose wrinkling at the familiar background scent. She leaned back to put her feet up on her desk and almost kicked a teetering tower of overdue paperwork on to the well-worn carpet. She looked up at the ceiling, which had once been white but had long ago taken on a yellow hue from decades of detectives hunched at their desks, smoking. Not that they’d been able to smoke in there for years, but then the place was slow to spend money on touch-ups.

  ‘What time d’you call this?’ asked DI Collins, the question emerging from beneath a moustache several shades darker than his hair.

  ‘Time your wife finally cleaned that shit out of her eyes and left your fat arse,’ replied Rita, to a chorus of approving laughter thrown in Collins’ direction.

  ‘We’re literally two minutes late, Collins, traffic,’ said Waterson, ‘by the way, I know it’s you who blocked up the bogs last week.’

  ‘You can’t prove a thing.’

  The whole office turned to eye Collins, who suddenly found his computer screen very fascinating.

  ‘Hobbes, Waterson, in here,’ said DCI Alexander Jenner, poking his balding, blonde head out of his office into the main space, cutting any further arguments dead.

  DCI Jenner closed the door to his private office behind them as Rita and Waterson entered and stood before his desk.

  ‘What was that about?’ asked Jenner, thumbing over his shoulder as he made his way around to his chair.

  ‘Men’s bog, Guv,’ replied Waterson.

  ‘Collins admitted to blocking it yet?’

  ‘No, Guv,’ said Rita.

  ‘Third time in a month. Someone seriously needs to look at that man’s diet.’

  Rita smirked. As far as bosses went, DCI Jenner could be a lot worse. Oh, he yelled, he expected way too much of them, and was just downright unreasonable at times, but somehow he managed to pull off the trick of being likable at the same time.

  ‘Got something for us, Guv?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Woman. Jane Bowan. Her partner, boyfriend, says she’s missing.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Waterson.

  ‘It’s been two days. Uniform have done the usual missing persons job, but family insist she hasn’t just walked out. Here,’ he tossed over a plastic folder containing all the information gathered so far. Rita snatched it up.

  ‘No clothes missing, no bags or suitcases gone, her phone still on the bedside table, her bank account hasn’t been accessed,’ reported DCI Jenner. ‘She just disappeared. So find her.’

  An hour later, Waterson pulled to a stop across the road from the house Jane Bowan and her boyfriend Greg Nicol shared.

  ‘Nice area, this,’ noted Waterson.

  ‘Yeah, for Blackpool. Let’s keep things in perspective, Waters.’

  ‘Water-son. Water-son. For my own sanity’s sake, just try it out, please.’

  Rita made a show of considering his plea, then frowned. ‘Nah, sounds weird. Shall we?’

  Waterson smiled and shook his head as they stepped out of the car and headed over to the blue door of the house.

  Rita had been thinking about putting in for a transfer to
London. To be truthful, she’d been thinking about it for the last four years, but this year, this was the year she was going to do it. She’d written up her transfer letter, printed it out, put it in an envelope, and sat it in the top drawer of her desk at the station.

  Before the year was out.

  She had to do it.

  She’d been stuck in that small, shuffling town her whole life. It was time for something different. Something more. Her stomach ached at the idea of another year cooped up in that frayed little place, living on the edge of the world, if you could even call what she did living. She hadn’t had the heart to mention her plans to Waterson yet. Sure, he heard her bad-mouth the place on a daily basis, but he had no idea she was actually about to go through with it and kiss the town goodbye.

  Rita was actually a little worried about how he’d take the news. She and Waterson had been partners for years. Yes they bickered, yes they fought, but they were each other’s rock. Best friends, really. She knew when she told him she was leaving him behind that he’d take it as a betrayal. He wouldn’t say as much, he’d probably even wish her well, tell her congratulations on finally doing what she always said she would, but she knew, under the blather, the sense of betrayal, of abandonment, would cut deep.

  But Rita didn’t have a choice.

  Blackpool was suffocating her. One more season spent in that small-minded, clapped-out town and she’d lose her mind. She needed to get out of there. To start over somewhere new.

  A man answered the door; he looked like he’d had about a year’s worth of rough nights, his eyes red and unfocussed, his skin pale.

  ‘Mr Greg Nicol?’ said Waterson.

  He blinked as if confused, then slowly nodded.

  ‘I’m DS Hobbes,’ said Rita, showing the man her badge. ‘This is DS Waterson. Can we come in?’

  ‘Yes, right, of course.’

  He turned and they followed him through to the front room. Greg sat in a chair, then hopped back up, dithering. ‘Sit,’ he said, ‘please, down.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rita, as she and Waterson sat on the couch.

  ‘So, is there news? Good news?’ asked Greg.

  ‘Not yet, I’m sorry,’ replied Waterson.

  Greg ran his hands through his mess of dark hair. For a moment, he looked as though he was about to crumple to the floor in tears, then reined in his emotions, nodded, and sat back in the chair again.

  ‘We’ve been put on your case, Mr Nicol,’ said Rita.

  Waterson folded his hands in his lap. ‘We’re here to ask you a few questions that should help us get a picture of this from your perspective. You’ll have answered these questions a hundred times I’m sure, but if you wouldn’t mind going over your story one more time.’

  ‘No, no, of course not. Happy to.’

  Rita took out her pocket notepad and a pen, ready to scrawl down his answers in a handwriting that was legible only to herself.

  ‘Can you take us through what happened?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Yes, of course. But like I said before, it’s just… there’s really not much to say. Practically nothing, it’s all so bloody… so… I don’t know what.’

  Rita gave Greg Nicol her best “I understand” face. All police had that down to a fine art. One year they’d even given out an award for it at the office Christmas party. Waterson had won. Kept the little plastic trophy in his bathroom.

  ‘Okay. Well. It was morning. I always get up before Jane, she likes to hit the snooze another couple of times, but I get up. Alarm goes off and I’m up. And, well, the thing is, that was the last time I saw her.’

  ‘When you got out of bed?’ asked Waterson.

  Greg Nicol nodded.

  ‘So you left for work and didn’t see her again?’ asked Rita.

  ‘I heard her. Before I left, I mean. I heard her turn off the alarm and get up. Heard her moving around upstairs. I had a tonne of work at the office piling up, so I’d decided to get in early and get a good, quiet hour in before everyone else turned up. So I shouted goodbye up the stairs and rushed out the door.’

  Rita nodded and took it all down in her notepad. ‘Did you hear from her again? Phone call? A text message? Anything at all?’

  ‘No. I sent her a text at lunch. I always do. Just a little “love you” text.’

  ‘But she didn’t reply?’ asked Waterson.

  ‘No. No, she didn’t. That’s not unusual—sometimes she leaves her phone turned off at work—so I didn’t think anything of it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Rita. ‘And how long was it before you realised Jane was missing?’

  ‘About two hours after I got back from work, so just after eight. That’s when I started to get worried. She wasn’t answering my texts, or calls, and then I found her phone in the bedroom. I called Kate, her friend—they work in the same office—and she said Jane… she said Jane hadn’t turned up to work at all. And she hadn’t called in to say she was sick or anything, either.’

  Greg Nicol bent over, head in his hands.

  ‘Oh Christ. Oh Christ. She’s dead, isn’t she? Jane, she’s dead. She’s fucking dead.’

  Rita stood and went over to Greg Nicol, patting him on the shoulder. It was meant to be reassuring, but came off more like she was patting a friend’s pet dog that she didn’t quite trust not to snap at her fingers.

  ‘We don’t know that, Greg,’ she said. ‘Let’s assume not until we have reason to, okay?’

  Greg looked up at her with red, bleary eyes, ‘Can you find her?’

  ‘We’re going to do our best, Mr Nicol,’ said Waterson.

  ‘We were getting married,’ said Greg. ‘Been engaged almost two years.’

  ‘When’s the wedding set for?’ asked Rita.

  ‘It’s in two weeks. Was in two weeks.’

  Waterson gave Rita a look she recognised. He was thinking it was possible she’d ghosted him. Decided the marriage wasn’t for her and cut out.

  ‘Had she been acting strange at all?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Just anything out of the ordinary,’ she replied. ‘Anything you noticed in her actions, or the things she said. Anything different about her behaviour that stuck out to you?’

  ‘No, nothing. She was excited about the wedding.’ Greg Nicol said this, then his brow furrowed.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Well, she’d been having bad dreams more often recently. She’d told me that.’

  ‘Since when?’ asked Rita.

  ‘Just in the weeks leading up to her… to her not being here anymore. But it was just a few nightmares, what could that have to do with anything?’

  Rita and Waterson left Greg Nicol and Jane Bowan’s house and headed for the car.

  ‘So,’ said Waterson, ‘bride-to-be gets the jitters as the big day looms, gets scared, gets stressed, starts having nightmares, then one morning she cuts out and holes up somewhere because she can’t face telling her hubby-to-not-be that it’s all over. That sound like a possibility to you?’

  Waterson got behind the wheel as Rita looked back to the house, doubt itching at her.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

  Razor liked London at night. It was the best time to skulk, and he prided himself on his skulking. He could spend hours surreptitiously moving his way from bar, to street, to library, to car park, his ears twitching at every conversation that came his way, searching for something useful. He knew by a person’s body language, by their tone of voice, whether the information being shared was worth storing away for future use.

  A little light rain began to spit, and Razor popped up the collar of his grimy leather coat, the bottom hem of which was tattered from where it met the ground. Razor was an eaves, and like all eaves, he looked a little like a person, and a little like a mutated mole. His eyes were beady, his ears pointed, hair coarse and close-cropped. And just like the rest of his kind, his mouth was full of needle-sharp teeth that could bite clean through a finger with little effort.

  His
snub nose twitched at the centre of a face that had seen better days. More than one fist, more than one blade, and more than one set of brass knuckles had left their mark upon what had never been the most aesthetically pleasing of mugs.

  Razor dealt in secrets. In information. In whispered words. All eaves did. This was their role in the Uncanny world. If something was worth knowing, chances are an eaves had heard about it, and would be willing to pass the information on, for a price.

  And the price they named? Magic. Just a taste. It nourished an eaves, and it kept them safe, which is just as well, as trading in secrets is wont to put a target on your back. Their dens, which twenty or more eaves at a time would call home, needed to be secure, else someone with a grudge creep inside and slit their throats.

  So, with each new secret that was passed on, an eaves would swallow a portion of magic for nourishment, then hold the rest back to add new twists, dead ends, and meandering passageways around their den. Only an eaves knew how to traverse the impossible tangle of doors and streets they created – doors and streets that had no business connecting to one another. Only an eaves could navigate such a labyrinth.

  Razor opened a door which, for anyone else, would have led to the inside of a fish and chip shop, but when Razor stepped through, he found himself inside an abandoned warehouse almost a mile from where that chip shop stood.

  He marched across the open space, the metal roof creaking in the wind, before stepping out into the men’s bathroom at a prestigious Leicester Square cinema. Razor snatched up the box of popcorn that a man who was urinating had left perched by the sink, then entered the third stall. He didn’t break his stride as he found himself not facing a toilet, but walking across the roof of the British Museum.

  As Razor munched the popcorn and headed towards the metal fire escape, he felt prickles shoot up and down his squat, thick neck, and spun round, dropping the stolen popcorn, fists clenched, ready for a fight.

  A tall man in a long, dark purple coat was sat upon an incongruous comfy reclining chair, reading a book. ‘Razor, I was wondering how long I’d have to wait for you to pass through.’ Carlisle waved a book at him. ‘A little over two hundred pages, as it turns out.’ He stood and slipped the dog-eared paperback into an inside pocket of his coat.