by Mark Morris
‘I heard you was lookin’ for us, mister,’ barked Clover’s killer, striding up to me. ‘Well, here we are, so what’s yer beef?’
He circled behind the dog to stand in front of me, glaring with his one good eye. His companions stood behind me, shuffling and sniffing; I heard one hoick up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it on to the ground.
My throat was dry, but I forced myself to speak. ‘You know why I’m here.’
Clover’s killer took another step forward, tilting his chin pugnaciously. A rank, unwashed odour came off him. ‘Is that so? Well then, I confess it must have slipped my mind.’
Behind me his cronies cackled; the spitter spat again.
Glancing at the dog and knowing I had little to lose, I asked, ‘Why did you murder my friend?’
Clover’s killer raised his eyebrows. ‘Murder, is it? That’s an ’orrible accusation you is makin’ there, mister.’
‘There’s no point pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about. You did it right in front of me less than half an hour ago.’
‘Half an hour,’ he repeated, aping and mocking my speech, emphasising the ‘h’ of ‘hour’. He glanced over my shoulder at the men behind me. ‘Where was we half an hour ago, Mr Jackery?’
A weaselly voice replied, ‘We was in the alehouse, Mr Hulse. We been there all day. In full view of our good friends and neighbours.’
Clover’s killer – Hulse – nodded reflectively. ‘That we have, Mr Jackery, that we have. Thank you ever so for reminding me.’ He fixed his gaze on me again, his scarred face creasing into a leering smile. ‘So there you has it, mister. I’m afraid your eyes has deceived you.’
I shook my head. ‘I saw you. I know what you did. There’s no point denying it.’ But then I fell silent. What was I achieving by throwing the accusation back in his face? Trying to sound reasonable, I said, ‘Just tell me why you did it. And… and at least give her back to me, so that I can give her a decent burial.’
Hulse’s menacingly jovial manner slipped and he scowled. ‘Is your brain addled, mister? I’s already told you the facts of the matter. Now hold your tongue unless you wants to lose it.’
So saying, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the knife he had killed Clover with. It glinted rustily in the meagre light spilling from the pub.
From behind me one of the men said, ‘Why not take his tongue anyway, Mr Hulse? Make a nice little titbit for Snap, that would.’
‘Aye, and his eyes too so’s he can’t finger us as the coves what took his purse,’ piped up a thin, reedy voice which I guessed belonged to the rat-faced youth. The other men laughed.
‘What an agile mind you has, Mr Swann!’ declared Hulse delightedly. ‘Agile and inventive! Don’t you think so, my lily-white friend?’
This last remark was directed at me. Instead of replying, I lashed out without warning, kicking the dog as hard as I could in the face. I had seen where the situation was heading, had known from the moment they confronted me that these men had no intention of allowing me to walk away. And so as soon as Hulse had drawn the knife I had decided that it was better to give them a run for their money rather than stand by and see events through to their inevitable conclusion.
Although the dog’s head was as hard as a brick, it let out a loud yelp and lost its footing, rolling on to its side. Before it could recover, and before Hulse could raise the knife, I leaped forward and punched the cut-throat as hard as I could between the eyes. Dropping the knife, he stumbled sideways, and then tripped over the dog, which even now, though still on its back, was twisting its body like a fat white maggot to leap to its feet. As the two became tangled in a snarling, roaring heap I skipped past them and started running.
I had no idea where I was going, and no time to examine street signs or ask directions as I fled through the filthy, ill-lit streets. My only plan was to duck around as many corners as I could, and to aim for the narrowest openings and passageways in the hope of shaking off my pursuers.
I was so focused on staying ahead of the pack, and of keeping my feet on the slick cobbles, that I had no idea how close behind me Hulse and his men were, or even if they were following me at all. Certainly I could hear nothing but the thumping of my own footsteps, the pounding of my heart and the rush of my adrenaline-fuelled blood.
I had been running for several minutes, and making as many twists and turns as I could, when I finally rounded a corner and saw, on my right, a particularly narrow alleyway. I veered into it, my sudden change of direction causing me to catch the wall a glancing blow with my left shoulder. Though my body still felt tender and sore, I faltered only slightly, fat black rats scuttling in panic before my headlong rush. I burst from the other end of the alleyway on to a surprisingly wide street – wide enough, in fact, to have been granted the luxury of a pavement. Unfortunately, a young couple, strolling arm in arm, happened to move directly across my path as I catapulted from the opening. I cannoned into the woman, causing her to fall against her companion, and all three of us went down like skittles.
The ground rushed up to meet me, slamming into my left knee and elbow. The impact was so jolting that I felt a wrenching pain in my neck that instantly zigzagged into my head, momentarily blotting out my senses. When I came to, no more than a couple of seconds later, I was horrified to discover that my right hand was empty. Though it hurt to move my head, I looked up and saw the heart nestled in the gutter a few metres away. Gritting my teeth against the throbbing pain in my arm, leg and head, I propelled myself across the pavement and lunged for it. The relief I felt when my fingers closed around it was short-lived, because almost immediately I felt a searing pain in my ankle. I looked round to see that the white dog, its muzzle lathered with blood-smeared saliva, had clamped its teeth around my leg.
I kicked out with my other leg, my foot thudding into the side of its barrel-like body. However the dog simply snarled and tightened its grip, making me howl with agony. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the couple I had barged into clambering gingerly to their feet, the man aiding his companion, fussing over her as she whimpered.
‘Help!’ I shouted. ‘Get it off me! Call the police!’
The man glanced in my direction, but I saw no sympathy or willingness to help on his face.
And then, behind him, I saw a flood of dark shapes spill from the mouth of the alleyway. Leading them was Hulse, his teeth bared in fury, his hand brandishing his knife. He saw me sprawled on the ground and howled in triumph.
Then, like a pack of wolves, he and his cronies were upon me.
TWENTY-FOUR
GHOSTS
Birds singing. The soothing orange glow of daylight on the inside of my eyelids. The smell of freshly laundered sheets and… something else. The warm, woody tang of tobacco smoke.
Frank, I thought, and opened my eyes.
And there he was, sitting quietly on a chair beside the bed in which I was lying, smoking one of his roll-ups. His skin was ethereally pale, so bloodless that it was not hard to imagine that he was a ghost, a vision from the past, and that if I blinked he would be gone in the split second it took me to close my eyes and open them again.
I blinked and looked. He was still there. One of his bony legs was crossed over the other, and he was casually brushing a spill of ash off his knee. He glanced at me with his mournful eyes, his face betraying no emotion.
‘Back with us, are you?’ he said, as if I had done nothing more than pop down to the shops for a pint of milk.
‘What happened?’ I asked, or tried to; my throat felt rusty through lack of use.
‘Heart brought you home,’ he said. ‘You’ve been in the wars, old boy.’ He smiled faintly at his own feeble joke.
My mind felt sluggish, as rusty as my voice. Memories blundered into view like slow, heavy animals emerging from a murky autumn dusk. Hulse and Jackery. The dog.
Clover.
I jerked up from the pillow as the memory of what had happened to her passed through me like an electric shock. The
sudden movement awoke points of pain all over my body – ankle, knee, elbow, wrist, back, neck, head – which in turn yanked a cry of pain from my throat.
‘Calm yourself, chief,’ Frank said, placing an almost weightless hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve been through a heck of an ordeal. You need to rest.’
Slowly I allowed myself to sink back into the bed. I didn’t feel as damaged as I had when I’d woken up in the hospital after being beaten up by Glenn and his mates all those years ago, but it was true to say that the parts of me that didn’t hurt were few and far between. My body felt like one huge bruise, although, after carefully wriggling my fingers and toes and flexing my limbs, I could more or less safely conclude that nothing was broken.
The main pain was inside. Not just the sense of scouring, of rawness, as if the heart was stripping me away layer by layer each time I used it, but the pain of loss, of grief. What was the point of the heart protecting me if it couldn’t protect the people I cared about? Kate was still missing, and I was no nearer to finding out what had happened to her than I had been on the day she was taken. And now Clover, my partner and friend throughout this ordeal, had been taken too, her life savagely ended by a man who had been long dead before she was even born.
If this was what the heart did – protected me, but allowed those around me to suffer – then I wanted no part of it. Despite my reliance on it, like the reliance of an addict on his drug, maybe it was time to seek a way to contact Kate’s kidnapper and arrange an exchange before I lost my daughter for ever. But how? By putting ads in all the London newspapers and magazines? By daubing cryptic messages on walls that only the kidnapper would understand? Or maybe I should just walk around London in plain view, offering myself as bait?
I wasn’t aware I was crying until my eyes blurred and I felt the tickle of tears on my cheeks. Again there came the light pressure of Frank’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t upset yourself, guv’nor. You know what they say. Things are always blackest before dawn.’
The words were so trite I almost smiled. Given Frank’s extraordinary nature it was easy to be in awe of him, to imagine that he possessed wisdom and understanding beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals. But now and again I was reminded he was actually not much more than a callow youth from the early twentieth century. All right, so his experiences had aged him beyond his years, and he had returned from death as a vessel for the horror of the war that had killed him and thousands like him. But he was still just a boy underneath it all, one as naïve as he was haunted, as uncertain as he was powerful.
Reaching up slowly with an arm that was stiff and bruised, I placed my hand over his. His cold, waxy skin didn’t bother me any more; I was comforted by his touch.
‘Clover’s dead,’ I said simply. It was the first time I had spoken the words, and I was strangely shocked, hearing them out loud, how blunt they sounded, how final.
‘That so?’ said Frank with his characteristic lack of emotion. ‘Want to tell me about it?’
Haltingly, croakingly, I recounted everything that had happened after Clover and I had fled the warehouse basement in the Isle of Dogs. I told him how Hulse and his feral companions had descended on me like a pack of wolves, and then I shuddered and looked at him, my neck creaking with pain. ‘But what about you? How did you get away?’
‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Nice cup of tea.’
It was only when he spoke the words that I realised how parched I was. I swallowed drily as he stubbed out his roll-up in a glass ashtray by his feet and stood up. ‘Back in a tick.’
Left alone, I inched my body into a sitting position, wincing at the pain. I was in a double bed in the large bedroom of either a very nice house or a luxury hotel. The carpet was the colour of oatmeal, and the wallpaper, patterned with a subtly embossed Art Deco design, possessed a gold-brown sheen that made it look classy and expensive. The furniture was elegantly but sturdily Victorian, the main light fitting in the centre of the high ceiling just this side of ostentatious. The room was bathed in autumn sunlight which poured through a row of long bay windows to my right, beyond which I could see trees and railings and some sort of pagoda-like structure on a hill in the distance – parkland or the grounds of a private house?
Listening, I realised I could hear not only the chirping of birds but the low-level rumble of traffic. So I was back in my own time then, and from the sounds of it reasonably close to a main road. Was I still in London? If so, that was probably Hyde Park I could see out there, or maybe Kensington Gardens.
Frank had said the heart had brought me home. But where exactly was ‘home’? And, for that matter, where was the heart? With a sudden stab of alarm I looked around the room as quickly as my aching neck would allow, searching for my blood and filth-smeared jacket. I couldn’t see it, but then I remembered that the last time I had seen the heart it had been not in my pocket, but in my hand. I had snatched it from the gutter after my collision with the couple in the street.
Shit. Had I dropped it? Left it behind? Had Hulse taken it? But if so, how had it brought me home? Then I saw it, sitting on top of a small cabinet beside the bed, and the breath of relief I expelled made me slump like a punctured balloon.
I reached for it – my drug, my lifeline to Kate – and clutched it gratefully to my chest, and a second later heard the creak of what sounded like stairs beneath the weight of an approaching presence. I looked up, expecting it to be Frank, even though the young soldier’s previous movements had been all but soundless. The door opened and a woman entered carrying a tray.
It was Clover.
My heart leaped, and I let out a weird (and slightly embarrassing) high-pitched yelp. As she approached the bed with an almost triumphant smile on her face, I could only gape, too overcome to speak.
‘Well?’ she said, putting the tray on the chair by the bed. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
My mouth moved, I licked my lips. ‘It’s… you!’ I blurted.
She smiled happily. She was clearly enjoying this. ‘Oh, very eloquent. I expected a bit more than that, if I’m honest.’
Something gave way inside me, some minor emotional dam, and I started to laugh. It made my ribs and neck hurt, but I didn’t care. ‘I thought you were dead,’ I said. ‘I saw you die.’
Lifting a teapot from the tray and pouring two cups, she shook her head. ‘You didn’t, you know.’
I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
I’d been so focused on the wonderful impossibility of Clover’s being alive that I didn’t realise Frank had slipped silently back into the room and was now standing at the end of the bed.
‘The Clover you saw killed wasn’t her, chief.’
I looked at him in bewilderment. ‘Who was it then?’
‘That thing from the Isle of Dogs.’
‘The… shape-shifter?’ I murmured.
Frank nodded. ‘That whole thing with McCallum and what he turned into, and Clover in the cage, was a trick, a double bluff. He… if that thing is a he… wanted you to save Clover.’
‘Why?’ I asked, and then I realised. ‘So that I’d drop my guard and make it easier for them to take the heart?’
Clover nodded, handing me tea in a proper china cup with a saucer. I put the heart back on the bedside cabinet before taking it. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘When he appeared at the hotel he looked like you, Alex. That’s why he caught me off-guard. I think he must have injected me with something. Next thing I remember is waking up to find myself in a dark little room that stank like a toilet.’
‘So the Clover that came with me,’ I said, ‘obviously meant to take the heart, but didn’t get the chance.’ I frowned, thinking hard for a moment. ‘Which begs the question: did Hulse kill the thing that looked like you because he thought it was you, or because he knew it wasn’t?’
Clover shrugged. ‘Search me. I’d never even heard of this guy until Frank told me about him a few minutes ago.’
‘That doesn’t mean he hadn’t heard of y
ou, though. Or at least, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t given orders to kill you.’
‘But why would he kill me and not you? You’re the one with the heart.’
‘Maybe because you were closer to him than I was? Or to make me follow him into his own time, where he’d feel more comfortable dealing with me? Or maybe he just killed you to break my spirit? I don’t know…’
I broke off, frustrated. Frank remained silent, watching me intently, as if willing me to work things out for myself. I took the look on his face as my cue to try.
‘If Hulse did know the woman he killed wasn’t you,’ I said slowly, ‘then wouldn’t that mean there’s not just one group after the heart? I mean, if they’re all Wolves of London, why kill each other? Maybe there are lots of different, weird, murderous factions, all after one thing?’
‘Comforting thought,’ said Clover.
Again I fell silent, my mind still working furiously. Then I said, ‘There’s another thing that bothers me.’
‘Just one?’ said Clover.
I looked at her, a worm of suspicion wriggling at the back of my mind. ‘Instead of going to the trouble of locking you up, why didn’t the shape-shifter just kill you when it caught you?’
She shrugged. ‘No idea. Maybe it needs the real person close by in order to change into them?’
‘But it changed into McCallum easily enough,’ I said, ‘and he’s dead.’
‘In that case, I don’t know.’ Then she saw the expression on my face. ‘Oh, come on, Alex. Don’t spoil the big reunion by saying you don’t trust me.’
Sheepishly I said, ‘I want to trust you. And I can’t express how happy I am that you’re alive. But given what’s happened, how do I know you’re who you say you are? How do I know anyone is?’
