Disturbed Earth (Ritual Crime Unit Book 2)

by E. E. Richardson

  “Anything to make this one stand out?” Pierce asked, scrutinising the leaflet. Sure enough, there was a picture of the symbol in question on the front, though it looked like a crude photocopy of something drawn in marker pen. She opened the folded pages to see a poorly reproduced photograph of a group of people clustered around a standing stone.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Fatima said with a shrug. She gestured to the leaflet. “That’s the only paperwork we have on them.”

  Pierce turned the leaflet over, looking to see if it gave an address. It did, complete with a little hand drawn map. “Then I guess there’s nothing to do but pay them a visit for ourselves,” she said. “Right. Off we go to sunny Huddersfield, then.”

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF the Society of the Crooked Hook turned out to be a room above a shop with a homemade poster in the window promising Tarot readings. Not a likely looking centre of criminal enterprise, but it took all sorts.

  Nobody answered the buzzer to help with their enquiries, but the manager of the shop below kindly furnished them with a telephone number for ‘Ron.’ Pierce waited for him to arrive while Deepan went off to canvass the staff of the surrounding buildings for any evidence of the white van.

  Ron, when he eventually arrived, turned out to be one Ronald Halford, a nervous, earnest little man somewhere in his late forties, wearing a suit that strained around his burgeoning beer belly and a tie covered in cartoon snowmen.

  He didn’t look like a criminal, or at least not the kind who climbed through museum and gallery windows in the dead of night. She’d learned early enough in her career that timid, mousy little men could still get up to all manner of vile activities, not least because nobody ever suspected they would have the nerve.

  But her instincts said that Ron was not their man. He almost fell over himself apologising for the fifteen minutes it had taken him to arrive, over-explaining in the slightly frantic way she most associated with those who had too much of a guilt complex to get around to committing any of the crimes they feared being accused of. It could all be a spectacular act, of course, but without greater reason to suspect him, Occam’s razor ruled the day.

  Halford let her in to the society’s base, which looked like any other shabby private clubhouse for a group with more ambitions than resources. The main room had a mismatched collection of furniture, probably assembled from whatever the members and their friends and relatives happened to have cluttering up their garages. The occult paraphernalia scattered about mostly seemed like cheap junk to her eyes: fancy candles, arrangements of crystals, lots of dangling beads and wind chimes and generically ‘ethnic’ art.

  A pinboard in the corner held a copy of the society’s latest newsletter, seemingly more concerned with badgering members to make their contribution towards the Christmas meal and hawking somebody’s self-published book than any real occult activities. A few curling newspaper clippings, some group photos, and a slew of takeaway menus and flyers from nearby businesses took up the rest of the space.

  There was a small cloth-draped altar at the rear of the room, but frankly, the centrepiece appeared to be the tea-making facilities in the corner. Ron fluttered around them uncertainly. “Um, can I get you anything to drink, er, detective? We’ve got tea, coffee... There are biscuits.” He brandished a packet of custard creams hopefully, like a pacifying sacrifice to ward off any harm.

  Pierce had already seen at a glance that there would be little need to hang around, but she let him go ahead anyway. It would give him something to do keep him calm, and at least she’d get a custard cream out of it.

  “None of the society’s members are in any trouble,” she said. There was always an unspoken ‘yet’ appended to such statements, but most people chose to be reassured by them anyway. “We’re just looking for some information in connection with one of our cases. Some paperwork with your group’s symbol was spotted inside of a van that we’re trying to trace. Can you think of any reason for that?”

  “Oh. Oh, dear.” He peered at her over his teacup with worried, pale eyes. “Well, um, I really don’t think that can be any of our members. Let’s see, um, Jonathan drives a Volvo, and Lisa doesn’t drive at all—her hip, you see. Her husband usually drops her off, but he doesn’t drive a van, it’s an—oh, I’m not sure, is it a Peugeot or a Vauxhall? I can never remember which one’s which. But anyway, it’s quite a small car. And Alice... I think Alice still has her Mini, though she was talking about trading it in. Um...”

  Pierce was fairly sure he’d have reeled off the full driving histories of the society’s roster of members if she’d let him. “So none of your members drive any sort of van,” she summarised.

  “No. No, I don’t think so. Not one that I’ve seen—and I would have seen, I’m fairly sure. We all know each other quite well. Most of the society have been members for, oh, it must be over a decade now. More than that, I suppose, now I come to think of it.” He shook his head. “It still feels like the ’nineties were only a couple of years ago. Do you find that? It’s as if my sense of time stopped at the year two thousand.”

  Pierce nodded and smiled along to what could be nervous rambling or just the man’s normal mode of speech. Either way, he was clearly going to need regular chivvying along, or they’d be here all afternoon. “No new members joined, recently then?” she said, taking a risk on dunking a custard cream; few things compromised your aura of authority quite like having to fish half a biscuit out of your tea with a spoon, but she managed to pull it off without disaster. “Say in the last six months or so?”

  Ron shook his head ruefully. “No, sadly not. The kids, well, they’re not interested, are they? They’ve got all their iPhones and whatnot—they’re used to everything happening with a touch of a button. You tell them magic takes effort, you need licenses and training and it’s all got to be exactly right, and they don’t want to know. They just want, ‘point, bang, fireballs,’ and it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

  “Thankfully,” Pierce said dryly. About the only defence they had against magical anarchy was the fact that ninety-nine percent of people who went in for ritual magic gave it up as a fiddly pain in the arse long before they managed to achieve anything measurable. Unfortunately, that did mean that the criminals they were left with were the ones with some patience and perseverance and attention to detail—all traits you preferred not to be facing in someone you were trying to apprehend.

  She sat forward. “So, if, as seems likely, the van driver isn’t a member of your society, how do you think he might have come to have papers with your symbol on in the front of his vehicle?”

  She didn’t pitch it as an accusation, but Ron still looked flustered. “Well, um, we do have a newsletter that Alice prints off: all our members get it, of course, and there are free copies in the library and at Crystal Village—that’s the, er, local shop that sells supplies for the craft.”

  Pierce nodded; another lead they could check out, though she already doubted that either shop or newsletter would be of much interest to anyone with genuine occult knowledge. Assuming the thieves had any, of course: their motive in picking the particular set of artefacts they were trying to assemble was still hazy, but the lack of monetary value or recent paper trail argued against either financial or sentimental reasons.

  “And of course, it’s not strictly our symbol in particular,” Ron added, almost as an afterthought.

  “Oh?” Pierce raised her eyebrows at him over her mug.

  “Er, no, it’s the mark of Francis Maundrell. He was a warlock who could talk to tree spirits—unjustly hanged for putting a curse on the local farmers here in 1675, or so my grandfather told me. He was the one who founded the society. Er, my granddad, that is, not Francis Maundrell, although we do try to continue in the spirit that we imagine his works—”

  “1675?” she said. And a collection of stolen artefacts believed to be circa seventeenth century...

  Maybe this visit hadn’t been a complete waste of time after all.
r />   CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PIERCE GOT A list of the society’s members to follow up on, but she doubted it would amount to anything. Deepan’s canvassing of the local shopkeepers had proven similarly unenlightening; nobody had anything of note to say about the occult society—most were wholly unaware it existed—and none of them recalled seeing a white Ford Transit van hanging around. Not that they were likely to remember if there had been one: criminals made their choice of nondescript vehicles for a reason.

  “Looks like this Francis Maundrell character is our best lead right now,” she said as Deepan drove them back to the station. “We’ll see if Documents can dig up anything more about him now we’ve got a name. If we can tie the stolen artefacts together, we may be able to anticipate the thieves’ next target, or what it is they’re trying to accomplish.”

  Deepan nodded, then frowned a little as he made the turn towards the station. Pierce looked ahead to see what had captured his attention. “Oh, what have we got here?” she said. “New police vehicles?” Their car park appeared to have been colonised by a rather conspicuous green Volkswagen bus.

  “It’s probably the druids back again, Guv,” Deepan said. “They’ve been bugging us for weeks—it’s coming up to the winter solstice, and they don’t have access to the stone circle they used to use for their rites because some company bought up the land.”

  “That’s not our department, surely,” Pierce said as they paused at the car park entrance. A pair of young women dressed in white robes were climbing down from the bus in front of them, carrying placards. Bloody marvellous. “Tell them to get in touch with the heritage people if they’re worried about it being built on.”

  “We did,” he said. “According to them, it should be a protected site, but it’s mysteriously not listed.”

  “Well, even if that’s true, it’s still not a job for the RCU,” she said. Someone might well be greasing the wheels to have paperwork go missing and dodgy deals pushed through, but that kind of thing had been going on since time immemorial, no magic involved. “We don’t handle shady deals unless they’re pacts with demons.”

  “We’ve told them all this,” he said, nodding along. “But they’re adamant that it’s a conspiracy, and that someone’s up to something nefarious on the site.”

  “And do they have evidence of this?” Pierce asked, narrowing her eyes as more robed figures stepped down from the van, these ones carrying a looped banner between them. They were never going to get into the bloody car park at this rate.

  Deepan gave her a sidelong look. “Well, the Archdruid got bad vibes, apparently.”

  “Oh, did he now?” She pursed her lips, then waved a hand at Deepan. “Honk your horn. We’ll be here all day otherwise.”

  He gave a discreet beep of the horn. A few of the druids in their path looked briefly mutinous, obviously considering whether to block their entrance, but they hadn’t had the time to get organised yet, and they scattered out of the way as the car began inching forward.

  “Don’t run anyone over. We can’t afford a lawsuit,” Pierce said.

  They avoided any druid-splattering incidents, but getting into the building was a gauntlet of its own. A small squad of robed druids bore down on them as they got out of the car, led by a long-haired, thickly bearded man who would have been at home in an aging prog rock band. She was guessing he was the big boss, from the subtle clues of his long red cloak, wooden medallion, and the tall staff he was leaning on.

  Lord, even when these people did have some form of magical ability to their name, she had a bugger of a time taking them seriously.

  “Sergeant Mistry,” the Archdruid called out as he approached them. He had a magnificent theatrical baritone, commanding attention. “I wonder if we might have further words about the progress on the invasion of our sacred site.”

  “You’ve spoken to these folks before?” Pierce asked Deepan.

  “Many times,” he said, with a barely noticeable sigh.

  She clapped him on the shoulder. “Then I think you’re best placed to liaise with them again,” she said. “See what they’ve got to say, and then just make sure they’re out of our car park before the superintendent leaves.” Even on their short acquaintance, Snow didn’t strike her as the type to have much tolerance for a group of attention-attracting protestors hanging around his car park. Not that many police higher-ups would.

  “Thanks, Guv,” Deepan said with a weary smile, as she slunk away and left him to the wolves. The druids, unfamiliar with her face after all her weeks off, ignored her to focus on the officer they knew, and she made it to the front door unmolested. When she glanced back, Deepan was in the midst of a huddle of white robes, trying to politely state his position while they all talked at him at once.

  She offered a brief wave that he probably didn’t see, and headed back into the building. Rank did have its privileges, and right now the main one was getting back to her desk so she could sit down and have a sandwich while she went through her emails.

  Even these modest lunch plans, however, were interrupted by an excited hail from Constable Freeman as she walked in. “Guv, I think I might have found something on those grave robberies you asked me to look for,” she said.

  “Oh?” Pierce went over with sandwich in hand to join her at her computer.

  Freeman had, by some act of computer wizardry a bit beyond Pierce’s ken, put together a map of the area around Bingley complete with little markers in various colours. She swept the mouse pointer over the display to indicate the lone black marker in the midst of brighter colours. “This is the site where the skulls were found,” she said. “I’ve been going through reports of graveyard disturbances and grave desecrations—not much of note recently, so I expanded it to the last six months. There are a lot from around Hallowe’en—”

  “Always are,” Pierce said. “More often idiots arsing about than anyone who knows what they’re doing.” Lord save them from the yearly flood of wannabes who thought that doing vaguely mystical things on a significant date was a better way to develop magical talents than years of study.

  Freeman nodded in acknowledgement. “I tried to filter out some of the noise: all of these incidents marked in blue are Hallowe’en or Hallowe’en adjacent, and if you hide those it’s a bit less busy, but there’s still quite a lot of data to dig through—I didn’t know grave-robbery was such a popular crime!”

  “Welcome to the wonderful world of the RCU,” Pierce said, taking a bite out of her sandwich. “It’s glamour all the way down. You and Taylor are going to get pretty used to squelching around graveyards in all kinds of weather.”

  She remembered that duty all too well from her own days as a DC and DS. They were always getting called to bloody graveyards—it only took a group of idiot teenagers playing dares or a vandalised gravestone to start a panic about Satanic cults raising the dead. Never mind that she’d never heard of any successful incident of zombie-raising in her long career, and was deeply sceptical of the few historical accounts.

  “Is there any way to sort the false alarms and grave desecrations from actual instances of remains being removed from the scene?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I was looking into that,” Freeman said, nodding. “And then in one of the crime scene photos I noticed this gravestone—the date.” She brought the photo up on the screen, and Pierce looked on in vague incomprehension at a picture of the headstone beside an opened grave. A relatively modern stone, in memory of one ‘Henry James Heath, died 22nd Dec 2003, beloved father and grandfather.’

  Then the date rang a bell. The twenty-second of December, D-day for Cliff’s prophecy of some kind of upcoming supernatural crisis; not related to the skull case, but she’d thoughtlessly scribbled it on the page of notes she’d given to young Freeman. She grimaced. Her own damn fault for being hasty and unclear. “That’s not—”

  “And it’s not the only one,” Freeman pushed on, switching the screen back to her map. “So far I’ve managed to find four cases of graves b
eing dug up in the last few months where the date of death was the twenty-second of December—different years, but all relatively recent graves where you’d expect to find a fairly intact skeleton. Two of them were in cemeteries near the ritual site in Bingley, while the other two”—she scrolled her map—“were up near Silsden.” She turned and grinned triumphantly at Pierce.

  Pierce studied the indicated set of markers on the map. One grave featuring that date would be a small coincidence; four, two of them in exactly their area of focus, started to sound an awful lot less like one. Maybe Cliff’s big supernatural event and their large-scale ritual weren’t so disconnected after all.

  And that meant they now had a second area of focus. She clapped Freeman on the shoulder. “Good work,” she said. “Keep chasing other cemeteries in the area, see if you can find any more disturbed graves with that date. I’ll get on the horn to Silsden and see what we can do about getting a search organised. Our outside expert tells me that there’s a big chance the Bingley site isn’t the only one, and you may have just got us a jumpstart on finding a second.”

  Freeman beamed at her, and Pierce smiled back, feeling a surge of rising optimism. At last, after days of dead ends, they had somewhere concrete to start. There had to be something in Silsden—maybe another ritual crime scene, or maybe the home base of the perpetrators, but either way, if they could track it down, they’d be one step closer to the root of this mess.

  THE SERIES OF phone calls that followed gave her optimism more of a battering. While the local police would have no doubt been fast on the ball if she’d asked them to search for a missing child or a fresh body, they were than less impressed by the prospect of pulling officers from their current duties to hunt for a few stolen skulls. Without a clear picture of what exactly the ritual was intended to do, all she could fall back on were empty warnings that it was probably both big and dangerous.