‘Investigation?’
Fleet pulled a face ‘Budget meeting.’
‘Oh, the glamour.’ Lydia sat down and offered her beer to Fleet. He took a swig and passed it back.
‘I have a mobile number and I need a peek at the phone records.’
‘That’s the favour?’
Lydia nodded. ‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’
‘I’m guessing this has something to do with the thing you can’t tell me about because of your stupid family code.’
‘Maybe.’
Fleet sighed and reached for her hand. ‘Lydia.’
‘I know it’s a lot to ask. I’m asking you to trust me.’
‘Everything is logged these days. I can’t just put in an action into the database and not attach it to an investigation, not explain why.’
‘You’re a DCI.’
He smiled, looking tired. ‘Barely. And I can’t fuck it up. My mother will kill me.’
‘Family pressure,’ Lydia forced a smile. ‘I understand that.’ She looked at the man opposite her and felt his hand enclosing hers. Then she closed her eyes and let her extra sense do its thing. There was that slight gleam. It didn’t come with a warning, though. Nothing told her to stay away, to beware. And the man had done nothing but look out for her. He was a copper, yes, and she had only known him a short time, but she trusted him. And Charlie had lied to her, tested her, withheld information. Plus, he was Charlie Crow. Hell hawk. Lydia leaned forward, lowering her voice. ‘Can I trust you?’
Fleet nodded, looking directly into her eyes.
‘I want to tell you something but I don’t want you to log it or whatever. You know you said that you thought there was some pressure from higher up when Madeleine Crow got busted? That could mean one of the families has influence in the Met or even people on the inside. If it gets out that I spoke to the police about this, it would be very bad for me.’ Lydia paused. ‘Very, very bad.’
‘I get it,’ Fleet said. ‘Right now, I’m not on duty and I’m not here as police. I would never do anything to hurt you.’
And Lydia believed him. She didn’t know if it was the head-banging sex or her own weakness. Maybe she was kidding herself like every other stupid romantic sap, but she needed his help. She took a deep breath. ‘Madeleine Crow went missing last week. My uncle asked me to find her and I’ve been trying.’
‘Where was she last seen?’
‘Coming out of her house, pretending to go to a job she had been fired from.’
Fleet nodded. ‘Okay.’
He didn’t ask why the family hadn’t reported Maddie missing, which Lydia appreciated.
‘So, I found a connection between Madeleine and Paul Fox and I have his phone number in here,’ she tapped the back of her mobile.
‘Solid connection?’ Fleet said.
‘Yes. And he is bad news but I can’t tell Charlie about it because he will overreact.’
‘The art of understatement,’ Fleet said. ‘Got it.’
‘Nobody in the Family can find out that Paul Fox is involved.’
‘If he is,’ Fleet said, ‘you are just guessing.’
‘I feel it,’ Lydia said. She shook her head. ‘But if I’m right…’
‘Badness,’ Fleet said.
‘If I can see his phone records for the last couple of weeks. Maybe there will be something. I don’t know. At the very least he might have called Maddie and then I’ll have proof.’
‘Proof you will keep to yourself?’ Fleet said. ‘For now,’ Lydia said. ‘I am trying to resolve this situation without kicking off anything bigger, but I do need to find Madeleine.’
Fleet held his hand out for her phone. ‘Show me.’
‘You’ll do it?’
Fleet looked at her levelly. ‘If I was logging this as a missing person case,’ he held up a hand, ‘which I know I can’t do, but imagine for a moment I am police and I’m following the proper procedure. Can you assure me that you have more than a feeling? That I would have reasonable grounds for accessing this man’s private phone records?’
‘Yes,’ Lydia said. ‘He was seen leaving Club Foxy with Madeleine and –’
‘I don’t need the details. Just your word.’
‘Thank you,’ Lydia said.
‘Can I ask you something first?’
‘Anything,’ Lydia said without thinking.
‘Did you sleep with me so that you could ask this favour?’
Lydia sat back. ‘Are you serious?’
Fleet smiled. ‘It’s fine if you did. Totally worth it. But I would rather know.’
‘No,’ Lydia said. ‘I slept with you because I wanted to and I’m asking you this because I need help and for some reason I trust you.’
‘Okay, then,’ Fleet said. After a moment, he added. ‘Stop glaring. It was a reasonable question.’
‘It was not a reasonable question.’
‘Focus on the bright side,’ Fleet said. ‘I might piss you off but you can always trust me.’
‘Get me the records and all is forgiven.’ Then she leaned across the table and kissed him. Because he was there and she could.
Chapter Eighteen
Fleet was as good as his word. The next day he handed Lydia a brown envelope with a print-out of activity from Paul Fox’s mobile phone for the previous two weeks.
‘That was quick,’ Lydia said.
‘A girl is missing,’ Fleet said. ‘And I have a friendly relationship with someone at the company.’
‘Friendly relationship?’ Lydia felt a stab of jealousy. Which was ridiculous.
Fleet smiled as if he knew. ‘Just friendly.’
‘None of my business,’ Lydia said, which made him smile more.
‘Thank you for this,’ Lydia said.
‘Let me know if it leads to any action,’ Fleet said, his smile disappearing. ‘Don’t do anything on your own. If you suspect this man of kidnapping your cousin, you must not approach him without help.’
‘Of course not,’ Lydia said.
Fleet put a hand to her cheek. ‘I’m serious. Call me. It’s my job.’
‘I will,’ Lydia said. She was dying to look through the records, but wanted to be alone. She had crossed a line in asking the police for help, even unofficially. She wasn’t about to compound the betrayal by taking a unit of the Met’s finest to meet Paul Fox.
Fleet clearly didn’t want to go, but Lydia shooed him on his way. ‘Haven’t you got work to do? Crims to catch? Budgets to balance?’
With a kiss which left Lydia’s mind swimming for a moment, and a final warning look, Fleet was gone. Lydia sat down at one of the tables in the window and went through the records. After a couple of minutes, when she realised the black text was dancing in front of her eyes and she wasn’t taking anything in, she forced herself to slow down. Numbers and durations of calls. Without the contacts to match the numbers to, she was in the dark, and she didn’t recognise any of the details. Except for her own number, of course. There were the two calls she had answered. She looked for repeated numbers and found one which had twenty-minute calls every couple of days. Family or friend or work colleague. It was a mobile number so no hint as to geographical area. She could call it, of course, find out that way. She picked up her mobile and began to enter the number. Then she stopped. There was another repeated number. On the previous three nights between six and eight in the evening, Paul had made very short calls to the same land line number. Each call was only a couple of minutes in length.
Lydia exited the phone dialler and Googled the number instead. It belonged to a Turkish takeaway in Maida Vale. The Fox Family lived in Whitechapel. If Paul Fox was calling for home delivery food, why on earth wouldn’t he use somewhere closer to his house? Unless he was visiting somebody in Maida Vale. Somebody he had stashed against their will or was helping to keep hidden.
* * *
Lydia didn’t know north of the river very well. The Crows roosted in Camberwell, and had done since it was just
a handful of farm cottages on the dirt road to Londinium, so crossing the river made Lydia feel almost like a tourist, gawping at the sights. At Warwick Avenue, she emerged from the underground station into a mild day with dampness in the air.
The takeaway was very helpful. Lydia was ready to spin her gold coin, but the guy behind the counter was bored and uncaring and he simply slid his order pad across when she asked and went back to re-doing his hair into a bun and watching YouTube on his phone. Phone numbers and addresses were scribbled alongside the numbers for the dishes. Flicking through the pad, Lydia wasn’t sure how long it would take to find the number, but in the end it was easy. An address that wasn’t an address leaped out. The Blomfield Road canal steps. ‘You delivered here last night?’
‘Not me. I don’t do deliveries.’
‘But someone took food to the steps? Don’t you require an actual residence?’
‘You pay, we deliver.’
Lydia walked to Blomfield Road. It was where Maida Vale became Little Venice, proper. Paul had ordered enough food for two people but had been cautious enough not to give out an exact address. She was tingling with excitement, even as she assessed the multiple residential properties, each one stuffed with separate flats. Door-to-door was going to take her a while. At the steps, she stopped. There was another reason, other than caution, for Paul to meet a delivery here. If the place he was staying in wasn’t easy to be found. If, for example, if it was moveable.
As she took the steps down to the canal a jogger swept past on her right side and, at the bottom, a mother with a toddler waited patiently for her charge to navigate the last step.
There was a break in the cloud and the ray of sunlight made the wet pavement glisten and turned the puddles into mirrors. In seconds, they had moved again, pulling a shroud over the day and turning the shining water back to flat grey. Lydia could feel the moisture on her fringe and the tops of her ears and it seemed colder down here, next to the water. Some of the brightly-painted canal boats were covered in tarpaulins and looked shut-up for the winter while others were clearly in regular-use with plant pots crowding the roof and, in one case, a deck chair with a Thermos next to it as if the owner had just popped inside for a moment.
It was undeniably picturesque, though, even on a flat grey day. A glimpse of what the Surrey canal could have been if it hadn't been abandoned by the city planning committee, left to rot with the crumbling industrial buildings which had once stood where the park was now. Grandpa Crow was still bitter about the canal. He had shown Lydia black and white photos and waxed lyrical about tow-paths.
Lydia looked at the boats, admiring one with fresh red paintwork until something more important caught her eye. One boat, several metres away and on the opposite bank, had a plume of smoke coming from the chimney. Lydia had the vague feeling that you weren’t allowed to burn fuel in central London, that it was a smokeless zone or something, but, nonetheless, grey smoke was curling in the air.
Lydia walked until she came to a bridge over the water and then doubled-backed to her target. It was quieter on this side and the overhanging trees, which reached their branches towards the gentle water of the canal, could almost make you forget that you were in the centre of one of the largest cities on earth. Almost.
Outside the boat, there were no other signs of occupation. The curtains were shut tightly and made of a dark thick material so Lydia couldn’t even tell whether there was a light on inside. She felt a tingling across her skin. A light wave of feeling which swept over the backs of her hands, up her arms and neck until her scalp was prickling. It was like the sensation she got when there was an unquiet spirit nearby. Or when Jason tapped her on the shoulder for fun. Lydia looked around but no ghosts had appeared. The birds were still singing in the trees and a man wearing baggy board shorts and flip-flops in defiance of the weather ambled past, speaking quietly into a phone clamped to his ear.
Lydia waited for a few moments and then stepped lightly onto the small deck at the back of the narrow boat. The tingling intensified and Lydia knew, suddenly, that not only was somebody behind those closed curtains, but that they had a small gleam of power. Low wattage but definitely there. More than that, if she opened her mouth and breathed in, she could taste the power on her tongue. It was a Crow. She paused, her hand on the door to the cabin and tried to send out her senses further, imagined testing the space for others. She couldn’t feel Silver or Pearl or, thankfully, Fox, but there could have been any number of non-magical humans hiding within. Although it was a small boat; how many could realistically be crouched inside, ready to take her on? Lydia shoved aside the image of scary, well-armed men piling out of the cabin like clowns from a tiny car. You are okay, she told herself. Her phone was ready, the GPS turned on and Fleet’s number on speed dial. The sensible play would be to let him know where she was, maybe wait for back-up, but she wasn’t sure what she was going to find and loyalty to Family came first.
The door handle turned smoothly and Lydia pulled the door open a crack. She didn't want to barge in and frighten somebody into doing something stupid. Lydia kept her voice light and friendly. ‘Madeleine?’
‘Who is it?’ The voice was female and it wasn’t frightened. It was confident with a touch of impatience.
Lydia opened the door and stepped into the body of the boat.
Madeleine, alive and well, was sitting cross-legged on a narrow, padded bench. Her silky brown hair was pulled into a messy top knot and her eyes were expertly ringed with liner, small flicks in the corners.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Lydia. I’m your cousin, but I’m here as a friend.’ Lydia knew there was no point trying to disguise her identity. Even if Madeleine didn’t sense that she was a Crow, there was a high chance she would recognise her from family gatherings and group photos. She opened the door wider, letting her eyes adjust to the relative gloom inside the boat.
‘Shut the door behind you,’ Madeleine said. The entrance led into the galley kitchen and the living space was beyond. Madeleine made no move to get up and Lydia felt she had no choice but to move through the kitchen and further into the boat. She didn't like it. One way in, one way out.
The interior was wood-panelled with red curtains pulled across the windows and multi-coloured paper lanterns strung above, giving the space a warm glow. Lydia tamped down the urge to fling open the curtains and let daylight in and edged down to the seating area. The taste of Crow was stronger in here, and Lydia could feel dry feathers at the back of her throat, and the tang of fresh blood on her tongue.
‘I’m not going home,’ Madeleine said. ‘So don’t even try.’
‘Okay,’ Lydia said. ‘Is it all right if I tell your parents you’re alive? They’re really worried.’
Madeleine lifted her chin. ‘No.’
‘Can I ask why not?’
‘You can ask,’ Madeleine said, not smiling. ‘Why are you looking for me?’
‘Uncle Charlie asked me,’ Lydia could feel that there was something seriously off about Madeleine, but she didn’t know what. Honesty seemed like the best policy. ‘And it’s my job. I’m an investigator.’
‘Not in London, you’re not.’
Lydia wondered why she was so sure. ‘Not usually. I work in Aberdeen.’
‘You got out,’ Madeleine said. ‘I heard that.’ She smiled for the first time and spoke quickly, getting more animated as she went on. ‘Mother said you broke your dad’s heart. And Charlie's. But you got out and that’s what matters. I know you’ll understand.’
Lydia opened her mouth to say that she hadn’t let her parents think she had disappeared, been abducted or killed, but Madeleine was still talking, her hands fluttering as she gestured.
‘They were always on my case, always telling me what I could and couldn’t do. ‘You’re a Crow’ and ‘Family comes first’. Well, it bloody doesn’t. I come first. Me.’
‘What did they stop you from doing?’ Lydia said, hoping to keep her talking until she could work out
how best to handle the situation. The relief at finding Maddie alive was tempered by the feeling in her gut that said something was very wrong.
Madeleine shook her head. ‘So many things. They had me in a cage. You don’t know, you were too precious, but the rest of us, we all had to muck in.’ She stopped speaking abruptly and tilted her head to one side, listening. Footsteps on the path outside and the sound of voices.
Once the unseen pedestrians had passed by, Madeleine carried on. ‘Uncle Charlie said jump and everybody did. Everybody. I don’t know how your dad managed to get out but nobody else is allowed to leave. So I had to run away. And they have to stay thinking I’m dead or whatever or I’ll get pulled back in.’
‘I’ll help,’ Lydia said. ‘I’m not in. I’m doing this one favour and then I’m back to my own life. I’ll support you, talk to Charlie for you. If you don’t want to be part of the Family business, you don’t have to be. The old folk all talk like it’s some kind of Mafia thing, but it’s not like that anymore. Times have changed. All the families have integrated and calmed down. It’s not like it used to be.’
Madeleine snorted with laughter. ‘Is that what your parents told you?’
Lydia decided to ignore the laughter. ‘Them,’ she said evenly, ‘and Charlie.’
‘Well they’re all lying.’
Lydia hesitated.
‘There’s less power around,’ Maddie swept one hand in a circle. ‘You’re right there. All the families are weak and their magic is diluted or, like, totally gone, but that hasn’t calmed them the fuck down. It’s made them want it more. The families are all really hungry. And you know what hunger does to people? Makes them ruthless.’ Madeleine leaned forward suddenly, making Lydia stiffen. She wanted to take a step back, the energy rolling off Madeleine was palpable and the air seemed thick. Lydia tried to suck in a deep breath, but it seemed to stick halfway, as if her lungs were rebelling.
‘Do you even know what the Crow Family business is? Have you got the first idea of what we are capable of?’
The Night Raven Page 17
