The Silver Mark

by Sarah Painter

  The Silver Mark

  Crow Investigations Book Two

  Sarah Painter

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  * * *

  Text Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Painter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by Siskin Press Limited

  Cover Design by Stuart Bache

  Also by Sarah Painter

  The Language of Spells

  The Secrets of Ghosts

  The Garden of Magic

  * * *

  In The Light of What We See

  Beneath The Water

  The Lost Girls

  * * *

  The Night Raven: Crow Investigations Book One

  For Cath,

  my partner in crime for over 30 years.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Thank You For Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Love Urban Fantasy?

  Chapter One

  Lydia Crow adjusted the desk fan so that the stream of air was hitting her more accurately and sat back in her broken office chair. The woman opposite was still talking and Lydia forced herself to tune back into the monologue. No. It was still detailing the sex life she and her husband had enjoyed for the previous fifteen years of marriage.

  ‘Always on a Saturday night, unless he had overdone the wine with dinner. Definitely an average of twice a week, though, once you count it all up from when we were first together, and that’s what they say is the national limit, don’t they?’

  That caught Lydia’s attention. ‘Sorry, what? Limit?’

  ‘Or is it two point five? The average number of times for married couples in England. I’m sure I read that somewhere. So he had no reason to complain. No reason to look elsewhere.’

  Lydia slumped back. This was the third infidelity case this week, which wouldn’t be so bad if she had other work coming in to dilute it a little. When she had started Crow Investigations she had hoped not to take any at all, especially after the Carter incident up in Aberdeen at her old firm, but it had proved impossible. Despite being rent-free courtesy of her uncle Charlie, living in London wasn’t cheap, and she had business costs such as public liability insurance, equipment, transport and registration fees. She still hadn’t resorted to honey-trap work, though, and things would have to become a great deal more desperate before that happened.

  It was too hot to stay slumped in the padded chair, she could feel sweat sticking to her vest top and the fabric of the seat was itching her legs. She straightened up and took a fortifying glug from her mug. It was a gift from Emma and had a magnifying glass and deer stalker stencilled on the side, which was both faintly embarrassing and very cheering. Lydia had started her own firm after only a year of training at a firm in Aberdeen and every vote of confidence was gratefully received.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t drink tea in this heat,’ the woman said, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘It’s coffee,’ Lydia said, not feeling the need to reveal that it also had a shot of whisky to help counteract the hangover she was still nursing, despite it being four o’clock in the afternoon. Was it her age or were hangovers getting worse?

  ‘So, can you help?’ the woman said. ‘I just need answers.’

  Lydia hated saying ‘no’ to a paying customer so she did the next best thing and selected her ‘top rate card’ and slid it across the table. ‘Plus expenses.’ It was the corporate rate. Not a figure that any private client could afford and it made unwanted jobs disappear out of the door, no fuss, no muss.

  ‘Fine,’ the woman said. ‘Do I need to sign a contract or something?’

  Lydia blinked. ‘I need the first ten billable hours paid up front.’ That ought to do it. Even for a corporate client, Lydia would have explained her refund policy; that if the job took less time than expected, the client would get some of that extortionate first fee back. But she kept quiet. Nothing like ridiculous sums of money to get rid of an unwelcome client with a dull domestic problem.

  ‘Fine,’ the woman said again, a touch impatiently. ‘Will you start straight away? I can’t live like this.’

  And there it was. The anguish in her eyes. The reason Lydia hated doing cheating work. Pain was part of the job. You didn’t call on a private investigator when everything was hunky dory and, human nature being what it was, the cause of the pain was usually close by, but still... It wasn’t just the dullness of investigating cheating spouses which got to Lydia. It was the unnecessary nature of the misery. All of that pain. And for what? Why couldn’t the couples talk to each other, agree that things had gone off the boil in their relationship and either spice it up or agree to an open marriage or go their separate ways. Infidelity cases just made Lydia sad. She opened the top drawer of the desk and gave the woman a contract, realising as she did so that she had managed to forget her name. Or, more accurately, failed to pay attention when the woman introduced herself. She was more hungover than she realised and felt a stab of shame when she imagined what Karen, her old boss, would say about such a lapse of basic observation.

  She watched as the woman dutifully printed her name above her signature, reading upside down. April Westcott.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Westcott. I’ll be in touch.’

  After Mrs Westcott had departed, Lydia went into her small kitchen and opened the fridge door. It was pleasant to stand in front of the cool air but there was nothing of interest inside. Never mind, she told herself, the cafe downstairs would close soon and then she could investigate its kitchen. If nothing else, Angel had a catering-size fridge which blasted out more cold air than Lydia’s little under-counter one.

  Back in the office of Crow Investigations, which used to be the living room of the flat and still had a sofa pushed against one wall, Lydia surveyed her domain. Her business had been running for two months and she was still using the rickety flat-pack desk and chair that she had liberated from the tiny office which belonged to the cafe. Now this was a more permanent arrangement, she really ought to give them back but Lydia couldn’t bring herself to feel especially bad. Her Uncle Charlie had done his level best to make Lydia stay in this place, above The Fork cafe, and she knew he would consider some ancient furniture a perfectly acceptable cost of doing business.

  Her laptop sat in the middle of the beige surface of the desk, with piles of paperwork and notes on either side. At some point she would need a filing cabinet. And a system. ‘Jason?’ She looked around for her unofficial assistant. Nothing.

  She found him in his bedroom, standing in the corner and facing the wall. ‘Are you okay?’

  Jason turned slowly and she realised he had a pen in his hand and had been writing on the wall. Again. ‘Yeah. Just thinking.’ His pale face brightened. ‘Do we have
a client?’

  ‘Mrs Westcott.’ Lydia said. ‘Don’t get excited, it’s another cheating spouse.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Jason said, moving so quickly that he made Lydia jump a little. ‘Have you added her to the sheet, yet?’

  ‘Just about to,’ Lydia said. She followed Jason to the office, sticking close and enjoying the way he cooled the air around him.

  He watched intently as Lydia added Mrs Westcott to the basic spreadsheet she was using to track clients and accounts. Now that he was able to touch things well enough to hold a pen and make coffee, Jason was fascinated by the possibilities offered by the laptop and Lydia’s phone. The internet seemed magical as far as Jason was concerned. Which wasn’t far from true, when Lydia stopped to think about it.

  Jason touched the edge of the screen reverentially. ‘When am I getting one of these?’

  ‘When we make enough money,’ Lydia said. ‘I know you just want to download a simulator and play space invaders twenty-four-seven.’

  Jason looked up. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘No,’ Lydia said quickly. If there was one thing less useful than having a ghost as her assistant it would be having an arcade-game playing ghost as her assistant.

  ‘Are you watching Mrs Lee tonight?’

  Lydia felt her headache throb. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘I wish I could do it, that would be so cool.’

  ‘Trust me, it isn’t.’

  ‘But I could be a real help, then,’ Jason’s face fell.

  ‘You are a help,’ Lydia said. ‘You are the best assistant I’ve ever had.’

  Jason gave her a long look.

  Lydia decided to change tack. ‘Maybe if you would let me look into what is holding you here, tying you to the building, we might be able to resolve it. And then you might be able to get out of here.’

  ‘Move on, you mean,’ Jason said, his expression thunderous.

  ‘No,’ Lydia said quickly. ‘Explore the street. Maybe even be able to leave Camberwell. You could see the sights.’

  ‘I’ve seen them,’ Jason said, still looking suspicious and angry, as he did whenever he suspected Lydia might be angling to make him move into the light, or whatever ghosts did when they left this plane of existence and went to wherever spirits went. ‘South London,’ he said. ‘Born and bred.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s new stuff,’ Lydia ploughed on. ‘The London Eye. The Shard.’

  ‘Get me one of those and I could look at them on the Google.’ Jason was gazing at the laptop again. ‘You can see anything on there. Anything you want.’

  Lydia reminded herself to put parental controls on the laptop before Jason stumbled into porn land. She tried, again, to distract him. ‘Seeing things in real life is much better. Wouldn’t you like to be able to walk around London again? It would do you good to get out, get some fresh air.’

  The words hung for a moment and Lydia wasn’t sure if Jason was going to fall into one of his dark moods. Understandably, he found being a ghost a bit depressing. Instead, he grinned, looking fully alive and five years younger. ‘I think my condition might be a bit past that,’ he said.

  * * *

  Mrs Lee worked for an insurance broker on Church Street and her husband had engaged Lydia’s services to find out whether she was truly going to Pilates after hours on Wednesday and Friday evenings or whether there was something else keeping her out of the marital home.

  Earlier in the week, Lydia had followed Mrs Lee from Church Street to the gym in the small industrial estate off Surrey Road and dutifully made sure she had entered the building, changed into her Pilates gear and walked into the class. Two hours later, during which Lydia sat in her old blue Volvo and watched the exit of the gym, Mrs Lee left and went straight back to her and Dr Lee’s garden flat near Denmark Hill.

  Tonight, Lydia arrived an hour before Mrs Lee’s official finishing time at the insurance firm and was rewarded for her conscientiousness when she was just in time to catch Mrs Lee leaving early, five minutes after Lydia had begun surveillance.

  Mrs Lee had a bulky handbag over one arm and she looked, to Lydia’s eye, light and happy. Instead of getting into her silver-grey Toyota, she walked down Church Street at a fast pace. Lydia got out of the Volvo and followed at a decent distance. It was tricky because there was a bus stop halfway along and if Mrs Lee was getting a bus, Lydia would have to scramble back to the Volvo to follow effectively, or risk getting on the same bus as her target. Mrs Lee passed the bus stop, though, and walked steadily on, turning down Broad Street and then into the leaf-lined Camberwell Grove. The pavement here was a little quieter and Lydia increased her distance. There was a cafe at the end of the road, Lydia knew, and she wondered if that was Mrs Lee’s destination. The rest of the road was residential. Then, without warning, Mrs Lee disappeared. More accurately, she had stepped off the pavement and onto the paved front garden of a small block of sixties’ flats. Like all of London, different eras were all smushed together and the boxy architecture rubbed shoulders with a couple of gorgeous bricked Edwardian houses. Lydia took the path to one of these houses, as if visiting. Mrs Lee wasn’t looking, she had rung a doorbell and gone inside.

  Lydia waited for a minute before doubling-back down the garden path she had taken, and following in Mrs Lee’s footsteps. The door looked like it belonged to a private residence. There were four flats listed with separate bells. One said ‘Nails’ and Lydia wondered briefly whether it was a surname or the extremely discreet sign for a manicure business. She looked at the buttons for recent-sweat residue but they all looked the same. Since she couldn’t tell which buzzer Mrs Lee had pressed, she dutifully photographed them all.

  The problem with a residential street on foot, was the difficulty of waiting and watching unobtrusively. Across the road, there was an alley next to a terrace of four houses and Lydia experimented with standing just inside its entrance. She could see the door Mrs Lee had used although she was pretty sure that Mrs Lee would also be able to see her. If she looked directly, that was. Lydia leaned against the wall in her customary ‘I’m going to be here for a while’ position and crossed her fingers that Mrs Lee was as unobservant as the average person. The average innocent person who was simply going about their life. Yes, maybe Mrs Lee was carrying out an affair and that was, technically, immoral, but Lydia hated feeling like a voyeur on someone else’s mistakes. Especially when life was complex. Maybe Dr Lee was a bastard. Maybe he had affairs of his own. Lydia’s old boss and the woman who had trained her as an investigator, had explained it this way; if she uncovered infidelity she would either be ending an unhappy marriage or providing the catalyst for it to improve. It was a win either way. Of course, it wasn’t always so simple. One of Lydia’s early cases had revealed that the woman was not having an affair, but had been trying to leave her abusive husband. The poor woman had very little freedom and Lydia had, luckily, been suspicious of the husband who had engaged the firm’s services. Instead of giving him the full report on his wife’s activities, Lydia had fabricated a story which kept the woman safe. It still chilled her, though, to know how close she had been to ruining a terrorised woman’s chance of freedom.

  An hour and ten minutes later, with Lydia’s mind pleasantly wandering through a fantasy which involved a naked DCI Fleet, the flat door opened and Mrs Lee walked swiftly away. Lydia caught a couple of pictures of her leaving the block of flats and then followed, her legs cramped from standing still for so long. Mrs Lee returned to Church Street. She was moving quickly and when she got back to her car, she threw her bulky handbag onto the passenger seat with some force. Lydia caught sight of her expression and it looked serious. And determined.

  Lydia got into her Volvo and followed Mrs Lee back to her marital home and then drove to The Fork, parking as close as she could, and climbing the stairs to her flat feeling unaccountably weary. She made a large mug of strong coffee and wrote up the report on the evening’s surveillance.

  Taking a break, she stretched her arms above
her head and then treated herself by cracking her neck, shoulders and wrists. The sounds of the city on a warm night wafted through the open window and Lydia felt her low mood lift. This was the life. She was her own boss. Sitting at her desk with the door open, she could see down the hallway of her flat to the front entrance. The retro wood-and-glass door which Paul Fox had sent to her as some kind of weird manipulation tactic still gave her mixed feelings. She hated the giver of the door and the presumption behind the gift, but she loved the film-noir aesthetic and the bronze-leaf lettering. Crow Investigations. Her own firm. Now all she needed was a case that didn’t make her soul curl up and die.

  Chapter Two

  It was too hot to sleep and the next day dawned bright and muggy, providing no relief whatsoever. Lydia checked her business account and saw that April Westcott had already paid her the required initial fee. After treating herself to a loud sigh and a quick shower, Lydia went down to The Fork to fill her travel mug with coffee before starting the preparatory work on the case.

  It was mid-morning and in between the early breakfast and lunchtime rushes. Only three tables were occupied and Angel was on a stool behind the counter, sipping water and looking at her phone. She looked up as Lydia scooted behind the counter. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey,’ Lydia replied. The coffee machine whooshed and liquid poured into Lydia’s mug, the scent filling the air. Lydia could feel her synapses waking up just in anticipation of her first sip. Thank God for caffeine.