by Mark Hayden
‘Mina. Mina Desai. It’s a shame you’re so far away in Cambridge, or she’d recruit you for the women’s cricket team.’
‘She’d be disappointed if she did. Strictly women’s rugby, me. Haven’t played for ages.’
‘Were you any good?’
‘Not for me to say. I never had problems getting a game, though.’
‘Then you should take coaching badges. There’s a tremendous shortage of female sports coaches. That’s why I’m the bowling coach for Clerkswell Ladies.’
She nodded. ‘That’s a good idea.’
She was being polite. Either she had no desire to get back into sport, or it was simply not in her life-plan at the moment. Or perhaps it wasn’t in Frances’s life-plan. At least we’d established a bit of common ground. I moved back to the important stuff.
‘I get that you don’t want to pre-judge the case. Can you at least tell me why you called me in for the magickal elements? I know what people say about me, and I don’t mean the Dragonslayer bit.’
She glanced at me and grinned. ‘And what do you think they say? I’ll let you know how accurate it is.’
I reached into the back and ran my fingers over the gun lying on top of my open kit bag. A ripple of magick flowed through the car. ‘Did you feel that?’
‘Yes. It was your Badge of Office, wasn’t it?’
‘It was, and it’s stamped into a SIG P226 handgun. The Dwarf who made it gave it a name: The Hammer. People talk about me in the same way – “When your only tool is a hammer, you see all problems as nails.” I get sent into situations where there’s a likelihood of lethal force.’
She opened her mouth to say something and changed her mind. She swallowed and said, ‘I called you in because of the Annex of Westphalia.’
This is a magickal pledge that every Mage is supposed to make: to abjure the wars of Popes and Princes. In other words, not to take your magick into a mundane battle. ‘Go on.’
‘Because of the Annex, and because you came late to magick, you’re the only Mage I’ve ever come across with actual, mundane combat experience. And in the RAF, too. You know what these guys have been through.’
‘Apart from the dying part. I hope never to have the experience of dying in an aircraft.’
‘Most of the Spirits don’t either. Or not the ones I deal with. They’re more recent deaths, and they haunt the airfields for all sorts of reasons. They miss it, I think.’
‘This isn’t your first case, obviously, so why do you need me?’
She sighed. ‘This lot are different. The Peculier Necromancer before me had done it for decades. She was the first woman to hold a senior post in the magickal hierarchy, even if it is pretty much under the radar. So to speak. Her childhood sweetheart died in a Lancaster Bomber and came back to be with her in Spirit. They were a team. Quite sweet, really.’
I thought it was downright creepy, not to mention bizarre and dangerous that a royal officer had formed a team with the ghost of her late boyfriend. Clearly Necromancers see this world (and the next) rather differently to you and me. Unless you are a Necromancer, and in that case, I shall try to be more understanding.
The Satnav interrupted, telling her to take care on steep hill. It was a good warning, and I shut up while she negotiated Sutton Bank. When she’d finished, I said, ‘Just tell me why this one’s different, and I’ll change the subject.’
‘These Spirits only really manifested when the archaeological dig started. There’s something funny about them. I’m not sure they’re real. That’s all.’
It took me a couple of seconds to pick up on the word real, which proves how deeply my perspectives have been warped by magick. Very little of this was real in any sense of the word. ‘Real ghosts? Real airmen? Real what?’
‘I don’t want to pre-judge things. Sorry. I’m not trying to be a pain, but it’s hard to put into words. Do you mind?’
I did mind. I minded a lot, but Hannah had told me that people would owe the Watch a favour if I helped out. I moved position, as best I could, and said, ‘So, did you go to Salomon’s House or one of the Circles to get your magickal training?’
She flicked a glance over and gave me a rueful smile that surely came from her father: I’ve seen it on the faces of so many technical officers over the years that she must have learnt it from him. ‘I was hoping for something on a completely non-magickal subject,’ she said. ‘Like, “Do you prefer Strictly Come Dancing or I’m a Celebrity?” Something like that. I prefer Strictly, by the way.’
‘And I prefer the beer in the Inkwell to both of those. I’m surprised that Frances goes in for such things.’ As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised what I’d said. ‘Sorry. I’m tired. I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘’Salright. She pretends to look down on Strictly, but she loves it really. I know that because she watches it when I’m out on business – like last weekend – and then she watches it again the next day with me, and she can’t stop herself giving spoilers away because she gets so worked up.’ She spoke with a mixture of affection and secret triumph. She clearly loved Frances a lot, no question. There was also no question that their relationship had issues.
‘I’ll give you a choice,’ I said. ‘Helicopters, cricket, Spanish villas or Dragons. That’s all I’m up for tonight.’
‘You gave a seminar on Dragons at Newton’s House, didn’t you?’
‘I did.’
‘So you don’t mind talking about it?’
‘Not at bit. It all started with an egg…’
And I was still talking when we got to Malton.
It’s a sleepy little town at the best of times, and at one in the morning there really wasn’t a lot going on. We passed a whole stack of substantial houses on the way in, and the town centre was just coming into view when we arrived at the four-square Georgian block of the Talbot Hotel. Woody slowed right down and the electric motor took over. Her Yaris was so quiet that it didn’t even wake the night porter.
I extracted myself from the cramped car with some difficulty and picked up my bag. Woody handed over a room key and manila envelope while I grabbed a quick ciggie.
‘See you in the morning, Conrad. Sleep well.’
‘And you.’
We made our way through the silent corridors of the substantial old inn and parted with a wave. The room was in an odd corner, but finished to a very high standard. I summoned the energy to get undressed and forced myself to Google one item before sending home a request. I collapsed on to the bed, and my last act before plunging into sleep was to send Mina a WhatsApp.
Arrived safe. No idea what the hell’s going on. Love you. Conrad. XXX.
I didn’t get a reply.
2 — Lessons of the Past
Woody looked a bit dishevelled at breakfast. ‘What?’ she said when I stood looking at her.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going in civvies,’ I said. ‘Last time I checked, a Cambridge sweatshirt was not Parade Uniform.’
‘No point getting jam down it. I’ll change after breakfast. Have some of my tea, if you want.’
I sat down and put the unopened manila envelope on the table. A waitress offered me a menu, and I said, ‘I know what I want, thanks. More tea, toast and the full English, please. One fried egg.’
‘Of course, sir,’ she said smoothly. She turned my teacup the right way up pulled out her notepad. Customer service is very good at the Talbot.
Woody had noticed the sealed envelope but was too nervous to say anything. I poured myself some of her tea and sat back. ‘How’s Dr Eder this morning? I presume you’ve been in touch. Is she looking forward to her lecture on Christina Rossetti?’
She flinched back, alarmed. ‘Why have you been checking up on me?’
‘To level the playing field a bit. I told you last night that Myfanwy the Druid is doing time as my housekeeper, and she gets up very early. Before I crashed out last night, I asked her to track down any Frances she could find at Malbranche College. Is that wh
ere you met?’
Woody went bright red. When she’d avoided the question about her magickal education, she’d also avoided saying that she’d started at Cambridge as a mundane undergraduate before transferring to Salomon’s House as a late developing Mage. Dr Frances Eder is a dozen years older than “Bobbi” and was already established at Malbranche College when Woody matriculated. Frances was also married (to a man) and had a child. That child would now be fourteen.
The arrival of my food gave her a chance to gather her dignity. ‘Frances is a professional,’ she said. ‘I started on philosophy, not English, so yes, I knew who she was, but we didn’t start dating until after I’d left and gone to Salomon’s House. Satisfied?’ I lifted my knife and fork in a gesture of surrender and carried on chewing. She pointed to the envelope. ‘Why haven’t you opened that? Too busy checking up on me?’
I swallowed. ‘Partly. And partly I wanted a cigarette. What’s in it?’
‘Open it and see.’
I was tempted to play the naughty boy and say no, but my professional instinct kicked in. I was supposed to be the senior officer, after all. Spearing the last of the sausage, I wiped my hands and ripped open the envelope.
It hadn’t been very thick to start with, and most of the contents was a printout from the Department of Archaeology at University of Lancashire Institute of Science and Technology. It was a proposal for a dig, and meant nothing to me. I flicked through the pages to the end, where I found maps. Now those I could understand.
Or not. According to one of the maps, I was eating breakfast under Lake Pickering. I looked at the ceiling, and it was dry. I looked back at the map and saw an annotation: Limit of glacial ice. Not a contemporary map, then. Something tickled the back of my memory, but I was keen to get on solid ground and shuffled the sheet to the back. The other map was a good old Ordnance Survey printout, marked to show former RAF Draxholt.
I poured more tea and ran my fingers along the contour lines to get a feeling for the area. Bomber Command had chosen a perfectly flat area north east of the village of Sherburn, in a typically wet place. I could see all the drainage channels running into the river Derwent. Unlike Suffolk, the airmen would at least have had a view of some hills. ‘I wonder why they put it there?’ I said, without realising I was talking out loud.
‘Bribery,’ said Woody.
‘Sorry?’
‘The landowner was fed up with labour shortages and he bribed the Air Ministry to build there. He was compensated. They only ever really used it as a relief landing strip – when those big raids limped home, they were always short of fuel and needed as many safe places as possible. It wasn’t uncommon for exhausted pilots to fluff the landing and break the undercarriage, blocking the runway for those behind.’
‘I know how they felt. Been there. Any fatalities?’
‘None recorded.’
There was one other annotation, in the top corner, pointing north east and saying To Star Carr. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s in the bid.’
I folded the OS map and put it in my pocket; the others I replaced in the envelope. ‘I’ll read it while you get changed. How far away is it?’
‘Half an hour. I’ll see you outside at ten thirty.’
She got up and I cadged a mug of coffee from the obliging staff that I could take to one of the outside tables. I was going to make the most of the morning sun because the weather forecast was not good for later.
I was lighting a cigarette when a large black luxury saloon pulled in. The chauffeur, in matching black, nipped smartly out of the front and opened the rear door. A suit got out of the back and headed into the hotel with barely a nod in the direction of the man who’d safely brought him here. The chauffeur’s shoulders relaxed as the tension left him and he looked around. I saw his right hand move to his jacket pocket in the unconscious gesture of a fellow smoker before he realised that he couldn’t leave the car where it was. A mad idea came into my head, and I nipped back into the hotel.
When he’d disposed of his vehicle, the chauffeur reappeared at the same time as a waitress with a pot of coffee for him. The sheer joy in his eyes turned to suspicion when she told him that the RAF guy had paid for it.
‘Not that I’m not grateful, sir,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know anything about why he’s here, if you’re after information.’ He pointedly hadn’t touched the coffee.
‘I don’t know who he is, nor do I care. It’s you I’m interested in. Go ahead. You look like you need it. Here.’ I offered him a cigarette and he poured himself a cup, adding cream and sugar.
He took a slurp and tilted his head. ‘Go on then.’
‘It’s like this…’
The Audi’s suspension took the field in its stride, and the chauffeur ignored the line of parked cars to take us to a gazebo on the edge of a series of marked zones that signalled the start of the dig. I waited for him to get out and open the door, enjoying the look on Woody’s face as she emerged from the gazebo to receive me.
I got out of the car and said, ‘Thank you. An hour should be ample.’
‘Sir.’
Woody saluted and turned puce, all in one clockwork motion. I saluted back. ‘Good morning, Lieutenant Woodhouse.’
‘Morning, sir,’ she said out loud. She lowered her arm and her voice to whisper, ‘How the fuck did you pull that off? I thought you’d gone and left me in the lurch. Sir.’
I leaned down. ‘I said I’d arrive in the manner befitting your CO, and I did. Your toy car is not befitting. You want your CO to look important, don’t you?’ I straightened up and raised my voice. ‘Good work, Lieutenant. Let’s get started, shall we?’
We had an audience. Three archaeologists, clutching enamel mugs, had come out of the gazebo to watch, and another half-dozen had stopped work in the trenches to see what was going on. I nodded to everyone and held out my arm, ushering Woody to make introductions. She jumped to.
‘Sir, this is Professor Cargill, and Doctors Rice and Gardner, all of ULIST. This is Squadron Leader Clarke.’
There was a shaking of hands and I got a good look at them. They were all dressed in variations of technical fabrics – boots, quick-dry trousers and aerobic tops, as much of a uniform as the light blue that Woody and I were sporting. I felt the calluses on their hands as we shook, and I noted the sun damage on their skin. I felt especially sorry for Dr Rice, the female member of the trio, who looked a lot older than the age given in her profile. Perhaps she’d lied.
‘ULIST,’ I said. ‘That’s in Cairndale, isn’t it?’
Woody gave me an odd look.
‘Yes,’ said Professor Cargill. He was 48 and wore a floppy hat to protect his bald head.
I looked over at the digging. When the trio turned to look with me, the lesser diggers stopped staring and went back to work. ‘What are you hoping to find under here?’ I said.
Woody’s odd look turned to alarm. ‘It was all in the proposal document, sir,’ she said hastily.
‘Was it? Didn’t get that far,’ I said. ‘I’m sure that Professor Cargill would prefer to show me and explain things in person, wouldn’t you, Professor?’
Cargill was taken aback. ‘Now you’re here, it wouldn’t hurt.’ He led me to a virgin piece of grass, roped off but as yet undisturbed. The others fell into step behind. ‘Do you know much about the late Mesolithic … erm, sorry, I didn’t catch your first name?’
‘It’s Conrad. Isn’t that the stone age?’
He waved his hand. The universal gesture of an academic forced to use terms he’s not happy with. ‘You could say that. It makes more sense if I say hunter-gatherers. After them came the farmers who built Stonehenge, amongst other things.’
‘Right.’
He pointed north east. ‘Just over there, near Scarborough, is Star Carr, the best preserved Mesolithic site in Britain. It was preserved because the site was next to a lake, and the lake filled with peat. To cut a long story short, we’re doing an exploratory dig here, hoping to find so
mething similar.’
‘Or better,’ I said, with a smile.
Cargill turned his head sharply. He was a professor, an academic. They can be as ruthless as the businessman whose car I’d commandeered. More so.
‘Quite,’ said Cargill. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the Storegga Slide?’
I shook my head. I could have made a joke about water slides at the North Yorkshire Water Park down the road at Wykeham, but that would have been crass. I was aiming slightly higher than that.
‘Around eight thousand years ago – 6200BCE – a huge chunk of underwater cliff collapsed. Near Norway. It was huge. The cliff was as big as Iceland, and it slid down into the deep Atlantic Basin. The tabloid newspapers said it caused “The First Brexit.”’
‘Let’s keep Brexit out of things, shall we? What happened?’
‘A tsunami is what happened. One of the biggest to leave evidence. A wall of water washed all the way up to Stirling in Scotland. It also submerged the land bridge that made Britain a peninsula. That tsunami turned us into an island people.’
‘And it washed up here?’
‘It did. We’ve done some computer modelling, and we think that the Moors may have deflected some of the energy.’
I’d been right about the outlook – flat as a pancake. Cargill gestured to the distant hills. ‘This would have been devastated, all right, but if the waves were lower, evidence of Mesolithic life might have been preserved.’
‘Interesting. How are things going?’
He led us over to the dig area that was being worked. I glanced behind us and saw that Woody was giving me a furious look. Doctors Rice and Gardner were looking bemused. Good.
The worked area was the size of a tennis court. A tennis court that had been attacked by weird cubic moles. There was a small digger in the corner of the field, and it had been used to scrape away the top two feet of earth, now sitting in a heap at a distance from the dig.
The rectangular hole had then been levelled to a perfect flat surface, and four seemingly random holes about the size of a grave had been excavated, none of them perpendicular to the main dig. It did nothing for my sense of order to see them at odd angles like that.
