The Black Shepherd

by Steven Savile

  There were three vehicles parked up outside.

  The Camper Van was gone.

  She thought about stealing one, but without keys she was going nowhere. Which, she tried to convince herself, was for the best. Steal a car, they come looking for it. All she wanted to do was slip away and disappear, find a different street in a different city to call her home. She wasn’t going to bind her life to a man who would drug and rape her. That was fucked in a very different way. No. They could do their binding rituals and pretend marrying a thirteen-year-old kid off to a grown man was natural, but she wasn’t going to be a part of it. Part of her wanted to try to save the girls, but they didn’t want saving, and it wasn’t like she could even save herself. And what if she did? What if by some miracle she found a way to get them all out of here? The Shepherd would find more and replace them easily enough. There were thousands of lost souls out there looking for the light he offered.

  So, she slipped away, running into the night and the darkness of the forest.

  She moved slowly at first, conscious of every sound.

  Moonlight barely filtered through the skeletal limbs of the trees, casting silver and shadows across the virgin snow. Every few yards she stumbled and reached out for the support of the nearest trunk to stop herself from falling face-first to the ground. Every time she reached out she left blood on the bark. Fear had her heart beating faster, her breathing coming shorter. The drug was still in her blood, diluted by the adrenaline, but still potent.

  She didn’t look back, because if she did there was every chance she’d still see the lights from the compound.

  She ran with no sign of the trees thinning out, and no lights up ahead.

  She ran towards the dawn, knowing they were going to wake up, knowing they were going to miss her, knowing that they were going to hunt her.

  She had never been so afraid of sunlight.

  She ran on, praying to the night.

  Stay dark.

  But she couldn’t run forever.

  She needed to find somewhere to rest.

  Somewhere to hide.

  She saw the torches, their lights waving around in the darkness. She heard feet crunching through the snow. She should have known they’d find her. She’d left scuffed tracks and blood. All she could think was run, outrun them, keep running, and never look back.

  She looked for a path through the trees, torn between sneaking and plunging headlong into the forest. She had no idea how the sound would travel. Every footstep sounded so loud in her ears. She needed to believe she could make it. That there was a way out.

  The hope lasted a matter of seconds.

  She heard a voice cry, ‘There she is!’

  She threw herself forward, overhanging branches clawing at her face as she plunged through them. She ran until she thought her lungs were about to burst. And then she ran some more, stumbling and slipping in the snow and on the roots that grew up out of the soil. And still she ran, lungs heaving, as the voices behind her grew relentlessly closer.

  She leaned against a tree, struggling to breathe.

  The ice-cold air burned her lungs.

  She turned around with her hands held up in surrender.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, though the words came out wrong, anything beyond the placatory sound lost in the gasps between them. She shielded her eyes against the torches that shone painfully brightly in her face, seeing only black shadows where there were men behind them. ‘I woke up in a strange place and I panicked …’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ The Shepherd said. There was such sadness in his voice.

  She held out her hand for him to take, a little girl lost, wanting to be brought back to the light. She was thinking fast, desperate thoughts, trying to save her herself by becoming what she thought he wanted.

  ‘I don’t like this feeling. I had such high hopes for you. I thought you were ready. I was wrong.’

  She heard the shot after the bullet had slammed her up against the tree trunk, punching the air out of her lungs. She wanted to say something; to say sorry. It didn’t hurt. She couldn’t feel anything.

  She still held out her hand as she slid down into the dirt.

  He didn’t take it.

  ONE

  TODAY

  It felt strange to walk into the bright, shiny new glass-and-steel monstrosity they now called home. He wasn’t going to get used to it in a hurry. It wasn’t him. Peter Ash was more the grim broom-cupboard dweller, at home in the cramped darkness of River House. Whoever had decided that Bonn should become the centre of their universe needed to take a long hard look at themselves. The Eurocrimes Division’s purpose-built headquarters stood on the outskirts of a massive industrial park. It was the height of fiscal responsibility, and the depths of soulless architecture. Every time he set foot in the place he was reminded of the line about cities not being concrete jungles but rather human zoos.

  That’s exactly what this place was, a zoo.

  They were on display like animals.

  It wasn’t like they’d had a choice and thought, Hey, let’s up sticks and move to Germany. He was quite happy back in London. He even missed the crowded insanity of the walk along the river to the small coffee shop where Laura fed her addiction. The same went for Frankie Varg. That was the thing, she’d worked alone long enough that she’d grown used to taking risks that she’d never take with someone else’s life on the line. They were similar like that. Not exactly broken, but incapable of giving enough of yourself to be a proper partner. Still, it wasn’t as though this was for ever – at least not if the bods in Westminster got their way, sleepwalking the country off a cliff into the splendid isolation of Brexit. It didn’t matter whether you were a Remainer or a Leaver, the schism this thing had wrought was deep and felt irreparable. The number of viral videos with nasty little thugs being given permission to let loose their prejudices on the world was disgusting. The spike in hate crimes and racial intolerance was staggering, but it shouldn’t have been surprising.

  But it wasn’t just a British thing, was it?

  This whole isolationist kick seemed to have gripped the world. You only had to turn on the television to see capitalism running wild, stealing pension-fund surpluses and giving trillion-dollar tax breaks to the one-per-centers while separating kids from their parents at the border and putting them in concentration camps in everything but name, all in the cause of making America great again, fancy red hat made in China and all.

  The world was going to hell in a handcart.

  It was obvious they were locked in psychological warfare with the Russian machine playing them like puppets.

  Someone was going to have to fix the world.

  All Pete could think was thank fuck it wasn’t his job.

  Still, it wasn’t as though he or Frankie could complain about being seconded to Bonn. It was part of the job description. They were field agents for a cross-border joint policing initiative. He joked he worked for Cops without Borders. All twenty-eight member states were represented, sharing their expertise and local knowledge as they investigated crimes that crossed national jurisdictions. But Laura was different. She was a homebody, settled and loving life in London, with family and friends that she wouldn’t want to leave behind. Sure, she’d talked about having an adventure, but she was happy where she was. London was a great city. Not just a vibrant one. It was the centre of the world. But it turned out that Laura was the same as him. She had work. The nearest thing she had to friends were in a choir she sang with on a Friday night on the rare occasions she managed to get away from the office in time. She didn’t even have a cat. So quite literally there was nothing keeping her in London when the call came.

  ‘Who knows, maybe I’ll get one now,’ she said, looking at one of the endless cat memes scrolling across her screen. She sipped at the foam of her cappuccino, which, as she’d told him twice a day for the last six months, just wasn’t as good as the one from the cart down on the River. ‘It’s that or a man, and
cats eat less.’

  He tried not to laugh because his ribs still hurt.

  It had been six months since he’d been discharged from the hospital to begin his recovery.

  He still woke in the middle of the night sometimes, damp sheets sticking to his skin, the taste of the smoke still acrid in his mouth and the crackle of the flames from the burning church fever-bright in his mind. The physio had warned him that it could take at least a year for him to regain full mobility, that he needed to keep pushing himself through the exercise regime, but that patience was more important than determination. The problem was that neither was easy. He wasn’t by nature a patient soul, when it came to his own physical well-being he’d never exactly been the stubborn type.

  ‘Look, you know I love you, right?’

  ‘I don’t like where this is going,’ Pete said with a wry smile.

  ‘You think you’re so clever, Peter Ash, but I know you better than you know yourself,’ Laura said. ‘And I know when you’re pretending. So, I’m going to ask you again, friend to friend, are you really sure you’re ready to be back out there?’ She leaned closer so that no one else in the room could overhear. ‘There’s plenty of stuff you could help me with.’

  She meant well, but he was fast going out of his mind.

  ‘You mean paperwork? I think I’d rather suffer a second crucifixion. Now, what have you got for me?’

  ‘Nothing exciting’s come across the transom.’

  ‘Where’s Frankie?’

  ‘Why don’t you read the ongoing case log.’

  ‘I was kinda hoping you’d save me the effort. You’re Google, after all.’

  ‘You should read the case log.’

  She was being cagey, and he didn’t like it.

  ‘What aren’t you telling me, Law?’

  ‘Read it.’

  ‘I want you to tell me.’

  ‘I’m serious, Pete. Read the log. If I tell you, I’m going to miss a detail, you’ll go off half-cocked, and I’ll be for the chop. We’ve got a lot more eyes on us here. Just do me a favour, read the log. Then you can yell at me. I’ll get a fresh coffee while you play catch-up.’ He knew full well her cup was still half full, and comfortably warm, meaning she was making herself scarce. She smiled and patted his shoulder as she got to her feet. ‘It’s good to have you back.’

  ‘It’s good to be back.’

  ‘Let’s see if you still think that after you’ve read the log.’

  TWO

  The ferry journey was a rival for Odysseus’s black ship on the long journey home. Sixteen hours between Scylla and Charybdis – meaning, literally, two evils.

  Frankie had managed little sleep.

  The decision to travel via Stockholm meant she’d been able to tie up a few loose ends renting out her apartment. She’d been tempted to sell it, but it was prime real estate, and right now the property market was spiralling in the city, meaning what might cost four million kroner now could be selling for six or seven by the time she was ready to return home – and at those prices her own home was going to be well out of reach, so better to sit on it. She’d needed to get permission from the condo board to rent the place out, and legally wasn’t allowed to make a cent profit on the deal. The letting laws were weird – very much a throwback to the country’s socialist roots – and meant she wasn’t allowed to charge anything beyond the interest levels on the mortgage, and nothing in regards to the amortization of the loan, so it was still costing her a couple of thousand a month to keep it, but it was a solid long-term investment. Plus, she liked the place.

  The journey across the Baltic to Tallinn gave her plenty of time to think about the job, the changes that had been thrust upon her from Division, and what she wanted out of life. The problem, as far as she was concerned, was that they amounted to the same thing.

  She stood on the deck as the ferry approached the terminal. Thick black cloud in the distance marked the forest fire that had been burning for over a week now. It stretched across the horizon, towering over the city. Reports put it at little more than a hundred kilometres from the city, which sounded like a lot, but out of control, wildfires could spread at ten kilometres an hour, meaning it was not much more than ten hours away from the medieval city. All it would take was a change in wind direction.

  These raging fires were becoming far too common in the long overly hot summers of climate change. Twice in the last few years Sweden had been ravaged by them, needing the Italians to fly in their water-bombing planes and a convoy of engines and firefighters from all over Europe to quite literally put all hands to the pump to bring them under control. The most recent one, last summer, had covered an area the equivalent of ninety-six thousand football pitches, and burned right up to the outskirts of her parents’ home in Sala.

  Without make up, her blonde hair cropped short, she could pass for a young woman – if young meant maybe twenty-five. In the right clothes, even younger. The ripped jeans, scuffed boots, and battered leather jacket would do the job. The slightly grubby sleeping bag she had strapped to a rucksack enhanced the illusion.

  No one was going to mistake Francesca Varg for a cop and that was all that mattered.

  She could have flown, but no self-respecting backpacker would take the plane, and there was nothing to say the people she was hunting weren’t watching the docks for people like her, travelling alone, vulnerable. It was all about playing the part.

  She watched the faces down on the terminal hardstand and through the glass windows as the ferry docked, but no one stood out.

  By the time she was walking away from the ferry terminal, eyes on the signs into the city, Frankie was already feeling grubby.

  There were plenty of people back in Division who weren’t happy with her wasting her time on this case. The prevailing wisdom was that any sort of investigation was going to take far too long, and the chances of any sort of meaningful results were negligible. Nikola Akardi, their ODA – Officer of Divisional Affairs – was adamant they had more than enough work on their plate and took her aside to tell her just that. But Frankie was a field agent, which gave her a certain amount of leeway with investigations. They were still getting used to the chain of command. She had to admit it was a bit weird taking orders from a guy seconded to Division from the Greek offices where before she’d been autonomous. Akardi oversaw the entire Eastern European operation. He’d only been in the post for three months and was growing into it. It wasn’t like he had a choice. They were all learning on the job.

  Akardi’s primary concern was that even if she hit pay dirt it was going to be virtually impossible for her to do anything about it.

  But that was only because he didn’t know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. Only Law did: no agent was permitted to work a case where they had a personal connection, no matter how distant. She’d weighed up the ethics of the situation, but how was she supposed to ignore her cousin’s cry for help when it was exactly the kind of hell she could help with? She could have passed it across to someone else, let Akardi assign another team; it wasn’t as though she didn’t trust her colleagues, but it was personal and there was no way she wasn’t going to do everything in her power to bring Irma Lutz home.

  She hadn’t seen her cousin since she was three, but that didn’t make her any less family, and Frankie’s extended family stretched like a spider’s web across northern Europe. She’d only met a fraction of them but had heard all sorts of stories from her mother, who was very much at the centre of the web.

  Irma was nineteen, a student at the University of Technology in Tallinn. By all accounts she was a bright girl, destined for great things. But something had derailed her, and she’d lost interest in her studies. It happened more often than people realized; someone with the world at their feet would fall in love, or just not cope with those first few months out of the nest and they’d lose themselves in the social side of university. As far as she’d been able to tell, there wasn’t much that was actually remarkable about Irma’s ci
rcumstances right up until the day she disappeared.

  Frankie had liaised with the local police, who weren’t interested, and spoken to her tutor, her housemates, and the staff of the coffee shop where she worked part-time. Every conversation circled back to the same thing: she’d had some sort of spiritual awakening and had found religion. Her housemates said she’d paid up her term’s rent and gone to join some kind of commune out in the middle of nowhere. And that wasn’t illegal. As police, their hands were tied. As family, hers weren’t.

  The officer in Tallinn had been more than happy to forward a copy of her file, not that there was much to read.

  Irma’s tutor had gushed a little too much about just how talented she was and gave her the names of a couple of other students she seemed close to. All but one was already on the list of police interviews in the file.

  Her first thought was, why hadn’t they spoken to the last girl?

  That was the way her mind worked.

  So, she’d written the name Annja Rosen on the pad in front of her and drawn a circle around it.

  It didn’t take Laura long to track down a mobile number for the girl, and within half an hour of hanging up on the Estonian police Frankie was listening to the girl tell her a story that had the fine hairs on the nape of her neck bristling.

  ‘I warned her. I told her not to get involved with them,’ Annja said. ‘But she wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Them?’ Frankie said.

  ‘One World. They suck you in, they tell you what you want to hear, but they’re fucking evil. When they’ve got you, they won’t let go. They’re a cult. They’re not a religion. They’re scum. They’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid,’ she said, meaning the one lasting legacy of Jim Jones and Jonestown, where the entire cult downed the grape-flavoured Kool-Aid in a mass suicide rite. ‘I told the police all about it.’

  That stopped her cold.

  ‘You told the police?’

  She leafed through the pages of the file. Not only wasn’t Annja Rosen’s statement on file, there wasn’t a single mention of One World anywhere in the printout, which threw a massive shadow across the veracity of the investigation as a whole.