Ghost Dance (11 page)

Spalding's infuriating, smug little smile widened. "Render unto Caesar - isn't that what their book says? You've chosen your side in the mundane world, but that's not the one that matters. There's a hidden war, too, and in that battle no one gets to be Switzerland."

"I don't need a fucking philosophy lesson. What do you actually want? You're gonna have to leave the job, maybe even the country now we know who you are. So what's the point of all this? You're not gonna change my mind and I don't think Belle was
that
keen to send her good wishes."

"I want you to stop chasing the man who killed Julie Kirkpatrick and Jane Granger," Spalding said. "And I want you to know exactly who he is."

"Yeah, because I'm really inclined to believe anything you tell me. I'm guessing he's one of yours."

Spalding began to rebutton his shirt. "He works for the Mossad."

"So? My father worked for the Hermetic Division."

"You're right, son. And Lahav is a soldier in that other war - but not on our side. Your murderer works for the opposition."

"Bullshit," Morgan said. "If he works for them, why do you want me to leave him alone?"

"Because there's a few things heaven and hell agree on, and this is definitely one of them. Just let him get on with his job."

"And help you? I don't think so."

Spalding shrugged. "But you'd be helping them too - and if both sides win, neither does, right?"

"Forget it," Morgan said, "you're just trying to mess with my head."

Spalding's head was cocked, listening, and Morgan realised he could hear footsteps approaching. "He's stronger than you," Spalding said, suddenly hurried. "That knife of his can cut through anything, any flesh - even yours. He's never been defeated and you won't be the first. Go back to the Division and tell them this isn't their concern."

The door opened and Morgan knew from the faces of the men there - tense and angry - that Kate had secured his release and pissed off the cops in the process.

He rose, fixing his eyes on Spalding as he left the room. If he saw him outside the station, Spalding was dead and Morgan wanted him to know it.

The other man smiled, unperturbed. "Nice meeting you, son," he said. "Remember what I said, won't you?"

The last glimmer of twilight had faded from the sky when he left. The nearest street light was broken and the moon was below the horizon, leaving only a smattering of stars to freckle the sky. Morgan blinked, momentarily disoriented. The town looked different in the dark, the shadows obscuring the signs of modernity and making it easy to picture the long centuries of its history.

He needed to tell Kate what had happened, but he couldn't use his mobile. The police had taken it from him while he'd been in custody and he couldn't take the risk that Spalding had tampered with it. He called from a payphone instead, keeping it brief. She told him to find himself somewhere to stay and that they'd be sending someone to debrief him tomorrow. He wasn't sure if there was disappointment in her voice, but he imagined it. He'd let her down and he knew it. There was another dead body and no more leads on the killer.

He remembered Julie's flirtatious smile and the way she scratched the back of her neck when she was nervous. He'd let his guard down with her because some part of him wanted to believe what Kate had said, that he could have a normal life if he chose it. Well, so much for that.

The bed and breakfast he found was shabby and unwelcoming. The scuffed, floral-patterned carpets and peeling flock wallpaper made it feel neglected rather than lived in and his room smelt cold, as if it had stood empty for a long time. He curled up beneath the orange bedspread and closed his eyes, hoping for rest he didn't really expect. Wakeful brooding merged with uneasy dreaming and when he rose at seven the next morning he barely felt like he'd slept at all. His joints creaked as he dressed and his eyes felt dusty.

Kate hadn't said when the agent coming to debrief him would arrive. He looked around the dingy hotel and knew he couldn't bear to stay in it another minute. Kate's man could be hours yet. And there was still a murder - two murders - to investigate.

He needed to know more about John Dee, but he couldn't face returning to the library. He leafed through the information the police had reluctantly handed over before releasing him and found they knew even less than the Hermetic Division. They didn't even know the identity of the killer, though his latest murder had left enough witnesses to provide them with a description.

There was only one piece of information in the files that was new to him: Dr Granger's home address. The police had searched her house and found nothing, but they hadn't been looking for the things Morgan wanted. He pocketed the address and left the hotel.

Her house was on the outskirts of the town, a bus ride from the centre. As Morgan leant against the bus shelter, waiting, he felt a prickling between his shoulder blades, the indefinable feeling of eyes on him.

The side of the shelter was clear plastic filled with an out-of-date advert for Pepsi. The day was grey and there was only the ghost of a reflection in the surface, his own wan face but nothing beyond it. He turned around as casually as he could and raised his eyes lazily to let his gaze sweep the street.

There was no one there, just an elderly woman hurrying into a shop, wheeled trolley pushed in front of her. He lowered his head and scanned the street again from beneath his lids. Still nothing.

Was it possible the observation he felt was something else, eyes watching from the occluded world? He wished, suddenly and strongly, that Tomas were with him. Tomas would have known what to do - he'd been at this game a long time. He'd pretty much started it.

Morgan sighed, closing his eyes completely and leaning his head against the wall of the shelter until the bus came. Tomas was gone and Morgan was on his own, which he should be used to by now. The bus drew up, engine huffing, and he opened his gritty eyes reluctantly and climbed on.

The journey to Granger's house took him out of the picturesque city centre and through suburban streets that were affluent but bland, rows of semi-detached 1930s homes and the occasional Victorian terrace. The don's house was in one of the latter, brickwork pleasantly crumbled with age but the paint on the doors and window frames fresh and bright. The front garden was carefully tended, a few square feet of gravel with pot plants at each corner.

There was a gilt-framed mirror in the hallway. Morgan paused to look in it, but only his own reflection stared glumly back. His talent allowed him to see death - not life.

Still, Granger's personality remained imprinted on her home. It was there in the neat row of spice bottles on her kitchen counter, in the fridge full of raw ingredients, nothing ready-made, the pots and pans which were heavy-bottomed and expensive. Granger spent a lot of time in this kitchen; she liked to cook. But she lived alone - divorced, the police files said. Morgan thought it was sad, this middle-aged woman cooking gourmet meals only she would eat.

Her sitting room looked pretty similar to her room in the college, bookshelves crowding every wall. But there was a television too, a stack of DVD box-sets beneath it. Morgan was surprised to see a collection of American crime shows:
The Sopranos
,
The Wire
,
The Shield
. It didn't fit with the image he was building of the dead woman.

And then there was her bedroom, the pile of unwashed clothes at the foot of the bed, the bed itself unmade and the pillowcases and duvet cover mismatched. It was as if the neat, house-proud woman who lived downstairs wasn't the same one who retreated to this room.

I am large
, Morgan thought,
I contain multitudes
.

It was a line from a poem, though he wasn't sure which one. Every week since Tomas had died, Kate had given him a new compilation and he'd read them doggedly from cover to cover, though he seldom understood them. But he thought he understood that line now, trying to fit together the mismatched puzzle pieces of Granger's life into the picture of a whole person.

He shook his head. It didn't matter who she was. That wasn't why she'd been killed. She'd died because of what she knew - and he could find no evidence of that in her home. He stood in the sitting room, eyes half-lidded as he thought. He couldn't afford to waste time on a dead end. Every second that ticked by saw Lahav free to commit another murder.

It came to him as he was walking back upstairs to take a final look round the bedrooms. He trotted back down the stairs and into the kitchen. And there it was: a long wooden pole with a metal hook on the end of it. He'd recognised it earlier but not really registered it. They'd used something like it in school to open the high windows in the sports hall.

But there were no high windows in Granger's house. So what did the hook open?

He found the trapdoor in the ceiling above the upstairs bathroom. She'd painted the edges to disguise them and the ring was hidden in the light fitting but it was easy enough to see when you were looking for it. He fitted the hook through the ring and tugged.

The trapdoor swung open and a stepladder rattled as it descended, its base landing on the floor with a thud. The wood of the ladder complained loudly as he climbed, each step bowing a little under his weight. When he reached the top he poked his head into darkness and fumbled for the light. It filled the room with a warm orange glow, chasing the shadows from its corners. And here it was at last - the reason Dr Granger had died.

His first thought was that it looked like one of the chemistry labs at school. His second was that it looked even more like an illustration from the book about John Dee he'd been reading when Julie was killed. The picture had been a reproduction of a woodcut, a 17th-century artist's impression of what the alchemist's work room looked like.

A human skeleton hung suspended from the low ceiling, the brittle bones held together with wire. On the wall behind it, there was a poster of - it took Morgan a moment to recognise it - the periodic table. Beside that was another chart, this one looking much older. It was also a list of elements, but even Morgan could tell many were missing, and the symbols beside them were arcane. A triangle-topped cross had been drawn beside sulphur and the sign for mercury looked like a cartoon devil.

A bench in the centre of the room held glass jars full of liquid, their colours ranging from a clear green to a cloudy, urine-coloured yellow. There were lumps of metal too; copper, rusted iron and a small bar of a buttery yellow metal Morgan was almost certain was gold. Beakers were linked together with networks of glass pipes and rubber tubing. A few sat on retorts above unlit Bunsen burners. And there were sheets of paper everywhere covered in scrawled notes and angry crossings-out.

Dr Granger wasn't just studying alchemy - she was practising it. But what had she been trying to do? Morgan looked again at the lump of iron and remembered reading something about turning base metal into gold. Or could Granger have found a way to contact the spirit world as Dee once claimed to have done? Julie had certainly been interested in the subject, and Granger was her tutor. Then there was what Coby had told him, that the old alchemist had been studying immortality, searching for a way to live forever.

Any of those secrets - or all three of them - could have been worth killing for.

Morgan knew he had to tell Kate. He fished his mobile from the pocket of his jeans before remembering that it was compromised. Public call boxes were rare these days, but he thought he'd seen a couple by the parade of shops at the bottom of Granger's road. He'd ask Kate to meet him in the don's attic. He knew she'd want to see what he'd discovered.

Outside the day had brightened and the streets had filled. The faces that passed by were an anonymous blur, but after a second he felt it again: the sensation of eyes observing him from the shadows. His earlier suspicion hardened into certainty. Someone had been following him, and now they were waiting, watching to see what he did next.

His foot hovered for a moment of indecision, then he made himself step forward. He tensed the muscles in his shoulders to stop himself looking around, then forced himself to relax and walk with the same easy stride he always did. He couldn't afford to let the watcher know he'd been spotted.

He heard and saw nothing, but he imagined footsteps behind him. He pictured Lahav holding his knife, the tip burning red as it approached Morgan's unprotected back. Then he remembered that Spalding had taken the knife when he'd arrested Morgan and he pictured the policeman instead, a smug little smile on his face as he raised his hand to kill.

Morgan's face was dripping with sweat, though a brisk wind stirred up the first fallen leaves of autumn on the pavement. A wad of chewing gum pulled at his heel. There was a faint smell of peppermint as his foot jerked free and then he was at the corner. The building ended in a promontory of elderly fruit crates piled outside the corner shop.

He turned as naturally as he could, keeping his stride easy and his arms loose at his side. The second he was out of sight of the main road he dropped and rolled, bringing his body between the rows of crates. The shopkeeper stared at him, raising a bushy eyebrow over a hawk nose.

Morgan could see only a narrow strip of pavement between the crate of browning bananas on one side and the boxes of wilting spring onions on the other. He tensed his legs and leaned his knuckles against the pavement like a runner in the blocks. A moment passed, filled with the pounding of his heart and the muted growl of the traffic. Then, sooner than he'd expected, a shoe dropped into his field of vision, a denim cuff above it. Morgan didn't have time to process the face as he flung himself towards it. The shopkeeper shouted behind him and his target gasped as Morgan hooked an arm around his waist and a foot behind his knee and pushed him to his back.

Frightened hazel eyes blinked into his out of a face he knew - but not the one he'd expected. It was Coby, Granger's other PhD student.

"Get away from him, young man. I'm calling the police," the shopkeeper shouted. He had a cordless phone in one hand and a cricket bat in the other.