Kraken (6 page)

“Did you have a look?” Baron said.

“It’s pretty much as you’d expect,” Vardy said.

“What?”
Billy shouted. “What you’d
expect?
What about it did you expect, exactly?”

“We’ll discuss that,” Vardy said. “We’ll discuss that, Billy. Now wait. I gather you saw Dane Parnell.”

Billy ran his fingers through his hair. Vardy seemed too large for the chair he was in: he squeezed his shoulders together, as if to avoid spilling himself. He and Baron looked at each other, sharing another unspoken moment.

“Right then,” said Baron. “Let’s have another go. Patrick Vardy, Billy Harrow, curator. Billy Harrow, Patrick Vardy. Professor of psychology at Central London University. As I gather you know.”

“Yeah, like I say,” Billy muttered. “My Google-fu is strong.”

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “I sort of assumed you’d be as half-arsed as most people. Wouldn’t even occur to them to look up our names.”

“So how much do you know about us?” Vardy said. “About me?”

“You’re a psych.” Billy shrugged. “You work with the cops. So I figure … You’re a profiler, aren’t you? Like Cracker? Like
Silence of the Lambs?”
Vardy smiled, a bit. “That poor sod shoved into the bottle, downstairs,” Billy said. “He’s not the first. Is that it? That’s it, isn’t it. You’re looking for someone … You’re looking for Dane. Dane’s some kind of serial killer. You’re here to work out what his thing is. And, oh Christ, he wants me, doesn’t he? He’s following
me
. And it’s something to do with …”

But he stopped. How did any of this make sense of the squid? Baron pursed his lips.

“Not exactly,” said Baron. “It’s not quite right.” He chopped his hands through the air onto the tabletop, organising invisible thoughts.

“Look, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “Here’s the thing. Go back a step. Who’d want to steal a giant squid? Never mind
how
just yet. That’s not important. Right now, focus on why. It seems like you might be able to help us, and we might be able to help you. I’m not saying you’re in danger, but I’m saying that—”

“Oh Christ …”

“Billy Harrow,
listen
to me. You need to know what’s going on. We’ve talked it over. We’re going to tell you the full story. And this is in
confidence
. Which this time please keep, thank you. Now, all this is not the sort of thing we normally lay out for people. We think it might help you to know, and to be perfectly frank we think it might help us too.”

“Why does Dane want me?” Billy said.

“I wasn’t on this case originally, as you know. There are certain flags that go up, you might say, under certain circumstances. Certain sorts of crime. The disappearance of your squid. Plus there are aspects of what’s downstairs that are … relevant. Like for example the fact that the diameter of that jar’s opening isn’t big enough to have got that gentleman inside.”

“What?”

“But what really clinched our interest,” Baron said, “what really rang my bell—and I mean that literally, there’s a bell on my desk—is when you drew us that picture.”

From his briefcase Vardy pulled a photocopy of the druggily exaggerated asterisk.

“I know what that is,” said Billy. “Kubodera and Mori—”

“So,” Baron said, “I head up a specialist unit.”

“What unit?”

Vardy pushed another piece of paper across the table. It was the sign again, the ten-armed spread with two longer limbs. But not the one Billy had drawn. The angles, the lengths of the arms, were slightly different.

“That was drawn a little over a month ago,” Baron said. “A bookshop got busted into one night and a bunch of stuff was taken. Bloke wearing this sign had come in a couple of days running beforehand, not buying anything, looking around. Nervous.”

“If this were a question of a couple of kids both wearing
Obey Giant
T-shirts, we’d not be bothered,” Vardy said, quickly, in his deep voice. “This is not a bloody meme. Though it may be going that way and thank you very much that’ll complicate things very nicely.” Billy blinked. “Are you a graffiti aficionado? It’s started to crop up. Early days. It’ll be on stickers on lampposts and student rucksacks soon. Turns out that this”—he flicked the paper—“is appropriate for the times.”

“It just fits,” said Baron.

“But not quite yet,” Vardy said. “So when it turns up twice, we sniff a pattern.”

“The guy who was burgled,” Baron said. “It’s Charing Cross Road. He stocks a lot of junk and a little bit of proper antiquarian stuff. Six books nicked that night. Five had just come in. Maybe two, three hundred quids’ worth. They were all on the desk up front, waiting to be sorted. At first he thought that was all that was gone.

“But where there are locked cabinets, the glass’s broken and something’s missing from a top shelf.” He held up a finger. “One book. From a bunch of old academic journals. He worked out what it was was gone.”

Baron looked down and read laboriously.
“For-hand-linger … ved de Skandinav
—something,” he said. “The 1857 volume.”

“How’s your Danish, Billy?” said Vardy. “Ring any bells?”

“Some villain wants to make it look like he’s rushed in and snagged at random,” Baron said. “So he grabs a load of books off the counter. But he then runs twenty feet down a corridor, to one
specific
locked bookshelf, breaks one specific pane of glass, takes one specific old book.” Baron shook his head. “It was that one journal.
That
’s what this was all about.”

“So we asked the Danish Royal Academy for the contents,” Vardy said. “Too old to be on databases.”

“To be honest, we didn’t think much of it at the time,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a priority. It only got passed to us because we’d seen that symbol knocking around a bit. When the list came in from Copenhagen nothing stood out. But. When we heard the symbol’d turned up here, and just what’d happened, one of those articles nicked weeks ago came back sharpish.”

“Pages one eighty-two to one eighty-five,” Vardy said.

“I won’t try the Scandiwegian,” Baron said, reading. “It’s an article about
blaeksprutter
, so they say. Translation: Japetus Steenstrup. ‘Several Particulars about the Giant Cuttlefish of the Atlantic.’”

“T
O RECAP
,” B
ARON SAID
. “W
EEKS BEFORE YOUR SQUID WAS SNAFFLED
, someone pinched an original copy of that article.”

“You’ll have heard of the author,” Vardy said. Billy’s mouth was open. He had. The giant squid was
Architeuthis dux
, but its genus was named for the man who had taxonomised it:
Architeuthis Steenstrup
.

“Now,” Vardy said. “Two crimes united by a questionable necklace do not a conspiracy make. However. Two crimes—three, now, with the chap downstairs—united by such jewellery
and
by giant squid, and our radar does indeed tend to ping.”

“That is the sort of thing that gets us interested,” Baron said.

“‘Us’?” Billy said at last. “Who
is
‘us’?”

“We,” said Baron, “are the FSRC.”

“The what?”

Baron folded his hands. “Do you remember that lot calling themselves New Rosicrucians?” he said. “Who kidnapped that girl in Walthamstow?” Baron thumbed in Vardy’s direction. “Found them. And he was I suppose you’d call it
consulting
during seven/seven, too. That sort of thing. It’s an area of concern.”

“What
area?”

“Alright, alright,” Baron said. “You sound like you’re about to cry.” Vardy handed Billy a piece of paper. It was, oddly, his CV. His PhD was in psychology, but his master’s was in theology. His first degree divinity. Billy pushed his glasses on and scanned the publications list, the Positions Currently Held.

“You’re an editor of
The Journal of Fundamentalism Studies?”
Billy said. This was a test.

Baron said, “The FSRC is the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit.”

Billy stared at him, at Vardy, at the CV again. “You
are
a profiler,” he said. “You’re a cult profiler.”

Vardy even smiled.

“T
HERE’S
…” B
ARON COUNTED ON HIS FINGERS
. “A
UM
S
HINRIKYO …
The Returner Sect … Church of Christ Hunter … Kratosians, close to home some of them … Do you have any idea the increase in cult-related violence in the last ten years? Of course you don’t, because unless it’s, boo, Al Qaeda and the Al-Qaedalinos, it doesn’t come close to the news. But they’re the least of our worries. And part of the reason you haven’t heard about this is because
we
are good at our job. We’ve been keeping the streets safe.

“That’s why you were encouraged to keep shtum. But you told someone something. Which A, you should not have done, and B, is not unimpressive. Collingswood’s going to have to ask you again, a bit harder.

“It’s not as if we’re exactly secret,” he said. “It’s not so much ‘plausible denial’—that’s not the best strategy these days. It’s more ‘plausibly uninteresting.’ Everyone’ll be like, ‘FSRC? Why on earth you asking about them? Silly nonsense, bit of an embarrassment …’” He smiled. “You get the idea.”

Billy could hear officers in the corridors outside. Phones were ringing.

“So,” said Billy at last. “So you’re cult people. So what’s this got to do with that poor sod in the basement? And what’s it got to do with
me?”

Vardy brought up a video file on his laptop and placed it where all three men could watch. An office, a tidy desk, books on the walls, a printer and PC. There was Vardy, sitting three-quarters toward the camera, another man with his back to the lens. All that could be seen of him was slicked-back thinning hair and a grey jacket. The colours were not very good.

“…
so
.” Billy heard the hidden-faced man say. “
I done a stint with that bunch in Epping, bog-standard manickies they are I think, balance balance balance not very interesting, I wouldn’t waste your time.”

“What about this?”
said video-Vardy, and held out what Billy could see was the symbol he himself had drawn.

The obscured man leaned in. “
Oh right,”
he said. He spoke in a breathless conspiratorial drone.
“The tooths, the toothies,”
he said. “
Yeah no I don’t know,”
he said. “
The toothies they’re new I think I hen’t seen them much except they been drawing that leaving it about
. A sign a sign.
You been to Camden? Saw it and I thought
I’ll have some of that
but they’re odd ones, they sort of wave hello but then you can’t find much of them. So. Are they secret?”

“Are they?”
said video-Vardy.

“Well you tell me you tell me. I can’t get to them and you know me so it’s, you know it’s tantalising is what it is.”

“Tenets?”

“Got me. What I hear,”
the man made gossip-talk movements with his fingers, “
all I can tell you is they talk about the dark, the rise, the you know the reaching out. They love that the outreaching, hafay
…”

“What?”

“Hafay hafay, where’s your Greek professor? Alpha phi eta
, hafe,
hapsis if you like, touchy touchy, that’s what they say—it’s a haptic story, this one.”

Vardy froze the picture. “He’s sort of a freelance research assistant. A
fan
. He’s a collector.”

“Of what?” Billy said.

“Religions. Cults.”

“How the hell do you collect a cult?”

“By joining it.”

O
UTSIDE THE WINDOW WERE THE WIND-BOISTEROUS LIMBS OF
trees. The room felt very close. Billy looked away from the light outside.

The man on-screen was not the only one, Vardy said. A small obsessive tribe. Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields. Soldiers of the Saviour Worm one week, Opus Dei or the Bobo Dreds the next, with genius for devotion and sudden brief bursts of sincerity sufficient to be welcomed as neophytes. Some were always cynically in it for the notch on the bedpost, others Damascene certain for two or three days that
this one was different
, until they remembered their own natures and excommunicated themselves with indulgent chuckles.

They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware Road cafés over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the “trap streets,” Vardy said. They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.

“What about your apocalypse, then?” “Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it’s going to shrivel and fall off into hell.” Murmurs of admiration. “Ooh, nice one. My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun.”

“H
E WANTS TO JOIN THESE ‘TOOTHIES,’ YOU SEE,”
V
ARDY SAID.
“H
E’S
a completist. But he can’t find them.”

“What’s a trap street?” Billy was ignored.

“Toothies,”
Baron said. “Get it? Harrow, sit down.” Billy had stood up and was walking toward the door.
“Toothies,”
Baron said. “Get it? Tyuh-tyuh-tyuh
-Tyoothies.”

“I’ve had enough,” Billy said.

“Sit down,” Vardy said.

“We’re the bloody cult squad, Harrow,” Baron said. “Why d’you think we’re called in? Who do you think’s responsible for what’s going on?”

“Teuthies.” Vardy smiled. “Worshippers of the giant squid.”

Chapter Six

“T
HE ARTICLE THAT GOT NICKED,” SAID
B
ARON
. B
ILLY STOOD
still, his hand on the doorknob. “It’s where old Japetus names
Architeuthis
for the first time. ’Course you can get hold of a reprint, but originals are a bit special, aren’t they?”

“He was refuting folklore,” said Vardy. “The whole piece is him pooh-poohing some fairy story, and saying, ‘No no, there’s a rational explanation, gentlemen.’ You could say it’s where the sea monster meets …” He gestured around him. “This. The
modern world.”
The stress was mockery. “Out of fable into science. The end of an old order. Right?” He wagged his finger
no
. Baron watched him indulgently.