Lockwood (16 page)

‘It’s a stinking bit of corpse-rag,’ Lockwood said. ‘
I
wouldn’t hold onto it for long. And it was dawn by that time. Psychic objects lose their power when the sun is up. They knew it’d be safe to touch the mirror then. Maybe they transferred it to a backpack, in preparation for their climb . . .’

He pointed to the dappled canopy above. Looking up, we saw the spreading branches of the lime, saw the silhouette of the longest branch jutting out against the brightness of the sky. Our eyes ran along it until it reached the boundary wall and disappeared beyond. The rope tied to it could just be seen dangling on the other side.

‘That’s the Regent’s Canal over there,’ Lockwood said. ‘They shinned down, landed on the towpath. Then they were away.’

George had been staring off amongst the gravestones. ‘Nice one, Lockwood. That’s great detective work. But you haven’t got everything right.’

Lockwood looked slightly put out. ‘Oh, really? In what way?’

‘They didn’t both climb the tree.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘One of them’s still here.’

We looked at him. George stepped aside. Beyond, wedged between two gravestones, was a body, lying on its back. It was a young man, dressed in black: black jeans, boots, a hooded top. A plump young man with an atrocious bumfluff moustache and pale, acned skin. He was very dead. The early stages of rigor mortis had set in, and his hands were raised up in front of his throat, fingers frozen in an awful defensive clawing pose. That wasn’t the worst of it. His eyes were wide open, his face twisted into a paroxysm of such horror that even Lockwood went white and I had to look away.

The night-watch kid made a choking noise.

‘Maybe I owe you an apology, kid,’ George said. ‘From your description, this might be Duane Neddles.’

‘Was it ghost-touch?’ I said. ‘Can’t be! It was after dawn!’

‘It’s not ghost-touch because he’s not swollen or discoloured. But
something
’s killed him, very fast and very horribly.’

I thought of the so-called mirror, of its little circle of dark glass. I thought of the way George had looked into it and felt as if his insides were being pulled out. ‘How, then?’ I whispered.

George’s voice was surprisingly level, matter-of-fact. ‘From the way he looks, Luce, I’d have to say he’s died of fright.’

Fifty years of the Problem have led to many changes in our society, and not all of them are what you’d expect. When the great Tom Rotwell and Marissa Fittes went public with their discoveries, all that time ago, the general reaction was shock and panic. Their first publication,
What Binds the Departed to Us?
, proposed that certain objects connected to violent deaths or other traumas might become ‘psychically charged’, and so act as a ‘source’ or ‘gateway’ for supernatural activity. Human remains, precious belongings, or indeed any potential object of desire might fall into this category, as might the exact location of a murder or accident. The idea caused a sensation. A public frenzy took over. For a while any object even dimly supposed to have some kind of psychic residue was treated with terror and disgust. Items of old furniture were burned, and random antiques smashed or thrown into the Thames. A priceless painting in the National Portrait Gallery was hurled to the floor and trampled on by a vicar, ‘because it looked at me in a funny way’. Anything with a strong connection to the past was considered suspect, and a cult of modern objects grew up, which remains with us even now. The notion that anyone might be
interested
in Sources for their own sake was laughable; they were perilous and needed to be destroyed. It was left to the agencies to deal with them.

Before long, however, it turned out that forbidden things
were
of interest after all, to several different kinds of customer. And where there are customers, people will be found to supply them. A black market in psychic artefacts soon began, with a new category of criminal operating at its heart: the so-called ‘relic-men’.

During my apprenticeship with Jacobs in the north of England I was taught that the wicked relic-man was in every respect the moral opposite of what an agent stood for. Both hunted out Sources: the relic-man driven by a desire for profit, the agent driven by a desire for public good. Both had psychic Talent; but while an agent used his to protect society from Visitors, the relic-man gave this no thought at all. An agent disposed of dangerous artefacts carefully – first encasing them in silver or iron, then taking them to the Fittes furnaces in Clerkenwell to be burned. A relic-man, by contrast, sold his prizes to the highest bidder. Rumours abounded of sinister collectors, of wild-eyed cultists and worse, who squirrelled away deadly Sources for purposes that ordinary citizens would fear to fathom. Relic-men were thieves, in short – society’s bottom-feeders, who skulked in graveyards and charnel houses, looking for unwholesome scraps to trade. Unsurprisingly, they often came to bad ends.

Few ends – at least, if his expression was anything to go by – were quite as bad as that which had befallen the unfortunate Duane Neddles, and our discovery of his body caused a great stir at Kensal Green. Before the hour was out, Inspector Barnes arrived; soon the place was crawling with DEPRAC forensic scientists, with Kipps and his associates hovering on the side lines. Kipps, inevitably, reacted to our find with agitation and, being desperate not to miss any clues we might have found, kept getting in the way of the forensic team until Barnes bluntly told him to get lost. In truth, though, there was little more to be learned. A search of the canal bank beyond the wall revealed no sign of Neddles’s associate or the missing mirror; and the exact cause of the relic-man’s death remained a mystery.

What with all the commotion, it was late afternoon before we could disperse on our different missions. Lockwood and I took a taxi south towards the city. George, crackling with suppressed excitement, set off for the dusty Archives. The night-watch kid (who now seemed to think of himself as an honorary agent, strutting around with an air of great importance, cap set at a rakish angle) was packed off to resume his duties, with strict instructions to call on us at Portland Row if he saw or heard anything further of interest. Whether it was Lockwood’s energy and charisma, his adventure in our company or (most likely) the money in his pocket, the kid readily agreed. We still didn’t know his name.

‘So,’ I said to Lockwood five minutes later, as the taxi moved steadily down the Edgware Road, ‘aren’t you going to tell me where we’re going?’

The shadows in the street were thin and bathed in gold. The shops had begun their last great flurry of activity before the long, slow, sensual onset of dusk. We agents call this the ‘borrowed time’: extra hours of sunlight you only get in midsummer. During these hours, many people seem filled with a strange and feverish energy, a kind of defiance against the looming dark. They do a lot of eating, drinking and spending; the shops were bright and cheery, the pavements thronged. The ghost-lamps were just coming on.

Lockwood’s face was lit by traces of the dying sun. He’d been unaccountably silent, deep in thought, but when he turned to me his eyes sparkled with the thrill of the chase. As always, that awoke a similar thrill in me.

‘We’re going to see a contact of mine,’ he said. ‘Someone who might help us find our missing man.’

‘Who is he? A policeman? Another agent?’

‘No. A relic-man. Well, a relic-
woman
, really. Her name’s Flo Bones.’

I stared at him; my thrill diminished. ‘A relic-woman?’

‘Yes. Just a girl I know. We’ll find her down by the river somewhere, once it’s dark.’

He looked blandly out of the window again, as if he’d suggested nipping to the shops or something equally mundane. And again I had that tipping sensation, the slosh of blood inside the head, like I’d had when the skull was whispering to me. It was the feeling of parameters shifting, old certainties becoming misaligned.
Secretive, deceitful
– that’s what the skull had said. Obviously I didn’t believe that for a moment. Still, I’d lived with Lockwood a full year and this was the first time I’d heard of Flo Bones.

‘This relic-girl . . .’ I said. ‘How did you meet? I’ve never heard you talk of her before.’

‘Flo? I met her a long time ago. When I was just starting out.’

‘But relic-men are . . . well, they operate outside the law, don’t they? It’s illegal for any agent to fraternize with them.’

‘Since when have you become a stickler for DEPRAC’s rules, Luce? Anyway, we need all the help we can get on this one. We’re in a race against time with Kipps. Plus this job is more dangerous and puzzling than I thought.’

‘You mean the mirror, of course.’ I could still picture the body in the graveyard: the popping eyes, the mouth drawn back into a slash of horror.

‘The mirror, yes; but there’s more to it than that. Barnes isn’t telling us everything. This isn’t any old Source, which is why George’s job is so crucial now.’ Lockwood stretched languidly. ‘Anyway, Flo’s all right. She’s not quite as antisocial as the other relic-men. She’ll talk to you, though she
is
cranky. You just need to know the right way— Which reminds me . . .’ Lockwood swivelled suddenly in his seat, lifted the swinging lavender crucifix, and spoke through the hatch. ‘If we could stop by Blackfriars Station, driver . . .You know that little newsagent there? . . . Yes.’ He turned to me and grinned. ‘We need to get some liquorice.’

Between Blackfriars and Southwark bridges, which connect the City of London with the ancient borough of Southwark, the river Thames turns gradually to the south-east. Here the current slows slightly, and at low tide a broad expanse of mud flats is exposed beneath the south side of Southwark Bridge, where sediment dropped by the river has built up around the curve. Lockwood pointed this out to me as we walked across the bridge in the glare of the dying sun.

‘She’ll be down there, most likely,’ he said. ‘Unless she’s changed her habits, which is about as probable as her changing her underwear. She starts the night at the Southwark Reaches, where stuff’s washed up by the tide. Later, she’ll move downstream, following the tideline.’

‘What’s she looking for?’ I asked, though I had guessed already.

‘You name it. Bones, relics, drowned things, things scoured up from the river mud.’

‘She sounds delightful,’ I said. ‘Can’t wait to meet her.’ I adjusted my rapier grimly.

‘Don’t try any heavy stuff on Flo,’ Lockwood warned. ‘In fact, the best thing is to leave the talking to me. We can go down here.’

We ducked through a gap in the parapet, and descended some stone steps that hugged the brickwork of the bridge. Its arch soared over us; there was a powerful smell of mud and decay. We alighted on a cobbled lane which ran along the embankment, and walked down it a little way. A rusted streetlight clung like a dead tree to the low wall overlooking the river. Behind us were warehouses, dark and cliff-like. A faint apricot-pink sphere of light gleamed about the lamp, illuminating nothing except a narrow flight of steps leading below the wall.

Above and all around were space and river mist, and the flowing onset of the night. Lockwood said, ‘We move carefully now. Don’t want to scare her off.’

The steps led steeply down towards the river. From the wall we could see the northern bank – a broken snake of lights, with London’s great grey mess of spires behind. The tide was fully out; the river’s sullen glister hung low and far away.

It was very quiet everywhere.

Lockwood nudged me, pointed. A lantern was moving out on the mud flats, an orange light, held close to the ground. Its reflection, flitting just beneath it, faint as a Shade, swooped wet and pale across the shingle, lighting the stones and weed and all the river’s washed-up flotsam – the wood and plastics, fragments of metal, bottles, drowned and rotting things. A stooped, slow-moving figure walked above the lantern-light, cocooning it, as if to shroud it jealously from all sight. It moved with methodical purpose, stopping now and then to pick at something in the debris. A heavy sack, which it dragged behind, carved an intermittent furrow in the slime. Whether it was the trail it left, or its hunched and rounded shape, this creature seemed more like a giant snail from the bottom of the Thames than a fellow human being.