Kraken (27 page)

“Alright,” she said. “PC Smith, PC Brown, and PC Jones. You three are heroes. You all made the ultimate sacrifice for the force. Line of duty.” The dirty smoke ghosts shivered, in and out of sight, proudly waited. “Now’s your chance,” she said, “to do it again. Work for those pensions you never got, right?” She lifted a big file.

“In here’s all the info we’ve got on the case so far. What we need is a certain bad boy name of Wati. Flits about a bit, does Wati. We need him brought to heel.”

wati wati?
some voice said out of smoke.
sands like a nonce sands like a paki oozes wati cunt?

“Half a mo,” Collingswood said.
slag a slag
she heard,
arl nick that cunt
. She dropped the folder into the fire.
done me prad
.

The ghost-things made
ah
noises, as if they were lowering themselves into a bath. They churned up a froth of aether that made Collingswood’s skin itch.

Ghosts
, she thought.
As if
.

I
T WAS A CON TRICK, WHOSE GULLED VICTIMS WERE THE TRICK
itself. A persuasion. These things she had made, constituted of vague but intensely proud memories of canteen banter, villains brought down, uppity little cunts slapped into place, smoky offices and dirty, seedy, honourable deaths, had not existed until a few moments before.

Ghosts were complicated. The residue of a human soul, any human soul at all, was far too complex, contradictory, and willful, not to say traumatised by death, to do anything anyone wanted. In the rare and random cases when death was not the end, there was no saying what aspects, what disavowed facets of persona, might fight it out with others in posthumous identity.

It isn’t a paradox of haunting—it only appears to be to the alive—that
ghosts
are often
nothing at all
like the living whose trace they are: that the child visited by the gentle and much-loved uncle succumbed to cancer maybe horrified by his shade’s cruel and vindictive needling; that the revenant spirit of some terrorising bastard does nothing but smile and try with clumsy ectoplasmic intervention to feed the cat his fleshly leg had kicked days before. Even had she been able to invoke the spirit of the most tenacious, revered, uncompromising Flying Squad officer of the last thirty years, Collingswood might well have found the spirit a wistful aesthete or a simpering five-year-old. So the experience and verve of genuine dead generations were closed to her.

There was another option. Toss up a few crude police-functions that
thought
they were ghosts.

Doubtless there was some soul-stuff from genuinely deceased officers in the mix. A base, an undercoat of police reasoning. The trick, Collingswood had learnt, was to keep it general. Abstract as possible. She could clot together snips of supernatural agency out of will, technique, a few remnants of memory and, above all,
images
, the more obvious the better. Hence the cheap police procedurals she burnt. Hence the televisions and the tapes, copies of
The Sweeney
and
The Professionals
, spiced with a little
Dixon
for sanctimony, swirled up into a golden-age nonsense dream that trained her spectral functions in what to do and how to be.

This was no arena for nuance. Collingswood wasn’t concerned with fine points of post-Lawrence policing, sensitivity training, community outreach. This was about the city’s daydream. A fetishised seventies full of
proper men
. There went a DVD of
Life on Mars
onto the pyre.

What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves. She heard herself slipping into the absurd register the functions themselves used, the kitsch pronouncements and exaggerated, stretched-out London accents.

“There you go, squire,” she said. “That’s yer lot. Wati. Last known address: any fucking statue. Job: making our lives difficult.”

They did not have to be, could not really be, clever, the faux ghosts; but they had a nasty sort of cunning, and the accrued nous of years’ worth of screenwriters’ fancy.
little bastard
she heard them say.
look at this shit
, a billowing of ashes of case notes.
bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street
. They clucked the words. They muttered in conspiracy, compared nonexistent notes. Collingswood heard them say names from the case
—wati billy dane adler archie teuthex bleedin nora
—as they learnt them from the burning files.

The presence or presences—they shifted between unity and plurality—slipped out of sensibility, out of the room.
fuckin bleedin ell
, Collingswood heard.
whats coming to him
.

“Alright,” she said, as they went, and the smell of burnt crap and blown-out televisions, no longer clotted to them, began to fill the room. “Bring him in. Don’t … you know. You’ve got to bring the little sod in. Need to ask him a few questions.”

M
ARGE WENT EVERYWHERE SHE COULD IMAGINE THAT MIGHT HAVE
connections with Leon or Billy, and put up photocopied posters. An hour and a half on her laptop, two jpegs and a basic layout,
Have You Seen These Men?
She gave their names, and the number of a mobile phone that she had bought specifically, dedicated purely to this hunt.

She stapled them to trees, put the posters on newsagent notice boards, taped them to the sides of postboxes. For a day or two, she would have said that she was approaching her situation as normally as she, as anyone, could in the circumstances. She would have said that while, yes, of course, losing her lover in this bewildering way, and then of course being menaced by those terrifying figures, was horrendous, sometimes horrendous things did happen.

Marge stopped telling herself that when, after a day then another day, she did not go to the police to tell them of her encounter. Because—and here it became difficult to find words. Because something was different in the world.

Those police. They had been keen to get answers from her, fascinated in her as a specimen, but she had felt not a scrap of personal concern from any of them. It was obvious that they had an urgent task to do. She was also, she realised, pretty certain that task had nothing to do with keeping her safe.

What was all this?
What the hell
, she thought,
is going on?

She felt caught up, as if in fabric getting stretched. Work came through a filter. At home, nothing was working quite right. The water when it came from her taps spattered, interrupted by air bubbles. The wind seemed determined to slap her walls and windows worse than usual. At night her television reception was bad, and the streetlamp outside her house went on and off, ridiculously bust and imperfect.

Marginalia spent more than one evening walking from sofa to window, sofa to window, and looking out, as if Leon—or Billy, who appeared more than once in these, what were they, reveries—might be just outside, leaning on the lamppost, waiting. But there were only the passersby, the night-light of the nearby grocery, and the lamp unleaned-on.

It was after many hours of blackout-lightup, a theatrical effect through her curtains, one night, that in her exasperation at it Marge paid the streetlight some attention, and realised with a physical jolt, an epiphany that had her momentarily staggering and holding herself up against the walls, that the illumination’s vagaries were not random.

She detected the loop. She sat still for minutes, watching, counting, and at last and reluctantly, as if to do so would grant something she did not want to grant, she started to make notes. The streetlamp fizzed in, fizzed out. Spark spark. Quick, slow, a lengthier glow. On off on-on-on off on off on off, and then a fuzzing fade and another little pattern.

What else could it be? Long-short in careful combinations. The lamppost was spitting out its light at her in Morse code.

She found the code online. The lamppost was saying
LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD
.

M
ARGE MADE IT TELL HER THAT REPEATEDLY, MANY TIMES
. S
HE DID
not think, during all those long minutes, about how she felt. “Leon’s dead,” she whispered. Tried not to think its meaning, only ensuring that she had translated the dot-dash glimmers correctly.

She sat back. There was aghastness, of course, at the bad absurdity, the
how
of that message; and the words themselves, their content, their explanation of Leon’s disappearance, she could not unhear, keep out. Marge realised she was weeping. She cried long, near-silently, in shock.

Attuned as she had become to the light’s rhythm, she was immediately aware of a last, sudden change. She grabbed for the Morse code legend and dripped tears on it. This last phrase the streetlamp repeated only twice.
STAY
, she read,
AWAY
.

Whickering with miserable breaths, moving as if through viscous stuff, Marge went to her computer and began to research. It did not occur to her for any time at all to obey the last injunction.

Chapter Thirty-Five

P
APER DRIFTED ABOVE
L
ONDON
.

It was night. Scraps spread out from One Canada Square, Canary Wharf. A woman stood at the tip of the rooftop pyramid, the apex of that nasty dick of a building. It would have been easier for her to gain access to BT Tower, but here she was forty-seven metres higher. Knack-topography was complicated.

BT Tower’s time had passed. There was a point she could remember when the minaret with its ring of dishes and transmitters had kept London pinned down. For months it had kept occult energies tethered in place when bad forces had wanted to disperse them. The energies of six of London’s most powerful knack-users—combined with the thoughts of comrades in Krakow, Mumbai and the questionable township of Magogville—had been focused along the shaft of the tower and shot in a tight burst that had evaporated the most powerful UnPlaced threat for seventy-seven years.

And had the building had any thanks? Well yes, but only from those very few who knew what it had done. BT Tower was an outdated weapon now.

Canary Wharf had been born dying: that was the source of its unpleasant powers. In those bankrupt nineties when its upper floors had been empty, their lucred desolation had provided a powerful place for realitysmithing. When at last developers moved in, they were bewildered by the remains of sigils, candle-burns and bloodstains resistant to bleaching that would be found again if the unbelievably fucking ugly carpets were ever lifted.

The woman stood by the always-blinking light-eye on the tower’s point. She swayed in the wind without fear. She was buffeted, blinked away tears of chill. She reached into her bag and brought out paper aeroplanes.

She threw them over the edge. They arced, their folds aerodynamicking them through the dark, streets lighting them from below. The planes caught thermals. Busy little things. They rose toward the moon like moths. The planes went hunting, above the level of the buses, dipping into the lampshine.

They went on whims—London hunches. Turning at turnings, round roundabouts, going one way up one-way streets. By the West-way one corkscrewed over-under-over the great raised road in what could not be anything but pleasure.

Many were lost. A miscalculated pitch and one might come to a sudden stop in a chain-link fence. An attack by a confused London owl, paper released to fall in scrap to the pavements. One by one, eventually, they turned over the roofs, lighting out for the territories—not from where they had come, but for their home.

By then the woman who had sent them out was there for them. She had crossed the city herself, more quickly and by quotidian means, and she waited. She caught them, one by one, over hours. She took a blade to each, scraping, or cutting from it, as closely as she could, the message on it. She gathered a pile of words. Unpapered writing lay beside her in strange chains.

T
HE PLANES THAT DID NOT MAKE IT HOME ACCELERATED THEIR
own decomposition in gutters, but they could not make it instantaneous. There was arcane litter.

“Hello Vardy.” Collingswood entered the poky FSRC office. “Where’s Baron? Bastard’s not answering his phone. What you doing?” He was making notes by his computer. “Vardy, you reading lolcats?” She peered over the edge of his computer screen. He looked at her without warmth. “‘I can has squid back?’” she said. “Noooo! They be stealin my squid!”

“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

“And yet, eh?” she said. “And fucking yet.” She dragged. He looked at her with calm dislike. “What a state of the world, eh?” she said.

“Well, quite.”

Collingswood called Baron again and again demanded to his voice mail that he get back to her ASAP. “So, found anything out?” she said. “Who’s behind our rubbery robbery?”

Vardy shrugged. He was logged into the secret chatrooms frequented by the magically and cultically inclined. He typed and peered. Collingswood said nothing. Stayed exactly where she was. He failed to ignore her. “There’s all sorts of whispers,” he said at last. “Rumours about Tattoo. And there are people I’ve not seen before. Usernames I don’t know. Muttering about Grisamentum.” He glanced at her thoughtfully. “Saying it’s all since he died that everything’s gone wrong. No more counterweight.”

“Is Tattoo still off radar?”

“Hardly. He’s all over the bloody radar, but that’s another version of the same problem, I can’t find him. From what I can gather he has … shall we say subcontracted agents? freelancers? … out there looking for Billy Harrow and his pal, that Krakenist dissident.”

“Billy, Billy, you little heartbreaker,” Collingswood said. She tapped her nails on the desk. They had tiny pictures painted on them.

“Anything’s possible right now, it looks like,” Vardy said. “Which doesn’t help us very much. And behind it all, I don’t know … there’s still all that …” He made big, vague motions. “Something exciting.” He did actually sound excited. “Something big, big, big. There’s a
vigour
to this particular hetting up. It’s all speeding up.”