Game Boy went exploring while Doc went to fetch Imp and Del.
This wasn’t deliberate perversity on Game Boy’s part; it was just that he hated being bossed around, even by Doc, who he liked, a lot. He’d always had an itchy impulse towards activity, but when he’d been a kid he’d been drowned in parental expectations of passivity and feminine behavior, which were now tangled up inextricably in his sense of identity. Telling Game Boy not to do something was a surefire way to make him do it, even despite his own better judgment. So while Doc went downstairs, Game Boy began opening doors to see where they led.
Bathroom: First door on the left. Avocado suite with corner bath, bidet, pedestal washbasin. Mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet above washbasin. Floored in cork tiles, walls in green and white ceramic up to one meter, painted white up to ceiling. Wall-mounted filament bulbs behind splash-proof covers. Radiant electric heater on wall above small, single-glazed sash window with frosted glass lower pane. Vintage: late 1970s.
Bedroom 1: First door on the right, opposite bathroom. 3.5 meters by 2.5 meters. Double bed with sprung mattress and down pillows, duvet, and plain white sheets, covered by dustsheet. Wardrobe in corner, chest of drawers (one meter high) at foot of bed, one bedside table with ceramic bedside lamp. 1970s Hitachi music center (stereo radio/cassette/record player) on top of chest of drawers, not plugged in, speakers on floor to either side. Wallpaper: dark orange and red abstract pattern. Carpet: plum woolen shag, medium pile. Curtains: brown, concealing sash window overlooking garden to rear of house. Mains socket: single BS 1363 socket with a 2-way adapter for the lamp, one receptacle free.
Bedroom wardrobe (door open): There are jeans and slacks with flares, lots of flares. A Biba maxi-dress; a couple of Laura Ashley frocks, plus blouses and skirts: all 1970s vintage.
View along corridor, outside bedroom door: There are two more doors to right and left. At the end of the corridor, four steps lead down to another corridor, turning right.
Bedroom 2: Second door on the left. Similar to Bedroom 1, but the bed is a single-width, and instead of a wardrobe there’s a schoolroom desk. Dusty Airfix models of Spitfires and Heinkels, carefully painted in Second World War camouflage, dangle on cotton threads from the ceiling. A creased promotional poster for the original Star Wars movie is sellotaped to one wall. It faces off against an Eagle Transporter from Space: 1999 and a photograph of Arsenal’s 1973 first eleven on the pitch at Wembley.
Bedroom 3: As Bedroom 1, but no clothes or personal effects—set up as a guest room.
View from top of stairs along short corridor to right: Corridor opens into rectangular hallway, 5 meters by 3.5 meters. High ceiling (3 meters) with fluorescent lighting tube: original plaster cornicework in place, painted white. Wooden floor, sanded and sealed, with rectangular woven rug in center. Five doors open off this space: one opposite the corridor, and two to either side. Indirect natural illumination provided via rectangular windowpanes above four doors.
Kitchen 1: First door on left from corridor: 6 meters by 4 meters, cream linoleum floor, cream and pale blue paint. Center of opposite wall: AGA three-oven, oil-fired cooking range with two insulated hot plates on top (currently inoperative and cold). Floor-to-ceiling shelves to left of AGA filled with crockery, silverware, cooking utensils, 1950s vintage Kenwood mixer and accessories. Worktop to right of AGA, with window opening over garden. Left wall: two stainless steel sinks with spigot over cabinets. Right wall: floor and wall cabinets, worktop, refrigerator. Center of room: oak rustic kitchen table with extending flaps, three wooden chairs (assorted).
Bathroom 2: White ceramic bathtub, toilet, and washbasin on pedestal. No carpet, linoleum floor. Window hinges outwards, gauze curtain. Mirror on wall above washbasin, floor-standing wooden cupboard. Fittings: 1940s?
Laundry Room 1: Rectangular, 3 meters by 3.5 meters. Window hinges outwards, gauze curtain. White ceramic sluice basin, drain. Top-loading, twin-tub washing machine with drain and fill tubes plumbed into wall-mounted taps beside wooden worktop/draining board. Clothes airer suspended from ceiling by pulley: clothes rack opposite. Shelves with white cotton sheets, towels. Late 1940s?
Pantry 1: 2 meters by 1.5 meters. Stone cold slab, icebox, wooden cupboards, shelves above cold slab. Vintage: predates domestic refrigeration and electric lighting.
Library: Rectangular, 4 meters by 8 meters, bookshelves on all available wall surfaces …
Normally, Rupert’s habit of handing her a drop-everything-do-this-right-now black op annoyed the hell out of Evelyn. But just for once, everything was under control. Rupe was out from underfoot, the various business deals in progress were wrapping up or winding down for the annual holiday shutdown, and Eve was able to offload all her lesser bullshit jobs onto lower-level executive staff.
Rupert wasn’t one for recreational reading—not when he could be indulging in more physical, not to mention less cerebrally demanding, pursuits—but over the years he had acquired a collection of rare editions and manuscripts. In Eve’s opinion it was mostly esoteric junk, but if the boss wanted to collect eighteenth-century anatomies bound in the skin of the hanged felon whose autopsy they documented, that was his lookout—it certainly wasn’t the most offensive of his hobbies. Over the years he’d cultivated a connection with an antiquarian book broker, Bernard Harris, who had traded out of an attic on Charing Cross Road since the 1970s.
The bookshops of Charing Cross Road were barely a shadow of their former glory (rent rises and rapacious property developers had seen to that), but Bernard’s specialty didn’t require lots of retail floor space. Rather than holding stock, Bernard maintained a database and brokered private sales: occasionally he acted as an acquisitions agent on behalf of well-heeled buyers. A copy of The Lord of the Rings—the original Allen & Unwin hardcover, first impression, mint condition with unfoxed dust covers and flat-signed by the author—would have been about the cheapest item on his list.
Not holding stock of his own had numerous advantages for Bernard. He could operate out of his home apartment without paying business rates—a discreet form of tax avoidance. There was no insurance premium due on rare books he didn’t hold, no need for security to protect his business premises, no working capital tied up in stock. And it meant no dusting. Just a comfortably furnished third-floor flat, crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookcases on every available wall.1 He’d converted the second bedroom into an office straight out of the early 1990s, complete with rotary dial telephones, a 286 PC with a tube monitor (its case the yellow of old ivory due to age), filing cabinets, and a modem with blinking red LEDs to bring it bang up to date. It was very atmospheric: a snapshot of a bygone age taped between the leaves of a photo album, taken just before the internet became a thing.
Eve put her research into plastic surgery on hold, ordered the switchboard to hold or divert all her non-emergency calls, and told the Gammon to bring the Bentley round to the front door. It was time to visit the master’s favorite book dealer.
Bernard’s apartment was on a stairwell hidden behind a metal door in an alleyway just round the corner from Charing Cross Road. It was one of several well-hidden flats occupied by stubborn revenants of the book trade, clinging on despite the multimillion pound valuations attached to even a cramped, dark, damp-stained tenement this close to the heart of London. Eve left the Gammon to find somewhere to stash Rupert’s wheels and climbed the stairs.
Bernard waited with ill-concealed impatience behind his front door, which was just barely ajar. He tried to present as a parody sixty-something book dealer, from the scuffed tips of his oxfords to his corduroy elbow patches, but somehow managed to make it creepy. “Ah, Miss Starkey, hello, hello! Do please come in!” he oozed.
Eve smiled automatically as she stepped across the threshold. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, so close that she could reach out to touch both sides of the passage. The carpet, gray with grime and threadbare in patches, was trapped beneath the wooden galleys. “I’m so glad I was able to catch you,” she gushed—laying it on a little thick since Bernard was a notorious agoraphobe who ventured outside only with the greatest reluctance. “You always seem to be so awfully busy.” She glanced back at the door.
“Oh, excuse me…” Bernard slithered past her and chained the door, then slid an insane number of deadbolts into place on both sides of the heavily reinforced frame. “That’s better! Now we don’t need to worry about interruptions. Would you care for a cup of tea?” he asked. He led her to the sitting room, which featured a bay window with a fetching view of the back wall of a Uniqlo store. This room, too, seemed to be furnished principally with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, not to mention piles of books on the carpet that had accumulated like stalagmites, products of a steady drip of publication. “How do you take yours again?”
“Milk, no sugar,” Eve replied automatically. Why am I even saying that, she wondered briefly, then nerved herself to drink what passed for Bernard’s brew and pretend to like it. Eve was a coffee person, but if it took drinking his tea to convince Bernard he shared a rapport with her, she’d suck it up.
“Excellent!” Bernard bustled off to the tiny galley kitchen at the other end of the flat, monologuing about some sort of rare books trade show he wished he could attend in Antwerp while the kettle boiled. Eve perched on the edge of one of his ancient wing-back armchairs, the arms stained and grubby from use. Eventually Bernard returned from the kitchen, bearing a tray with two chipped and steaming mugs of orange-brown liquid. “Your tea, my lady. Now, what can I do for you?”
“The book Mr. de Montfort Bigge caught wind of,” Eve said carefully. “What have you been able to learn about it?”
“It’s absolutely fascinating!” Bernard settled into the other armchair. “The book—yes, it’s on Rupert’s wish list, but at first I thought it was a joke.” As with all Bernard’s customers, Rupert had left a hit file of targets for acquisition with the dealer. “To my certain knowledge, at least seventeen different pastiches purporting to be the Necronomicon were published in the last century. Most of them are novelty items or ephemera, targeting fans of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The book itself is widely considered to be a fictional construct Lovecraft concocted, supposedly a fount of blasphemous wisdom relating to the so-called ‘Elder Gods’ and their—”
Eve’s smile became fixed. In a momentary lapse of attention she actually raised her mug and took a sip. To her credit, she managed not to spit it out again. She licked her lips: “I hardly think Rupert would be interested in a practical joke, do you?”
“Of course not.” Bernard’s eyes almost crossed as he took a scalding mouthful of his brew. “To cut a long story short: like all the best stories, there is a nugget of truth buried beneath a continent of lies.”
“Do go on.” Eve nodded encouragingly. “Please?”
Bernard needed little or no encouragement to mansplain. “The title of Necronomicon, or Book of Dead Names, has been assigned to at least three different manuscripts that circulated in Europe between the late thirteenth and early eighteenth centuries. One—the most likely candidate—originated as an Andalusian work of scholarship titled Al Azif, which found its way into the custody of the Dominican order in the 1590s—its existence may have been part of the impetus for the creation of the Spanish Inquisition—at any rate, it has a most foul reputation. There’s a copy in the obscene manuscripts collection of the Bodleian Library, but it’s been sealed since 1945. Apparently the three most recent readers committed suicide after working on the damned book.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. There were reports of delusions—hearing strange voices, paranoia, a conviction that certain dead things were controlling their limbs while they slept—the usual. One of the scholars was so upset he sought an exorcism; afterwards, the priest had a nervous breakdown. Another of them shot his mistress then hanged himself, leaving a suicide note that said she was pregnant with the anti-Christ. But the real clue that this might be the actual book is that it isn’t in the Bod’s sealed collection any more.”
“What happened?” Eve had noticed the tendency of Bernard’s gaze to track towards her chest, and adjusted her posture accordingly, leaning forward to present him with a better view.
“It was borrowed,” Bernard confided, with evident relish, “by the Prime Minister.”
“But the Bodleian doesn’t lend—” Eve bit her tongue before she could say too much. “Right.”
“Right.” He nodded emphatically. “So, that’s Rare Manuscript AW-312.4, the Third Candidate. There are two other known copies: one’s in the Vatican archives, the other is in the royal library in Riyadh, although it disappeared after the Salafi ascendancy in the 1980s. But that’s not what’s for sale. Oh no.” He took another mouthful, then put his mug down on the carpet, slopping tea, and leaned closer. “This is even rarer. It’s the concordance!”
“A concordance?” Eve forced a puzzled smile onto her face.
“Indeed.” Bernard gazed into her eyes. “If simply reading AW-312.4 is bad for you, how damaging would it be to try and index the thing? To read it and to comprehend the significance of every word, to study the interrelation of concepts and interplay of references within the manuscript, and then to map every single occurrence of every term?” His smile was bright, fey, and not entirely sane.
“Who was responsible?” Eve asked. If Bernard noticed the slight tension in her voice, he pretended not to.
“Various friars and monks, during the seventeenth century.” Bernard sat back and waved his hand dismissively. “It always ended in tears before bedtime. Well, there were also a couple of autos-da-fé and burnings at the stake as well, but what else would you expect of the Spanish Inquisition? At least, that’s how they usually ended. There was a final attempt in 1833 and that was successful.”
“How?”
“Technology and … determination? A fortuitous combination. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Vatican copy came into the custody of a librarian, an Archbishop Rodriguez, whose ambition was to index everything. After all, what use is a territory without a map? He had heard of AW-312.4 and the disastrous attempts to index it, and he decided he was going to finish the job, once and for all, so that future clergy might be vigilant for even the most fragmentary sign of these unholy scriptures. And he had access to three things that no previous indexer had been blessed with: an entire scriptorium of Dominican monks; the scholarly letters and published patents of Sir Charles Babbage; and an early punched-card-controlled jacquard weaving machine.”
Eve blinked. “Let me guess. One page per scribe, one punched card per index word, and he was familiar with Babbage’s difference engine? Perhaps how it might be used to drive a printer? Division of labor?”
“Not exactly. The monks all wore an eyepatch, so they still had one working eyeball after they finished their assigned page. And they didn’t build a Babbage printer like the one in the Science Museum: they just wove a, a demonic tapestry. Afterwards they burned the Jacquard loom and the card deck in a last, secret auto-da-fé. Then Archbishop Rodriguez went into seclusion for six months, fasting and praying as he un-stitched the embroidered cloth encoding the concordance and transcribed it by hand onto pages blessed by the Pope himself.” Bernard leaned forward again, and touched her right knee: “It didn’t save him, of course; the poor bastard gouged his eyes out and died raving about a month later. But at least he finished the job.”
Fascinating, Eve thought, resisting the impulse to break his fingers, one by one. “So what happened to the manuscript?”
“Oh, the usual. They made a couple of attempts to print copies for Inquisition use, but something always went wrong, so eventually they decided to stop killing editors and proofreaders. This was back before it was practical to ship it to China for typesetting, where the workers, being unable to read the manuscript, would be immune to its effects. AW-312.4 vanished back into the archives and the concordance was locked in a closet for a few decades. It’s rumored that the concordance is warded, powerfully—an anti-theft sigil. You’re safe if somebody gives you the book, but if you try to steal it, oh dear no. Anyway, some time later it was stolen. Which ended badly for the thief, but at that point it was free for the taking by anyone who stumbled across it. And they did. It crops up again in Paris in 1872, then again in London in 1888, in a secret auction brokered by a barrister in chambers in Middle Temple who died within six months of its conclusion. And then the trail goes cold. The concordance vanishes from history—the chambers’ records were bombed during the Blitz—until about a week ago.”
Eve nodded again. “What’s the story?”
“Well.” Bernard squinted. “I can’t attest that it’s definitely the real thing, you understand, although the prospectus is quite—” he shuddered and finally removed his hand—“convincing. Ah, I will need to invoice you for expenses incurred, by the way.” She nodded encouragement. “They included a fragment of a book cover allegedly containing human DNA, as evidence of anthropodermic bibliopegy. There was also a scan of a single sheet that quite made my eyes water, even though their laser printer crashed a quarter of the way down the page. Ah-hem. Anyway. The prospectus and sample, along with bidding instructions, are in my bank deposit box—I couldn’t sleep with that thing in the house—and if you give me a ceiling I’ll submit a sealed bid. The seller wants ten percent, non-refundable, in advance to cover auction expenses, and the rest held in escrow—they’re retaining one law firm to disburse funds and another to receive bids, both offshore, it’s all a bit complicated. The winning bidder will receive instructions to retrieve the manuscript from secure storage. So, ah, how much is it worth to Rupert? And you?”
Eve stared at him for a minute as she pulled her scattered thoughts together. Thoughts like, Another goddamn cursed magic tome, really? And, Sealed bids? We definitely have competitors? And, Is this a come-on? She swallowed. “I’m not the purchaser you need to satisfy,” she finally told him. “Are there any other concordances of this … this book?”
“Not that I know of.” Bernard paused. “There is a rumor.”
“A rumor.”
“The Bod’s copy. Right before Number Ten grabbed it, some civil service bunch got their greasy paws on it. Something to do with training a deep learning neural network to recognize the script in AW-312.4 and generate a concordance automatically.”
“And did it?”
Bernard kept a poker face. “Rumor has it they discovered six ways—hitherto unknown to computer science—to drive a neural network insane.”
“So.” She leaned forward again, deliberately giving him an eyeful. “Let me get back to you with Rupert’s bid?” She smiled. “You won’t be talking about this to anybody, will you?”
Bernard swallowed. “Of course not, my dear.”
“That’s sweet of you.” She rose. “If you should happen to overhear the names of any rival bidders I’m sure you could find a way to let me know?”
“Absolutely! But the vendor is being very secretive. Between you and me, I think they’re probably afraid of the Russian element.” Followers of Chernobog, or worse. He stood hastily. “My commission—”
“Will be the usual.” She smiled: “But if you hear any names, there might be a bonus in it.” Bernard’s usual was 3 percent plus expenses, but 3 percent of upwards of ten million was nothing to sneeze at. “And ten percent plus a half million bonus if you can identify the seller before it goes to auction. I’m eager to make them an offer to preempt.”
“Jolly good then, I’ll get digging right away—”
“I’m sure you will! And Bernard? One more thing?”
“Yes?”
“Really don’t tell anyone else about this; it wouldn’t do for the wrong people to get the idea that they could get a leg up by gazumping Rupert in an auction. Rupert finds that sort of thing intensely irritating.” Rupert’s preferred treatment for irritants was an unmarked grave. “And he can be very possessive.”
“I’m sure—” Bernard’s face flushed as he got the message: good, so he knows about Rupe’s temper—“that won’t be a problem!”
“Of course not,” Eve said graciously as she let herself out. “Be seeing you!”
“This is nuts,” Doc said when he caught up with Game Boy, in lieu of telling him off—he was still in a fragile state, Doc guessed. “A library?”
“Wouldn’t you want one in your house if you could have one?” Game Boy enthused.
“I don’t see what’s so special about a load of old books,” said Del, blowing a plume of dust off a tome as fat as an old-timey computer manual. The book was bound in green cloth, the spine bleached by sunlight. She flipped it open and recited the title: “A Boy’s Compendium of Lore and Legend: Valiant Legends from before the British Empire. Yeah, right.” She dropped it on the floor: Game Boy winced but didn’t bend to pick it up.
“Some of these are probably worth something secondhand,” said Imp, his eyes alight with avarice. He’d heard stories about places like this in his infancy, fairy tales Dad told him at bedtime, but he could hardly credit the reality of it. Mind scrabbling for traction, he latched onto its most mundane utility first.
“Good luck figuring out which,” Doc opined dourly. “Have you checked your phone signal?”
Imp squinted at his phone. “You got no signal either? That sucks.”
“There’s no signal anywhere once you get past the steps at the end of the first corridor,” Game Boy volunteered. “I tried to Instagram it, but…” He shrugged adorably and Doc had to fight the impulse to pick him up and carry him to safety, away from this confusing spatiotemporal maze of rooms. There was something disturbing about the idea of being cut off from modern communications even though they were so close to the throbbing heart of a capital city—especially as his phone had plenty of data out on the landing, just beyond the door Game Boy had opened.
“What the fuck is this place anyway?” complained Del. “I counted paces. We should be next door by now!”
Imp was poking around the lower shelves, replete and bulging with leatherbound hardbacks. “Look what I found.” He bent down and, with a grunt of effort, heaved a book out of a row of identically bound volumes. He laid it on the leather-topped reading desk in the middle of the room, directly beneath the warm beam of sunlight that filtered in through the skylight. Dust rose as he leafed through it. He took an uncharacteristic degree of care. “Encyclopaedia Britannica … tenth edition? That’s, uh—” he puzzled over the roman numerals for a bit—“published in 1902. My great-grandparents could have owned this.” He looked up. Rebecca was staring at him. “What?”
“I thought you only read graphic novels these days?” She sounded as if she felt personally betrayed.
“I can read if I want to! I used to read lots!”
“Children,” Doc intervened, “what we have here is a puzzle and a problem and can I suggest we discuss it downstairs, maybe over a can of beer?” He side-eyed the two closed doors at the far end of the library. Doors that he’d noticed Game Boy eyeing with a worrying degree of curiosity. They were a peril and a provocation. “It would be really easy to get lost in here,” he explained. The thought of Game Boy haring off into who-knew-what liminal spaces made him sweat.
“That’s an excellent idea!” Imp wasn’t far behind the curve of his thoughts: “We need a strategy, and a plan for exploration, and a map and a key and a ball of string to find our way back if we get lost! I shall work on an exploration plan forthwith! But I really think we jolly well ought to go downstairs right now.”
“There are no games up here.” Rebecca turned to Game Boy. “Can you even survive?”
“There’ll be something,” he said confidently. “There’ll be a games room, you’ll see! And it’ll be full of 1970s games consoles and pinball machines!” But he still followed Imp back down the hallway and up the staircase and past the avocado suite of mundane contemporanea.
Doc didn’t have the heart to point out the other thing he’d noticed down on the skirting board, the thing that Imp had also clocked. The electricity sockets in this room all had round holes, rather than the more normal rectangular cross-section ones. He’d seen round-pin sockets in a documentary about home life during the Great War. They’d gone out of use in the 1940s. There was no phone signal here. Nor were there LED and halogen lights, automatic machinery, or (beyond the first few rooms) modern electrical appliances. Where might it all end—with gaslight and coal fires, or all the way back to Roman hypocausts?
Eve found the whole idea of a cursed concordance of a book of spells fascinating. But not as fascinating as the fact that Rupert had gotten wind of it and was willing to trust her—her!—with its acquisition.
Rupert had kept Eve on a tight rein for years, ever since the day he’d laid his cards before her and told her how things were going to be. That day he’d taught her that in order to win at the high-stakes games of the elite, it was not enough to be right: you had to be powerful and ruthless enough not to have to play by someone else’s rules. This had been a hard lesson to stomach. True, over the years since then he’d given her progressively more autonomy. But the rope around her neck was still a rope, whether it was woven from hemp or silk. The benefits of every project she masterminded accrued to Rupert, while the penalties for failure were hers alone to bear.
As part of her penance these past five years, Eve had single-mindedly studied Rupert for weaknesses she could exploit. If she tried to escape him prematurely, he could make a single phone call that would condemn her to life as a fugitive or even, these days, have her executed: his real hold was not any kind of geas or spellwork, but a dossier of cold, hard crimes she had committed in his service. But knowing he held one end of her noose had made him complacent. Rupert had come to rely on her for too many services, minor and major. In the process, she’d become intimately aware of certain aspects of his business that he should not have trusted to anybody, let alone to one who served out of fear rather than love.
It was Eve who had commissioned the architectural drawings and managed the planning process and hired the contractors who dug out the second subbasement beneath the Knightsbridge apartment. It was Eve who, working with the head of security, had arranged for the secret tunnel with the pits and the quick-drying cement. It was Eve who had helped Rupert’s strange co-religionists—never say cult—convert the old home theater room into a shrine with an altar that required drainage and running water. And it was Eve who carried out his acquisition, over a multi-year period, of a collection of texts on the subject of witchcraft and magic that started with the swivel-eyed lunacy of the Malleus Maleficarum, worked through the bloodthirsty magnificence of the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, and included not less than six pretenders to the title of Al Azif, the Book of Dead Names.
Frankly, it had come as no surprise whatsoever to Eve to learn that her employer was an ecclesiast in the Cult of the Mute Poet—an esoteric religious order that, because of the sanguinary nature of its devotions, had a pronounced tendency towards secrecy. These days cultists were crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Under the New Management, membership of such dark churches was hardly a career-killing move, as long as they did not challenge the supremacy of the Mad God of Downing Street. And enough money could buy a worrying amount of selective blindness on the part of the authorities. Rupert had connections, Bullingdon Club connections, Piers Gaveston Society connections. Rupert had probably been inducted into the cult by Count Gottfried von Bismarck himself. Rupert could get away with shit that would have any normal person gazing eyelessly down from the glass and chrome skull rack at Marble Arch before you could blink.
But that was okay, because Eve didn’t plan to tackle Rupert head-on. She wasn’t going to denounce him to the secular authorities, or leak about him to the press.
Information wants to be free: but information also wants to cost the Earth. Eve was acutely aware of this. Eve was also aware that, over the past few years, certain strange things had crept across the threshold of possibility, slithering out of the shadows to caper in the daylight, openly mocking the age of rationality and reason that had prevailed for the past several centuries. Superheroes flying overhead, the charismatic narcissism of a reborn god in pinstripes sitting in Parliament, magic that worked—Eve was hardly an innocent, and she knew enough about the contents of Rupert’s locked and alarmed cabinet of curiosities to know that the concordance of AW-312.4 was a most desirable asset.
Rupert had complacently told her to obtain it by any means necessary, putting her in charge of the process of procurement. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask why he’d been allowed to hear about the auction in the first place, or just how broadly Eve might interpret her remit.
Eve intended to do exactly as she’d been told, and take custody of the manuscript.
And then she intended to give it to Rupert.
Give it good and hard.
Safely downstairs, once the door to Neverland on the top floor was wedged shut with wadded-up newspapers to stop the history from leaking out, Imp celebrated their deliverance by opening a half-gallon jug of Old Rosie. He sloshed generous libations into four mugs and then handed them out as Rebecca passed around a never-ending spliff provisioned from Imp’s stash.
“We need gridded paper and pencils,” said Doc.
Game Boy nodded along to a beat only he could hear through imaginary headphones. “Used to do paper-and-pencil dungeon crawls with all that stuff.”
“You won’t get the angles right.” Rebecca waved her joint around by way of punctuation. “Need to measure everything.”
“No.” Imp glared around the room, slightly red-eyed from the smoke. “That’s not necessary. We know the angles don’t add up to three hundred and sixty degrees up there! The distances don’t sum, the spaces overlap. What we need are the, the connections. Like a tube map, where the lines are nothing to do with the actual distance between stations. This way we won’t get lost even if the measurements say we’ve doubled back on ourselves.” He leaned backward precariously, sinking into the carnivorous brown sofa until he nearly toppled sideways onto Doc. “Huh. I could totally use that shit in the script—an infinite house! Somewhere.”
“If it keeps getting older the further back we go, eventually we’ll hit the Victorian period,” Game Boy said. “Could you use it for filming the set for the Darlings’ house?”
“Yes!” Imp sat up excitedly, nearly spilling the dregs of a mug of scrumpy across his lap: Doc caught it in time and gently took it away from him. “The Darling household! That totally works! We’ll need lights, which means power, but did you notice there wasn’t any traffic noise up there? It’ll work for all the indoor scenes!” Then his smile sagged. “I’ll still need to sneak into a soundstage for the motion capture bits aboard the asteroid base and pirate ship, though. Hmm.” Doc pulled him closer and rubbed his hand in small circles on the small of Imp’s back.
“So it all comes back to the great work, huh?” Rebecca blew a lazy smoke ring at the ceiling.
“Everything converges on the great work,” Imp confirmed. He took his mug back from Doc, then frowned at the lack of contents. “Top me up, boy,” he demanded, waving it languorously.
His pose was so theatrically exaggerated that for a moment Doc expected him to add something tasteless—a thoughtlessly racist chop-chop, perhaps—but Imp wasn’t quite that wasted, or was finally beginning to get a clue. Or maybe Game Boy was just in a good mood and chose to ignore it. Either way it summed to zero. Game Boy shook the jug of scrumpy, then threw it in the air, lidless: as it fell back into his hands it sprayed cloudy hard cider that somehow all ended up in Imp’s mug. Oblivious, Imp raised a toast: “Here’s to the great work!”
Mugs, or joints, or both, were raised all around as the Lost Boys drank, or toked, or both, to Imp’s projected fifteen minutes of fame.
Imp was mercurial, charismatic, and theatrical by disposition. He was also full of himself. Since the age of seven and three-quarters he had held an unshakable conviction that he was destined to be London’s twenty-first-century answer to Pittsburgh’s Andrew Warhola (if Andy Warhol had grown up with computer graphics, a Peter Pan fixation, and a willingness to fund his art by robbing toy shops rather than painting soup cans). Imp’s magnum opus, the project upon which he had lavished the majority of his creative energies for years, was to be the definitive video (and now classic, old-school, film-camera movie) experience of Peter and Wendy—the stage play by J. M. Barrie. He’d gotten hooked on it as an infant, when his father read it to him at bedtime. It was a family tradition, Dad had insisted. You read Peter and Wendy to your children when it’s your turn to have them. Imp had no intention of ever having children—in fact, he found the prospect existentially terrifying—but the book still had a profound influence on him.
Imp intended to channel the spirit of the original author’s intent, not the twee rubbish pandered by the Disney Corporation. Peter Pan was an inspiration to Imp in every way imaginable: a chillingly grandiloquent and narcissistic serial killer, detached even from his own shadow. Even in adulthood Imp found himself unaccountably irritated by his inability to fly.2
However there were obstacles on Imp’s path to greatness. For starters, the bank of Mum and Dad wasn’t around any more. He had a not-terribly-large trust fund, but most of the checks went to keeping the Student Loans Company off his back for his time at art school. Then there was the vexatious issue of copyright law. Peter and Wendy was in perpetual copyright—a copyright granted by Act of Parliament to Great Ormond Street Hospital. All recordings and derivative works were liable to pay royalties, and a pirate production would be perceived by the public as a sin as dastardly as any of Hook’s escapades. Stealing money from sick kids never played well with the tabloids unless you were a billionaire. (Billionaires, in Imp’s world view, could do anything. They could—and many did—play the villain in their very own live-action Bond movies.)
So Imp’s goal involved egregious and lamentable copyright violation as a precondition, followed by folding, spindling, and rendering nightmarish a children’s fantasy beloved by the millions who had been brainwashed by the evil Wizard of Walt. (Never forgive, never forget—Imp had committed to memory an impassioned half-hour peroration on the evils of the Rodent Corporation, just in case he was ever called upon to monologue, or even soliloquize, in the dock at the Old Bailey.)
And finally there was the matter of the ever-evolving script, which in Imp’s view required alterations to render it palatable to a modern audience.
Imp’s version of Peter and Wendy featured dead kids being downloaded from cyberspace and resurrected by the hacker Peter, a maniac with a detachable shadow who led the Lost Boys. Peter was a ruthless gang leader locked in eternal struggle with a lawless cyborg ravager, the Dread Space Pirate Hook, with whom he shared a mutual homoerotic love-death relationship. (Imp totally shipped Peter and Hook. In fact, Imp was bent on starring in his own movie as Peter, with Doc playing opposite him as Hook.)
A psychopathic murderer and child kidnapper, Peter slew without remorse or affection, and demanded absolute unquestioning obedience of his followers on pain of being thinned out. (This bit was totally faithful to the original.) He had a malign ghostly AI servant that ran through the tunnels and structures of the abandoned asteroid colony where they lived. She had a crush on Peter—Peter was nothing if not pansexual—and tinkled maliciously as she vented the air from the sleeping capsules of any Lost Boys who dared grow up. But that didn’t happen often because Peter kept them trapped in an eternally delayed pre-pubertal state using a cocktail of hormone suppressors (Game Boy had given him a list), for to grow up was the ultimate betrayal of the principles of the Neotenous Underground.
Other aspects of Imp’s script were distinctly heterodox. (That is: they took liberties with the source material’s intent.) His Wendy was in no respect a maternal figure—Rebecca would have kicked Imp’s ass all the way around Camden Market if he tried to write her into any kind of mothering role. She was a lethal bounty hunter, modelled on Grace Jones’s character in Luc Besson’s The Sixth Element. Imp’s Wendy had been sent to the asteroid to infiltrate Peter’s cell of nihilistic terror-children and assassinate their leader, but she was destined to fall in love with him and, after his heart was cut out by Hook, she was to graft his head onto the side of her own neck while his body regenerated. Finally there was the alien, the ticking lizard-monster in the ventilation ducts, that lived only to lay its eggs inside their bodies. And there was also going to be a blue, six-legged, brain-upgraded, psychopomp cyberdog called Nana that would win the boss fight with the crocodalien, just because it was awesome.
(“Steal from the best” was Imp’s watchword, as was “steal from more than one source and remix them so nobody spots what you’re doing.” (This last assertion was, Doc insisted, highly questionable.) And so was “try to make sure your sources are dead: if they’re still worth stealing, they’ve stood the test of time.” Alien wasn’t dead yet, but since the Disney takeover the Alien Queen was technically a Disney Princess. So it was all a moot point in Imp’s opinion; and anyway, revenge was sweet.)
In the two years he’d been working full-time on Peter and Wendy: A Cyberpunk Dystopia in Space, Imp had completed eleven drafts of the script. He had also figured out how to get unemployed actors to work for him “for the exposure” (it helped that Imp could convince rain that it was dry and night it was day); how to walk into an Apple Store and blag his way into being given a sweet Mac Pro loaded with video editing software; how to talk his way into endless free training courses in film editing, and even a one-on-one workshop session with Robert McKee; how to cozen his dealer into giving him a 70 percent discount on blow; and how to carry out foolproof bank robberies.
He hadn’t actually filmed anything yet, although that was going to change real soon now.
“We start shooting at the beginning of next month, and that’s final,” he announced, staring up at the smoke dragons circling lazily under the ceiling lights. “Before we can do that, we need another job, to pay for the film and the lab time. But don’t worry, I’m sure something will come up…”
The day after she rescued Professor Skullface, Wendy returned to work. Her first destination was the staff canteen for a coffee that hadn’t been festering in its jug for hours, and her second call was Gibson’s office.
“I’ll take the job,” she said. A cold night in the dark with no electricity had made up her mind for her.
“Great, first I need you to sign this—” He slid a sheet of paper titled Nondisclosure Agreement across the desk—“then I’ll talk you through this—” a much fatter document titled Employment Contract: Transhuman Investigations Division. “It’ll take a while. Then I can brief you on the job.”
It did not escape her attention that the NDA came first: but she signed it anyway. It was pretty much what she expected. All the obligations for secrecy were on her, and all the benefits went to HiveCo. The employment contract was a little better. It guaranteed an hourly rate plus a higher pay band when on jobs, plus actual sick pay and annual leave—“This looks like I’m on salary?” she asked.
“Next clause.”
“One month probationary period, then I’m permanent, subject to three months’ notice if I want to leave?”
“Unless we fire you for gross misconduct.” Gibson’s expression was unreadable, but Wendy got the message loud and clear. We need you. Which also meant, she realized, we’re getting you cheap while we can. But with no experience in this higher-level role she had no bargaining leverage—
“This non-compete.” She put her finger on the next clause. “You know that shit is legally unenforceable in the UK?”
Gibson smiled. “That is the current law, yes.”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m not having it.” She crossed her arms and glowered.
In the end they compromised: three months’ notice with three months’ non-compete, and a no-headhunting agreement on top, rather than the two years’ non-compete the contract started out with. HR had given Gibson some wiggle room for negotiating. Then they signed both copies, after which Gibson shook her hand across the desk and said, “Welcome to Investigations! I knew we’d come to an arrangement. Now you’ve got an appointment in Secure Briefing C for your first assignment.”
“Wait.” Wendy stood. “Don’t I get the usual HR dog and pony show? Induction, code of conduct, training in procedures, uniform kit?”
“You get all of that except a uniform,” Gibson said as he walked around his desk, “but we’ll fit it in when you’ve got some dead time—there’s an urgent job waiting for you, and I want you to hit the ground running. Right after lunch, if not before.”
Secure Briefing C was in a part of the building Wendy hadn’t visited previously. That wing was secured with a smart badge reader that her ID now had permission to open. Other than that, it looked much like any other HiveCo site office until Gibson waved his own badge at a reader outside an unmarked door and ushered her into something out of an X-Men movie. Exposed ductwork and cables lined a hollow concrete cube that contained a transparent-walled room suspended from hooks in the ceiling. Even the furniture in the glass room was transparent—off-the-shelf Louis Ghost chairs and a matching transparent table. The only opaque artifact it contained was a Microsoft Surface tablet sitting on the table.
“What is this?” Wendy asked, looking around as Gibson shut the outer door and turned a handle. Her ears popped and the hiss of air conditioning dampened.
“Anti-eavesdropping precautions. We’re suspended inside a Faraday cage with a pressure-controlled, filtered air supply. There are no hiding places for drones or bugs.” Someone had doodled a pentacle from a seventies Hammer Horror movie on the bare cement below the transparent floor. Now it lit up, glowing an eerie green like a poisonous deep-sea creature warning off its predators. “Ah, good, grid’s up. Have a seat, Deere.”
“What kind of eavesdropping needs this, sir?”
“Demons.” Gibson said it matter-of-factly. “Also vampires.” He gestured at the ceiling where a couple of LED lights reflected violet highlights off the Perspex roof. “The UV spots are to deal with them.” Above the dangling overhead lights, another pentacle-in-a-circle diagram pulsed red. “Not to mention gates into the dreamlands. You can’t be too careful these days.”
Wendy took a couple of seconds to catch up. “I thought we were in the business of apprehending criminals, sir.”
“Yes, but there are criminals and there are criminals.”
“All this—” her gesture swept the room—“you’re talking about magical shit? I thought we were dealing with transhumans…”
“Same thing,” he said dismissively. “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Where do you think your power comes from, anyway?” Before she could answer he tapped the computer screen, then plugged a small USB key into one port. “It’s a physical authentication token,” he told her. “We don’t just rely on passwords for this stuff.” He stabbed the ball of his thumb with a sterile needle, then smeared a trace of blood onto a glass window in the USB stick. “Soul lock confirmed.” The Windows login screen vanished to reveal a PowerPoint project and a green-screen window that, after a moment, Wendy recognized as a terminal emulator connected to the Police National Computer system. (And how that worked inside a shielded room was anybody’s guess.) “Okay, here we go. First, I want to show you the security camera feed from a robbery at a Pennine Bank branch on Kensington High Street three weeks ago. Then we’ll get to the really interesting stuff—what the perps said in the interview suite.”
If you caught the robbers why are you showing me this? Wendy wondered. But she was on the clock at her new working pay grade, so she nodded and went with the flow.
The video side of the presentation divided the screen into quadrants, each showing the view from a different camera covering the interior of a bank branch. The bank was laid out old-style, with three counters separating the clerks from the members of the public queuing in the lobby. A couple of ATMs had been installed along one wall. To one side of the counters there was an armored door with a mirror-glass window, and there were open-plan desks out in front for staff dealing with customer transactions that didn’t involve cash. It was clearly a busy time of day—12:54 according to the clock in one of the CCTV windows, peak lunchtime rush hour—and ten customers were queueing for the clerks at the two staffed windows.
“Old-school bank at lunchtime. Now watch this,” Gibson said.
Three figures wearing masks and body-stockings rushed the front door. Wendy leaned forward. They weren’t obviously armed, but—transhumans, she figured—the body language was aggressive and the leader was shouting orders, telling the customers to get on the ground. The elderly video cameras didn’t deliver enough pixels to lip-read from, and there was no audio track.
“He’s saying, ‘This is a stick-up, you are all hostages, open the door to the back or we start shooting people.’”
Wendy drew breath sharply. In her thankfully limited experience, sane robbers didn’t do that: robbery was bad enough, but with just one sentence the leader had added kidnapping and aggravated assault charges on top. Which, under the new laws promulgated by the New Management, pretty much guaranteed a short drop with a sudden stop at the end.
The bank clerks weren’t stupid: they jumped up and fled. But a couple of seconds later the security door sprang open. Someone in a control center elsewhere, intent on avoiding a massacre, had hit the big red button. (The liability payout if a customer lost their life would be far larger than any amount of cash held in the branch safe.) Two of the robbers rushed through the door into the back office, while the one waiting out front with the hostages struck a pose.
The camera views switched. In the back room, the villains shoveled the contents of the cash drawers into laundry bags. The staff had all made a clean escape. Desks cleared out, one of the robbers turned and asked the other a question. He shrugged.
“He asked if the vault was open, if they were supposed to open it and take the contents,” Gibson explained. “He said he didn’t know, it wasn’t in the script.” Wendy squinted, suddenly getting an inkling that this wasn’t business as usual. “Now watch the next bit.”
The two supervillains stalked out of the back room and lined up beside their colleague. Then, to Wendy’s astonishment, they high-fived and bowed to the hostages.
“He said, ‘That’s a wrap.’” Gibson narrated. “Quote, ‘We nailed the shoot.’”
Half the customers stood up and scattered, rushing for the exit. The other half mobbed the supervillains. For a few seconds it was chaos in the bank, then two cops stormed through the door and tased the robbers. “Count them,” Gibson hissed. “Count everybody.”
“Pause it for me?” Wendy grabbed the Surface and began to scrub back and forth through the video. “Ten customers at first, four when it ends, plus two cops—no, wait, what am I looking for?”
“The money bags. Where did they go?”
It took Wendy just a minute to retrace the sequence. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
“Did you see that customer’s face?” Gibson demanded.
“Nuh-no…” Wendy blinked in surprise. “He didn’t show his face to any of the cameras, not at any time.” In admiration. “That was slick. Tell me about the marks?”
“Three wannabe actors.” Gibson huffed like a frustrated dog after a snatched-away snack. “They answered an ad on Facebook offering work on an amateur video project. Cinema verité, heard of it? The pitch was that the director had rented an old bank building and had replaced the CCTV cameras with the kit they needed to film his movie. The customers and clerks were all extras. The wannabes were given a script and told to make it look good. They thought it was entirely legal and they were doing it for the exposure.”
“Except it was a real bank and the real robber was waiting to snatch the cash and do a dash while they provided a distraction?”
“Pretty much.” Gibson scowled.
“And the transhuman angle?”
“The marks all met the director. He pitched them in person, script and all, gave them an audition and screen test, and promised them a good day’s pay for a good day’s work. You’d think they could tell us who the guy that hired them was, wouldn’t you? Or that they’d have asked some questions?”
“They didn’t ask—” Wendy had a suspicious mind at the best of times, and now her inner alarm bells were ringing. “Riiight.”
“They were tampered with.” Gibson’s scowl deepened. “The loss adjusters hired a forensic psychiatrist to examine them. They were acting under a high-level geas. If it ever goes to trial they’ll probably be found not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility. The, uh, director has supernatural powers of conviction: people believe whatever he tells them. The bag man is impossible to grab, he’s as slippery as an eel, and the getaway driver—just don’t go there. This isn’t the only job the gang has pulled in the past two months, Deere, or even the first job that’s hit one of our customers.”
“You want the director and his associates, not the fall-guy actors.”
“Yes! But it’s not going to be easy. Most bank robbers have a simple MO, which is how we eventually catch them. That, or they talk to someone and we get a tip. These guys are different. Not only do they have transhuman characteristics, but they do a variety of jobs—not just banks. They’re really good at not showing up on videos, and they mix it up creatively.” Gibson pulled the Surface over to his side of the desk. “So let’s talk about their most recent job, when they hit the cash room at Hamleys Toy Shop…”
Bernard wasn’t answering his phone, so Eve decided to pay him a visit.
She stood on his doorstep, waiting impatiently for him to answer the entryphone. After a minute, she pushed the button again.
“Dammit, Harris,” she swore quietly. She’d expected him to report back this morning—the commission she’d dangled in front of him should have seen to that. She pulled out her phone—a Caviar-modded iPhone 6S with a 24-carat gold body—and called his landline again. There was no reply, and Harris’s antique tape-based answering machine didn’t cut in.
She turned to make eye contact with the replacement Gammon. (The old one had proven inadequate; the new one was ex-military and vastly more effective.) He came to attention. “Open it,” she ordered.
“Yes, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “If you’d care to stand back…”
Eve stepped away from the door as the Gammon undid the button on his suit jacket, shrugged to loosen his shoulders, then pivoted and slammed a size thirteen boot into the lock.
The door crashed open and rebounded. The Gammon caught it before it slammed shut and held it for her: “Ma’am.”
Eve stepped past him without comment. This one’s an improvement, she noted. Maybe he’s a keeper.
She took the stairs to the flat at a measured pace, not hurrying—it wouldn’t do to arrive out of breath—but not dawdling, either. Something was clearly wrong. Bernard never forgot to switch on the answering machine on the rare occasions when he went out.
Eve paused on the top-floor landing. The Gammon arrived behind her, not even huffing. “Ma’am?”
“One moment.” Eve reached towards the door handle, then paused. “Hmm.”
“Want me to open it, ma’am?”
Preoccupied, Eve forgot to bite his head off. (He was, in any case, trailing her own line of thought, albeit a few steps behind.) “Not yet.”
She clasped her hands behind her back as she reached for the door handle again, this time by force of will alone. Mind over matter, she chanted to herself, quivering with effort. A prickly perspiration broke out across her forehead. Eve had a knack for telekinesis, but to her total disgust, she could bench-press greater weights using her arm muscles alone. Her other abilities were all so risibly feeble that a less determined woman would have given up on them. But Eve had persisted, exploring her limits and learning how to use her powers in combination and to best effect. Precision and perception could, if deployed correctly, compensate for a lack of raw power. So although her mind could barely hold a twenty-kilogram weight against gravity, she could reach behind a keyhole and feel for hidden tumblers. And it took much less than twenty kilos of force to spring a Yale lock.
There was a click: then the doorknob rotated, and the door swung softly inwards.
“Ma’am?”
She pointed: “That’s a steel door frame, and the door’s reinforced. You’d have broken your ankle.” And a broken front door and an unlocked inner door will tell a misleading story if the police come calling. “You go first.”
The Gammon had already snapped on a pair of blue surgical gloves. He bulled through the door and swept along Bernard’s narrow hallway, one hand concealed under his jacket. He cast left, covering the hall closet and the bathroom, then right, checking out the living room. “Clear,” he called softly. On into the rear of the flat: the compact kitchen, the bedroom. “Clear, clear—” At the end of the hall, the office door stood shut. The Gammon froze beside it, drew his pistol, then looked to Eve for direction.
“Allow me.” Eve stepped into the bedroom doorway, then reached out with her mind. The door handle turned and the Gammon crouched as he followed the door in, covering the room.
“Clear,” he said, then paused. “Ma’am, you’re not going to like this.”
“How long has he been dead?” she asked, stepping out from behind her cover.
The Gammon knelt beside Bernard’s body. His death had not been dignified. The sleazy book spiv lay face down on the office floor, his head half-covered by a wool cardigan that had fallen on top of him. The feet splayed out behind him were shod in bedroom slippers, their leather soles worn to a high gloss. He was, she observed, still wearing his pajama bottoms. There was a significant amount of blood, but blood loss wasn’t what had killed him.
“No rigor, ma’am.” The Gammon touched the back of the victim’s neck. “He hasn’t been dead long enough to go cold. I’d say less than six hours, maybe less than four.”
Eve glanced around the room. The computer’s monitor stared darkly back at her. Its usual hum was absent, and there was a gaping rectangular hole in the front of the system unit where a hard drive would normally be. The desk drawers were open, their contents disturbed.
“Well.” She composed herself, took a deep breath, and mustered up a smile: “Well! This is a setback.” Stop babbling in front of the help, she admonished herself sternly. Stiff upper lip. “Obviously somebody was extremely eager to preempt the auction.” She toed the corpse distastefully with the tip of one Manolo Blahnik. “Turn him over.”
“Ma’am? Preserving the crime scene—”
“Is not our concern,” she said crisply.
“Yes, ma’am.” He gripped the body by one shoulder and heaved.
Eve pulled on a pair of gloves and crouched beside him. “Right. Right.” She touched the back of Bernard’s head, through the matted, bloody hair. Bone grated mushily under her fingertips. “A blow to the occipital bone, showing signs of extreme force. Probably sent splinters into the foramen magnum, tearing the medulla oblongata. The hemorrhaging is from the posterior spinal artery: there isn’t much because cardiac arrest was nearly instantaneous.” She stood and contemplated Bernard’s mortal remains for almost a minute. Her hands itched for a scalpel.
“Ma’am? What should I do?”
“Go and close the front door, then stand guard. If anyone you don’t know tries to enter, kill them.”
“Very good, ma’am.” For such a large man he could move surprisingly quietly.
Once he was gone, Evelyn closed the office door, then pulled out her phone and dialed. “Julian, this is Eve,” she said without preamble. “I want a cleanup team round at Bernard Harris’s flat. Crash priority, open checkbook. Prime the pig farm to expect a consignment for disposal. I need the contents of the office here bagging and tagging, and a full forensic teardown of Mr. Harris’s PC, although it looks like the hard drive’s been removed. He’s old school, so you’ll need to search for paper records, notebooks, diaries, that sort of thing. Oh, and there’s an old-fashioned printer—not an inkjet or laser, the kind with a ribbon. I want you to look into lifting an impression of the last document he printed on it.”
Eve hung up. She knew better than to turn on the PC and meddle. Bernard probably didn’t keep anything valuable on it anyway, and if he did there’d be passwords and maybe booby traps for the unwary. Whoever had killed him and taken the hard drive was pursuing a fool’s errand.
She glanced at the filing cabinet. The top drawer was ajar. Papers had been pulled out, but she saw a scattering of rectangular plastic containers like wombat turds in the bottom. They were diskette boxes: when she’d been growing up, the cash-starved comprehensive school she’d attended had still used PCs with floppy disks, even though they were long-obsolete in business.
Eve smiled to herself. The killer was not only impulsive and slapdash: they were young or expensively educated or both. And Eve, who was neither of those things, now had the beginnings of a profile of her enemy.
Bernard’s antiquarian PC might have lost its hard drive, but it gave up its secrets with barely a fight.
Eve’s first stop on her arrival back at Chateau de Montfort Bigge was the IT Department. IT, in keeping with Rupe’s disdain for boffins, were confined to a sad, windowless gerbil hutch under the main staircase that had once served as a cloakroom. There was always at least one semi-interchangeable minion on duty. “You!” she barked at the nearest gerbil—or possibly the least able to scramble for cover when she slammed through the door. “What’s your name?”
“M-Marcus, Miss?” Marcus was bald, bearded, and gnomishly middle-aged. He wrung his hands as he looked up at her through horn-rimmed glasses with pebble-thick lenses. “Can I help you?”
“I should think so.” She reached into her Louis Vuitton handbag and produced three boxes of floppies. “These are backup disks from a PC. I want them imaged, cracked, and a copy of the original files restored.”
Marcus froze, then focussed on the boxes, oddly intent. “May I, Miss?” he asked eagerly. She tipped the boxes into his cupped hands: he stared at them as if they were a particularly delectable treat. “Ooh, I haven’t seen these in a while!” He carefully popped the lid on one box and peered inside. “High density, 1.44 jobs. Definitely an old PC, not a Mac?”
“A beige boxy thing from the late 1980s. It didn’t have a mouse, if that’s any help. The hard disk is missing, and this is the only material that could be salvaged. I’m relying on you,” she said.
His eyes glazed as he dreamily stroked the exterior of the box. “I may need to get hold of some specialized kit, I don’t think we’ve got anything that can read floppies any more, but having said that—”
“Buy anything you need; just keep the receipts. I expect a full work-up within twenty-four hours.”
“Uh-uh-yes, Miss.” Marcus snapped back to terrified obedience. “Right away, Miss.”
Eve stalked back to her lair, brooding. Someone had killed Bernard and taken the hard disk. The timing strongly implied that his murder was connected to the auction. So it suggested that the item was worth considerably more on the market than Rupe had indicated. Interesting. The killer was now one jump ahead of her, unless they were incompetent and had killed Bernard by mistake before weaseling the auction details out of him. In which case (an unpalatable thought) they might have irremediably fucked up the entire job for everybody and she’d have to start again from scratch, this time using an unfamiliar book dealer. Either way, Eve was clear on the steps she needed to take.
It occurred to Eve that she’d need a thief. And for a job like this, there was only one person she could turn to.
Eve didn’t need much sleep, and the promise of the coming treasure hunt kept her awake as effectively as a pint of espresso. She spent the early evening making use of the gym in the basement, then moved on to the firing range, where she flung ball bearings at pistol targets by force of will alone until her head ached. Returning to the office, she handled issues arising in the American subsidiaries. For dinner she ordered up a cold collation from the kitchen, which she ate at her desk. At eleven, she rose, restless, and returned to the shooting gallery, where she amused herself with a bag of marbles that shattered satisfactorily when they slammed into their targets. By two in the morning she was drained, but she was no closer to sleep than she had been at eight the night before: the febrile anticipation of action had her in its grip.
Finally she could no longer contain herself. She returned to her lair, restored her appearance—hair secured in a scalp-tugging bun, lips and mascara retouched, suit straightened—then marched on IT. “Well?” she demanded.
Marcus was still at work, but clearly flagging. He jolted upright at her voice: “Yes Miss!” he blurted. “It’s done and dusted!”
“What precisely is done and dusted?”
“You were right about it being an antique, Miss! Norton Backup, vintage 1992, from a 40Mb hard disk on a 286. The disks weren’t corrupt but the backup was encrypted, so I had to copy the images and spin up a few thousand VM instances on EC2—” Eve narrowed her eyes at him and he gulped—“erm, I cracked the password and there’s a VirtualBox with a bootable copy of the hard drive right here.” His hands fluttered above the keyboard of his workstation. “What do you want me to do to it?”
“Get out and leave me to it,” she told him. Marcus bolted from his chair as if she was a cheetah. Eve took his place at the desk and found herself doing a double-take.
Bernard’s PC had run MS-DOS—nothing as sophisticated and slickly modern as Windows 3.1—but he’d had an email client, a text-mode monstrosity that collected mail from some weird modem-connected lacuna of the internet that hadn’t yet discovered fire, let alone the World Wide Web. After some swearing she got it working and fumbled her way into his mailbox. (It was refreshingly free of spam, for some reason.) Running on modern hardware, virtually everything happened instantaneously, including text searches. It took her barely ten minutes to find what she was looking for in his inbox. That’s interesting, she thought, then smiled to herself. It was all here: the anonymized email address of the auctioneer, Bernard’s banking details, Rupert’s wish list. It took her another couple of minutes to shut down the VM and upload a copy to her personal area on the office file storage, then delete the original from Marcus’s machine. The disk boxes were sitting beside it, next to a very shiny-looking floppy disk drive, and she took the lot.
Marcus was waiting outside the office door, knees knocking. “Excellent job,” she reassured him generously: “I’ll be sure to let HR know. I’m taking these,” she added. “You didn’t look at the contents of the disks, did you?”
“No, no, Miss!” The poor little rodent was eager to return to his cage.
“Excellent. You won’t speak of this to anyone. You can go home now—wherever you go when you’re not here, that is.”
Marcus was still babbling his thanks as she stalked back to the elevator. He’s good, but he’s much too talkative for comfort, she realized. I’ll have to reassign him. Once back at her desk with her office door locked, she checked that the disk image was bootable. Then she shredded the floppy disks and drafted a memo to Human Resources, asking them to put him on the next flight out to the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Research Station. Let him blab to the penguins: the birds weren’t about to bid on the book.
Eve smiled again. Then she picked up her phone and called her thief.
Imp and the gang stayed up late into the night, wasted on a never-ending roll-up and a periodically emptying jug of scrumpy (followed by Del’s distressingly crap stockpile of lager when the good stuff ran out). Eventually Game Boy staggered off to the games room, where he could cuddle up close to his PC and obsessively play KOF until he fell asleep. Some time later, Del announced she was going to the bathroom and never came back. That left Imp and Doc passing the guttering embers of a joint with which they exchanged sloppy blowbacks, too wasted to get properly amorous. “I’m drunk and you’re ugly,” Doc slurred, “but in the morning I’ll be hung-over and you’ll still be ugly.” He leaned sideways and kissed Imp deeply, his mouth smoky. But before Imp could get anything more than his hopes up, Doc stumbled to his feet and wandered towards the staircase.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!” Imp called from his pit on the sofa. He yawned resentfully. “I dunno. Some people. Lightweights.” The room pancaked and wobbled around his head. Doc had a point, he had to admit, and whistled a few out-of-key bars of “Too Drunk to Fuck” by way of self-deprecatory comment. Then he lay on his back alone, his mind empty for once.
Then, for the first time in over a week, his phone rang.
“What the—what—fuck—” Imp sat bolt upright and flung out a hand in the direction of the device. It was thundering out the bass line of “Making Plans for Nigel” at audible-over-traffic volume, even though it was three in the bloody morning.
“He has his future in a British Steel—hello, who the fuck is this do you know what time it oh hello, sis, long time no see, really, you’re calling now? Who died and made you pope?”
“Are you drunk?” his sister accused.
He chuckled: “Maybe a little?”
“Listen carefully,” Imp’s sister said, enunciating each word with obsidian precision, sharp enough to slash his eardrums. “This is very important.”
Instant sobriety: “It’s not Mum, is it? Has she died?”
“No, she’s not dead. You’d know if you bothered to visit her.”
Imp bit back his instinctive response. “What is it, then?”
“I need a favor.”
Imp blinked at the ceiling, perplexed, and took stock of his surroundings. Nope, he hadn’t suddenly been transported to Neverland. He was lying on his back, holding his phone in one hand—it was his phone, it hadn’t magically metamorphosed into a rainbow chameleon baby while his attention was elsewhere—and yes, he was still lying in the carnivorous living room sofa, surrounded by discarded beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. He took stock. There was a chill of dampness in the air despite the oil-filled radiator running off the stolen electricity supply. It was December 2015, and he was drunk and stoned, and his sister, of all people, wanted a favor.
“You’re mad,” he said, and waited for the explosion.
There was no big sister detonation. Instead, something much more disturbing happened. She chuckled. Imp cringed: he knew that laugh, had known it since before he learned to walk, and it meant nothing good. She didn’t use it very often, but when she did … It was a laugh worthy of a young Shakespearian witch, a laugh destined to grow up to be a cackle of malice. Mischief was afoot. Oh fuck, he thought fuzzily. Stoned and drunk, Imp was no match for his big sister. He’d rather face a police raid or Game Boy’s tiger parents in full hue and corrupting-our-daughter cry. He’d even undergo a Work Capability Assessment, if it meant never again hearing that horrible ululation.
“Stop,” he implored, “please, just stop. It’s three in the fucking morning!”
“If I knew all I had to do was laugh at you I’d have phoned years ago.” She tittered briefly, sending chills scurrying up and down his spine. At three in the morning his sister could titter like a ghoul. “But I’m serious, Jeremy. I want you to do me a favor.”
“What’s in it for me?” he asked automatically, before his tongue caught up: “Don’t call me that!”
“I think I can make it worth your while.” Pause. “I know where you live.” Another pause. “I know who you live with. And I know it can’t be easy or cheap.”
“No need to rub it in.” Big sis had always had a knack for getting under his skin.
“If the shoplifting and petty larceny aren’t cutting it, you could always put your artistic projects on hold. Get a real job. The trustees would even pay for you to go back to university, as long as you study something employable this time.” A bitter tone crept into her voice.
Skin crawling, Imp had to work hard to resist the urge to tell his sister to fuck off. Like him, she’d chosen her own path and pursued it with terrifying tenacity. He felt it was almost his duty to counterbalance her workaholism by slacking. “Would I have to wear a suit and tie?” he asked idly. “Because that’d be a hard no.”
“Oh you.” She chuckled again, almost indulgently. “Never change.”
His vision doubled, blurring as she whipsawed him from love to hate and back again. You could build your own family through choice, but you couldn’t erase the one you were born with, even if you chose to avoid them. With a supreme effort of will he gathered his wits. “Listen, it’s three in the fucking morning and you want a favor and it can’t wait, which means it’s pretty fucking big, so why are we pissing around the bush like this? What do you want?”
“I’d like to hire you,” she said, “to do a job.”
“No.” It came out instantly, without having to think. “You can’t make me work for you.” Or see you.
“You misunderstand: this is a one-off, not a permanent position. And it pays very well…”
“Doesn’t matter: I’m still not going to work for you.”
“Not even freelance? On your own terms?”
“Huh.” Imp stared at his phone for a moment, wondering if he was dreaming, or maybe nightmaring. “Good try, but the answer is still no.”
“I just want you to get hold of a book for me. There’s eighty large in it for you, no questions asked.”
“Eighty—” Imp remembered who he was talking to at the last instant and body-swerved—“no.”
“I can make your dyke biker chick’s Yardie neighbors leave her mom alone. I can get you what you need to make your boyfriend with the attitude problem happy. I can get the Chinese kid’s parents off his back. I can even hook him up with SexChange.”
“SexChange is a myth,” Imp said automatically. Game Boy had spent ages chasing after the mirage in question, whose power was the ability to put the trans into transhuman.
“SexChange is real.” Her voice dropped an octave: “And I can get you the use of a RED Dragon and all the lenses you need, and a slot on the number four sound stage at Millennium Studios in Elstree whenever you’re ready for it.”
“I—” Imp’s larynx froze. This was a nightmare scenario: Big Sis was back in his life, wanted him back in her life, and knew how to pull his strings—“cunt!”
“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?” She sounded idly amused, and far too awake for the time of night.
“Fucknuggets. Yes, all right, but can we talk about it in the morning when I’m sober?”
“Of course. My office, backside of n—no, ten o’clock, I know what you’re like before breakfast. Yes, come to my office at ten o’clock and I’ll fill you in.” She rattled off an address. It was, Imp realized with dismay, a mere fifteen-minute walk from the squat. “Security will be expecting you. Be there or stay poor, Jeremy! Ciao!”
Jeremy—Imp—lay back on the sofa and groaned softly, clutching his head. She’s found me, he thought dismally. By the sound of it she’d been watching him from afar for some time. Typical. Five years of avoiding her and suddenly it turned out she’d known where he was all along. Just please god don’t tell me it’s for Mum. The less he had to do with his family, the better for everyone. Jesus fuck.
But he had to, however unwillingly, face the facts. It was three o’clock in the morning, an hour when nightmares came true; and his sister was willing to pay eighty thousand pounds and a bounty of dreams in return for a rare book. She hadn’t actually threatened Del, Doc, or Game Boy, at least not explicitly. As for why: if anyone knew what Imp was capable of, it’d be his big sister. And it would be her sleazebag boss’s money she was spending. Even so, eighty grand was a lot to pay for a book.
There was no alternative: tomorrow morning he’d go round to her office and find out what Eve wanted.