Wendy took a couple of hours to type up her confidential report—more accurately, her confession—on Del’s nefarious activities. Gibson would bury it with a stake through its heart so the company could profess due diligence if Del’s unpunished crimes ever came back to haunt them; meanwhile Gibson would be free to offer her a job. After delivering it, Wendy retreated to her desk with a mug of coffee. She rated a cramped, windowless office of her own now, because her work required her to deal with confidential resources. One such was the folder Gibson had dropped in her SharePoint on the office network. She opened the first file: PRODUCT ADULTERATION REPORT ON FLAVRSMART BRANCH 322. She sighed as she began to read, expecting tedium beyond anything she’d ever known. But five minutes later she was banging on the boss’s office door.
“Seriously, sir? What the ever-loving fuck are we even doing with this? Isn’t it a job for SCD-1?”
SCD-1 was the London Metropolitan Police Service’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command: Wendy had once hoped to work there, back before she’d had a run-in with an abusive senior officer.
“Sit down, Deere.” Gibson had a Biro clenched between his teeth, clearly a pale substitute for a cigarette. “Give me a minute.” He unmuted his telephone handset and gruffly concluded his call. “Thank you,” he said, with heavy irony. He placed it back on its base station. “Right. This is the FlavrsMart case, I take it?”
“Sir.” Wendy set her jaw firmly. “With all due respect, seven homeless persons have been reported missing near the shop in the past two months, and then this”—she flapped her hand for emphasis—“product adulteration case shows up in the supermarket, and the contaminant DNA in two of the pies matches the Criminal Records Bureau sequence records for two of the missing persons—how has this not landed in SPIU’s lap?”
For an instant Gibson looked infinitely weary. “Follow the money, kid.” Wendy bristled, but let it slide: she was in her mid-twenties and Gibson was pushing fifty. He continued, “Funding is bad, and, well, you tell me the victim profile?”
“Oh. Oh.” Wendy rocked in her chair. “Three female and four male, all NFA—” no fixed abode—“ages range from seventeen to sixty-two. Four from troubled backgrounds, five are opiate abusers not enrolled in treatment programs, one is long-term enrolled but repeatedly falls off the wagon, four are alcoholics, six have mental health issues, all seven are known to the police, six are definitely unemployed, five have records for petty crime and vagrancy…” She paused for a moment’s angry contemplation. “They’ve all been de-emphasized, haven’t they?”
De-emphasized was the current euphemism for thrown on the trash heap. It denoted people the New Management considered to be of no (or minimal) value to society. They had no money, they couldn’t hold down a job, and they didn’t even soak up resources in a useful way. The productively disabled, the deserving disabled, had the decency to stay in their nursing home beds generating economic activity and jobs for carers, just like the dumb career criminals serving time in their prison cells and providing employment for prison officers. But the de-emphasized had the temerity to try to look after themselves in ways that resisted monetization. Their existence implicitly threatened to undermine the system as a whole by suggesting that it was possible to opt out completely. They didn’t claim benefits—or survived despite being sanctioned—and they didn’t take workfare assignments, and they were mostly homeless but still they stubbornly persisted. And that couldn’t be allowed.
So the New Management de-emphasized them and waited for them to die of neglect.
“Yes.” Gibson nodded gloomily. He might be management-tier within HiveCo Security, but he’d been an Army officer in an earlier life. Public service was his touchstone, and the whole idea of de-emphasis was repellant to that mind-set. But HiveCo Security was private sector and had to turn a profit, and the government had washed its hands of these people to the extent that the police wouldn’t even investigate if they were murdered.
“Why are we re-emphasizing them?” Wendy asked, with only mildly ironic emphasis. She crossed her arms and waited.
“Officially?” Gibson raised an equally ironic eyebrow. “There shouldn’t be any human DNA in processed meat products, much less DNA from missing people. They’re trialling some kind of new robotic just-in-time manufacturing process. Eventually they plan to have vats full of animal tissue culture in every branch, feeding it to 3D printers on the deli counter—meat products without animal cruelty and the risk of another Mad Cow Disease epidemic.” Also without the farmers and the stockyards taking their cut of the profits, Wendy mentally translated. “Right now, it’s in prototype—Branch 322 is a test bed for lots of next-generation retail tech. They’ve set up a rendering line in one of the loading bays, taking in carcasses from a local abattoir and carving them up by robot, then piping the mechanically reprocessed slime to the printers. But the point is, the pies are made by robot. Carcass goes in at one end of the line, pies print out at the other. Tell me, what are the signs of a serial killer?”
The abrupt change of tack nearly gave Wendy whiplash, but she was getting used to it. Gibson was shrewder than the job called for: too shrewd by half.
“Serial killers … uh, let’s see. They usually start small, with animal cruelty.” She held up a finger, regurgitating points from a half-remembered college lecture. “Personality screening typically finds Dark Triad traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—but those aren’t unique to serial killers. Smart Dark Triad people often end up in senior management or politics. Police, even. The serial killers are usually the less-bright ones. Motives vary: may be sexual, but not always. They can go slow and take one victim every so often, on an irregular basis, or in brief bursts separated by years or even decades. Fallow periods may correspond to prison sentences: they usually engage in other lawbreaking activities and if they get banged up that puts a brake on their hobby. They’re mostly male but there are exceptions, often working with a male partner—Myra Hindley, Rose West.”
“Now tell me about their victims.”
I see where you’re going here and I don’t like it. Wendy’s skin crawled. “Please tell me you’re not handing me a serial killer brief disguised as a thief-taker investigation, sir?”
“I can’t tell you that.” Gibson’s expression was now absolutely unreadable.
“I’m not remotely qualified to lead one of those, sir.”
A full-dress murder investigation by the Met would have up to ninety officers assigned to it at various points, from the initial responders through the Scene of Crime team, to the detectives developing a timeline, to community liaison bobbies interviewing everyone who was in the vicinity. It’d have every warm body who could be mobilized looking for physical evidence, a fully crewed Incident Room putting together a timeline and GIS maps of the area. There’d be chain-of-evidence specialists to write up the case for the Crown Prosecution Service, interview teams for suspects, the whole nine yards. A proper murder investigation cost millions—and nine times out of ten it paid off with a conviction, because if you threw unlimited resources at a policing problem you usually got results. And that went squared for a suspected serial killer or a spree killer going active—it made national headlines, with round-the-clock bulletins and government ministers being grilled under spotlights on the Nine O’clock News.
Well, it used to involve all that, before the Leeds Incident, the New Management, and the gibbets at Marble Arch. These days the rules had changed and, ominously, the most recent crime figures Wendy had seen from the Office of National Statistics were strangely lacking in detail.
“I never suggested you were qualified to lead a serial murder enquiry, Deere.” Gibson looked uncomfortable. “But you’re the least unqualified body I’ve got, even before we get to your Class Three abilities.” Wendy’s transhuman talent was surprisingly useful: if she’d had it back when she worked for the Met, they’d never have let her go. “FlavrsMart wants someone to go undercover at Branch 322 and find out what’s wrong with the prototype meat processor line, how the contaminants are getting into the product. There might be an innocent explanation—homeless people dossing in the loading bay and spitting in the pink slime, or something. I don’t need to tell you how sensitive DNA testing is.”
The Polymerase Chain Reaction, used to copy and amplify fragments of DNA in a sample prior to sequencing, could turn even an invisibly small trace contaminant into a detectable signal. But there were seven missing people, and the idea that they just happened to have spat in the machinery was frankly implausible.
“Unofficially, if there’s a serial killer disposing of bodies using FlavrsMart facilities, FlavrsMart management want it cleared up and suppressed. Perp neutralized under total news blackout, NDAs signed all round, then maybe we hand over the case to SCD-1 or possibly the spooks from MI5. But we’re being paid by FlavrsMart to clean up their shop, not to run a murder investigation. And we’re going to take a very fat bonus in return for keeping our yaps shut forever. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Wendy set her jaw. The de-emphasized weren’t being treated as murder victims; they were being treated as bad publicity. But she had another, unwelcome thought, close on the heels of the first. “Sir, what if they’re not just using that supermarket to dispose of the bodies?” She chewed her lower lip. “What if it’s a hunting ground?”
Gibson walked towards his office window, which faced the windowless concrete wall of a warehouse across a narrow alleyway. He stood at ease with hands clasped behind his back for almost a minute.
“Sir?” Wendy asked eventually. “Is there anything else?”
“Before I left the Army,” Gibson said quietly, “I wore a red cap: Fourth Investigation Company, First Military Police Brigade, Special Crimes Team, officer commanding.”
Oh, thought Wendy, suddenly attentive.
“I was tangentially involved in a serial killer case,” he added, his voice slightly choked up. “I was on station in Iraq. If you think you need backup, call me. Call at any hour of the day or night. I trust you to do the right thing. Just … be discreet.”
He paused again, then added, “Dismissed.”
Wendy saluted him silently, then left.
Every second Monday was a hot-desking day for Amy, because once a month Jenn summoned Barry and Tara back to the mother ship to spend a day sweating under her wingtip-eyelinered gaze, just to remind them who they worked for. Amy privately welcomed the change because, other than the necessity of finding a mains socket for her laptop, it got her out from under Jenn’s nose. As long as she handled the paperwork, Jenn ignored her; and as long as she evaded the CCTV it was possible to sketch with no one any the wiser.
On this particular Monday, Amy took extra pains over her appearance—after all, she’d be the visible avatar of management in the shop for the day—then walked the floor. As she walked she considered her workspace options. There was a stool and a free bench tucked around a corner in the dispensary, but the pharmacist was a vindictive cowbag who had it in for Amy. There was a back room behind the deli, but the deli was still closed for deep cleaning, and in any case the smell from the butcher’s rendering line reminded her why she’d gone vegan. In the end, she lucked into a desk on the side of Loading Bay Four. The automatic door was jammed and the engineering crew hadn’t arrived to fix it yet, so there were no lorries using it today. The floor manager had his minions stashing empty recyclable packaging on the dock, but apart from a chilly draft and the clash and clatter of roll pallets there was nothing to disturb her. So she kept her head down, obscured from view by a wall of cardboard waste.
There were no disciplinaries today. Most of the workload was routine: signing off on training, approving annual leave requests (from the minority of permastaff who weren’t too terrified to abandon their posts for a week), even recommending two unusually long-term employees (over five years each!) for their Tufty Club bonuses. Jenn would give her the evil eye for it—staff weren’t supposed to stick around long enough to claim the prizes—but being able to make someone’s day brighter cheered up Amy.
But then she sighed and blinked unhappily at her screen. Because the inevitable had happened. What goes around comes around, and it was time to find a body who could fill the late and unlamented Adrian Hewitt’s shoes.
Oh my rancid fucknuggets, she thought, as she reviewed the job description: It’s one of those.
Once upon a time, back in the depths of prehistory, offices used to run on arcane things like carbon paper and typing pools full of manual typewriters. (Amy saw a typewriter on a school trip to the Industrial Museum once: she didn’t understand how they were meant to work underwater.) But then a bright-eyed proto-geek called Mr. Xerox invented the photocopier, thereby enabling the rightsizing of legions of bikini-wearing, snorkel-snorting copy typists, and generating new and interesting disciplinaries for proto-Amys by means of the magnetic attraction between copier machines and buttocks.
The Xerox machines of yore were not a sleek modern device that you simply plugged in, used until out of magic copying powder, then threw away.4 The original Xerox was a gargantuan box of cogs, driveshafts, prisms, cams, periscopes, hammer mills, steam engines, and reciprocating slides that sucked in paper at one end and labor at the other. A copier cost more than a year’s wages bill for the entire typing pool and broke down as often as a professional mourner. Consequently Xerox repairmen—they were invariably men—became a semipermanent fixture of any large office building.
The bespoke meat products line on the deli counter was the latest incarnation of the copying machine, and the unlamented Mr. Hewitt had almost certainly been a very naughty Xerox repairman in a previous incarnation, for which he was now being punished.
His firing had broken an essential component in the machinery of FlavrsMart Branch 322, and the deli counter was going to be offline until a person of similar skills could be recruited. But the skills in question were esoteric. The job called for a fleshmachine whisperer, someone proficient in nursing jointing/flensing robots, coddling the MSM/MRM fractionator, and coaxing the delicatessen counter 3D printers into life.
Amy reviewed Mr. Hewitt’s record with a sinking feeling.
Adrian Hewitt had arrived at FlavrsMart unencumbered with student debts. He was a high school dropout who, after a variety of casual jobs (bin man’s assistant, mortuary porter, night watchman), had somehow acquired a Higher National Diploma in meat processing, attended a vocational training course in automated deboning machinery in slaughterhouses, took advantage of a bursary to address the sucking vacuum of meat printer maintenance operatives, and was unaccountably headhunted by FlavrsMart—who then paid for him to take three whole months of training in his first six months on the job.
When filling an internal vacancy, Amy normally ran the skills matrix past the database of recent applicants until some names popped out. But she could see at a glance that it wasn’t going to work this time. Ade was not just a pair of hands for stacking shelves. Despite the recent blot on his copybook—Gladys had taken a splenetic, laxative-assisted shit all over his Personal Development Profile—Ade was horrifyingly specialized. He was also highly trained in arcana that spanned the gamut of meat production. He’d been doing everything, from booking in carcasses from the abattoir to programming the 3D multi-substrate extruders that turned the slushy, vile residues into something superficially resembling food. Along the way his tasks ranged from servicing the knife-wielding robots that lined the processing cage—where dangling carcasses entered at one end, and neatly deboned cuts of meat emerged on a conveyor from the other—to maintaining the high-pressure sieving system and pressure cooker that turned the leftovers into pink slime. He also cleaned and serviced the pipelines that fed the slime to the printers, where they emerged as beautifully formed nuggets and meat loaves and textured novelty roasts. He was, in short, a bizarre gastronomic Athena who had sprung fully formed from the brow of Mr. Xerox’s spiritual heirs.
“We’re going to have to advertise this one externally,” she muttered to herself as she wrote up a memo, eyes-only, for Jennifer’s attention. Jenn was going to hit the roof. Advertising externally meant paying fees that came out of HR’s discretionary budget, which was measured in pennies. Replacing Ade might end up costing thousands—tens of thousands, even—all for the sin of taking the most expensive workplace selfie in Branch 322’s dismal history. We can’t possibly rehire him, can we? she pondered. It would make life so much simpler. But that was water under the bridge: certain copybook blots couldn’t be repaired in this lifetime, and subsequent events on the deli counter had underlined the wisdom of firing him.
There was no alternative: Amy just had to hope Jenn could magic up a replacement.
An hour and a half after it took off from the Barclays London Heliport, the AgustaWestland Power Elite settled onto the helipad at Castle Skaro so gently that the surface of Imp’s second glass of Lagavulin barely rippled. “Fuck’s sake,” he slurred, “are we there already?” He raised his glass and necked the whiskey, coughed, and put it on the side-table for someone else to clean up.
Eve was already unbelting as the rotors slowed. “Yes, Jeremy, we are there already,” she said with an elder sister’s exaggerated patience.
“Is this your first visit?” he asked.
Her eyes flickered uneasily aside. “Yes.”
The pilot opened the door for them. “Welcome to Skaro,” she said, bowing. Gammon Number Two stood vigilantly alongside the chopper, keeping an eye on their reception party. The pilot mentioned something about nipping across to a maintenance hangar in Jersey and needing half an hour’s notice when they wanted picking up, but Eve let it slide: now was not the time to get bogged down in trivia.
Imp followed her out of the executive chopper’s Versace-lined cradle and found himself standing on the flagstoned rear courtyard of a late medieval castle.
To the onlookers who were waiting for them they must have seemed an odd couple. Imp resembled a rock star in rehab, and Eve could have been the rock star’s attorney. He took the lead, long-haired and louche in a stained overcoat of uncertain vintage, while she followed behind in black Armani and killer heels, briefcase in hand and hair pulled back in a viciously tight bun.
“Yo, howdy!” Imp said, flashing a brilliant smile and extending a hand to the appalled-looking butler, who recoiled gratifyingly: “Is this the way to the next whiskey bar?”
Eve elbowed him in the ribs. (They shared the usual childhood sign language: her gesture promised much pain, delivery conditionally deferred.) To the staff: “I’m Mrs. de Montfort Bigge, and I’m here to inspect my husband’s office,” she announced in a voice as sharp as a razor blade.
The butler bottled whatever response he had been readying for Imp, swallowed apprehensively, then bowed. “Yes, My Lady,” he said. “Do you wish to meet the household staff first? They are waiting for you outside the great hall.”
“Jeremy,” she gave her brother a chilly smile, “be a dear and inspect the castle staff for me.” She smiled at the butler, her expression only slightly warmer: “I’m a great believer in delegation, but my husband’s office absolutely can’t wait. You can introduce me to the housekeeper and department heads later—my brother will deal with the staff for now.”
“Right-o,” said Imp, showing no sign at all of being crestfallen at his demotion to Lady de Montfort Bigge’s personal greeter. “Which way towards the enemy?”
Eve focussed on the butler while a flunky of some sort led her brother towards the end of the courtyard past the helipad. “Ma’am, if you’d care to follow me, I’ll take you straight to your husband’s suite.”
The butler was in late middle age, balding, and wore his traditional tailcoat and pinstriped trousers with the dignity of an undertaker. He seemed uneasy about something, but Eve couldn’t tell whether it was Imp’s onslaught of chaos, or if rumors of her reputation at head office had made their way back to Skaro. Interestingly, he’d shown no sign of surprise at her self-introduction. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Mr. de Montfort Bigge always called me Jeeves,” he said carefully. “The private elevator to the master suite is just along this passage: the entry code is—”
“I am not my husband,” Eve bit out, “and I would prefer to know your real name.” Subtext: there are going to be some changes around here.
“Anthony Cunningham at your service, ma’am.” He bowed again, this time more deeply. Then, as he straightened from it, he braced. “Ma’am, when your husband returns—”
She gave him a sad, slightly pitying expression: “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” Thank fuck I wore the black suit this morning. It had been a fortuitous accident, until she opened the safe and read her file: if she was going to play the role of Rupe’s widow she’d probably have to modify her wardrobe a little, although hopefully the staff here didn’t expect her to adopt full formal mourning dress.
“Please accept my deepest sympathies for your loss,” Cunningham murmured, which was a nicely ambiguous way of kicking the can down the road. As he punched numbers into the keypad on the lift door Eve memorized them. “My Lady.”
They stood in silence while the lift—brushed steel ceiling and polished black marble floor, with mirrored walls to make it feel less cramped—ascended. Evidently Rupert’s roost was just below the battlements, as if he fancied himself a great angry seabird nesting on a cliff face.
Cunningham led her along a corridor with bare stone walls and a white-painted ceiling, supported by blackened timbers that had settled and bowed slightly over the centuries. It was not entirely austere, for a previous occupant had hung faded tapestries depicting scenes of medieval chivalry along the walls. Some more recent resident had suspended discreet halogen spotlights from the beams, and these illuminated the weavings. They passed niches, possibly former firing slits, where the draughty breezes had been blocked by means of cellular double glazing. A decorator had lined the hall with fully articulated suits of gothic-fluted plate, presumably bought as a job lot in the sixteenth century when armor was sliding into military irrelevance. The LEDs of a wifi range extender blinked merrily from above an early hot water radiator, and Eve queasily contemplated the central heating bill. No wonder castles were cheap to buy: it was the running costs that bankrupted you.
They turned a corner into a windowless corridor that ended in a row of robust oak doors. “Bodyguard’s ready room, valet’s quarters,” Cunningham intoned, counting them off as he led her past. “The Master’s suite, and this is Lady Skaro’s bedroom, comprising your day room, your maid’s chamber—”
“—Is there a maid in residence? Or a valet?”
“No, My Lady.” Cunningham sounded apologetic. “You’ve never visited before. When I heard the news I took the liberty of having your apartment aired and cleaned, and the linens replaced. If you wish I can find you a temp, but I assumed you would bring your own staff, not—” He fell silent.
“I don’t have a staff,” Eve said. “Yet.” She gestured at the door. “Show me.”
Lady Skaro’s boudoir resembled the honeymoon suite of a particularly stuffy and old-fashioned highland hotel, the kind that displayed a plaque in the lobby boasting that the Prince of Wales had parked one of his mistresses there while he stopped to play a round of golf in 1887. It was furnished with dark wooden antiques, many of which clearly predated the French Revolution. She’d need a stepladder to climb onto the canopy bed—if she dared, for there was room for a revolutionary republic of spiders to hold their constitutional convention in the drapes.
There were some signs of modernization, to 1950s levels of “modern.” Ancient pumped-water radiators lined the niches below the narrow windows, gurgling villainously as they converted banknotes into hot air. The filament bulbs were dim enough to look at directly, like the sun seen through the smoke of a wildfire, but at least they weren’t gas mantles or oil lamps. There was even a television set in the day room, but it was a glass-tubed antique from the 1950s. The lidless gaze of a beheaded deer reflected sightlessly off its freshly sprayed and polished screen.
“Hmm,” said Eve. “I take it the room’s been unoccupied for a while?”
Cunningham bowed his head reverently: “Lady Rebecca passed away three years before my father was born, My Lady, and Lord Alexander never saw fit to remarry. It has been cleaned and repaired on a regular basis, and the lightbulbs replaced, but the title was vacant for rather a long time before your husband petitioned for it.”
Eve had seen enough. “So … my husband’s suite, if you please?”
“Yes, My Lady.” Cunningham marched to a door disguised as a wall panel to one side of the canopy bed. “The connecting door,” he cleared his throat discreetly, “leads directly to the Baron’s bedchamber.”
Eve was struck by a strange conceit as she paused in the doorway. For a moment she imagined herself lying sprawled across the bed in a filmy peignoir, staring empty-headed at the ceiling when the door opened and someone lingered on the threshold. Droit du seigneur was a medieval urban legend, but coverture was anything but: the women who’d slept in this room had no legal right to resist their husband’s advances. Had the Ladies of Skaro been victims, quivering in fear of nightly violation? Or had they been joyful brides, shivering in delighted anticipation? There was so much history here it was making her queasy. Eve shuddered, and quickly followed the butler into Rupert’s bedroom.
The Master’s suite had been drastically remodeled, if not in a manner calculated to reassure a conjugal visitor. Rather than dark wooden antiques, it was dominated by carmine wallpaper and thick black carpet. Crimson velvet curtains flanked the picture windows, the radiators had been replaced by underfloor heating, and the TV opposite the bed was positively pornographic. A chrome trellis to one side offered a selection of Rupert’s favorite things: floggers, canes, ball gags, manacles, butt plugs, locking belts. She eyeballed the bed and was unsurprised to see attachment points for wrist and ankle restraints between the black silk sheets and pillows.
“En suite bath,” Cunningham murmured, “with the smaller fifty-five-inch home cinema—waterproof—and wet bar, also humidor, seating for seven, bidet, imported Japanese heated toilet seat with scented water jet, air drier, massager, walk-in monsoon shower, triple-nozzle enema machine with restraint chair…”
Eve didn’t blink—she already knew far more than she wanted to about Rupert’s sex life—but she felt a hot flush when she remembered she’d been unknowingly married to him for five years. It was like the uncomprehending double-take brought on by a sniper’s bullet that tugged at the edge of her sleeve rather than splitting her scalp. The only reasonable question was, why had fate ignored her?
“My brother can sleep in this suite,” she announced. “I’ll take the lady’s maid’s room for tonight. If you can provide a memory-foam mattress topper and a fresh duvet and pillows, that will suffice. Also a wifi login that works and has decent signal, even if you have to get Facilities to install an extra repeater for me? I will be working while I’m here.” She turned to look at the door opposite the one they’d entered by. “Is that his office?”
“Yes, My Lady.”
“Ma’am will do. Or”—a momentary hitch—“if you insist on formality, Mrs. Bigge.” For now, until I can get it annulled.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Cunningham opened the connecting door.
Eve’s first impression of Rupert’s office was that it was like his den back in the London headquarters, only built inside a modernized thirteenth-century castle rather than a modernized eighteenth-century town house. Broad French windows set back behind steel shutters, currently raised, provided access to an external terrace with low stone railings. The balcony overlooked the entire island. Inside, an ostentatiously large Admiralty desk with an office chair that probably cost as much as Rupert’s Aston Martin occupied the middle of the room; a green leather Chesterfield and coffee table were set off to one side for guests, the table positioned on top of a tigerskin rug with paws and head still attached. Typical Rupert, she thought contemptuously. The wall decorations included antique longswords and shields. There was a handmade globe in a wooden frame that doubled as a drinks cabinet—total cliché—also a sideboard, a filing cabinet, and an absolutely top-spec FruitCo desktop computer that looked as if it had never been switched on. Her lips curled in barely restrained scorn. The worst thing about Rupert was the banal predictability of his excess. The man somehow managed to combine monstrous appetites, an unhealthy lust for power, and a taste for disgusting occult rites, alongside the good taste of a dim-witted New York real estate mogul.
“All right.” She folded her arms. “Mr. Cunningham, please send my brother up here as soon as possible.”
“Yes, My Lady. Your—” the butler paused—“he really is your brother?”
“All families have black sheep,” she said lightly. “He has his occasional uses. We’ll be staying overnight: I brought a bag but he’ll need pajamas and a toothbrush, and the kitchen need to be informed. What time is dinner served?”
“Six thirty for seven o’clock, My Lady. If that’s everything…?”
“It is, for now.”
Eve waited while Cunningham bowed and retreated into the corridor, then took a deep breath. She crossed to Rupert’s desk and placed her briefcase in the middle of his tooled-leather blotter. Then she slowly turned in place, searching the walls for any clue as to where Rupert might have hidden his secrets.
Nothing in her first third of a century of life had prepared Mary to take custody of a fire team of pre-tween supervillains on a post-raid high. Dressing like a respectable nanny did not automagically confer nannying skills, it just made it easier to con people into thinking you had them. Mr. and Mrs. Banks had been easy enough to mislead with the aid of a little magic provided by the Boss, but she’d only had to fake them out for half an hour. Robert, Lyssa, Ethan, and Emily had brought on her first gray hairs already, and she had to keep them on lockdown for (she calculated) another hundred and sixty-two hours.
Daunting, that.
Fucknuts and fiddleshits, she swore silently as she smiled at the children and gave the taxi driver directions towards Chez Banks. Was it too early to put drugs in their cocoa, or should she hold that in reserve until tomorrow?
On the bright side: she’d worn her gloves all the time they’d been indoors, so no fingerprints. The children weren’t in the Disclosure and Barring Service’s database, or anywhere else the police might identify them from. A quick change of appearance and they could all disappear, as long as the cops didn’t catch them getting into the taxi. Using private CCTV to record in public spaces, like the pavement outside the shop you were licensed to surveil, was strictly illegal per the Data Protection Act, which the New Management had not yet gotten around to repealing. She’d relied on that quirk of the law many times to facilitate a clean getaway. Still: there was luck, and there was preparation, and Mary preferred to put her faith in the latter, because sooner or later luck always ran out and she had no desire to end up with her head on a pointy stick.
A mile from their destination, Mary clapped her hands and told her audience, “I know! Would you like to eat at McDonald’s?” Then before anybody had time to object, she hit the talk button and told the driver: “Change of plans, please drop us at the nearest McDonald’s.”
The Golden Arches weren’t crowded at this time of day, and Mary managed to corral the kids at a table and place an order without anybody abstracting the contents of a cash till. She paid for the meal with a couple of her bent banknotes5: McNuggets and a slow carb overdose all round, with Frozen Flurry McLiquisquits and Sprinkles for dessert. But she made sure to order only Coke Zero for the kids to drink. She didn’t want to have to deal with the consequences of a caffeine high on top of a sugar rush and a successful toy-shop heist before bedtime.
“This is great,” Robert said, wide-eyed, “Mum never lets us go to McDonald’s!”
“I’m not your mother, dear,” Mary said, smiling as benevolently as a minor devil who has just secured the lien on another soul.
“C’n I have the unicorn play set?” Lyssa wheedled: “Ethan doesn’t need—”
Ethan snarled possessively and curled his hands around the chunk of brightly colored plastic from his Happy Meal. “Mine!” The unicorn snickered appreciatively.
“What’s wrong with Marceline the Vampire Queen?” Mary asked hastily, then fingered the Boss’s amulet to give the idea a little extra sparkle. Marceline had come with Lyssa’s Adventure Time–themed Happy Meal. The little girl’s breath caught momentarily as she reached lovingly for the toy. I wonder if I overdid it? Mary asked herself. The amulet had been calibrated for adult attitude adjustment. But moments later another squabble broke out—it seemed that Emily, too, wanted a magical riot police unicorn play set—and sooner rather than later they were done.
“Now come along, children, it’s time to go home!” Mary’s smile was fixed and weary by this point, although it was barely four o’clock. But she had to keep up the pretense, at least for now: “There’ll be more playtime before supper, and tomorrow I’ve got a special surprise for you!”
That evening, she tucked the twins up and read them a bedtime story. (Lemony Snicket’s The Bad Beginning might be age-inappropriate, but Mary thought it was fucking hilarious under the circumstances.) Then she supervised Lyssa and Robert as they washed and dried the dishes in return for the promise of an hour of unsupervised computer time. Finally, with the kids sorted for the night, Mary stood on the front porch with the outer door open, smoking a menthol cigarette and waiting for the Boss to answer the dog and bone.
“Mary,” the Boss said warmly, “’ad a good day, ’ave we? What’s tricks?”
Mary blew a weary smoke ring and sighed. “You ’ave no fucking idea.” It was easy to slip back into her native accent when she wasn’t on high alert. “Kids.”
The Boss chuckled. “You’ll change your mind when they’re yer own…” Mary’s reply was an extended scatological rant. When she ran out of invective, the Boss continued: “So ’ow’s it really going?”
“The rug rats are transhuman! Jesus fuck, I nearly shat myself when I found out. The five-year-old girl’s a plant whisperer and ’er twin brother is a toy animator. The nine-year-old girl’s got mind control, and I’m not sure about her big brother, but that’s not good news either, he’s got a talent, too, he’s just better at hiding it. If they sus me I’m screwed.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and held it, staring at her shaking hand. “I’m out of my weight class. If they were adults, or if they get a clue—”
“Relax, they won’t. You got through the first day, didn’t you?”
“It almost got away from me.” She shuddered, remembering the acrid smell of burning powder and the hammering recoil, the screams of onlookers and the jingling heft of Lyssa’s stolen lucre landing in her capacious messenger bag. “I took ’em to a toy shop and it went sideways at a thousand miles an hour. I swear they’ll be the death of me.”
“So don’t do that again.” The Boss was matter-of-fact. His accent sharpened, poshing up as he asserted status: “We live and learn, and we learn to do better as long as we live. That which does not kill us makes us stronger: Nietzsche. And if it was an easy gig I wouldn’t have sent it your way, know what I mean?”
“I don’t think the Filth made me,” she breathed out slowly. “Not this time.”
“You know the plan: stick with it and you’ll be fine.”
“Yeah.” She glanced sideways at the door behind which Robert was happily slaughtering NPCs while Lyssa tortured her collection of Bratz, or whatever Princess Sparkle-Shoggoth got up to when nobody was watching. “Operation Magical Mystery Tour is in effect.” She bent her right knee and stubbed her cigarette out on the sole of her granny boot.
“Friday, Mary.” The Boss’s chuckle had a hard edge to it this time. “Just keep your shit together for a week and we’re square. Just don’t fuck up, yeah? One million in medical cover and I take care of all your old man’s debts. Don’t let me down.”
“Fuck,” she breathed as the Boss hung up. She repeated the word several times as she leaned her forehead against the door and punched the brick wall, not quite hard enough to hurt her gloved fist. The Boss was an expert, that much was true: he knew how to use the carrot and the stick, alternating them to keep her off-balance. The Boss wanted the children out of the picture and out of their home within twenty-four hours of her arrival, and under control for another six days while he did—something—that required the unspeakable pressure of a professional kidnapping applied to their desperate parents. Mary’s conscience wasn’t usually a sticking point, but she was reasonably certain he’d give the wee ones back at the end of the week. He had kids of his own, after all. But in the meantime, he’d have Captain Colossal and the Blue Queen totally panicking, frantic with grief and desperation. Mary was under no illusions: he’d set her up as the cutout, the quick-blow fuse. She was a casual employee, no benefits or points in the operation, a gig economy fall-girl working on the supervillain equivalent of a zero-hour contract, strong-armed into doing one last job because her dad was Expensive and she wasn’t making enough dosh to keep them both afloat any other way.
Just got to get through six more days of this shit, she told herself: then you can find a real job. Buy a car and drive for Uber or something. She took a deep, pissed-off breath of chilly nighttime air and went back inside, to pack the children’s luggage for the morning flit.
Castle Skaro put Imp in mind of that one time he had done ’shrooms and cuddled up with Doc Depression on the carnivorous sofa in the living room. They’d fast-forwarded through an entire season of Downton Abbey at three times normal speed while making out. Castle Skaro especially reminded him of the sequence common to every Edwardian costume drama, where all of Below Stairs turned out in the courtyard to meet the new lady of the house when she arrived for the first time: except that thanks to the ’shrooms their heads had been enfolded in a peace-colored aura, and the clouds in the slate-gray winter sky spelled love.
Imp had dropped something naughty into his single malt aboard the chopper to help with the stress. Really, he was nobody’s idea of an Edwardian heroine, or even a Regency one. That was Eve’s forte, wasn’t it? But she’d delegated it to him, right after she guilt-tripped him for signing the piece of paper that had made her Lady Skaro—lah de dah!—and because she obviously didn’t want anything to do with Rupert’s legacy, he did his best to deliver.
Imp nodded politely, shook every hand he was offered, and confined himself to the occasional innocent and entirely nonconfrontational question such as “Where exactly is the family burial crypt—is it under the chapel or the wine cellar?” and “Do you think a Roomba would help with that?”
After three-quarters of an hour the queue or receiving line or punishment gauntlet had barely shortened to a fraction of its original length and the housekeeper’s expression had hardened from talc to granite. Then he was rescued by the butler, who materialized from a side-door next to the giant Gothic archway. “Mr. Starkey? Your sister requests your presence in his Lordship’s office. Sybil, I think Mr. Starkey is finished for the time being—”
Mr. Cunningham steered Imp up the front steps, along an oak-panelled hallway that looked like a firetrap in waiting, and up enough stairs that his well-lubricated kneecaps felt as if they were about to fall off by the time he reached the top. He managed to cease saying “Delighted,” and “I’m sure,” and handshaking the air after a couple of minutes. Then he pinched himself and glanced at Cunningham. “What’s all this about, then?” he asked sharply.
“I really couldn’t possibly say, sir—” Cunningham was as imperturbable as a main battle tank—“but your sister requested your presence. She also said that you would be staying overnight. Dinner en famille commences with drinks in the east dining room at six, food being served at seven. It’s a formal occasion, but—” he looked down his nose at Imp—“I’m sure we can find something suitable for you to wear. Should you choose to return to Castle Skaro, an appointment with a tailor can be arranged, given a little advance notice.”
Did he just harsh my fashion edge? Imp asked himself, just as his other inner voice said, If an informal family dinner is black tie, what happens when the Baron is in residence? “Shake it ’til you fake it, baby,” he muttered. (Or was it Shake it ’til you make it?) “Don’t mind me, I might be stoned.” Oops, there went his internal filter.
“Our criminal code predates the steam locomotive, never mind the Misuse of Drugs Act, sir,” Cunningham murmured. “Hemp and laudanum are perfectly legal, merely frowned upon in polite society. This way, please.” He led Imp along a passageway that pulsated in time with his breathing, then knocked on a heavy wooden door, waited three heartbeats, and opened it. “My Lady? Your brother, as requested.”
Imp found Eve cracking the safe in the Evil Overlord’s den. At least, that’s how he interpreted her delicate finger gestures and the squint she directed at the lock. The Evil Overlord bit was blatantly obvious, thanks to the baroque excesses of an interior designer who clearly hated their client and wanted to make him look like a fool. Wards glowed pale blue atop the Hammerite surface of the safe door—the blue of instant death, if Imp’s inner eye was to be trusted. Even the walls seemed to be holding their breath. “Whoa, sis,” he burbled softly.
“Stand back,” Eve warned, her lips a bloodless line of concentration. There was a click, then the safe door slowly swung open. The wards quenched with a sullen hiss as she gasped for air and straightened up, dabbing her forehead. “What time is it?”
“It’s—” Imp checked his phone. “Two o’clock?”
“Okay. Let me explain why you’re here.” Eve glanced at Cunningham: “Fetch us a carafe of coffee, a couple of mugs, and a jug of cream. Then see to it that we’re not disturbed for the next two hours.”
“My Lady.” Cunningham made himself scarce.
“Right,” Imp tried again. “So what’s this about?”
“Semiotic minefield clearance.” Eve pointed at the filing cabinet and the open safe. “There is good news that is also terrible, bad, no-good news, depending how you look at it. The wards on Rupe’s safes respond to me because I’m his feme covert: magic runs on the laws of sympathy and contagion, Rupe’s geas leverages the marriage contract to turn me into an extension of his body, and all the other enchantments agree. The hardest bit was picking up the wheels by telekinesis without breaking the safety tab and jamming the fence, because Rupe was exactly the kind of asshole who would have a Group One lock with an added fail-secure mechanism and a magical booby trap on top. These documents are his crown jewels, the stuff he kept only on paper and outside of UK jurisdiction. But—” she held up a warning finger—“it’s possible he anticipated someone might crack the safe, and he’s the kind of asshole who would leave another trap inside it, just in case. Death spells, curses, that sort of thing. Given he was at least one jump ahead of me and I never noticed—” her expression was distraught—“it’s also possible that he anticipated that I might get in here, so there could be instructions that will trigger the geas.
“Anyway, we’re going to go through the documents in the safe first, and the filing cabinet second, and sort them—I have a spreadsheet. Here’s the most powerful ward I could bake for you at short notice. Wear it constantly and you should be safe.” She passed him a cheap-looking necklace. “I want you to check each and every page for anything addressed to me, or anything that looks like it’s a basilisk.” A trigger for a hidden fatal spell, in other words. “Once we’re reasonably confident they’re safe, I’ll scan them for analysis back home in London.” She gestured at the duplex document scanner she’d parked on Rupert’s desk.
“Yeah, right.” Imp grimaced at the open safe. “Aside from booby traps, what are we looking for, again?”
“If there’s any way to invalidate the marriage or break the geas it’ll be in here somewhere, and I need it. Otherwise I’m not safe. He could have left instructions behind for me, hidden in his ordinary files, or sitting in a computer’s calendar, waiting to ambush me at some future date. Also, he’s not above blackmail. I need to know I’m immune to his compulsions before I go looking for dirt that could hang us all if it gets out.”
“What a mess. Okay.” Imp sat down heavily on the sofa. There was a discreet knock at the door and a maid bustled in, carrying a silver salver loaded with refreshments. They waited in silence as she placed it on a side-table, depressed the plunger on the cafetière, and left. After she closed the door Imp took a deep breath and then asked, “How long are we staying?”
“As long as the job takes. Why?”
“Your man said dinner is at six, and it’s a formal affair. We’ve only got four hours…”
“Less: we need to dress first before dinner.” She smiled thinly. “This is your chance to see how the other half lives—I’m sure you can use it as research for one of your movie projects. So get to work.” She handed him the first ring binder from the safe, careful not to accidentally glimpse its title before he searched it for occult landmines.
That evening, the Deliverator cycled across central London. Arriving at a run-down HMO, she dismounted and pushed one of the entryphone buttons. “Wendy? It’s me.”
There was a buzz and a click. “Come on up.” Wendy’s voice sounded scratchy. Del carried her cycle indoors and chained it to the bannisters, then climbed the stairs. Wendy was waiting in her doorway. “Becca.” She smiled tiredly. “You came.”
“I came,” Del—Rebecca—agreed. “You look like shit, girl. What happened?”
“Nothing—to me. I just got handed a new assignment.”
“You go, girl! That’s gr—” Del skidded to a halt as she took in Wendy’s dishevelment. “What?”
“It sucks and it’s horrible,” said Wendy. “Come in, I need to get drunk and I don’t want to do it alone.” She backed into her room, beckoning. Del followed her and swung the door shut. Wendy was wearing a sweatshirt up top but only briefs below, and she had an open can of IPA in her free hand.
“Just started?” Del asked.
“Near enough.” Wendy pulled another can out of the fridge and passed it to her, then flopped down on her futon. “Sláinte.” She shifted over to give Del room to sit, which she did, then cracked her beer.
“So, what’s so bad about this job?”
“I can’t tell—oh.” Wendy shook her head. “The fuck: old habits die hard? It got drummed into me, you never talk about an investigation with MOPs—members of public—it could tip off a subject, prejudice a jury, run the Met’s reputation into the shit, yadda yadda. Only I’m not a cop any more and the Met’s rep is craptastic anyway. I’m not supposed to talk about thief-taker ops outside the firm, but since—did you sign the background check waiver yet?” Del nodded—“Then I figure you’re thinking about taking the job, and I don’t know all the deets yet anyway, and what I don’t know I can’t tell you so fuck—” She took another mouthful of beer and choked.
Del thumped her on the back, then held Wendy while she spluttered. She waited the gasps out, waited as they threatened to turn into hiccups. Finally Wendy regained control over her rebellious diaphragm. Del leaned back, pulling Wendy against her so that they sprawled cheek to cheek. At last Wendy stilled.
“Want to talk about it?” Del asked softly.
“The law.” Wendy shuddered for a moment. “The law is supposed to treat everyone alike. Doesn’t matter who you are, you’ve got a right to the law’s protection. That’s what I believe and that’s why I went into the force. Equal before the law is kind of a touchstone, you know? Even though if you’re rich enough to afford a good barrister you can get away with a lot…”
“Equal?” Del caught her eye. “Equal?”
“I—oh.” Abashed, Wendy shook her head. “No, I get it, I’m saying that’s how it’s supposed to work, not how it works in practice. The color of your skin shouldn’t have anything to do with it. That shit is wrong, and besides, it’s illegal—”
“—It’s illegal when an individual cop beats up a black man or arrests a black woman but somehow nobody ever gets sent to the nick for it,” Del commented, “least not in my memory.”
Wendy sighed. “That’s on the IPCC—” the Independent Police Complaints Commission—“It’s hard to fix institutional prejudice in a bureaucracy, let alone in an algorithm, is what I’m saying. But the thing is, we—I mean, the police—they’re supposed to treat everyone equally. At least in this country. Even if they fail more often than not.”
Del turned her head just far enough aside that Wendy couldn’t see her roll her eyes. She riffled Wendy’s hair with one hand, fine strands that fell naturally straight. She bit her tongue, not trusting herself to say anything that wasn’t some variation of And it took you this long to figure it out? It wasn’t exactly Wendy’s fault that she was white, full of unexamined privilege, and having trouble wrapping her head around how her world looked from the outside. Del sighed. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure. But there’s a serial killer—” Del sat bolt upright as Wendy continued, too wrapped in her internal focus to notice her alarm—“and the Met aren’t allowed to investigate, and the only reason anything is being done about it is that a supermarket is worried about contaminated produce and wants it tidied up before anybody notices.”
“The fuck?”
Wendy tightened her grip around Del’s waist. Another shudder ran through her frame. After a second, Del realized that Wendy was sobbing, silently and angrily.
Wendy shook her head. “I’m just … just getting it out of my system now so I can be professional about it tomorrow.”
“What the fuck?” Del was unable to wrap her mind around it. Who the hell doesn’t investigate a serial killer? “Is it a creepy rich billionaire dude?” Visions of American Psycho danced in her head, followed by Imp’s big sister’s shadowy boss.
“The victims were all de-emphasized.” Wendy made air-quotes with the fingers of her free hand. “Fuck.”
“What—but they don’t—”
“They disappeared. Except for DNA traces.” Wendy repeated an abbreviated version of Gibson’s briefing. “The de-emphasized don’t get police protection. They’ve reintroduced actual no-shit outlawry.”
“Like Robin Hood?”
“No, not like Robin Hood. Outlaws are persons outside the law, you can set fire to them in their sleeping bag in front of the nick and the worst thing that’d happen to you is the duty officer will ticket you for littering. Maybe arson if they’re having a shitty day and don’t like your face.” Wendy took a deep breath. “I didn’t see this coming, I truly didn’t and I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
Del was working through it slowly. “Fucksake, this is worse than Hostile Environment.”
“No shit.” Wendy took another breath and struggled upright, still leaning on Del’s shoulder. “Seven dead and they handed me the investigation because I’ve got some detective training and the client wants it swept under the rug, not because they want justice for the dead—”
Del stared out the window overlooking the high street as she stroked Wendy’s back in soothing circles. “You’ll give them justice,” she reassured her. Wendy nodded. Del turned and kissed her forehead. “Is your tinny empty?” she asked.
Wendy up-ended the can into her mouth. “It is now.”
“Well.” Del necked her beer, burped, then chucked both the empties in the bin. “How about a smoke?” she offered, reaching for her stash.
“Can’t: got a scheduled piss-test coming up—”
“What? Since when do HiveCo Security do piss-tests? Why wasn’t I—”
“It’s the supermarket, not HiveCo. Boss man wants me to go undercover for a couple of weeks, and stacking shelves in a supermarket requires a certificate that you’re drug-free. Even though punching supervillains doesn’t.”
“You’re going to be working undercover?” Del stood and took another couple of beers from the fridge. “That definitely calls for another beer.”
“Back in a sec.” Wendy sighed, then stood up and ducked out to the bathroom along the hall.
Del shoved the unopened cans back in the fridge as Wendy returned: “I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “Sitting around getting drunk is no good for you. Get your glad rags on: we’re going clubbing.”
“Who the fuck is the Mute Poet?” asked Imp.
He was sitting cross-legged on the Chesterfield sofa, reading—not skimming—the contents of a folder Eve had handed him from the top shelf in the safe. Something about his tone instantly set her on full alert. “What have you found?” she asked.
“This is—” Imp shook his head. “No basilisks, I don’t think,” he said. They’d been at the task for a few hours and they were both getting punch-drunk from proofreading. The pile of papers Eve had already scanned to PDFs on her laptop was almost twenty centimeters deep and the computer’s fan was whirring loudly as it indexed the text. “It’s, uh, a service of worship? The Dark Matins, definitely not Christian-adjacent going by the bits in Enochian.”
Eve sniffed, feeling a momentary pang of nostalgia. They’d learned the language of magic together at Dad’s knee, back when the world was a happier place. Then what her brother had said caught up with her. “Enochian? Did you say, Mute Poet?” Imp nodded. “Oh dear…” She trailed off. “Is there a list of names in that file by any chance?”
“What?” Imp looked puzzled, then began to flip through the file rapidly. “Yes, yes there is—holy shit, holy shit.” He began to rock back and forth above the file, hyperventilating as he gripped its cover. “We are so fucked!”
“Jerm. Talk to me.” Eve leaned over him. “Slowly! Breathe. Hold it … breathe again. And hold.”
“It’s a fucking cult. One of the cults Dad warned us about. Isn’t it? And it’s here? In the castle? We are so fucked!”
“Calm down, Jeremy.” Eve massaged his shoulders. “Let me see the list.” He turned the file to face her, and she looked at it. In pride of place, at the head of the first column, was a distressingly familiar name. “Right, so what we have here is the membership of a church. One where … apparently Rupert de Montfort Bigge was rather higher up than I thought? Also it’s a lot bigger than I realized. How inconvenient! Calm down, there’s no need to panic yet.” She pressed down harder on his shoulders, trying to calm him. Perhaps the second cup of coffee had been a mistake.
“Did you know about this, sis?” he demanded.
Eve bit her lower lip. “Not exactly, but I don’t think there are any accidental coincidences here. I knew Rupert was up to his elbows in something dodgy involving sacrifices and a chapel in the basement, but I wasn’t invited to participate. I thought it was fifty-fifty whether it was a stupid secret society or an actual cult, but it didn’t look like the sort of thing Mum was—but no. I was wrong,” she admitted.
Rupert had presented to her as a poor excuse for a sorcerer: haphazard, slapdash, and weak. But now she was beginning to suspect that he had been stronger and more secretive than she’d realized. Having a congregation and a patron demiurge on whom to focus their prayers was a thaumaturgic force-multiplier. Even a shitty sorcerer could wield the delegated power of a godlike entity with deadly effect, as long as he didn’t burn himself out by accident. It was like working on a live high-tension line: if you were aware of the risks and had the correct equipment, you didn’t necessarily have to set fire to your own nostril hairs. “So what else have we got?”
It turned out they’d hit the mother lode: the core membership list, liturgy, password to some sort of concealed reading room in the library, and a calendar for sacrifices to be conducted in the crypt below the chapel. It gave them everything except next Sunday’s sermon and the keys to the communion wine cupboard. “Well,” said Eve, “well, well, well.” What the hell was Rupe doing, committing this stuff to writing? She could hazard a guess. The risk of the New Management ever reaching its tentacles into Castle Skaro and cracking Rupe’s safe was negligible: if they did, the shit had already hit the fan and Rupe was a dead man. But the sacrifices …
“Hedge Fund Haruspicy Best Practices,” Imp mumbled, going slightly green about the gills. “What the hell is an Offshore Summoning Vehicle? Or a Damned Soul Default Swap?”
“You don’t want to know,” Eve said grimly. Haruspicy was oracular divination by examining the entrails of sacrifices. “Let’s scan this last file and put the completed ones back in the safe. Then I want to check out the family chapel before we dress for dinner.”
“But I don’t want to—” Imp saw her expression and shut up.
“I’m sure Mr. Cunningham will happily show us the ropes once you give him a little push.” Eve hardened her heart. Most of the time she went easy on her brother, but right now the situation called for ruthless control.
“He’d love to show us the chains and the manacles and the altar while we’re down there, too,” he said gloomily.
“Yes, but afterwards you’ll make sure our little tour completely slips his mind. And we’ll discuss what to do with whatever we find there after dinner.”
“I hope you’re carrying some ibuprofen, because I’m going to have a Godzilla-sized headache.”
Instead of a bell-pull there was a discreet intercom by the door. Mr. Cunningham was clearly waiting nearby, because he arrived within seconds. “You called, My Lady?”
“Yes.” Eve stalked towards him: “My brother was expressing an interest in seeing the family chapel. Can you take us down there? Just to see where it is, pay our respects to the last Lord and Lady Skaro, nothing to worry about—”
The butler’s face paled, but Imp cut in: “She is your Lord’s wife,” Imp murmured, gurning hideously as he shoved will-to-believe into Cunningham’s brain like a bog brush down a blocked U-bend. “She needs to make obeisance and ensure that the mysteries are correctly observed before the next Dark Matins—when does it fall, by the way?—”
“Next Tuesday,” Cunningham wheezed, “but I must say, you can’t just—”
“—Oh yes I can.” Eve glowered at the butler. Years of dealing with reluctant employees on Rupert’s behalf made it easy to overwhelm: “I am Lady Skaro, lawfully wedded wife—” the words almost choked her—“of Rupert de Montfort Bigge, Baron Skaro, an initiate of the third degree in our Silent Lord’s service. I have every right to inspect the chapel where I was married, and I will personally cut the tongue out of the mouth of anyone who naysays me.” She produced an ice queen smile so chilly that it probably violated Disney’s copyright on Maleficent (her onetime childhood crush); she told herself it was a bluff, it was probably a bluff, but if she didn’t believe in herself nobody else would. Meanwhile her head pounded with the overspill from Imp’s believe-me mojo as her brother forced the butler to bend.
Cunningham was surprisingly resilient, and not because he was warded. Something had sunk its roots deep inside Cunningham’s soul and really did not want Eve to intrude. “You will obey!” she insisted, and felt Imp reinforcing her command. A moment of anxiety threatened her resolve: Cunningham wasn’t young and they were pushing him really hard—she’d have to stop soon or risk injuring him. She began to move her fingertips behind her back, shaping the strokes of a symbol that would trigger a macro—a pre-prepared spell—that would forcibly bind him using her connection to Rupert. It was an option that made her skin crawl, for if she used it she would also embed the barbs of Rupert’s command geas deeper into her own soul, but it was better than inflicting a heart attack.
“I…” Cunningham choked convulsively, his face turning puce before he gabbled, “I obey! Mistress! I obey! Please, no more, please don’t hurt me—”
Phew. “Deep breaths, Mr. Cunningham, deep breaths. There, there: nothing to fret about, everything is going to be fine.” Imp walked around them, keeping the pressure up, frowning in obvious discomfort.
“Take us to the chapel,” Eve said quietly, “and we can get this small unpleasantness over with. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Take us there now and get it done.” Cunningham drooled slightly, more than somewhat glassy eyed: he didn’t reply. Behind the butler, Imp winced. “Are you all right?” Eve asked him.
Imp mustered up a wan smile. “Been better.”
“Well, try not to throw up on the tiger skin rug, those things are hard to clean,” she said tartly, trying to distract him. Hard-shell Eve was necessary. If hard-shell Eve cracked in the next few hours—if Eve lost her shit for even a microsecond before they were ready to retreat back to London—they’d be in deadly danger. Cunningham wasn’t the only resident of Skaro on the Cult of the Mute Poet’s roster, and she had no intention of allowing the congregation to go all Wicker Man on her and Imp.
Jeremy wasn’t the only one of them who looked close to throwing up. Eve wasn’t feeling that great herself—her stomach was in turmoil and her forehead pounded—and Mr. Cunningham looked as if he’d just found Colonel Mustard in the Library with a dagger in his back. But the epic battle of wills against whatever had bound the butler to obedience was receding, and she’d clearly won: Cunningham swayed slightly, then strode off down the corridor without a backwards glance.
Imp waved at Eve. “Pearls before swine?”
She nodded at his suggestion, then hurried after the butler. As she did so, she wrapped her telekinetic fingers around the pearls at her throat. They were more expensive than glass marbles—her practice ammunition of choice—but the beauty of a pearl choker was that nobody objected to a well-dressed woman’s jewelry. She could wear a string of 9mm ball ammunition through airport security and nobody would stop her, as long as they looked shiny and expensive.
The ageing butler led them down a less-travelled hallway lined with stiffly formal portraits of lords and ladies, set in dusty rococo frames between threadbare wall tapestries. They came to a side-door that opened onto a narrow, spiraling stairwell that corkscrewed down into the depths of the castle. The stone steps were worn and concave, the footing treacherous. Eve silently cursed her heels as they descended: she’d dressed for the boardroom that morning, not anticipating a dungeon crawl before dinner. The stairs led down to a warren of bare-walled passages and pantries, then back into a darkened formal hallway, its furniture swathed in dust sheets. Finally Cunningham stopped at a locked door. It looked as ancient as the spiral staircase, but the lock and the hinges were recently oiled.
By Eve’s estimate they were well below the level of the helipad. “How deep does this go, and how extensive are the tunnels?” she asked as Cunningham took an LED camping lantern from a shelf, then ushered them through the door and down another staircase, this one windowless and straight.
“It … depends which part of the castle you mean, I suppose.” He sounded dazed. “This section dates to the fourteenth century. The Nazis built bunkers on the other side of Skaro during the occupation, but they don’t connect to the castle catacombs. At least, I don’t think they connect. There may be some smugglers’ tunnels leading to the harbor. But this is the shortest route to the underchapel without passing through the dungeons, which are best avoided.”
“So. Oubliettes, underground chapels, burial vaults, and presumably a wine cellar, but if we want to visit the secret Nazi bunkers we have to go outside, do I have that right?” Imp asked.
Eve tried not to roll her eyes: men. It was all just one big adventure comic to her brother. Totally the wrong attitude to take when you were stranded overnight in a medieval castle full of demented cultists who worshipped the gruesome undead god of your debauched husband by proxy marriage. “Tell me about the chapel,” she nudged.
“The chapel dates to the thirteenth century. It used to be at ground level, but when the motte was expanded and faced with stone it remained in situ, adjacent to the stables, which were converted into cellarage. A new chapel was built aboveground after the Black Death, during the latter half of the fourteenth century—they needed somewhere to keep the bones, the existing charnel house being full. The Earl of Guernsey converted to Protestantism during the Reformation but during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms the Protectorate ordered the castle slighted and the chapel—being seen by Cromwell’s men as a suspiciously Catholic place of worship—took the worst of it. When the walls were restored after the Glorious Revolution, the Skaro family—who had quietly maintained their ancestral faith throughout their exile—continued to hold mass underground…” Cunningham droned on for several minutes like the tour guide from hell, but Eve was clear on the gist of the story: ancient stones buried by time, lotsa battles, cultists worshipping underground in secret, the same old same old.
“Tell me, where does, did, the Skaro family hail from? Did you say the castle was built by the Earl of Guernsey, not Baron Skaro?”
“Oh, the Guernseys were good Norman stock, ma’am! Roots all the way back to the Conquest. But they ran awful thin after Bloody Mary burned half of them at the stake, and then the Duchy used the vacant title to raise capital. The treasury was bare from all the wars in the seventeenth century—they brought in a distant relative who married the only surviving daughter, heiress to the barony, and the title passed down to their descendants. He was a Baronet, not a full Baron, but that’s the Duchy for you, always doing things differently from the mainland, and they effectively sold him the Baronial title, which set a precedent. Anyway he married a local girl and went native and they were already secret Catholics anyway, so what difference did it make?”
They came to a vestibule where Eve took careful note of another staircase, as Cunningham swung open the final door. “So this is your family chapel, My Lady! Dedicated to Saint Ppilimtec, patron of writers—Saint David, patron of poets—” Eve jolted to attention but the butler didn’t seem to notice anything wrong—“behold. Is this what you needed to see?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “I really think it is.” It was just a small, low-ceilinged chapel, illuminated by stark, overhead fluorescent tubes. There were enough pews for at least two dozen family and staff, an altar bearing the usual accoutrements and ritual objects, a pair of stained-glass windows backlit by spotlights in lieu of daylight—all told, there was nothing particularly weird about it except for Cunningham’s glitch. Saint Ppilimtec. “Is that the vestry?” she asked, pointing to a side-door.
“That’s just a storage closet, My Lady, the chapel isn’t large enough to justify a full-time parson and a vestry. See?” The butler opened the door and gestured at the shallow shelves inside. “Nothing to see here,” he explained. “Now—” he made a show of checking his wristwatch—“if I may make so bold, the dinner hour is fast approaching and your brother needs appropriate attire. If you would care to follow me…?”
“You are an utter, utter tool, darling,” Jennifer snarled sweetly as she stepped around the man trussed to the steel-framed chair in the attic above Loading Bay Six. “What are you, darling?”
“An—” he swallowed—“utter, utter tool, Miss.” He slurred slightly: his dentition needed some reconstructive work.
Jennifer beamed. Her teeth flashed highlights from the single warehouse floodlight illuminating him in the midst of the darkened room. “Would you like Rick and Morty to remind you what you did wrong one more time?”
Adrian Hewitt took in the figures standing at parade rest behind her and swallowed again. A trickle of blood leaked from the side of his mouth.
“Well?”
“No, Miss.”
Rick and Morty gave no sign of caring what Adrian Hewitt wanted. They were as expressionless and unreadable as mummified corpses—which, after a fashion, they were. They stood swathed in white Lycra bodysuits that covered them from head to toe. Aside from their name badges only their faces distinguished them, and then only up to a point: they wore e-ink death masks displaying the Company Face, a beneficent computer-generated image intended to respond appropriately to the emotional cues of whoever the wearer was dealing with. Or, in Ade’s case, a pair of silently screaming skulls: evidently the Branch Computer was very displeased.
“Good. Just bear in mind that if you fuck up again you’ll join the muppets on the night shift.”
Adrian swallowed, his mouth dry with fear. His ribs were on fire and his face felt as if he’d been hit repeatedly with a meat tenderizer, which was indeed one of the tasks muppets sufficed for. Jennifer hadn’t laid a finger on him, but Rick and Morty were obedient and tireless—strong and silent by design.
He’d had a hand in creating Rick and Morty (acting on Jennifer’s orders, although pointing that out seemed unlikely to help right now). Muppets were meat puppets, built to carry out basic instructions and point the Company Face at MOPs. They were improving with each iterative upgrade: he’d managed to get five viable units out of the last test subject, and these two were probably good for another couple of weeks before they needed to be hosed down the drain.
“… However, it seems to me that putting you on the night shift would be a waste of your talents,” Jennifer mused aloud. “All that very expensive and specialized training, gone!” She walked behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’d need a new operator. Our numbers in this city are few, and the Bishop isn’t answering my emails. It appears that we are flying blind, working our Lord’s will in isolation. So you are a very, very lucky tool of the Lord, Adrian. Kiss-kiss!”
She leaned close and smacked her lips millimeters away from his unclipped ear. Ade cringed away in a full-body shudder. Jenn giggled as she tugged him back upright, careful not to get blood on her suit.
“Now listen,” she explained. “Adrian Hewitt is dead to FlavrsMart. He can’t go back. He can’t work anywhere else, either: it’s on your permanent, transferrable personnel record, sweetie. If I edit it, someone might notice. And if I faked up another identity and you went back to work on the counter, Gladys would throw a fit. I’d have to replace the entire front-of-store staff, and that simply isn’t going to happen in the middle of a recruiting freeze. So we’ll have to try something else. Nod if you understand me.”
Adrian nodded enthusiastically. She seemed to expect it: and right now he was all in favor of not defying Jennifer’s expectations.
“Jolly good! So … it happens that there is a way to get you back into a position where you can continue to serve our Mute Lord. But certain compromises must be made—mostly on your side. I can hide you among the night shift muppets rather than turning you into one—as long as you’re discreet and nobody spots you.”
The night shift had started out as living bodies sent over by the Department for Work and Pensions on compulsory workfare placements. They were benefit claimants who’d been sanctioned (or just gotten unlucky) once too often. The HR protocol was harsh but simple. Give them a zentai bodysuit, a randomized name badge to wear, and the Company Face—anesthetize their larynx and gag them, so that if anything emerged from their mouth in front of a customer it would be Cortana speaking, not the wit and wisdom of a random prole—and they could stack boxes. At least, that was how things had started out. The truth these days was somewhat different. The payroll didn’t go into any dolie scum’s pocket, where it might be wasted on cigarettes or food or rent. Instead it went straight into the Order’s coffers and contributed to the operating expenses of the research and development program Jennifer oversaw and Ade executed. Just as the workfare bodies listed in the payroll database now contributed to the grand cause in death, whether or not they’d have been willing to do so in life.
“I’ll get you a suit and a Company Face, and you can overhaul the butcher line and printers anonymously. The night shift won’t care, and the deli counter staff won’t give you any trouble.” That much she was in a position to guarantee. “I’ve arranged for deep freeze four to be listed as offline for repairs indefinitely—unavailable parts—and you can install a sofa bed and television for all I care. It’s soundproof and lockable so nobody will bother you during the day. Take your meals from the expired stack out by the dumpsters. Just keep a list and I’ll have it written down as shrinkage.”
“But…” Whatever protest was brewing died in Ade’s mouth, unvoiced, as he met Jennifer’s excitedly deranged stare.
“I’m going to hire someone to ‘replace’ you—” she mimed air-quotes around the word—“someone totally unqualified who won’t ask any questions for fear of losing the job. It’s only for the next month or so, until the takeover is complete. Afterwards you won’t need to hide: our Lord’s will be done.” She paused. “By the way, why did you do it?”
“She was so beautiful!” Ade slurred. “You should have seen her—”
“I did see, and so did everybody else. If you’d got her properly dressed—” in a zentai suit—“and waited until after the Rite I could have covered for you. Nobody notices a necrophile at work if their meat’s still moving. But you need to be more discreet. I can’t give you another chance if you fuck up again.” She stepped in close and touched his chin, tilting his head up: “Do you understand, Ade? I’m giving you this second chance because our Lord is merciful and beneficent, but if you screw up again he will not be pleased, and I won’t be able to save you from the flowery path.”
“I … understand.” Ade swallowed.
“Good.” Jennifer smiled again. “Now I’ll just fetch you a couple of codeine tablets from the pharmacy and you’ll be right as rain in half an hour! You can have a good think about what I said, spend tonight in soul-searching and prayer, and in the morning I’ll show you to your cell so you can catch up on your sleep. You’ll be right as rain and back at work by this time tomorrow night! And if you’re really good I might even help you reanimate your next girlfriend.”