Chapter Seven
Seven
“Garner. What is it?”
The same gruff Lancastrian voice, roughened over long seasons of cheap whisky and cigarettes and rain, and not very interested in hearing whatever the person on the other end of the line had to say.
Duncan grinned at the sound, crimped the phone against his ear with one shoulder while he rummaged in a drawer for more aspirin.
“Garner, you old bastard. It’s Duncan. How you keeping?”
“I’m a year older than when we last spoke and no better for it. Aching joints and scars and the same bad back. What do tha want, lad?”
“Maybe some advice. Might be across in your neck of the woods soon, thought I could pick your brains before I do that.”
Long pause. Duncan found his aspirin and sat up straighter in his chair.
“Something wrong with that idea?” he asked softly.
“If you mean neck of the woods literally, then aye, lad, there’s summat wrong with that idea. Happen it’ll get thee killed.”
“More than it usually might, you mean?”
“Aye, more than it usually might, Mr. Pulp Hero.” Garner’s trademark sarcasm coming over oddly restrained this time.
“The Huldu are reet stirred up over here at the minute. We’re three woodsmen down in the last month alone.
A couple of them I knew, and they were canny lads.
Years in the business. Not the sort to make stupid mistakes. ”
Duncan frowned. “When you say down? You mean declared missing, or—”
“I mean impaled alive on conjured fire-thorn right in the tree line, left there to scream and bleed out so folk come running to find them. Took more than a whole day and night in one case, no way to get the poor bastard free. Someone had to put a .303 in his head in the end, he were begging for it. That’s messages sent, lad—messages to stay out.
Does that paint a clear enough picture for thee? ”
He supposed Garner was angry and trying to unload some of it, to shake him by forcing a shared revulsion.
A small part of him even wished it would work.
But he’d heard men out in No Man’s Land die as slow, more often than he could easily now recall, and a few times in the deep Forest he’d stumbled on men and sometimes women to whom far, far worse had been done.
Garner was just going to have to shop his tales of Huldu horror to a queasier audience somewhere else.
He popped the aspirin tin, crunched a couple of tablets down. “Any of them say anything before they died? About why it happened, I mean?”
“I wasn’t there taking bloody notes,” Garner growled.
“All right. Here’s something else, then. You want to do me a favor? A paid favor, that is. Usual rate.”
“Could do that, aye.”
“Need you to look up a clerical worker called Irene Rush. She worked for”—he checked the notes he’d made—“Caulders Stationery and Office Supplies. They’re on Chestergate.”
“I know the place. Been past it a couple of times.”
“Aye, well, she was there until about six months ago. Renting rooms out in Dowgreave with her infant daughter, Mimi, and a maid called Susan. Number 17, Tegg’s Road.
No husband; he died in the war. Job at Caulders dried up, so she moved to Erlsley.
Ask around, see what you can find out. How long you reckon you need? ”
Garner considered. “It’s late, won’t get much done at this hour. I can make a couple of calls, maybe swing by the house if it’s occupied. But I’ll need the morning tomorrow, some of the afternoon, too. Tha want it all posting out?”
“No, I’ll take the train over and collect. Can you be done by five, say? Meet me at the station in Macclesfield?”
“Don’t see why not.”
“Good. Oh, and listen, would you book me somewhere to stay? There, in the village. That place we had drinks last time I was over, maybe? White Horse, was it?”
“The White Mare. Maggie Worrart’s place.”
“If you say so. Get me a decent room, if she can spare it. I’ll buy you dinner there after we get done.”
“On expenses, then? Big contract?” Something very like jealousy in the Lancastrian’s voice. “Is it the girl? The daughter?”
Duncan hesitated, then realized his silence had already answered for him. “Aye, it is.”
“And tha think she were taken here? Before they moved?”
“It’s not impossible.”
This time it was Garner who went quiet.
“There, or Erlsley,” Duncan prodded him. “Trying to rule one or the other out.”
“Aye.” Still oddly hesitant. “Then I’ll tell thee what, lad. Tha’d better pray to whatever gods tha still have that it were Erlsley, not here.”
—
Another kind of war. Hardy’s words of that morning, floating back through his still faintly hungover skull. With new enemies and rules we have yet to learn.
Garner thought the excruciated woodsmen were a warning to stay out, and maybe he was right.
He’d been a sharp enough woodsman himself before the accident, he still had good instincts.
But there was no way to be sure. The murdered men could just as easily have fallen foul of some whimsical Huldu hunting band new to the region.
It was a tumultuous part of the Forest among the Fae, no well-established eternal figures the way there were down south or up in Scotland.
A lot of young males, vying for legend, a lot of churn among the clans, hard to predict.
It might be a warning off, right enough.
It might equally be some form of challenge or other ritualistic display.
It might even represent—and here Duncan had to admit he was reaching a bit—some sacrificial rite in honor of deeds or deities long past, some ancient anniversary no human calendar had ever marked.
Huldu had long, tangled memories, reaching back centuries, in some cases thousands of years into the premodern dark.
No telling what you could dredge up out of that morass.
Duncan sat at his desk long after he’d hung up the phone, drenched in memories of his own, none of them good. Eventually, he fetched a glass and poured himself a judicious, medicinal hair-of-the-dog measure of Port Ellen.
Beyond the office window, autumn tipped the afternoon over into early evening with what seemed like ungracious haste. The sunstruck blue sky grew a little more solid, a little less blue. Its high, bright chime faded out, tarnishing toward indigo and the night to come.
The mansion crashes into his mind—blond sandstone Victorian grandeur, wooded rise of the Munro behind, torn and tarnished silver evening sky, light on in the window of his third-floor room…
Like a storm wind howling through his head…
Knees soaked through from the cold, wet grass, blood on his clenched fists, a trembling through his limbs like fever…
He blinked. Aye, well. Enough of that.
He took a chunk off the Port Ellen. Grimaced as it went down.
Sunlight marching away golden red across the rooftops of the city outside. Shadows lengthening across the room, puddling in corners…
Knocking at the door.
He frowned, swiveled his chair about.
“It’s open,” he called.
She cracked the door and slipped into the room, stood with hands laced together behind her back, modeling her bust for him. She gave him the heart-stopping lopsided grin.
“Gordon just got in. He’ll be holding the fort until midnight.”
Duncan raised his arm, ostentatiously checked the Mappin & Webb on his wrist. “Well, now, that is a lot of time for an innocent Irish lass to be alone in a strange man’s rooms, is it not?”
Niamh pushed the door gently closed. “Strange is about right. You after some company, strange man?”
“Aye, I could be.”
She sashayed toward him across the room, reaching back to the nape of her neck for the top buttons at the back of her white lace blouse.
The movement lifted her breasts under the material.
Unaccountably, his thoughts flashed back to Wolfbane Sally in her dressing gown, her shuddering sigh with his name on her lips.
He hastily banished the thought as Niamh reached him.
He breathed in, caught the green herb scent of soap and a recent bath.
“A little help, sir?” Feigning a demure maid’s voice, fumbling behind her neck, jiggling the material of the blouse. “I fear my buttons might be caught.”
He reached round, gathered her in to him as he worked at the fastenings.
Buried his face in the soft yield of her breasts through the lace.
No corsetry or brassiere beneath, and Niamh was a woman who bucked the new flapper trend for boy-like figures with outrageous, voluptuous disregard.
Her bust drew looks in the street at twenty yards.
Duncan felt himself hardening in the trousers he wore.
Niamh made soft, encouraging noises, put her hands either side of his skull, pulled him tighter to her, pressed her lips down hard on the top of his head…