Chapter Thirty-One #2
Duncan pulled the apologetic face again. “I don’t mean to be vague, Inspector, truly. But it’s perhaps better if you see for yourself. Get an unbiased detective’s eye on things.” Another gesture, urging the other man down the stairs. “Please.”
Boyle rolled his eyes, grunted, and took the stairs. “I don’t know what experience you’ve had in interrogation, Captain, but this kind of—”
Three steps up and back, Duncan braced on the walls with both hands, stomped forward as hard as he could.
He hit Boyle low in the spine, sent him flying, like a man tied across the mouth of a cannon and blown away.
Boyle flew out ahead of his own legs, went tumbling awkwardly down the angled curve of the stairwell, hit wall and floor at the bottom with a thump.
High, wrenched scream that Duncan guessed meant a broken bone.
Duncan drew the Webley and went down after him.
“What the fucking hell do you think you’re playing at?” All civility shredded from Boyle’s voice, but the rage died in his throat as he saw the gun in Duncan’s hand. He scrabbled backward in the confines of the corridor, one tweed-trousered leg dragging awkwardly.
He bumped into Bennett’s corpse.
Jerked around, saw the other blood-drenched body as well.
One slow moment, as it dawned on him. Then, breathing hard, he turned himself back to face Duncan. Lifted himself as well as he could on his elbows, glared defiantly upward.
“What are you then—fucking IRA?”
“No,” Duncan told him. “This is personal. You don’t lay hands on my woman.”
The two men stared at each other across the gulf of what had been done.
“You’ll hang for this,” Boyle spat.
Duncan had planned to shoot him in the belly and let him linger.
But something in the gritted courage he saw staring back at him, some Welsh-accented tracery of compassion, shifted his aim at the last moment.
He shot Boyle in the face, watched him jerk back slumped against his fellow interrogator’s already cooling corpse.
He stood over his handiwork for a long moment.
But the thing that now lived in his blood only bubbled and chuckled and turned over endlessly on itself, like an increasingly smooth-running motor, and was not even close to satisfied.
—
“We’ve got a ride out,” he told Garner, upstairs. “Hillman tourer, parked right outside. You want to go and crank it up?” He hesitated. “You do know how to do that?”
Garner gave him a look. “I don’t like motorcars, lad, and I don’t want to own one. Doesn’t mean I don’t bloody understand how they work. I ran a bloody farm, for Christ’s sake!”
He went out into the street. Duncan descended the stairs once more, stepped over the dead men.
They lay there in the narrow corridor space, like abandoned sacks of some crop no one cared about anymore.
He went into the first cell where he’d handcuffed one of the prisoners.
The man huddled into the radiator he’d been cuffed to, looked up fearfully.
“We’re done here,” Duncan told him. “And my word holds—you will not be harmed. But when Hardy gets here, I want you to give him a message for me. You tell him Duncan Silver is back from the Forest, back from the fucking dead, and I’m coming for him next. Duncan Silver. Got that?”
From the man’s face, he judged that he did.
Upstairs, he reloaded the Webley from the pouch Crammond had given him, pocketed the spent shells.
He ripped the phone cable out of the wall—why make Hardy’s job any easier—killed the lights in the office, and joined Garner on the pavement outside.
Boyle’s Hillman was all started up, puttering quietly to itself in the predawn gloom.
Duncan puffed out a long, relieved sigh.
The air was just cold enough to put ghostly scraps of frost in his breath as it blew away.
Autumn’s fair warning, the first of the season.
“You don’t want to drive, then?” he asked Garner with a sidelong glance.
“Do us a favor and shut thy trap, lad, I’m in no kind of mood. Just get us out of here.”
Duncan obliged. He’d not had to drive in quite a while, and the Hillman was a little stiff in the gears. But it ran smoothly enough once they were rolling. He felt himself beginning to relax as they threaded through the empty streets.
“I’ll need to call the White Mare,” Garner said somberly. “Maggie Worrart’s a good woman, she’ll have fed and stabled Mabel for me the while. But I conner expect her to keep it up forever without word.”
“We’ll find a call box.” Duncan remembered belatedly that he’d been meant to call the witch. “Saw a couple on the way here.”
“I saw one just now.” Garner turned in his seat, nodded back the way they’d come. “Down that last right turn back there. You got coin?”
Duncan nodded, took the next right, and brought them back round through the southern end of Maunston, searching for the box.
He found it at the end of a street that looked out directly on the Forest across a scant sixty yards of scrub-grown waste ground.
Beyond that, he saw the bricked rise of the pottery’s bottle kilns above the canopies of the trees that had drowned them.
At the tree line, someone had abandoned an AEC Y Type with full load, and with the cracking and lifting of the concrete as the new growth erupted, the lorry had sunk at the back and tilted, spilling crates through the canvas cover and over the side.
In the shrouded moonlight, it looked like a black-and-white illustration from some Vernian tale of submarine horror, as if something dreadful and tentacular was trying to drag the vehicle down and back into the trees.
“Nice spot,” grumbled Garner.
“Aye, you can see why nobody was keen to stay. Sit there a minute, will you. Got to make a call myself.”
Duncan jumped down from the Hillman, dug coins from his pocket on the way to the call box, heaved open the weighty latticed iron door.
The hinges protested with years of disuse, gave grudgingly and quite noisily, did not piston closed afterward.
It left him with a chilly sensation of exposure at the back of his neck as he dialed.
“Duncan!” She always knew it was him, before he even spoke. He was almost used to the faint slither of unease it always gave him. “This is a very liberal interpretation of the words not early.”
“Aye, sorry. Got caught up, busy all day, there wasn’t—”
“Well, you’d better come and see me anyway.” Riding down the apology, impatient. “Tomorrow. Soon as you can, darling.”
“Look, that’s what I was calling about. There’s no need to go magicking after Niamh. I already found her. Problem solved.”
“Well, that’s just as well, because I hadn’t even started scrying. But that’s not why you need to come and see me. Something else has come up.”
He hesitated. “I’m kind of pinched right now, Sal. It’s not—”
“This is for your benefit, Duncan, not mine. Have you ever known me to waste your time?”
It didn’t need a reply.
“Then get here as soon as you can.”
She hung up.
For a moment, Duncan stood like an idiot with the warmed Bakelite of the receiver still at his ear. Blink. Not what he’d expected.
But then—odd spells and torrid, drunken sex, disembodied voices and half-seen shadow figures in the hall, the luck of a barnyard squabble and the still-beating heart of a Final Isles Huldu prince—when had Wolfbane Sally Bethune ever delivered him anything approaching the expected?
He went to put the receiver back on its cradle, jolted rigid before he could complete the motion.
In the pit of the receiver’s speaker, down at the limits of hearing on the empty line, he caught the whisper and chime of high, sibilant voices chanting his name.
Duncan…
Come back, Duncan…
Did you think it was over, Duncan, did you think you could just walk away…
Did you think it would be that easy?
Duncan!
A taloned hand, falling on his shoulder…
“Duncan?” No talons, just Garner and the edge of worry on his voice. “Lad, what are tha playing at? We don’t have the time for clagging about!”
Duncan blinked again. Shook himself. He turned in the confined space, squeezed out past the other man, handed him the receiver.
“Sorry,” he said vaguely. “Just thinking about something.” He dug around in his pocket for more coins, handed them over. “Here. I’ll wait in the car.”
But as he walked back to the Hillman, he looked out at the Forest edge sixty yards off, the scrub-grown concrete ground between, and wondered with a shiver what kind of sly, slim roots might have wound undetected beneath that surface without showy cracking or rupture, found the cabling of the modern age, and somehow—what?
spliced with it? infested it?—made connection.
And he wondered where else in the places men built over and thought safe, the same thing might be happening even now.
—
Garner was a couple of minutes. He came hurrying back from the call box, shoulders hunched more defensively than you’d expect for the mild chill in the air. He climbed into the car, looked at Duncan strangely.
“Line all right?” Duncan asked neutrally. “You get through?”
“Aye. She’ll feed and water Mabel for the duration. Stout lass, Maggie is. Always has been. Said I’d pay her soon as I’m back.”
“You can’t go back to Macclesfield right now.” It jerked out of Duncan before he’d realized what he was going to say. “Not with that fuck Hardy still in play.”
“Aye, well, I’m not the only one. Don’t see thee or thy Irish lass safe to walk the streets of Erlsley for the time being either.”
They both sat in silence while the truth of it soaked in.
“Bit bloody complicated, aye?” Garner said finally. “Looks like fighting the bloody Fae was the easy part.”
Duncan nodded, wordless, weighed down with new concerns and complex fears he had no way to name. He stared out at the tree line, the dark spaces below the canopies, the broad stretch of the Forest beyond.
This time, he did not shiver.
This time, he felt the deep, eerie call, and it was like the voice of some dark, unnerving lover, calling him home.