It was easy to see that the woman, dressed in loose shorts and a pink T-shirt, was covered in fur from head to feet. Large pointed ears rose from the sides of her head, and her mouth and nose were elongated into just enough of a muzzle to be clearly non-human. No whiskers, I noticed, but the fur was thick and slate-blue. Although I could see whitening around her face.
The first Faceless Man had made chimeras for his select clientele in the Strip Club of Dr Moreau. The ones we’d found had all been dead, except for Tiger Boy, who’d been shot by armed police on a Soho rooftop.
‘Yes yes yes,’ hissed Caroline, looking at us staring. ‘Upstairs and we’ll talk.’
The next floor had several rooms off a hallway – bedrooms and bathrooms. We kept climbing up into a stair tower with a door out onto a roof garden. Or possibly the upper ground floor, since the roof was level with the hillside and the garden extended back into a terrace. There was an empty swimming pool outside, with white concrete walls stained with old leaves and mould at the bottom. Next to it was a pool house with a raked skylight roof, to which Caroline led us and told us to make ourselves comfortable while she made coffee.
We hadn’t asked for coffee but we all recognised a stalling tactic when we saw it.
One entire wall of the pool house was floor-to-ceiling patio doors, and rain rattled on the skylights to run in rivulets down the slope and into the guttering – which, in keeping with the International Style, had been designed for the south of France, not Derbyshire, and was overflowing, and probably responsible for the disfiguring damp patch on the south wall.
‘When do you think this was built?’ asked Seawoll, who was trying not to wallow in a pastel-coloured modular sofa unit. The rest of the furniture was definitely late seventies, from the Habitat catalogue and fitfully cared for since then. The corners were worn and the colours faded.
‘Judging by the building materials,’ I said, ‘1930s probably, maybe later.’
The garden showed echoes of old landscaping but had been allowed to run wild and the trees had encroached until they overshadowed the flat roof of the main house and the pool house. It was mature growth, too – thirty years’ worth of trees, maybe more. It explained why the satellite view on Google Maps had failed to show anything. There was a path leading from the pool area into the trees and I could hear an intermittent clang coming from that direction. A ringing industrial sound – metal hitting metal.
‘We’re definitely in the right place,’ I said.
Danni snorted and I looked over to see her staring at me and biting her lip. She had a lot of questions, starting with WTF cat-girls? and WTF tall posh black woman? But she knew better than to ask them until we were away from said posh woman. Seawoll knew about the chimera, and had met Caroline before when she and her mother had got involved in our hunt for Martin Chorley.
Who, incidentally, had inherited the title, the chimera and the casual cruelty from the first Faceless Man. We’d thought all the original cat-girls, the ones created to entertain the Faceless Man’s select clientele, had died ages ago. That was one connection we were going to have sort out straight away. Also, there were things Danni would need to know – potential eavesdropping or not.
‘Caroline is a practitioner,’ I said. ‘A good one from a separate British magical tradition. You would have been briefed about them last week if we hadn’t been distracted.’
‘Not another local god, then?’ said Danni, and I heard Caroline laughing in the kitchenette.
‘Have you perfected flying yet?’ I called.
‘Not quite yet,’ said Caroline, bringing in four mismatched mugs on a tin tray. ‘There seems to be a rather strict time limit.’
She put the tray down on an oval glass-topped coffee table. Thoughtfully, she had provided a scattering of sugar packets with differing labels.
‘How long?’ I asked.
The fact you couldn’t levitate yourself using magic had been a source of constant frustration to generations of practitioners.
Caroline pulled a face.
‘That’s the problem,’ she said. ‘The duration is variable, from as little as thirty seconds to as long as two minutes. So I try not to get too far off the ground.’
‘Impressive, though,’ I said.
‘Not enough,’ said Caroline.
‘That’s all very interesting,’ said Seawoll. ‘Would you like to tell me why you have a house full of illegal medical experiments?’
‘Victims,’ said Caroline sharply. ‘Victims of illegal medical experiments. This is a shelter for them, and I think they’ve suffered enough without the authorities taking an interest.’
I wanted to say that we didn’t care – we were pursuing a double murder inquiry, and what consenting adults chose to do with their time was none of our business. But the trouble with turning a blind eye is that people often take the opportunity to punch you in the face.
‘Do you run this place?’ I asked. ‘Is your mum about?’
‘Still back in Montgomeryshire,’ said Caroline. ‘Thank God.’
‘So what’s your involvement?’ I said.
She explained she was there to keep an eye on the ‘ladies’, but others helped out. I didn’t press on who the ‘others’ were, but I guessed that they were probably further practitioners – what the Folly had used to call hedge wizards or hedge witches. I supposed we’d better come up with a modern term, probably something like ‘Unregistered Informal Practitioners’.
‘They used to have a house on our grounds,’ said Caroline. Her mum owned twenty hectares of ex-hill farm in Wales where she raised foster-kids and ran alternative therapy retreats for nervous rich people. ‘But they were beginning to attract attention and this place became available. Mum still pops up to do medical checks.’
‘How long were they at your mum’s?’ I asked.
‘Since the eighties at least,’ said Caroline. ‘They used to babysit us when we were kids.’
‘Who owns this place?’ asked Seawoll.
‘Technically, the IronFast Trust, which is famous for sponsoring apprenticeships in traditional country crafts with a focus on … guess what?’
‘Smithing,’ I said.
‘And less famous for its property portfolio in Manchester, Leeds and Bradford,’ said Caroline. ‘And this place. It’s all totally legal with a board of trustees of which, unsurprisingly, my mum is one. If you want more details you’re going to have to ask her about it.’
Seawoll looked at me and I shrugged. This was something we could pursue later.
‘Does that property portfolio include the Sons of Wayland’s archive?’ I asked.
‘As it happens,’ said Caroline, ‘it does. But if you want to see inside you’re going to need permission from the Grand Master.’
Seawoll sniggered.
‘The Grand Master?’ I asked.
‘Traditional title of the leader of the Sons of Wayland,’ she said. ‘Didn’t Nightingale tell you?’
‘I think he assumed there wasn’t one,’ I said.
Caroline looked up at where rain was still pounding the skylights.
‘Let me get an umbrella,’ she said. ‘And I’ll take you to see her.’
Having procured a pink and yellow polka-dot umbrella from a stand by the door, Caroline led us away from the pool house down a path paved with tan concrete slabs. It had probably originally been intended to wind through an attractive terraced garden, which had subsequently been left to be overrun by the forest. As we threaded our way through the dripping trees, the clanging sound got louder and the rhythm of the hits became obvious – it was the sound of someone hammering metal. As we got closer I saw flashes of light radiating, like lens flare in a film, from a single point ahead. The path opened into a small clearing in front of an open-fronted Nissen hut made of rusty corrugated iron that extended back into the hillside.