“What do you think’s behind all the pangolin bones?” Baron might ask him, of some emerged oddball sect, or, “Any clue what that priestess meant by ‘stick-blood’?” or, “Where do we think they might sacrifice that boy?”
“Not sure,” Vardy would say. “Couple of ideas. I’ll have a think.” And his colleagues would be quieter, and Collingswood, if she were in the room, would make what a twat motions, or pretend to intend to spill her drink on him or something.
He would stay like that a long time, at last snap open his eyes and say something like, “It’s not to do with the armour. Pangolins are bipedal. That’s what this is about. That’s why they kidnapped that dancer…” Or: “Greenford. Of course. The changing rooms of some disused swimming pool. Quick, we haven’t got long.”
“He can’t move for squid stuff,” Baron said. “Last time I looked he had the notes on Archie’s preservation and a bunch of articles on squid metabolism. And some leaflets for that Beagle trip.”
Collingswood raised her eyebrows. “I can’t get any sniff about that business in Putney,” she said. “Too much going on. The fucking squid’s got everyone on edge. The number of cranks calling in you would not believe.”
“How are you doing with it all?”
She made a rude noise. “Fuck off, guv,” she said. She did not tell him about her new recurring nightmare, of being thrown from a car, hurtling toward a brick wall.
“It’s definitely for us though, this Putney thing?”
“If I had to put dosh down,” said Collingswood. “Bruises like that.” A body had been listlessly humping the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water. He was a journalist with a special interest in labour, who appeared to have been crushed. The murder had been passed to FSRC when a pathologist had pointed out that the four huge bludgeoning wounds on the man’s chest looked a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist.
Baron glanced at his screen. “Email from Harris.”
“Am I right then?” Collingswood said. She had mooted the possibility that the body they had found in the basement-“Leave aside the doesn’t-fit-in-the-fucking-jar thing for a minute, boss”-was nothing to do with the squid case. Was, in fact, some many-years-old arcane gangland hit that Billy had stumbled onto at that moment of heightened sensitivities. “He’s got something,” she had said. “A bit of nous. Maybe all stressed he sniffed something.”
“Hah,” said Baron, and sat back. “Alright then. You’re going to like this, Kath. You’re right.”
“What?” She sat up fast enough to spill her coffee. “Bollocks. Really, guv?”
“Harris says the body was put in the bottle, she reckons, a good hundred years ago. That’s how long it’s been in that muck.”
“Holy shit. Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?”
“Just you wait. That’s not all. There’s an ‘and.’ Or maybe I should say a ‘but.’ Isn’t there some word that means both?”
“Get on with it, guv.”
“So that body’s been preserved like that for a century. But-stroke-and. Have you heard of GG Allin?”
“Who the eff’s that?”
“Search me. Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google. He was a singer, says here. Though it also says that stretches the definition. Delightful. ‘Scum rocker,’ it says here. More of a Queen man myself. ‘Don’t stand in the front row,’ Harris says. Anyway, he died about a decade ago.”
“So what?”
“So we should probably not ignore the fact that one of our deceased chap’s tattoos reads ‘GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.’”
“Oh, shit.”
“Indeed. He was apparently pickled several decades before he got his tattoo.” They looked at each other.
“You want me to find out who he was, don’t you?”
“No need,” he said. “We got a hit. He’s on the database.”
“What?”
“Fingerprints, DNA, the whole lot. That would be the DNA that is both a century old, and also gives his DOB as 1969. Name of Al Adler. AKA various stupid things. They do love their nicknames.”
“What did he get done for?”
“Burglary. But that was because of a bargain, he got to do a bit of regular bird. The original charge was on the other list.” Codes against illicit magery. Adler had been breaking and entering by esoteric means.
“Associates?”
“Freelance when he was starting out. Did a stint as some sort of stringer for a coven in Deptford. Spent the last four years of his working life full-time with Grisamentum, it looks like. Disappeared when Griz died. Grisabloodymentum, eh?”
“Before my time,” Collingswood said. “I never met the bloke.”
“Don’t remind me,” Baron said. “It should be illegal to be so much younger than me. He was alright, Grisamentum. I mean, you never know who you can trust, but he helped out a few times.”
“So I bloody gather. Geezer does crop up. What exactly did he do?”
“He was a bit of a one,” Baron said. “Finger in a lot of pies. Sort of a player. It’s all gone a bit tits-up since he died. He was a good counterweight.”
“Didn’t you tell me he didn’t die with…”
“Yeah, no. It wasn’t anything battley and dramatic. He got sick. Everyone knew about it. Worst-kept secret. I tell you what though: his funeral was pretty bloody amazing.”
“You were there?”
“Certainly I was.”
The Metropolitan Police could not not mark so important a passing. So advertised a good-bye. The details of where and how Grisamentum would valedictory the city had been leaked so ostentatiously they were clearly summonses.
“How’d you finesse it?” Collingswood said. Baron smiled.
“A not-very-competent surveillance, ooh, look at us, you all saw us, tish, we’re so silly.” He waggled his head.
Collingswood was long-enough inducted, subtle enough in her policeness now, stalwart of the FSRC and London protocols to understand. The police could not officially attend the passing of so questionably licit a figure, but nor could they ignore that public event, show disrespect or ingratitude. Hence a mummery, an act designed to be seen through, the putative incompetence of their spying on the event leaving them seen, and understood to have attended.
Collingswood said, “So what did Adler do? To get bottled?”
“Who knows? What he did to piss somebody off, your guess is as good as mine.”
“My guess is way better than yours, guv,” she said. “Get the necessary, I’ll fetch my shit.”
She went to her locker for an old glyph-fucked board, a candle, a pot of unpleasant tallow. Baron sent Harris an email, requesting a rag of Adler’s skin, a bone, a hank of his hair.
HE COULD NOT LEAVE, BUT HE WAS NOT OTHERWISE RESTRAINED. Billy spent hours in the sunken library. He saturated himself in deepwater theology and poetics. He looked for specifics about the teuthic apocalypse.
A swallowing up and a shitting out, taken from darkness, in darkness. A terrible biting. The elect like, what, skin-bugs, little parasites on or in the great holy squid body, carried through the vortex. Or not, depending on specifics. But it wasn’t like this. When at last one time he sighed and took off his glasses and reshelved verses on the tentacular, blinked and rubbed his eyes, he was startled to see several men and women who had been in the meeting with the Teuthex. He stood. They were various in age and clothes, though not in their respectful expressions. He had not heard them enter or descend.
“How long’ve you been here?” he said.
“We had a question,” said a woman in a gown, gold tentacle-sigil winking. “You worked on it. Was there anything about this kraken that was… special?”