China Mieville - Kraken

“Alright. Alright, now, listen…”

“I feel like I’m going mad,” Billy said. “Even before that… Before what’s in the basement. I’ve been feeling like I’m being followed. I didn’t say anything because, it’s stupid, you know…” The wind shook the windows abruptly. “I tell you I’m losing it… What happened downstairs? Did Dane do that?”

“Let me think for a second, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said.

“When I was in with you, why was there a psychology professor there? Vardy. That’s what he does. I looked him up. Come on, Baron, don’t look like that-all it took was a bit of an online poke about. I could tell he wasn’t a cop.”

“Is that so? You can ask him yourself in a bit.”

“Was he there because… Is it that you think I’m mad, Baron?” There was another silence. “Is that what you think’s going on with me? Because, Jesus…” Billy breathed out shakily. “Right at the moment, I think you have a point.”

“No,” said Baron. “None of us think you’re losing it. Rather the opposite.” He glanced at his watch. This time, when he arrived, Vardy shook Billy’s hand. He had one of those unpleasant too-hard grips. He was carrying a briefcase.

“Did you have a look?” Baron said.

“It’s pretty much as you’d expect,” Vardy said.

“What?” Billy shouted. “What you’d expect? What about it did you expect, exactly?”

“We’ll discuss that,” Vardy said. “We’ll discuss that, Billy. Now wait. I gather you saw Dane Parnell.”

Billy ran his fingers through his hair. Vardy seemed too large for the chair he was in: he squeezed his shoulders together, as if to avoid spilling himself. He and Baron looked at each other, sharing another unspoken moment.

“Right then,” said Baron. “Let’s have another go. Patrick Vardy, Billy Harrow, curator. Billy Harrow, Patrick Vardy. Professor of psychology at Central London University. As I gather you know.”

“Yeah, like I say,” Billy muttered. “My Google-fu is strong.”

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “I sort of assumed you’d be as half-arsed as most people. Wouldn’t even occur to them to look up our names.”

“So how much do you know about us?” Vardy said. “About me?”

“You’re a psych.” Billy shrugged. “You work with the cops. So I figure… You’re a profiler, aren’t you? Like Cracker? Like Silence of the Lambs?” Vardy smiled, a bit. “That poor sod shoved into the bottle, downstairs,” Billy said. “He’s not the first. Is that it? That’s it, isn’t it. You’re looking for someone… You’re looking for Dane. Dane’s some kind of serial killer. You’re here to work out what his thing is. And, oh Christ, he wants me, doesn’t he? He’s following me. And it’s something to do with…”

But he stopped. How did any of this make sense of the squid? Baron pursed his lips.

“Not exactly,” said Baron. “It’s not quite right.” He chopped his hands through the air onto the tabletop, organising invisible thoughts.

“Look, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “Here’s the thing. Go back a step. Who’d want to steal a giant squid? Never mind how just yet. That’s not important. Right now, focus on why. It seems like you might be able to help us, and we might be able to help you. I’m not saying you’re in danger, but I’m saying that-”

“Oh Christ…”

“Billy Harrow, listen to me. You need to know what’s going on. We’ve talked it over. We’re going to tell you the full story. And this is in confidence. Which this time please keep, thank you. Now, all this is not the sort of thing we normally lay out for people. We think it might help you to know, and to be perfectly frank we think it might help us too.”

“Why does Dane want me?” Billy said.

“I wasn’t on this case originally, as you know. There are certain flags that go up, you might say, under certain circumstances. Certain sorts of crime. The disappearance of your squid. Plus there are aspects of what’s downstairs that are… relevant. Like for example the fact that the diameter of that jar’s opening isn’t big enough to have got that gentleman inside.”

“What?”

“But what really clinched our interest,” Baron said, “what really rang my bell-and I mean that literally, there’s a bell on my desk-is when you drew us that picture.”

From his briefcase Vardy pulled a photocopy of the druggily exaggerated asterisk.

“I know what that is,” said Billy. “Kubodera and Mori-”

“So,” Baron said, “I head up a specialist unit.”

“What unit?”

Vardy pushed another piece of paper across the table. It was the sign again, the ten-armed spread with two longer limbs. But not the one Billy had drawn. The angles, the lengths of the arms, were slightly different.

“That was drawn a little over a month ago,” Baron said. “A bookshop got busted into one night and a bunch of stuff was taken. Bloke wearing this sign had come in a couple of days running beforehand, not buying anything, looking around. Nervous.”

“If this were a question of a couple of kids both wearing Obey Giant T-shirts, we’d not be bothered,” Vardy said, quickly, in his deep voice. “This is not a bloody meme. Though it may be going that way and thank you very much that’ll complicate things very nicely.” Billy blinked. “Are you a graffiti aficionado? It’s started to crop up. Early days. It’ll be on stickers on lampposts and student rucksacks soon. Turns out that this”-he flicked the paper-“is appropriate for the times.”

“It just fits,” said Baron.

“But not quite yet,” Vardy said. “So when it turns up twice, we sniff a pattern.”

“The guy who was burgled,” Baron said. “It’s Charing Cross Road. He stocks a lot of junk and a little bit of proper antiquarian stuff. Six books nicked that night. Five had just come in. Maybe two, three hundred quids’ worth. They were all on the desk up front, waiting to be sorted. At first he thought that was all that was gone.

“But where there are locked cabinets, the glass’s broken and something’s missing from a top shelf.” He held up a finger. “One book. From a bunch of old academic journals. He worked out what it was was gone.”

Baron looked down and read laboriously. “For-hand-linger… ved de Skandinav-something,” he said. “The 1857 volume.”

“How’s your Danish, Billy?” said Vardy. “Ring any bells?”

“Some villain wants to make it look like he’s rushed in and snagged at random,” Baron said. “So he grabs a load of books off the counter. But he then runs twenty feet down a corridor, to one specific locked bookshelf, breaks one specific pane of glass, takes one specific old book.” Baron shook his head. “It was that one journal. That’s what this was all about.”

“So we asked the Danish Royal Academy for the contents,” Vardy said. “Too old to be on databases.”

“To be honest, we didn’t think much of it at the time,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a priority. It only got passed to us because we’d seen that symbol knocking around a bit. When the list came in from Copenhagen nothing stood out. But. When we heard the symbol’d turned up here, and just what’d happened, one of those articles nicked weeks ago came back sharpish.”

“Pages one eighty-two to one eighty-five,” Vardy said.

“I won’t try the Scandiwegian,” Baron said, reading. “It’s an article about blaeksprutter, so they say. Translation: Japetus Steenstrup. ‘Several Particulars about the Giant Cuttlefish of the Atlantic.’”

“TO RECAP,” BARON SAID. “WEEKS BEFORE YOUR SQUID WAS SNAFFLED, someone pinched an original copy of that article.”

“You’ll have heard of the author,” Vardy said. Billy’s mouth was open. He had. The giant squid was Architeuthis dux, but its genus was named for the man who had taxonomised it: Architeuthis Steenstrup.