Simon Green: Casino Infernale

The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. The very secret agent.

They all know my name, in the back streets of London, in the shadowy places where shadowy people do all the things the everyday world isn’t supposed to lust after. Shaman Bond is a face on the scene—a character, a chancer, always au fait with the very latest in sin and diversion. Always up for a little deviltry, with a taste for the illegal and the unnatural. Shaman Bond can turn up anywhere, and no one will ever be surprised. Because his type are ten a penny in the hidden life, the secret world. Not a bad man, necessarily, but always around when the bad stuff is kicking off. Sometimes he does good things, when he thinks no one’s noticing. Sometimes he’ll help out in a con or a sting, especially if they’re designed to show the real Bad Guys the error of their ways. But really, he’s just . . . around. A part of the scene. He hangs out at all the right places, with all the wrong people, smiling his crocodile smile.

The name is Eddie Drood, and only the older members of my family call me Edwin.

My family exists to stand between Humanity and all the hidden horrors that threaten it. We fight the monsters so you don’t have to know they really exist. We’ve been doing it for centuries, and I’ve been trained to the work since I was a child. I’m a Drood field agent, searching out the nastier secrets of the clandestine world, and doing whatever it takes to keep the lid on. To keep the everyday world safe. I’m an agent, not an assassin. Though I have killed more than my fair share in my time. They all needed killing, but in the early hours of the morning, when the dawn seems farthest away . . . that doesn’t help. When I’m out working in the field, my name is Shaman Bond. A pleasant and personable mask for me to hide behind. So people will tell him all the things Eddie Drood needs to know.

He’s a nice enough guy. Just a shame he isn’t real. Merely a cover story. So why do I feel so much realer being him than I do when I have to be me?

When I’m with my family, I’m Eddie Drood. When I’m out in the world, I’m Shaman Bond. But now that I’ve left my family because they told me one lie too many, and gone to work for the Department of the Uncanny, who am I now?

Who am I, really?

I’d go to the end of the world for you. I suppose we’ve all said that, or something like it, to the one we love. Only I really did do that, once. I should have known that the end of the world is where the lies run out, and the truth returns. And while the truth may satisfy, it’s never going to be as comforting as a treasured lie.

Scotland has almost eight hundred offshore islands, though fewer than a hundred are populated. Trammell Island is the most northern, way out past the Orkneys and the Shetlands, just a jutting rock set in dark and deathly cold waters, where no one goes any more. Or at least, no one with any sense. Not a big island; you could walk round the perimeter in less than an hour. Trammell Island has a beach, a cliff face, and an ugly stone hill with a single building at its summit. Monkton Manse. The house at the end of the world. Originally a monastery many centuries ago; then a rich man’s holiday home; now nothing more than a deserted property, an abandoned folly. Empty and silent, holding within dust and shadows and bad memories, and one last terrible secret.

Trammell Island: a long way from anywhere, and soon to be the end of more than one person’s world.

I stood at the very top of the cliff face, as close to the edge as I could get. Dry, cracked earth crumbled and fell away under my weight, dribbling streams of dirt down the sheer rocky face and into the crashing waters far below. I looked down at the heavy swelling waves as they pounded the narrow pebbled beach and broke against the outcropping rocks. Night-dark waters, cold enough to kill anyone unfortunate enough to end up in them, they threw great clouds of frothing spume into the air as the waves fell back, frustrated, from the inhospitable shore.

A cold wind blew savagely in from the north, bitter enough to have come all the way from the North Pole. Which wasn’t that far off, truth be told. I hunched my shoulders inside my heavy, padded greatcoat, thrust my gloved hands deep into my pockets, and wished I’d worn a hat like everyone suggested. I hate hats. Never found one I looked good in. I shuddered despite myself as the cold sank into my bones and Molly Metcalf thrust an arm through mine and snuggled up against me. She was wearing a long sheepskin coat with stylishly fringed sleeves, and a bobbly woollen hat pulled down over her ears. She looked like a traveller on her way to protest against something fashionably despicable.

It’s hard to know what to wear when you’re visiting the island at the end of the world.

Molly looked down at the bleak, empty shore and the raging waters, and smiled brightly at me.

“You take me to the nicest places, Eddie.”

“Easy on the name,” I said. “As far as everyone we’re going to meet here is concerned, I’m just Shaman Bond. General bad boy about town. No one we’ll be meeting would be at all happy to meet a Drood.”

“Not many are,” said Molly. “Your family might protect the world, but no one ever said the world would thank you for it. Especially given some of the tactics you use. Hey, speaking of names, I looked up Trammell in the dictionary before we left London. It’s an old Scottish name for a burial shroud. Very fitting.”

“So it is,” I said. “More importantly, it also means an impediment to function, or a shackle for a horse.”

“Smugness is very unattractive in a man,” said Molly.

“Always go for the complete Oxford English Dictionary ,” I said. “Never settle for the lesser.”

“You’ve got a dictionary built into your armour, haven’t you?” said Molly accusingly.

“Look at those gulls,” I said. “The only birds that will come out this far, pursuing the fishing boats. And even they’ve got more sense than to come anywhere near Trammell Island. Just black smudges on a grey sky . . . with the saddest cries in the world. There are those who say that seagulls cry for the sins of Humanity. And that if we ever get our act together, they’ll be able to stop crying.”

“You’re in a mood,” said Molly. “Don’t you dare try to out-gloom me. I’m the only one here entitled to indulge in deep dark existential brooding. This is my past we’re visiting.”

“Never look back,” I said wisely. “All you’ll ever see are lost opportunities creeping up on you with bad intent.”

“You don’t have a sentimental bone in your body, do you?” said Molly.

“If I did, I’d have it surgically removed. Sentiment just gets in the way of seeing things clearly.”

“Sometimes . . . that can be a good thing.”

I looked at Molly, but she’d already let go my arm and turned away from the cliff edge to look steadily at the single great building at the top of the hill. Monkton Manse. An ugly building, with an ugly past. Once upon a time it was a monastery, founded by a heretic offshoot of the monks of Saint Columba. Long abandoned now, left to fall into ruin and decay. In the 1920s it was rebuilt and refurbished to resemble an old English country manor house complete with pointed gables, a slanting grey-tiled roof, protruding leaded-glass windows in a mock Tudor frontage, and a really big oaken front door. Large and solid and blocky, grim and forbidding; built to withstand Time and the bitter elements. Even though no one had lived in Monkton Manse since the late twenties, it still looked ready for visitors. In a dark and threatening sort of way.