Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

The Hecate visiting her and smothering her in her own power certainly meant it was a serious matter, but as far as Pete was concerned she could jam her head straight up her own arse. Jack was already dead, and she had more important things to do. Like find out who’d killed a man whom everyone he knew had a reason to want dead.

She stood and hobbled to the sofa, where she opened the record cabinet and had her drink after all. A visit from a creature as old as the stones of the world warranted it. Pete toasted the empty window with Jack’s whiskey. “Sod you,” she told the Hecate, and drank the glass down in one go.

Pete couldn’t cross into the Black in Whitechapel. There were too many layers of psychic soot to allow any thin space to exist, caked up with murder and blood and the ashes of London’s dead. Jack had loved the place, the way it dampened his sight down to nearly nothing, except for the passing of Whitechapel’s own ghosts, trapped forever in the labyrinth of black magic and blacker deed that lanced through the narrow streets and leaning buildings like a parasitic nervous system.

Pete decided to walk, to clear her head of the talent hangover and also because it was near evening rush hour, and Hammersmith & City tubes would be packed. Near Tower Hamlets, she felt the pull again, the lessening of Whitechapel’s static scattering her senses. Jack said the white noise helped him sleep. Pete likened it more to living under a constant, ominous thunderhead. The promise of rain and the crackle of excited ions, ever waiting.

She decided to call on Ollie first. If she were honest, she’d admit she missed the sounds and sights of a police squad, the routine of finding and solving misdeeds. Even after what had happened at the flat, and with bloody Ethan Morningstar and his brigade of thugs running on the petrol of Jesus. Piety and murder went so well together, like curry and rice, or, more likely with a bunch of self-important real English like Morningstar, sausage and mash.

Pete allowed herself to rationalize a bit, that not telling Ollie some behatted wanker in Christ had it in for him was the smart move. Ollie only half-believed on his best day, and he’d likely do something stupid like go round to Morningstar’s and kick his door in, just to make a point. Then she’d be visiting Ollie in the intensive care ward, if not the mortuary.

She wasn’t taking the case because of Morningstar. She was doing it for Ollie, and for the very real possibility that some idiot necromancer had bitten off more than he could chew and kicked off a carnival of the grotesque and homicidal with the spell he’d left on Carver’s body. Demons and things of their ilk didn’t need much of an invitation to kick open the gates of Hell. Usually a name was enough.

The CID unit for Camden, which included six detectives counting Ollie responsible for serious crime, was housed in a single cavernous gray room crowned with buzzing fluorescent lights at the Holborn police station. Pete bypassed the front, where a uniformed officer waved her on. She was still recognizable here, if not for her great detectiveing or her status as Connor Caldecott’s daughter, then for the press coverage of her last case before she’d unceremoniously quit the force. Every law officer in Camden Town knew she’d been Ollie Heath’s partner, the bird who dropped off the map and down into the dark side. The dark side, of course, being superstition and mumbo-jumbo, the one thing most coppers hated even more than shit coffee and national holidays involving pyrotechnics.

Pete found her way to Ollie’s station, where she paged through the top of the snowdrift of papers that permanently occupied his desk. The Carver case had a fat autopsy report, and Pete flicked the cover open with her nail, looking at the large, high-res photos Nasiri had snapped before the cutting. The wounds on Carver still sent a spike straight through her head, even in 2-D form, and she flipped the file shut again.

“Snooping?”

Pete felt her heart fly up, slam against her chest, and fall back down. “Jesus fucking Mary Magdelene in a boat, McCorkle! Didn’t your mother teach you not to sneak?”

“Sorry,” he said with a shrug, settling himself at Pete’s old desk and putting his feet up. “Think your mouth is even rougher than Heath’s, you know?”

“I taught him his first dirty word,” Pete said. “I’m like a proud mum.” She looked pointedly at McCorkle’s feet. His shoes were pristine, and she could see her elongated, glaring face in the toes. They’d get covered in shit and blood soon enough, and then she thought McCorkle might be a bit more tolerable. “Is Ollie in? I need to speak with him.”

McCorkle dug out an evening Times from two days past and rattled it open. “He ain’t here. Nipped out to get supper.”

Pete bristled when she found herself facing rumpled newsprint, then reminded herself McCorkle was newly promoted and therefore arrogant. He’d learn. Or somebody would put their boot up his arse for being a prissy twat. “Did Ollie say he’d be coming back?” she said, giving McCorkle the same tone she used on the neighbor boy when he threw his transforming robot toys against the door of her flat.

“Might’ve,” McCorkle said absently, turning the page. “You can wait, if you like.”

Pete sat in Ollie’s chair and took one of the biscuits from his righthand top drawer, crunching it just loudly enough to overshadow McCorkle rattling the paper. “Where’d you come over from, McCorkle?”

“Paddington Green,” he said. “Missing Persons.”

“They all get found, then?” Pete flicked her crumbs onto McCorkle’s side of the desk. He looked at them as if they were live ants, then folded the paper away. In a stolid, Norse way, McCorkle was nice-looking, Pete supposed. His forehead was too thick and his hair was shaped vaguely like a blond wire scrub brush, but the crushed-and-reset nose and the bulky neck-deficient torso would do it for some women.

“You know,” McCorkle told her, ruining any goodwill Pete might have allowed him by opening his mouth back up, “if even half of what they say about you is true, you have no business being in this room.”

“Oh?” Pete wondered if she was going to have to punch somebody else in the mouth. Punching people got very tiresome. Sherlock Holmes didn’t have to go around smacking skulls together.

“No business at all,” McCorkle said. “I may not have a dad who was Supercopper, but I did the training and the time. And I sure as Hell didn’t leak sensitive evidence to an informant and then quit the squad to avoid censure.”

“Is that what I did?” Pete said. The rumor varied. Sometimes she’d bollocksed her last investigation, sometimes she’d joined a cult. Most times she’d simply quit because she couldn’t hack finding four children catatonic and never catching the man who’d done it. Officially. The truth was somewhat more satisfying, but Pete wasn’t going to try and explain hungry ghosts to McCorkle or anyone else in the Holborn nick. She didn’t owe it to them. They’d talk no matter what.

“That’s what you did,” McCorkle agreed. “Makes you a shit cop. Always were one, to my way of thinking.”

Pete forced an expression that was simply nothing, not anger and not agreement. “Why aren’t you throwing me out, then? You too much of a saint to soil your good cop hands?”

McCorkle put his feet down and booted up his computer, scrolling over to the HOLMES database and beginning to type in case numbers. “Heath likes you, you get a pass. He’s a good bloke.”

“He is,” Pete agreed, as Ollie backed into the squad room with two bags of takeaway. She leaned into McCorkle’s half of the desk. “I wager you and I will see each other some day when Ollie isn’t a factor,” she murmured. “And then perhaps neither of us will have to be so polite.”