"Street Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kittredge Caitlin)

Chapter Two

The sign on the building, half off its hinges, optimistically proclaimed hotel. Underneath, in smaller gold script that had faded, "Grand Montresor."

The tiny purple asters grew all around the crumbling concrete steps, forcing their way out of the cracks in a great spray of example for nature versus man.

Pete stepped over them, careful to avoid crushing any blossoms, and pushed her way into bleach-scented gloom. The Montresor, like the whole of the block around it, had seen better days and couldn't remember exactly when they were. It stood out like a dark pock on the face of Blooms-bury, and Pete wondered why information always had to be garnered in the filthiest, most shadowy places of her city.

A clerk straight out of The Vampyre ruffled his Hello! magazine in annoyance when Pete came to reception. "Yeah?"

"Could you tell me about the person staying in room twenty-six?" Pete said, trying to sound bright and official. It took more than a forced smile and a chipper tone to garner a reaction from the clerk, for he just grunted.

Pete unfolded the note Oliver Heath, her desk mate at the Metropolitan Police, had handed her. "Grand Montresor, Bloomsbury by King's Cross. Room 26 @ 3 p.m."

"Said he had information on the Killigan child-snatching." Ollie had shrugged, the gesture expansive as his Midlands drawl, when she'd questioned him. "Said that the lead inspector were to come alone, and not be late."

Bridget Killigan. Six years old. Disappeared from her primary-school playground when her father was late fetching her. In normal cases Pete advised the parents to be hopeful, that children were usually found, that nothing would happen to their family. Because in normal cases, the child was snatched by a parent in a custody case or an older schoolmate as a prank, or simply said Bugger this and ran off on their own, only to be confounded by the tube system and get stranded in Brixton. Strangers took children in folktales, not Pete Caldecott's London.

Even so, when the Killigan case came to Pete, she got that sink in her chest that always heralded an unsolvable crime. Bridget had no divorced parents, no creepy uncles. The girl had been taken by a figment with no ties to the world Pete could discover, and she knew, in the leaden and otherworldly way she just knew some things, that the only way they'd find Bridget Killigan would be dead.

The clerk was giving her the eye, so Pete showed her warrant card. "Does the lift work?" she asked.

The clerk snorted. "What d'you think, Inspector?"

Pete sighed resignedly and mounted the stairs. She'd been meaning to get more time at the gym, hadn't she? One didn't become a twenty-eight-year-old detective inspector without spending every waking moment plastered to a case. At least, one didn't if one didn't want to endure the whispers about DI Caldecott the elder and how he'd worked for his position, he had, wasn't right how some young slip just waltzed right in…

Room 26 matched all the other doors in the hallway, robin's egg blue, like a door in a dirty London sky. Pete lifted her hand to knock and then dropped it. She'd tried to ignore that knowing, of course. You couldn't know things you hadn't deduced with fact. The feelings of tight pressure behind her eyes, the whispers of the future echoing down the time stream to her ears—those things were stress, or low blood sugar.

Not real. Had never been real. Maybe she'd had a good hunch a time or two, was all. She was good at her job. Nothing spooky about it.

Pete lifted her hand again and knocked this time, firmly and thrice. "C'min," someone mumbled from behind the door. "'S open."

"Not very smart in this city," Pete replied, knowing the best she could hope for on the other side of the door was a shifty-eyed informant who had heard some fifth-hand story about Bridget Killigan and needed a few quid.

She turned the knob and stepped in, keeping her chin up on the off chance that it was a shifty-eyed axe murderer, instead. "I'm DI Caldecott. You wanted to speak about Bridget Killigan?"

He was slouched on the sill, a lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip. The sun was low over King's Cross and it lit up the man's platinum-dyed hair, a halo over a dirty hollow-cheeked face.

"Yes," said Jack Winter, exhaling smoke through his nose. "I did."

He'd been bloody and still the last time Pete saw him. Eyes staring at the ceiling of another's tomb. Pete could only stare for a moment, and her heart fluttered as the two images of Jack overlaid one another, spattering blood droplets and pain across the living incarnation's face. He'd been so still.

Younger, too. Bigger. A body gained from nights sleeping on a floor and fights outside the club after his sets. That was gone now. Jack was all sharp corners and creases. He flicked his ash on the sill and unfolded his long arms and legs, gesturing Pete to the bed.

"Sit, if you like."

Pete couldn't have, not if God himself commanded it. She was rooted surely as an old oak.

Bloody and still. Dead.

"You…" The word came out on a shiver. "You."

"Yeah, I'm surprised a bit meself," Jack said, dragging on his cigarette like he was underwater and it was oxygen. "I mean, I rang asking for the inspector on the Killigan case and they give me your name. Almost said fuck it, then. You don't deserve the success."

Pete finally managed to blink, to set the world right side up again and march ahead despite the thousand screaming questions ringing inside her skull. Jack Winter was alive. Right. On with it.

"What do you mean by that?"

He threw down the butt of his cigarette and stamped on it with a jackbooted foot. "You know bloody well what I mean, you fickle bitch."

"I don't—" Pete started, but he cut her off, grabbing up an old leather jacket from the bed and shrugging it onto shoulders that showed their bones.

"Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery," Jack cut her off. "I'd prefer five hundred pounds cash reward, but since you're a copper I know your heartfelt thanks will have to do."

He went around Pete for the door, stamping his feet in a jerky stride like he was cold. Pete decided that her mind might be standing agape, but the rest of her didn't need to be. She caught him by the wrist. "Wait! Jack, how do you know that? Please."

Please tell me why you've been alive all along and never breathed a word to me. Please tell me how you survived that day.

He sneered. "Let go of me."

Pete held on, and he wriggled in her grasp. "I just want to have a word, Jack—after twelve years, don't you?"

"No," he said. "I told you what I needed to tell you, and now I'm off to the pub. Leggo, you bloody fascist!"

He ripped his arm away and the sleeve of the jacket jerked back, revealing a miniature tube system of veins and punctures on his forearm. Numbness stole over Pete as she stared, until Jack glared and pushed his sleeve down again.

"How long?" she asked.

Jack shoved a cigarette between his lips and touched it with the tip of his finger. An ember sprang to life. "Like you bloody care."

With a slam of the broken door, he vanished.

Pete dialed MG at her commune in Sussex on her mobile when she left the Grand Montresor and hung up. She dialed her desk at Scotland Yard. Ollie picked up, but Pete rang off with him as well.

What the bloody hell would she say? "By the way, that bloke who dropped dead in front of me when I was sixteen? Saw him today. Yeah. Gives his love."

Ollie was ill equipped to offer advice, unless it was regarding Leeds United football or cheap minibreak destinations. MG already had enough reasons to think Pete was a raving nutter. After the graveyard, after Pete had started talking again a few weeks later, MG had screamed and slapped her and demanded to know what had happened to her boyfriend.

I wish I knew, I really do, Pete had said, but it wasn't good enough. MG had never really trusted her again. She had been the one to introduce Pete to Jack, taken her to hear the Poor Dead Bastards play, so in MG's mind, where the universe rotated around MG, it was MG's fault that Jack was dead, and Pete's fault that she didn't throw herself on the same sword. Picking up and getting on with things was Da's way, and MG wouldn't hear of it.

Pete leaned her head against the steering wheel of her Mini, and tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the wasted middle-aged man in room 26 with the memory she'd carried for a dozen years. She hadn't brought Jack to mind often. It was painful to think of even the first time she'd seen Jack, at Fiver's, torn up and bloody even though his set had just started. That image stayed with her, Jack screaming and bleeding and irrefutably alive.

In the dreams that came in the twelve intervening years, the two pictures of Jack—alive and inanimate—blended, and Pete often found herself standing alone in the pit at Fiver's, being sung to by a dead man.

Pete's mobile rang and she jerked, dropping it between the driver's seat and the shift console. She swore as it continued to chirp and finally dug it out from the crevice. "DI Caldecott."

"Where are you?"

Pete held the phone away and checked the caller ID screen, terry (work) blinked in red letters. She took a breath and shoved everything that had happened inside the Montresor into the tidy bin she kept at the back of her mind for information too awful or real to process.

"I was working and I turned off my mobile. I do have a job still, Terry."

Terry drew in a breath. "You were supposed to be at the estate agent's to sign the sale papers at four."

Pete turned the key in the Mini's ignition and the faulty dash clock flickered to life. Three forty-five. "Terry, there's no way I can make it in traffic," Pete said. "We're going to have to put it off until tomorrow."

"Pete." Terry sighed. "Just because we're no longer together doesn't mean you can dispose of our communal property at your leisure. I want the flat sold by summer. I'm going on holiday to Spain and I don't want to deal with it."

"God forbid I should intrude on your precious holiday," Pete muttered. "Because it's all about you, Terry. Isn't it?"

"Pete," he said. "We bought the flat together, and we're no longer together, and I am going to get my money and wash my hands of it. That's all there is."

Pete had nearly forgotten the patronizing tone Terry pulled out, the one that made her feel like a first-year recruit every time, but it came back to her in a rush. "Terry, I'm working," she snapped. "I don't have time for you."

"That was always your whole problem," said Terry. After a moment a bleep told Pete she'd been disconnected.

"And a fine afternoon to you, too," Pete muttered, tossing the mobile into the back seat. Terry had a job that began and ended at the same time every day. He never got blood on his shoes.

He never saw people return from the dead.

Pete gripped the Mini's wheel for a long thirty seconds before she felt steady enough to drive. She tried to blot Jack's face out and replace it with Bridget Killigan's, because the little girl was who she should be dwelling on. Not Mr. Risen from the Bloody Dead.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

"Bollocks," Pete said firmly, and pulled away from the curb.