Amongst Our Weapons

9 Air Support

Glossop is in a different force area, so we bade farewell to DC Eileen Monkfish and the Greater Manchester Police and, pausing only to stock up on snacks, caught a local train from Manchester Piccadilly.

‘I have a car in Glossop,’ said Seawoll. ‘My dad’s going to drop it at the station for me.’

It was raining heavily as the train headed back out over the massive railway viaduct that feeds Manchester Piccadilly. Dirty grey clouds were low enough to drag their skirts across the tower-block-studded plain of the city. As the train peeled off to climb through the outer suburbs, me and Danni fired up our phones and got updated on the course of the investigation. Seawoll stayed strangely quiet and stared out the window.

At one point we shot across a valley on an extraordinarily high viaduct – one of those constructions that seems too ambitious to be made out of Victorian brick and wrought iron.

‘There’s a story,’ said Seawoll, still staring out the window, ‘that the mist came down once and the train stopped on a signal on this viaduct, and half the passengers alighted thinking it was the station and fell to their deaths.’

Glossop was the end of the branch line and a single-platform station – a low-slung, single-storey structure built of sandstone. Outside was a brick-surfaced car park, and waiting amongst a clutch of nearly new Peugeots, VWs and Toyotas was a battered Ford Escort that had, I estimated, last passed an MOT before the turn of the millennium. It was a sun-faded red, with a mismatched panel and white patches where dents had been beaten out.

‘This brings back memories,’ said Seawoll.

The doors were unlocked and the keys were hidden behind the sun visor. There were still drink bottles and food wrappers in the back seat’s footwell. Left over, Seawoll, said, from his leaving party. I’ve been in better-maintained pool cars and it creaked alarmingly when Seawoll levered his bulk into the driver’s seat. But when he turned the key in the ignition the engine started smoothly – that, at least, had been properly maintained.

Seawoll must have sensed my surprise.

‘I use it when I come up to see my dad,’ he said. ‘You need a car to get around up here.’

But not to get to the Volcrepe Mill – we could have walked it in fifteen minutes. Down a high street of sandstone terraces that crowded against the pavement. Small shop fronts with local brands, an Esso petrol station, a flat-roofed leisure centre that looked as if it was a prefab but was probably too modern. More terraces of the same sandy brick, and then we turned down a narrow lane which dipped down to what I knew from the map on my phone was the Glossop Brook.

On our left reared a derelict factory with boarded-up windows, and on the other side was a hoarding festooned with hard hat signs and hazard warnings. A building site – more housing, according to Seawoll, Glossop having gone from grimy industrial town to a ‘charming community’ set amongst the borders of the Peak District.

‘More lawyers, architects and financial advisors than you’d find in Maida Vale,’ he’d said as we passed multiple estate agents on the High Street.

Seawoll parked up next to the bridge, where a grey metal palisade gate blocked off the access road to the factory. Seawoll rattled the chain and padlock that held it shut and scowled.

‘We could climb over at the side,’ said Danni.

The ugly modern gate was fixed between the original sandstone posts – these were low and smooth enough to be climbed. You could even use the parapet of the stone bridge to start you off.

‘You can if you want to,’ said Seawoll, and he turned to me and held up the padlock. ‘Peter, come here and make yourself useful.’

I have a number of spells that can make short work of a lock, providing you never want to use it again. But when I gave the shackle a pull it proved to be open already.

‘Excellent,’ said Seawoll. ‘That makes it almost legal.’

I looked at Danni, who shrugged. Given that Seawoll held the exalted rank of detective chief inspector, we were both totally prepared to abdicate our responsibilities re: proper powers of entry procedure to him, as our senior officer. Lower rank, as I have often noticed, can have its privileges, too.

Beyond the gate was a cracked asphalt road that ran between the factory building and the river. The windows were all boarded up, but there was a door at ground-floor level that had been left hanging open. The rain, which had been fitful up until then, grew suddenly heavy, so rather than follow the road we ducked inside.

‘I used to come down here as a kid,’ said Seawoll. ‘Mind you, there was a lot more of it left in them days.’

We were in a room twenty metres long, where the first floor had obviously been allowed to collapse onto the ground. Piles of rubble and structural timbers were heaped in a ridge from one end to the other. The rain was pounding on the remains of the roof and pouring through a great gash that ran its length.

It smelt of mould, old stone and decay.

It was remarkably light on the vestigia – nothing more than a whiff of sulphur. I pointed this out to Danni.

‘Should there be more?’ she asked – raising her voice over the din the rain was making on the roof.

‘A working factory this old,’ I said. ‘Should be tons.’

‘Where to next?’ asked Danni.

Seawoll pointed to where an open doorway led to what appeared, from where we were, to be a more intact area.

‘Let’s try through there,’ he said.

‘It’s not here,’ said a voice behind us.

We turned to find a young white girl standing on one of the piles of rubble. She looked to be about ten or eleven, with a mop of sandy hair over a round freckled face and dark blue eyes. She was dressed for mischief in a pair of blue denim dungarees, a red and black chequered shirt and red Converse.

‘What’s not here?’ asked Seawoll – raising his voice to be heard above the rain banging on the remains of the roof.

‘What you’re looking for,’ said the girl, and I noticed that she didn’t need to raise her voice at all.

‘And what are we looking for?’ asked Seawoll.

‘Don’t you know?’ said the girl.

Then she skipped down the pile of rubble towards us. She did it without hesitation or looking down to see where she was putting her feet, the heels of her red Converse kicking up dust but never slipping.

As she got closer, I heard the rush of water and the creak of gigantic wheels and, over it all, the long lonesome cry of a falcon high over the moors.

‘As it happens,’ said Seawoll, ‘not really. Why don’t you stop fucking around and tell us?’

‘Alexander!’ said the girl with mock severity. ‘Do you kiss your mam with that mouth?’

‘Who are you?’ asked Seawoll.

‘She’s the Glossop,’ I said.

‘You can call me Brook,’ she said. ‘Or Glotti – depends on how old-fashioned you want to be.’

‘Do I know you?’ asked Seawoll.

‘No, Alexander,’ said Brook. ‘I was asleep for a long time, but I watched you and your friends playing in my dreams so perhaps I was in the middle of waking up. I loved your games – all those Daleks and Drashigs and other monsters. It reminded me of when the world was young and we still had dragons.’

I must have reacted to the last, because Brook fixed me with her dark eyes.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘We had dragons back then, breathing fire and crawling on their bellies – or were that the wyrms? I couldn’t keep them straight then, either.’

‘You were going to tell us what we’re looking for?’ said Seawoll, who obviously wasn’t going to let meeting the ancient spirit of his home town’s river get in the way of the police work.

‘First you’ve got to introduce me to your friends, Alexander,’ said Brook. ‘It’s only polite.’

‘This is Danni,’ said Seawoll. ‘And this is Peter.’

In a spirit of inquiry, I stuck out my hand for Brook to shake. She took it in her small hand, her grip firm, and for a fleeting moment I was up in a high place under a clear night sky – the stars wheeling over my head.

A wide, disturbing grin spread across her face.

‘That, Peter,’ she said, and let go.

When Danni put out her hand, Brook childishly faked her out and thumbed her nose at her.

‘You’re not ready for awesome yet,’ she said. ‘Shit will get real soon enough.’ She looked at me and winked. ‘Isn’t the internet wonderful,’ she said. ‘Better than dragons any day.’

‘So what is it you think we’re looking for?’ said Seawoll. ‘That’s assuming you actually know what you’re talking about.’

‘The Sons of Wayland,’ said Brook. ‘Those mad romantics in iron and steel – keeping alive the ancient traditions but not above knocking out a decent steam boiler if you asked them nicely.’ She looked from Seawoll to me.

‘You’re looking for the storehouse what was brought here in 1939,’ she said. ‘But they moved it out again in 1946. I wasn’t there, of course. I was asleep and I didn’t awake for another forty years. There were only fitful dreams of bombs and fires in the night.’

‘Do you know where it is now or not?’ asked Seawoll, who doesn’t take lip from a witness – no matter what they say they’re the god of. ‘Because I’m getting that desperate for my tea.’

‘Come with me,’ said Brook.

She led us out the back of the building. As we approached the rear door the sound of the rain faded and daylight lightened, so that when we stepped outside it almost felt like sunshine.

It was still overcast but it felt like a bright spring day. Ahead I could hear children laughing.

‘I remember this,’ said Seawoll. ‘This was our adventure playground back in the day.’

What it was was a health and safety nightmare. A big orthogonal open space bounded on all four sides by the sandy-coloured ruins of the Volcrepe Mill. Small hills of brick rubble mixed with rusting girders and the remains of gantries twisted into gallows shapes by time and neglect. Weeds and scrubs pushed up through broken asphalt and concrete slabs strewn with broken glass and jagged metal shrapnel.

Anyone looking to film a low budget post-apocalyptic movie need look no further. A Young Adult dystopia at that, because a dozen or more kids were playing amongst the ruins.

‘God, I hope they’ve had their tetanus jabs,’ said Danni as we watched a pair of boys sled down a rubble heap on a piece of rusty corrugated iron.

‘Don’t be such a mitherer,’ said Brook. ‘If you don’t bloody your knees when you’re a kiddie, what kind of a childhood would that be?’

‘One without septicaemia?’ said Danni.

‘Nobody’s going to get septicaemia or tetanus or crippled or the like,’ said Brook. ‘Not while I’m here.’

‘Swear,’ I said, and the light faded a bit.

Brook turned on me, her face a stern adult mask.

‘You dare?’ she asked – her voice deceptively pleasant.

‘Swear,’ I said.

I felt her power then, and it went all the way back to a time the Glossop was a mad unchannelled stream that ran free and wild down from the moors. A time when bears and wolves patrolled her banks and bison drank from her pools.

What was I in the face of all that geological time?

And then Brook was eleven again and smiling a mischievous smile. The sky brightened and I took another breath.

‘The Starling,’ she said. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

‘And the kids?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘I swear on my power and all that. Satisfied?’

I looked at Seawoll, who was looking impatient, obviously having missed all the mystical stuff.

‘And the archive?’

‘I can help you find it,’ said Brook. ‘But first I need your help with something.’

‘Oh great, a bloody side quest,’ said Seawoll.

But in policing, like in open-world RPGs, you get used to chasing after collectables in the hope they’ll help you move things along.

‘This way,’ said Brook.

We followed her around the remains of a brick shed. In front of us was an area where the rubble had been cleared away. On it, bits of scrap metal had been cemented together with what looked like papier mâché to form the shape of a plane – a big plane, at least fifteen metres long and with a wingspan to match.

Not just any junk either, but what appeared to be actual bits of aircraft fuselage. As we watched, a couple of older kids held a curved section in place while a younger child pushed papier mâché into the crack between it and the next section along. I could see patches of untarnished aluminium and structural spars with the distinctive lightening holes drilled through them to save weight.

I had a friend at school who was mad keen on Airfix models, who probably could have told me the make of plane, but I knew enough to guess it was a Second World War bomber.

It was a patchwork anyway – some fragments were painted khaki, others showed bare metal or scraps of camouflage patterns. I thought I saw at least one white USAF star and part of an RAF roundel.

‘It’s like a cargo cult plane,’ said Danni.

It was just that. As if the children of Glossop were hoping to attract planes to bring them cargo – although given that the town seemed entirely built on a slope, I wondered where they thought they would land.

‘I slept for fifty years,’ said Brook, ‘and woke up to find you lot had made a right mess of things. Now down here in the valley I was used to that, but up on the moors?’ She shook her head. ‘I expected better.’

Seawoll nodded towards the front of the bomber, where a seven-year-old girl was drawing a stick figure reclining under the broken edge of the cockpit windscreen.

‘Are you talking about the crash sites?’ he asked. ‘Most of those were cleaned up.’

‘Not the planes, not the metal,’ said Brook. ‘That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the poor dead sods left cruelly behind that plague me. Sad shadows condemned to walk the moors like a bad Morrissey song.’

‘I don’t know what you expect us to do about that,’ said Seawoll.

‘Not thee, Alexander,’ said Brook, and she nodded at me. ‘The Starling is the man I need.’

On the afternoon of 18 May 1945, a Royal Canadian Air Force Lancaster bomber out of RAF Linton-on-Ouse was doing bumps and circuits – a training manoeuvre where the plane circuits an airfield, comes in for a landing but after the wheels make contact with the tarmac they accelerate again and take to the air. At some point the crew got bored – after all, they were young men in a strange country currently in possession of a go-anywhere machine. And so they went for a sight-see around the beautiful English countryside. Because they were supposed to be sticking close to their airfield, they didn’t have a navigator on board. Perhaps this is why they got themselves lost, and after circling Glossop for a while they crashed into a hillside on the moors to the east. Seawoll said that he’d visited the site as a boy. You could still see the scar the plane made when it hit and read the memorial plaque that marks the spot. The crew were all buried in the Canadian section of the military cemetery at Brookwood.

The crash took place ten days after Germany surrendered. It wasn’t the first aircraft to crash in the Peak District, and it wouldn’t be the last.

According to Brook and Seawoll, there were biplanes out there, single-engine fighters, transport planes and at least one Superfortress. Even a Meteor, the first British jet fighter, and a Vampire – which I thought was a cool name for the second.

And some German bombers, too – having got lost while attempting to flatten Manchester and hit the hills on their way out. Brook advised me to Google translate some phrases while I still had Wi-Fi.

All these crashes was why I found myself sitting on a stile built into a drystone wall on top of a ridge a couple of thousand metres east of the ruins of the Volcrepe Mill and its cargo cult bomber. Behind me, the sun had fallen into a golden gap between the clouds and the horizon. Ahead, the moors rose up as darkening shadows vanishing into the mist. To the south of me, down a steep slope, the traffic on Snake Pass passed by in a fitful distant grumble. Sensibly, the cars had their headlights on and I watched their rear lights vanish into the low cloud like will-o’-the-wisps. Which is totally a real thing, by the way, and not to be messed with.

I chose this location because by the stile was a large boulder that had been incorporated into the wall – something I could enchant to serve as a beacon. I’d spent the last couple of hours enchanting it to do just that. Me and Nightingale had once used a similar approach to create a ghost attractor at Harrow-on-the-Hill Tube station. I’d done some experimentation since then, seeing if I could get more attraction for my magic. The lux variant I was using didn’t even radiate in the infrared, but it did imbue objects with power.

Ghosts feed off the ambient magic that accumulates around human activity. Why? Don’t ask. We don’t know. One day someone much cleverer than me might, but I probably won’t understand the maths. That ambient magic is what we call vestigia. Stone, metal and some plastics retain vestigia better than wood or other organics, which is why old houses tend to be haunted and old horses hardly ever are.

I reckoned that the ghosts of the airmen, if there really were any, would have been subsisting off the little vestigia retained by the metal components of their crashed aircraft. Up on the moors, with no human activity to renew them, they must be getting pretty thin. Brook thought one good point source of magic should be enough to draw them down.

‘Most of them, anyway,’ she’d said. ‘Some will not come however loud we call.’

We’d named the ghost attractor at Harrow the Hangover Stone, because it was set up early in the morning. But this was more of a beacon.

There were small enchanted stone beacons every two hundred metres down the slope to the west and along the valley down into Glossop proper. I’d enchanted a section of the cockpit of the cargo cult bomber directly – it was steel rather than aluminium, and thus a good receptor.

It was a lot of magic to expend in one day, even with such a low stress spell as my lux variant. For the first time in years I felt it necessary to log my magic use. Overdo magic and you can end up with a brain like a diseased cauliflower. Doctors Vaughan and Walid’s latest theory is that, under stress, the magic starts to open little holes in your brain.

‘Like microscopic singularities,’ Abigail had said, with far too much enthusiasm for my liking.

Beverley has made it clear that she loves me for both my body and my mind and expects me to keep the latter intact.

I slapped the side of the stone and gave it a last zap for good luck.

Gondor calls for aid, I thought.

Since there was bugger all for them to do, Seawoll and Danni had sloped off for dinner at Seawoll’s father’s place – although Danni had popped back up with a flask and a home-made bacon roll at half six. I’d eaten the roll while it was still hot, but I waited until I was done before opening the flask. It was tea – milky and sweet.

While I waited for the ghosts to arrive I moved away from the beacon, turned my phone on and called home.

‘Hi, babes,’ said Bev. ‘What you up to?’

In the background I could hear muffled voices, then a thump and then Maksim yelling, ‘No, no, the lining goes over there!’

‘I’m up on the moors fishing for ghosts,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s just Maksim making some last-minute preparations,’ said Beverley. ‘He’s worse than my mum and your mum combined.’

I heard the distinctive sound of a diesel engine starting up and thought of Indigo’s big diggy thing.

‘Is that a JCB?’ I asked.

A door closed nearby and the sound became muffled. Beverley putting some walls between her and Maksim’s ‘preparations’.

‘Are you coming back tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘I hope so,’ I said.

‘You’d better,’ she said. ‘Or there’ll be trouble.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Beverley to someone at her end, and then to me, ‘I’ve got to placate the neighbours.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Laters.’

‘You’ve got to say it – before you go,’ said Beverley.

I sighed.

‘Say it!’ she said again – with emphasis.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I should hope so,’ said Beverley, and she hung up.

I shut down my phone and went back to the beacon.

The setting sun briefly turned Manchester into a glittering city of gold and then it was dark. Just to maintain the mood, it began to drizzle.

The first ghost arrived just as I finished my tea – he didn’t seem happy.

‘I say,’ he said. ‘Where the devil am I?’

He’d started as the barest impression of movement in the mist, but as he approached the beacon he took on form and colour. A sandy-haired young white man with a cheerful open face that looked all of fifteen but probably wasn’t. He wore a deflated yellow life jacket over a sheepskin jacket, but under that I saw he’d gone up with his tie neatly done in a Windsor knot.

‘You’ve been in a crash,’ I said. ‘You need to get to the debriefing.’

‘Prang, eh?’ he said. ‘That explains …’ He faltered. ‘I must have hit my head because I feel like I’ve been waiting forever.’

‘It’ll all be explained at the debriefing,’ I said. ‘Over the wall – follow the beacons.’

‘Jolly good,’ he said, and vaulted over the stile. ‘Good to see you West Indian chaps getting involved,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t want you to miss out on the fun.’

And then he vanished.

The next lot were Americans, who arrived mob-handed and silent. They seemed thin and attenuated, even when close to the beacon. They didn’t speak but the leader, possibly the captain, nodded gloomily when I gave him his instructions and led his companions down the hill towards Glossop.

That was a mood – as Abigail might say.

There were many more – Australians, Canadians, British. More Americans. A white guy in flares and a polo shirt who wanted to ask too many questions. They came in groups, in pairs and on their own.

Something passed me as nothing more than a chill in the air.

I lit a paraffin-fuelled hurricane lamp, guaranteed magic-proof, against the darkness. But amazingly, as night drew on, the sky cleared and a sliver of a moon chased the vanished sun down towards a smudge of light that might have been Merseyside.

I waited, sitting on the stile, for another half an hour but no more ghosts appeared. I was about to pack it in when I spotted a figure briefly silhouetted on the horizon. Unlike the ghosts, this one didn’t glow with pseudo-phosphorus but stayed a shifting patch of shadow until she stepped into the circle of lamplight.

It was a small white woman with blonde hair cut short and a pop-idol-beautiful face. She was dressed as I remembered her from when we were probationers – high-viz jacket over a Metvest, Airwave clipped to her shoulder, tactical belt full of CS spray, speedcuffs and an extendable baton. Blue uniform trousers and DM lace-ups. All she was missing was the uniform cap with its badge and checkerboard band.

‘Hi, Peter,’ said Lesley May.

I lunged to grab her, using the stile as a brace to push off with my right foot. We’ve had magical fights, me and Lesley, and I couldn’t say who was better. Especially now when she’s been off learning fuck-knows-what from Christ-knows-who. But I was physically bigger, stronger and, in any case, she wouldn’t be expecting a grapple.

It was good tactics and it might even have worked if I hadn’t jumped right through her body and landed flat on my face.

I rolled over to find Lesley staring down at me. My hurricane lamp was still sitting on the wall behind her and her face was in shadow.

‘Good trick, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Picked it up in America.’

‘I’m assuming you’re not dead,’ I said, rolled over and got to my feet.

‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Still alive.’

I passed my hand through her torso and she stood still and let me. There was no resistance but there was a faint vestigium, like the smell of salt and a gentle surf breaking on a beach.

And children singing in what I recognised as German.

‘Is this astral projection?’ I asked.

‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘I’m sort of piggybacking on this ghost.’

I lunged suddenly at her eyes with my left hand – she flinched.

‘And, yes, I can see and hear you,’ she said.

‘This could revolutionise telecommunications, though,’ I said. ‘What’s the range?’

‘Nice try, but I’m not anywhere near you,’ she said.

But you are, I thought. Close enough to know I was attracting ghosts and then waylay one poor soul on his way off the moors. If I fire up my phone, can I persuade Derbyshire Police to put a helicopter overhead, bring in search teams? Probably not.

‘Peter,’ said Lesley with a note of exasperation so familiar to me that it made me smile. ‘Focus. Even if you had the army on standby you couldn’t get a cordon around me in time to catch me. This spell isn’t going to last that long and I have stuff I need to tell you.’

‘Where have you been?’ I asked.

‘Mostly in the States,’ she said. ‘They’re mad over there, by the way, and it’s wide open. I feel sorry for Kimberley, I really do, if she’s all they’ve got. But that’s not important. I was hired to nick something but I think there might have been some unintended consequences.’ She pulled a face. ‘Which were totally not my fault.’

‘Did you steal something from the archive?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but—’

‘Where is it?’

‘Close by,’ she said. ‘You’ll be there tomorrow – and are you in for a surprise! I know I was.’

‘What did you steal?’

‘A lamp,’ she said. ‘A magic lamp. A collector in the States wanted it.’

‘Did it have a genie in it?’ I asked. ‘Did it grant you wishes? Did it sing?’

‘Christ, and I was starting to miss you, Peter,’ she said. ‘But, yeah, there was something trapped inside and I don’t think it grants wishes. Unless you’re feeling suicidal, that is.’

‘The Angel of Death?’ I asked – thinking of the way she had just vanished into thin air like a genie might.

‘So you’ve met her, then?’

‘And she was in a lamp?’

‘It was a very fancy lamp, definitely enchanted, definitely old, definitely not to be fucked with.’

‘And yet you obviously fucked with it.’

‘Not on purpose,’ said Lesley, looking defensive. ‘The archive was a little bit more defended than I was led to believe. There was a bit of a scuffle. But because it was me, not you, the place was still standing at the end.’

You know that really shouldn’t have annoyed me as much as it did. But even as I knew I was being manipulated, I was getting angry. And I couldn’t afford angry – not when I was dealing with Lesley. Not even when she was a ghost projection or whatever.

‘I think the lamp got damaged in the fight,’ said Lesley. ‘And I was halfway back to my bike when there was a magical discharge and everything goes white and then black.’

I sat back down on the stile and fished in my coat pockets for the emergency Mars bar I was sure I’d left in there.

‘Real or magical explosion?’ I asked.

‘Magical, I think,’ said Lesley, and she came over to lean against the stone wall as if we were just two friends having a chat. ‘The lamp was intact but it had lost its sparkle – something had escaped.’

‘Our angel?’ I asked, coming up empty on the Mars bar front.

‘Yeah,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe, but I didn’t see her and I was too busy running away to hang about and make inquiries. I did wonder who’d killed Carmichael, but it wasn’t until the guy in the Silver Vaults that I put two and two together.’

I didn’t see an obvious connection, which meant Lesley knew more than I did.

But if she’d only been after the lamp, why had she been visiting the dead Preston Carmichael in the first place?

‘Are you after the rings as well?’ I asked.

‘Is that the time?’ said Lesley, and she stood away from the wall. ‘This guy’s got a plane to catch.’

There was no transition – one moment it was Lesley and the next it was a German airman. He was dressed in a Luftwaffe flight suit, complete with leather helmet and quilted yellow life jacket. He seemed ridiculously young – maybe twenty – and his eyes were large and scared.

I looked around to see if the rest of his crew were with him, but there was nothing.

‘Wo ist die Einsatzleitung?’ he said. ‘Ich muss doch Meldung machen, aber ich fürchte, ich komme zu spät.’ I pointed down the hill.

‘Geh den hügel runter,’ I said in my best Google Translate German. ‘Folge den Leuchtfeuern.’ Follow the beacons.

‘Danke,’ he said, and slipped past me to half-walk, half-glide, down the hill.

I pulled out my notebook and by the yellow light of the hurricane lamp wrote up my encounter with Lesley. The only possible connection between the archive and David Moore and Preston Carmichael was the rings. And the only connection between the two men was Preston Carmichael’s prayer group. And fellow member Jocasta Hamilton had a ring, too. Were there more rings? Did any other member of the prayer group have rings? Were they in turn in danger from the Angel of Death? And was Lesley using us to locate them so she could steal their rings?

Whatever else I did, tonight I was going to have to brief Seawoll and Nightingale so they could take steps. I’d let Nightingale explain to the DPS about Lesley’s new astral projection thing.

I was finishing up when something started fluttering around the beacon stone. I might have thought it was a moth, if moths were invisible and the size of seagulls. It was a very faded ghost – what I would call a one on the ‘annie’ scale of spectral solidity. My brain was latching on to the sensation of movement and interpreting it into the flapping of wings. I made sure my phone was still off and cast another werelight, using a second forma, scindere, to fix it into place on the other side of the stile.

Instantly the fluttering movement darted over to the fresh source of magic and landed on the railing. It solidified, so quickly that if I’d blinked I would have missed it, into a large black bird. Beverley has taught me some basic bird stuff so I recognised it as a corvid – too big to be a crow, I thought, so probably a raven.

I stayed still and watched for a bit while it preened itself. Then, satisfied with its comfort, it lifted and turned its head to regard me first with one eye and then the other,

Animal ghosts are rare. Abigail insists that the foxes believe that animals are too sensible to hang around after their death.

‘They say that any animal ghost stupid enough to hang around will be gobbled up by evil vampire cats,’ she said.

The foxes tend to blame most of the ills of the world on cats.

According to Enoch Corkenhale’s equally unreliable An Animal Phantasmagoria (1857), ‘the spirits of animals are most often associated with the presences of man. As a faithful hound may refuse to leave its master’s grave, so may its ghost refuse to leave its master’s abode.’

‘Were you on one of the planes?’ I asked. ‘The debriefing is that way.’

I pointed down the hill – the raven continued to eye me suspiciously.

‘Geh den hügel runter,’ I said, and the raven reared up, spreading its wings and cawing at me.

‘Guten tag,’ I said when it settled, and it cawed again – twice.

Perhaps this had been in one of the German planes – a not so lucky mascot.

Just on the off-chance, I repeated the German for ‘follow the beacons’. The raven took off and, beating the air over my head, turned and flew down the valley.

I waited a couple of minutes and then, turning to look up the valley again, I shouted, ‘Last call for ghosts! Time, gentlemen, please!’

Then I turned back and followed the beacons down the hill.

It took me a whole hour, on account of having to go slowly down the rough side of the hill. Then along the A57 as it changed from Snake Pass and became the High Street. Past neat rows of modern semis with their televisions flickering and muttering behind net curtains. The front gardens shrank down to nothing as I reached the Victorian end of town, turned left at the roundabout, hopped a fence and pushed through the bushes until I reached the ruined courtyard of Volcrepe.

Where Dennis the Glossop had recreated the last scene from Casablanca. The cargo cult plane was up on its wheels and whatever scrap had gone into its making – it looked like a Dakota to me. And I’ve watched Band of Brothers and A Bridge Too Far so I know what I’m talking about.

The moon was down, and it should have been pitch-black, but the scene was lit by the silver shimmer that seemed to roll off the plane like mist. The same mist which covered the rubble and broken metal of the courtyard.

‘Play it again, Sam,’ I said.

‘That was a Lockheed L-12A,’ said Brook. ‘And this is a Dakota.’

‘How do you even know about Casablanca?’ I said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

Brook shrugged.

‘Maybe I dreamt it,’ she said. ‘Or maybe I saw it on TV – after the first thousand years you stop worrying about these things.’

She slipped her hand into mine like I was her older brother.

‘Watch this,’ she said. ‘You might learn something.’

Brook began to sing, starting with the child’s soprano you’d expect for her apparent age. It was an old song, in a language that hadn’t been spoken for thousands of years, a sad song in a minor key full of loss and longing and the silence of the high places.

It swept me away, picked me up and whirled me into the sky so that I went pinwheeling south until I was high above my own modest little town. Where Beverley was shifting uncomfortably in her sleep, and Dad was dreaming of that time he played with Joe Harriott and Mum dreamt she was grooving in the audience.

Suddenly they were all below me. The good, the bad and the merchant bankers. The mob and the gentry, the Rivers and the foxes. And I saw the delicate intaglio of their lives traced in gold and silver and blue.

And for a moment I thought I saw a pattern – one I might understand if I could just lose myself in it first.

Brook squeezed my hand hard, much harder than a child should be able to.

‘Come back, Peter,’ she said. ‘Don’t get lost on me, lad.’

I was suddenly standing beside Brook with the Dakota in a wide flat field at dusk, the sun a bright line on the horizon, hangars behind me like shadowy caverns, and beyond the plane a tower, a squat two-storey block with its windowed control room blazing like a lighthouse.

I could see movement in the cockpit as the flight crew made their last-minute checks. At the rear, the young men in American, Commonwealth and German uniforms lined up patiently to board, and as they waited they sang the sad refrain of a people long lost in history. A raven flew low over my head, circled and cried out twice before settling on the nose. When I looked again, it had become a picture of itself painted below the cockpit window.

The last of the lost pilots boarded. The port and then the starboard engines stuttered into life and roared. The plane taxied around to face away from us; imaginary prop wash made my coat flap. Before he closed the rear door, one of the young men waved goodbye – I couldn’t tell which uniform he was wearing.

The engines revved, the Dakota picked up speed, the rear lifted, and then it was rising and banking towards the west. It levelled its wings and climbed out of sight.

The real world returned as darkness. I lit my hurricane lamp and its yellow light illuminated rubble, scrub and scrap metal.

‘Where did they go?’ I asked.

Brook looked up at me and gave me a lopsided smile.

‘How should I know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they went nowhere.’

‘Are we done?’ I asked, because frankly I was knackered and wanted my dinner.

‘Yeah,’ said Brook, and we picked our way through the rubble to the gate and onto the road.

Brook gave me an address that I hoped meant something to Seawoll, and walked me out of the ruined factory and onto the old stone bridge over her river.

‘You want to watch yourself when you visit,’ said Brook. ‘They’re a right fearsome lot in that house.’

And with that unhelpful statement, she jumped over the parapet and vanished without a splash.