The Deceit

27

Karen got off the Tube at Blackfriars. It was a cold and rather drizzly evening. Tourists were wandering along the Thames Embankment. She called the school to make sure Eleanor had been collected by Alan, as arranged.

Her first day back as a mother and already she was neglecting her daughter. Again. The guilt burned but Karen did her best to ignore it.

As she walked along, Karen gazed about; she’d always loved this part of London. The exotic clash of ancient and modern, the surreal quietness at night. She used to walk here when she was a student in the big city, loving the hushed and medieval precincts of the Temple, tucked between the shining offices and bank HQs, the cenotaphs of money.

She passed one particularly glamorous and empty new office block. The darkness of a cold winter evening had sent the office workers home. Spires of Georgian churches loomed between chasms of glass. And then she found it.

102 Chancery Lane. It was a rundown Victorian building, a sooty old heap with greyed windows, yellow brickwork and an air of sickliness. It was also pretty much derelict, ripe for redevelopment. Surrounding the ground floor of the block was a palisade of wooden walls, with scaffolding creeping up the sides. KEEP OUT signs were everywhere.

But the builders were nowhere, of course. The whole block was desolate. Indeed this whole quarter of London was so very quiet: another enclave of historic silence amidst the monied and glittering bustle.

‘Ah, hi. Darren Glover.’ The young site manager came running up the road. ‘Sorry I’m late, just got off the bus.’

He turned a padlock and pushed open a temporary wire door, and they squeezed inside the palisade. The last thing Karen saw of the outside world was a bus rolling down Holborn, and then she was inside. It was gloomy within. A couple of bare, shining bulbs were strung on naked wires, hanging from a cracked and corniced ceiling, but they didn’t seem to work. There was an old chandelier covered in oil lying in a corner of the lobby. Karen and Darren switched on their torches.

The ground-floor rooms were bare and bereft, having been already stripped by the developers and then left to go damp. They offered no sign of life, and no sign of habitation in the recent past. Darren Glover put his hands on his hips, vindicated. ‘I told you, it’s empty! Nothing here.’

Standing in the dank and chilly hallway, Karen frowned. Frustrated. Maybe she was wrong. Or maybe she was right. She remembered the newspaper piece: passing from the cold stone dusk of the stairs … ‘Let’s try the upper floors.’

Around the stairs the dust of old bricks, and old life, was thick. Karen went first this time, guiding them with her torchbeam, which pierced the dust as if it were sea-fog. The grand Victorian stairway led to an old stone landing, and then she saw in the darkness a large door, its size indicating that it led to a significant apartment.

The door was closed, but the smell hit them at once. Something fetid and dead, but recently dead: something rotting.

‘Jesus,’ said Darren. ‘That’s disgusting. What the hell is in there?’

Karen walked to the silent, peeling door, and pushed. The door appeared to be locked. If Rothley had been here, how had he got hold of a key?

The affable site manager was now a lot less cheerful. ‘Do you think someone is in there?’

Someone, or something? was the ludicrous thought that flashed across Karen’s mind. What was she expecting, a demon?

Stupid.

She pushed against the door again but it did not give. Even so, the door was old, and ill-fitting: there were cracks at the bottom, spaces between the jamb and the warped and peeling panels. Enough spaces for that ghastly stench to escape.

Another unwarranted thought intruded. The girl, on the bed, growling like a dog.

He will kill you, bitch. Luke will smell your fear. He will kill you.

‘There’s a box of tools downstairs.’

Karen turned to Darren Glover, their torchbeams crossing in the dust. ‘Sorry?’

‘Right at the foot of the stairs, there might be a crowbar. Let me go and get it.’

He disappeared into the gloom and the murk, leaving Karen alone with whatever was inside and beyond that door.

Was that a noise? She pressed her ear to the panel. Some kind of scratching? A rat? A pigeon? Something else?

‘Darren?’ Karen whispered. ‘Mr Glover?’ She wasn’t sure why she was whispering but she didn’t seem able to shout.

He will kill you, bitch

‘OK, I got it.’

Glover re-emerged, illumined by his own torchlight, carrying a long black crowbar. He applied it boldly to the door, jemmying it behind the jamb. Just two savage tugs were sufficient, then the door snapped open and the full rotten scent flooded out: engulfing them.

Darren Glover pressed a sleeve to his nose. ‘Jesus Christ. Yuk.’

Karen recognized the smell now. It was mammalian decomposition, probably human. She’d experienced it often enough: rancid, pungent, sickening, with a faint and eerie top note of sweetness. But there was a lot more in that smell, too, something … churchy. Incense?

Her torchlight pierced the room. One quick sweep told her it was empty, apart from a rug on the bare floorboards — and here, some red smears on the grey, wallpaperless walls. She stepped inside, and looked closer. Almost certainly paint, as if someone had begun to decorate the room then stopped. Were they trying to recreate Crowley’s flat? The rose-coloured room? But then they’d abandoned the job for some reason?

Her shoes scrunched on something. She gazed down. She was walking on tiny dead birds. The floor was littered with little dead birds, and feathers. They really were repeating Crowley’s rituals.

‘What the fuck are they?’ Glover yelped. ‘Starlings? Sparrows? And this! What the … what’s going on?’

‘It’s black magic. This room used to belong to a famous Satanist, Aleister Crowley, a hundred odd years ago. He would feed little birds to a skeleton. They are copying him.’

So now she had her proof. Someone had been in here, recently, and that someone was surely Rothley. But what was that smell? And where was it coming from? It seemed to fill the room, but it had no obvious source. A dead rat lodged behind the walls?

But she recalled Donald Ryman’s words: Some say the Abra-Melin ritual can only be successfully completed if several humans are sacrificed, culminating in the murder of a living child.

Karen shuddered. Once again, her torchlight illuminated something odd. A fat red disc, like a hockey puck, lying next to the birds. She took some gloves from her jacket pocket and snapped them on.

‘You think this is a crime scene.’

Ignoring Glover’s nervous assertion, she knelt and picked up the disc. It was soft, and organic: the shape and consistency of fishcake, but purplish red. Karen sniffed at the disc. It smelled strongly of incense: myrrh, copal, storax, whatever they used in churches. It was also a little crumbly. They’d get no fingerprints from this; but it was worth analysing. She took out a ziplocked evidence bag from her other pocket and dropped it in.

She picked up one of the birds, and bagged it, too. And these, what were these? Dead wasps? A dead little lizard? They also went in the bags.

And these: rats’ feet. Severed, and scattered beyond the birds. She remembered the moles’ feet in the museum in Boscastle. Repressing her revulsion, Karen went across the floor on her hands and knees, methodically gathering all this evidence.

Glover said, again, ‘You think there’s been a crime here. Right? Those are evidence bags.’

Karen said nothing. Now that she was closer to the ground the smell was even more intense. She realized it was coming from under the rug. From under the floorboards …

She stood up, abruptly, and whisked away the rug. The smell surged out. Her torchbeam revealed that several planks had been recently and crudely hammered over a hole in the original floorboards.

‘Help me,’ she said, gesturing at Darren’s crowbar. ‘Let’s get these floorboards up.’

His expression showed his absolute reluctance, but he obeyed nonetheless. Grunting, and tugging, he jemmied up the new boards one by one.

First Karen saw the legs: bare feet, bare human legs, dead and grey, gnawed a little by rats: the corpse had been here a few days. Then the middle planks came away and she saw the midriff. A young woman, naked, smeared with blood.

Glover yelped. ‘Fuck. Look at the hands!’

The hands and arms were covered with bite marks. Two of the fingers had been severed, messily: as if chewed off. Tourniquets had been applied to the upper arms, which now hung loose and leathery. Dark purple patches in the cement underneath showed where the blood had soaked.

Glover backed away. But Karen pointed to the last plank. Covering the face. ‘Please?’

He swore, in a low voice, but he applied himself. The final plank came away with little effort, the nails lifted, the wood cracked, and the woman’s face was revealed.

Karen stared, shocked.

She had expected to see a face contorted with horror, or grimacing, or simply rigid with fear — as she normally found in murder cases.

But the dead girl was calm and open-mouthed. The open mouth was clogged with drying red blood — and something else. Something raw and strange. What was it? Karen stooped close, to look, then she recoiled.

The girl’s mouth was choked with her own severed fingers.