The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic 2 Read online

  That was how they’d met, Harri and Jane, she’d told Val a dozen times how she’d found him in the field hospital, as good as dead.

  ‘I took one look at him, lying there like a wet lettuce and said, ‘‘Come on, frame thi sen!’’ Jane would laugh and slap her bird boned hand on the bed for emphasis. ‘And do you know what, Val? He blooming well did, an all.’

  Mrs. Frowe had a cracking sense of humour and didn’t hold a grudge against the German pilot who took her husband’s eye. Neither did he, according to Jane. ‘He always said that it was the best thing that ever happened to him.’

  Val laughed the first time she’d told her. ‘You sure about that, Jane?’

  ‘Oh, aye. He said it gave him time to think, lying in the hospital, and that if he hadn’t lost it, he’d have never met me.’ Then they both laughed, the first time, and the tenth time Jane told the story. She hadn’t told it for a few weeks now. She was too busy sucking air into tired lungs to have time or energy to talk much these days. Even when she was fully awake all she did for the most part was look out of the window.

  Val would never admit it because she was a professional and you had to be realistic, but she was going to miss Jane. In the month since she’d been admitted, Val had heard so many of her stories that the day seemed empty without them. She’d learnt things about Bradford that she’d never known things that would never make it into a history book. The tales she told were old legends shared on dark nights sitting at the kitchen table. There were stories about goblins and severed heads, lost statues, hidden occult temples and ancient battles fought in streets she’d walked all her life without a second thought. The old lady told them word for word every time and in a dialect that she swore had been passed down from the Vikings who settled here hundreds of years ago.

  ‘Vikings lived in Bradford? You’re pulling my leg, Mrs Frowe.’ Val had said.

  ‘It’s true; love, sure as I’m lying here. They kem ’ere ’cos it reminded ’em of their ’ome; wet and miserable.’ Jane replied with a giggle, laying the accent on extra thick for effect.

  They’d had some laughs before she’d started to slip away. It was horribly hot in the room; stifling. Val couldn’t stand it, and she knew Jane didn’t like it either; said it reminded her of the spinning sheds where she’d started work at 13 ‘doffing off’ the bobbins. After the war she worked there as the nurse which was apparently, ‘A right step up.’

  ‘Too hot in here, innit, Jane?’ Val asked, expecting no answer. ‘D’you want me to open the window, love? All right then.’

  Val push-pulled the paint stiffened window open and basked a moment in the cool air. Refreshed, she hung the chart back on the end of the bed and checked that the monitor was on and working, and that Jane was, well, whatever Jane was; somewhere between life and death. After making sure that her nightgown was tidy and that her white, cotton-fluff hair was neatly combed, Val crept to the door. She should have left it open, but someone passing might see the window and close it because of health and safety. Val had to laugh. As if the old lady could get out of bed and jump out of the window.

  ‘N’night and God bless, Jane love.’ said Val. As she closed the door she sighed her acceptance that in all probability, she would not see her alive again. She’d worked on D1 long enough to know when the dying were ready to let go and Jane was getting ready.

  *

  Jane woke early sometime between night and dawn when the world didn’t quite know where it was and so lay still while it figured it out. There was never anyone around at this time, just before shift change because the nurses were at their station, filling in the handover sheets. She didn’t mind, just so long as she didn’t pee herself. She had a mortal fear of peeing the bed, even though she’d never minded others doing it when she’d been a nurse. During the war, pee was the least thing to worry about finding in a bed, especially when she was out in France.

  ‘Dear God, Harri, d’you remember the mess you were in when I found you, you mucky pup.’ She wasn’t sure if she thought it or said it aloud.

  Harri would have laughed; and said, ‘Nay, lass, ‘ave slept sin then.’ When the morphine was flowing she swore she could hear him speak, swore she could see the old bugger; sitting in the corner. He’d come mostly at dusk, after the nurses had been. He’d sit himself in the faded, blue hospital chair, framed by the row of cards and sagging balloons sent by family who were waiting for her to die, but who were too polite to say so. He’d fold his hands in his lap, fix her with his bright bead of an eye and chuckling would call her a daft old mare. He didn’t come last night after Val had gone, last night her only visitor had been a big old crow, come to shelter from the rain on the window ledge. She didn’t mind, it made a change from the pigeons.

  Birds in mind, Jane turned her head towards the thin blister of light bulging against the false horizon of the window frame. The drone of traffic from Duckworth Lane was warming up like a violin concerto being played by tone-deaf drunks. Time was when she and Harri had sung and drunk their way the length of that lane, and it was bloody long with a lot of pubs back then, in their heyday. The pubs were mostly gone now. Fifty years she’d lived in this part of town and she remembered every day of all of them like it was yesterday. ‘Mind like a steal trap,’ Harri would say, and he was right. She’d lost three of seven kids and her husband, but she’d never lost her memory, or her teeth.

  Her visitor of the night before returned, blotting out the light, the big old crow wick-whacked a flurry of darkness against the half-open window as he landed heavily on the ledge. They’d plonked her in the old part of the BRI, where the Victorian stonework provided an ample perch for the … no, not a crow, it was a raven. The hollow beat of her heart danced. She was a city girl, born and bred, and so any wildlife out of the ordinary, even a carrion bird, was a rare delight, a touch of magic.

  Country folk could never understand, nay, would think her daft. Crows, ravens, rooks and the like were just pests to them, but not to a city lass who, barring a trip overseas in the 40s, and the odd week’s holiday in Scarborough, had spent almost her entire life living in the back to backs off Allerton Road, surrounded by mills and factories that still ate the young to feed the beast of industry. To Jane the mere glimpse of something like a fox or a raven was a thrill. And this chap was a fine example of his kind. She craned her neck despite the groan of tendons too set in their ways for comfort and blinked the rheum from her eyes as she tried to focus on the bird. He was staring right at her, bold as brass.

  ‘Yer a cocky bugger, aren’t you?’ she said, her voice a papery whisper.

  It cawed, fluffed out its ruff of neck feathers, and tilted its head as though it was thinking about what she said.

  Had she breath to spare she would have laughed, but her lungs were as light as the cotton fluff she’d inhaled for sixty years. There was no substance, nothing left to draw upon save the memory of breathing. For the first time in months she let a tear fall. Stoicism was a hard skill to master, but three miscarriages had been good teachers and she’d learnt well how to hold back the floods, but today she let some go, it was time after all. Another dark shape rose into view, black wings lashing the air as it landed and sighted her down the length of its angular beak.

  ‘I see tha’s brought thi’ girlfriend.’

  The ravens didn’t answer. They just watched her, two pairs of bright jet beads peering right into her, right through her eyes.

  ‘’As tha’ come f’me, then, eh?’ she thought she said.

  The new bird nodded. ‘Yes, Jane, I have come for you. We are old, you and I. Come, fly with me. Let us taste again the heedless joy of youth.’

  Jane thought she smiled. ‘Go-on then; hung fer a sheep as a lamb, as mi mother would say.’

  And so Jane flew with Muninn the raven. And Muninn remembered.

  Muninn remembered the spinning mills, the blackouts and the air raids. She remembered rationing; the old market; the backstreet cellar dives; the cinema with a dome fashioned to rival
the Taj Mahal. She remembered what the Taj Mahal was because of a sweet young man called Rashid who’d worked in the dye house and had a nice smile and a young family back in Pakistan who he missed more than life. She remembered everything about the broad ford, about Bradford. Memories connected and flowed from every person Jane had ever known to every person they had ever known and on they went. A thousand memories flowed through Muninn like wine flowed in the All Father’s cup and like him; she was renewed by the heady brew. As the sun birthed bright and strong, Huginn rose in tight wheels and joined them.

  ‘Harri, love! Is that you?’ said Jane, her dark, glassy eye spying the giveaway smirk that tugged at Huginn’s gleaming beak.

  ‘Well, who else would it be? You had me worried for a bit there, lass. I didn’t think you were going t’ wait for me t’ catch up,’ said Harri and they both laughed. Wing tip brushed wingtip and they soared like arrows, up beyond the bow of the sky, far above the broad ford.

  Huginn and Muninn

  Fly every day

  Over all the world;

  I worry for Huginn

  That he might not return,

  But I worry more for Muninn…

  That she might not remember.

  Where the Brass Band Plays

  By Adrian Tchaikovsky

  People ask me where I met Walther. They ask because we don't fit. You see me, I'm a big man. I used to be a fit man and most of it's still there, although some of it's hiding. I do bouncer work, club work. I keep my hair cut short, just off military. It helps, in my normal line of business. With the stuff I do for Walther, it doesn't help. Sometimes you can look as tough as you like, but the other man's always going to look worse. This was one of those times.

  Walther, now... This time we met on the seafront at Bridling Spa. He didn’t fit there, but Walther Cohen doesn't fit anywhere. He looks younger than me, and he's a lot smaller; very thin. He's got a thin face, too, with a nose on it, and his hair is always neatly combed over like his mum does it. He wears white suits. I never saw anyone wear a white suit in the flesh before I met him, only people on the television selling fruit or something. He usually wears a hat with it, a kind of white trilby thing with a black band. This time, picture him with a newspaper under his arm, and a golf umbrella. Just the man for the seaside, right? Well you've never seen Bridling Spa then. Probably you've never seen any seaside place these days.

  ‘Welcome, Michael,’ Walther said to me, ‘to the last resort.’ We'd met in a car park with a view of the sea, which was a kind of deep browny colour. Behind us there was a tacky little cafe, which was closed. It was just after the season. The car park was a quarter full, with a rank of motorcycles two-deep along one side. Beyond the car park, on one side, was a caravan park, and it was still full of stained, ugly pieces of junk that people had dragged here to the seaside. Probably they lived in them all year round. I thought of those crabs, the hermit ones, tugging the borrowed shells of dead animals around.

  ‘Don't you just love it?’ Walther asked. The wind had a go at his hat and he clamped it to his head. ‘A thousand families still at the seaside in October, all of them beetling here in their little metal houses. The holidaying elite, don't you think?’

  I had seen enough of his elite on my way here from the station. The off-season crowd at Bridling Spa was here for gambling and cheep booze. The seafront chip shops and amusement arcades were spilling over with beer-bellied shaven-headed men and baseball-capped starved-faced youths.

  ‘Can you estimate what percentage of the national benefits burden is here with us now, in this town?’ Walther asked. He asked it quite loud, and there were enough people in the car park that a few heard us. It would not be the first time I had stopped someone beating him up. Standing there in his white suit, speaking as elaborately poshly as he could, he was a living invitation to it.

  He does this, you understand. If it had been later in the day, he'd catch the drunk crowd, and then there would have been trouble. The thought would not have stopped him. ‘Look, Walther, why are we here?’ I said.

  ‘A client,’ he said, hopping down again, abruptly serious. ‘As always.’

  We found a table, one of those wooden-slatted picnic tables with the bench part built in. Walter had a newspaper cutting and spread it out, holding it flat to stop it being blown away. Somewhere off, from beyond the car park, someone shouted, ‘Oi! Queers!’

  ‘Her,’ Walther said. The photo was of a girl about ten, a school photo. Gina Brown. She wore glasses and looked uncertain. The piece was small for a local paper reporting that ‘Police Hunt for Missing Schoolgirl.’

  I have no idea how Walther gets his clients. He may advertise in the classified pages of some strange periodical, or leave cards in telephone boxes for all I know. Sometimes I think he solicits them, turning up on their doorsteps with impossible offers of help. Those offers have helped, on and off, in the past. I know he's been doing it since before I met him.

  ‘Missing person? Not your normal, is it?’ I wouldn't have been able to say what his normal was, but it wasn't this.

  ‘Not the first time, Michael,’ he told me. ‘I've got a feeling.’

  His feelings are always right. You should know that.

  ‘You've got an idea where she is?’

  He grimaced. ‘I've got an idea what happened to her. Not the same thing. She's from Draythorpe, that's about twenty miles away. Came here with her family three months ago. Vanished. Police have no leads, but I'd like you to make your usual enquiries. With them. With the Woo-waa. I'll do my own digging. Municipal hall, paper archives. That's today.’

  The Woo-waa was the internet. It was not that Walther was a technophobe, but the patience he had for sifting for hours through paper records simply did not extend to the web. He said that at least, sitting in the library stacks, there weren’t people trying to sell you things all the time. It was one reason he called me up. I did courses in computers when I was inside. I won't be hacking the Pentagon any time soon on my little laptop, but I can Google with the best of them.

  *

  We met up that evening in a dingy little pub. The day had been more eventful for Walther than for me. He had a decent-sized bruise about his cheekbone, which he waved away with, ‘Some fellow was kind enough to suggest I inspect the pavement.’

  ‘You bring it on yourself.’

  ‘Do I?’ His eyes were very clear, very pale blue. They genuinely pierced. It was one of the things that made people uncomfortable about him. It made him difficult to lie to. ‘In being myself? In avoiding becoming a Morlock like them?’

  ‘In rubbing their noses in it.’ I'd read the book he meant, and I wasn't sure I agreed with him on it. I always thought the Morlocks got a raw deal. They were the only ones doing any work. Speaking of which: ‘I've drawn all kinds of blanks. I don't reckon I've found out anything the police don't know.’

  ‘And what do they know?’ he asked. ‘Come on, Michael. You've pressed the right buttons, haven't you?’

  He didn't mean the Woo-waa then. So I have a few friends in the police. Friends isn't quite right. I helped them with their enquiries, way back. I kept in touch. A few phone calls and I’d had DS Hawker's Irish drawl on the end of the line, and two hours later, she’d called me back.

  ‘You know,’ I told Walther.

  ‘Other disappearances. Missing persons,’ he said. ‘Nine children in the last fifteen years.’

  ‘Walther, it happens,’ I pointed out. ‘Kids run away. Kids get taken by ... well, by just the normal sort of freaks.’

  ‘They do. Especially in places like this.’ Walther bared his teeth in a grimace against the general awfulness of it, which made him look like a rat. ‘Seaside places. I wonder why? But that's just the kids. Come on, Michael. You're holding out on me. What about the others.’

  ‘Well adults disappear as well,’ I said defensively. He's not right as often as he thinks, but he's right more often than anyone should be. When he kept looking at me I shrugged. ‘Hawker said that
this place was, what was it? Above the national average. For missing people. Quite a bit above.’ I had some numbers I had jotted down, and I pushed them over to him.

  Walther nodded, hands folding and stowing the paper neatly. ‘Missing adults aren't news. And of course there are the ones who don't get reported to the police.’

  ‘So what are you saying, there's some kind of serial killer?’

  ‘Maybe. Some kind of. But you're right, people do just go for whatever reason. There's a lot of noise in the numbers. Still. Missing people, Michael. Different from murder, no? Murder leaves bodies, eventually. But missing...’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Tell me the dates your police are working from.’

  ‘Most of it’s closed files, but Hawker reckoned the local plod have been worried about it for at least twenty years,’ I said. ‘Long time for a serial killer to get away with stuff. Before then the figures are in line with everywhere else, give or take. Like you say, there’s noise. What's our next move?’

  ‘We stroll along the prom, prom, prom,’ Walther said. ‘Tomorrow's Sunday. A good day for it.’

  I knew Walther was Jewish, and about as non-practising as you could get, but he liked to do his serious digging on the Christian sabbath. I wasn't religious at all. Given some of the things that Walther had unearthed, some people find that surprising.

  We checked into a Bed and Breakfast. Between the lateness of the season and the vast swathes of packed caravan parks, the old couple were glad for the business and didn't complain.

  *

  We’re getting nearer the difficult part, but I'll work up to it. I want to get it down right.