Something Wicked (15 page)

Jenny wrapped a strand of hair around her finger. ‘It’s fine.’

Conscience clear, Andrew moved on. ‘So, how did you get on with the other Alex?’

‘Oh, he tried it on, at least for the first minute or two. I said I wanted to chat about Lara and he started stroking my arm, then got dressed in front of me—’

‘Oh . . . sorry.’

‘I’ve seen it all before. Anyway, he told me about some incident with Lara getting upset at a Harry Potter movie, telling them all that magic was real.’

‘I heard that too.’

‘That’s it really. It was hard to get him to talk about anything apart from the other Alex who lives there. They’ve got a massive love-hate thing going on. She keeps accusing
him of stealing and moving her stuff, he says she’s doing it herself to try to get his attention. It’s like some bizarre mating call – they should just do it and get it over
with.’

Andrew pulled onto the street where his office was located, ready to accelerate towards the much-prized parking space. Jenny spotted it moments before him, pointing unnecessarily. Andrew pressed
the footbrake, stopping in the middle of the lane, not bothering to check if there was a car behind.

His office’s front door was double-glazed, white plastic with rippled glass at the top. The type of thing used by tens of thousands of houses around the country.

What now set it apart were the markings on the bottom panel: a crudely drawn circle with an upside-down triangle inside.

The symbol had been drawn in scuffed dark charcoal, the circle slightly oval-shaped, with a fatter bottom half. The triangle had slightly wavy lines, as if it had taken two or
three attempts to get the markings close to straight.

On a wet day, it would have already been washed away.

Neither Andrew nor Jenny had been to the office that morning, so it could have been drawn at any time since they left the previous evening.

‘Are you going to be okay by yourself here?’ Andrew asked.

Jenny nudged him with her shoulder, dimple on show. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

Andrew watched her unlock the office, hovering by her shoulder in case there was something nasty waiting inside. She looked both ways, sniffed the air and then crouched to pick up the United
Utilities bill. That was foul enough in itself, but definitely not enough to worry Jenny. She tucked it into her belt, tapped the alarm code into the wall, and then turned, beaming. ‘All
done.’

‘You’re definitely going to be all right?’

‘Of course.’

Andrew pulled the front door closed, taking in the symbol one more time. He took a photograph of it on his phone and then scuffed the markings away with his palm, leaving a smudgy, dusky smear
across the white. If someone was trying to intimidate him, they were going the right way about it. Jenny was definitely calmer about things than he was.

He crossed the street, accidentally sending a loose stone fizzing across the concrete and clattering into a wall with a solid
thwick
. Andrew stood outside a set of glass double doors,
tapping gently on the front until the woman at the back of the wide reception area noticed him. She smiled and pressed a button on the desk, making the doors open.

‘Can’t let any old reprobate in,’ she said with a smile as Andrew stepped inside.

The building opposite Andrew’s office housed a collection of agencies on different floors. The receptionist had dark blonde hair that was wrenched into a ponytail. Even though she was
looking directly at Andrew, her fingernails click-clacked expertly across her keyboard.

‘Morning, Tina.’

‘Afternoon actually.’

‘Sorry, yes—’

‘Oh don’t worry, hon. If it wasn’t for my giant planner, I’d forget what day of the week it was.’

Tina nodded at an enormous grid pinned to the wall behind her. Above it was a list of floors and occupying companies.

‘Have you been on all day?’

‘Since eight but I’m off tomorrow for a long weekend. Other half’s been banging on about getting away for a few days but you can’t guarantee the weather, can
you?’

Andrew nodded back towards his office’s front door, clearly visible through the glass front. ‘Did you see the circle on my door earlier?’

Tina’s fingers continued flying across the keys but her eyes didn’t leave Andrew. ‘Some triangle thing? Is that a new logo you’re trying out?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Oh, just the local shites, is it? Remember the other month when they spray-painted the c-word on our doors? Course, the police don’t do anything – didn’t even come
out.’

‘Did you notice if it was there first thing?’

The tip-tapping halted, Tina’s fingers poised over the keys as she sucked on her bottom lip. ‘I think so. I assumed you’d had it done last night.’

‘Did you see anyone out there?’

‘No, hon. I’d have called you or the police if anyone was messing around. What’s going on?’

Andrew turned to leave. ‘I wish I knew.’

A group of kids bounced down the stairs of Affleck’s, falling onto the pavement in a squirrelled collection of giggles as Andrew hurried past, hands in pockets. They
massed underneath the ‘. . . And on the sixth day, God created Manchester’ sign, arguing over who had whose fags.

The building was full of tiny stalls selling vintage and customised clothes, old-fashioned sweets, vinyl records, band T-shirts and any number of other things youths might want to buy in the
name of looking exactly like everyone else. The girl at the front eyed Andrew suspiciously: Converse trainers, torn tights, mini-skirt, a black sweatshirt with a cannabis leaf on the front, long
black hair and a trowel-load of make-up.

‘What you looking at, paedo?’

Andrew ignored her. For a second, he’d thought it was Lara but the girl was younger, struggling to look eighteen even under the make-up. Weren’t they supposed to be at school?

Her boyfriend was wearing shorts – in November – with spiky orange hair making him look a little like a carrot. ‘Paedo alert.’

The howls of laughter caught the breeze as Andrew bounded along, embarrassed. A woman was crossing the road with a pushchair. She glanced nervously over her shoulder towards him, rushing ahead
to make sure the kiddy-fiddler didn’t get anywhere near her child.

Andrew continued across the junction, heading into the warren of alleys and ginnels that made up Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The area was chock full of independent shops, cafes, pubs
and galleries: an artistic flair brought to the huge city, let down only by the giant wheelie bins left on the cobbled cut-throughs, masking the area’s homeless community.

A couple were standing outside a tattooist’s shop, peering at the images in the window, smiling and speaking too loudly.

‘. . . you should definitely get the dragon on your back . . .’

She bloody shouldn’t, unless he was using some sort of euphemism.

Andrew zigzagged his way through the area until he reached what was essentially a garage. The rollback door had been hoiked up, revealing an emporium of books and papers stacked floor to
ceiling. A grubby awning hung over the pavement, covering paperback-filled boxes with ‘Two for £1’ scribbled in felt-tip on the front. On the side of the wall,
‘Scrumpy’s Antiquarian Bookshop Est: 1980’ had been engraved in the stone.

Trying not to kick anything over, Andrew edged around a table piled high with issues of
Enthusiastic Camper
magazine, which sounded niche to say the least. From the rear of the stall, the
barely audible sounds of a man’s voice crackled from a radio.

Andrew made his way to the back of the shop, where he found a bundle of hair sitting behind a heavy wooden table. The surface was covered with more magazines and books, towering precariously
towards the ceiling, one good gust of wind away from burying the man. Hidden behind the books was an old-fashioned cash register with a pull-down lever on the side.

‘Afternoon, Scrumpy.’

The man’s face was barely visible through an overgrown white beard that stretched to his chest and a floppy fringe hanging around his eyes. He was wearing a blue velvet dressing gown,
which flapped open as his knees crossed, exposing a pair of hair-covered legs that wouldn’t have been out of place on an aged chimpanzee.

Scrumpy slipped a pair of glasses from the end of his nose, face breaking into a smile. ‘Andrew, m’dear boy, it’s been months since I last saw you.’

He pronounced the ‘th’ of ‘months’ like the letter ‘f’. His accent couldn’t have been more West Country if he’d been sitting on a hay bale with
straw between his teeth and a jug of brown sludgy cider in his hand.

‘How’s business?’ Andrew asked.

‘Shite. You?’

‘Not too bad.’ Andrew nodded towards the radio on the shelf behind. ‘What about the cricket?’

‘Getting our arses battered in Sri Lanka. We’re ninety-odd for six.’

Andrew wasn’t entirely sure what that meant but cricket was always a good way in. He took his phone out of his pocket and brought up the photograph of the symbol on his office door. He
handed it across. ‘Any idea what that means?’

‘You not got the Internet?’

‘I figured it was better talking to someone who knew what they were on about.’

Scrumpy bounced back in his chair, uncrossing his knees and howling with laughter. ‘Right you are.’ He hopped up, squeezing his ample arse around the side of his desk and setting the
stack of books wobbling. Andrew pressed into a nook, allowing the shop owner to pass and then following him along the aisle towards the front. Scrumpy pulled out a small set of steps from
underneath a bookcase and then edged slowly towards the top. Andrew wasn’t sure if the creaks were coming from the rotting wood, or Scrumpy’s ancient joints. Probably both.

‘’Ere y’are.’

Scrumpy dropped a thick hardback down into Andrew’s waiting arms, sending a puff of dust into the air. As Andrew gasped for breath, Scrumpy groaned his way down the steps and nudged them
under the counter with his knee.

Back at the desk, he shunted the pile of magazines aside with the dexterity of a seasoned professional, not even making the ones at the top wobble. Andrew put the book down on the newly cleared
spot, sending a second dust cloud into the atmosphere.

Scrumpy grunted a word that sounded suspiciously like: ‘Arse.’

‘Sorry?’

He nodded towards the radio. ‘Seven down now. Useless lot.’ With a heft of the cover, Scrumpy began hunting through the pages, talking as he did so. ‘Have you heard of the
lizard people?’

‘No.’

‘Some nutters reckon we’re ruled by something they call the illuminati: giant lizard people in human form. Recently, your symbol’s been associated with them, but . . .’
Scrumpy stepped back from the book, pointing at the open page. ‘. . . traditionally it’s associated with the occult.’

Andrew peered down at the page of the book, which showed a collection of symbols: pentagrams, upside-down crosses, and other odds and ends. The one that interested him was the triangle in a
circle, exactly like the tattoos on Nicholas and Lara’s wrists and the charcoal markings on his door.

Scrumpy plumped back into his seat. ‘Those are all symbols of evil through the ages. Most of them are associated with witchcraft or sorcery: burnings, spells, curses, that sort of thing.
Dangerous business to mix yourself up in.’

Andrew peered up at him. ‘Honestly?’

Scrumpy howled with laughter again. ‘Is it buggery. All mumbo-jumbo, made-up bollocks. It’s all the films nowadays, of course. In my day if you told a girl you wanted to drink her
blood and suck on her neck, they’d lock you up. Now they think you’re the new Casanova.’

Andrew started flicking through the pages. It was like the one he’d taken from Nicholas’s house but longer and far more in-depth.

‘Do you get much demand for this kind of thing?’

‘Not really – mainly confused teenagers. They see all these witch- and vampire-types on the telly and think they’d like to know more about magic. They don’t realise
it’s just a bunch of symbols, words, and nonsense. The minute they see a bit of Latin, they realise it ain’t all pixies, fairies and shagging each other. You get a couple of the old
loons coming in too, but it’s all on the Internet nowadays, like everything.’

‘Any idea where I can find out more about your old loons?’

‘You tried the yella pages?’

‘
Almost e
verything’s on the Internet nowadays.’

Scrumpy grinned upwards, stroking his beard and sending flecks of dried skin tumbling onto his lap. He reached under his desk and wrestled out a large leather-bound volume which he plopped on
top of the magic book. The wood of the desk creaked, the magazine tower wobbling but not toppling. He started flitting through the pages, muttering under his breath. Andrew pressed forward, trying
to read the contents upside down. Each page was filled with names, addresses and numbers, the spidery calligraphy almost impossible to understand even if it was the right way up.

‘Blimey, there are some old names in ’ere.’ Scrumpy paused, jabbing a thumb at an entry towards the top of the page. His knuckles had sprouts of wiry hair erupting in all
directions. ‘This bloke used to buy pornos off me. Course, they called it artistic back then.’ Another name: ‘He were into model-train collecting – used to get me hunting
down obscure books and magazines. This lad ’ere liked road signs. Mental.’

He continued rummaging through the pages, reminiscing about what could only be described as a ‘colourful’ cast of customers. Who would have thought there was a magazine dedicated to
barbed wire?

Scrumpy ran his eye along a row of the page, hairy finger tapping enthusiastically. ‘’Ere’s yer man.’ Andrew leant in to look but the shop owner clamped the pages closed.
‘My old handwriting’s bloody awful. So are my eyes. Such a shame it’s hard to make out.’

Andrew dug into his pockets with a knowing sigh. He plucked a twenty-pound note from his wallet and placed it on the table. ‘Will that help?’

Scrumpy’s mass of facial hair crept upwards into a smile. ‘Maybe a little.’

Another twenty-pound note.

‘Aye, that’ll probably do it.’ He didn’t bother reopening the book. ‘You want to talk to someone named Kristian Verity. He’s been coming in for years, seeing
if I can get him stuff from the book fairs. eBay can only get you so far and I go out to Europe for various trade shows. He’s always in the market for rare magic books – and not ones
that teach you card tricks, if you get my drift.’