Something Wicked (21 page)

The headache tablets in the bathroom cabinet had something about ‘fast-acting’ plastered on the front but they weren’t quick enough for Andrew’s liking. How come when he
was coming through reception with a woman there was a security guard there to give snide looks, yet when someone who wanted to kick his arse came along, they’d handily nipped off for a toilet
break?

Andrew thought about calling the police but they hadn’t even pulled their collective fingers out about his car yet, so what good would it do? So far, they’d decided they didn’t
have any evidence from the actual vehicle to say who had set fire to it, although the good news was that the damage was only cosmetic. It was now at a local garage waiting to be resprayed and would
be ready for pickup on Monday.

His only other option was to sidestep the official procedures and call the detective sergeant he knew. That would still be a tough call: ‘I kind of had my arse kicked because I let a
teenager overhear me talking to his mother, can you ride to the rescue?’

All things weighed up, it wasn’t worth it. She’d probably laugh.

Head still pulsing, Andrew stumbled through to the living room and pulled open the curtains. It was a decent-looking day for November, the clouds bordering on white but with a glaze of frost on
the tops of the surrounding buildings. He watched a small group of fun-runners jogging through the streets far below, up at a ridiculous time for a Sunday. If God had meant people to do exercise on
the seventh day, he definitely wouldn’t have rested himself.

Andrew slumped on the sofa, letting the folds of leather envelop him. It had come with the apartment but really was comfy. He picked up Jenny’s backpack and emptied everything they’d
borrowed/liberated/stolen onto the coffee table. The largest item was one of the magic books. The cover was made from a damp-feeling brown leather, with an almost faded gold pentagram etched into
the material. The pages had a spongy texture but the contents were similar to what they’d seen in the books underneath Nicholas’s bed: symbols, Latin-looking words, apparent spells and
curses, plus information about bones, plants and herbs. In many ways, it didn’t matter whether magic was real – Kristian Verity believed it was and perhaps Nicholas and Lara did
too.

As well as the book, there was the heavily smudged photograph of Kristian as a teenager, the straw doll, the wrapped-up bones and the twig symbol. Andrew peered around the room, trying to
remember what had happened to the contacts book. It had definitely been put into the bag. His head still felt heavy, as if he was moving in slow motion. Eventually, he spotted the small black book
on top of the radiator in the kitchen. He didn’t remember putting it there, so it must have happened in a moment of clarity not long after Stewart Deacon left the previous evening.

The broiling heat had dried out the pages but most of the contents had been destroyed by the clogginess of the garage. Andrew leafed through to one of the words which was clear: MALVADO, as
visible now as it had been in the clingy atmosphere the night before. Lara’s family name was clearly known to the magic fanatic. Richard Carr had told them Lara was orphaned but it was now
time to start trying to find out exactly who her parents were – and how long ago they died. Malvado was certainly a strange enough name.

With Lara’s name being in Kristian Verity’s contacts book, it meant two men connected to her had disappeared.

Andrew continued flicking through the book. There were many fragments of words and names and a few half-visible phone numbers but much of it was unreadable. The once-blue ink was now a pale
mauve, draining into the margins and pooling into a dirty, dark smudge.

From the entire book, there were only three more names Andrew could make out, and he wasn’t entirely sure he had those correct. The spidery handwriting wasn’t helping but he pieced
together the names Esme Graham, James Wicker and Brian Oswald, alongside partial addresses. If he’d had only the names, he would have left them for Jenny the next day but Andrew wasn’t
too bad with the computer system.

The laptop he took home could connect to the information system in his office, with all traffic routed through a proxy so that it didn’t look as if he was based in Greater Manchester.
Everything on the hard drive was encrypted and he’d been assured by the tech geek who put it in that no one – even the police – would be able to access it without the key. He
didn’t have anything to hide but who knew when it might come in useful. Jenny had given the entire setup her own seal of approval too, although he’d turned down her offer of getting
someone she knew from her old course to try to hack in.

After first using the Internet, Andrew called the guy who ran credit checks for him. Despite his contact grumbling about the fact it was a Sunday ‘and sodding early too’, Andrew
finished up with three most recent addresses for the people who might know Kristian Verity. They were all in the Greater Manchester area – not around the corner but drivable.

Andrew downed a couple more headache tablets, drank so much water he knew his bladder was going be plotting payback for later, and then decided to do something productive with his day.

A small army of young teenagers slumped along the pavement as if a zombie apocalypse had happened overnight. Their arms hung limply by their sides, chins low to their chests,
sullen aimless stares into the distance. Andrew drove past them, checking the address he’d written down and parking under a lamppost.

Apart from the zombies, no one in their right mind was out and about in the icy conditions on a Sunday. The sane members of this particular Bury housing estate had locked themselves inside,
turned the central heating on, and were currently sitting around with their feet up watching cookery programmes. What they definitely weren’t doing was driving around trying to track down
people from a missing man’s largely destroyed address book.

Andrew watched his footing carefully on the frost-covered pavement, treading one step at a time towards the house that apparently belonged to Brian Oswald. Each step felt as if he was
walking a perilous tightrope that could end up with him on his arse at any given moment. Winter had well and truly arrived, late this year. Usually it kicked in about the end of September and then
hung around the north of England until April, like an annoying drunken uncle that wouldn’t leave on Christmas Day.

Brian Oswald’s property had a set of steps leading up a ridiculously steep slope to the house at the top. Andrew held onto the rail, negotiating one step at a time. The area was shaded by
an overgrown tree on the opposite side of the road, viciously combining to make it colder and more frozen than the other houses.

The front door was opened by a scraggy-looking woman, with wet dark hair kinking off in all directions as if she’d just unplugged herself from the national grid. It was going to take more
than a comb to tame that. She peered over Andrew’s shoulder towards the road, valley-like furrows in her forehead.

Andrew tried to sound as polite as he could possibly manage. ‘Is Brian in?’

She brushed a matted clump of hair away from her face, flashing a wedding band in the process. Presumably this was Mrs Oswald.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘I’m one of his old workmates. I was in the area, so thought I’d pop in and say hi.’

It was just about plausible but she didn’t budge from the door, her emotionless stare making it clear she had her suspicions. ‘Which job?’

‘From the call centre in town. We both got laid off at the same time when they moved the work out to India.’

That had been easy enough to find out from the credit check and an Internet search, with Mrs Oswald’s face finally cracking into something that was only around eighty per cent
hostility.

She was chewing either the inside of her mouth or some gum. ‘He’s not in.’

‘Any idea when he’ll be back?’

‘Nope.’

‘Do you know if it’ll be today?’

More chewing: ‘Nope.’

‘Is he working . . . ?’

‘He’s just away.’

‘On holiday?’

‘Just away.’

This was going well: the type of responses Andrew had got from women when he was a teenager but with marginally less disdain. Mrs Oswald stepped backwards, one hand on the door ready to close it
in his face, jaw bobbing up and down.

Andrew reached forward, trying to at least get something from his morning jaunt. ‘When did he go away?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘Is there any way I can get hold of him?’

‘Nope.’

She nudged the door until there was slim crack but didn’t close it entirely. Andrew moved back a step, carefully, still watching her. Mrs Oswald’s eyes hadn’t left him.

Andrew waited on the edge of the top step, his ear hurting from a mix of last night’s blows and the wind. ‘If Brian’s not here, perhaps you could answer something for me. I
don’t suppose you know the name Malvado, do you?’

Her eyes finally darted away from his, the door opening slightly as she peered both ways along the street. In a flash, the door was closed with a solid click but her flinching reaction gave
Andrew the answer he needed.

That meant there were three men connected to Lara’s name who were missing – but that was only part of the story. Kristian Verity was single, some sort of loner, so
it was unsurprising no one knew he had disappeared until the rent stopped being paid. With Brian Oswald, the woman who answered the door knew who he was, and was probably married to him. If he was
missing, then why wouldn’t she have reported it? If he wasn’t missing, why the secrecy over where he was and how long he was likely to be away?

Andrew drove around the edge of the city to the outskirts of Oldham. He was so convinced that everyone connected to the name Malvado was missing that he stared in surprise when Esme Graham
answered ‘that’s me’ when he asked for her. She was in her late forties, skinny, with a taste in clothes similar to Lara’s and long black hair to match.

He thought of asking Esme about Kristian Verity and the names in his contacts book, perhaps even Lara, but held back for a reason he wasn’t sure of. Something was definitely going on and
announcing himself as a private investigator was only going to alert people to the fact that he was trying to find out what.

He twisted back towards the road, speaking over his shoulder. ‘Have you ever thought about switching energy suppliers?’

Esme’s eyes narrowed as she closed her front door a fraction, staring at him in the same way Mrs Oswald had done. He felt her gaze flitting across him, trying to weigh up who he was.
Andrew didn’t have an ID badge, clipboard, tablet computer or anything else on him that might be used to identify himself or pass on information. It was the first thing he’d thought
of.

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘I didn’t. I think I might have the wrong house.’ Andrew turned to walk away but could feel her staring at him, knowing he’d lied about who he was. Jenny might have been
able to dig herself out of the situation but Andrew wasn’t that good an actor. As he moved his way down the path towards the car, he spotted a small collection of items in the corner of the
garden, almost hidden by the shade of interconnecting hedges. Attached to a small stump of wood was a thin twine of rope tied into a circle with a triangle stitched into the centre.

Scrumpy had said that the symbol was associated with the occult. It was appearing all too regularly in Andrew’s life: first Nicholas’s wrist, then Lara’s, the
woods, within Kristian Verity’s possessions and among the people he knew. Not to mention the charcoal version drawn on Andrew’s office door. Whatever the occult involved – genuine
evil, magic, something to do with the devil, or a figment of people’s imaginations, Andrew was beginning to feel intimidated by it. The web of people he’d stumbled across were connected
by it, with everything stemming back to Nicholas and his girlfriend.

The final name from Kristian Verity’s book was James Wicker, whose address already had Andrew questioning whether he should go there by himself. He lived on a rough estate sandwiching
Longsight and Moss Side.

Long, ugly rows of red-brick terraces stretched along both sides of the road, with grubby, battered vehicles parked half on the pavement leaving a narrow gap for people to manoeuvre their cars
through. A dab hand with a paintbrush must have been through towards the end of the summer because each of the houses had their window and door frames painted a bright, blinding white. It was a
nice try but didn’t distract from the unsightliness of the area.

Andrew waited at a junction, allowing a car to pull out, but everything looked the same in all four directions: rows and rows of neglected housing. Even the woman on the sat nav seemed to have
given up trying to decipher the jumble of streets, insisting Andrew was at his destination, even though he was outside a pizza shop. He pressed the button to turn it off, instead relying on
old-fashioned methods. He pulled up next to a bloke who was carrying a black bin liner across the street and lowered the driver’s side window, asking for directions. The man pointed behind
Andrew, offering vague assertions that it was ‘somewhere on the right’, which only marginally helped.

With the road so tight and the number of cars hemmed in nose-to-tail along its length, performing a U-turn was an impossibility, so Andrew made his way along the parallel street, reaching the
end and finally spotting the street sign he’d been looking for.

James Wicker’s end-terrace house was in pretty decent shape compared to some of the others in the row. His windows were clean for a start and the ‘no junk mail’ sign next to
the letterbox hadn’t been defaced. Andrew knocked on the door and waited.

At the far end of the street, there was the sound of giggling as a car pulled up and three young girls climbed out in pretty pink dresses, dancing their way into one of the houses. Attached to
the front door were pink and red balloons and a ‘happy birthday’ banner.

Oh for the days when birthdays were celebrated, not dreaded.

Andrew tried knocking again but there was still no answer. He clicked open the letterbox, nudged the bristles aside and stared into the empty hallway. The walls were a crisp magnolia, with an
insurance-invalidating set of keys attached to a hook on the left-hand side. If James’s keys were inside, then he probably hadn’t left the house, so where was he? Andrew was about to
stand when something caught his eye at the back of the hall. The narrow gap didn’t give him much space through which to peer but what he could see was spotless: no junk lining the edges of
the hall, no rubbish bags, strewn coats, random shoes, or anything else.