Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series (2 page)

F
reya Oldstock, the man had said. Was it a name that meant anything to him?

On his guard, Sam made a show of thinking about this. In fact his memory made an instant match, though down the centuries Freya had used many names.

‘We did know each other. Years ago.’

‘Close, were you?’

‘I liked her, certainly. I think she liked me too, but neither of us felt we had to be especially forthcoming.’
Because when I knew her, talking was the last thing we did.

Already, taking hold like the brief numbness after some bad injury, there was the sense that what came next would be bad indeed.

He forced himself to say, ‘Why?’

Seeing the look on Sam’s face, pale and slack, the policeman did his professional best to use tact. ‘Sorry to be the one to tell you… her body… discovered yesterday…’

Sam’s thoughts had exploded in several directions at once.

Freya’s dead?
 

What should I be feeling?
 

What should I be saying?
 

Freya, I’m so sorry
…
 

Who
’
d do this?
 

He had to ask them to repeat themselves before he could take in anything much – the time, the place. Part of him, as if looking on at his own shock, supposed most people must respond like this.

She’d been found at her cottage in the Devonshire village of Holcombe. Stabbed. He had the presence of mind to ask, ‘What sort of weapon?’

‘A strange one, sir,’ the older man said, watching him even more closely.

Of course it was. You think a conventional weapon would kill Freya?
 

‘Strange… how?’

The two policemen exchanged the briefest of glances. Sam felt the atmosphere turn unforgiving

‘Traces of bone were found in the wound. Not her bone – we couldn’t find a DNA match.’

That’s because she was stabbed with one of the few weapons that are good at killing us. The bone of a dragon would hardly have DNA on your record – not a dragon-bone knife. Oh Light, that means it was one of us who did it
…
 

They were waiting now, to see if their silence would make him blurt out anything more. From grief, from confusion, from dread of a danger beyond anything they suspected, he couldn’t help himself.

‘So why have you come to me?’ It made it worse that he couldn’t meet their eyes. Something about the presence of the law made him feel guilty even when he knew better.

He tried to forget that it was Freya who lay dead, tried to freeze over and think logically.
What would they know about her, about me? She’s dead; nothing I’m able to do can bring her back. I must look after myself, she’d understand that.

‘This letter’ – placing it in front of Sam – ‘was found. In two envelopes. The first was addressed to someone by the name of Luc Satise, the one inside to Sam Linnfer. I think the idea was that if it didn’t find Luc Satise the first envelope could be torn off and the second one used to get to you.’

Sam took the letter warily, as if Freya might attack him from the hereafter. It was in a neat, precise hand, definitely hers, but the text was faded by much application of chemicals. Apparently the police, having tried to analyse its purpose, saw delivering it as just a fall-back.

‘Does this mean anything to you, sir?’

‘No,’ he said firmly, eyes not moving from the letter. ‘The Grove is a pub in Hampstead where we used to meet, but that’s all I know.’

‘No idea who Luc Satise is? Or “the old hammer”?’

‘No.’

‘Or “the head of my house”?’

‘No.’

‘What does she mean by a “prime”?’

‘Her quaint way of saying someone she liked. “Primes” were people high in her esteem, “seconds” were those she liked well enough but not greatly, “thirds” she could tolerate, “fourths” she didn’t trust, “fifths” she couldn’t stand.’

‘And what do you think she meant by “
another
prime”?’

‘She often said she was her own best friend. A strange lady, Freya.’

‘Strange indeed, sir. Writing cryptic notes to two people but sounding as though they were one. Categorising people. A secretive person, was she? Perhaps not a… regular citizen?’

For a panic-ridden second Sam thought they’d found it. Just as quickly he discarded the idea. No. They wouldn’t have had time to search his flat properly, and even if they had it was well sealed with things the police would never understand.

He was careful to control his voice, though, as he said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘When we searched her house’ – Sam winced at the thought of intruders digging through Freya’s neat, fragile possessions – ‘we found several bizarre items. A collection of books – and several charts – in unfamiliar languages, and a kitchen full of unidentified herbs and odd-looking knives.’ He leaned forward and added, ‘
Three
passports: British, Swedish, and Russian. All dated the same year.’ The man’s little eyes, made narrower by his intent on the hunt, wrought havoc on Sam’s nerves. Of all people, Sam didn’t need to hear the words ‘highly irregular’.

‘And none of them had been revoked.’ The man sat back, patience itself, waiting for Sam’s response.

‘Certainly she was a British citizen, as well as Swedish at one time. I didn’t know about the Russian passport, but I suppose it was possible.’

‘Legally, sir, it wasn’t at all possible.’

‘Oh.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘Shows how much I know.’

‘And the books, sir?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I hear you’re quite the expert on unlikely languages.’ That grating phrase – ‘I hear’ – implying that the officer knew Sam from within a shared circle of friends, rather than as a stranger.

‘She was very good on old Scandinavian languages.’

The questioning was contrived, as he soon realised, to catch the subject off guard at every turn. At one moment, ancient languages; the next, back to the letter; then his past with Freya. Here Sam had to tread more carefully. He had no idea what other leads the man had. If he told one story, he was pretty confident that someone else would tell another.

‘We studied in roughly the same field. One day we met in a library looking for the same book, and we’ve bumped into each other now and again ever since.’

He knew they weren’t buying it.

‘We’re told that Ms Oldstock seemed a sensible woman. Why do you suppose she’d write a note which no one could understand, and send it to you?’

‘I don’t think it was intended for me. Probably this “Luc Satise” was supposed to get it. I was second choice.’

‘But from what little we can understand, the matter was important. Why, if she wasn’t certain it would get to Mr Satise, would she try and contact you? I thought you weren’t close.’

‘We weren’t. I’ve no idea why she acted as she did.’

‘Do you know any other of Ms Oldstock’s… acquaintances?’

‘No. She never introduced me to any of her friends.’

A dangerous answer. Sam felt like a man standing on one leg, not sure what forces were about to shove him or from which direction. If ‘other acquaintances’ were involved, again he had no idea what testimonies might contradict his own.

Meanwhile with every plausible reply he made, the younger man seemed to get more annoyed with him. Taking the letter, he thrust it at Sam. ‘So what can you tell us about this bit – where she seems to suggest she’s being watched? Are you sure you can’t think why someone might want to watch Ms Oldstock?’

‘Yes, I am. No, I can’t think.’ He had to stop himself from pointing out how often they’d now asked him this.

‘Was she given to paranoia?’

‘Definitely not!’

The older man opened his mouth to ask a question, and seemed to think better of it. Finally he stood up. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you, sir. If anything comes back to you, please contact us.’

Sam gratefully rose with him. In his relief he found it hard not to gabble. ‘I’m sorry about Freya,’ he said, as much to himself as them. He remembered to add, ‘I don’t suppose you know who’s arranging the funeral?’

‘Family, sir.’

Family. Great.
 

As the police were leaving, the senior man turned in the doorway. ‘Just one small thing, sir.’

‘Yes?’

‘Where were you the night before last?’

Faced with such a grotesque implication, somehow Sam managed to restrain himself nonetheless. In angry, clipped tones, he replied, ‘At my university.’

It showed how well the coppers had done their research that the man didn’t ask ‘which university?’ He merely smiled, rapped off a cheerful ‘goodnight, sir’, and led the way down the stairs. Behind them Sam slammed the door, harder than necessary.

Only when the sound of their footsteps had retreated from the house did he lean on the door and close his eyes against involuntary tears.

T
hough he’d mastered himself and calmed down, Sam didn’t go straight to bed even though the night would soon be growing old. Having opened the windows to let in the cold February air he sat for a long time motionless at the kitchen table. His face would have been expressionless, but that his reddened eyes were narrowed against the glare of bright memories.

Freya had been killed with a dragon-bone knife. Dragon bone meant someone who knew what Freya was, and was strong enough to approach her and do the act. Before she’d died she tried to arrange a meeting with him. Was that connected to her death?

But who would want to kill Freya? She had no enemies. Not now. In the past, yes, but the war is over
…

The involvement of the police was a new kind of problem. Whenever there’d been something like this before – and, yes, things like this had happened – the body was tidied away by relatives or friends well before the police could get stock of the situation. By the time officialdom woke up to any of what had happened, every record of the dead person’s life had been erased.

But not now. This time, family hadn’t responded to the disaster. Because of the… corruption reported by Freya just before her death? Even the old hammer is corrupted, she’d said. Sam felt his guts churn. The old hammer and he were not famous for being friends. It seemed there’d be little help there, in finding out what had happened.

Besides, how to do so without the police knowing? He was certain his performance hadn’t been good enough to shake them off. Murder was murder, and he must be almost the only lead.
For that matter, maybe the only suspect
.

Rising, he padded into his bedroom. He knelt down beside the bed, pushed a frayed red carpet to one side, and laid his hand on a floorboard. There was a flash below it, as of a spark rising from a fuse. When the light had faded he pulled back the board and extracted several items, including a long slim object and a shorter narrow one, each wrapped in well-oiled leather, and a shoebox fastened with string.

From this last he produced a wad of fifty-pound notes still in its banker’s slip, and five well-thumbed passports: American, British, German, Swiss and Canadian. Each was stamped with place names from Greenland to Egypt, Nigeria to Tibet. Two, the Canadian and the Swiss, were issued to Luc Satise. The face that stared out from these with traditional passport-photo stoniness was Sam’s own, albeit unusually hard and expressionless. It was remarkable, he mused, how passports made everyone look like a crook. The German one was issued to Sebastian Teufel; the other two were Sam Linnfer’s.

From inside his wardrobe he took out a travel bag, fully packed. He always kept it ready lest one day, leaving in haste, he forgot something whose importance meant life or death. He also lifted out a box, from the very bottom of the wardrobe, containing Ordnance Survey maps and a
London A to Z
. The street guide he opened at the end of its index, where a neat hand had written the heading, ‘Portals – Hell’. Below were a series of names. Hyde Park. Camden Market. The Embankment. Mare Street. A further three entries under ‘Portals – Heaven’ were in the same hand.

Sam was reluctant to use any of these; as a method of travel the Waywalks that lay beyond were exhausting and often inaccurate. If he could reach a destination instead by Intercity, he’d do it however appalling the price. But it was always good to know where the serious escape routes lay.

Next he made a phone call.

‘Hi, it’s Sam.’ It wasn’t his usual name when talking to this person, but he knew it would be recognised. He also knew that if he started saying, ‘Hello, it’s Luc’ his troubles could only get worse. There might well be a tap on his phone, especially if he was a suspect
. And even if the police don’t listen in, others may try.
Sam didn’t trust his own story to hold.

‘Sam? As in —’

‘Adam, thank God it’s you!’ he exclaimed, forestalling the other’s words.

Adam cut short what he’d been about to say, on recognising his own alternative name. Also Sam had pointedly exclaimed ‘Thank God’, when on principle he abhorred saying any such thing. Clumsily Adam grabbed at these hints. ‘Oh. Yes. Hi, Sam…’

There was no right way Sam could give news like his.

‘Freya?
Dead?
How?’

‘I can’t talk. Can I see you in the King’s Head, usual time tomorrow? Bring your wits.’

For all that Adam might want to say, ‘Oh sorry, how are you for the day after?’, he didn’t dare. When Sam Linnfer asked if you could meet up, that’s what you did. It was a matter of respect and rank. If he said ‘bring your wits’ it made the situation doubly bad.

And the question that besieged both of them.
Who would want to kill Freya? She hadn’t an enemy in the world, in any world
. A silly thought. Of course she had an enemy – she was, after all, dead.

But Sam knew as he rang off that by tomorrow, while losing all pursuers, Adam could be trusted to have discovered everything he could concerning Freya’s death. And Adam had eyes everywhere, so the rumour went.
Always rumours. And how proud some people would be to realise that the most fantastical ones were right.

He went into the kitchen and dug around behind a large biscuit tin full of stale flapjacks foisted on him by a friend who fancied herself an excellent cook and who he hadn’t the heart to enlighten. It was cooks like that, he reflected, who made you wish for a handy dog under the table. He pulled out a fat address book from behind the tin and flicked through it. Some addresses were in English, but most were in an archaic script that would have multiplied the rumours at the university many times over. When in Europe he claimed it was a form of Hindi; when in Asia, he pretended it was written in Scandinavian runes.

But language aside, it was simply an address book. Finding the entry for Freya Oldstock, he scribbled it on the palm of his hand. He didn’t want to be caught with the book in his possession – too many names in it would rather stay private.

That done, he consulted his map for the area, marked at strategic points in two colours. Blue for Heaven, red for Hell. He ran his finger round the village of Holcombe, knowing he didn’t have to look far. Freya would almost certainly have had her home near a Portal. It was in the blood of everyone in his family. You were either as far away from a Portal as possible and damn quick on your feet when you needed one, or you lived close by, ready to run straight through it. Because evidently in this world anybody, even innocent Freya who just a while ago was friends with everyone, had enemies.

When the clock struck twelve, Sam Linnfer finally put his head on the pillow and fell into a dreamless sleep. Outside in the street, there was the sound of a cat mewing. In the distance, the roar of a main road and the wet rush of a bus. The wheels of the bus sent a sheet of water up from the little lake around a blocked drain, to soak a group of drunken youths emerging from the nearby pub, so saving maybe three hours’ worth of sobering up. The V Shop across the road played its endless silent songs and films on the never-dying TV screen in its window, and New Look squatted uncomfortably between the shoemender’s and the newsagent’s, which even at this inhospitable hour was still open, the family that owned it working constant shifts to try and pay off who-knew-what debt. Only two of the five children spoke English, and the husband kept a very old guard dog with yellow teeth and a famous temper. Outside the shop was a stand that sold strange bent vegetables that looked like some kind of religious symbol, and which only one ethnic minority in the whole world could cook properly to get that particular dead-dog taste that was so prized.

A raven flew down the street, and this was unusual in several ways. Firstly, Camden is not famous for its ravens; the dustbins full of McDonald’s packages tend to attract, at best, a scrawny breed of pigeon. This raven was sleek, a gleaming shade of black. It flew along a dead straight line, keeping below the house tops and following the street itself – as though it had been given directions and needed to see the street signs to know where it was going. Once it overshot a turning and had to spin round, disobeying the traffic system in a way to make a traffic warden weep. Somehow it managed to navigate from Tufnell Park station to Camden Road and along a canal, until, looking, it must be said, slightly lost, it hit the street where Sam lived and banked sharply, almost colliding with a lamp-post. Flying down the quiet street, it looked this way and that until it reached his house. It made for a window ledge, sensing its target.

Then something happened. The raven itself was not thinking as such, but behind those unblinking, beady eyes there was an acute consciousness nonetheless, a light that most people wouldn’t expect to find in a brain the size of a walnut, and one that fed hungrily on the images the raven sent back to it. As the raven’s feet touched the window ledge, however, something seemed to change. There was a tingle through the creature’s body. Silver sparks flashed across its eyes. The grip on its little mind slipped, faltered, was shoved away. Then the raven was once more a raven, taking off in panic, completely disorientated and with no memory of what had just happened.

In the bed, Sam rolled over and opened his eyes. He felt no surprise that someone had tried to spy on him; indeed he’d been expecting it, which was why he’d taken such careful precautions. His landlady, dotty as she was, hadn’t noticed the many hours he’d spent drawing symbols throughout the house, that sparked occasionally during thunderstorms even though not connected to the mains. It was inconvenient, he decided, before drifting back to sleep, that his defences had been activated, but it would have to be tolerated.

For now.