Wolf in Shadow-eARC (23 page)

The student grinned at her.

“Well, that’s a better response than everyone else has got,” he said.

“Everyone else?” Rhian asked.

“At uni, we’ve opened a sweepstake, and the first one to take you out wins.”

He winked and went off with his drink, leaving Rhian speechless. They’d opened a bloody sweepstake on her favours?

She was still fuming when the door opened to admit two large bald men with no necks and expensive suits that didn’t quite fit. One of them causally beckoned to her.

“Come on, Mister Parkes has decided to take you clubbing Up West and has sent us to fetch you,” the goon said.

“Up West” meant the West End of Central London, where the theatres, expensive restaurants and nightclubs were to be found.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know any Mister Parkes.”

“Everyone knows Charlie Parkes,” the goon said, “and I was telling you, not asking. Hurry up, Mister Parkes don’t like to be kept waiting.”

Rhian got it then—Charlie Parkes, the blagger who hung out with bent coppers.

“Tell Mister Parkes that I can’t spare her,” Gary said, politely, putting a hand on Rhian’s shoulder.

Rhian had not heard him come down.

The two goons walked up to the bar.

“I haven’t got time for this, Hunter,” a goon said, putting thick, heavy hands flat on the bar. “Would you prefer to spare her or your fucking kneecaps? She’s going with us anyway, whatever condition we leave you in.”

“It’s okay, Gary,” Rhian said, a smile covering her burning fury at being treated like a whore. “I don’t mind going for a little ride with these nice gentlemen. I might find it quite interesting. So might they.”

The snarl she felt in the core of her being was the closest the wolf got to a laugh. It was amused, so things could get very, very interesting once they were outside.

“No, it’s really not all right,” Gary said.

Rhian saw his hand sliding towards a baseball bat he kept out of sight under the bar. She tensed, the wolf stirred. Things were about to kick off. She had hoped to do this outside on the dark street, where there were no witnesses.

Two hands casually moved the goons aside as if they were made of
papier-mâché,
revealing a tall, slim man in an ankle-length black leather coat. It should have looked ridiculously pretentious, but on him it was perfect.

“What do you want?” Rhian asked, wearily.

“Snow White, is that any way to greet an old friend and confidante?”

“Hello, Max,” Rhian said with resignation.

CHAPTER 12
REVELATIONS

Jameson knew he was close to home when the air stank of sulfur oxides and sewage, and the smog was so thick as to cause perpetual gloom. He coughed, and spat into the cobbled street to get the acrid taste out of his mouth. The alley was barely a couple of meters wide, and wooden houses overhung on both sides. Figures loomed as shadows out of the gloom and disappeared as quickly. The smog did not just smother the senses of taste and sight but also seemed to dampen sound like a thick duvet. He could just hear the clop of iron horseshoes on stone in the distance, but had no sense of the direction of the sound.

This was one of the most powerful Jungian psychoanals of the London Otherworld. The Dickensian rookery was an archetype not just of Dickens and other classical writers but a thousand modern books and films. Here stalked Sherlock Holmes, The Ripper, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and a vast supporting cast of blowers and broadsmen, chivs and chavs, dippers and dragsmen, jacks and judies, lags and lurkers, macers and mugs, palmers and pigs.

A woman in a bonnet and long ragged clothes sprang out of a doorway at Jameson. She had a straw basket in her left hand and something purple in her right.

“Buy some lucky heather, darling. A square-rigged toff like you needs his toll of luck in this manor.”

Her remaining teeth were blackened, and between them oozed breath that stank so badly as to overpower the general miasma. Jameson pushed past the woman without speaking and hurried after Karla. It was best not to interact too closely with the shadows of the Otherworld or you could be sucked into their reality.

Karla opened the wooden door of a lean-to in a small square and went in. Jameson followed. It was pitch dark inside until Karla opened an internal door and flooded a walk-in larder with yellow electric light. The next room was a kitchen with an old-fashioned gas stove, brightly colored blue Formica-topped storage units, and a floor covered with yellow tiles. Jameson had a shrewd idea where they were even before he opened the kitchen door.

He preceded Karla into an old-fashioned London pub dominated by a long mahogany bar. Pint mugs hung from the wooden screen over the bar, behind which was a mirror advertising Gordon’s gin. In its way, the Victorian-styled pub resembled a secular church. The screen separated the holy of holies where the priest officiated, from the seated punters beyond. Of course the priest was a barman and they worshipped other gods than the Biblical, but alcohol and nibbles still featured in the service.

“On the seventh day God rested and popped down the Blind Beggar for a swift half,” Jameson said to himself, as if chanting a litany.

“Can’t you come through the front door like anyone else, Jameson?” the barman asked, spoiling the analogy.

“Depends where I’m coming from, Henry,” Jameson replied.

Henry gazed at him sightlessly, eyes concealed behind a sepia-stained cloth tied around his head. The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel was ancient. How old, no one knew, but it probably started as a Roman fast-food bar on the London-to-Colchester road. By Medieval times it was a coaching inn, although the current building was Victorian.

The pub was named after Henry de Montfort, who had his eyes put out by the victorious Royalists after their victory in 1265. According to legend, Henry gravitated to Whitechapel and begged at a crossroads on the old Roman Road. He found fame as the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green. The story goes that a duchess nursed him back to health and bore him a daughter, Bessie, remembered in the name of a nearby road.

It was probably all bollocks. Just another London tale invented to entertain tourists in exchange for free drinks, but the barman was blind and he was called Henry. Which came first, the barman or the legend? Was Henry the Blind Barman an avatar of Henry the Blind Beggar? Who knows? In London, myth and history swirled together like a raspberry ripple.

Henry was not entirely human, but he never left the Beggar, so The Commission had no particular interest in him. Besides, the Beggar was useful. The walls between reality and the Otherworld stretched and distorted to the point of insubstantiality in this place. That was true all over Whitechapel, but the Beggar was a semi-stable halfway house between the worlds. That made it a useful place for meeting on neutral ground. Every so often the pub was raided by The Commission, often with interesting results.

It was no accident William Booth chose the street outside the Beggar to give the seminal sermon that kicked off the Salvation Army. Evil oozed out of the place like lava from the mouth of a volcano. By opening his preaching in such a place, Booth laid down a challenge to the forces of darkness. He made a declaration of total war. It was a bit like striding up to the castle of a robber baron and pissing on his portcullis, or attacking motherhood on Mumsnet.

Jameson was horrified to find himself sporting a collarless grey suit, zip-up ankle boots, and an original Beatles haircut. He felt bloody ridiculous. Karla looked rather fetching in a white hairband, silver babydoll mini-dress, and light purple boots.

He sighed, “The bloody swinging Sixties again.”

Through the window, Jameson could see an Austin Mini Cooper, gaudily painted lemon yellow. The blue, red, and white stripes of a Union Jack motif decorated its roof. The Beggar had a tendency to revert to the Sixties when in resting mode. That was when East End Ganglord Ronnie Kray topped George Cornell with a nine-millimeter Mauser in the bar. Cornell was an enforcer for the South London Richardson Brothers’ Torture Gang.

This seemingly trivial East End incident triggered events that brought down both gangs, ruined a number of political careers, and led to the biggest clear-out of bent coppers from the Met for a generation. Even the Head of the Sweeney, the Commander of the elite Flying Squad, was implicated. “Sweeney Todd” meant Flying Squad, in London rhyming slang. It is no exaggeration to say that events that night in the Beggar changed the lives of thousands of Londoners, creating a psychic shock that was imprinted on the brickwork.

“Be seeing you,” Jameson said to Henry.

“Don’t be in any hurry to come back,” Henry replied.

Karla and Jameson walked out of the Beggar into modern London. The Mini Cooper was still there, still lemon colored, but was a BMW mini with the Red Cross of Saint George and England painted on its roof. Tropes evolve, like everything else.

Jameson checked his mobile phone and waited while it locked on to a network. He touched an icon, which changed when it acquired a secure line.

“Randolph,” said a voice.

“Re our little problem, find out all you can about the Sith,” Jameson said.

“I wondered where you had got to,” Randolph said. “What are Sith?”

“Try looking under Irish elves,” Jameson suggested. “And find out what information we have about an organization of suckers called Protectors. Supposedly they defeated and banished the Sith.”

“Protectors and Irish elves.” Randolph sighed. “I suppose it’s better than leprechauns.”

“I’m going home for a shower and a sleep. I’ll come in later.”

“Decent of you to grace us with your presence,” Randolph said, ringing off before Jameson could come up with a suitably crushing reply.

“I have a proposition for you, Snow White, so why don’t we have a little chat?” Max asked.

“My name’s Rhian. Snow White’s a character in a fairy tale.”

“Aren’t we all in a fairy tale?” Max asked, rhetorically.

“What’s your game?”

A heavy materialised at Max’s side. He looked more bewildered than angry, as if he could not quite believe what had happened. Max looked him up and down. The heavy obviously failed to impress Max, who turned back to Rhian.

“I’m talking to you,” the heavy laid a hand on Max’s arm.

This proved to be a bad decision. Max’s reaction was breathtakingly fast. He wrenched his arm free and backhanded the heavy across the face. Max did not appear to exert himself unduly, but the gangster flew across the room, only stopping when he demolished a table. Beer, glass, and wood exploded, an unfortunate customer going backwards over his chair, still clutching his newspaper.

The second heavy was clearly having problems dealing with the intellectual challenge posed by such an unprecedented situation. His face contorted with concentration as great as Einstein’s must have been when postulating Special Relativity, Darwin’s when struggling with evolution, or Harry Fox’s when he devised the Foxtrot.

However, the goon brightened at the onset of a fight. This, his expression seemed to say, was his metier, his
raison d’être
, the purpose for which he had been put on Earth. It was a shame that it all went wrong so quickly.

The heavy charged, arms flailing. Max took a step back at the critical moment, and the heavy went past like a buffalo heading for the water hole. He covered the ground with impressive speed for such a large man until he made intimate contact with the fruit machine. It made an angry chucka-chucka noise at the heavy’s impudence, vindictively spraying the gangster with coins while flashing colored lights like a Japanese car console.

“Friends of yours?” Max asked Rhian.

“Do they look the sort of people who would be friends of mine?” Rhian asked witheringly.

The fruit machine shorted out with a loud bang.

“I am sure your employer can spare you for the rest of the evening,” Max said smoothly.

“I have to earn a living,” Rhian said.

“Indeed, and that is what I wish to discuss with you, in private,” Max said, pointedly.

“Do you know this man?” Gary asked, meaningfully cradling the baseball bat.

“Yes, he’s a pain in the neck but not dangerous,” Rhian replied, mentally crossing her fingers.

Gary laughed humourlessly, looking around at the wreckage of his bar. “Tell that to Charlie Parkes’ enforcers—and my slot machine.”

Max took out his wallet and laid an impressive wad of twenties on the bar. “That should cover breakages.”

“Perhaps it would be best if I find out what Max wanted, if that’s okay?” Rhian asked Gary, diplomatically.

“Why not? I don’t seem to have many customers left,” Gary said gloomily, securing the notes.

The pub had emptied except for the heavies, who had lost interest in the proceedings.

“Excellent,” Max said.

“I’ll get my coat.”

Ever the gentleman, Max held the door open for Rhian. Once outside, he lit a cigarette with an old lighter that smelled of petrol.

“Those things are dangerous,” Rhian said disapprovingly.

Max took a deep lungful and exhaled. The smoke curled up, briefly illuminated by the dim street lights before vanishing into the dark.

“The lighter or the fag?”

“Both.”

“I’ve a strong constitution,” Max said.

Rhian could not see his face, but she just knew he would have a smug smile plastered all over it. Max offered his arm and Rhian found herself resting her hand on it as they walked, like some Edwardian gentle-lady out with her beau. It was all rather old fashioned but somehow right. Refusal would have been churlish and demeaning to her, rather than him. Good manners, she reflected, could be very disarming.

“You said you had a proposition.” Rhian said. “A
business
proposition, I trust.”

“Of course,” Max replied. “You continue to intrigue me, Snow White.”

Rhian opened her mouth to correct the use of her name but shut it again. The bastard was only trying to get a rise out of her.

“So I’ve done a little digging into your past.”

“Really?” Rhian asked.

“Really,” Max replied. “And guess what I found?”