The sound of chairs scraping back from the table was indecently loud. Before Grace had a chance to bolt for her room, Jack managed a quick moment with her.
“I am sorry,” he said again.
She looked at him with emotionless eyes, then turned her back and walked away.
What do you know? Jack thought, watching her, remembering what he’d felt from her arms. And what are you?
Friend, or foe?
Victim, or trap?
“Jack?” said Weyland, jangling a set of car keys in his hand.
Jack finally managed to have a hurried conversation with Noah as she helped him on with his coat.
“Noah, how did the four kingship bands make it into the Faerie?”
“Why do you want to—”
“Noah, please, just answer.”
“I turned them into golden ribbons and tied them about Grace’s arms and legs. Then the Lord of the Faerie carried Grace, and the bands, into the Faerie. Why?”
Jack stared at her, but before he could answer Weyland walked up.
“Jack? Are you coming, or not?”
The Savoy’s garage was situated within the basement of the hotel. It was filled with such an array of luxury vehicles that Weyland’s Daimler appeared almost ordinary. Weyland led Jack and Harry to a spot partway down the garage. Here was his Daimler, and beside it a pale grey-green Austin convertible, its cloth hood folded back.
Jack stepped close, running his hand admiringly over the soft leather of its seats.
“You would trust me with this?”
Weyland tossed him the keys, and Jack had to twist quickly in order to catch them.
“If it means you are gone from here,” Weyland said, “then, yes, I will trust you with it.”
He turned, walking away a few steps before halting and again addressing Jack. “I don’t know what you did to Grace this afternoon, Jack, but I can’t help feeling that she’d have been better off without you.”
ELEVEN
Clapham
Sunday, 3rd September 1939
Weyland didn’t go back up to Noah and Grace once Jack and Harry had left. Instead he stood, staring blankly at the space where the Austin had been parked, before cursing under his breath and opening the driver’s door of the Daimler.
He drove to a narrow, sad side street running off High Street in Clapham. Empty crates and overflowing rubbish bins lined the footpaths, most of the windows on the buildings had been boarded up, a small, thin dog lay curled up, shivering, in a doorway, and puddles of something thick and vile lay glinting on the road surface.
Weyland had never been here before, but he had long known of the street’s most shadowy residents. Having locked the Daimler, Weyland walked up to a door and knocked softly.
Someone had tacked a wooden plaque to the wall by the door, and Weyland glanced at it as he waited.
Philpot Investigations
James Philpot and William Philpot,
Proprietors
Footsteps crept cautiously towards the door, and Weyland tensed slightly.
“Come on, come on,” Weyland muttered.
The footsteps halted on the other side of the door.
Weyland banged his fist on the door.
“We’re closed,” came a whisper.
“You’re bloody not closed to me,” Weyland said. “Open up!”
“We don’t work for you any more, Weyland,” the voice whispered.
“Do you work for money?”
The voice hesitated. “Yes,” it whispered eventually, the word riddled with caution.
“Then you’re working for me,” Weyland said. “Now open up, damn you!”
There was a long silence on the other side, then, just as Weyland raised his hand to bang on the door again, he heard the rattle of keys.
A lock was turned, then another, and then one more, and, achingly slowly, the door creaked open an inch.
“I haven’t got all night,” Weyland said, and pushed at the door with his shoulder.
There was a startled yelp on the other side as whoever had crouched behind the door was pushed onto the floor, then Weyland was in a dark corridor. He groped along the wall, hoping that the fools had at least had their establishment electrified, found a switch, and flicked it down.
Light flooded the corridor from a bare bulb hung high.
A thin man dressed in drab clothes was slowly rising from the floor, his hands fluttering at his trousers as if to brush from them the dust collected during his fall, his bright black eyes wide with fright and fixed on Weyland. His dark hair was slicked back against his skull, his face was swarthy and marked with old acne scars, and his mouth curled as if wondering whether or not to snarl.
“So this is what you look like all grown up,” said Weyland to the imp. “Which one are you, then?”
“Jim,” said the imp, now fully risen, “and quite independent, thank you.”
Weyland regarded him. He’d first created the imps almost a thousand years ago as a means to control Noah and Stella—Caela and Swanne as they had then been. But during the last life Weyland had come to love Noah, and had set the imps free in London, tired of them and the agony they’d inflicted. This was a decision Weyland had regretted when the imps became the servants of Catling, draping her hex about Grace’s wrists. Every so often over the past three hundred years Weyland had occasionally sent his senses out scrying for the imps, seeing what mischief they were about, but he hadn’t bothered himself with them otherwise. They’d simply faded into London’s turgid underworld after the Great Fire, where no doubt they had created some limited mayhem, but not any major troubles, so far as Weyland could make out.
“Private investigators, moreover,” he said. “What do you investigate, Jim? Gutters? Sadnesses? Despair?”
A muscle twitched in Jim’s throat, and he edged past Weyland. “We’re entirely respectable.”
Weyland sneered.
“If you’ll come through,” Jim Philpot said, nodding to a doorway at the end of the corridor.
The other imp sitting at a wooden table in the back room had just picked up a bread-and-dripping sandwich from a plate. There was another plate with a half-eaten sandwich pushed to one side; evidently, Weyland had interrupted their evening meal. As Weyland entered, the imp put his sandwich down and stood warily.
“You must be William,” said Weyland, noting that the imp was identical to his brother, save that his face was slightly rounder and even more pockmarked.
“Bill,” said the imp, wiping his hands on his stained vest and then holding one out to shake hands.
Weyland ignored it. “I need you to do something for me.”
Jim and Bill shared a glance.
“He said he’d pay,” Jim said.
“Money?” said Bill.
Weyland, who had been inspecting the contents of a filing cabinet, turned around. “I’ll pay you in violence, if you like.”
“We’d prefer money,” said the imps together.
“Well, if you insist. What are your rates?”
Bill told him, and Weyland raised his eyebrows. “I’ll pay you half that. You’re worth no more.”
“We’re very good,” said Jim.
“We can creep anywhere,” said Bill.
“Discover anything for you,” said Jim.
Weyland grunted. “I need you to display some manner of delicacy. Think you can manage it?”
The imps grinned, showing unexpectedly white, good teeth.
“Has Noah a lover?” said Bill.
“Do you need photographs?” said Jim.
“No! Not Noah,” Weyland said, and the imps glanced knowingly at each other.
“Jack’s back,” said Bill.
“We can take photographs,” said Jim. “Dig out receipts. Bribe hotel clerks. Present you with the evidence.”
“Not Noah!”
“Of course not,” said the imps as one. “Not Noah. Never Noah.”
“Jack,” Weyland said, his voice grating.
“Jack,” the imps said, their eyes gleaming. “Now there’s an interesting fellow.”
Weyland’s eyes narrowed. “And what do you know about Jack?”
“Absolutely nothing,” said Jim.
“Never heard of him,” said Bill.
Weyland drew in an irritated breath. “Jack thinks there’s something ‘different’ about London. Something that is possibly…malign.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Jim.
“Sounds like our kind of job,” said Bill. “We can take photographs of the malign, if you like. Lots of them.”
“Shut up,” Weyland said. “Just listen! Jack is all over my wife and my daughter, and I don’t like it.”
Jim opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and closed it again.
“Everything has…changed…since he’s come back,” Weyland said. “Grown unsettled. I don’t like it. Like as not Jack will destroy us all. Destroy Grace.”
“Sweet Grace,” whispered Bill, and Weyland snarled at him.
“I said not to speak! Can’t you just listen?”
The imps both nodded vigorously.
“I don’t like not knowing what he is doing. Not knowing what he’s about. Discover it. Follow him. If he is seeing…”
The imps raised their eyebrows.
“Just follow him,” Weyland finished. “And see if you can’t find out what Jack is babbling on about when he talks about this difference…this wrongness.”
“We can do that,” said Bill.
“Be careful,” said Weyland. “Don’t reveal yourselves.”
“We’re very, very good,” said Bill. “He won’t know we’re following him. We can cloak ourselves from Jack—and Ringwalker too, come to that.”