Hell and High Water Read online

  ‘Maybe I do.’

  A rush of … anger rose, and I had to fight to push it down. I’ve worked hard to build this life, and I’ve worked just as hard to bury the old one.

  ‘Farewell Fatales, Tai,’ said Coronis softly. ‘Something like that name’s been heard before, and if you thought I didn’t know then you’re an idiot.’

  ‘Should’ve picked a better band name,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Look, I’m in fucking Athens and you aren’t. Could you at least go to the airport? If something prevented her from getting on the plane, maybe someone saw something.’

  ‘On it,’ I said, curtly. ‘Don’t call me unless you hear from Mea. I’ll let you know if I turn anything up.’ I hung up without waiting for a reply.

  I stood for a couple of minutes in front of the brightly-lit window of the bar, seeing nothing of the darkened street around me. Really, we were both right. The person I am today has no power to track a missing person. But the person I’d once been… that Thetai’s still in here somewhere. I just have to be willing to dig deep enough to find her.

  There are few things I want less.

  ‘Shit,’ I sighed again, and stuffed the phone into my pocket. I left without returning to the bar; I could still hear the faint strains of the music, going merrily on without me. It would keep until I got back.

  If something prevented Mea from getting on the plane — something ordinary — there are lots of things she could have done. Got on the next plane instead, for one, in which case she would certainly have let Coronis know that she’d be delayed — and she would still have made it to Athens by now. If she’d changed her mind for some reason, or some emergency had come up and called her away, well, ditto. No way would she have gone eighteen hours without talking to either of us. Even if some mishap had occurred to take her phone out of use, she’d have found a way to communicate by now. Mea wasn’t flaky. She was sweet, she was thoughtful, and she’d never leave anyone to worry about her.

  Coronis wasn’t at all prone to fits of panic. Something was wrong. She knew it, and so did I.

  I stopped abruptly as a thought occurred to me. Mea’s luggage. What might have happened to it? Had she proceeded so far as to check it in — and if she had, had it been offloaded again, when she didn’t show up for the plane?

  I snatched up my phone and called Coronis back.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, breathless with hope.

  ‘Don’t get excited. I just have a question. What does Mea do with her sealskin when she’s travelling?’

  ‘Wears it. She’d never let it out of her sight.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ I hung up again.

  A great deal of a selkie’s powers are centred in their skins. They’re seals in the water and women (or men) on land, and to lose that skin would be… well, let’s take Fi as an example. She’d sooner lose her head than lose her skin again. At least that way she’d merely be dead.

  I wished, with a stab of acute regret, that I could just call Fi. She knows what it’s like to lose her skin. She could tell me what it means. Maybe she could tell me what to do.

  Tough luck. I retrieved my backbone from wherever it was I’d left it, and went in search of a taxi. Mea had already been gone for most of a day. I couldn’t let another one pass without finding some trace of her.

  Chapter Three: Fionn

  I could have slept for another day at least, and gladly. There is little time to rest in the weeks leading up to a major show, and I am disinclined to waste the time on it; there’s always an opportunity to make up for a touch of sleep deprivation. Later.

  But somebody had other ideas. I understood this from the relentless pounding upon my door, the muffled sounds of which drifted through to my bedroom, and roused me from the depths of my slumber.

  Eventually. That there had been some delay seemed indubitable, for as I rose and donned a silk dressing gown and padded to the door, someone began to shout through it.

  ‘Hag’s bones, Fionn, wake up!’

  A terrific crack sounded, and the door shuddered. Was someone kicking it?

  I fumbled with the lock, still sleep-clouded, and yanked the door open. ‘Stop, please,’ I said mildly. ‘I’m awake.’

  The person assaulting my front door proved to be Jessamy. I wasted no time questioning her presence, however unusual; her appearance told me clearly enough that something was badly wrong. The hour was still early, not even nine in the morning, and she ought still to be with her bond-tree, a splendid silver maple in Green Park. Yet here she was, dishevelled, distraught, and tear-stained, not to mention committing unusual violence against my property.

  ‘Come in,’ I said quickly, and drew her inside. Once I had secured the door behind her — and the protective charms I keep around the flat along with it — I began. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘It’s Nara.’

  ‘Narasel?’

  ‘Yes. She’s…’

  ‘Ill?’ I supplied, when the words dried up. A tendril of unease unfurled somewhere within. No ordinary illness would put Jessamy in such a state.

  But Jessamy just shook her head, standing there with her small fists clenched and tears pouring down her cheeks.

  ‘Worse,’ I said softly. ‘Jess. Where is she?’

  Poor Jessamy took a choked breath. ‘The police found her three hours ago.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was… they’d left her in — in the water.’ She stopped, wrapped her arms around herself and stood there, shaking.

  ‘She’s dead?’ I said, gently.

  Jessamy nodded, her mouth forming a soundless howl.

  I paused a moment, uncertain how to react. The news came as a profound and unsettling shock; Narasel’s absence from my show might have been uncharacteristic, but nothing could have prepared me for this. For a long, slow moment my mind and body froze; when thought and feeling returned, I hardly knew what to focus on first.

  Jessamy. The poor girl was swaying on her feet, and looked ready to collapse. I towed her further into my living room, and pushed her down onto my blue velvet sofa. I sat beside her, gripping her hand, unsure what to say. I hadn’t known that she and Narasel were so close.

  She cried hard for some time, great, choking, agonised sobs. With every passing minute, my unease deepened. This wasn’t the result of an accident.

  They’d left her in the water.

  ‘Jess,’ I said, when she had calmed a little. ‘Who are “they”?’

  Jessamy took a shaky breath, and sat up. ‘That isn’t known,’ she said tightly. ‘Whoever it was… they left her body in the river, Fionn. A selkie. You know what that means.’

  A selkie, dead in the water. Dumped there? That would be an irony — or a deliberate cruelty. But Jessamy’s words suggested something else.

  Was Narasel dead because of the water? That should not be possible. In water, selkies take the form of seals; we swim, and breathe, with ease, whether freshwater or salt (though salt is by far preferable). Even in my woman-shape, water cannot kill me — or, it shouldn’t.

  ‘Where is her skin?’ I said, though I hardly needed to ask. I knew what she would say.

  ‘Gone,’ said Jessamy, and went on, as though that one word had not been enough to freeze me where I sat. ‘I— I went straight to her house. It isn’t there. She didn’t have it. Someone took it from her, and — and—’

  ‘Killed her,’ I said. ‘Jess, I know this is hard, but it is important. Did she drown?’

  ‘If she did, she had — help. She’s — she’s in bad shape.’

  Selkies are fae, but some consider us a… handicapped species. Too much of our magic depends on our sealskin; without it, we are virtually defenceless. We might as well be human.

  Worse, if it falls into someone else’s hands? Someone who knows what it is, how to use it? We can be… manipulated.

  Narasel’s had been taken, stripping her of her transformative magic, and trapping her in human form. She was a slim, slight woman, like most
models, and to the best of my knowledge, she was — had been — peaceful. Nothing could have prepared her to fend off such an attack.

  My stomach twisted. The murder of a selkie is already sickening beyond words, but there is an extra level of cruelty involved in drowning us.

  ‘When I spoke, my voice emerged cold as ice-water. ‘Tell me what’s known.’

  Jessamy mopped tears from her face with the back of one hand. ‘Like I said,’ she began, sounding weary now. ‘Someone found her body a few hours ago. I don’t know who, but they called the police. I got there as they were taking her — away — and she —’ Jessamy stopped.

  ‘How did you hear about it?’ I said, still glacially calm.

  ‘Faerd sent word.’

  I nodded. I know Faerd, a little. He is an asrai, a race of fae commonly called water-ghosts. Pale and ethereal, and profoundly nocturnal, they are notoriously elusive; there is no catching up with Faerd unless he wants to talk to you. He’s part of a small colony who’ve been living up and down the Thames for centuries.

  I wondered, passingly, why he had sent word to Jessamy, and not to me. He ought to know this would be… my area.

  Perhaps that was it. It was too much my area.

  I forced down a surge of sickness, and focused on Jessamy. ‘What else?’

  She shook her head, a helpless gesture. ‘I don’t know anything else. I was getting really worried about her, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I went to her house, but she didn’t answer the door and I thought she must be really sick.’

  ‘You didn’t go in?’

  ‘I don’t have a key.’

  ‘Then how—’

  ‘I broke in through a window,’ she interrupted, answering my question before I had chance to express it. ‘Not something I would do if I thought she was sick in her bed, but now…’

  ‘Has anyone seen or heard from her since the show?’

  Jessamy gave me a sick look. ‘Fionn, she was still wearing her ensemble.’

  ‘Hag’s bones,’ I whispered. She had been pulled out of the river wearing my designs.

  When Narasel had been spotted running out of my show, that was the last time any of us would ever see her.

  And I had just slept through all the long hours since.

  ‘Where in the nine Hells was she?’ I said.

  ‘I have no idea.’ Jessamy was shaking her head again; she looked drained and sick. ‘She wasn’t at home. She could have been anywhere.’

  ‘Were there any signs that anyone else had been there?’ I said quickly. ‘At her house?’

  ‘I didn’t — I don’t know. I barely beat the police there. I had time only to confirm her skin was gone, and I had to get out.’

  ‘You knew where she kept it?’

  Jessamy nodded. ‘She used a glamour. It’s hidden in a pile of shawls she keeps on the second shelf of her wardrobe, looks like one of them. Cheap cotton things, nothing anyone would think to steal.’

  ‘Were any more of them missing?’

  ‘No. Just that one.’

  Either someone had known, somehow, exactly how Narasel hid her sealskin — or Narasel had removed it herself, though how she had been divested of it later remained under question.

  A moment’s fierce, intense regret hit me like a punch to the stomach. I had been concerned for my model’s well-being when she ran out on the show. If I had gone after Narasel last night…

  Useless, useless.

  I stood up. ‘It would be of no use to go to her house again at present,’ I said. ‘The police will have cordoned it off, and I cannot think of a way to persuade them to let us look at it. But if they’ve removed her body from the water, then perhaps it will be possible to get a look at the site.’

  Jessamy looked up at me. ‘Why? What are you going to do?’

  ‘You came to me for help, didn’t you?’

  ‘I — don’t know what I was thinking. I just… I knew you would understand.’

  If she meant I would understand what all this meant, she was more right about that than she probably had any idea of. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘The police will never find her killer. They will see her as an unfortunate human woman, nothing more; they’ll never know to look for her sealskin.’

  Jessamy stood up, but she looked uncertain. ‘Are you going to find who did it?’

  The words stung, but only a little. She saw me as her employer, and perhaps a friend; an artist, talented with a bolt of silk, passingly comforting to run to in times of crisis, and that was all. She could not be expected to know the first thing about my history.

  I wished again for Tai, and for Daix, far more fiercely than I had under the influence of too much gin. I’d never had to do anything like this alone.

  Still, it did not take too much effort to cast my mind back eighty years or so, to another time, and remember another Fionn. Once, the three of us had been equal to anything. Tracking a lone killer across London would have been a piece of cake.

  It might be more difficult to pull it off without my partners, but what choice did I have but to try? No one else was going to do it at all.

  ‘I’ll dress,’ I said to Jessamy. ‘And then we’re going to the river.’

  I donned slim blue jeans, a loose shirt and a light, pearl-grey jumper. Nothing to attract attention, nothing to restrict movement. Easy enough to discard if — or more likely, when — I needed to investigate the river-water more directly.

  By the time I was dressed, Jessamy had got herself under better control. I’d turned her loose on my kitchen, and she had downed half of a large mug of tea by the time I reappeared. She swallowed the rest in three gulps, set down her mug, and headed straight for the door.

  I paused only to pick up my keys — and phone, Fionn, don’t forget the phone — and we were gone.

  Jessamy took us down into the Underground. We picked it up at Sloane Square, emerged into the air again at Canning Town, and headed south. We walked in near silence, grim and quiet, Jessamy with her gentle face set into a mask of mingled heartbreak and rage. The morning was clear, bright and fresh, the more so the nearer we drew to the silver expanse of the river. It began to call to me from the moment we exited the Tube: that cool, familiar scent, the way the river-breeze ruffles my hair.

  Jessamy led us into Silvertown, and, finally, the Thames Barrier Park. I did not need her to tell me when we neared the scene: a quantity of uniformed police, crime-scene tape, and gawking bystanders informed me of that. They made a cruel contrast against the rich green verdure of the park, its ornamental hedges and brilliant green-grass splendour far too pretty a backdrop for the harsh scene.

  Narasel’s body was gone, but a section of a low railing at the water’s edge was cordoned off. One or two officers were still at work there, questing for… something. Information. I paused to watch them for a few moments, intrigued. It’s so long since I have conducted anything like investigative work, I am out of touch with the ways things are done in the twenty-first century. Forensics. It would fascinate Daix to no end, but I have been devoting my time to more aesthetic pursuits.

  Still, nothing they were doing could help me, at this moment; I turned my attention away. Leaning nearer to Jessamy, I murmured, ‘Where?’

  She gestured towards the far end of the cordoned-off space. We pushed our way past several men and women with strange, avid expressions — what is it with mortals and their fascination for the macabre? — and stopped right at the shore. The water gleamed in the thin, morning sun, burnished silver, and I felt the familiar need to submerge myself in it.

  Soon.

  There was, of course, nothing much to see. I could picture poor Narasel’s lifeless, drifting figure; that meant, of course, that she could have gone into the water somewhere else entirely. She might have been adrift in the river for most of the night, as far as anybody could tell.

  Well, perhaps that could be judged, to a point. I would have to try to discover what conclusions were made once her remains had been suitably investigated. H
ow long she had been dead before her body was discovered, for example, could be a crucial piece of information. If several hours had passed, she could have travelled a long way by water. If not…

  Somebody hailed me. ‘Ma’am?’

  I looked up. One of the police officers stood at my elbow, wearing an expression of firm, but polite, disapproval. Perhaps I had been too obviously scrutinising the scene.

  I adopted a wide-eyed expression layered with horror. ‘What’s happened here? It looks like something bad, and I only live around the corner—’

  ‘Nothing to worry about, ma’am,’ said the policeman, with a slight softening of his grim demeanour. Good. Even if he was lying. ‘Just a bit of an incident in the night, but it’s being dealt with now. If I could ask you to step back? This area is off-limits.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about?’ I said, permitting my voice to rise a touch. ‘It looks like somebody died here or something. This is a family park. If I’d known this kind of thing was going to happen I’d never have moved here.’ I permitted myself to be towed a ways back from the railing, still grumbling. No sense in pushing the police any further at present. There was nothing to see.

  The policeman made no further remarks of any pertinence — ‘Nothing to worry about at all — keep a clear distance — thank you’ — and then abandoned me, safely stowed a clear six or eight feet away from the cordoned off space.

  Jessamy was looking at me like I had metamorphosed into an entirely new person. Which, in a way, I had.

  ‘Yes?’ I murmured.

  Her brows rose.

  ‘I told you,’ I said, turning away from the scene. ‘I wasn’t always a designer.’

  ‘I see that.’

  She left an empty conversational space for me to fill with an account of my history.

  I passed.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last, breaking the silence. ‘What did we learn?’

  ‘That there is nothing to be learned here.’

  ‘Great.’

  I shrugged. ‘It narrows things down, a little.’

  ‘But we got nowhere.’

  ‘Not yet, but we will. I need to find out where Narasel’s body was taken.’