Coldfall Wood Read online

  It didn’t last long.

  Ellie hunkered down beside him, holding one of the girls’ mobile phones.

  “Take a look at this,” she said, showing him the video Hajara had filmed of the murder. The picture was clear, even with the glare of the restaurant’s lights reflected in the glass window between them. He watched the silent exchange wishing the mic could have picked up the words that passed between them as the knife was driven home with brutal force. That wasn’t the worst of it; it was the detached way with which the kid turned to look at the camera, wiping the knife off on his jeans, before he turned to run.

  “His name’s Jamshid Kirmani. The victim’s Ollie Underwood. They are in the sixth form at Albion Grange.”

  “Do the girls know what it was about?”

  “Another one of their classmates, Aisha Kahn.”

  “Okay we need to find her, priority one, make sure she’s safe. As long as Kirmani is out there there’s room for this to get so much worse than it already is,” Julie said. Still kneeling over Ollie’s body, he unclipped the radio from his lapel and called it in. “Dispatch, this is Gennaro. We’ve got one fatality here. The attacker’s name is Jamshid Kirmani. A sixth former at Albion Grange. Eyewitnesses captured the whole thing on video. Looks like it is some sort of honor killing. There’s a girl, one of their classmates, Aisha Kahn. She needs protecting until we bring Kirmani in.”

  “Too late for that,” the dispatcher said. “Banks and Sykes just responded to a call over at Sal’s Gym. She’s been stabbed. Paramedics are on the way, but it doesn’t look good.”

  “Shit. Just shit. And Kirmani?”

  “Taken flight.”

  He looked around him. There were already maybe 150 people in the street, gawkers mainly, but there were others among the crowd looking for confirmation of what they thought had happened, not just ready but eager to take the law into their own hands.

  “We’re going to need more bodies on the street.”

  “That’s the last thing we want,” Julie said, the two of them meaning completely different things.

  6

  Tommy Summers and Daniel Ash sat side by side on the park bench; empty lager cans spread out in a circle around their feet. They were angry. They’d been on the High Street watching Ollie Underwood’s body being hauled into an ambulance, not that there was anything the paramedics could do but zip him up in a body bag. That shit Kirmani had gutted him like a fish. That kind of disrespect couldn’t be allowed to go unanswered. There needed to be a reckoning. A good old-fashioned eye for biblical eye. Justice. Because who in this fucked-up city looked out for the good kids like Ollie Underwood?

  Well, tonight, they did.

  They watched the game.

  It wasn’t much more than a kickabout, but a few of the lads were going for it. The coach’s voice barking out commands that made no sense to either of the boys accompanied energetic claps and flurries of movement on the training ground. It wasn’t quite jumpers for goalposts, but it was close, with four bright orange traffic cones arranged as makeshift goals at either end of a pitch at what was mostly mud. The kids were oblivious to the rain even as it went from a few fat drops to a genuine downpour, and slid about making rash challenges and risking broken legs.

  They were watching one kid in particular, Musa Dajani. He had the world at his feet. That’s what everyone said whenever his name came up. It was obvious he was special, even to a couple of no marks like Tom and Danny who had never kicked a ball in their lives. The ball seemed to be glued to his foot, he’d twist and turn and somehow find a pass, threading it through a tangle of legs and mud with perfect weighting, and always seemed to have space and time to do whatever he wanted even though everyone else was busy being kicked and sliding around caked in mud. Musa was just better than the rest; it was as simple as that.

  Which made him perfect for what they had in mind.

  One of the dads on the touchline crouched down beside his two-year-old son, talking to him all the while as he changed him from a smart little suit jacket into his Batman jumper. “It’s like Bruce Wayne becoming Batman,” he said to the delighted boy, then seeing Tom and Daniel watching him, offered a wink.

  “Fantastic,” Danny said, smiling right back.

  It was a nice moment. A proper dad moment. The kind of thing he’d like to do if he ever had kids.

  The little lad walked side by side with his dad, his tiny hand in the bigger man’s light grip, beaming with pride. In that moment he really was Batman and it wasn’t just make-believe.

  Tom took a deep swig from the gold can in his hand, draining it, then crumpled the aluminum and dumped it on the grass with the rest of their discards.

  A whistle blew in the center of the park and then half of the boys made a show of rubbing their celebrations in the faces of the other half before they filed off toward the changing rooms.

  They’d managed to down the rest of their lagers before Musa emerged, showered, with his kit bag slung over his shoulder. His trainers were painfully white. Brand new. He had his headphones on and walked past them lost in the music. He didn’t acknowledge the two boys, but he did walk just a little bit faster as he passed them.

  “Time to make our presence felt, I think,” Tom said.

  He pushed himself to his feet and followed the young footballer.

  Danny was a couple of steps behind him, and had to hustle to catch up.

  A stray dog barked in the distance. That wasn’t something you heard so much anymore, he thought, a bit like the white dog shit that used to be everywhere when he was small. Now it was all rich brown and healthy crap. He chuckled to himself. Tom gave him a weird look, as if wondering how he could find anything funny in what they were about to do. He scratched at the tattoo of the spider’s web on the side of his neck, the fat vein there pulsing hard as his breathing quickened.

  Musa glanced back over his shoulder, sensing them behind him.

  They didn’t break their stride.

  The dog stopped barking before they reached the edge of the park. Weirdly, there were no other sounds to replace it. The night was eerily quiet. It was as though a protective vacuum had gone up around the park, sealing it away from the city.

  Musa looked back again, his footsteps quickening again.

  The boys kept their steady pace, falling into step beside each other as they marched from one puddle of streetlight to the next. Twenty feet closer to the gate, Musa started to run.

  Tom and Danny took off after him, their longer legs eating the distance between them in seconds. Tom slammed his hands into the boy’s kit bag, sending him sprawling across the ground.

  There was blood on the chips of stone from where they’d cut through his trousers and opened the meat of his knee. It wasn’t a lot, but once spilled it couldn’t be taken back. The effect it had on Tom was primal, as though the smell of it tripped a mental switch that woke some dormant gene, transforming him into a feral animal. He launched kick after kick into Musa’s back, lifting the boy bodily off the ground with the sheer ferocity of his attack.

  The boy tried to curl up into a protective ball even as another vicious kick dug into his kidneys.

  Danny heard him choking on his tongue and realized he was in trouble.

  But Tom wasn’t stopping.

  Again and again he delivered crippling blows, then, not content with the damage he’d done, dropped onto his hands and knees, sitting across Musa’s body, and punched him over and over until his knuckles were raw and bloody. “Fucking terrorist cunt, this is for Ollie Underwood. Remember that name. Ollie fucking Underwood. He was worth ten of you ragheads.”

  “That’s enough, Tommy,” Danny said, but Tom wasn’t listening. Another savage blow had the boy gargling blood. He wasn’t coughing it up, it just dribbled out of his mouth. His eyes rolled up into his head. And still Tommy didn’t stop wailing on him, his fists beating out a savage tattoo. “Jesus Christ, Tommy, you’re killing him,” Danny half screamed, and this time when his friend didn
’t stop, Danny dragged him off Musa and crouched down over the kid protectively, not thinking about what he was doing as he put his fingers down the kid’s throat and tried to fish out his tongue. Musa convulsed beneath him, and then, even as Tommy hammered his fist into the side of Danny’s head yelling, “Let the fucking shit die!” managed to hook his finger beneath the meat his tongue and cleared the boy’s airway. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to save his life for a few minutes more.

  Hwaet! Áríseaþ!

  “What the fuck did you just say? Speak English you fucking cunt. You can, can’t you, you ignorant fuck?” Tommy raged, but it wasn’t the kid talking. The voice came from far away and yet all around them at the same time, seeming to whisper with the rustle of the leaves and linger in the drumming of the rain.

  “It wasn’t him,” Danny said, still disorientated from the shock of the blow to the head. He felt a surge of sickness swell deep in his stomach and come clawing its way up his throat desperate to get out. He fell forward on his hands and knees, puking his guts up.

  Tommy stood over him.

  “You know what that was?” Without waiting for an answer, he howled again and again and again in quick succession, each one rawer than the last. “That was a fucking call to arms, mate. This is our time. Can’t you feel it? These bastards are going to bleed.” He held up his hands. “This is my land,” he said, echoing the voice heard by Charlie and Penny half a dozen streets away. “And I am the king.”

  Tommy turned and walked away, following the voice toward the trees on the far side of the park.

  He left Danny kneeling a few feet away from his unmoving victim.

  Danny crawled on his hands and knees to Musa’s side, willing the kid to be alive as he fumbled in his pocket for his mobile phone intending to call for help.

  A hundred yards away Tommy stopped walking. He tilted his head to the side as though listening to a voice only he could hear, then turned to shout, “We’re going to need that piece of shit, bring him with you when you finally get your shit together.”

  7

  The lightning-struck tree was a prison.

  The world lurched around him, his horizon veering away alarmingly.

  Charlie Mann reached out to steady himself, his right hand catching a low-hanging branch. In that moment, as skin and bark came into contact, Charlie’s mind flooded with images of the great woods, towering trees and their lichen-smeared trunks, of moss-covered broken stones, of King Stag, the majestic white-antlered Lord of the Great Hunt he had seen only moments ago crossing the Rothery. And in that moment they were one, he was the Monarch of the Wild Hunt and the Monarch of the Wild Hunt was a boy on his seventeenth birthday. The image was fleeting; the shadow-burn of the Summer King lingering long after the last leaf had fallen away. He heard voices, chants, a stampede, rushing, rushing, rushing through his mind.

  And then he saw fire.

  He knew what he had to do.

  He left Penny at the tree outside of The Hunter’s Horns, running along the side of the road sniffing the air like he was trying to root out truffles. He moved from car to car, crouching down to inhale the filth of the underside, then pushed himself up and ran on to the next until he found the leak he was looking for.

  Charlie dropped to his knees, reaching into his back pocket for the penknife digging into his ass, and flicked the blade out. Gripping onto the rusted bumper with his left hand, he leaned in beneath the car to the dripping fuel tank and jammed the tip of the blade into the rusted metal, turning the drip into a trickle into a steady stream as he worked it wider. Charlie cupped his hands beneath the hole, filling them with petrol. When he was sure he had enough, he crawled out from under the car and smeared it all over his coat, covering the material in black handprints.

  Carrying the petrol-soaked jacket back to the grass square and the lightning-struck tree, Charlie wedged it into the vee where the wood had divided, and put a match to it.

  It took a few seconds for the material to burn, wisps of black smoke curling off the sleeve where the match touched the stain. His fingertips burned before the coat did. Charlie struck a second match and dropped it onto the coat and stepped back.

  This time it burned.

  Penny stood beside him, watching the flames slowly rise, charring the tree trunk and slowly eating through the bark to get at the dried-out pulp of the wood itself.

  It took five minutes to really burn, but when it did, it burned.

  Charlie watched the flames dance, seeing shapes inside them.

  Beside him, Penny breathed heavily, hypnotized by the sight.

  The flames lit the planes of their faces, making it look as though they were in the grip of a rapture.

  “Look. Can you see it?”

  “I can see him,” Charlie said, looking beyond the flames to the green where the white stag stood behind the tree, watching them.

  “His horns … He is … beautiful.”

  The flames shrouded the tree, spreading out from branch to branch, crackling and snapping as it burned. Smoke thickened around the trunk, billowing away with the wind that rose up around them. Charlie felt a peculiar chill against his skin that defied the heat of the burning tree. The sight was intensely beautiful, beautiful in ways that he couldn’t begin to describe. A gust rippled through the middle of the flames, conjuring a weird moment of visual trickery where the flames appeared to part, and through the smoke he could see the white stag walking slowly toward them.

  “Look at him,” Penny breathed, beside Charlie. “He is incredible.”

  And that he was.

  “The Horned God,” Charlie said.

  8

  Alex Raines looked through the dirty old window at the street below. The ’80s anthem on the radio could have been narrating her life save for the fact that the synthesizer was ridiculously perky. She didn’t feel the least bit perky, but then she had just spent the afternoon at the funeral of her boyfriend’s partner, so every ounce of bone-deep tiredness was understandable. She’d forgotten about the coffee cup on the table, and now coffee had solidified into something that would amuse paleontologists for years to come.

  She scraped a fingernail across a broken blister of white paint in the wainscoting.

  Alex was too tired to sleep, but not awake enough to function. She was trapped in that weird half existence between the waking and sleeping world. So, she stood there, watching the boats on the river and the bright lights that lured the tourists in, waiting for the first crisis of the night to hit. There was no such thing as a quiet night. Something always happened.

  It didn’t take long—and it was the last thing she’d ever have imagined happening. No drunks, no stabbings, no cardiac events, car crashes, hit-and-runs, or broken bones.

  The break room door opened and a doctor stuck his head around the corner.

  “I need you,” Aaron Rosenberg said. He was one of the good guys. “She’s awake.”

  She didn’t need to ask who. There was only one sleeper on her files. Emmaline Barnes. Age unknown, a Holloway woman. Major head trauma had left her in what was supposed to be a PVS—persistent vegetative state—the old woman had been on Alex’s ward as long as Alex had been a nurse, and for years and years before. They talked regularly about freeing the bed up, moving her on to hospice care, because she wasn’t supposed to wake up. Not now. Not ever.

  Alex had honestly given up hope the old woman would ever open her eyes. She’d sat night after night, the only person sitting a lonely vigil, wondering if there was anyone in the city who mourned the old woman who wasn’t dead yet, and tried to find the words to say it was over, that she should let go, without actually saying that.

  Walking through the corridors, she amused herself with a much more immediate problem: What was she going to say to Emmaline? Those first few words? After all, it wasn’t every day you got to introduce yourself to someone you’d been looking after for five years for the first time.

  They all sounded like the kind of stilted dialogue that ru
ined those old black-and-white movies her brother was obsessed with.

  The hospital was daunting, with all the menace of a Victorian asylum built into its labyrinthine corridors. Alex swept through the warren of wards to the bank of elevators—so old they had iron grills for doors—and up to what some of the staff referred to as the vegetable patch, the extended care unit. There were no more than seven patients at any given time. Today there were three. Emmaline Barnes had a room to herself. She had never met the mysterious benefactor who paid for the private room. The closest she’d come to that was seeing his name on the itemized bill: R. Viridius. The nurses had done their best to make it feel homey, but no matter how it was dressed up it would always feel like a hospital room. There was no escaping the antiseptic quality that permeated those four walls.

  Rosenberg was at the old woman’s bedside.

  She was awake, sitting up in bed.

  “Okay, Emmaline, there’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Rosenberg said, seeing her enter the room. “This is Alex, she’s been looking after you.”

  The woman didn’t say anything.

  Her eyes were open, but she was absolutely still.

  “Hey, Emmaline,” she said. “It’s good to finally meet you. How are you feeling?”

  Nothing.

  “She’s not said a word since opening her eyes,” Rosenberg explained.

  “Responsive?”

  Alex looked deep into the woman’s eyes. The pupils darted up and down, taking in everything there was to be seen. She was aware. She was in there.

  “Can you move your lips for me, Emmaline? Maybe a little smile?”

  Nothing.

  “How about something small, a finger?” She looked at the woman’s liver-spotted hands, which both lay flat on the crisp white linen of the bedsheet.

  Nothing. Not so much as a twitch.

  “Okay, don’t worry, Emmaline. These things take time. I want you to do something for me, if you can understand what I’m saying, can you blink? Does that work?”

  It did.