“Quite a spike,” Vardy murmured.
“With the strike and all that, you wouldn’t expect to see shit like this,” she said. Vardy looked lengthily around the room, as if the dead animals might be responsible.
“Do you want to know what any of these things are?” said Billy.
“No no,” said Vardy thoughtfully. He approached the oarfish caught decades before. He looked at an antique alligator baby. “Ha,” he said.
He circumnavigated. “Ha!” he said again abruptly. He had reached the cabinet of Beagle specimens. He wore an unrecognisable expression.
“This is them,” he said after awhile.
“Yeah,” said Billy.
“My good God,” Vardy said softly. “Good God.” He leaned very close and read their labels a long time. When finally he rejoined Collingswood, as she ran information through the computer, he glanced back at the Beagle cabinet more than once. Collingswood followed his glance.
“Oh yeah,” she said to the jars. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Are you who I’m supposed to meet?” Billy said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m him. Come down the pub.”
“Uh…” Billy said. “I don’t think that’s in my plans…”
“Best thing for you, a drink,” Baron said. “Best thing. Coming?” he said to Vardy.
Vardy shook his head. “I’m not the persuasive one.” He waved them out.
“Nah,” said Collingswood to Billy. “Not so much. It ain’t that he’s not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He’s interested in it. Like something in a jar.”
“Come on, Billy,” Baron said. “Come and have a drink on the Metropolitan Police.”
The world was swaying when they left. Too many people speaking in too many street-corner hushes, too much foreclosure, the sky closing some deal. Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote. The pub was a dark drinkerie decorated with old London road signs and copies of antique maps. They sat in an out-of-the-way corner. Even so, the other punters, a mix of seedy geezers and office workers, were clearly unsettled by Kath Collingswood’s uniformed-if unorthodoxly-presence.
“So…” Billy said. He had no idea what to say. Collingswood seemed unbothered. She just watched him while Baron went to the bar. Collingswood offered a cigarette.
“I think it’s no smoking,” Billy said. She looked at him and lit. The smoke surrounded her in dramatic shapes. He waited.
“Here’s the thing,” Baron said, delivering the drinks. “You heard Vardy. Parnell and the toothies have eyes on you. So you aren’t necessarily in the safest of all situations.”
“But I’m nothing,” Billy said. “You know that.”
“Hardly the point,” Baron said. It surprised him how hard it jarred him to see Collingswood drink and smoke in uniform. “Let’s take stock,” Baron said. “Now, Vardy… You saw him in action. You know the sort of thing he does. For all our expertise, in this case, vis-à-vis-that is to say, what’s going on at the moment-we could do with some input. From a specialist. Like yourself. We’re dealing with fanatics. And fanatics are always experts. So we need experts of our own. And that is where you come in.”
Billy stared at him. He even laughed a bit. “I wondered if you were going to say something like this, but then I was like, don’t be mad.”
“None of us knows shit about giant squid,” Collingswood said. The animal’s name sounded absurd in her sarky London voice. “’Cause we don’t give a shit about it, granted, but, you know.”
“Fine, then, so leave me alone,” Billy said. “Not as if I’m an expert anyway.”
“Oh come on, don’t be like that.”
“Don’t just mean book-smarts, Harrow.” Baron said. “I have a healthy respect for cultists. And they think you’re something special, which says a lot, no matter what you think. Remember when you saw Dane Parnell? Remember about the bus window?”
“What?” said Billy. “That it was broken?”
“What you said to us was you saw it break. How do you suppose that happened?” Baron let the question sit. “The way we, the FSRC I mean, do things… we need a subtler approach than the rest of the force. It’s handy to have members outside of the actual service.”
“You actually are actually trying to get me to join,” Billy said, incredulous.
“There’s certain privileges,” Baron said. “A few responsibilities. Official Secrets, whatnot. Bit of dosh. Not enough to really make a big difference, to be honest, but, you know, it’s a couple of pizzas…”
“And tell me, does anyone in the FSRC,” Billy said, “ever make a blind bit of sense?” He looked at his drinking partners blearily. “I was not expecting to be recruited today.”
“Yeah, and by the filth, too,” Collingswood said. She blew gusts, gave him a little smirk. Still no one was telling her to stop smoking.
“We want you onside, Billy,” Baron said. “You could help Vardy. You know the books. You’ll understand the squid stuff. Any investigation, we always start with beliefs, but the biology’s going to be part of all that.
“You know, I have to tell you…” Baron shifted as if broaching a painful subject. “You might have heard, it’s an old standard that if you’re looking for whodunit, you start with whoever finds the body. And you did have access to the tank, too.”
Billy’s eyes widened. He began to rise. Baron pulled him back down, laughing. “Sit down, you pillock,” he said. “I’m just saying that if we wanted to, we could approach this a whole other way. Where were you on the night of, et cetera and so on. But you and us can scratch each other’s backs. We want insight and you want protection. Win-win, mate.”
“So why are you threatening me?” Billy said. “And I told you, I don’t have any insight…”
“You going to tell me,” Baron interrupted, tilting his chin in a come now look, “you’ve got no sense of the bloody awesomeness of that thing?”
“… The squid?”
“The Archi-bloody-teuthis, Billy Harrow, yes. The giant squid. That thing in the jar. That. That got took. And is been and gone. Are you really surprised someone might worship it? Don’t you want a better idea why? What the stakes are? You know stuff’s going on, now. Don’t you want to know more?”
“There’s new life and new civilisations,” Collingswood said. She did her face in a hand mirror.
Billy shook his head and said, “Bloody hell.”
“Nah,” Collingswood said. “That’s a different unit.”
Billy closed his eyes, opened them at the sound of the glasses vibrating on the table. Collingswood and Baron looked at each other. “Did he just…?” Collingswood said. She looked at Billy again, with interest.
“We know you’ve been unsettled,” Baron said carefully. “Makes you a great candidate…”
“Unsettled?” Billy thought of the jarred man. “That’s one way to put it. And now you want me to, to go looking stuff up for you? That’s it?”
“For a starter.”
“I do not think so,” Billy said. “I’d rather go home and forget all about whatever’s going on.”
“Right,” said Collingswood. She took a drag. The low light glimmered on her gold trimmings. “Like you can forget about it. Like you can forget about all this.” She swayed in her chair. “Good luck with that, bruv.”
“No one doubts you’d rather,” Baron said. “But choice, alas, is not given to all of us. Even if you’re not interested in it, it’s interested in you. Let me just let that stand for a tick.
“Thing is, Billy, we should be outdated. FSRC got set up a little bit before 2000. Cobbled together from a couple of older outfits. Supposed to be temporary. It was the millennium: we were waiting for some devout nutters to set fire to the Houses of Parliament. Sacrifice Cherie Blair to their goat overlords, something.”
“No luck there,” Collingswood said. She did the French breathing thing with her smoke. Disgusting as it was, Billy couldn’t take his eyes off it.