‘As I said,’ said Chorley with a grin, ‘especially made for you.’
I tried once more – just for luck – and Chorley shook his head sadly and withdrew.
I got up and looked around. I was in a circular underground cell eight metres wide at the base, with walls that went straight up for two metres before narrowing to form a dome with the entrance at its centre. Because of my misspent youth playing role-playing games I recognised it instantly as an oubliette – a place where you left people who you wanted to forget.
Though it was a very clean example of the type. With whitewashed walls, two futon beds, one on each side, a toilet, a shower and a sink.
The bedding on one futon bed was neatly folded up at the end while the other was loosely made up, the duvet clean but rumpled in the traditional manner of someone in too much of a hurry to make their own bed.
I wondered who that might be and whether they would be pleased to have a cellmate.
I noticed there were no tables, chairs, fridges or televisions.
No light fittings either – all the light came in through the entrance above.
I checked the shower but it consisted of an old-fashioned Psycho-style head cemented at an angle into the wall. Likewise, the sink and the toilet had all been designed with the minimum exposed piping. I flushed and twisted taps and found it all worked. There was a single shelf of white laminated chipboard above the sink with two lidless plastic takeaway trays, each with a toothbrush, toothpaste and a squeeze tube stolen from a hotel with The Best Shower Gel You Will Ever Steal printed on the side. I assumed that the box with the toothbrush still in its packaging was mine.
No moisturising cream, I noticed – not even some cocoa butter.
And not much in the way of entertainment.
‘Can’t I at least get Wi-Fi?’ I shouted up.
There was movement above and I jumped back as a hardback book fluttered down from the hole to land in front of me. Cautiously, just in case something heavy was about to join it, I grabbed the book and retreated back towards the unused futon. When I was sure nothing else was forthcoming I had a look. It was old, but not an antique. A 1977 first edition of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. And it might have been worth something if still had its dust jacket, and hadn’t been covered with finger marks and coffee rings and had its page corners turned down to mark the reader’s position. According to the stamp on the inside cover it had once belonged to Macclesfield Library.
Which is the closest library to Alderley Edge, where Martin Chorley grew up. Which meant it was likely that he’d half-inched it as a boy. I wondered if there were any useful notes in the margin. I retreated until my back was against the wall, then stood still and listened until I was pretty sure nobody was watching before sitting down and starting to read.
Who I was sharing my oubliette with became clear five pages in when Foxglove jumped down – landing on the drop mat elegantly with a slight bend at the knees. She had a courier’s bag around her shoulders, which she unslung and threw in my direction before loping over to what I now realised was her bed.
I didn’t have a chance to move, but the bag dropped into my lap. Inside was a white towelling bathrobe of the kind regularly stolen from four star hotels, a packet of Marks and Spencer’s boxers and a pair of plain blue cotton T-shirts. I had a good rummage but couldn’t find any receipts or other identification.
I looked up to find Foxglove sitting cross-legged on her bed and glaring at me.
I gave her a friendly smile.
‘So when’s dinner then?’ I asked.
Her eyes narrowed further.
‘Being kidnapped makes me hungry,’ I said.
She tried glaring again, but you’d think people would have figured out that I’m pretty immune to that now.
Foxglove sprang off the bed, jumped onto the drop mat and, as if it were a trampoline, shot up and out of the oubliette.
That was definitely magical, I thought. So I got up and tried a range of spells including the snapdragon, whose only purpose was to make a loud noise to scare off wild animals.
Nothing – the formae just wouldn’t catch. But I was starting to recognise the sensation. It was the same feeling I had when I couldn’t do magic in fairyland. I wondered if the oubliette was also part of an intrusion by fairyland into our world. That would explain why Foxglove could leap about and maybe also why she slept down there.
I went back to my book.
Since I was stuck there I’d decided to see if I could get all the way through ‘The Music of the Ainur’, the first bit of The Silmarillion and something I’ve never managed to do before. Tolkien and my dad had weirdly convergent ideas about the musical nature of the universe, although my dad would probably have been more forgiving of Melkor’s improvisation. You know, providing it didn’t step on his solo.
During the draggy passages I calculated what might be happening while I was tucked into my personal tertiary subspace manifold.
They knew that I’d encountered Lesley, and where, so there’d be no mucking about or down period while everyone wondered where I was. Say an hour, tops, to pull the CCTV at Wetherspoon’s and Holborn, and confirm that I’d got into a fake police car.
Or was it a real one? We knew Chorley and Lesley had contacts in the Met.
If it was real then snatching me would have blown his cover – good. I hope they threw the bastard to the wild Seawoll. That’d learn him.
A kidnapped police officer, even one as accident-prone as me, is always a priority case. So no more than a couple of hours with ANPR and CCTV to track the police car, fake or otherwise, and work out where the switch to a van took place. The big variable was how long it would take them to identify the van. And I guessed the answer to that, given the operation had been planned by Lesley, was probably never.
So what next?
Zach would have been brought in again. Fuck, everyone on the Little Crocodiles list who Seawoll and Stephanopoulos even thought might be worth a tug would be tugged. That would include Patrick Gale and Camilla Turner. And they wouldn’t be interviewed in the ABE suites, either. Nightingale would be out with Guleed, putting the frighteners on the demi-monde. And a whole web of contacts and arrangements that we’d painstakingly built up over the last couple of years would be strained to breaking point.
I wondered what Beverley was doing, and hoped it didn’t involve major property damage.
So I reckoned I was on my own. All I had to do was escape from a trap devised by the most devious fucker I’d ever met and a woman who once caught an entire gang selling counterfeit Gucci bags while on her coffee break. A woman who knew me better than I knew myself.
Or at least thought she did.
I let the words on the page blur out and let myself sense my surroundings. Assuming I really was in a bubble of fairyland, or more like an interface where the bubble intersected with the real world, then it must be the bubble that interfered with the formae I needed to create to produce a magical effect.
And if it had an effect on something I created, then it stood to reason that I should be able to detect that effect, the way the fingers can feel the rough surface of the board through the chalk.
We really were going to have to come up with some terminology one of these days. I supposed we could leave it to Abigail, if we didn’t mind having the basic magical particle called the Wicked and possessed with the qualities of positive or negative charge, pro and anti-ship and bae.
There. I felt a ripple above me like a raindrop in a puddle – looked up and saw Foxglove drop onto the landing mat with her arms full of flimsy white takeaway bags.