The Wolves of London (37 page)

I kicked out with my other leg, my foot thudding into the side of its barrel-like body. However the dog simply snarled and tightened its grip, making me howl with agony. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the couple I had barged into clambering gingerly to their feet, the man aiding his companion, fussing over her as she whimpered.

‘Help!’ I shouted. ‘Get it off me! Call the police!’

The man glanced in my direction, but I saw no sympathy or willingness to help on his face.

And then, behind him, I saw a flood of dark shapes spill from the mouth of the alleyway. Leading them was Hulse, his teeth bared in fury, his hand brandishing his knife. He saw me sprawled on the ground and howled in triumph.

Then, like a pack of wolves, he and his cronies were upon me.

B
irds singing. The soothing orange glow of daylight on the inside of my eyelids. The smell of freshly laundered sheets and… something else. The warm, woody tang of tobacco smoke.

Frank
, I thought, and opened my eyes.

And there he was, sitting quietly on a chair beside the bed in which I was lying, smoking one of his roll-ups. His skin was ethereally pale, so bloodless that it was not hard to imagine that he was a ghost, a vision from the past, and that if I blinked he would be gone in the split second it took me to close my eyes and open them again.

I blinked and looked. He was still there. One of his bony legs was crossed over the other, and he was casually brushing a spill of ash off his knee. He glanced at me with his mournful eyes, his face betraying no emotion.

‘Back with us, are you?’ he said, as if I had done nothing more than pop down to the shops for a pint of milk.

‘What happened?’ I asked, or tried to; my throat felt rusty through lack of use.

‘Heart brought you home,’ he said. ‘You’ve been in the wars, old boy.’ He smiled faintly at his own feeble joke.

My mind felt sluggish, as rusty as my voice. Memories blundered into view like slow, heavy animals emerging from a murky autumn dusk. Hulse and Jackery. The dog.

Clover.

I jerked up from the pillow as the memory of what had happened to her passed through me like an electric shock. The sudden movement awoke points of pain all over my body – ankle, knee, elbow, wrist, back, neck, head – which in turn yanked a cry of pain from my throat.

‘Calm yourself, chief,’ Frank said, placing an almost weightless hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve been through a heck of an ordeal. You need to rest.’

Slowly I allowed myself to sink back into the bed. I didn’t feel as damaged as I had when I’d woken up in the hospital after being beaten up by Glenn and his mates all those years ago, but it
was
true to say that the parts of me that
didn’t
hurt were few and far between. My body felt like one huge bruise, although, after carefully wriggling my fingers and toes and flexing my limbs, I could more or less safely conclude that nothing was broken.

The main pain was inside. Not just the sense of scouring, of rawness, as if the heart was stripping me away layer by layer each time I used it, but the pain of loss, of grief. What was the point of the heart protecting me if it couldn’t protect the people I cared about? Kate was still missing, and I was no nearer to finding out what had happened to her than I had been on the day she was taken. And now Clover, my partner and friend throughout this ordeal, had been taken too, her life savagely ended by a man who had been long dead before she was even born.

If this was what the heart did – protected me, but allowed those around me to suffer – then I wanted no part of it. Despite my reliance on it, like the reliance of an addict on his drug, maybe it was time to seek a way to contact Kate’s kidnapper and arrange an exchange before I lost my daughter for ever. But how? By putting ads in all the London newspapers and magazines? By daubing cryptic messages on walls that only the kidnapper would understand? Or maybe I should just walk around London in plain view, offering myself as bait?

I wasn’t aware I was crying until my eyes blurred and I felt the tickle of tears on my cheeks. Again there came the light pressure of Frank’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t upset yourself, guv’nor. You know what they say. Things are always blackest before dawn.’

The words were so trite I almost smiled. Given Frank’s extraordinary nature it was easy to be in awe of him, to imagine that he possessed wisdom and understanding beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals. But now and again I was reminded he was actually not much more than a callow youth from the early twentieth century. All right, so his experiences had aged him beyond his years, and he had returned from death as a vessel for the horror of the war that had killed him and thousands like him. But he was still just a boy underneath it all, one as naïve as he was haunted, as uncertain as he was powerful.

Reaching up slowly with an arm that was stiff and bruised, I placed my hand over his. His cold, waxy skin didn’t bother me any more; I was comforted by his touch.

‘Clover’s dead,’ I said simply. It was the first time I had spoken the words, and I was strangely shocked, hearing them out loud, how blunt they sounded, how final.

‘That so?’ said Frank with his characteristic lack of emotion. ‘Want to tell me about it?’

Haltingly, croakingly, I recounted everything that had happened after Clover and I had fled the warehouse basement in the Isle of Dogs. I told him how Hulse and his feral companions had descended on me like a pack of wolves, and then I shuddered and looked at him, my neck creaking with pain. ‘But what about you? How did you get away?’

‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Nice cup of tea.’

It was only when he spoke the words that I realised how parched I was. I swallowed drily as he stubbed out his roll-up in a glass ashtray by his feet and stood up. ‘Back in a tick.’

Left alone, I inched my body into a sitting position, wincing at the pain. I was in a double bed in the large bedroom of either a very nice house or a luxury hotel. The carpet was the colour of oatmeal, and the wallpaper, patterned with a subtly embossed Art Deco design, possessed a gold-brown sheen that made it look classy and expensive. The furniture was elegantly but sturdily Victorian, the main light fitting in the centre of the high ceiling just this side of ostentatious. The room was bathed in autumn sunlight which poured through a row of long bay windows to my right, beyond which I could see trees and railings and some sort of pagoda-like structure on a hill in the distance – parkland or the grounds of a private house?

Listening, I realised I could hear not only the chirping of birds but the low-level rumble of traffic. So I was back in my own time then, and from the sounds of it reasonably close to a main road. Was I still in London? If so, that was probably Hyde Park I could see out there, or maybe Kensington Gardens.

Frank had said the heart had brought me home. But where exactly was ‘home’? And, for that matter, where was the heart? With a sudden stab of alarm I looked around the room as quickly as my aching neck would allow, searching for my blood and filth-smeared jacket. I couldn’t see it, but then I remembered that the last time I had seen the heart it had been not in my pocket, but in my hand. I had snatched it from the gutter after my collision with the couple in the street.

Shit
. Had I dropped it? Left it behind? Had Hulse taken it? But if so, how had it brought me home? Then I saw it, sitting on top of a small cabinet beside the bed, and the breath of relief I expelled made me slump like a punctured balloon.

I reached for it – my drug, my lifeline to Kate – and clutched it gratefully to my chest, and a second later heard the creak of what sounded like stairs beneath the weight of an approaching presence. I looked up, expecting it to be Frank, even though the young soldier’s previous movements had been all but soundless. The door opened and a woman entered carrying a tray.

It was Clover.

My heart leaped, and I let out a weird (and slightly embarrassing) high-pitched yelp. As she approached the bed with an almost triumphant smile on her face, I could only gape, too overcome to speak.

‘Well?’ she said, putting the tray on the chair by the bed. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

My mouth moved, I licked my lips. ‘It’s…
you
!’ I blurted.

She smiled happily. She was clearly enjoying this. ‘Oh,
very
eloquent. I expected a bit more than that, if I’m honest.’

Something gave way inside me, some minor emotional dam, and I started to laugh. It made my ribs and neck hurt, but I didn’t care. ‘I thought you were dead,’ I said. ‘I
saw
you die.’

Lifting a teapot from the tray and pouring two cups, she shook her head. ‘You didn’t, you know.’

I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

I’d been so focused on the wonderful impossibility of Clover’s being alive that I didn’t realise Frank had slipped silently back into the room and was now standing at the end of the bed.

‘The Clover you saw killed wasn’t her, chief.’

I looked at him in bewilderment. ‘Who was it then?’

‘That thing from the Isle of Dogs.’

‘The… shape-shifter?’ I murmured.

Frank nodded. ‘That whole thing with McCallum and what he turned into, and Clover in the cage, was a trick, a double bluff. He… if that thing
is
a he…
wanted
you to save Clover.’

‘Why?’ I asked, and then I realised. ‘So that I’d drop my guard and make it easier for them to take the heart?’

Clover nodded, handing me tea in a proper china cup with a saucer. I put the heart back on the bedside cabinet before taking it. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘When he appeared at the hotel he looked like you, Alex. That’s why he caught
me
off-guard. I think he must have injected me with something. Next thing I remember is waking up to find myself in a dark little room that stank like a toilet.’

‘So the Clover that came with me,’ I said, ‘obviously meant to take the heart, but didn’t get the chance.’ I frowned, thinking hard for a moment. ‘Which begs the question: did Hulse kill the thing that looked like you because he thought it
was
you, or because he knew it
wasn’t
?’

Clover shrugged. ‘Search me. I’d never even heard of this guy until Frank told me about him a few minutes ago.’

‘That doesn’t mean he hadn’t heard of you, though. Or at least, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t given orders to kill you.’

‘But why would he kill me and not you? You’re the one with the heart.’

‘Maybe because you were closer to him than I was? Or to make me follow him into his own time, where he’d feel more comfortable dealing with me? Or maybe he just killed you to break my spirit? I don’t know…’

I broke off, frustrated. Frank remained silent, watching me intently, as if willing me to work things out for myself. I took the look on his face as my cue to try.

‘If Hulse
did
know the woman he killed wasn’t you,’ I said slowly, ‘then wouldn’t that mean there’s not just one group after the heart? I mean, if they’re all Wolves of London, why kill each other? Maybe there are lots of different, weird, murderous factions, all after one thing?’

‘Comforting thought,’ said Clover.

Again I fell silent, my mind still working furiously. Then I said, ‘There’s another thing that bothers me.’

‘Just one?’ said Clover.

I looked at her, a worm of suspicion wriggling at the back of my mind. ‘Instead of going to the trouble of locking you up, why didn’t the shape-shifter just kill you when it caught you?’

She shrugged. ‘No idea. Maybe it needs the real person close by in order to change into them?’

‘But it changed into McCallum easily enough,’ I said, ‘and
he’s
dead.’

‘In that case, I don’t know.’ Then she saw the expression on my face. ‘Oh, come on, Alex. Don’t spoil the big reunion by saying you don’t trust me.’

Sheepishly I said, ‘I
want
to trust you. And I can’t express how happy I am that you’re alive. But given what’s happened, how do I
know
you’re who you say you are? How do I know
anyone
is?’

‘You don’t,’ said Frank simply. ‘But if we were your enemies, don’t you think that instead of looking after you for the last three days, we’d have just killed you and taken the heart?’

It was a fair point – and then I realised what Frank had said.

‘
Three days?
Is that how long I’ve been unconscious? What about Kate? Has there been—’

‘Nothing on the news,’ said Clover shortly. ‘I’m sorry.’

I slumped back, but my mind was whirring. I felt frantic.
Three days
. Shit. In the present circumstances it was an eternity. Even though I knew it was barely my fault, I couldn’t help thinking I’d let Kate down, failed her.

‘We thought we were going to lose you at one point,’ Clover was saying. ‘You were delirious, running a fever. You looked like death.’ She nodded at the heart. ‘I thought maybe you’d overdone it with that thing.’

‘Maybe I had,’ I said distractedly, still thinking about Kate. ‘Maybe the human body isn’t equipped for time travel.’

‘Time travel?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’ I gulped my tea. ‘How did you get away from the shape-shifter, Frank? What happened?’

The young soldier shrugged. ‘War of attrition, chief. I wore the bugger down. It helped that you’d already singed its whiskers with the heart, and that it was in pieces. Soon as the bit that had disguised itself as Clover left with you, it lost a lot of its strength. Crawled away between the cracks in the walls to lick its wounds.’

‘So you didn’t kill it?’

‘Don’t think so. Not sure if something like that
can
be killed.’

I was about to respond, and then a wave of nausea hit me. It was as if the tea I’d drunk had suddenly rebelled on its way down and decided to turn back. ‘Oh God, I think I’m going—’

And then it all gushed out of me. I puked on the bedclothes between my knees, filling the room with an acrid stench. Afterwards I felt shaky and feverish, my stomach hurting all over again, my head pounding, my skin sensitive to the touch. My hands felt stiff, and when I looked at them I was certain this time that my fingers were a little more crooked than usual, the knuckles swollen, as if the bones had become slightly distorted. Again I thought of how shrunken and twisted Barnaby McCallum had been.