Page 4 of Smoke & Ashes
“My husband has gone missing.” I couldn’t help staring at her—the Eliseswereall different if you looked closely, and this one was by far the most natural-seeming. She sat down in the chair opposite me where any of her sisters would have stood for preference, especially if they were upset. “The police say that there is nothing they can do as he’s an adult and can make his own decisions, but I worry that something”—she gave me the big eyes—“something terrible might have happened.”
This was getting rough. Once I’d realised that Elise had started out in life as some guy’s creepy magic fuckbot, I’d tried really, really hard not to sexualise her. That had got harder when I met Beth, the one who was basically an evil dominatrix enforcer, but I’d still mostly managed. Now another identical woman was sitting opposite me doing the fullhelp me Mr Spadebit and it was sending my mind to some very awkward places even without the reminding-me-of-a-woman-I-got-killed element. “And why do you think that?”
“It’s hard to explain.” She glanced at her hands, which were folded decorously across her knees. “You see, I worry that something may have happened to him because of me.”
I made a “go on” kind of noise.
“You may find this hard to believe, Miss Kane. But I’m—I’m not human.”
Yeah. No shit.
3
Agents & Estates
Idecided against telling the client that I probably knew more about her than she did about herself. It would have felt cheap. Instead I let her tell me her story, which was less horrific than Elise’s by an order of wasn’t-thrown-in-an-actual-dump. From what she said, I was certain she’d been Russel’s first girl. For a start he’d called her Galatea, meaning she now went by the somewhat odd name of Galatea Brown. Then there was the way he’d got rid of her. Instead of trying to sell her or destroy her like he had with the others, he’d abandoned her one day in the middle of London and hoped that would fix everything. She’d wandered around Lambeth for a long time—not needing to eat or drink made it more bearable but having no friends or home or any idea what the fuck was happening to you while you stood on the street and hoped somebody would take you in seemed like it would still be fucking nightmarish—before finally meeting this dude called Edward Brown. He’d picked her up, helped her find somewhere to stay, generally done the gentleman routine. I say gentleman, but since she wound up ambiguously married and subsequently abandoned for the second time in her short life, I wasn’t sure the guy got a pass ulterior-motive wise.
“Eventually I moved into his flat with him,” she explained. “He had been very good to me and he made me happy. He never pushed me about where I had come from. I think he thought I’d escaped from some manner of criminal organisation, and he was very protective of me. We had trouble getting a marriage license because I have no formal identification, but he spoke to some people and arranged it somehow. I am a real legal person now, or I pass for one.”
I made a mental note to check up on that—legal reality was a tricky thing and I didn’t totally trust Eddie Baby to have been straight with her. “Any idea who these people he spoke to were?”
“No. He did it all through his work, and I never found out how.”
Not super helpful, but the work was a possible lead. “And have you any other ideas about what might have happened?”
She reached inside her purse for a piece of paper. “He left me this, pinned to the fridge with a magnet.”
It readI’m sorry. Don’t look for me. I wasn’t sure if that was suspicious or just shitty. I mean he’d basically ditched his wife by post-it. “What do you think it means?”
“I worry that he’s in danger. That something magical from my past or some criminal he had to work with to arrange my papers came and took him.”
This was a tough one. On the one hand it was a paying gig. On the other, I was way too close. And if I did find Galatea’s husband, and he did turn out to not want her any more, and all this stuff about the past catching up with them was nothing but a story she was using to make herself feel better, what then? “I’ll look into it,” I said.
“Thank you. I—I have money.”
“I’d hope you would. This ain’t no charity lady.” I did the last bit in a bad Bogart voice, which confused her.
“How do I…? That is, how much do I…?” Oh this was getting unbearable. I had to get this dame out of my office before I lost it.
“We’ll sort that out when I find your husband. Until then I’ll stay in touch. Give your details to my … give me your details, and we can sort out the fine print later. You’re clearly still in a bad place.”
She rose with that same brought-to-life-by-angel-fire grace I remembered Elise having. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”
“I’m really not. Believe me.”
I took down a couple of other bits of information—her address and phone number, mostly. It turned out she didn’t know that much about her husband’s life outside their home, which was odd. And, though I hated to think it, another point on the side of his being a bad guy. Whether that meant the normal cheating love-rat kind of bad guy or the more complicated secretly a vampire or a gangster or a vampire gangster kind of bad guy, I wasn’t going to speculate. Basically I had his name, and the fact that he was an estate agent, and that he probably workedsomewherein Brentford. Still, I’d worked with less.
Once she was gone I sat back at my desk, stared blankly at a spreadsheet I’d forgotten how to update, and cried. This was unfair. Right when I thought I’d got all the other last things I needed cleaned up and dealt with, the universe had to come along with its fucked in the head sense of humour and give me a new last thing I needed. It was bad enough knowing that my as-good-as-dead best friend had a bunch of spooky doubles running around without the one spooky double who didn’t know about all the other spooky doubles turning up in my office.
And what sort of man doesn’t tell his own fucking wife where he fucking works. Stupid question; probably the same sort of man who marries an animated statue with no past in the first place. Because sure, maybe he was being all noble and trusting and shit, but I’ve never gone far wrong betting against human decency and it was likely that he just cared more about the fact that she was hot, vulnerable, and would do him than about little details like where she came from or if she’d ever been trafficked into sexual slavery.
Fuck it, maybe I was projecting. I liked to think that I would have taken Elise in even if she hadn’t been absurdly easy on the eyes and I hadn’t been essentially forced into it by a swarm of sentient rats. But, honestly, I couldn’t have sworn to it in court.
Anyway. Job. Whoever the guy was, I’d been hired to find him. Edward Brown was about as common a name as you could get—hell it was so common that the wikipedia disambiguation page for men called Edward Brown listed other disambiguation pages that disambiguated searches for men with names a bit like Edward Brown. Add that to a vague idea about his job and where he had, until recently, lived, and I at least had somewhere to start. And how many estate agents could there be in Brentford anyway?
I checked.
That many, huh?
