Page 13 of Fortune's Ashes
‘Owen’s got a meeting at the Talismanic Bank,’ Liza told me as I dropped the brush back onto my desk. ‘But he told me to pull out those old files for you and leave them on your desk. That’s all there is. None of them have been added to the computer system yet, so all you’ve got is the paper in front of you.’
‘Great. Thank you, that’s really helpful.’ It would have taken me far longer than Liza to work my way through the ancient filing system; she understood its vagaries whereas the rest of us only pretended to.
Tony hadn’t liked computers and, while Liza did her best to upload and update the older files, she had other time-consuming jobs to do. Until Grace arrived, Supe Squad had worked under its own set of rules. I was glad that we were dragging ourselves into the twenty-first century but I was painfully aware that it involved a lot of work to do it properly.
I flicked on the kettle; caffeine might make the job easier. Then I hesitated – was caffeine bad for babies? Probably. I grimaced, knelt down and rummaged around the small, grubby cupboard underneath the table. The best I could come up with was an ancient herbal teabag that smelled dubiously of lavender and stale fruit. Better than nothing.
I made the drink, wincing when I took a sip, and sat at my desk. I eyed the pile of folders. Work would help; anything that occupied my mind for the next few hours would be a good thing. Being busy was easier than being idle, particularly when you had a vexing abundance of personal problems to worry about.
Even Fred had learned the value of occupying himself and managed to find something to do: he was slouching on the sofa with a police-issue laptop balanced on his knees using both index fingers to type up a document, although at the rate he was going it would take hours to complete.
I skimmed through the first three files. A spate of burglaries committed against pixies, all of which had occurred more than eight years ago. An unexplained werewolf death from 2019. The disappearance of a gremlin in 2010. Hmm. I took another gulp of the herbal tea, immediately regretted it and set it to one side.
There had been no more reported pixie burglaries and the trail was very, very cold. Whoever had been behind the crimes had probably left the area or moved on to better – and hopefully more legal – things. The unexplained werewolf death was interesting, but it only took one quick phone call to the McGuigan clan to establish that they’d found the culprit themselves and he was currently doing twenty years at the Clink, the prison run by supes and solely for supes. I updated the file before pushing it aside.
In years gone by, the lack of communication between Supe Squad and the supes themselves had been annoying, to say the least. I allowed myself several mutters of pointless frustration, then focused on the gremlin disappearance. This might be something I could get my teeth into.
The gremlin in question was a thirty-one-year-old male. I checked his date of birth and realised that he was the same age as me; not only that, we shared the same birthday. I was vaguely aware of the birthday paradox – the theory that in a room of twenty-three people, there was a good chance that at least two of them would have the same birthday, but it didn’t prevent me from feeling an odd tug of kinship with the vanished gremlin.
I gazed at his photo. Quincy Carmichael was a friendly looking soul. His eyes twinkled and his hair, although tousled, had a rakish, fun air about it. He had the look of someone who’d be a good person to have a party. His last name put me in mind of Phileas Carmichael Esquire, the gremlin solicitor with whom I’d often tangled in the past. There was nothing in the file to suggest they were related, but it seemed likely.
I turned towards Liza, who was chewing on a biro and frowning at her own pile of papers, and cleared my throat. ‘Liza, how many gremlins are there in London?’
‘Two hundred and thirty-three,’ she said without looking up. ‘Wait – no. Two hundred and thirty-two. Ma Higgins passed away last month.’
Liza was a wealth of useful information and I had no clue how she retained it all. I nibbled my bottom lip. With so few gremlins in the city, it seemed even more likely that Phileas and Quincy were related. I made a note to check it out and moved on.
According to the files, Quincy had been something of a jack-the-lad, starting and ending different businesses in quick succession. He’d opened a launderette in Lisson Grove that had lasted almost eight months until problems with the washers getting clogged with werewolf fur were too much for him to deal with. He’d sold the operation to a zeta in the Fairfax clan.
He’d then tried his hand at running tours around various supe haunts, no doubt aiming to make a quick buck from curious humans. He was assaulted several times when he tried to take groups of humans into some of the quieter supe establishments where they weren’t welcome, so in the end he’d abandoned that idea and moved on to a dating agency specifically for supes.
That hadn’t been a bad move; until recently, it had been incredibly difficult for a supe to get a serious date from any of the usual dating websites. However, supe numbers were limited, so poor Quincy had struggled to get enough customers to make his business viable.
At the time he’d disappeared, he’d been dipping his toe into the fake-blood business. He’d been searching not only for ways to provide non-human blood products that offered sustenance to vamps, but also for other fake-blood products that would give humans a similar sort of experience. Food and drink laws were strict, so it sounded as if he’d been skirting the edge of what was legal, but given what I knew of the market and the number of fake-blood ‘goodies’ that could be purchased in supe shops and online, Quincy Carmichael could have been onto a winner. Unfortunately, he’d vanished before the business gained a real foothold.
There was a lot of information and it would take me time to scour all the details, so I prioritised and scanned the list of people who had been included in the files by my predecessor, Tony. It appeared that Quincy had been as prolific in his love life as he was in his professional life: there were three ex-girlfriends and two ex-boyfriends. Two of the girlfriends had been human.
Tony had written notes about each one, but his handwriting was appalling and it was difficult to decipher more than the odd phrase or two. What was surprising was that he’d gone as far as interviewing Quincy’s nearest and dearest. When Tony was the detective in charge, it was unusual for Supe Squad to follow up on supe crimes. Either the supes themselves took over the investigations, as had been the case with the McGuigan werewolf death, or other sections of the Met Police nabbed the cases when it was established that humans were involved. The disappearance of Quincy Carmichael was something of an outlier.
‘You were working here in 2010, right?’ I asked aloud.
Fred stared at me. ‘Boss, in 2010 I was guzzling industrial-strength cider in the park with my mates and trying to put together my entry for the Guinness World Record for the longest bike wheelie.’
‘You know your youth is a slap in the face to the rest of us?’ Liza said.
‘Sorry, grandma.’ Fred grinned.
Liza rolled her eyes and answered me. ‘Yes, Emma. I was here in 2010.’
‘Do you remember Quincy Carmichael?’
She gave a mild snort. Stupid question: of course she remembered him. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked.
‘Tony did a lot of work on his case. Why was he allowed to?’ I tapped my fingers on the file. ‘Why didn’t the supes look into it?’
Liza put down her biro, and a faint frown lined her forehead as she thought about it. ‘As I recall,’ she said finally, ‘nobody took his disappearance seriously. He had a reputation for being fickle, and evidence was found at his home that suggested he’d decided to leave the country and head for Spain.’
I flipped through the file again. Ah, yes: his passport was missing, and just before his disappearance he’d purchased a one-way ticket to Barcelona. By bus, not plane. I made another note.
