Oddjobs Read online

  Acting rather than thinking, the enormous Tyrone swung at Rod with his fist. Much faster, Rod leaned out of range and slammed his pistol side-on into Tyrone’s face. The big lad went down, clutching his flat (and now much flatter) nose and cursing in Venislarn. Jamie had dropped his baseball bat and put his hands up before Tyrone even hit the floor.

  Vivian felt something cold and sharp against her throat.

  “Back off, man!” Billy shouted. “Back off!”

  Nina and Morag were right behind Rod and, bizarrely, so was a small herd of cats.

  “Put the knife down, Billy,” said Rod, loud, clear and calm. “Let Mrs Grey go.”

  “Screw that!” he yelled back. “You’re not taking me.”

  With a hand grabbing her shoulder and his knife pressed tight against her throat, Billy dragged Vivian backwards, down the sloping floor to the open end of the boathouse.

  “Do not move!” shouted Rod. “I will shoot!”

  Water lapped over Vivian’s feet. It was cold, like death.

  “Shoot,” said Vivian. “Do it.”

  With a yank, Billy dragged her back further around the edge of the doorway. The boathouse abutted the back of a warehouse and a makeshift wooden jetty had been erected along its edge, a handspan above the water. Billy stepped back onto the walkway but he didn’t take Vivian with him. He span her as she rounded the corner and flung her out and away into the canal.

  Vivian heard the beginning sounds of a yell and then she was underwater. Cold black wrapped around her.

  Daganau Vei. The lair of the deep god.

  Vivian kicked with her legs and strained futilely against the bonds that tied her arms. If this had been an ordinary canal, her feet might have already touched bottom or at least ploughed through the silt and muck. There was no bottom. Without sight, she could sense the gulfing depths below her, she could feel the pull of their crushing gravity.

  A vast smoothness brushed her leg.

  Vivian screamed soundlessly through gritted teeth.

  Something looped under her armpit and she struggled for a moment before she realised it was a human arm. It pulled. It lifted.

  Vivian broke the surface, yelled and gasped. She and her rescuer went down once more but finally resurfaced.

  “Here! Here!” Morag was shouting.

  It was Nina who had jumped in after her. Vivian coughed and muttered with feeling.

  “What?” gasped Nina.

  “Idiot,” said Vivian. “You’re an idiot.”

  Nina grunted. Vivian felt herself passed to other arms. Boards scraped painfully against her side as Morag hauled her onto the walkway. Vivian hauled her legs out of the water quickly.

  “Get out, get out!” she snapped at Nina.

  Having the young fool die in her place would be more unbearable than being Daganau-Pysh’s lunch.

  Along the walkway, a door slammed. Vivian coughed up canal water. Billy the Fish had slipped through a doorway into the warehouse. Rod rattled the handle, shoulder-barged it and yelped.

  As Nina rolled onto the walkway, Vivian saw a wide, shallow bow wave move past and along The Waters. Morag was attending to her bonds. Nina wheezed and spat. Vivian suspected that no one else had seen the wave.

  “Rod!” she called. “Rod!”

  Rod wasn’t looking. He gripped the door handle, dug his fingers between door and frame and, with a roar, ripped it open. Amid exploding splinters, the door opened and bounced back on its hinges. Behind the door was a plain brick wall.

  Rod turned, a furious look on his face, and shook out his painful fingers.

  “Rod!”

  The bow wave breached and a limb as long as a tree reached out of the water. Not an octopus or squid tentacle but a muscleless frond of translucent tissue like the arm of a ghostly anemone or the trailing stinger of some giant jellyfish. Rod backed away; it wasn’t interested in him. The tentacle rapidly insinuated itself around the wooden door, barely touching it until it tightened. It effortlessly snapped the door off its hinges and hoisted it into the air.

  A letterbox in the door flipped open and grey fingers poked through.

  “Lord Daganau! It’s me, father! Don’t!” It was Billy, on the other side, in the space that the door led to. The tentacle tightened, loop over loop, like a boa constrictor. Wood creaked and splintered.

  “I did it only for you! For your glory! Ggh! Father! Father! Yo-Daganau-Pysh! Ffer sla’vhen byach karken’ah! Hrifet! Hrifet!”

  The door cracked and, for a moment, bled and then it came apart in shards that rained silently onto the water. The tentacle withdrew and was gone.

  Nina propped herself up on her elbows.

  “That was some weird shit.”

  “There!” said Morag and Vivian’s arms were free.

  Vivian inspected her wrists. “That was a stupid thing to do, Nina,” she said. “You could have died.”

  “YOLO, Vivian. YOLO.” Nina wrung out her sodden sleeves. “But, Jesus, I look a mess.”

  “You look fine,” said Morag.

  “Oh, really,” said Nina.

  “You’ve got that whole skanky detective look going on.” Morag slipped off her jacket and passed it to Nina. “Bold perfume too.”

  The Grand Central shopping centre above New Street Station catered to all desires and tastes, assuming those desires and tastes didn’t mind spending a lot of money. Fortunately, Morag was in a philosophical frame of mind and was happy to max out her credit cards. She bought new clothes to last her to the weekend, enough bathroom products to last until Armageddon (or next month, whichever came sooner) and a big pull-along case to take them home in.

  She took the train to Bournville and, on her meandering walk back to Franklin Road found a petrol station with an integral supermarket. She stocked up on pizzas, pasties and microwaveable macaroni cheese. She grabbed milk and tea bags, and looked without success for a bottle of something horribly alcoholic to curl up with for the evening. She took her purchases to the till and, as the cashier scanned everything, asked him if the market had a drinks section.

  He smiled. “Not in Bournville.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s a dry village.”

  “Say again?”

  “Dry village. All this area was built by the Cadbury family when they built the factory. Quakers, see? You can’t buy booze anywhere within the area. It’s the law.”

  “It’s inhumane,” Morag whispered.

  “Less than a mile to Cotteridge centre. Pubs and offies galore there.” The man pointed along the road.

  Morag shook her head. Then she saw a display of blue and orange boxes at the side of the till.

  “Oh, I’ll take them though.”

  “How many?” said the shopkeeper.

  “All of them,” said Morag.

  The cashier scanned and bagged all twelve. “You do know that they’re not real oranges? They don’t count towards your five-a-day or nothing.”

  The game was a welcome distraction as Rod and Nina walked back to the office.

  “Seawhores.”

  “Good one. Blowfish Job.”

  “Ha. Er, Halibut Plugs.”

  “Eww. Okay. Moby’s Dick.”

  “Nice,” said Nina. “Touched In Her Special Plaice. Plaice as in –”

  “I get it. I get it,” said Rod. “Let me think.”

  “Chocolate Starfish,” said Nina.

  “It was my turn.”

  “You’re too slow, old man.”

  “Um. Deep Trout.”

  “Deep Trout?”

  “As in Deep Throat.”

  Nina swiped the blank wall of the lift. “Never heard of it.”

  Rod looked her in the eye. “It was a classic porn movie.”

  “Does classic mean old?”

  “It means classic. Nineteen seventy-something. The whistleblower on the Watergate scandal, Deep Throat, took his name from the film.”

  “Water-what?”

  Rod huffed.

  “You’
re doing this on purpose now. Watergate scandal. Richard Nixon.”

  “Is he the one who was on Doctor Who?”

  The lift pinged open.

  “Flaming Nora, Nina. You do know there was a world before the year two thousand? It’s called history. It’s quite important, you know.”

  “It’s all in the past, Rod. Move on.” She shrugged happily. She wasn’t a tall woman and the oversized gym clothes she had swapped into to replace her wet clothes made her look even smaller.

  “Remind me again how old you are?” said Rod. “Twelve, was it?”

  Nina swiped them through the door. “So, work-head on. With Billy dead, where’s your investigation going next?”

  Rod stroked his chin.

  “Our friend, Izzy Wu, was asked to break into the Vault by her jeweller boyfriend Ben, who was killed by the Waters Crew and had links to the tattooist who inked their porn starlets to keep them in line. All of them worked for Billy the Fish, who is now dead. And none of the other half-brained mackerel have a clue about the finer details of the operation.”

  “Exactly.”

  Rod stopped beside Izzy’s detention cell. “I don’t know how much of value we’re going to get from little miss clueless here.” He opened the door.

  Izzy Wu was slumped in the corner of the room, head lolling, eyes half open.

  Nina knelt beside her, lifted her head up and felt for a pulse under her jaw. “Izzy. Izzy, wake up.” There was no response.

  Rod took something from the young woman’s hand, a crumpled square of paper. He smoothed it out and saw a drawing. At first he didn’t understand. It was just a squiggle, spiky lobes twisting around a segmented stalk, like a spiny conch shell sliced end-on. But there was something about the pattern…

  “She’s breathing,” he heard Nina say. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  The shape on the paper almost made sense. If he followed this line along, the way it met with these other lines surely meant…

  “Rod?” said a voice, far away.

  His gaze followed the inward curves and the zahir opened up to him, layers peeling back to reveal the deeper mysteries within…

  Somewhere, much further away now, a voice spoke and a hand touched him.

  The word zahir struck his consciousness. He faintly knew the word meant something, something dangerous and if, if… (Bloody hell! He knew this! It was on the tip of his tongue!) If… Yes. If he followed this line then the other intersections would come together and make a complete circuit –

  The image was snatched away. Rod gave a cry and fell back.

  Nina tossed the screwed up piece of paper into the far corner. Rod gasped for air and batted away at the remnants of the image that still clouded his vision.

  Nina grabbed him. “Rod! Rod!”

  He tried to focus on her.

  “Come back!” she said and shook him.

  “Nnh!”

  “Wake up, man!”

  “’m awake,” he mumbled.

  She sighed in relief. Rod lay on his back and put his hands to his head. A part of his brain that he couldn’t control tried to remember the hypnotic layout of the zahir, but it had gone.

  “A Langford Basilisk,” said Nina. “Damn.”

  Rod lay there for a time and concentrated on breathing. Eventually, he felt he had returned to himself enough to speak.

  “Hardcore Prawn,” he said.

  “Yep,” said Nina. “That’s a good one.”

  Morag threw her sweaty, chemical, funky, cat-attracting clothes straight in the washing machine and spent an excessive amount of time under the flat’s power shower before dressing in straight-from-the-shop clothes. It felt good in a way that few things did.

  Feeling human again, she gathered up the dozen chocolate oranges she had bought and made her way downstairs to flat one. A cat was sitting by the front door studying her. It did not run up to her, rub itself against her or meow. That felt good too.

  The door to Richard’s flat was closed, but the lock was still broken and the door swung open as she pushed it. There was no one in the living room. She called out a hello but there was no response. She could hear tinny music coming from another room but there was no sign of her neighbour.

  The fruit bowl was back on the coffee table, clean and empty. She could just leave her apology present in the bowl and sneak out again. It would be a pleasant surprise.

  She tiptoed across. To her side, there was a creak of floorboard and something implacably hard struck her in the face. Terry’s Chocolate Oranges flew everywhere.

  “Fuck’s sake!” she grunted.

  “Oh,” said Richard and dropped the colander he had whacked her with.

  “Christ!”

  Her mobile phone started to vibrate. She ignored it and put her hand to her nose. There was no blood. It stung so much she really thought there ought to be. “What did you hit me for?” she snapped.

  “You surprised me,” said Richard.

  “It was meant to be a nice surprise!”

  He looked at the chocolate oranges strewn across the carpet. “Those were for me?”

  “An apology. Fuck! Am I bleeding? Can you see blood?”

  “No,” said Richard. “There’s some red…” He gestured generally at her face. “Circles.”

  “You hit me with a fucking colander.”

  “I was draining green beans. Green beans are good for you.”

  She went over to the wall and tried to inspect her reflection in the glass of a pinned butterfly case. The eyespot designs on the butterfly wings stared back at her. She couldn’t see any marks on her face.

  “I think I’m the one who owes you an apology now,” said Richard.

  “You think?”

  “But you did say I should, and I quote, ‘really bust some moves’ on people who break into my house.”

  “Not on me!”

  He made an awkward face.

  “I don’t know what to say now.”

  She exhaled the remnants of her surprise and anger.

  She went over to him. “Hi,” she said and held out her hand. “I’m Morag Murray. I’m the idiot who lives in flat two.”

  “Hi,” he replied and shook her hand. “I’m Richard Smith. I’m the idiot who lives in flat one.”

  “Well, Richard, I think I’m going to go back to my flat and inspect the damage to my face.”

  “Okay. I can assure you it’s minimal.”

  “Maybe sometime we can do the whole new neighbours thing properly. Get pizza in or something.”

  “Okay,” said Richard. “When?”

  Morag wasn’t expecting a question at that point. “Um. Er. Tomorrow?”

  “What time?”

  “Well, I do work late sometimes. I’ll definitely be home by ten.”

  “Then it’s a date,” said Richard.

  “It’s not a date,” said Morag.

  “No, it’s not a date,” he agreed emphatically.

  “Goodnight,” she said.

  “Goodnight,” he replied.

  Morag returned upstairs, probing her tender skin with her fingertips. As she entered the flat she remembered her mobile. She had voice mail.

  “Morag, it’s Bannerman.” Bannerman was the Edinburgh consular chief. “I hope you’ve had a positive couple of days in Birmingham.” Morag laughed at that. “I have some… news for you. The incident on Sunday night. Damnation Alley. The Venislarn know and they’ve made their intentions known.” Morag felt a tight ball of nausea twist inside her. “They’re coming for you tomorrow,” said Bannerman solemnly. “If you need to call me, I am available anytime, anytime at all.”

  Morag let the phone drop. She stared numbly at a flat that wasn’t her home in a city that she didn’t know.

  The Venislarn were going to kill her tomorrow.

  Wednesday

  Morag woke up and did not die.

  She dressed and left for work and still did not die.

  She caught the train, bought something unhealthy to
eat for breakfast as she walked to the office and still she did not die.

  She swiped herself into the Library, said good morning to Security Bob and continued to not die.

  In the office, Nina Seth put a piece of paper in her hand. Morag looked at the word-filled grid.

  “For this morning’s session with Chad and Leandra. And you’ll need to put five pounds in the pot.”

  “What pot?”

  “First one to get a line wins a fiver. First one to get them all wins the pot.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s straightforward stuff, Scarlett Johansson. It’s just to break the monotony.”

  “Um. I think I’m going to die today, Nina.”

  Nina grinned. “It’s not that bad. It’s just Chad and Leandra.”

  Morag went to the kitchenette to make herself a cup of tea.

  “You are to be presented to the Venislarn court later this morning,” said Vivian without any kind of preamble, social niceties or any indication of human warmth.

  “This morning?” said Morag.

  “As the official registrar of all Venislarn beings, I am to take you there and make introductions.”

  “To the Venislarn court.”

  “Yes.”

  Morag thought about it. “That’s the one at the top of that building.”

  “The Cube. An unnecessarily garish and hollow edifice if you ask me.”

  “Yo-Morgantus,” said Morag.

  “Are you telling me these things or asking?” said Vivian irritably.

  “Vivian.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’m going to die today.”

  Vivian regarded her carefully. “A quarter of a million people die every day,” she said. “Our line of work holds considerable risk. I don’t know if you enjoy the stereotypically unhealthy diet of your fellow Scotsmen and you are – let me see – forty?”

  Morag’s mouth wouldn’t work for a good second.

  “I am… safely in my thirties,” she said. “That birthday is some distance off still.”

  “There is a percentage chance that any of us might die on any given day. Wednesdays are statistically one of the safer days. This morbid belief is not due to a horoscope reading or similar?”