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  Morag put a hand on his forearm and instantly worried that he – like so many men – might take a gesture of bonhomie as something more, although she was quickly coming to the opinion that he might be gay.

  “All good suggestions. And seriously, that’s as close as you’re gonna get.”

  He nodded.

  “So, are we all going to die soon?”

  She gave him a look.

  “Hey,” he said. “Maurice and I recently bought gym memberships. I’m just curious to know if we’re wasting our time.”

  The waiter appeared with two tumblers on a tray.

  “We’re all going to die,” said Morag and sipped her whiskey. “Eventually.”

  “Of course. But we shouldn’t have to die before our time, of something unpleasant and avoidable. That’s my sales pitch, my professional philosophy.”

  “And ours too. Absolutely.”

  Rod believed the universe had its own natural rhythm: cause and effect, gag and punchline, the long drop and the sudden stop. When someone says “Don’t look behind you but –”, it is a universal certainty that heads will swivel. When Rod had lost his 60mm anti-tank mortar on that fateful night when he was separated from the rest of his patrol outside Al-Qa’im, it was an iron-clad guarantee that he would need it before the night was through. So when a ditzy young woman mentioned a mummy that she “did not touch,” Rod immediately prepared himself for its appearance.

  It stepped out into the corridor fifty feet behind the handcuffed protestor and stumbled ever so slowly towards them.

  “On cue,” said Rod.

  “What?” said Izzy, fingering her earrings nervously as she watched him try to pick the handcuff locks.

  “Nothing,” said Rod.

  The mummy had apparently learned how to walk from decades of zombie movies, shuffling in the gait of a man in callipers who had just wet himself. Its bandages were wide and scab brown as if the creature had been wrapped in enormous, dirty sticking plasters. Its head was featureless, a mottled mass of coverings.

  Rod had yet to pick the handcuffs. If they had been standard police issue, they’d have been sprung already but these were something else and they weren’t about to give just yet.

  He took a step back and put a call through to Ingrid. “Do we have a mummy in the Vault?”

  “No, Rod. We do not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  There was a pause while Ingrid thought.

  “Hey,” said the protestor. “Are you going to ignore me?”

  “You chained yourself up, lass,” said Rod. “Be patient. Look at the pretty paintings.”

  “No mummy,” said Ingrid. “We do have a hibernating scion of the Uriye Inai’e. Kerrphwign-Azhal.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But it’s locked away in a secure case.”

  “Er. You might want to rethink that last statement.”

  “Who painted this one?” said Izzy, pointing at a surrealist image in which amorphous pink and grey figures embraced, or possibly ate each other, against a blood red landscape. “I think I’ve seen something like this before.”

  “Like it but not that one,” said Rod.

  “If it looks like a mummy then you’re safe,” said Ingrid, on the phone.

  “Why wouldn’t it look like a mummy?” said Rod.

  “If it looks like a mummy that means it’s still chewing.”

  The mummy stopped in an archway. Its brown bandages bulged fatly. It looked like the Michelin man had lost some weight while dossing in the sewers. Izzy caught Rod’s eye and was about to look round.

  “It’s a Conroy Maddox,” said Rod.

  “What?” said Izzy.

  “This painting. A local lad. It’s one of a series of paintings Scotland Yard confiscated during World War Two.”

  The mummy, Kerrphwign-whatever, seemed to be having some trouble. Its bandages (which were clearly not bandages) rippled and started to unfurl.

  “Why?” said Izzy.

  Rod glanced at the painting.

  “The official line is that they suspected Maddox of being a fifth columnist and sending coded messages to the Nazis through his paintings.”

  “So that’s not true?”

  “No. They were seized because they are an impossibly accurate rendering of the Venislarn Apocalypse.”

  “The what?”

  “The end of the world, lass.”

  They weren’t bandages at all. They were limbs, appendages, like giant tongues or the bodies of flat worms. They opened out, revealing red undersides bristling with yellow teeth.

  “How can it be an accurate rendering?” said Izzy. “The world hasn’t ended.”

  “Give it time.”

  The creature had five limbs, possibly seven, definitely a prime number, joined together around a cluster of eye stalks. The eyes looked human. They looked… borrowed. The teeth too. Definitely human. It slapped an arm onto the wall and swung itself upwards, letting the ancient but still juicy remains of its last human meal fall to the floor.

  Rod spoke into the phone.

  “It… er, Kerrwi… Kervph… Kevin, has stopped eating.”

  “Are you sure?” said Ingrid.

  “I can see its leftovers.”

  “Who are you talking to?” said Izzy.

  Kevin hung in the archway from three limbs. Its eyestalks regarded Rod wetly.

  “It’s staring at me,” he said.

  “It is a she!” said Izzy huffily.

  “Probably still hungry,” said Ingrid.

  Rod’s right hand drifted towards his holstered pistol.

  “Please tell me it’s fair game.”

  “One of the Uriye Inai’e? Imagine the reprisals. No, Rod. You cannot kill it.”

  “I’m not seeing other options.”

  “We can subdue it with a prayer of supplication. Once it’s fed again.”

  “I’m not right happy about that, since the only food in sight is us.”

  “Are you a virgin?” said Ingrid.

  “I… what?”

  “It only eats virgins. Their hearts specifically.”

  “It’s a fussy eater?”

  Izzy frowned. Rod clicked his fingers to keep her attention.

  “I need to ask you a question in a moment, lass. Pay attention.” Into the phone, “Are you sure? This chap does not look like a fussy eater.”

  “Sure,” said Ingrid. “There was one in Sao Paulo a few years back. I read a paper.”

  “A paper…” Rod looked at Izzy. “Right. That question.”

  “Yes?” said the manacled protestor.

  “It’s gonna sound odd.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And perhaps a little pervy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Are you a virgin?”

  Izzy, quite reasonably, looked at him as though he were mad.

  “Are you hitting on me?”

  “Who the hell hits on someone by asking them if they’re a virgin?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a Christian thing.”

  Kevin swung slowly along the ceiling towards them with the confident lazy lope of an orangutan, flat tentacle over flat tentacle, leaving behind a series of slimy prints and a circle of indents where its teeth had bitten into the plaster.

  “It’s not a Christian thing. It’s not an anything thing. I just need you to answer the question. And quickly.”

  “No. I’m not telling you.” She drew her coat around her tightly, protectively. “And, besides, what counts as a virgin?”

  “Well, that’s obvious. It’s someone who hasn’t done it.”

  “You’ll need to be more specific.”

  Rod screwed up his nose in irritation. If the silly woman hadn’t cuffed herself to the Bloody Big Book, he could have simply dragged her away to a safe distance for a bit of regrouping and rethinking but, no, she had to chain herself up, make things difficult and ask stupid questions like…

  “What’s a virgin?” he said into the phone.

&nb
sp; “What?” said Ingrid.

  “Is it a… a penetration-based criteria?”

  “Penetration-based criteria?”

  “And can you lose it by yourself? And… and lesbians…” He abandoned that sentence before he strayed too quickly away from the realms of his own experiences. “Ingrid. I’m going to need some clarification here.”

  “You’re not a lesbian, Rod.”

  “Not me!” he hissed. “Is there nothing from that Brazil incident?”

  “I will need to get back to you on that.”

  Rod huffed. Kevin was barely ten feet away from them and dangling silently from an air vent grille, its tentacle-mouth-arms reminding Rod very much of the inside of a meatball and sauce sub sandwich he had once eaten and quickly regretted.

  “Izzy,” he said, gripping the woman’s arms. “I need an answer.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s genuinely a matter of life and death.”

  “Whose?”

  “Well, if you’re a virgin, yours. If not, someone else’s. Everyone else’s.”

  The woman wasn’t budging.

  “I don’t have to answer a personal question like that and I’m going to call the police unless you step back and tell me what is going on.”

  “Right,” he said with restrained fury. “There’s this… entity, Kevin. One of the Venislarn. And, don’t look behind you but –”

  Izzy looked round. Of course she did. It was the rhythm of the universe.

  Izzy screamed. Kevin wrenched opened the air vent and slid upwards through the narrow opening and into the bowels of the Library.

  “Bugger,” said Rod with feeling.

  “I’m not a virgin!” sobbed Izzy.

  “Aye, so I gather.”

  Regret was a stupid emotion, Morag thought miserably.

  She stood in the central concourse of Birmingham New Street station, beneath a vast glass atrium that let in too much hateful morning light. She couldn’t be sure if she was hungover or still drunk. She was ready to lie down, vomit and then sleep for a century, so probably a mixture of both.

  It was stupid to regret spending the entire night drinking with Derek. She’d done it, it was done and she was going to have to live with it. Just as it was stupid to regret her last act working for the Edinburgh consular mission. The deed was done, the bitch was dead and, flee though she might, hell itself was certain to descend on her soon enough.

  “No regrets. Fuck ‘em.”

  She plodded around the station with her pathetically small pull-along suitcase. She wandered in and out of shops, playing a sort of retail Russian roulette, in which the loser was going to have to ‘clean up in aisle one,’ and bought chewing gum, deodorant spray, two cans of Irn-Bru and the saddest looking Cornish pasty she had ever seen. She felt a surprising kinship with that pasty.

  Morag then wandered out of the station and into the pedestrianised shopping district. Seven in the morning and the only things open were sandwich bars, a twenty-four-hour supermarket and a Wetherspoons. Morag sat on a bench, ate the pasty, downed an Irn-Bru, chewed gum, surreptitiously sprayed herself and wondered what the hell to do next.

  She opened the uCab app on her phone, found the nearest taxi and selected it. She met the cab on a steep side road called Temple Street and all but rolled into the back seat.

  “Library of Birmingham.”

  The bearded taxi driver grunted and pulled away. Morag fumbled with her seatbelt, then gave up and watched her new home city glide by. Repurposed Victorian banks and square office buildings, mostly redbrick here rather than the grimy sandstone of Edinburgh, quickly gave way to brutalist glass offices, dual carriageway and railway arches.

  “Is it far?” said Morag. “The library?”

  The driver grunted wordlessly again.

  “Right,” said Morag.

  They passed over a canal bridge and hit a queue of traffic. Police cars and orange barriers blocked the road ahead. Morag saw cops in hi-vis running along the brick-paved towpath.

  “Something going on?”

  Morag heard the buzz of a helicopter somewhere overhead though she couldn’t see it or be bothered to look. Over to her left, huge modern buildings squashed up against the canalside, the National Indoor Arena on one side, a building identified as the National Sea Life Centre on the other.

  “Aren’t we like a hundred miles from the sea?” said Morag.

  The driver grunted.

  “Maybe the cops are chasing an escaped octopus,” she suggested. “What do you reckon?”

  The driver grunted.

  “You Brummies talk too much,” Morag muttered.

  “Okay, so what does this Kevin look like?” said Nina.

  “He’s all arms and teeth,” said Rod.

  “I’ve met guys like that.”

  The Sea Life Centre had been closed off even before it had opened and its night security staff bundled away behind a police cordon that stretched around the canalside and Brindley Place. Rod stood by a crab tank and looked down and over the zig-zagging walkways that rose up between the fish tanks and touch-and-feel rock pools at Nina Seth, who stood in the ticket hall.

  “I’m not talking about a gropey Bee Gee,” called Rod. “Think psycho-starfish as big as me.”

  “That’s big, big man.”

  “Aye.”

  Nina was young, small of frame and not authorised to carry a firearm. She couldn't stop Kevin from eating her for breakfast, if it so wished, so she was lucky she did not match its particular dietary requirements. She had sworn that she was no longer ‘pure’ an hour before, although this was just a formality. Coffee break conversations on Monday mornings had made it very clear what Rod’s junior colleague got up to at weekends. Rod considered himself to have active hobbies and leisure pursuits. Listening to Nina describe hers was itself exhausting.

  “You know I’m not a clean-up specialist, Rod,” said Nina. “Or an investigator. Resource allocation, that’s me. This would be a job for Greg.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Vaughn says they’re sending a new investigator down from Scotland today.”

  “Wonderful,” said Nina.

  “And Ingrid is only tech support.”

  “I know.”

  “So,” said Rod, “until the Argyle and Sutherland Highlander arrives, please allocate your resources into finding Kevin.”

  “Who we are not allowed to kill.” Was that fresh disappointment in Nina’s voice?

  “No. Tag him with tracer spray, nothing more.”

  Rod pointed to the entrance to the ray tank section. “I’ll sweep this way. Stay in contact.”

  “I’m going to check out the penguins,” said Nina.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “I like penguins.”

  Rod nodded.

  “Oh, one last question,” said Nina.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What the hell’s a Bee Gee?”

  Morag pressed the intercom buzzer and waited. A grey-bearded security guard shuffled unhurriedly across the lobby floor.

  “Library’s closed,” he mouthed through the glass.

  Morag held her Edinburgh consular mission warrant card up for the man to see. He squinted at it as though she had just presented a doughnut as identification. The man’s bushy eyebrows waggled indecisively for a bit before he opened the door.

  “Are you expected?” he said.

  “I hope so.”

  “Who are you here to see?”

  She shrugged.

  “Whoever’s in charge. I’ve been transferred. Promoted,” she added hurriedly. “I’m Morag Murray.”

  “I wasn’t told we were expecting anyone.”

  “Really?” she said wearily. “I mean, if you weren’t told… Maybe I should just go away again.”

  He either hadn’t been issued with a sarcasm-detector or chose to ignore it.

  “No, that’s fine,” he said in a tone that indicated this situation was anyt
hing but. “You’ll come this way.”

  He led her past an empty coffee shop to a bank of lifts. He gestured her into one, swiped his own ID card against a perfectly unexceptional square of lift wall and pressed for the seventh floor.

  “Not coming?” she said.

  He stepped back from the closing door.

  As the lift rose, Morag rubbed her tired eyes with the heels of her palms and then inspected her appearance in the mirrored wall of the lift.

  “Looking rough there, Morag,” she told herself and yawned.

  She ran her fingers through her hair, decided there was nothing to be done about the remains of yesterday’s make-up and was halfway through reapplying some deodorant when the lift stopped.

  Morag fumbled the deodorant out of sight and stepped out into a white corridor. A hatchet-faced woman with her silver hair drawn back into a tight ponytail and a mobile pressed to her ear paused in her pacing, eyeballed Morag sharply and then resumed pacing. Morag sidestepped her and went up to the glass-fronted reception desk.

  The receptionist wore large false eyelashes, Betty-Boop kiss curls and a clip-on library ID that said Lois Wheeler. She smiled at Morag. It was a genuine smile but it lasted only a microsecond, as though she didn’t have the energy to sustain it any longer.

  “I’m Morag Murray,” said Morag and presented her warrant card.

  “So you are,” said the receptionist, Lois, cheerfully.

  “I’m starting today.”

  “Starting?” She blinked. “As in starting starting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  Morag grimaced. “The security man downstairs didn’t know anything about it either.”

  “Security Bob doesn’t know anything but I’d have thought someone would have told me… Do take a seat for a minute while I sort you out.”

  Lois picked up a phone and dialled. Morag stepped back from the glass and regarded the seats beside the lift. They looked far too comfy. She feared that if she sat down, she’d be asleep and drooling on her lapel in under a minute.

  “Finally!” said the hatchet-faced glarer. “Who are you?”

  “Mor—” replied Morag before realising the woman was on the phone. Morag gave an awkward cough and looked away.

  “Then listen,” said the woman. “I am enquiring about a death. No, no name. Yes, you can, Mr Williams. You can. You record all deaths in the city and collect relevant information and I seek a body that meets my requirements.”