found in the basement—“Leave aside the doesn’t-fit-in-the-fucking-jar thing for a minute, boss”—was nothing to do with the squid case. Was, in fact, some many-years-old arcane gangland hit that Billy had stumbled onto at that moment of heightened sensitivities. “He’s got something,” she had said. “A bit of nous. Maybe all stressed he sniffed something.”
“Hah,” said Baron, and sat back. “Alright then. You’re going to like this, Kath. You’re right.”
“What?” She sat up fast enough to spill her coffee. “Bollocks. Really, guv?”
“Harris says the body was put in the bottle, she reckons, a good hundred years ago. That’s how long it’s been in that muck.”
“Holy shit. Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?”
“Just you wait. That’s not all. There’s an ‘and.’ Or maybe I should say a ‘but.’ Isn’t there some word that means both?”
“Get on with it, guv.”
“So that body’s been preserved like that for a century. But-stroke-and. Have you heard of GG Allin?”
“Who the eff’s that?”
“Search me. Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google. He was a singer, says here. Though it also says that stretches the definition. Delightful. ‘Scum rocker,’ it says here. More of a Queen man myself. ‘Don’t stand in the front row,’ Harris says. Anyway, he died about a decade ago.”
“So what?”
“So we should probably not ignore the fact that one of our deceased chap’s tattoos reads ‘GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.’”
“Oh, shit.”
“Indeed. He was apparently pickled several decades before he got his tattoo.” They looked at each other.
“You want me to find out who he was, don’t you?”
“No need,” he said. “We got a hit. He’s on the database.”
“What?”
“Fingerprints, DNA, the whole lot. That would be the DNA that is both a century old, and also gives his DOB as 1969. Name of Al Adler. AKA various stupid things. They do love their nicknames.”
“What did he get done for?”
“Burglary. But that was because of a bargain, he got to do a bit of regular bird. The original charge was on the other list.” Codes against illicit magery. Adler had been breaking and entering by esoteric means.
“Associates?”
“Freelance when he was starting out. Did a stint as some sort of stringer for a coven in Deptford. Spent the last four years of his working life full-time with Grisamentum, it looks like. Disappeared when Griz died. Grisabloodymentum, eh?”
“Before my time,” Collingswood said. “I never met the bloke.”
“Don’t remind me,” Baron said. “It should be illegal to be so much younger than me. He was alright, Grisamentum. I mean, you never know who you can trust, but he helped out a few times.”
“So I bloody gather. Geezer does crop up. What exactly did he do?”
“He was a bit of a one,” Baron said. “Finger in a lot of pies. Sort of a player. It’s all gone a bit tits-up since he died. He was a good counterweight.”
“Didn’t you tell me he didn’t die with …”
“Yeah, no. It wasn’t anything battley and dramatic. He got sick. Everyone knew about it. Worst-kept secret. I tell you what though: his funeral was pretty bloody amazing.”
“You were there?”
“Certainly I was.”
The Metropolitan Police could not not mark so important a passing. So advertised a good-bye. The details of where and how Grisamentum would valedictory the city had been leaked so ostentatiously they were clearly summonses.
“How’d you finesse it?” Collingswood said. Baron smiled.
“A not-very-competent surveillance, ooh, look at us, you all saw us, tish, we’re so silly.” He waggled his head.
Collingswood was long-enough inducted, subtle enough in her policeness now, stalwart of the FSRC and London protocols to understand. The police could not officially attend the passing of so questionably licit a figure, but nor could they ignore that public event, show disrespect or ingratitude. Hence a mummery, an act designed to be seen through, the putative incompetence of their spying on the event leaving them seen, and understood to have attended.
Collingswood said, “So what did Adler do? To get bottled?”
“Who knows? What he did to piss somebody off, your guess is as good as mine.”
“My guess is way better than yours, guv,” she said. “Get the necessary, I’ll fetch my shit.”
She went to her locker for an old glyph-fucked board, a candle, a pot of unpleasant tallow. Baron sent Harris an email, requesting a rag of Adler’s skin, a bone, a hank of his hair.
HE COULD NOT LEAVE, BUT HE WAS NOT OTHERWISE RESTRAINED. Billy spent hours in the sunken library. He saturated himself in deepwater theology and poetics. He looked for specifics about the teuthic apocalypse.