wankface,” Collingswood said. She pinched the top of her nose. “You cuntbandit.”
“Jesus, Kath, you alright? What’s all that?”
“It’s just tension, boss.”
“Tense? On a beautiful day like this?” She glared at him. “What’s got your goat?”
“Nothing. It’s not like that. It’s just …” She raised her hands. “It’s all this. It’s the fucking Panda.”
Through a meandering chain of half-arsed jokes, that was the name Collingswood and Baron had given the end on the edge of things. The end for which even the most tentatively apocalyptic faith was preparing. The magic reek of it had Collingswood, as a knack-smith, on edge: toothached, crampy, unsettled. She had been referring to that fearful approaching whatever-it-was repeatedly, until Baron had suggested giving it a shorthand. It had started as Big Bad Wolf, from where it had quickly become Sausage Dog, and ultimately Panda. The nickname did not help Collingswood feel any better about it.
“Whatever it is has to do with the fucking squid,” she said. “If we knew who’d taken the bugger …”
“We know who the top suspects are. Certainly if anyone in the office asks.” The devout might pay a lot for the corpse of a god. The FSRC listened and fished, ho ho, for word of the secretive Church of God Kraken. But the disappearance might be a more profane, though knacked and abnatural, crime. And that would be a complication.
Bureaucracies turf-war. The FSRC were the only officers in the Met who were anything other than blitheringly inadequate to deal with the eldritch nonsense of knackery. They were the state’s witches and hammers of witches. But their remit was a historical quirk. There were no Wizardry Squads in the UK Police. No SO21 to police Crimes of Magic. The Flying Squad did not. There was only the FSRC, and technically they were not concerned with the powers of ley lines, charmed words, invoked entities, et cetera—they were a cult squad, specifically.
In practice of course it was staffed by and kept watch on all those with questionable talents. FSRC computers were loaded with occult hexware and abgrades (Geas 2.0, iScry). But the unit was obliged to maintain appearances by describing all its work in terms of the policing of religion. They had to take care, if they concluded that it was purely secular abcriminality behind the Architeuthis disappearance, to stress what links they could with London’s heresiarchs. Otherwise they would lose jurisdiction. Without cult-games at the heart of the squidnapping, it would be handed over to some brusque unsubtle unit—Serious Crime, Organised Crime. Antiquities.
“God preserve us,” Collingswood said.
“Just hypothetically,” Baron said. “Between you and me. If this is crims, not godsquadders, you know who our top suspect is.”
“Tat-fucking-too,” said Collingswood.
Baron’s phone went. “Yeah,” he said into it. He listened and stopped walking. He looked sick, and sicker, and old.
“What?” Collingswood said. “What, boss?”
“Alright,” he said. “We’ll be there.” He shut the phone. “Goss and Subby,” he said. “I think they found out that Anders gave them to us. Someone … Oh, bugger me. You’ll see.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHEN BILLY WOKE HE REALISED THAT HIS DREAMS HAD BEEN nothing but the usual cobbled-together fag-ends of meaning.
Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?
He knew he was at war now. Billy stepped out into it. It wasn’t his city anymore, it was a combat zone. He looked up at sudden noises. He was a guerrilla, behind Dane. Dane wanted his god; Billy wanted freedom and revenge. Whatever Dane said, Billy wanted revenge for Leon and for the loss of any sense of his own life, and being at war with the Tattoo gave him at least a tiny chance for that. Right?
They were simply disguised. Hair flattened out for Billy, teased up for Dane. Dane wore a tracksuit; Billy was absurd in clothes stolen from the imaginary student. He blinked like the escapee he was, watched Londoners hurrying. Dane took a couple of seconds to open a new car.
“You got some magic key?” Billy said.
“Don’t be a twat,” Dane said. He was just using some criminal finger technique. Billy looked around the vehicle’s interior—there was a paperback, empty water bottles, scattered paper. He hoped with a hopeless sense of fret that this theft would not hurt someone he would like, someone nice. It was a pitiful equivocation.
“So …” Billy said. Here he was, in the trenches. “What’s the plan? We’re taking it to them, right?”
“Hunting,” Dane said. “We