dreams unless there was something to be gained by going there. And it was the hospital from my dreams, white-and-gold lights and everything, a Google image search confirmed it. Still, dropping in on a group of wizards who hated me was a job I was very much inclined to put off until the evening, which left me a whole day to fill.
Tara’s car dropped me off at the office. The door of said office was still hanging open but as far as I could tell nobody had been through my stuff. That was the nice thing about having a failing business, nobody could be bothered to rob you. I rang a locksmith and explained the problem, he told me that if the door had been kicked in I’d probably need a new frame as well as a new lock, but that since they were a general security firm he’d be able to get somebody out today to look at it.
Then I settled in to ring around every fucking estate agent in fucking Maidenhead, trying to work out which one had hired Edward Brown. About halfway through the job, I got a reply from Eve. It just said: Professor lady?
10
Tens & Queens
So it turned out that ringing every estate agent in a town of 73,000 people took longer than I thought it would, but I managed to get most of them to at least tell me that they didn’t have an Edward Brown working for them. That narrowed the field down to three places that insisted on a policy of not discussing their staffing, of which one was the Maidenhead branch of the same firm that he’d worked for in Brentford, so I felt pretty confident there, leads-wise. Although not so confident that I thought I could schlep all the way out there, find out what the shit was up with the guy, and get back to town in time to see Nim, make sure Sofia hadn’t been murdered by a hate-fuelled witch-vampire working for a master manipulator with two millennia of scheming under his belt, and then catch a ride back to Safernoc in time to see if Tara had been serious about the dungeon.
Not that I was totally sure I wanted her to be serious about the dungeon. I’d been down there before and for all my bravado it was a nasty place to be chained up in. Then again, the right company would probably have made the world of difference.
To my unbelievable shame, the hospital where Nim had been lying ever since she and Arty King did the mutual-embrace-of-death thing on each other was all of forty minutes’ walk from my office. I crossed Waterloo Bridge and took what would have been a pleasant late-afternoon stroll up the waterfront if it hadn’t got to the point where I was incapable of watching a boat go down the Thames without assuming it was some kind of deep and meaningful metaphor for a primordial vision quest that I was spectacularly fucking up.
Outside a modern concrete building which claimed to be a pub but was clearly actually a bar which is a whole different vibe with way more tapas and way less atmosphere, I stopped for a moment by a lichen-covered wall and stared at the river flowing under Blackfriars bridge. Of course I said “bar” but basically it was a bunch of low tables where—once it got to more that time of the evening—people would be sitting and drinking overpriced beer under a perma-grey London sky. Right now, the tables had exactly one inhabitant, an old woman in a grey anorak and fingerless gloves. I knew without looking that she’d be dealing cards in front of her. I looked anyway.
Sighing, I went up to her. “Okay,” I said. “What have you got to tell me?”
“Why don’t you sit down.”
I sat down. “Should I ask who you are?”
“A famous clairvoyant,” she replied. “But not as the likes of you would know about.”
“The likes of me?” Was I sitting down with a homophobic fortune teller?
“You in your high tower, watching from the windows and never coming down into the muck with the rest of us. You what thinks you know but knows nothing.”
I rubbed my temples. “And which of the many, many weird creatures that seems to live in my dreams are you, exactly?”