The Comeback of the King Page 23

  “Yeah.” Ted twitched a grin that mirrored Stephen’s. “And I’m still available … only not that available.”

  Stephen reacted suddenly to an unheard command.

  “Way-up, they’re back.”

  The witch looked expectantly up at her acolytes who appeared in a circle around her. Even with the robes their body language was like a bunch of guilty school kids. They scuffed their feet, they could barely lift their heads up to meet her eye … She looked from one to the next to the next and her expression slowly grew darker and darker.

  She had sent them off to locate the Knowledge, Ted remembered – unsuccessfully, it appeared.

  She shot one last, suspicious look at Ted and raised a hand with fingers bent like a claw. A spark of pain stabbed between his ears and images rushed through his mind: the distinct feel of the claw stuck into his memories, churning them up, seeing what it could find buried there.

  “Oi! No, I don’t have it!”

  “No,” she agreed after a second’s pause, “you do not.”

  Ted rubbed his head resentfully.

  “And think how much trouble you could have saved everyone if you’d done that earlier! Like, August!”

  She shot him a look that could have frozen a leg of lamb.

  “I have cauterised the neuron clusters where it dwelled. It will not be returning.”

  Ted’s mouth dropped. He probed gingerly at his hair with his hands.

  “You … you’ve cauterised … inside my head … well, thank you so bloody much!”

  “You have plenty to spare.” She gestured to her followers, and turned away as if they were all leaving the room. Stephen managed a final grin and a “bye, mate.” Then in one blink they somehow left the room, the world, the dimension, and Ted was alone with the inspector in a layby on the A36. He looked around. Police car in ditch, other traffic streaming past, no sign of witch or King or anyone else.

  “And that was all about …?” the inspector asked.

  “It’s over,” he muttered, still rubbing the side of his head. In principle he knew the witch was right and she probably wouldn’t have done anything that might have harmed him, but even so! Those were his brain cells she had killed off.

  And – “bye, mate”? That was all he got?

  “What, just like that?”

  “Apparently.” Bye, mate … Goodbye, Stephen. It was surprisingly easy to say. Maybe he had done his grieving. Maybe he had been letting go ever since the summer. Stephen was so obviously happy, in wherever-the-hell-it-was the witch came from, with like minds that he had never dreamed existed. He was never going to have to lower his mighty brain to Ted’s level again, and Ted was very happy not to be living in a community where no one ever … never mind. “Can you drive me home?”

  She looked pointedly at him, then at the wrecked car, then at him again.

  “Oh. Yeah. Okay, I’ll call a taxi–”

  He stuck his hand in his pocket for his phone and frowned as his fingers closed around an unfamiliar oblong shape. Wrong size, wrong weight, wrong feel. Huh? And then he remembered: he had turned his own phone off so that it couldn’t be traced and had been using this cheapo pay-as-you-talk piece of tat instead. He was more than happy to shove it away, retrieve his bag from the car and get his normal phone out.

  The screen showed four voicemails and five new texts.

  ted i think ive got it call me

  ted ansa yr phone dammit

  earth 2 ted earth 2 ted do u read over?

  … and all from the same source. He grinned and pressed ‘reply’. The phone rang twice before a harried voice answered it.

  “Ted? Where the hell have you been? Are you still at Malcolm’s? I can meet you there–”

  “Hi Zoe. Wassup?”

  “Ted, look, I think I’ve got it.” At the other end of the line, Zoe had to raise her voice to speak over the tortured roar of her Mini’s engine and all the other sounds of the little car being pushed to the limit. She must be hurtling along some road or other. He hoped she was talking hands-free. “This King you told me about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s possible he’s some kind of personification of natural forces–”

  Ted rolled his eyes.

  “Wow!”

  “He was probably around a few thousand years ago but for some reason he’s come back–”

  He felt a grin splitting his face and tried to keep the laugh out of his voice.

  “Gee! So, uh, how do you suggest we deal with him?”

  Chapter 22

  “So, you lot have been busy then?”

  The driver of the breakdown truck peered through his windscreen at the brightly lit back yard of the police station. It heaved with the kind of activity Amanda usually associated with a Saturday evening after a home game. Vans parked shoulder to shoulder disgorged a crowd of men in riot gear. A small cheer went up as the truck nudged its way through with Amanda’s car on the flatbed.

  “Just trust me, it will be okay–”

  That was what Ted had said, and as he had so far been right about most other things …

  The men were laughing and chatting amongst themselves. It wasn’t the proud, manly, bragging laughter of some guys who had been in a good rumble. Some had arms in slings or bandages wrapped round their heads, but even from them it was like they had all come back from a really enjoyable social day out, embracing their inner whatevers and learning to love one another.

  Now Amanda came to think of it, the breakdown driver had been strangely cheerful and chatty himself. She had just assumed it was how he was, and tuned it out, which was what she usually did with cheerful, chatty people.

  “You must have heard it on the radio,” she said. “Trouble in the city centre?”

  “Oh, yes, that.” He shrugged. “Sounded like it might be getting a bit out of hand at one point, didn’t it? Still, you know. Christmas high spirits, eh?”

  “Just trust me, it will be okay–”

  “High spirits,” she agreed tonelessly. “Yes, indeed.”

  More cheers as she and the driver climbed down from the cab and he went about unloading the car.

  “Evening, ma’am!”

  “Hit some ice, did you?”

  And not a single crack about women drivers. Amanda reluctantly fished a smile out of her memory and stuck it onto her face. There were so many genuine smiles around that it seemed rude not to. It also felt utterly fake.

  The van backed out again and it really was time to face the music. She couldn’t put it off any longer, though what she really wanted to do was go home, fall into a hot bath and stay in it for the next year or two. She pushed her way through the throng and into the station. The good atmosphere in here was just as heady and she sniffed the air cautiously. There was no sign of anything that shouldn’t be there: it really must be what Ted had told her about.

  And there was the man she had come to see, peering over an operative’s shoulder at a monitor.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Inspector Stewart!” Superintendent Wallace glanced over his shoulder and beckoned her closer with a twitch of his head. The monitor showed a CCTV view of Churchill Way. “Come and look at this idiot. Goes up to over 70 between speed cameras, slows down to exactly 30 as he goes over the markings and thinks we won’t notice. Some people. Who do we have in the area?”

  “Tango Alpha are onto them sir,” the operator reported.

  “Good. I want that fool off the road. We need to send an extra hard message for Christmas.” He turned away, shaking his head, eyes set hard as stone. So, Amanda couldn’t help noticing, it’s not like everyone’s forgiving everything.

  Wallace looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Shouldn’t you be off shift by now, Inspector?”

  Here goes. Amanda swallowed.

  “Um, yes, sir. Just going. Sir, about earlier–”

  Wallace held up a hand, and now he smiled.

  “Not to worry, not to worry. I was out of order.
You had a lead, I was interfering with typical back-room red tape. Not how a man of my experience should act. I should know to let my officers follow their instincts. That’s how good policing gets done. Say no more of it, eh?”

  Sir, I lied to you, assaulted you, locked you in a cell and basically went all vigilante on you, and you want to say no more of it? Amanda thought. Then: well, if you’re going to twist my arm …

  “No more, sir,” she agreed.

  “If it relates to the King, it’s forgiven; anything else, business as usual.” That had been Ted’s assurance, though from his tone she hadn’t been convinced even he completely believed it. But it seemed to be the case and it was an arrangement that she could live with.

  “So what did happen to that lead?” he asked. They fell in side by side as they headed upstairs. “That name you said you were following. Get any further?”

  “Dead end, sir. I was barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Oh. Well. Can’t win ’em all.” He paused at the door to his office and gave her a friendly nod. “Goodnight, Inspector. See you tomorrow.”

  “Goodnight, sir.”

  His door was already closed, and while the thought of knocking off for the night was strong within her, there was one more thing she had to do.

  Amanda went on further to find her own desk. Two other officers pushed out through the swing doors as she pushed in. One of them was one of her former Hunter group. He just gave a friendly “g’night, ma’am” and carried on talking to the other, a foreigner, if that term still applied.

  She sat down at her PC, let the monitor light up from standby, logged on, called up her files. The one she wanted was always at the top of the directory listing because of the way she had prefixed it: !!_ted_gorse_.docx.

  Four months’ worth of Tom Blake’s patient, private research … Her finger came down on the ‘delete’ key, and when asked to confirm she clicked ‘yes’.

  She sat back and thought. She wasn’t as computer-literate as Ted but she knew about recycling bins. She opened the desktop bin up, found her file at the top of the listing there and deleted it again.

  “Astonishingly, yes,” she muttered when the computer asked her again if she was really sure, warning her that the file would be unrecoverable. “Yes, I do. That is why I just told you to do it.”

  She was about to turn off when the memory of another case tugged at her mind. What had it been – oh yes, a fraudster: a few thousand quid siphoned into his own account, had deleted the evidence and redeleted it from the bin, but it had still been recovered by one of the techies. He had told her what the man should have done.

  And so she carefully created a new blank file called !!_ted_gorse_.docx, and deleted that, and deleted it from the bin, and then repeated the same steps three more times. The original !!_ted_gorse_.docx would be well and truly buried, forever.

  She sat back and looked at the blank screen for a few seconds, before pushing her chair back and standing up. She turned the monitor off with a jab of the finger and headed for the door.

  She hadn’t touched the records of Ted’s previous dealings with the police. She had no intention of doing so. But when it came to any extracurricular investigation …

  Congratulations, Mr Gorse, you have a clean slate. Use it wisely.

  Chapter 23

  This, Ted thought on Monday morning, would be the acid test of the King’s magic. He knew how Malcolm loved his Jaguar …

  He hunkered down in his chair at the front desk of the Agora and strained to listen to his employer’s voice coming from the back room.

  “That’s right … Yes, as I explained to the last lady I spoke to … and the one before that … yes, the roof has been completely split open … Yes, exactly as in the picture … well it would be because that is a picture of the actual damage–”

  Malcolm had impressed Ted by photographing the damage to his car – probably the first time he had ever used that particular feature on his phone. Ted had shown him how to get the photos off it and send them off to the insurance company.

  “No other vehicle was involved … Yes, I’d read those reports too but I wasn’t anywhere near the town centre … No, I’m unable to explain how the damage occurred … Well, quite, but as you can see, the fact is that whoever or whatever caused it, I have a car whose roof has been split open–”

  The conversation trickled on, not very helpfully. Eventually Malcolm came out of the back room and gave Ted a philosophical smile.

  “Between you and me, I doubt they’ll buy it, but something might happen. Oh, and I believe I owe you this.”

  He plonked a ten pound note down on the desk. Ted raised an eyebrow.

  “Thanks.”

  So, Ted thought as he tucked the note away, your car that costs a small mortgage gets horribly damaged and you can just shrug it off … yup, I think the King did his stuff.

  Malcolm was gazing out of the window at the shopping crowds of New Canal.

  “And I do believe we have a visitor–”

  Ted was on his feet in an instant, craning his neck to see outside, wide grin splitting his face. And there she was.

  Zoe had been about half Goth when Ted first knew her. She had de-Gothed completely in the months since. Her black, shaggy hair was a more natural shade of chestnut brown. The dark makeup had gone and Ted wasn’t expert enough to say if she was wearing just enough not to be noticeable, or if she was just naturally stunning anyway. He couldn’t see what else she might be wearing under the comfortable, warm, full length, extremely un-Goth raincoat.

  The bell chimed as she came into the shop and Ted saw that the amused, knowing smile was exactly the same.

  “Malcolm! Ted!”

  Malcolm got a kiss on both cheeks. Ted got a kiss on one.

  “Back from your wanderings?” Malcolm asked. “Can I make you a coffee?”

  “Possibly, haven’t decided; and no, thanks. Malcolm, do you mind if I take your shop assistant on an early lunch break?”

  She smiled brightly from one of them to the other, but the smile might not have been quite so bright when it settled on Ted.

  *

  “You’re in a good mood,” she commented soon after. They sat at the window table of a teashop looking out over the market place.

  “I sure am.” Ted put the menu down and beamed. “The Knowledge is well and truly gone, so it can’t bugger up my life again, and no one got killed, and everyone’s forgiving everyone.”

  “Uh-huh.” Zoe glanced out of the window. They could just see the grove of trees that had sprouted up around the war memorial. It had been cordoned off with black and yellow tape and a group of tree surgeons were already at work. “And Salisbury is in the grip of a kind of collective madness that makes everyone turn double somersaults in their heads not to talk about what happened.”

  It wasn’t quite how Ted would have chosen to describe his moment of triumph. On the other hand it did quite nicely describe the weird atmosphere when he had got home last night. Mum and Barry brighter and happier than he had seen them for a long time, and conspicuously not talking about how she had almost seen him burned alive. Robert acting like his experiences that day had just been another fun day out. Sarah too, though that might just have been a ploy on her part, to guilt-trip him into sitting through a presentation of every single picture she had drawn in the last month, giving a critical reaction to each one. Reactions weren’t allowed to be negative and no two critiques were allowed to be alike.

  “You make it sound like it’s a bad thing,” he mumbled.

  “Oh, you did a pretty good job of repairing the mess but wouldn’t it have been great if the mess wasn’t there in the first place?”

  Ted was surprised at the sudden surge of anger within him.

  “Look, I’m getting kinda tired of being told it’s my fault. She seemed to think it was, the Knowledge seemed to think it was, but who put the Knowledge into my head in the first place? Okay, it was to save my life and I’m sorta grateful for that but if sh
e didn’t realise it was going to stay, how was I meant to know? Or maybe she’s not as clever as she thinks she is? And meanwhile, who was it who actually got to do something?”

  “Like, tamper with forces you have no conception of?”

  Ted remembered the sheer, gut-gnawing terror and despair when he realised how wrong the attempt to call up the guardian had gone.

  “Well, at least I was doing something! And Sarah’s okay.”

  “Is she? Are you?”

  She said it so significantly that Ted narrowed his eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, using the excuse of a sip of coffee to pause and marshal her words into the right order.

  “Ted, first, I’m not blaming you for what happened. It might have sounded like that – I’m sorry.”

  She gave him a rueful smile that went straight to his pleasure centres, but even if the anger evaporated under its onslaught, enough hung around like a fine mist to make Ted think, that’s a dirty trick, lady.

  “But?” he prompted.

  “Ted–” A sigh, another pause. “You had the Knowledge living inside you. That has to have changed you, somehow. And you – and Sarah– have been involved in two quite significant acts of magic within the space of a few months.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  She looked at him over the rim of her coffee, then down at the cup as she raised it to drink.

  “It attracts attention,” she said quietly. Three little words that made Ted’s self-satisfaction, which had been there all along even during his outburst, pop like a bubble.

  “Attention?” He actually looked around. “Attention from who?”

  It could be good attention, of course, he told himself wildly. Attention from all the right … somethings. But attracting good attention wasn’t something you warned people about, or something that worried your friends. Zoe sounded worried and her words had come across a lot like a warning.