Street Magic

'No,' he said. 'I told you what I needed to tell you, and now I'm off to the pub. Leggo, you bloody fascist!'

He ripped his arm away and the sleeve of the jacket jerked back, revealing a miniature tube system of veins and punctures on his forearm. Numbness stole over Pete as she stared, until Jack glared and pushed his sleeve down again.

'How long?' she asked.

Jack shoved a cigarette between his lips and touched it with the tip of his finger. An ember sprang to life. 'Like you bloody care.'

With a slam of the broken door, he vanished.

Pete dialed MG at her commune in Sussex on her mobile when she left the Grand Montresor and hung up. She dialed her desk at Scotland Yard. Ollie picked up, but Pete rang off with him as well.

What the bloody hell would she say? 'By the way, that bloke who dropped dead in front of me when I was sixteen? Saw him today. Yeah. Gives his love.'

Ollie was ill equipped to offer advice, unless it was regarding Leeds United football or cheap minibreak destinations. MG already had enough reasons to think Pete was a raving nutter. After the graveyard, after Pete had started talking again a few weeks later, MG had screamed and slapped her and demanded to know what had happened to her boyfriend.

I wish I knew, I really do, Pete had said, but it wasn't good enough. MG had never really trusted her again. She had been the one to introduce Pete to Jack, taken her to hear the Poor Dead Bastards play, so in MG's mind, where the universe rotated around MG, it was MG's fault that Jack was dead, and Pete's fault that she didn't throw herself on the same sword. Picking up and getting on with things was Da's way, and MG wouldn't hear of it.

Pete leaned her head against the steering wheel of her Mini, and tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the wasted middle-aged man in room 26 with the memory she'd carried for a dozen years. She hadn't brought Jack to mind often. It was painful to think of even the first time she'd seen Jack, at Fiver's, torn up and bloody even though his set had just started. That image stayed with her, Jack screaming and bleeding and irrefutably alive.

In the dreams that came in the twelve intervening years, the two pictures of Jack—alive and inanimate—blended, and Pete often found herself standing alone in the pit at Fiver's, being sung to by a dead man.

Pete's mobile rang and she jerked, dropping it between the driver's seat and the shift console. She swore as it continued to chirp and finally dug it out from the crevice. 'DI Caldecott.'

'Where are you?'

Pete held the phone away and checked the caller ID screen, terry (work) blinked in red letters. She took a breath and shoved everything that had happened inside the Montresor into the tidy bin she kept at the back of her mind for information too awful or real to process.

'I was working and I turned off my mobile. I do have a job still, Terry.'

Terry drew in a breath. 'You were supposed to be at the estate agent's to sign the sale papers at four.'

Pete turned the key in the Mini's ignition and the faulty dash clock flickered to life. Three forty-five. 'Terry, there's no way I can make it in traffic,' Pete said. 'We're going to have to put it off until tomorrow.'

'Pete.' Terry sighed. 'Just because we're no longer together doesn't mean you can dispose of our communal property at your leisure. I want the flat sold by summer. I'm going on holiday to Spain and I don't want to deal with it.'

'God forbid I should intrude on your precious holiday,' Pete muttered. 'Because it's all about you, Terry. Isn't it?'

'Pete,' he said. 'We bought the flat together, and we're no longer together, and I am going to get my money and wash my hands of it. That's all there is.'

Pete had nearly forgotten the patronizing tone Terry pulled out, the one that made her feel like a first-year recruit every time, but it came back to her in a rush. 'Terry, I'm working,' she snapped. 'I don't have time for you.'

'That was always your whole problem,' said Terry. After a moment a bleep told Pete she'd been disconnected.

'And a fine afternoon to you, too,' Pete muttered, tossing the mobile into the back seat. Terry had a job that began and ended at the same time every day. He never got blood on his shoes.

He never saw people return from the dead.

Pete gripped the Mini's wheel for a long thirty seconds before she felt steady enough to drive. She tried to blot Jack's face out and replace it with Bridget Killigan's, because the little girl was who she should be dwelling on. Not Mr. Risen from the Bloody Dead.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

'Bollocks,' Pete said firmly, and pulled away from the curb.

Chapter Three

DI Ollie Heath was leaving for the day when Pete slumped at her desk in the warrenlike Homicide and Serious Crime division, and he stopped and folded his coat over his ample stomach. 'You look a fright, Caldecott.'

'Ta muchly,' Pete muttered.

'Is it that tosser you were to marry?' Ollie asked. 'I'm sure I could work up a traffic warrant or two if he's giving you trouble.'

'It's not Terry,' said Pete. 'Just… someone I knew, a long while back.'

'Unpleasant reunion?' Ollie said.

Jack's eyes, a blue like the coldest part of a glacier, wide and staring, his skin and his platinum hair dappled in blood. Pete pushed, hard, against the flood of grief and other, darker thoughts that Jack's face stirred up. Thoughts that she'd put away for good, denied as hallucinations and dreams covering the ugly, bloodstained truth. 'No. Just old, bad memories.'

Ollie patted her awkwardly on the shoulder a few times. Pete felt herself go stiff as a mannequin, and Ollie quickly drew back, his pudgy hand disappearing into his pocket. 'Don't work too late, Caldecott. Can't find Bridget Killigan if you're dead from exhaustion.'

'Right. 'Night, Ollie.'

Ollie left without any further thought, home to his tidy flat and his cat and his telly. Pete wanted to follow him, but her flat would be cold. Too many ghosts were around her tonight for any sort of rest. Jack, MG, Terry, Da. Da would have known what to do. He would have known whether to trust Jack, if that man in the hotel was Jack. In the sharp glow of the Major Investigation Room and her computer screen, Pete found it easier to believe she'd dreamed it entirely.

'Why did you come back to me?' she muttered, putting her hands on her desk and her face on her hands. Because she knew it was Jack. Pete had known things only a few times before—that storms were blowing, and that when the oncologist took the first X-rays of Connor's lungs that he was going to die. She tried to push her intuition back at every turn, because admitting the rightness of the thing would open the door to the very path Jack's reappearance was leading her inexorably down. To that day, the thing in the center of the stone tomb…

'Stop it,' Pete murmured, and only Jack's phantom voice answered her back.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

Pete sat up, rubbed her eyes, tried to fill out paperwork and ignore the heavy weight of certainty against her mind. Connor would have laughed at her, even at the end when he was strapped to an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day.

'Bugger this,' Pete muttered. She got her things and strode down the corridor to the rear exit, where the night air was still sharp and cold, real winter in the rain and the scent of the turning trees. Leaving the Mini in the lot, she walked for a time, going over all of the reasons why she shouldn't believe a word that came out of Jack Winter's mouth. He was dead, for a first. Untrustworthy even when alive, for a second.

But when she shut her eyes, his face would not leave her, nor what he'd said.

'I don't have anything else,' Pete sighed into the air when she'd walked as far as she could before falling into the Thames. And if she wasted a few hours chasing Jack's dragons, she hadn't lost. Bridget Killigan had been missing for three days and it was as if the girl had become vapor. 'I don't have anything else,' Pete repeated, and at the late hour it made a bit of sense.

Chapter Four

At six a.m. silver bathed the street and cooled Pete's skin to the temperature of the air. The brick wall of the East Cemetery at her back prodded, keeping her from nodding off as she watched the plain black iron gates, locked up with a modern chain and padlock that jarred any sense of mystery right out of the scene.

Ridiculous was more like it. She was too bloody sensible to be here, with four hours of sleep behind her, waiting for a promise made by the shade of Jack Winter.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

Pete stuck a Parliament in her mouth and lit it with an inhale of regret. Hadn't she promised everyone who mattered that she'd quit? A dozen times over, at least.

But it was a hard morning, an autumn morning, and it was cold. Her jacket was too thin and she was rattled and everywhere she looked she saw bloody Bridget Killigan, six years old, grinning out from a school photo.

The smoke rubbed her throat and Pete exhaled. She couldn't erase Bridget from the backs of her eyes any more than she could erase Jack. She couldn't stop seeing her face, feeling the seconds run through her fingers as days passed.

Crying. Bridget was crying. Pete snapped her head up, the Parliament falling to the pavement. She stepped on it as she moved into the street, listening over the ever-present whisper of traffic, the slamming of doors from the block of flats nearby, a dog howling. She refused to believe she was so far gone that she was hearing phantom sobs.

Crying, issuing from under a low-hanging tree with glossy leaves near the barriers that closed off Highgate Cemetery and divided the land of the living from the land of the dead. Senseless and wordless and filled with pain, it rose and wavered and mingled with Pete's own wordless exclamation.

She shoved branches aside and saw Bridget Killigan hunched on the ivy with her knees pulled to her chin, sobbing softly but shedding no tears. She refused to look at Pete when Pete gathered her into her arms, and from what Pete saw never looked at anything with her white and staring eyes, ever again.

'Shock,' said Ollie when Bridget and her crying parents had been loaded into an ambulance and sent streaming away into thick morning traffic. 'Poor bit's obviously had a time of it.'

Pete lit the fifth Parliament of the day.

'That's not shock, Ollie,' she said. 'I've seen shock.'

Ollie shook out his tidy notebook with the blue cover, turning a new page because Bridget Killigan was found and there was no reason to open to her anymore. 'Then what is it?'

White eyes. Tearless and staring into forever. Pete took a long drag on the cigarette. 'That? That was bloody haunted.'