the only time he sounded his age. He set down his drink.
“Hullo, John. Janice said I’d find you here.” Arthur Bryant was standing beside them, jauntily leaning on his walking stick. He reached down and ruffled Rufus’s hair. “Hullo, little boy, do you want a sweetie?”
“Do you want a smack in the mouth?” retorted Rufus.
“I remember you, Rufus. I’ve known you since you were so high.” Bryant held out his hand. “Oh, you still are.”
“Good to see you too, Mr Bryant,” said Rufus. “Have you figured out how to open your e-mail yet?”
“Mr May won’t let me do it anymore, not since I crashed the interweb. I hope you’re taking care of yourself, with so many children carrying knives these days.”
“Don’t worry,
A pair of yellow-jacketed station policemen caught May’s eye. They were entering the champagne bar and heading in their direction. Rufus sensed them behind him, too. “Hey, check it, sharks at midnight. You gotta bail me a less readable venue next time, man.”
“Don’t worry, Rufus, they’re not after you, they’re just – ” But when May turned back, he found the seat opposite him empty.
? Bryant & May on the Loose ?
31
Magna Mater
The little house on Avenell Road, Finsbury Park, had been painted a hideous shade of mauve since he was last here. The bell didn’t work and the knocker seemed to be welded to the door, so Bryant tried to rattle the letterbox, only to find that this too was stuck fast. Looking around the chaotic front garden (home to a mangle, a half-burnt chest of drawers, a gigantic dead aspidistra and a table lamp made out of a cow’s leg), his gaze alighted on a hanging basket blighted with a single sickly nasturtium. The front-door key was sticking out of the pot, so he let himself in.
“None of your door-furniture works,” he complained to Maggie Armitage, the white witch from the coven of St James the Elder who had helped unit members so many times in the past, although not always in the way they expected or desired.
“Ah, no, it wouldn’t,” she called back. “I hired a Polish gentleman to decorate my hall, and he proved rather over-enthusiastic. He painted over my knocker, the bell, the letterbox and my fanlight.”
“So how do you know when anyone’s calling?”
“I always know, you foolish man, I’m a witch. Give me a hand with this.” Maggie appeared dragging a large fibreglass statue of a child in callipers through her hall. “Remember these charity boxes? They used to have them outside shops. Quite collectors’ items now, apparently. This was from a grateful client. So I thought until I opened it, anyway. I’d successfully located her lost Yorkshire terrier, but had forgotten to tell her it wasn’t alive anymore. A technicality, from my point of view, but she wasn’t pleased. I gave her a voucher for a free seance.”
“Let me help you with that.”
“Perhaps it’s not such a good idea, with your knees. Go and put the kettle on.” Maggie set the collection box aside and patted her fiery red perm back in place. She had chiming incense balls and a necklace of little plastic babies around her neck, pencils and bits of tinsel in her hair, miniature bunches of bananas dangling from her ears and what appeared to be a bell-ringer’s cord tied around the waist of a blue-and-yellow-striped skirt. She looked like a deckchair piled with seaside knick-knacks, but Bryant had learned not to be surprised by her sartorial choices.
“Come here,” said Bryant, reaching forward and wiping Maggie’s cheek. “You’ve got mascara all over you.” He brushed harder. “And pollen.”
“Maureen and I were conducting a spring spell to bring back the bees,” she explained. “I did miss you.” The white witch was a source of goodness in a dark world, forever on the move, using positive energy to banish despair. If Bryant could have had his way, Maggie would have been available as a service on the National Health.
“I missed you too,” he said tenderly. “You’ve always been there for me, Maggie. I’m not very appreciative, am I? You’re always sending me things, thinking of me. I presume it was you who sent me the postcard of Merlin’s prophecies with the Get Well Soon message.
“Yes, that was me. The last of Merlin’s edicts, and the only one yet to come true. I thought you should be warned, at least.” She smiled up at him, her eyes vanishing to crescent moons. “It’s good to have you back, Arthur, I felt your aura ebbing.” She clapped her hands together. “Oh, I meant to tell you: I found something odd in the cellar. Come and look.”
“What do you keep down here?” Bryant followed her down an unstable narrow staircase.
“I’m looking after Maureen’s scuba equipment until she’s had her operation. She can’t risk getting into a wet suit with her bladder. Look at this.” She pulled out a huge photo album filled with faded Polaroids. “There seem to be pictures of me in a Playboy Bunny costume. You don’t suppose I was a Bunny Girl in a past life, do you?”
“You were a Bunny Girl in this life, you silly woman,” Bryant snapped. “I know it was a long time ago, but how could you have forgotten?” There were few careers Maggie Armitage had not tried in her time. She had been a nightclub hostess, a teacher, a carnival burlesque dancer and, for a brief period in the 1980s, the astrological advisor to Number 10, Downing Street. Some of her insights displeased Margaret Thatcher, but it was not the first time the incumbent Prime Minister had been compared to Beelzebub.
“I think you’re right, it is me.” Maggie pulled a chopstick out of her hair and scratched her decolletage idly with it. “I asked Maureen to hypnotise me because there were things I wanted to forget, but I think she overdid it, and now I can’t remember the name of my first husband or where I’ve put the pressure cooker. The line between past and present is so easily erased.” The curse of her unusual talents had not led her to an easy existence. She had often been drawn to harmful people in a desire to save them. “Let’s get that tea, shall we?”
“We’ve moved into King’s Cross now,” Bryant called over his shoulder, heading for the kitchen to search for two vaguely clean cups. “ Two thirty-one Caledonian Road. It’s got upright goats on the walls and a pentacle on the floor. Any idea why that might be?”
“Well, of course I have,” said Maggie, appearing in the cluttered kitchen. She shifted a pile of dolls’ heads from a chair and sat down. “Two thirty-one was the address of the Occult Revivalists’ Society of Great Britain. They split away from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in order to write their own magical rituals. The original founders of the Golden Dawn all lived in King’s Cross until the members of the Lodge of the Isis-Urania Temple fell out with each other. Self-governing societies are a nightmare when no-one can agree on the founding rules.”
“So what happened?”
“The splinter group set up on the Cally Road. They shunned the former Imperator, W.B. Yeats, and ran things on their own for quite a few years, but it eventually collapsed and the rozzers closed the place down. There was a court case, if memory serves. It transpired there was a fair amount of licentiousness going on, quite a few naked ladies happily offering themselves as sacrifices, that sort of thing. The
Bryant considered the information. Yeats, Blake and Hardy, all visitors to St Pancras Old Church, mystics and occultists operating nearby, the seeds of Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus springing up in the local graveyard. Once again he felt himself moving at a tangent, drawn to areas of exploration he knew he should shun. “Let me get this clear in my head. The town of Battlebridge, later to become King’s Cross, is built on a pagan site that’s a mound from which the sunrise can be seen. Battlebridge’s forests give rise to legends of Jack-in-the-Green and it becomes associated with fertility, hunting and the great god Pan. The surrounding areas become Christian, but the church is built on the pagan site and the neighbourhood remains forever associated with the occult, right up to the present day when our stag-man attempts to turn public attention back to ancient traditions.”
