The Mystery of the Marsh Malaise: Wonky Inn Book 5 Read online

  “So what can we see in there?” I asked. It all looked like double-dutch to me. I guess I’d been hoping for something with bells and whistles that screamed out at me. ‘I’m what you’re looking for!’

  “Documents, letters, some emails. Things that have been downloaded and saved automatically. That’s the beauty of many modern devices. Unless you know how to circumvent it, you’re required to save when you download any attachment, image or document. On some packages it happens automatically, and you forget that you’ve saved stuff. There’s bags of material here in the downloads file, Alf. There has to be something of use.”

  I nodded, my heart beginning to beat a little faster.

  And now for the golden ticket question. “Astutus?”

  Ross glanced at me, unable to hide his triumphant smile, before turning his attention back to the screen.

  “Yep,” he replied coolly.

  I was anything but calm. I emitted a groan of ecstasy. At last! “Tell me.” I hammered on my desk impatiently.

  “Alright. You have to go in through the dark web and that’s anything but straightforward.” He clicked a few times, windows minimized and then the screen went black. We waited a few seconds and a little rotating icon started spinning on the screen, followed rapidly by a series of password screens that Ross completed in double-quick time.

  “Once you get here the levels of security start to become more prohibitive, and I have to be honest, I’m a little out of my comfort zone. I’m wary of finding tripwires and crashing the system or alerting anyone to my presence.”

  “Tripwires?”

  “You must have seen those films where a computer suddenly goes haywire and deletes all the information contained on its hard drive?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s what I’m wary of. Maybe triggering catastrophic viruses or something similar.”

  “Fair enough.” I nodded, chewing on my lip. He clicked a few more items, minimizing and maximising screens, clicking crosses and shutting things down. Faster than I could keep up.

  “In my old job I had to make sure that our systems couldn’t be breached, so I’m well aware of the methods universally tried out by most hackers. The thing is, of course, that they’re always coming up with new ones. I’m not au fait with everything current.”

  “But you’re sure…?”

  “That I’ve found Astutus?” Ross nodded with satisfaction. “Oh yeah. You told me that you’d seen evidence that they had made a payment to someone?” I had told him that. “In any case I saw the photo on your phone, the one you took of the bank statement?”

  The sneaky blighter!

  Ross had the grace to look a tiny bit embarrassed, but I had a feeling he wasn’t particularly.

  “I used that as my starting point. If Astutus have a bank account it will be traceable, you can be sure of that. I just have to look in the right place.”

  So he hadn’t found it. I felt slightly deflated.

  “Don’t pull that face,” Ross said in his soft voice. “Don’t go giving up on me yet. The best is yet to come. Turn your printer on.”

  “My printer?” I asked, confused.

  “I’ve linked this laptop up to your printer. Turn it on.”

  I pressed the screen on the printer. It would normally have woken up but now it remained dark and quiet.

  “Oh I turned it off at the plug,” Ross said, and I noticed a smug glint in his eye. I nodded, leaned over and flicked the switch above the skirting board. Then I pressed the printer’s little display screen. The machine whirred and clicked into life, the way it always did when it had been switched off for a while. After a few seconds it calmed down, waiting for a print job, but almost instantly started up again, spewing reams of paper at me.

  “There was a backlog waiting on this machine. Lyle must have run out of ink but had forgotten to cancel the print jobs. I wanted to hang on until you were here to print this stuff out. I’ve a vague idea of what we’re going to see…”

  He tailed off as I rounded on the printer in excitement and snatched up a handful of pages, flicking through them, hardly daring to hope. There were invoices, copies of bills to hand over to customers. I tossed them aside, staring hungrily at the printer as it produced more information.

  And this time, there it was.

  A single sheet with the Astutus logo at the top. A letter addressed to Lyle, instructing him to purchase huge quantities of three different chemicals, to charge the company for the purchases, and then find safe places to store the goods.

  I rocked back on my heels.

  Surely this was the definite proof I needed that Astutus were behind the poisoning of the water in Whittlecombe.

  “Ross,” I said, waving the paper at him. “Is it possible to get a date from this? Why would Lyle have only tried to print this out recently? Is there a paper trail?” I was babbling and Ross was frowning at me. I took a deep breath. “What I need from you next is proof of a link between a gentleman named Derek Pearce, and Lyle or Astutus. Can you find that for me?”

  Ross nodded slowly. “Derek Pearce? I’m sure I’ve seen that name somewhere.”

  “Where?” I demanded. “Think!”

  Ross’s ghostly fingers were a blur. “Oh where was it. Wait a minute.”

  I jiggled impatiently watching Ross work. He shook his head in frustration, tutted a few times, and swore once, his forehead creased, but eventually he roared. “Got it!” I dashed to his side as he pulled up Lyle’s email. Buried in the trash folder, a sent email from months before, requesting payment to Derek Pearce for ‘holding goods.’

  “That has to be it.” I breathed out in a rush.

  There would be more, and Ross would help us find it, but I had listened to his concerns and we couldn’t go it alone from here.

  I reached for the Bakelite telephone on my desk and dialled a number.

  Hundreds of miles away, a similar phone was ringing in an office on Celestial Street. I imagined a thin hand with perfectly manicured nails reaching to answer it.

  “Quigwell,” she said.

  “Penelope,” I gushed, struggling to catch my breath. “You have to get down here with one of your technical wizards. I’ve got some data that will be of huge interest to you.”

  Within hours Penelope Quigwell and three of her technical wizards had arrived in Whittlecombe and made my office their own. I couldn’t move for computers, printers, scanners, a portable and secure server and the goddess only knows what else. After stubbing my toe—painfully—for the third time on the hardware littering my floor, I opted to leave them all to it.

  They hardly noticed my departure, however. Whatever Ross was discovering on the hard drive of Lyle’s computer would keep them all engrossed for hours if not days. I could also see, straight off, that Penelope was very taken with Ross’s abilities. He was in safe hands.

  As I stalked out of my office in a huff—wishing I’d set Ross up in The Nook or The Snug downstairs, the way I had Perdita Pugh back in September—I snatched my mind map from the wall and then stood in the hall wondering where I could tack it up now. It needed to be somewhere I could see it, an aid memoire if you like.

  A kick in the pants I preferred to call it.

  Florence floated next to me, a duster close by. “Everything all right, Miss Alf?” She peered through the door at Ross, surrounded as he was by Penelope’s wizards, and conversing in words that might as well have been a foreign language.

  I watched them too. “Yes, everything’s very good. I think we’ve had a breakthrough.”

  “Will it help you find Mr George?”

  I watched the printer spewing paper. Penelope was taking no chances. She wanted physical copies of every record held on the machine, along with everything in the Cloud. She fully intended to leave no stone unturned.

  “We can only hope.”

  I stared down at the mind map in my own hand. I couldn’t solve the issue of the water in the marsh until I had found George.

  That had to b
e the next step.

  I located Silvan out the back near where the stable block had stood before The Mori had burned it to the ground. We’d cleared the area and made a makeshift seating area complete with decking, and the arbour from the vampire wedding. The sky was a beautiful shiny blue, and billions of insects buzzed in the hedges and trees surrounding us, birds singing happily too—they had plenty to feed on after all.

  Such a stark contrast to Speckled Wood, where even the grasshoppers and frogs had fallen silent, and the birds had vacated their nests and branches, and the small mammals had fled. When I studied them from a distance, even the trees drooped quietly, pale and woebegone despite the early summer’s day.

  I swallowed my distress. ‘Soon’, I promised again, and turned my attention to Silvan.

  He had his feet up on a table and was rocking back in his chair—rather precariously—a hat covered his eyes. He could have been sunbathing, it was certainly warm enough, but he was dressed head to toe, as he always was, in a silk black shirt, black leather trousers and long black leather boots too.

  “Hey,” he said, without removing the hat that hid his face from me. I could imagine his eyes closed beneath and wondered what he was thinking. I guessed he had heard me coming out of the kitchen door, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have sensed my arrival.

  The mysteries of his magick were beyond me, and I could see why most of the witches I knew would choose not to have much to do with the likes of Silvan. The darkness of black magick can be at once alluring, but also deadly dangerous. You can never quite control it.

  And I imagined that nobody had ever been able to control Silvan either.

  At the heart of it, his magick was about power. Power with a capital P. And that’s what I needed right now.

  “Hi.” I pondered on how to broach the subject I needed to embark upon. How could I enlist Silvan’s help, when all we’d contracted for prior to this was his tutelage?

  It turns out I needn’t have worried. He was—as usual—two steps ahead of me.

  “The time has come, has it?”

  I pulled up a chair and perched uncomfortably, feeling oddly nervous. “How do you mean?”

  “Aren’t you just about to ask me to help you find your missing love?” I could hear several shades in his tone. Irritation. Amusement. I hated him for mocking me. He still hadn’t removed his hat. He could be insufferably rude at times. I held my own annoyance in check.

  “You should give into it you know. All that anger.” Finally he plucked the hat from his face and sat up to face me, his hair falling over his eyes which sparkled with glee. “I’ve told you before. Channel that anger to where it’s useful.”

  “You have mentioned that before, yes,” I replied. “Repeatedly.” I took a deep breath, willing myself to remain calm, and placed my hands flat on the wooden table in front of me, enjoying the feeling of the wood grain under my fingertips, while allowing my feet to connect with the natural world through the earth.

  “You’re right. I do need your help,” I announced. “I probably can’t do what I want to do without it.”

  Silvan nodded, his face became serious for once, and when he spoke it sounded sincere. “I’m at your disposal. What’s the plan?”

  What’s the plan, Alf?

  Oh to have one.

  Just after midnight, Silvan, Finbarr and I walked up the dirt track that led to Piddlecombe Farm. The scent of cow manure stank stronger than ever in the fields around us. The evening was fine and dry. Slow-moving clouds occasionally blotted out the light of the moon, but on the whole we could see reasonably well. Unfortunately that meant there was a possibility we would also be seen.

  All of us had dressed in dark clothing and boots of course, and we stuck closely to the tall hedges on either side of the dirt lane. Silvan, always alert, had his wand drawn, ready for anything unexpected. Finbarr too remained wary, his hand not far from the pocket where he kept his. I occasionally reached into the pocket of my own robe to feel the chunky twig I’d requisitioned. I still couldn’t think of it as a wand, but the more I touched it, the more comfortable it felt in my hand.

  Over the past few weeks I’d searched high and low, and queried everyone I could think of who might have some inkling of the whereabouts of George. I’d used the orb. I’d plagued Wizard Shadowmender and Mr Kephisto. I’d consulted fortune tellers and psychics whom I’d met at the Psychic Fayre, and I hadn’t found the slightest trace of him.

  I’d concluded that he was either dead, or The Mori had him where I couldn’t find him, in some dark, secretive world to which I had no access.

  If that was the case, then who better to help me find him than Silvan?

  Ignorance is not bliss. It is a deep black well. You cannot cast light on things you don’t know exist. But Silvan did know of the existence of many dark things. Through him I intended to learn more—so much more—about magick than I ever had before. So the plan—such as it was—meant starting right back at the beginning, at the moment in time when George had disappeared. The memory of the phone call, when George had sounded alone and desperate, remained fresh in my mind. He’d come to Piddlecombe Farm because this is where I’d sent him, but he should never have come alone.

  This was where I’d heard from him for the final time, and now I was hoping that Silvan—a master of the dark arts, and a necromancer—would be able to help me find something, some bare trace of George’s existence.

  We crept quietly along, my feet sinking into the softer mud at the edge of the track where the sun didn’t quite reach to dry it out during the day. We moved slowly and cautiously, ears and eyes straining to catch the sights and sounds of anything untoward, senses primed to pick up anyone heading our way.

  After half a mile or so, we spotted a white sodium light shining brightly out into the night. As we moved closer, I could see how it lit up the entrance to the barn on the left and illuminated the other buildings around it.

  We passed a long row of tall storage units on both sides of the track and made our way closer to the main buildings, staying out of the circle of light as we headed into the danger zone. From somewhere, one of the outbuildings possibly, or the farmhouse itself, a dog barked a sharp warning. Once, twice.

  Silvan raised his wand. “Somnum penitus.” The barking ceased abruptly. We remained where we were, and I looked around uneasily. Where did The Mori sleep at night? Did they even need to sleep? Were they watching us now?

  Silvan held his hand up – a signal to bide a while longer. We remained in place for more time than one might imagine necessary. If anyone had been alerted by the dog barking they would be watching. They would continue to watch far longer than the average person would wait. But Silvan wasn’t the average person. He elected to play a waiting game. We stood behind him, listening to the lowing of cattle in the barn, and the stamping of hoofs as the beasts shifted about, waiting for the early dawn and the arrival of the farm’s manager who would let them out into the fields, and later bring them in again for milking.

  Finbarr had been keeping a watch on the farm from time to time over the past few months, spending hours camping out at a safe distance with a pair of binoculars. He’d observed the comings and goings of personnel. Our best guess was that one or two henchmen occasionally stayed in the farmhouse itself, but certainly not every night. The farm appeared to be run by a manager and a few agricultural workers. The only animals on the farm were the small herd of cows and occasionally someone’s German Shepherd dog. No chickens, no pigs, nothing else. None of the surrounding fields were worked. Fields further away from the main building had been leased to other farmers or smallholders, and many outbuildings were underutilised or simply remained empty.

  The main income for the farm appeared to be from the storage units, now behind us. Here, people such as Rob Parker—of Parker’s Porky Perfection fame—stored his sausage wagons. Finbarr had checked the units out and found an array of interesting contents—everything from some classic 1950s sports cars, several tra
ctors, and a unit full of dolls’ heads—absurdly spooky. Someone even appeared to be storing tinned food in case of a forthcoming apocalypse. But, really, it had all been fairly innocent.

  The buildings we were most interested in were the farmhouse itself at the top of the lane and the row of smaller storage buildings to our right. Now that I saw them again, I knew this was where I’d been held on the night of my abduction from the Fayre. I recognised the cow barn and the farmhouse, and the large muddy expanse of ground between the three key areas.

  A filthy Land rover, the number plates obscured by mud and the windows thick with dust, had been parked on the verge, close to the hedge. Finbarr, always light on his feet, scampered over, and peered inside. He tried the doors—all locked—then came back to us with a shrug.

  As we began creeping forward again, I grabbed Silvan’s sleeve and tugged gently to alert him to the buildings on our right. I wanted to look inside. Silvan nodded at me and cocked his head to motion me to go first. He gestured with his wand at Finbarr to position himself by the door and keep watch.

  I carefully tried the heavy door, fearing it would be locked, but it swung open easily enough and I stepped inside. It smelt musty, having been closed-up for a long time—and of something else. Something with a slight chemical tang that reminded me of my time spent here. The large plastic sacks—the ones that had first alerted us to the possibility of chemicals—remained in the corner. I slipped over to them, taking out my mobile and snapping a few images of them. They matched the ones I’d found in Speckled Wood.

  Silvan came inside with me, scenting the air and wrinkling his nose in distaste. He illuminated the tip of his wand, peering into the dark corners, and pointed it at the ceiling. I couldn’t be certain what he was looking for, but his eyes swept this way and that, pausing to look more closely at certain objects or markings – a spider’s web, scuff marks on the floor, a scratch on the wall.

  When he’d done, I pointed silently at the large door built into the floor and we stood alongside it. I reached out to heft the heavy weight, recalling the loud clang it had made the last time I’d opened it and let it fall, alerting my captors to my escape. Earlier today I’d briefed Silvan about my brief stay here at Piddlecombe Farm and forewarned him of this door and the passage that ran below. It headed in the direction of Whittlecombe, eventually opening out in a natural cave south of here.