The Mysterious Mr Wylie: Wonky Inn Book 6 Read online

  “One of many,” he smirked at me. When I rolled my eyes, he laughed. “And how is your beau? The brave and intrepid DS Gilchrist? I trust he’s recovered from him time spent in the marshes of Speckled Wood?”

  “I didn’t leave him there for very long, you know that,” I chastised Silvan. “And he’s not my beau.” I averted my gaze so he couldn’t see any residue of pain there. “Not anymore.”

  Silvan was quiet for a moment. “I see. I’m sorry.”

  Silvan didn’t do sorry, so I took that with a pinch of salt.

  He rolled out of bed and stood, wrapping the coverlet around himself. “So what brings you here? You’re not in trouble, are you?”

  I averted my gaze while he collected his clothes together.

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “Back at the inn, we found a skeleton in the walls. To cut a long story short, it seems that it’s been there for some time, although we haven’t been able to put a date to it. I think Gwyn knows something about who it is and where it came from, but she won’t talk about it.”

  Silvan started to pull his clothes on. “Okay. But why should that concern me? Why come all the way up here?”

  Good question. “I’m not entirely sure. It’s bothering me. I mean… how this fellow came to meet his end. And… I’m worried that someone in my family may have been involved…”

  “And because you’re such a goody-two-shoes you don’t like that idea.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Well of course I don’t.”

  “Same old, Alfhild. Still trying to save the world, eh?” Silvan laughed and buttoned up his black tunic.

  I bristled. “I don’t think that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s just a mystery I want to solve, and I thought you might be able to help me.”

  Silvan dropped back down on to the bed and pulled on a long black leather boot and set about lacing it up as I moved around to face him.

  “What’s in it for me?” he asked.

  That stung, too. “I thought we were friends. I thought…”

  “You think too much.” Silvan reached for his wand on the bedside table and jabbed at somewhere behind me. His hat soared through the air, narrowly missing my shoulder. He caught it with his free hand and placed it on his head at a jaunty angle.

  “Shall we grab a spot of lunch?” he asked, and pointed at the door. “You can tell me all about it.”

  “I suppose so,” I harrumphed. The man was impossible.

  “Your treat,” he said, and bowed me out of the room.

  Seven hours later we were back in Devon. Silvan had been surprisingly easy to persuade to return to the inn with me. I’d shown him to the room he’d stayed in before, it was small and plain, but he seemed to like it. Then I’d offered him some dinner, but he’d insisted he wanted to have a look inside The Throne Room first.

  “How interesting,” he’d exclaimed as I followed him in. He poked his head into the gap between the walls and scanned the area, cocking his head and listening. Finally, he pulled out some chalk from his pocket and enclosed the secret space within two semi-circles. He drew a number of symbols between the two lines.

  “Take me through to the room next door. Is anyone staying there?”

  “No,” I said, showing him the way. “We can’t really use these rooms until we’ve completed the work we started.”

  “Lucky for us then.” By feeling the wall on this side, he was able to locate the start and finish of the semi-circles next door and join them up.

  We returned to The Throne Room and I watched again, feeling slightly useless as well as curious. He knelt in the gap between the walls in the location where we had discovered the skeleton, then ran his hands lightly around the floor, not touching anything. I watched his fingers quiver in certain places, and then he stood and repeated the process close to the remaining walls and into the cavity above his head.

  He dropped into a squat again and began murmuring, speaking the words of a spell I didn’t know or understand. I kept quiet, minding my own business. It wasn’t my place to interfere.

  Finally, he finished what he was doing, brought his hands together in a quiet gesture of thanks and stepped out of the circle.

  “Interesting.” His black eyes sparkled. “What haven’t you told me?”

  “What do you mean?” It wasn’t my intention to be cagey, I just wasn’t sure what he needed to know.

  Silvan reached for my arm and pulled me close to the hole in the wall. “Put your hand up,” he said, directing me to hold my hand in mid-air, about six inches in front of the right-hand corner. “What do you feel?”

  I ran my palm back and forth without touching the wall. “Nothing,” I said finally, disappointed that I couldn’t sense anything, not in the way that he could.

  “Alright.” Silvan pushed my arm down, about three feet above the floorboards. “And now?”

  At first, I felt nothing, but then as I moved my hand slightly left and then right again, I sensed it. A slight magickal frisson.

  “What is that?”

  Silvan knelt next to the hole and I followed suit, my hand following his, creating a trail, like a large rectangle. “It’s a forcefield. I can’t be sure, because the traces are so faint, but I reckon it’s a repellent.”

  “To stop people getting into this space?” I asked.

  Silvan shrugged. “Perhaps to stop anyone knowing about it.”

  “It was so well hidden…”

  “Yes. But think about it. This is a public place run by supernaturals. It stands to reason that other supernaturals might have sensed something between the walls and have been curious about it. By putting a repelling force in place, they could keep anyone curious at bay.”

  That kind of made sense. “Well who do you mean by ‘they’? Someone was pretty determined the body should never be found, that’s for sure.” A deep sense of unease shifted within me.

  Silvan grunted. “Somebody who didn’t think it through.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Silvan squatted back on his heels, frowning. “Look, whoever set this forcefield up, they knew their way around magick alright. This is good strong advanced magick.”

  I could see the ‘but’ coming a mile off.

  “But it’s the sort of magick a good witch would perform.” I instantly knew where this was going. Silvan had repeated this many a time. “A devious mind would know that a repelling forcefield will attract its own share of interest.” He smiled at me. “Believe me, when I see a sign that tells me to ‘keep out or not to enter, it acts like a red rag to a bull. It’s green for go. I’m straight in there.”

  He waved his hand around the hole again. “For sure, not everyone can pick up on traces of magickal energy—you couldn’t do it particularly well until I trained you for example. But there are many of us who can, and some of us would find such a forcefield worth exploring.”

  He laughed, but without humour. “To be honest, the creator of this forcefield was doing the best they could at the time, but I think it backfired.”

  I didn’t understand what he was driving at. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because this forcefield wasn’t destroyed by your builders. It had already been disrupted prior to that. Someone else had been in here.”

  “But you’d never have known that from the state of the wall,” I protested.

  Silvan inhaled noisily and considered that. “It must have been some time ago then.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You said you had some photos of the body in place when it was discovered?”

  “Yes, George gave me copies.”

  “Show me.”

  I slipped back to the office and rummaged among the folders in my bottom drawer until I found the envelope George had passed to me. I bought them back to Silvan, finding him sitting against the wall by the door, staring into the hole, a faraway look in his eyes.

  “Here they are.” I offered the images to him. He spent a few min
utes examining them, not saying anything.

  He turned one of the photos towards me. The one with the robes. “What did you say this order were called?”

  “The Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards.” I’d told him what I had discovered over lunch in The Web and Flame—where incidentally the food was as good as the beer.

  “Oh, that’s right. Clever.” He’d enthused about an order of wizards that could travel through time. “I bet they’d have some serious skills I’d like to learn more about.”

  He took the photo from me and handed me the next one. The skeleton sitting upright in the corner, hands in his lap, personal items scattered around him. “So, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

  “Go on.”

  He tapped the photo. “The good news is… I don’t think your victim here was murdered. So, if one of your ancestors was involved in the interment, I don’t think they were a murderer.”

  I looked at him askance. “Well that is good news, but how can you tell?”

  “Look.” Silvan pointed at the body. “Look at the way the body has been arranged.”

  “He’s on display,” I said. “Don’t murderers do that?”

  “Sure they do, but I wouldn’t say he was on display. In fact, I’d argue that he’d been arranged with great compassion. He’s sitting up, his hands are in his lap. He’d been left there holding a book and he had his belongings with him. That doesn’t sound to me like someone was trying to hide a crime. It feels more respectful somehow.”

  I shook my head, unsure. “That’s difficult to prove,” I challenged.

  “What are you? A high court judge? Okay it’s a guess, but it’s an informed one.”

  “Can’t you ask him?” Isn’t that what necromancers were supposed to be able to do? Communicate with the dead?

  “That’s the bad news. The scene has been cleansed very thoroughly.”

  “The police came and did their thing,” I said.

  “Old Georgie?”

  “Well him and his team. They took everything away.”

  “All the evidence left with the body you mean? Physical and tangible evidence. No, when I say cleansed, I mean it was more than that. This area has been magickly cleansed. I can’t get a fix on this man at all. Who he was and what he did. Nothing. Not even how he died. Somebody with powerful abilities. Who would do that if it wasn’t you?”

  “It definitely wasn’t me.” I thought about the people who’d enjoyed access to the room. “Well Gwyn, I suppose.” The thought troubled me. Why was Gwyn working so hard to hide any evidence relating to the identity of the skeleton and the reason for his death?

  “Could she have done that? Impressive. Our next step should involve locating your great-grandmother and having a word with her.”

  “I wish we could,” I replied. Then a logical thought struck me. “But there’s someone else who had access to this room, isn’t there? I told you about him. Mr Wylie? I’m willing to bet his magick is unlike anything we’ve seen before.”

  “I want to go back up to the room.” Silvan appeared troubled.

  We’d been tucking into a late supper of cold cuts teamed with potato salad, along with a beetroot and onion relish, and the tail end of the day’s freshly baked bread. Silvan as always had a healthy appetite, but unusually he had refused the bottle of beer I’d offered to go with the meal. We were eating alone at the kitchen table. Charity had disappeared up to her room, and although Florence had apparently been attending to her duties at some stage, she too was nowhere in sight and I could only assume she was catching up on her fix of television in the games room in the attic. I had Zephaniah and Ned on the bar.

  “Okay.” I placed my knife and fork neatly in the centre of my plate. “Now?”

  “I need an artefact.”

  “An artefact? What kind of artefact?”

  Silvan smiled, his face grim. “From the body.”

  I chose to misconstrue his meaning deliberately. “Oh. You mean… like his clothes? Or one of the original photos? The book?”

  With a shake of his head, Silvan slid his dinner plate into the centre of the table. “No. It needs to be more personal than that. I need something directly from the body, like hair, or skin. A bone would be better.”

  I baulked at this. “A bone? From the body? How are we going to be able to get that?”

  Silvan gave me a pointed look. “Your friend George, of course.”

  “You want what?”

  “Hahaha.” I laughed to cover my nerves. The last thing I wanted to be doing was calling George for help at this time of night. “Yes, it is a strange request admittedly. But we do need it, otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”

  “I should put the phone down right now, Alf. You’re crazy.” George sounded cross and more than a little weary himself. “What are you going to use it for?”

  I hesitated. “It’s not for me. Well, not really. Silvan is here. He’s going to try and communicate with whomever was in that gap in the wall.”

  There was a heavy silence that went on for far too long, until I heard someone call George’s name.

  That Stacey woman.

  I bristled. Boy, she had moved quickly.

  “Silvan is there with you, is he?” George asked, his tone hardening.

  “Just as Stacey is there with you,” I retorted.

  Another silence. I took a deep breath and calmed myself. I could imagine the wheels of George’s mind turning.

  “Look, let’s discuss it in the morning, shall we? I can’t imagine how much paperwork I’d have to fill in to remove a bone from the mortuary even if the coroner would agree.”

  Oh dear. He wouldn’t like what was coming next. I steeled myself. “Erm… yeah. We need it here at the inn by midnight.” I winced and waited for the explosion.

  “You’re out of your mind,” George replied calmly, and the phone went dead.

  I removed the phone from my ear and studied the screen. Call ended. I grimaced.

  “That didn’t go to plan, I take it?” Silvan asked, raising an amused eyebrow.

  “About as well as you’d expect. What do we do now?”

  Silvan slid his chair back and stood. “Get your shoes on. Grab the van keys. We’re going out.”

  I sighed in exasperation, tired out after my early start and return trip to London. Where did Silvan get his energy from? “Where are we going?”

  Silvan was already moving. “We’re going to meet George. He’ll be ringing you back any second.”

  How could he possibly know that? Reluctantly, I reached for the boots I’d taken off and discarded under the table. Were we really heading out on a wild goose chase at this time of night?

  It turned out we were. I’d hardly finished lacing my boots when my mobile rang.

  Silvan and I, in Jed’s newly-fixed old van, drove across the moor towards Exeter and pulled into a rough clearing that passed as a car park just before 11 p.m. George lived in Exeter, near the main police station, and so it had seemed simplest to meet him halfway.

  “How did you know he would change his mind?” I asked Silvan, as we sat in the van and waited for George to show up. My stomach twanged with anxiety and I fidgeted with my keys. What we were asking George to do wasn’t legal. He could end up in serious hot water.

  Silvan shrugged. “He’s an honourable man. He owes us for saving his life.”

  I frowned. “Poor George. He wouldn’t have ended up needing our help if I hadn’t involved him in my struggle in the first place.”

  “That’s life,” Silvan replied, closing his eyes and slouching further into his seat. I turned my head sideways to stare at him. Did he care about anyone except himself?

  Headlights beamed in the distance, coming over the brow of a hill, alerting me to another vehicle. George’s battered silver Audi indicated to enter the car park, and he pulled up opposite us. I nudged Silvan, although he must have heard the noise of the other car joining us, and he jumped to attention.

  Like two outlaw gangs of cowboy
s meeting head-on in the Wild West, George and Stacey and Silvan and I met in the middle of the car park.

  Silvan regarded Stacey with interest and tipped his hat at her. “Pleased to meet you,” he drawled and offered his hand. George narrowed his eyes at Silvan, as I inwardly seethed. What did this Stacey woman have, that I didn’t? Sure, she was pretty enough. Slim, dark hair, almond eyes, clear complexion. Obviously, the men doted on her. But… hello? What about conniving, manipulative and a man-eater?

  I felt a snarl building in my throat.

  You’ve either got it or you haven’t, Alf, I told myself, but never you mind. There are always bigger fish to fry.

  “This is Stacey,” I told Silvan, but he already knew that of course. He glanced at me with a knowing smirk. I badly wanted to kick his shins. “And this is Silvan,” I told her and elected to leave it at that. If George wanted to explain who and what Silvan was, that would be up to him.

  “I have what you asked for.” George held up a plastic evidence bag with a small white bone inside.

  “Ah perfect,” Silvan purred and accepted it from him. “A proximal phalange.”

  “I hope getting hold of it didn’t cause too much trouble?” I asked, worried about the potential consequences for everyone involved.

  George seemed stoic. “Not the easiest night at the office.” He turned to Silvan. “I need it back. First thing in the morning.”

  “Just come with us now,” Silvan grinned. “Join in our merry gathering. You might find it interesting.”

  George gazed at Silvan in horror. “No thanks. I’ll give that a wide berth. In recent months I’ve had enough interesting experiences to last me for quite some time.”

  Stacey looked on curiously, not saying a word. Her face didn’t give much away. I wondered how much she knew and what she was thinking.

  “I’ll be outside the inn at six tomorrow morning. I need to get the bone back to the morgue before seven.” George looked at me pointedly. “Don’t make me regret this.”

  “We won’t,” I promised. “I’ll share with you anything we find out tonight.”