AN: While no suicide occurs in this story, suicide and suicidal ideation are discussed. If such topics are difficult for you to read about, this may not be the story for you.
And you once said, "I wish you dead, you sinner."
I'll never be more than a wolf at your door for dinner.
- "Wolf," Phildel
Part One
Weekend mornings at the Folly are a leisurely affair. Unless there's an urgent case there's no police work and Nightingale doesn't make me practice magic, either. Molly still serves breakfast at eight o'clock sharp, though, so I don't really get to lay around in bed unless I want a dirty look from her when I creep into the kitchen late looking for leftovers. Not that I spend much time in laying in bed these days, what with post-Lesley insomnia and all, and anyway I've stayed at Beverly's almost every weekend since we got back from Herefordshire. But Beverly had kicked me out to study for her first chemistry quiz and I'd actually started sleeping better lately—Nightingale would probably attribute it to the beneficial effects of country air, which is why I didn't say anything to him about it—so I actually slept in that morning and that's why I came down to breakfast half an hour late.
Molly glared at me as I slipped into the breakfast room and I gave her my best little-boy grin, the one I've used against both Lady Ty and my own mum, but Molly was visibly unimpressed. Nightingale was at the table doing the crossword with a cup of tea at his elbow, but his plate had already been whisked away. There was still plenty of food, though, so I helped myself and sat opposite him.
"Good morning," he said without looking up.
"Morning," I answered. He was wearing a pale blue shirt and gray tweed blazer but no tie—it was, after all, a Saturday. He still put my khakis and navy jumper to shame, but I knew I had no hope of keeping up with Nightingale so I wasn't bothered by it. I applied myself to tea and toast and was about to ask Nightingale to spare me a section of paper—I wasn't picky, even the sports would do—when the phone rang.
Molly, approaching the table with a fresh pot of tea, paused. We all stared at one another before I remembered myself and got up to answer it. Usually when someone from the Met needed us they knew to call my cell phone, since a call to the landline was usually just met by Molly's creepy silence. I picked up the receiver in the lobby on the fifth ring and said, "Folly."
There was a pause and then a woman asked, "Is this the Specialist Assessment Unit?"
"That's us."
"Do you know anything about werewolves?"
I hesitated. "Who is this, please?"
She introduced herself as Diane Paget, a DCI with the Essex Territorial Police Force who thought she had a werewolf on her hands.
"A werewolf," I repeated.
"That's what you deal with, isn't it?" she asked. "Werewolves and weird stuff like that."
Werewolves were new, but weird stuff I was used to. "What makes you think there's a werewolf involved?"
Late Thursday night Lynn Macey, widow and mother of two, had vanished from her home in Theydon Bois, which I thought was northeast of London somewhere. There was no sign of violence and if it hadn't been for the two parentless kids the police might not have been too concerned. Then early this morning a jogger found Macey's torn clothes in the Epping Forest, only half a kilometer from her house.
"I took one look at the scene and knew something was off," Paget said.
The clothes, the same ones Macey had been wearing Thursday night, were in a loose heap near a popular footpath. The soft earth and leaf litter was perfect for holding footprints, and sure enough there was a clear set of prints matching Macey's shoes leading up to the scene—and large canine prints leading away.
It did sound suspicious, but nothing I'd read so far suggested werewolves were common and the moon was only in the first quarter—after dealing with unicorns in Rushpool I'd made it a habit to keep track of the current lunar phase. Still, no police officer called the Folly without being well and truly desperate, so Paget was either crazy or really convinced there was something odd about her case.
"Let me check some references," I told her. "I'll get right back to you."
I jotted down her number on the notepad next to the phone and went back to the breakfast room. I could double-check Wolfe's Exotica but asking Nightingale was faster.
"Werewolves?" Nightingale said, when I told him about Paget's missing person. "As far as I know, there aren't any in here in Britain."
Apparently werewolves had always been more of a European thing. Reports from the British Isles were rare, and none of them confirmed. Even Continental cases were poorly documented, leading some to doubt their very existence.
"Wolfe thought the stories come from people affected by some kind of magical delusion, didn't he?" I asked, thinking back on all the reading I'd done to figure out what the Pale Lady was.
"Seducere," Nightingale agreed. "Like poor Melvin Starkey."
Who had been glamored by the spirit of the Grand Union canal into believing he was a rat. "What about the Nazis?" I asked. "Didn't they have werewolves?"
Nightingale sipped his tea thoughtfully. "We were never entirely sure what their capabilities were," he said. "They were certainly practitioners of some sort and were called werwölfe, but we had no evidence they could actually transform themselves into wolves. It does seem unlikely," he added. "Such magic would be extraordinarily difficult for a human practitioner, if possible at all."
"For a human practitioner," I repeated. "Could some kind of fae do this?"
"There are some…" I could see him hesitating over the word species, or possibly races. "…types of fae capable of changing their shape. They are extremely rare, and to my knowledge none of them are capable of taking the shape of a wolf or any other kind of canine."
"So probably not a werewolf in Theydon Bois, then."
"Probably not," Nightingale agreed. "What was your impression of DCI Paget?"
"She didn't sound crazy," I said, knowing what he meant. "Or like she was trying to fob the case off on our budget."
"Then she must be desperate," Nightingale said. "Perhaps it would be best for you to drive out and have a look 'round."
So much for my Saturday, I thought, and went to give Paget the good news.
I took the A12 east, crossing the River Lea at Stratford and heading north on the M11. The road paralleled the River Roding for a while; I caught a few glimpses of it through the trees, beginning to show their fall colors, on my left. I spent some time trying to remember where the Roding emptied into the Thames and whether I had met her yet before my satnav had me get off at Loughton. Leafy suburbs gave way to farm fields and patchy forest, with a couple golf courses thrown in for variety. It was more urban than Herefordshire, which was good because I'd just about had my fill of the country, but also more wooded. I drove through Theydon Bois proper, which was a nice little village, though strangely lacking in streetlights, and onto a side street that cut through the Epping Forest. After missing my turn and having to double back, I found myself in a small gravel lot beside a row of seriously nice houses with gated drives and privacy hedges—some of which, I noted, included what looked suspiciously like small palm trees.
There was a uniformed PC and a woman in a white button-down shirt and heavy-duty khakis waiting for me in the lot next to an elderly Ford Escort that was just as obviously ex-panda as mine was. There were two other cars in the lot, a gray Astra and a late-model Prius. I squeezed the Asbo between the Astra and the Prius and walked over to say hello.
The PC was a mixed-race man about my age but a few shades lighter named Gabriel Zuberi. His companion turned out to be a Forest Keeper, a tall, willowy Asian woman with a solid Estuary accent who introduced herself as Min Ji Yi. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and they told me DCI Paget had asked them to show me to the scene when I arrived.
We started down a wide trail leading from the lot into the forest, along the side of the first of the row of houses. Another high hedge blocked the view into the house's back yard on our left; to the right, the trees were just turning brilliant bronze and gold above a thick carpet of leaf litter and a sparse layer of undergrowth. The temperature was cool but not cold, the sun shone brightly through the canopy overhead, and not even the prospect of werewolves could stop me from enjoying such a perfect fall day.
I asked Yi what kind of trees we were walking under.
"Beech," she said, sounding disappointed but not surprised at my ignorance, and without prompting launched into an explanation of forest management in Epping Forest. Which seemed to largely revolve around pollarding, the practice of cutting back trees so they produce new growth of even thickness for cutting.
"After the Epping Forest Act of 1878 harvest ceased and pollarded trees were allowed to grow unchecked," she said, "to the point that they could no longer support the weight of their own branches. This results in an abundance of dead wood, which is good for fungi, but also in a closed canopy, which is bad for understory plants."
I had the feeling this was a speech she gave often. I also had the feeling she and Zuberi were curious about what the heck I was doing here, but neither was bold enough to come out and ask and I wasn't going to volunteer anything about "weird stuff" until I knew how much Paget wanted me to volunteer. We turned right at a junction and found ourselves surrounded on forest on both sides. It was cooler under the trees, the sunlight muted. After another two hundred meters or so along the packed-dirt path I caught the distinct flash of police tape ahead.
DCI Paget was waiting for us beside the trail. She was a dark-haired white woman with the kind of handsome face that ought to go with a figure of statuesque proportions but was in her case was paired with petite, plump body. She greeted me and shook my hand with more politeness than I was used to from officers who felt compelled to call on the Folly's expertise.
"Sorry about your weekend," she said. "But I want you to have a look at this."
"This" was about twenty meters west of where we stood but clearly visible from the path despite that, there being little undergrowth due to the overgrown trees, remember. From a distance it looked a little like someone sleeping on the ground, though it could just as easily have been mistaken for a pile of rubbish.
"A jogger noticed it this morning when her dog started acting strangely," Paget explained as she led me over. We took a circuitous route, circling around the little heap so we came at it from the far side. "Said she thought it was a body at first."
Epping Forest being infamous for body dumps, though Paget insisted it didn't happen as often as the media would lead you to believe. The jogger investigated, much to her dog's dismay, and quickly realized it wasn't a body, dead or alive. But, like the upstanding citizen, she was—her words, not Paget's—she called the Forest Keepers anyway, fly tipping being a major concern in the forest. Since Yi was already in the area she biked over, mountain bikes apparently one of the Forest Keepers' preferred means of covering ground, and saw that, far from being a random pile of rubbish, the pile of discarded clothes matched the description of those last seen on Lynn Macey. That's when Paget's Saturday morning was derailed, several hours earlier than my own. A couple of forensics types had already come and gone, but Paget had insisted the clothing remain in place until I could arrive.
"Here are the footprints leading in," Paget said, pointing at the ground. To my Londoner's eye it just looked like a thick layer of dead leaves, churned up by the boots of the coppers and forensic team who had already been over the scene. I said as much, and she assured me the footprints had been preliminarily matched to the victim's shoes—final confirmation awaited a lab comparison of the shoes and casts taken from the scene.
"She probably came in from the golf course," Paget said, gesturing to the east, away from the trail I came in on. I looked and could make out an open space on through the trees. "Macey's house is just on the other side. Cutting across the fairway would be the fastest way to reach this spot on foot."
I picked my way carefully across the disturbed ground toward the pile of clothing, trying not to step on the invisible footprints. I meant to crouch down for a closer look but as I bent forward a wave of vestigia hit me so hard I actually lost my balance and wound up on my knees in the dirt. Clean fur, the sensation of running flat out but effortlessly, snow and pine pitch, the copper tang of blood on my tongue, and underneath is all an overwhelming need, like hunger or thirst but nothing to do with food or water.
"Constable Grant?" Paget stood behind me, her voice concerned, uncertain.
I shook my head, trying to clear away the sensations. The taste of blood was so strong I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, convinced I must have bitten myself. But there was no wound, just one of the strongest vestigium I had ever encountered.
"You said she was a widow," I said, to cover my shakiness. "What happened to her husband?"
"Phillip Macey. Died in a car accident two years ago."
I was getting my breath back and pulled a pair of gloves out of my pocket. "And her kids?"
"There's two of them. Aiden is fifteen, Katherine's eight. They're staying with their uncle and his family in Waltham Abbey—father's side," Paget added, before I could ask.
I slipped into the gloves and started going through the clothes. A pair of practical walking shoes, well broken in but not worn. Only one sock. Blue jeans, one leg pulled inside-out. The knickers were about a meter away, torn to shreds. A flannel shirt, both arms torn at the shoulders, half the buttons missing. The bra, remarkably undamaged and still clasped in the back. The leaves and dirt around the area were badly disturbed, as though by a violent struggle.
There was no blood anywhere. I mentioned that and Paget told me one of the only things they had bagged from the scene was a pair of earrings, bloodied as though they'd been torn out of Macey's ears. Her cell phone had also gone to the lab, which would have been my next question.
"Where's the paw prints?" I asked.
Paget showed me. Most of the trail I couldn't make heads or tails of, but there was one, on a patch of bare ground, that even I could see was a print made by some kind of large dog. Very large.
"Well?" Paget demanded, after I'd stared at the print in shock for a few moments. "Is this your shout?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "This is weird stuff, all right."
