Black London 05 - Soul Trade

 
    1.
    Pete Caldecott sat on a tombstone, watching fog curl soft fingers against the graveyard earth and waiting for Mickey Martin’s ghost to appear.
    Mickey Martin hadn’t always been a ghost, and before a hail of constable’s bullets had snuffed out his life in the winter of 1844, he’d managed to slit the throats of thirteen women.
    Murderers weren’t supposed to be buried on consecrated ground,but with a bribe to the right vicar, Mickey Martin’s admirers made sure he got a proper burial. Even razor-wielding serial killers had their fans.
    Mickey Martin professed to be a man of God, ridding the earth of wickedness, and in the poverty-stricken world of Victorian London, a bloke who went about slashing prostitutes and charwomen was looked on not as a monster, but as an avenging angel,cleaning the mud-choked streets of the East End of their filth.
    Pete wasn’t usually the one who sat in chilly graveyards, waiting for the dead. Usually, that was Jack’s job. But Jack, the one who could see the dead with his second sight, the one who had all the talent when it came to disposing of the unnatural that crawled under cover of night in London, wanted nothing to do with the Mickey Martinbusiness. Or, if Pete was honest, with much of anything lately.
    She could have put her foot down, demanded that Jack be the one to take this on, but that would bring on a row, and she’d had her fill of those for this lifetime and possibly the next. Sitting alone in a graveyard at nearly midnight didn’t bother her overmuch. It wasn’t like she’d be getting any sleep at home, between Lily’s erraticschedule and Jack’s ever-present foul mood.
    Still, she wished she could chuck it in and go home, sit down in front of the telly with Lily and Jack, and pretend just for the span of a program or two that they were a regular sort of family. The sort where Mum and Dad occasionally got along, and neither of them had any special connection to the ghosts and magic that wound around the city as surelyas the river and the rail lines.
    Jack had said this job wasn’t worth their time when it had come in, but he said that about every routine exorcism. They weren’t flashy, but they usually paid, the victims too terrified to even consider stiffing the person who had made the big bad ghost go poof. And something had to put food on Pete and Jack’s table, to pay for Lily’s nappies and the expenses involvedwith living in London, which were considerable. If that was boring, shopworn exorcisms, so be it.
    It wasn’t as if this particular ghost job had come from a disreputable source. PC Brandi Wolcott was a member of Pete’s old squad when she’d been on the Met, smart and hardworking, ambitious and driven. And now terrified, after a routine call had turned into a brush with Mickey Martin.
    Pete hada reputation with such matters, whether she liked it or not. Everyone at her old squad in Camden knew she’d quit to go chase spooks and vapors. Or at least those were the rumors. The truth was a little more complicated. But trying to explain to coppers like PC Wolcott that if they just cared to look, from the corner of their eye, a part of London would reveal itself—a part made of magic and shadows,harboring creatures like Mickey Martin and far, far worse—would end with leather straps and lithium, and that wouldn’t help anyone.
    “Caldecott.” Pete’s Bluetooth headset came to life, and she jumped. She cleared her throat before fishing her mobile from her overcoat. She didn’t want PC Wolcott to know she’d been drifting and not holding up her end of their two-person search team.
    “Yeah, I’mhere.”
    “I’ve finished my perimeter sweep. Heading back your way.” Wolcott was out here on her own time, which Pete gave her credit for—though not more credit than she gave PC Wolcott for calling her in the first place. Ghost attacks against the living were rare and could usually be written off as muggings or bad trips, but something about this one had shaken Brandi Wolcott badly enough that shequietly went searching for an exorcist, and found Pete. Beyond that, she hadn’t said all that much, and Pete got the sense she was having second thoughts about the whole thing. You didn’t want to be the only PC who believed in ghosts.
    Pete shoved her mobile back into her pocket and let her hands follow. October nights brought on the chill and the threat of winter to come, and the damp crept throughher hair and her clothes, all the