Bone Gods

it should be.

EPILOGUE
    GHOSTS
Still they come up to me
With a different name but the
same old face
I can see the connection
With another time and a different place
—The Stiff Little Fingers

CHAPTER 36
    Nearly three weeks later, Pete met Felix Patel at the Dogstar on Coldharbour Lane. She watched him check the bar from the door, eyes scanning the entire room before he made his way to the two-top where she sat beneathed the arched window. The sun hit the blue paint on the bar’s exterior walls and reflected harsh silver light across Patel’s face.
    “What is it?” He didn’t even take his coat off, just sat and folded his hands as if he were in the interrogation room rather than a bar.
    Patel had deep grooves under his eyes, and Pete detected stubble on his formerly pristine jawline. London to the north had settled down, the isolated riots, murder, car accidents, and random acts of mayhem wrapped up, but London to the south was still evacuated in wide swaths, the British army running backup to the Met. Ollie had gone back to work the week before and declared the entire city, “A fuckin’ mess from top to fuckin’ bottom.”
    Pete didn’t bother even trying to explain. The cataclysm that had rolled outward from the Black was gone, but the twilight world was even worse off than the daylight one. Lawrence had become a virtual hermit. Pete hadn’t even tried to go to the Lament and check in with Mosswood—she figured if the Green Knight was ever going to speak to her again, it would be on his own terms. She wasn’t going to force the issue.
    “You look tired, Felix,” she said. “Can I buy you a pint?”
    “I’m on duty,” Patel said. “And I haven’t ruled you out in the McCorkle matter, Ms. Caldecott. If that’s what you brought me here to ask.”
    “McCorkle and Gerard Carver were schoolmates,” Pete said. “Ask Ollie for the details from his case file, but Carver was caging artifacts from his job and selling them on the black market. He sold McCorkle a reliquary, Babylonian. Carver’d promised that particular item gratis to a bloke named Nicholas Naughton.”
    Patel narrowed his eyes. “This means what to me?”
    “Naughton is wanted in Devon for the murder of his brother Danny,” Pete said. “He killed McCorkle, and Carver, and I wager if you wander down the lane to Southwark, you’ll find some talkative mates of his in a club called Motor.”
    Patel stood up, chair shoving back with a screech of wood on wood. “Caldecott, I don’t like you. I don’t trust you, and I don’t believe a word of that shit you spout to Heath. Until I say otherwise, you’re still a suspect.”
    “But you’ll look into it?” Pete said. “You’ll talk to Heath about Carver?”
    “ ’Course I bloody will,” Patel snapped. “Unlike you, I’m a good fucking police detective.”
    Pete stood as well and put a tenner on the table for her drink. “That’s all that matters, then.”
    Patel pointed a finger at her. “Don’t cross paths with me again, Petunia. Unless you want me to get a lot more interested in your business than is comfortable.”
    “When you find Naughton, Sergeant, do me a favor,” Pete said. Patel held the door for her as they left the Dogstar.
    “And what’s that?”
    “Tell him to enjoy it while it lasts.”
    She watched until she was sure Patel was in his unmarked and driving back down the lane toward the Lambeth station before she walked back to McCorkle’s flat.
    Naughton wouldn’t last in prison. He’d been unseated as the baddest man on the block. He might skate on McCorkle’s murder, but not on Carver’s. And if the other inmates of Pentonville didn’t get him, sooner or later an angry ghost he’d had a hand in creating would. Without his protection hexes and thugs in their matched suits, Naughton was just another sad bastard grasping at magic. He’d get sent on soon enough. What was waiting for him in the thin spaces was worse than anything Pete could wish on him while he was alive.
    She waited on McCorkle’s steps until one of his neighbors came out, and slipped through the door. The third floor was still taped off, but Pete ducked under it and stood in McCorkle’s living room. No one had bothered to clear away the blood, and the room was musty and stank faintly of rotted things. Flies buzzed around the bin in the kitchen, and the taps dripped out of sync.
    Pete found it behind the kitchen wall—a patch of plaster half-covered by a cheap generic poster