Bone Gods

because he hadn’t expected to die. But any spell worked in flesh and carried out with funerary relics wasn’t something that was going to cause pink unicorns and toffees to rain from the sky. “I think we need to look at Carver’s house,” Pete said. “And I think I need to find out who his friends were off the clock.”
    “You can’t come along to his house,” Ollie said. “Newell will shit his own testicles. But if you were to take it upon yourself, as a good citizen of my fair city, to make discreet inquiries, well. I’d be obligated to follow any leads, as an officer of the law.”
    “Cheers,” Pete said. Ollie started to reply, but his mobile went.
    “Heath,” he grumbled. Then, his breath hitched, and Pete’s stomach twinged. She knew the pause, knew the slack absence of expression that caused Ollie’s jowls to bag. She saw it in more than enough faces to memorize during her Met days, when she appeared on doorsteps, delivering bad news.
    “Where?” Ollie bit out. “Fucking when?” A few seconds of silence and then, “Right. I’m coming now.”
    “What is it?” Pete said. Ollie’s face was blank as she’d ever seen it, and he gripped his mobile in his fist so that it chirped as his grip mashed the buttons. “Ollie,” Pete said, running to keep up with his broad stride. “What’s happened?”
    Ollie breathed in, out, and then stopped, pressing his forehead against the corridor wall. “McCorkle,” he said. “He’s dead.”

CHAPTER 14
    Ollie didn’t ask Pete to come with him, but he didn’t say anything to the contrary when she followed him to his Vauxhall. Ollie didn’t say anything, full stop, until they were over the river and heading into the crawling ant-farm roads of South London.
    “Said his landlady found him. Christ, his fucking landlady. Not even a girlfriend … Hell, boyfriend. Not even me. ”
    “Ollie,” Pete said, watching his meaty hands turn pink and white as he gripped the steering wheel hard enough to dent it. “This is not your fault.”
    “He was my partner,” Ollie said. “I was meant to be looking out for him.”
    “We don’t know the details,” Pete said. “Could have been anything. Could have slipped in the loo, completely accidentally.” Of course, the officers from Ollie’s own station, miles from the crime scene, wouldn’t be calling him if that were the case. Accidents that happened to coppers who worked CID, especially on an MIT, weren’t even always accidents. Connor had written off a few suicides in his day, gun-cleaning incidents, slip and falls, that sort of thing. Pete knew it and Ollie knew it, but offering him a ray of hope was just the thing to do.
    McCorkle lived in Brixton, and Ollie crawled along Coldharbour Lane, past a mom-and-pop market and a pub, a café with its gate down for the night, and an upscale vintage shop.
    “Place has changed a lot,” Pete said, to say something. Sitting with Ollie and yet being completely silent wasn’t natural. “My dad was in the ’81 riot, you know. First year on the job as a PC.” Ollie didn’t tell her to shut up, so she kept on as lights from patrol cars flared in the distance, gathered outside a pair of Victorian homes that had been chopped into flats, estate agent’s sign still hanging in a front window. “Never talked about it much. Imagine it bothered him, being an Irish kid forced to smash other kids with a truncheon unless he wanted to be done in himself. Think it put him off the job forever, in a way. He was never the kind of copper who talked about being the line, acted as if he were doing some great service.”
    Ollie parked illegally near the phalanx of uniformed officers milling outside McCorkle’s flat, smaller bodies orbiting the two marked cars and the ambulance. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
    Pete waited a respectful thirty seconds, until Ollie had found a plod who seemed to at least have enough brain cells to give him relevant details, before she joined him on the pavement. “What’s going on?”
    “Trying to determine that myself,” Ollie said, hands twitching like he wished they were around the plod’s neck. “Listen, you—either let me in there or I’m walking over you. No real decision on your part.”
    “Heath?” A tall figure wrapped in a blue coat cut through the uniforms and came to Ollie’s side. He was as trim as Ollie was wide, and together they cut an odd pair, even more so given the new bloke’s