by I had so confidently expected to find Merlin waiting for us at Home, I was surprised speechless to discover Sally instead.
At first, I thought maybe there had been a mistake. We were sent to one of the smaller (and more secret) meeting-rooms on the ground floor, and when I saw Sally (the fence, remember?) sitting alone at the glass-topped table with a cup of coffee before her, and an open notebook, I conducted a quick sweep of the room. You know, just in case an entire extra person was sitting in one of the other chairs, or upon the window-seat, and I’d somehow failed to notice.
It was just Sally.
She looked up as we came in, and greeted us with one of those professional nods that always seem just a bit grim. ‘I apologise for the lateness of the hour,’ she said. ‘I understand you have been much engaged on business today.’
‘To say the least,’ I sighed, sliding into a chair opposite her. ‘But we appreciate your coming by. I gather you have news? Something important?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve already seen Val. She thought you should hear it directly from me.’
‘Sounds serious.’
Sally glanced at her page of notes. ‘It is about the matter of Merlin’s Grimoire.’
‘You’ve discovered something?’
She hesitated. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
We waited.
‘I sent out enquiries,’ she began. ‘Among various of my contacts who might have heard about that incident. To my surprise, I found that several had. It had never reached my ears because the stories had been broadly dismissed as moonshine. And they do sound improbable. I would have dismissed them myself, were it not for your information.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘A shadow in the night? An improbably successful super-thief who can bypass security like it was never there, help themselves to the most carefully guarded artefacts, and vanish without trace, leaving not a single clue behind?’
Sally stared at me.
‘And this super-villain primarily targets Merlin-related objects?’
‘Exactly.’ Sally closed her notebook with a snap. ‘If you already knew about this, why did you—’
‘We didn’t,’ I said. ‘We found out about it today.’
Jay added, ‘It’s been an interesting day.’
‘Tell me,’ said Sally.
So we did, though we left out the parts about the maybe-Merlin eyeballing me like I was relevant to something. ‘We have no idea who she is,’ I finished. ‘Except that she talked like she is Merlin, and we know that must be impossible.’
‘That, too, I’ve heard,’ said Sally. ‘I don’t think anyone believes it.’
Jay and I exchanged a look.
‘You mean you do?’ said Sally in disgust.
‘Not… exactly,’ I said. ‘But there’s clearly something very strange going on here.’
‘Strange, and by all logic ought to be impossible,’ said Jay.
‘Where else has she been seen?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know that there have been too many direct sightings of the thief,’ said Sally. ‘Besides the grimoire, a belt buckle said to be Merlin’s disappeared about two years ago from a private house in Scotland. The thing was inscribed in Ogham, believed to be authentic, as far as anyone can be sure about that. And there was one more rumoured incident, though it was too long ago to be relevant.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘How long ago?’
‘More than twenty years. A chalice, made of horn inlaid with opal and silver, taken from a museum in Cornwall.’
‘Silver?’ said Jay sharply.
I saw the direction of his thoughts. Was it silver, or argent?
‘Why didn’t Val find anything about this on the net?’ I said, frowning.
‘Because there’s nothing there,’ said Sally. ‘Anytime anyone writes anything about this “Merlin”, those articles… disappear. It’s become something of an urban legend, spread by word-of-mouth.’ She smiled briefly. ‘I believe some of my people think I may have run mad, asking about folk tales.’
‘This is really helpful,’ I said. ‘Thank you for bringing it to us.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear of anything more concrete.’
She waited, expecting something.
‘We’ll let you know if we do,’ I promised.
I guessed right, for she smiled. The curiosity bug had bitten her pretty badly. ‘I’ve got a hot chocolate appointment with Val,’ she said, rising from her chair.
‘Don’t be late,’ I said. ‘She hates that.’
Sally bustled out fast enough, leaving me to exchange long looks with Jay.
‘The plot thickens,’ he said.
‘The internet is full of references to things Merlin’s said to have owned or used at one time or another,’ I said. ‘Those articles haven’t vanished, and neither have the objects.’
‘Just the articles pertaining to the things that were taken,’ said Jay.
‘So why those things?’
Jay sighed. ‘You’re going to argue that it has to be because they’re authentic, aren’t you?’
‘Can you think of another reason?’
‘I really can’t.’
I looked around at the empty room, feeling slightly deflated. Never mind that we had just received a lot of interesting and relevant information. ‘I thought she’d be here,’ I said.
‘Merlin?’
I nodded.
‘I thought she would, too,’ Jay admitted. ‘Milady didn’t say who it was, but she sort of hinted…’
‘That it was somebody Secret and Important?’
‘Right.’
‘Which, I suppose, it was.’
‘But,’ sighed Jay. ‘All Sally’s info, while fascinating, still doesn’t help us. If all these objects were taken by the same person, no one seems to know where to find her.’
‘So we’re still stuck.’
‘Like glue.’
I held out my closed fist. ‘Go Team Magick.’
Jay bumped my fist with his own. ‘It’s great being unstoppable.’
I sighed, and lowered my cheek to the table. ‘Wake me when we have a break-through.’
Crystobel called me the following morning.
I had occasion to regret that I’d given her my personal mobile number.
‘Ms. Vesper?’ she said crisply into my ear.
‘Ves,’ I said. ‘Please. Ms. Vesper makes me feel about eighty.’
I suppose my bleatings deserved no particular response; they certainly received none. ‘Is there any progress to report?’ she said.
‘Well…’ I debated how much to tell her. ‘Sort of?’
‘Sort of.’
‘We’re fairly sure we have identified the person who took the grimoire.’
‘Oh!’
‘Sort of.’ I mean, I would recognise her if I saw her in the street, but that was about it. The only name we had for her was Merlin — maybe — and we had nothing else. Hardly information to take to the police, or indeed to Crystobel Elvyng.
‘Perhaps you could explain what you mean?’ She spoke civilly enough, but I detected traces of impatience.
Fine, less of the caginess then.
‘The likely candidate for the theft of your grimoire identifies herself as Merlin,’ I said, and then paused, remembering too late that she hadn’t actually done so. We had, as the only interpretation we could come up with for her minimal utterances that made any sense.
Sort of.
There was silence on the line.
‘So you’re saying,’ she finally began, ‘that some Merlin-wannabe has taken my grimoire?’
Curse it, how difficult could a conversation get?
Pretty work, maybe-Merlin had said. But it isn’t mine.
‘I think she may have believed herself to be retrieving her own property,’ I said.
‘Ah. Bit of a crazy, is it? That can happen,’ said Crystobel knowledgeably. ‘I trust you’ll have her apprehended soon, and the grimoire restored to my father.’
‘We’re doing our best,’ I said weakly. How could I explain the rest? Unless being “a bit of a crazy” could imbue a person with astonishing magickal powers, Crystobel’s explanation could be nowhere near the truth. But to say as much would make me sound a bit crazy.
We needed something more concrete before I could lay any of this before our client.
So I mouthed a few reassuring words and let her ring off, confident in the belief that her family would have their grimoire back soon.
Hah.
Then I threw in the towel, proverbially speaking, and took myself up to Milady’s tower.
It’s always humiliating to have to go up there and admit to being clueless, but one must swallow one’s pride. Sometimes, a conversation with Milady is exactly what’s needed to clear the head.
‘So,’ I said half an hour later, pacing restlessly back and forth across the plush carpet of Milady’s personal (and rather sumptuous) tower chamber. ‘We’re in a bind. On the one hand, these speculations of ours might well turn out to be moonshine, as Sally put it. They are completely bonkers. In which case, we’ve gone down completely the wrong track, and we will have to go back to square one. On the other hand, we might be absolutely right about this “Merlin” person; but that isn’t especially likely, and either way it doesn’t help us much if we can’t find her.’
‘Why isn’t it especially likely?’ said Milady.
That brought my pacing to a halt. ‘Um. Because the figure of Merlin has always been treated as more myth than reality, and even if he — or she — was a real person once, it must be extremely unlikely that he or she could still be alive today.’
‘You’ve encountered such things before.’
‘Baroness Tremayne? I had thought of that, but it’s different. The Baroness is locked between the echoes of Farringale, whatever that means; I’m still unsure. What it doesn’t seem to mean is that she’s free to wander the streets of the twenty-first century world, alive and kicking, the way this maybe-Merlin is.’
‘There could still be another explanation,’ said Milady.
‘Oh, there could,’ I agreed. ‘But I haven’t the faintest idea what it might be; neither does Jay; and that leaves us with no avenue for investigation.’
Milady was silent for a while. I wondered, not for the first time, what might be going through her head. This disembodied-voice thing was difficult. No face to read, no visual cues. Just words, or indeed silence.
‘I find myself with a dilemma,’ said she, and that wasn’t what I was expecting her to say at all.
‘Oh?’ I said, perking up.
‘What you have told me interests me greatly,’ she said. ‘It is… not what I had imagined you were to find, upon launching this hoax of an exhibition. But I nonetheless find myself unsurprised.’
‘You know something about this Merlin?’
This silence was undoubtedly a hesitation. Milady didn’t know what to say.
Milady didn’t know what to say.
I sensed a secret, and pounced. ‘If you know something that has some bearing on this case…’ I began, and then had no idea how to finish the sentence. Out with it? Speak up, or suffer the consequences?
‘I suppose there is no other way to persuade Ms. Elvyng to part with some of her argent?’ said Milady. ‘Purchase, for example? I am assured of Mandridore’s financial assistance.’
‘We could try that, but Jay and I already offered to buy from her. She said she doesn’t need more money. She wants her grimoire.’
Milady sighed. ‘And if it should prove not to be her grimoire?’
‘You mean it really does belong to this woman?’
‘Perhaps it might. What then?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I cannot imagine Crystobel, or her father, would welcome the idea that they aren’t getting their grimoire back, let alone that they never really owned it in the first place. And they’d need concrete proof that the grimoire is the rightful property of this Merlin-woman, and how could we get that?’
Milady addressed none of these obstacles. Instead she said: ‘Forgive me if I backtrack, but I thought you implied that this woman evinced a special interest in you, Ves. Am I right to think it?’
My turn to hesitate. ‘I might have imagined it,’ I said. ‘Although Jay got the same impression, so maybe not.’
‘What did she say to you?’
‘Nothing. She said very little to anybody. She just… looked at me.’
‘Looked?’
‘In a special way. Like she was trying to read my soul, or like… she saw something really compelling. And she did that more than once.’
‘She did not look at anybody else in this way?’
‘No. Just me.’
Silence again, for a little while. ‘I had wondered,’ said Milady, but in an abstracted way, as though she were not really talking to me anymore. ‘When the lyre…’
‘The lyre?’ I prompted, when she trailed off.
‘Ves,’ said Milady, sounding once again like her efficient, no-nonsense self. ‘There is more afoot here than I can speak of. I cannot tell you the precise identity of the woman you met, for I’m unsure of it myself. But I urge you to keep an open mind. There is more to magick than you know.’
