‘It’s the “or something” that I’m not chuffed about,’ Rani said. ‘Let’s see if we can at least get some idea what they’re up to.’

  The door that joined the office block to the accommodation unit was a reinforced steel one, but the Ragged Sisters might have needed a refresher on security, because a heavy steel door is no use if you don’t lock it.

  We pushed through and the metal door slammed behind us.

  This time, it locked.

  Five robed and masked figures stood on one side of the office, backs to the blacked-out windows, and another five were on the other side. Each of them had two knives.

  The woman sitting at the desk at the far end of the office block, right in front of the door to the outside, wasn’t wearing robes or a mask. She looked like she was ready for a meeting in a high-powered commercial enterprise – a navy blue jacket, pearls, hair that had been taken care of by someone who probably earns more in a day than our bookshop earns in a week. She had dimples, but they didn’t look like they got much of a workout. It was hard to tell exactly how old she was. One minute she seemed forty-one and the next forty-two. The only out-of-kilter detail was the little silver skulls gleaming in her earlobes.

  Liliana Pascal, chief Ragged Sister.

  She was studying us with one of those professional frowns on her face, the kind that says her time is more important than yours. ‘I could pretend that it was disappointing,’ she said, ‘how easy it was to lure you here, but since there seems to be a shortage of ghost hunters in this town I’m quite pleased with how things have turned out.’ Her frown vanished and was replaced by a sunny smile. ‘In other words, you’ll do.’

  Rani’s shoulders slumped a tiny bit before she rallied and straightened. A microslump. ‘Don’t hold back,’ I muttered to her. ‘They’re not going to.’

  Rani bit her lip, but nodded.

  If my limited combat talents were even less likely to be helpful in this enclosed space, I had to fall back on my natural talent and try to talk them to death. ‘Liliana Pascal,’ I said. ‘You mind if we call you Lili?’

  A tiny narrowing of her eyes. Even leaders of murderous cults get picky about their names. ‘So you’ve learned a thing or two since we met last.’ The sunny smile again. ‘But, obviously, not enough to leave the country in order to stay well clear of us and our mission.’

  Rani moved the tip of her sword in a tight little figure eight, right in front of her eyes. It was incredibly cool. ‘But we’ve learned not to enter such a transparent trap as this without substantial back-up.’

  A bluff is always worth a try, I say. Like, maybe there was a one-in-a-million chance that Liliana Pascal was going to say, ‘What? You’ve got reinforcements on the way? Come on, guys, let’s hightail it out of here!’ but why not give it a go?

  ‘And where would this back-up come from?’ Liliana Pascal asked, and my hopes of a bluff-inspired retreat were dashed. ‘Your Company of the Righteous has abandoned this place to concentrate on matters closer to home.’

  You know how some people just sound smart? That was her, and it was either the words she chose or the way her sentences were shaped, but she was definitely intelligent. Flat American accent, totally confident.

  ‘Take them both,’ she said. ‘Prepare them for the ritual. This time, we’ll add the dismemberment variation.’

  I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not a big fan of the word ‘dismemberment’, especially when it’s referring to me. We weren’t mucking around here. The prospect of ending up dead and in pieces was right there in front of me.

  ‘You might call this a trap,’ I said, shoving fear aside, ‘but I ask you, who is trapping whom?’

  Liliana Pascal wrinkled her brow. ‘Whom?’

  ‘No, who.’

  As if all it was waiting for was a grammatical hesitation, the door behind Liliana Pascal burst open. A snarling grey shape hurtled in and went for her throat.

  Jamie and Kirsten charged after Fergus the ghost hound, Kirsten howling like a siren.

  While I stupidly stopped and stared at the dramatic and very Scottish entrance, Rani cheered. ‘What took you so long?’ she yelled.

  ‘I saw a powerful owl!’ Kirsten ducked a knife swipe and kicked the knee of an over-eager Ragged Sister. ‘Bonnie big bird, it was!’

  ‘Take that corner!’ Rani snapped and rammed me with a hip to get me going while she leapt into the corner on the other side of the office. Backs to the wall – no one was sneaking up on us. Rani’s corner was both a tangle and blur as the nasties tried to crowd in on her and her blade went to work, as the Scots were brawling with glee. Soon, shouts, barks and the noise of steel on steel filled the unit.

  I didn’t know if I should feel offended or relieved, but they sent just two after me. Still, two biggish guys with sharp knives is plenty to ruin anyone’s day. They hadn’t learned anything from our encounter at the observatory, though, because I tore the Li’l Ace out of my jacket pocket and at that distance the ball bearings went straight through their robes. One toppled after the first shot, the other took two in the midriff and kept coming in a staggery, half-hearted way, one hand on his torso.

  Disadvantage of having a wall behind me? I had nowhere to back away to, so I was glad when Fergus the ghost hound sank his teeth into my attacker’s leg and dragged him to the ground.

  After that, as they say, it was pandemonium.

  Liliana Pascal had taken up position in the far corner and was watching the progress of the fight, getting angrier and angrier. Slowly, she bared her teeth, gradually becoming something far more savage, far more dangerous than her Businesswoman of the Year persona. One look at her snarling, and I believed all of the stories about the Ragged Sisters. This was someone who wasn’t afraid of buckets of blood.

  She was gripping a small leather handbag, not much bigger than a soft drink can. With a shake of her head, she took a tiny glass bottle out of it and threw it so that it smashed on the floor behind Jamie and Kirsten, who were in the thick of the fray.

  A handful of indistinct ghostly figures erupted from the shattered bottle. They quickly became more solid and threatening, with grimacing faces, gnashing teeth, hands more like talons than anything else.

  The Ragged Sisters had Rogues in a Bottle.

  Rogues in a Bottle. Rogues, the most ferocious, most dangerous of ghosts, captured and kept in a container for later use. We’d run into this development in phasmaturgy a few months ago, when poor, tormented Stacey Evans had used the same tactic on us. It made me wonder if there was a website where these guys shared little phasmaturgical hints, Life Hacks for Ghost Magic sort of thing.

  This was something I could get my teeth into. Or my plungy ghost-hunting hands, at least.

  The vaporous apparitions eddied about before separating into four Rogues, all roughly from the same time period, if their shiny Elvis pompadours, leather jackets and tight jeans were anything to go by. Rock and roll will never die, right?

  The Ragged Sisters were backing away to form a guard around their leader. She’d resumed her corporate manner by now, happy to have the Rogues batter us into submission. ‘Let’s see how good you are!’ she called to us.

  Jamie was bleeding from another head wound, a real horror-movie injury; the whole left side of his face was red. He touched it with a hand and swore. ‘I’ll do you for that!’ he roared.

  Rani grabbed his arm as he advanced and, even though he tried, he couldn’t budge her. ‘Let us demonstrate the Marin way,’ she said.

  Show time.

  I slid across to her side as she went in high on the first Rogue. As rehearsed, this left me room to duck and scoot in beneath her blade, ripping my hands up under the ribcage of the ghost that was trying to grab Rani. The flat of her sword kept its hands away from me and I twisted, sending it beyond the here and now.

  The other three Rogues had been crowding the first, trying to get at her. Even though Rogues are fierce, they’re still ghosts, which means they aren’t smart enough to win a debate with a sandwich. Combat tactics? Nil.

  When their frontmost guy flew apart in ghosty fragments, the other three drifted for a second, then Rani took a mighty swipe and smacked their heads, forehand and backhand, flat of the sword cracking on spooky skulls that were substantial enough for them to make cartoony ‘Bonk!’ noises as they smacked into each other.

  Instant disorientation, which was my cue. Middle guy first, plunge, twist, gone. The other two, thanks to Rani’s attentions, had been leaning in on him and when he vanished they toppled. Left – plunge, twist, gone. Right – plunge, twist, gone.

  I was breathing so hard I bent double, hands on knees, dealing with the rush of memories they’d left behind. Four easings in such a short space of time meant everything was even more of a jumble than usual, but out of the muddle of ordinariness, one memory rose above the others, bright and hard as crystal.

  One of them had met the Queen. Where and when wasn’t clear, but it was definitely a youngish Queen Elizabeth, radiant, with a tall young man by her side.

  Jamie had been watching us closely while he dabbed at the wound on his forehead. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Interesting? Is that all?’ I said. ‘You can’t see how kind it is?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe. It’s not our way, though.’

  ‘Ways can change.’ Rani touched my shoulder. ‘The Ragged Sisters have gone.’

  ‘Not all of them.’ Kirsten trooped back through the open door, dragging the robed and masked figure of one of the Ragged Sisters. ‘We’ve got ourselves a prisoner!’

  Stripped of his mask, the Ragged Sister turned out to be a pudgy, balding guy in his forties. He was pretty defiant, considering his situation, tied to a chair and abandoned by his mates. ‘You won’t get anything out of me,’ he snarled. ‘I’d rather die.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ I said, sitting in front of him. ‘You haven’t heard the options.’

  He blinked. That wasn’t quite what he’d been expecting, because Rani was fingering her sword, and Kirsten was making a great show of cleaning hers while Jamie wiped the blood from his forehead and glared.

  I’d convinced them that I should open the interrogation. After all, I was sure I could be the Good Cop, all reasonable and moderately friendly, since I wasn’t actually holding a deadly weapon. Besides, I’d seen so many cop movies and cop TV shows that I reckoned I could do this in my sleep.

  ‘I’ll have none of your options,’ he snarled again, with an accent that could have been South African. ‘I live for blood, death and ruin, the way of the Ragged Sisters.’

  ‘It’s nice to have a hobby. But I was wondering about your buddies, the ones who ran away and abandoned you.’ I paused and smiled in a rueful and consoling way. ‘Whatever happened to “no one left behind”?’

  He sneered. Sneering and snarling; he had quite a repertoire. Next he’d be snapping, but I don’t think snoring was on his playlist anytime soon. ‘No one left behind? Stupid sentimentality. We Ragged Sisters like leaving someone behind so that the others can escape while dunderheads like you pride yourselves on taking a prisoner.’

  Okay, so that had a sort of whacky, brutal logic, but it did emphasise how little they thought of human life.

  I leaned forward, all sympathetic. ‘I’m sure that’s what they told you, but hasn’t it always been like that? Aren’t you the odd one out, the guy who gets the crappy jobs, the last one to hear about important developments? And they never remember your birthday, do they?’

  ‘Hah! Shows you how much you know! They remembered last year and we had a cake!’

  ‘And who had to buy the cake?’

  He hesitated, but then glared. ‘They gave me money for it.’

  I pushed my chair back and we went to the other end of the office to discuss what to do with him. He kept a tight-mouthed evil eye on us and Fergus kept a hungry doggy eye on him.

  ‘Time for us to go Bad Cop on him,’ Jamie suggested. The bleeding had almost stopped from the long but shallow scrape on his forehead. He was going to need a couple more Peppa Pig Band-Aids to go with the one on the other side of his forehead.

  ‘Aye,’ Kirsten said. ‘We should be able to find out a lot if we go about it the right way.’

  ‘I get an awful feeling that you’re talking about stuff that’s banned by just about every international treaty and convention,’ I said.

  ‘Torture doesn’t work,’ Rani said flatly. ‘You torture someone enough and they’ll tell you anything to make it stop, and then how can you trust the information? The Company of the Righteous gave up torture a long time ago.’

  Kirsten and Jamie shared a look. ‘The Company of the Righteous has always been a mite hasty with their doings,’ Kirsten said. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t say that our methods fall under the heading of “torture”.’

  ‘It’s all in the way you look at it,’ Jamie added. ‘A definitional matter.’

  More hairsplitting. Save me.

  ‘I don’t think that someone being tortured is really worried about what you’re calling it,’ Rani said.

  Kirsten cracked her knuckles, something that always makes me wince. ‘Let us have some time with the lad and we’ll get him talking.’

  ‘We let him stew for a bit,’ Jamie said, ‘and then I’ll just show him this.’ He put his hand inside his vest and whipped out a metal needle that must have been thirty centimetres long. ‘Hah!’

  With the appearance of the needle, Rani turned slightly side on, ready to engage, but at Jamie’s grin she relaxed. ‘Do you always have such a thing with you? Just in case?’

  ‘Hah again!’ he said, and whipped out another long metal needle, a twin of the first. He brandished them as if they were magic.

  Kirsten groaned. ‘They’re knitting needles, that’s all. Jamie knits while we’re out waiting for ghosts to manifest.’

  ‘Knitting?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Socks and jumpers and stuff like that?’

  ‘You know how it is,’ a beaming Jamie said, ‘you’re parked somewhere, keeping an eye out for a ghost you’ve heard of in the vicinity, so you have to fill in your time somehow. I can whip up a tidy scarf, no bother.’

  ‘Rani and I read,’ I said. ‘And we talk.’

  ‘I read, too,’ Kirsten said. ‘Wikipedia.’

  Rani and I stared at her while Jamie pretended he wasn’t related. ‘You read Wikipedia?’ Rani asked.

  ‘On my phone,’ she said. ‘No end of interesting stuff.’

  ‘You don’t read anything else?’

  ‘Just Wikipedia. There’s a world in there. For instance, did you know that your city once had the largest steerable telescope in the world?’

  ‘I did, actually,’ I said and ignored Rani rolling her eyes.

  Jamie rattled his needles together. ‘Stewin’ times over. Time to show our prisoner these wee lovelies. He’ll cave, no problem.’

  I had misgivings. My misgivings had misgivings. I hand-balled to Rani because this was her sort of thing. Maybe not full-on combat stuff, but closely associated. The aftermath of military intervention, if you want to look at it that way.

  ‘You can have an hour,’ Rani said eventually. ‘We’ll wait outside.’

  The night was quiet, and the gentle curve of the Westgate Bridge stretched across the sky not far away.

  ‘Did you consider telling me you’d patched it up with the Scots?’ I asked Rani.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I had. And if I’d told you they were coming to our rescue, it might have made you overconfident.’

  ‘Overconfident? In the face of knives like that? I don’t think so.’ I tweaked my beard. ‘How exactly did you patch it up?’

  ‘After our row, when I went on my angry walk, I rang and offered them another go at the Ragged Sisters,’ Rani said. ‘And I promised that you were extremely sorry and desperately wanted to apologise for insulting their honour.’

  ‘And in return they’ll apologise for insulting me in all sorts of ways? And you?’

  ‘For the greater good, Anton, we get to suck it up.’

  I glanced back at the office building, the scene of our most recent bout of mayhem. ‘Bao set us up, didn’t she?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, but it gave us the chance to turn the tables. We weren’t entirely successful, but we do have a prisoner.’

  ‘Bao.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m glad you were suspicious.’

  ‘Suspect everything. It’s the way I was trained.’

  ‘Don’t be hard on yourself. I think it goes with our job.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Aunt Tanja. I’ve been thinking all sorts of things about her.’

  ‘She’s been prickly, but I put that down to the trauma of being where she’s been.’

  ‘And that makes good sense.’

  ‘But I didn’t know her before she went away.’

  ‘Don’t do that. Don’t get me thinking again.’

  ‘Are you really worried about something sinister?’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Our job means spending heaps of time with sinister. Maybe we’re starting to see it everywhere.’

  Kirsten stuck her head out of the doorway and whistled to us. ‘All done here!’

  ‘He wasn’t fussed by the needles,’ Jamie said when we joined him. Glaring Ragged Sister guy was now slightly sick-looking Ragged Sister guy, sitting on the floor with his arms tied behind his back with the remains of his robe. ‘So I had to get serious.’

  Uh oh. ‘He’s okay?’

  ‘Aye. All we had to do was to explain to him that we had his life in our hands, thanks to the wonders of social media.’

  ‘What?’ I looked at him. ‘You tweeted at him until he gave up?’

  Kirsten held up her phone. ‘I snapped a few photos then told him that it’d only take a few seconds and he’d have a reputation as a grass, or, worse, someone who’d sold out the Ragged Sisters before joining the good guys.’

 

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