Chapter 8: The Chain Of Command
I was escorted out of the building by the two men with only a brief pause of say, an hour and a half, while they filled in all the correct forms. I was sat off out of the way and ignored while my transaction was arranged, apparently no more necessary to my own fate than a litter of kittens. Finally they woke me up and led me outside and stuck me in the back of a car.
'I've got to ask,' I said from the back seat as we pulled away, 'but how did you get away so soon?'
They did not respond.
'I don't mean anything by it,' I continued, 'but the last I heard you were being force fed spiked drinks and yet here we are, not twelve hours later, and you both seem sober.'
Again, no response, though I thought they may have looked sideways at each other.
'And I know you're the same two guys because you've got that cast on your wrist, and I heard one of you got hit on the wrist when you tried to pull a gun.'
Nothing.
'Actually, I heard he broke it.'
Still nothing. I started feeling mischievous, I would goad them into talking to me. 'That must have really hurt,' I said, 'serves you right for pulling a gun I suppose.'
'Just,' said the man with the cast, 'drop it, okay.'
'Okay,' I said, 'but I've got to know, how did you get away.'
'We're not complete amateurs,' said the other man, 'when we didn't check in a team was dispatched to check on us.'
'How did you sober up?'
'A lot of hot coffee, a trip to casualty, and right royal bollocking,' said the man with the broken wrist.
I laughed despite myself, I was genuinely trying to get on their good side. 'Where are we going?' I asked.
'You'll find out when we get there,' said the man driving, 'now shut up.'
I shut up. I leaned my head against the window and watched the world go by. I thought about Selkie, then I thought about breakfast, then I thought about my car and wondered if I was going to get a parking ticket, then I thought about Selkie some more. Then I went to sleep.
I did not sleep well, and was finally woken properly by the sun coming up. We were driving through London down the Holloway road. Once upon a time I had had a lot of friends in the area and driven there frequently. That had been what, ten years ago, we used to drink regularly in a pub just down from Highbury and Islington but I could not remember the last time I had been there. What had happened to that crowd. James and Claire had split up, she lived in Germany now, he had gone back up north, Stephen had moved to Nottingham and was living with some girl I had not even met, Chris and John were still in London, Chris in Walthamstow and John in Hampstead, but we did not see each other very often anymore. Everybody wants change at heart, we want our lives to be moving forwards, but sometimes it is hard to leave things behind. We had fun back then, and I have the memories, but it is still sad to see the area and think that those times will never return, that we allowed them to peter out and die, and never marked their passing.
We drove down towards Westminster, and then, in some street I did not know, turned off and into an underground car park. The two men led me out of the car, up a lift, through a long corridor, and into a plush office. There was wood panelling, a carpet that seemed to come up to my knees and made me suddenly aware that my shoes were still muddy from yesterday's adventure, a window from which, through the rain, you could see the sun rising over the houses of parliament, and a huge oak desk. Behind the desk sat a man in his mid fifties, he was wearing a pin stripe suit and a pair of round wire frame glasses. The glasses gave him a slightly eccentric look but other than that he appeared the archetypal civil servant.
He rose, extended his hand to be shook, and introduced himself as Weatherby, John Weatherby. I sat on a chair at the desk, and the two men who had brought me there sat down on a couch near the door. I looked straight past John Weatherby, admiring the view.
'Marvelous isn't it,' he said, 'I never tire of it.'
'Are you always in this early?' I asked, seeing a clock on the desk indicated it was a quarter past seven.
'Sometimes,' he said, 'but not always.'
'Shame to miss the sun rise.' I said, 'it must be marvellous on a clear day.'
He smiled. 'Clear days, Mr Wallingford, are just one of our worries.'
'It might be helpful,' I said, 'if you told me who you are, and why you have arrested me.'
'Mr Wallingford you have not been arrested, you have merely been invited here for an informal chat. I apologise if my colleagues have given the wrong impression.'
'In that case,' I said, rising from my seat, 'I think I'll be on my way.'
'However,' he said forcefully, I noticed the two men behind me had also stood up, 'I do have the authority to detain you without charge if necessary.'
I sat down again.
He smiled. 'Good,' he said, 'you asked who we were, which is not an easy question to answer. These two gentlemen are Mister Cholderton and Mister Bauer, MI5 operatives on secondment to the Office of the Witch Finder General. I have a number of titles, but this morning I am talking to you in the capacity of Deputy Witch Finder General.'
'And who is the Witch Finder General?' I asked, 'and why haven't I heard of you before.'
'The witch finder general is Lord Angus Lepusstrom, who is currently abroad on business,' he said. 'You have not heard of us because very few people have. We are a small office, consisting of only two permanent employees, myself and Lord Lepusstrom, and we are funded as part of the home office under the title Department for the Moral Well-Being of the Nation.'
'You must get noticed.'
'Every new Home Secretary notices us eventually, and there seems to be a new one every other week these days, it is part of my job to justify our very small expense when they do.'
'And how do you do that?' I asked.
'Justify our existence,' he said, 'I'll admit it is not always easy. There are dark forces at work in this land Mr Wallingford, and there have been for thousands of years, long before England was Christian, before England was England even. We have enough evidence in our archives to justify ourselves to the most hardened sceptic. Even as hardened a sceptic as a politician. But I suspect you have seen enough already.'
I said nothing. I had seen a lot in the past forty eight hours but had drawn no conclusions, although in a way he was right, I was not nearly as hardened a sceptic as I had been.
He looked at me. 'No more questions?' he asked.
I shook my head.
'Then allow me to ask some of you. Do you know the whereabouts of one Miss Selkie Pfinnenwicken?'
'No,' I answered.
He nodded. 'Do you have any idea where she might be?'
'Yes,' I said, 'but I do not believe I am under any obligation to tell you.'
'No,' he said, 'you are not. I could make it so you are but it is a very inconvenient business. Not half as inconvenient for me as it is for you, but still, very inconvenient.'
'Then persuade me.'
'Persuade you,' he said, 'I am surprised that is necessary. It should be obvious that we are both on the same side.'
'Side?' I asked, a touch angry at the suggestion.
'Yes, side. We are both combating the forces of darkness are we not.'
'No,' I said, 'all I've been doing is helping out a friend.'
'Oh.'
'And for someone on the same bloody side, you certainly have a strange way of behaving.'
'Ah,' he said, 'I understand there were some, err¦ misguided choices made in the heat of the moment.'
'Misguided choices,' I spluttered, and then wheeled around in my chair and pointed at the two men. 'They bloody shot at us.'
'Actually,' said the man without the broken wrist, who had been introduced as Mister Cholderton, 'that was a warning shot.'
'Warning shots', I said in a voice scraping along the edge of shouting, 'are normally accompanied by a warning. Otherwise they might be miss-con-bloody-strued.' I turned back to face Weatherby before either of the two men had a chance to answer. They remained silent.
After a short pause Weatherby said 'I see there has been some misunderstanding, which is largely our fault.'
'When a witch finder tries to arrest a witch,' I said slowly, measuring my words, 'I don't see that there is much room for misunderstanding.'
'Yes,' he said, 'they are an unfortunate pair of titles. Lord Lepusstrom is very attached to tradition, which is why we keep ours. I imagine the Pfinnenwicken women keep theirs for much the same reason.'
'Titles and misunderstandings aside,' I said, not wanting to get sidetracked, 'that doesn't explain why you tried to arrest two innocent citizens who you now claim to be on the same side as.'
'I assure you Mister Walllingford,' he said, 'our only aim was to take Miss Pfinnenwicken into protective custody.'
'Protective custody?'
'Yes.'
'And what the bloody hell does that mean?'
'There are things afoot Mister Wallingford, as I am sure you are aware, things that we as the government are better qualified to deal with than a have-a-go amateur like Miss Pfinnenwicken.'
'You mean the Black Goat.'
'The Black Goat?'
'Yes. They were who we were looking for.'
'The official view of this department,' he said, 'is that the Black Goat are harmless.'
'Harmless!' I shouted the word at the top of my voice.' One of them killed two of my friends last night.'
He turned the pages of a report on his desk. 'I'm afraid stabbings are a bit beyond our remit here. We deal with a more¦ esoteric threat.'
For a moment I said nothing, spluttering half formed words. Finally I said 'the Black Goat are harmless?'
'That is departmental policy.'
'So what the hell do you think you are protecting Selkie from.'
'Black Goat or not, she will investigate until she gets herself in danger, we intend to prevent that.'
'Who the hell makes up this policy?'
'All policy comes from¦'
'Don't tell me,' I interrupted him, 'the illustrious and conveniently absent Lord Lepusstrom.'
'Lord Lepusstrom does have final say yes¦'
'This is a conspiracy,' I said.
'I assure you it is not.'
'Isn't it? Then why is it painfully obvious to a man like me, until last week completely ignorant of anything remotely supernatural, and still with no more experience of magic than watching people make it rain slightly harder when it is already raining, that the Black Goat are extremely dangerous and almost certainly behind whatever the hell is going on, but you, an apparent expert in the subject, just sit there and blithely spew out platitudes like "it is the policy of this department that the Black Goat are not a threat.'
He looked a little taken aback. 'Well¦' he stuttered.
'And,' I said, marching forward whilst I had the momentum, 'who the hell sold them that land they've been doing god knows what on for the past thirty years, who made sure they weren't moved off even after they murdered two policemen, and who the hell isn't even interested when they start murdering people who stand in their way.'
'That's err¦' he said, 'that's a lot of different points.'
'You,' I shouted, 'you stuck-up pillock. Whilst you've been running about trying to arrest an innocent girl, and you can't even get that right, Selkie and her friends have put their lives on the line to actually combat this "dark forces at work in this country, and now, when I tell you what is going on, you aren't even bloody interested.'
I twisted in my chair so I didn't have to look at the prat. I suppose in retrospect it is obvious, but I had not realised how much watching my friends being murdered, being arrested, kept up all night, abducted to a strange location, and threatened, had annoyed me. I had had a real head of steam to let off, and now I had vented the room was plunged into a very awkward silence. You could hear the rain rapping against the window, it was a reminder, to me at least, that whilst we sat in the warm and the dry others worked for our benefit facing unknown dangers.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Weatherby place both hands flat down on the desk ready to say something when a voice came from behind us.
'He's got a fucking point.'
I wheeled round, it was Mister Bauer that had spoken, the man with the broken wrist. In retrospect, he had even more cause than I to be pissed off.
'Yes,' said Wallingford, 'you do have a point, but I don't see what I can do about it now.'
An idea struck me. 'I know exactly what you should do,' I said. 'You should talk to Mog Ruith, ask him what's going on. You do that and I'll tell you where Selkie's gone.'
'Mog Ruith?'
'The Black Goat druid currently held at her majesty's pleasure.'
'I don't know if we can¦'
'You're part of the home office aren't you,' I said, 'pull some bloody strings.'
'I could not,' he said, 'but Lord Lepusstrom might be able to.'
I gestured to the phone on the desk. 'Call him,' I said.
He picked up the receiver and hesitantly dialled. I glanced back at Mister Bauer and Mister Cholderton. Mister Bauer winked at me.
'Lord Lepusstrom please,' said Weatherby.
'It's John.'
'John Weatherby.'
'Hello sir, I was hoping you could arrange something.'
'We need to talk to an inmate in the prison system.'
'The only name we have is err¦' He looked at me.
'Mog Ruith,' I said.
'Mog Ruith,' he repeated.
'Yes sir, that Mog Ruith.'
'Well the thing is we have Mister Wallingford here and he refuses to tell us where Miss Pfinnenwicken is until we investigate the Black Goat angle.'
'I know what our policy is sir.'
'We could do that, but it would be awkward and might not do us any good.'
'Yes sir, he seems very determined.'
'Well the way we look at it sir, is that Miss Pfinnwicken is apparently in search of the Black Goat herself, so if they are genuinely harmless, then we can afford to waste the time, but if they are actually not, then it will not have been a waste of time. If you follow sir.'
'Yes sir.'
'I think there was some business about a land deal, but I doubt that would be relevant.'
'No sir, it will all be completely off record.'
'Yes sir I will.'
'Thank you sir.'
He put the phone down. 'He'll make some calls,' he said, 'it will be arranged.'
'Do we know which jail?' asked Mr Cholderton.
Weatherby looked at me. 'I don't know,' I said, 'somewhere in Scotland I think.'
'Better call in a helicopter,' said Cholderton.
