Of all the magic spells someone can learn - of all the tricks and enchantments - there is none as sought-after as immortality. To some, it is the brass ring of magical practice. The end goal of a lifetime of dedication to arcane study. We all blame Merlin for that.
Ever since that guy set unrealistic expectations, others have tried desperately to emulate his success. Life-extension spells are typically among the first that practitioners try after spotting their earliest grey hair or unexpected crow’s foot. Sometimes they work.
Each practitioner has an internal pool of energy used to power their spells. The most common spells that extend life do so by taking energy from that pool, so you find yourself unable to cast spells without instantly dropping dead of old age. Or worse; the pool simply drains away in the background without you noticing, and you drop dead as a withered corpse that even your family wouldn’t recognise.
But sometime in the 1930s, a young Korean practitioner from a mountain village near the border with China hit upon the Magic Formula of magic formulae. He turned his inner well of power into a fountain of youth. For the next sixty years, he didn’t age a single day and, if you believe the rumours, actually got younger until he was in the prime of his life, indefinitely.
He’d probably still be alive today if he hadn’t held the conference.
I spent the night at my flat, catching Sam up with recent events and getting some much-needed sleep. The following morning, we grabbed an early breakfast of croissants and coffees and took another slow walk through the city.
“So you’re in the doghouse with your department for ignoring instructions,” she asked, around a mouthful of pastry as we stopped near the entrance of the park, “and your intent is to ignore further instructions and run down a cold case? Just so we’re clear?”
“Looks that way, yeah,” I said.
“Well, when you end up fired, the CAB is hiring.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“You do have a masters in forensic accounting, right?”
“Not a masters, no.”
“Oh, well, never mind then. Maybe McDonalds will take you.”
“It’s Burger King for me or nothing.” I kissed her on the cheek then said, “But I have to run before I’m actually fired. That data won’t entry itself.”
I did actually run to the Department then, aiming to get there before the rest of Archives showed up at 9am. I bypassed Records and went straight down to Materials.
In addition to the vault and a few testing rooms, there was a large climate-controlled room for long-term storage of files and physical material from crime scenes.
Kathy Quinn’s murder was a long time ago - well past the usual retention limit - but she was ‘one of us’ and her case had never been closed, so the usual rules wouldn’t apply. I found her case file on a low shelf. It was a squat cardboard box sealed with red tape. Sitting on top of it was a brown paper bag, wrapped around several times with the same tape. Someone had written the same case number on the side of the box and the bag.
By 9am, I was back at my desk in Records with the box and bag tucked away at my feet. I transcribed overtime timesheets for the morning then grabbed both and took them outside to the smoking bench for my lunch.
I wolfed down my sandwich then turned my attention to the box. Inside were the full case files from her murder investigation. I decided to check them more thoroughly later, and unsealed the bag. It contained a plastic raincoat, a small plastic cylinder, and a large faux-leather handbag. A paper tag tucked away at the bottom of the bag indicated that this was the contents of her office locker when it had been opened after her death.
I examined the cylinder carefully. It was almost perfectly smooth, but I found an indentation near one end that felt like it was activated by a thumb. I pointed the cylinder towards a wall and gingerly pressed it. With a loud whip and a thump sound, a hemispherical umbrella extended and popped into place. I let out my held breath and cursed the contraption a few times. I pressed the button again, and watched as the umbrella shrunk and withdrew back into the handle. It was definitely magical and not just clever engineering.
The handbag was stuffed. I still don’t know how some women do it. I’d have a hernia carrying this thing to work every day. On top of everything else was a plastic tobacco pouch, the logos on it long faded, held closed with a tiny piece of tape. I opened it and the smell of old stale leaves nearly knocked me off the bench. Nestled in among the brown mulch were a half-dozen hand-rolled cigarettes with cardboard roaches instead of filters. I rolled them back up in the pouch and dived deeper into the handbag.
There was no purse - she presumably would have taken that home instead of leaving it in her locker - but there was a leatherbound notebook with a bookies’ pencil tucked inside the front cover. It was a year planner for 1993, with haphazard notes on every page. The first few pages were an address book, filled with the same maddening handwriting. I thumbed through it, hoping to recognise a few names. There were a few names familiar from either old case files or local legend, and a few more names I recognised as still being active in the community. On the final page of the address book were three entries written in black ink instead of pencil.
Chloe: +353 908 9144
Charles: +353 81 848 849
Cody: +353 38 186 162
I flicked back to the other entries but could find no other mention of those names, or any reason why these three would warrant their own page and the permanent ink treatment.
Back to the handbag where I unearthed a pair of large designer sunglasses wrapped in a silk scarf and a pair of light cotton gloves. The very lowest stratum was a stack of puzzle books. Most were crosswords, though there were some logic grid puzzles in there too, as well as two books that were entirely in Japanese and which seemed to be early sudoku puzzles. Every puzzle in every book was completed.
I stacked them on the tree-root next to me and patted the empty handbag thoroughly, looking for hidden pockets. This was something the Scene Team would have done twenty-nine years earlier, but it never hurt to double-check. The patdown provided no results.
I packed everything back the way it was, except for the address book and diary which I shoved into my back pocket.
I returned to my assigned desk and task after lunch. When June and Sarah returned I continued typing diligently for a while as I tried to find a way to bring Kathy Quinn into casual conversation.
"Did someone called Cody ever work here?" was the best I could come up with after forty minutes.
June and Sarah considered my question.
"I don't think so," said June after a moment.
"I don't think I've ever met a Cody," added Sarah.
"There's one in Deejay's class," said June. Deejay was her eldest grandson and was a total angel or an absolute terror, depending on the day. "It's a very American name. You don't meet many," she added.
"This would have been early to mid nineties. Found a note in an old file and I was wondering if it was an employee."
"Oh, then definitely not," said June. "I'd remember that. What file was it?"
"Oh, an old case file I was reading a while ago. From Kathy Quinn, if you remember her."
Sarah sniffed dismissively as June said, "Oh, her. Yeah, that was very sad. Killed in her garden."
"What was she like?" I asked, watching Sarah out of the corner of my eye.
Sarah made one of those I shouldn't speak ill of the dead expressions before volunteering, "She was very pretty," she said. Then added, "Always fashionable with designer tops and shopping trips abroad," in a voice that screamed 'notions'.
"Still," I said, "She was the Department Wizard in her thirties. And only the third or fourth woman to get the job. She must have had a head on her shoulders."
"She was clever," said June. "And she loved puzzles. We used to get all the papers delivered here every morning. She'd have the crosswords done before lunch."
I shook my head and said, "Shame about her death. Steve Mulligan was the chief investigator back then, right? I heard he was good. Surprised he never closed the case."
The two ladies had worked here almost forty years, and they preserved their sanity by drawing a thick line between the work of the Department and the duties of their office, so I wasn't surprised when Sarah just said, "I wouldn't know about that," and resumed her typing.
I didn't go home at 5pm, but took the evidence box through the Midnight Door. When I arrived, I could see a long jetty extending from the road, over the beach, and out beyond the breakers where Ronnie Watts' boat was moored alongside a sleeker sport fishing boat.
The jetty was old and its wooden planks long weathered by exposure to the elements, but it had definitely not been there the previous night. The circle of wizards had grown further too, surrounding either a large campfire or small bonfire in the leeward side of the pier.
As I approached, I dropped the box on the sand, swept a hand towards the long jetty, and barked, "Who the hell conjured this?"
The group fell silent for a moment before a newcomer I didn't recognise said, "I don't know. It just a… piered."
It was a terrible joke, but it got a massive reaction from the crowd.
I rounded on the newcomer, still angry. "Is that your boat?"
He was young and sported a short ponytail. He had one of those goatees where the moustache had been grown out beyond the length of the beard. He stroked the moustache and said, "Yes, but the pier was here when I arrived."
I'd been around wizards long enough to smell a lie of omission. "Was it here before you arrived?" I asked.
"I reserve my right not to answer any questions without counsel present," he said, to another round of laughter. "But I can glamour it so regular folk don't see it, if you really want me to," he added.
"I'm more concerned with the fact that you conjured a pier connecting the land," and I pointed one way, "with the ocean," and pointed the other, "which is essentially a bridge between two different realms, right next to an area that is already undergoing an incursion. I'm not a fucking wizard, but that strikes me as a dumbass thing to do."
He stood suddenly, and a worried look rushed over his face. "I- I didn't- it's an enchantment on the boat," he said. "Should I remove it?"
The others had also stood now, and some of them walked towards the incursion, craning their necks and checking for disturbances to the sand.
"Please don't," I said. "Yanking the knife out again can be just as unwise and jabbing it in. Cormac, get McGinnis and run a full survey. Compare what you find now to the last measurements taken before this thing appeared."
Cormac nodded and made a move towards the incursion before returning to me and whispering, "Do you think making the Midnight Door was a dangerous thing to do?"
Fuck. "Well, I do now." The gathering had well and truly broken up, so I stood on an upturned log that someone had been using for a seat and waved my hands to get everyone's attention. "No more portals!" I yelled. "No doorways or travelling circles or or or wormholes or any of that nonsense. If you've already opened any, leave them open, but do not use them!"
I hopped down onto the sand again and gestured towards the ponytail, who was jogging down the dock to his boat. "Who's the newcomer?"
"Darren Oakwood," Cormac said. "Been working out of Galway the last few years."
"I've heard the name, but hadn't put a face to it," I said. "Is he any good?"
"Very. I've been emailing him about Martin's Curse and he's had some really interesting ideas. He actually managed to cleanse a carriage on the Galway to Limerick Junction line. He even rode in it a few times with no ill effects."
I saw McGinnis emerge from the tent containing our Midnight Door, carrying his measuring equipment. I waved and started towards him with Cormac in tow. "The cleansing was permanent?" I asked.
"Eh. Sort of," he said as he made one of those 'sort of' gestures. "The carriage was fine, until they uncoupled another from the train. The minute they did, everything reset. And it didn't seem to affect the lines it ran over." He kicked at the ground, sending an arc of sand into the air. "But it was a good first step."
"Well, tell him no hard feelings for the dock. And to speak up if he has any ideas about this whole sinkhole situation."
We rendezvoused with McGinnis and showed him the dock.
He had a few choice words to say about it, but then he and Cormac began mapping the perimeter of the sinkhole along with the cluster of practitioners. The party atmosphere had died for the evening, it seemed.
I returned to the box of evidence and took it to the Gradys' van. Inside, Caroline was busy in the kitchenette, slicing pastry into thin squares.
"Permission to come aboard?" I asked from the doorway.
"Oh, Vic, yes. Park yourself," she said, gesturing towards the sofas with a flour-covered hand. "I'm making filo."
I had no idea what filo was, but I sat. "I'm wondering if you have a space I can borrow," I said, tapping the box. "I need to go through this properly, outside of the department."
"Of course. You can take it upstairs," she said.
"Upstairs?"
She moved to a narrow door that I had assumed concealed a closet and shower and elbowed it open to reveal a tight curved staircase; the type you would see on a double-decker bus.
"You read the laws of physics and just decided to ignore them, didn't you?" I asked.
"I read about them," she said.
Upstairs was a small salon with some more sofas arranged around a rectangular table. Panoramic windows offered a second-storey view out onto the beach and surrounding area. I wondered briefly what someone standing outside would see if I threw something through the glass. It was probably an experiment best saved for another time. I got to work on the case file instead.
Steve Mulligan had been pretty thorough, but it was clear he had been working with limited resources. He had pinpointed Quinn's trips abroad in the year before she died. Two visits to London and three to Italy. There was no mention of her visit to Seoul, but I could not tell if that was because it was before the window of time he had been checking, or if it was because she had covered her tracks well.
The London trips were later in 1992. The first was apparently to see a play and visit her cousin. The second was a department-sponsored trip to attend a briefing at the London OHMSI about travellers from the former Eastern Bloc and their magical practices.
The Italy trips were the following year; in 1993. Trips to Milan in January and March, and one to Rome in July. The Rome trip was just days before her death. Mulligan had less information about these visits. His hand-written notes said simply, "Holiday? Family? Lover?"
Things had been very different in the days before email, I suppose. If you wanted information from Italian police, it would have involved an awkward phone call with lots of pausing-for-translation. Italy has no equivalent of the OSI and even today our links with INTERPOL are all under-the-table or via third-parties. Mulligan would have been effectively stonewalled in investigating Quinn's activities while abroad, especially as her death happened after her return to Irish soil.
Her financial statements provided more interesting reading. Mulligan had filled a three-ring binder with photocopies of her bank and credit card statements. He'd circled unusual transactions with different-coloured pens. There was some system at play here, but I suspected he took the key to understanding it to his grave.
I generally dislike coincidences but was never so happy to hear a familiar voice call out, "knock knock!" from the stairwell at that moment. I stood and peered down it to see Sam's face smiling up at me.
"The hell are you doing here?" I asked in pleasant shock.
"Cormac said there was a beach party," she said, climbing the stairs. "He said it'd be a nice way for me to meet some folks from your world."
I kissed her and asked, "How long have you and Cormac been social?"
"You were missing for a month, Vic. Your friends rallied."
"And did he also mention that the beach may spiral through a tear in reality any moment?"
"He did," she said. "He also said that you can't use your magic door thing any more so you'll be stuck here for the foreseeable. So if the world is going to end, I'm taking tomorrow off work for a long weekend by the beach with my boyfriend." She dropped the small bag she was carrying and took off her coat. "What are you doing?"
"I'm analysing financial statements for signs of fraud or other criminal activity."
"You're kidding."
"Nope. Fancy some," I made one of those gestures, "inter-agency co-operation?"
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