Suddenly, all over the house—all over the country—the music stopped. Midnight struck. Those who were still conscious laughed and wept and kissed and hugged with more than their customary exuberance: it was, after all, the Second Millennium, and mere survival was something worth celebrating. The unsteady throng carolled Auld Lang Syne, a ballad written expressly to be sung by inebriates. Some revellers removed masks, others removed clothing (not necessarily their own). One hapless youth threw up over the balustrade of the gallery, in the misguided belief that he was vomiting into the moat. There was no moat. In the dining hall, a beauty with long black hair in a trailing gown of tattered chiffon refused to unmask, telling her light-hearted molester: ‘I am Morgause, queen of air and darkness. Who are you to look upon the unknown enchantment of my face?’
‘More—gauze?’ hazarded her admirer, touching the chiffon.
‘Sister of Morgan Le Fay,’ said a celebrated literary critic, thinly disguised under the scaly features and curling horns of a low-grade demon. ‘Mother—according to some—of the traitor Mordred. I think the lady has been reading T.H. White.’
‘Who was he?’ asked a tall blonde in a leather corselette with short spiked hair and long spiked heels. Behind a mask of scarlet feathers her eyes gleamed black. She did not listen to the answer; instead, her lips moved on words that the demon critic could not quite hear.
After a brief tussle, Morgause had lost her visor and a couple of hair-pieces, revealing a flushed Dana Walgrim, daughter of their host. She lunged at her molester, stumbled over her dress, and crashed to the floor: they heard the thud of her head hitting the parquet. There was a minute when the conversation stopped and all that could be heard was the invasive pounding of the music. Then people rushed forward and did the things people usually do under the circumstances: ‘Lift her head—No, don’t move her—She’s not badly hurt—There’s no blood—Give her air—Get some water—Give her brandy—She’ll come round.’ She did not come round. Someone went to look for her brother, someone else called an ambulance. ‘No point,’ said Lucas Walgrim, arriving on the scene with the slightly blank expression of a person who has gone from very drunk to very sober in a matter of seconds. ‘We’ll take her ourselves. My car’s on the drive.’
‘You’ll lose your licence,’ said a nervous pirate.
‘I’ll be careful.’
He scooped Dana into his arms; helpful hands supported her head and hitched up the long folds of her dress. As they went out the literary critic turned back to the spike-haired blonde. ‘Drugs,’ he opined. ‘And they only let her out of the Priory three months ago.’
But the blonde had vanished.
In a small room some distance from the action, Kaspar Walgrim was oblivious to his daughter’s misfortune. One or two people had gone to search for him, thinking that news of the accident might be of interest although father and child were barely on speaking terms, but without success. The room was reached through the back of a wardrobe in the main bedchamber, the yielding panels revealing, not a secret country of snow and magic, but an office equipped by a previous owner, with an obsolete computer on the desk and books jacketed thickly in dust. Beside the computer lay a pristine sheet of paper headed Tenancy Agreement. Words wrote themselves in strangely spiky italics across the page. Kaspar Walgrim was not watching. His flannel-grey eyes had misted over like a windscreen in cold weather. He was handsome in a chilly, bankeresque fashion with an adamantine jaw and a mouth like the slit in a money-box, but his present rigidity of expression was unnatural, the stony blankness of a zombie. The angled desk-lamp illumined his face from below, underwriting browbone and cheekbone and cupping his eyes in pouches of light. A glass stood at his hand filled with a red liquid that was not wine. Behind him, a solitary voice dripped words into his ears as smoothly as honey from a spoon. A hand crept along his shoulder, with supple fingers and nails like silver claws. ‘I like this place,’ said the voice. ‘It will suit me. You will be happy to rent it to me…for nothing. For gratitude. For succour. Per siéquor. Escri né luthor. You will be happy…’
‘I will be happy.’
‘It is well. You will remember how I healed your spirit, in gratitude, as in a dream, a vision. You will remember sensation, pleasure, peace.’ The hand slid down across his chest; the man gave a deep groan which might have been ecstasy. ‘Do you remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘Finish your drink.’
Kaspar Walgrim drank. The liquid in his glass held the light as if it were trapped there.
The spiked blonde hair was screwed into a ball on the desk. The knife-blade heels prowled to and fro, stabbing the floorboards. The bird-mask seemed to blend with the face of its wearer, transforming her into some exotic raptor, inhuman and predatory.
When he was told, Kaspar Walgrim signed the paper.
The year was barely an hour old when a minicab pulled up outside a house in Pimlico. This was smart Pimlico, the part that likes to pretend it is Belgravia: the house was cream-coloured Georgian in a square of the same, surrounding a garden which fenced off would-be trespassers with genteel railings. Two young women got out of the taxi, fumbling for their respective wallets. One found hers and paid the fare; the other scattered the contents of her handbag on the pavement and bent down to retrieve them, snatching at a stray tampon. The girl who paid was slender and not very tall, perhaps five foot five: the streetlamp glowed on the auburn lowlights in her short designer haircut. Her coat hung open to reveal a minimalist figure, grey-chiffoned and silver-frosted for the occasion. Her features might have been described as elfin if it had not been for a glossy coating of makeup and an immaculate veneer of self-assurance. She looked exquisitely groomed, successful, competent—she had booked the taxi, one of the few available, three months in advance and had negotiated both fare and tip at the time. Her name was Fern Capel.
She was a witch.
Her companion gave up on the tampon, which had rolled into the gutter, collected her other belongings, and straightened up. She had a lot of heavy dark hair which had started the evening piled on her head but was now beginning to escape from bondage, a wayward wrap and a dress patterned in sequinned flowers which was slightly the wrong shape for the body inside. Her face was in a state of nature save for a little blusher and some lipstick, most of which had been smudged off. For all that she had an elusive attraction which her friend lacked, an air of warmth and vulnerability. The deepset eyes were soft behind concealing lashes and the faintly tragic mouth suggested a temperament too often prone to both sympathy and empathy. In fact, Gaynor Mobberley was not long out of her latest disastrous relationship, this time with a neurotic flautist who had trashed her flat when she attempted to end the affair. She had been staying with Fern ever since.
They went indoors and up the stairs to the first floor apartment. ‘It was a good party,’ Gaynor hazarded, extricating the few remaining pins and an overburdened butterfly-clip from her hair.
‘No it wasn’t,’ said Fern. ‘It was dire. The food was quiche and the champagne was Blank de Blank. We only went for the view of the fireworks. Like all the other guests. What were you discussing so intimately with our host?’
‘He and Vanessa are having problems,’ said Gaynor unhappily. ‘He wants to buy me lunch and tell me all about it.’
‘You