Death And The Art Of Pyramid Selling

by Rossi

Chapter Two: Happy Families.

***

The address Phil had given Constantine was far from a haunted manor. It (and following his nose) led him to a small stone cottage, roofed with grey slate and with low, wide windows overlooking another of the cottage gardens endemic to the area. It had roses growing over the door, for fuck's sake.

"Christ, mate, you're living in a bloody Beatrix Potter book," he said as the door was opened to his knock, but his grin slipped as he took in the state of the former Detective Sergeant. "Bloody hell, Phil, what have they done to you?"

***

It was hard to watch Phil's hands, trembling slightly, lifting the teacup to his lips.

"Sugar for you, dear?" asked Marjorie, teaspoon hovering. On a deep, almost-subconscious level, she worried Constantine - she reminded him of various well-meaning but catastrophically interfering female relatives who had clustered around his sister and himself after their mother died. Cheryl had sent them packing, right enough - in her way, she was cut from the same cloth, and would brook no interference - but not before many an agonising afternoon tea at this aunt's or that second cousin's.

"Um yeah. Thanks," he said, hands awkward on the fine china as she passed the cup to him.

"So nice of you to visit. Phillip doesn't see many of his old friends, and I worry about him sometimes. He needs a hobby." Constantine barely restrained his snort and she continued, not noticing. "So, what brings you to Yorkshire, Mr Constantine?"

"Call me John." He glanced across at Phil and read the message in his eyes - whatever the reason for Constantine's summoning, it wasn't to be discussed in front of the wife, and she wasn't about to let them break up the happy little tea party and slope off to the local. Escape plans needed to be put into action. "Ah, mind if I smoke?"

Marjorie's mouth thinned disapprovingly. "I'd prefer if you didn't inside. The smell. It seeps into the carpets. I was so pleased when Phillip gave up at last."

"How about I take him into the garden?" Phil offered gruffly. He levered himself out of the floral print armchair so slowly it was painful for Constantine to watch - all the energy seemed to have been leeched from the man. He'd never thought Phil would take well to retirement - too much the man of action, was Phil Kingston - but the reality was worse than his imaginings. Phil was an old man. Still, as he led Constantine through the small cottage, which was tastefully decorated in a country cottage sense, and into the back garden, his stride retained echoes of the old policeman's walk. Detective Sergeant Kingston wasn't dead then. Only resting.

The air was as clear and crisp and cold as an Australian beer, catching the back of Constantine's throat and making him cough. Phil looked on at his spluttering with a hint of wry amusement.

"I always figured you'd be allergic to fresh air," he remarked dryly.

Constantine snorted and put a cigarette to his lips, cupping his hands around his lighter to shield the small yellow flame from the biting wind. "So, besides providin' you with amusement, what am I doing here?"

Phil's face went bleak as he looked out over the small garden to the rocky hills beyond. Autumn roses bloomed in the deepening dusk, but the rest of the garden beds were bare, small evenly-spaced gravesites of turned earth.

"Got a job for you, John." Phil's voice came from his chest thin and reedy, an old man's voice. "Got something that's too big for me."

"Strange, I thought you were retired. Gold watch, big piss-up, telling your super to shove it up his arse, the works."

"This isn't work. It's personal. Family." Phil pulled a folded section of newspaper out of his pants packet and passed it to the Londoner. "Here."

'Local Tragedy at Railway Bridge,' read the headline. The clipping was slightly yellowed, frayed at the edges and where it had been folded. There was a date in one of the margins in Phil's meticulous handwriting, making the article eight months old. The story itself was short, tactfully discreet, but it wasn't hard to read behind the lines. Local widow, mother of two, killed beneath a train. No suspicious circumstances.

"It's a suicide mate." Constantine raised his eyebrows at Phil over the paper. "Hardly a smoking gun here, unless you've got something more."

"My daughter in law." Phil's voice was tightly controlled, stony as the granite that lurked scant metres beneath the black soil of this landscape. "My son's wife."

Constantine recalled something he'd heard in passing, about Phil's son being a soldier killed during active duty in Ireland - those who had known Phil before that time had said the man had turned to stone at the news, become rock-hard and refused to let anything crack him. Until now, anyway - Constantine was disturbed on a fundamental level to see tears standing in those cold eyes. Not since Raguel had he seen Phil so shaken.

"She was murdered."

"Phil, mate, I can understand you're hurt by this, but come on. This report says she was just sitting there on the tracks."

"No way would Chrissie do that. No fucking way." The tone was quiet but the vehemence was undeniable. "She was _murdered_. And I know who by."

"You do? Great. Take it to the boys in blue and let them do their thing." Constantine took another deep drag of his cigarette to counter the cleanness of the air.

"I _can't_." Phil took a deep shuddering breath, closing his eyes for a second. "John, I need you on this. Do you think I would ask you if I didn't?" When Constantine remained silent, he elaborated. "There's magic here, John, I'm sure of it. Your type o' thing."

For a long moment, all that could be heard was the wind rattling through the small garden. Neither had to speak to know the phrase was echoing in both their memories.

"Interesting choice o' words, mate. You remember how things turned out last time you called me in to help you out. Think you can handle the body count this time?"

Phil's face turned grey, and the tremble returned to his lips. He turned his eyes to the distant hills, visibly struggling to control himself. "Bastard," he said, his voice quiet but intense with feeling. Conscience, unfamiliar but still carrying a sting, pricked at Constantine. Raguel's death hadn't been Phil's fault, even though his hands had wielded the railway spike. The kid had been doomed from the moment of his conception.

"Phil, I'm sorry, that was out of line."

"Fuck off, John. I mean it." Phil turned on his old friend with venom. "You think I'm senile? Fine. Piss off back to bloody London then. Read about my untimely demise in the papers. 'Cause that's just like you, isn't it John? You and your damnable luck keeping you safe, keeping you untouched. Not like the rest of us." Constantine opened his mouth to argue, but Phil ploughed on, drowning his protests out. "Oh, I know all about your tragic history, the friends you've buried, but you want to know something? They're dead because o' you, because you used them to get what you wanted. Cannon fodder. An' you just go merrily on your way, because you're John Bloody Constantine, the Bastard, an' nothing and no-one ever touches you. You just don't give a rat's." Shaking slightly with the strength of his diatribe, Phil gestured at the door. "I'll see you out. There's a train in another hour. Best you be on it."

Constantine took one last long draw at the cigarette in his mouth, blew out a great cloud of blue-grey smoke that was taken and shredded by the wind. Dropped the butt on the fake-brick patio and ground it out deliberately under his heel.

"It's been a pleasure seeing you, _mate_," he said, and led the way back through the cottage to the front door.

"Oh, are you leaving already? You only just arrived!" Marjorie fluttered, rising from the chintz-printed couch as Constantine shrugged into the tan trench-coat that was his second skin.

"John has urgent business in London, don't you, John?" Something in Phil's tone pulled his wife up short, polite concern rapidly switching to suspicion. "Can't be helped."

"Yeah, something like that. Nice to meet you, missus." Constantine looked at the retired copper as he opened the door. "Phil." Volumes were contained in that one word, but before either could say anything further, the front gate creaked and a small blue-coated blur shot past Constantine to wrap itself around Phil's legs.

"Grandad!"

"I'll be off then," Constantine told Phil, and turned to head down the path. He almost collided with the another small shape, this one clad in a red anorack, topped by red hair. She looked up at him with large dark eyes, and she _knew_ him, knew what he was. Constantine shivered despite himself, and blamed it on the chilly Yorkshire wind.

"Out of me way, kid," he said gruffly, but not unkindly. Not with Phil behind him, watching his every move like an elderly guard dog.

She smiled then. "You can't go yet," she said. "You haven't done what you came to do."

"Enough, Alice," Phil said from the doorway. "Mr Constantine can't stay." The other little girl in blue had already gone inside - her piping voice could be heard chattering to Marjorie - and he nodded at the older girl in red. "My grand-daughters. Chrissie and Paul's kids. Me and the wife have got custody, since."

"Since Mummy was killed." Alice looked up at Constantine again. "And you're going to stop the person who did it, aren't you?"

"Cheap shot, Phil, setting your grandkid up like this," Constantine told the other man bitterly. He directed his glance down to Alice, who was still standing in his way, a muscle working along the length of his jaw. "An' guess what? It didn't work. I'm out of here."

"But." Alice frowned.

"No buts, kid. I'm not your knight in shining armour. Or even your magician in ratty trench coat. I'm a bloke who's going to be on his way back to London by means of the next train out of this dump, and I plan to be rescuing pints from imprisonment in a pub by your bedtime." Gently, but firmly, he shifted her out of the way. "An' a word of advice - no more magic. Unless you want to end up like your mum, no more DIY protective charms, right? Your grandad should know better than to let you fool around with that stuff."

Phil's expression became concerned. "Alice? What have you been up to? You haven't been doing that stuff again, after what I said?"

The eldritch mask slipped, revealing a child caught out in disobedience. "But it was only a _little_ spell, Grandad, and Auntie showed me how."

Constantine took advantage of the distraction to slip away, walking briskly back the way he had come to the station. As he walked, he thought about what Phil had said, what he had asked. "Poor old bugger's lost it," he muttered to himself. "Seeing shadows that aren't there." It wouldn't be the first time his world had proved too much for someone's sanity, and to be fair, Phil had taken the Raguel business hard, and then with the death of his daughter-in-law and having to look after the two sprongs. "Be enough to send anyone around the bend," he decided as he reached the small station. He'd forgive him the stuff he'd said, eventually. Phil probably didn't mean it, and even if he did, a lot of it was true.

The timetable pinned to the wall informed him in neat, official script that the next train back to London wasn't until the next morning. Constantine's forgiving mood withered as he muttered curses under his breath about Phil Kingston's senility dragging him into the wilds of nowhere on a wild goose chase. He looked around, at a loss, until he caught sight of the sign swinging in the increasing breeze at the front of a homey-looking building across the road. "The Drover's Arms", it read, and the name made promises of pints of home-brewed ale, some bland if filling foodstuff, and a lumpy bed in a damp-ish guest room.

"Any port in a storm," Constantine muttered to himself, and crossed the narrow cobbled street.

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