The Dark Detective: Venator (The Max Darke Files)

  As with many police officers, there were days when Max felt his work went unnoticed and his talents unrecognised, but it turned out that someone had been watching him – very closely.

  Max had been working the beat, excited to be assigned to Soho and based at Scotland Yard. He and his partner, Larry Newberry, had been dealing with a particularly brutal and unpleasant murder, just off Greek Street. It was thanks to Max’s keen instincts that the perpetrator had been found, tried, and imprisoned for life. Most of the other police said it was ‘luck’, or his ‘copper’s nose’, and other such fanciful ideas.

  Kennet had sat next to Max in the pub whilst the beat officers and CID team celebrated in style. Max had seen the old guy around Scotland Yard but didn’t know which Division he’d worked.

  “Well done with that case, lad,” he’d said.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Max. “We just got a lucky break.”

  “I don’t believe in luck,” said Kennet.

  He stared at Max, making him feel uneasy.

  “Do you know why you solved this case so quickly?” said Kennet.

  Max shrugged. “The crime scene didn’t add up – it just didn’t feel right, so we kept digging and we found some evidence that led us to him.”

  Although Max had included Larry in the official reports, in truth, the older officer had spent most of the evening vomiting in a corner.

  Kennet nodded slowly, a thin smile stretching across his lined face. Max wondered why the old guy hadn’t retired yet – he certainly looked like he was old enough.

  “You can tell yourself that if you like,” said Kennet. “Luck is a good thing for a policeman to have. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

  He stared at Max, the smile vanishing.

  “You can smell evil,” he said.

  Max laughed. “Whatever you say!”

  “I’m serious,” said Kennet. “Evil has its own particular odour. Very few people can recognise it. You’re special, lad. You’ve got the nose.”

  Max was beginning to get bored of this weird, old guy. He was here to celebrate with his mates, not listen to a lecture from some has-been detective, reliving his glory days by hanging out with Max’s squad. But as the man was a Chief Inspector, Max couldn’t exactly tell him where to go and how to get there.

  “You probably think I’m full of it,” said Kennet unexpectedly.

  Max had the odd sensation that the old man had read his mind.

  “Not at all, sir,” he said formally, wishing he could get back to the party.

  “I was like you once,” said Kennet. “Young, cocky, so sure of my place in the world. I know different now. I’m offering you a job, lad, with my Division. You’ll be a DC.”

  Max’s eyes widened with surprise. It sounded like the old guy was serious.

  “The hours are long,” continued Kennet, “the pay is abysmal but I promise you now, it’s like nothing you’ve ever done before; it’s like nothing on Earth.”

  Max was almost interested.

  “Okay – I’m listening.”

  Kennet smiled and pushed his chair away from the table.

  “Follow me, lad,” he said.

  Ok, now this was a bit weird. Max was unwilling to leave what looked like a promising party, but the old man was insistent – and a senior officer. And he’d just offered Max a job in CID – unheard of for a rookie plod just six months into the game and still a few months from his nineteenth birthday.

  Reluctantly, Max followed him.

  “Are you religious, lad?” said Kennet as they left the pub.

  Max shook his head impatiently, both at the question and at being called ‘lad’.

  “I believe that people can be evil,” he said shrugging. “What about you?”

  The old man smiled again but didn’t reply.

  Max was feeling irritated, and the cryptic conversation wasn’t improving his mood.

  Kennet was silent now and Max followed him, feeling royally fed up. He wondered how long his mates would stay at the pub before they headed for a club.

  His thoughts were drawn back to Kennet: he had expected that the old man would lead him back to Scotland Yard, but instead he turned and wove his way through a series of increasingly narrow lanes until they found themselves outside a derelict warehouse that backed onto the Thames.

  “What are we doing here?” said Max.

  “I thought you’d like to have one last look at the prisoner before he’s... sent down,” said Kennet.

  Max frowned but followed the old man inside. It was quite possible the old boy had completely lost it after all his years on the Force. Wasn’t it time somebody retired him?

  The old man removed a surprisingly shiny looking key from his pocket. If Max hadn’t known better he would have said it was made of silver. But that didn’t make any sense: no-one, except possibly HRH the Queen, had locks and keys made from silver.

  The warehouse was empty, and Max was beginning to think about risking the consequences of heading back to the party, when the old man opened a door that had been disguised as a packing case. A pair of lift doors slid smartly open in front of them: the high-tech cubicle didn’t go with the derelict state of the building at all.

  Max’s surprised expression was reflected in the shiny doors. The old man stepped inside and Max followed warily. There were no buttons in the lift but as soon as Kennet said, “Basement,” the lift shot downwards, forcing Max to put his hand out to steady himself.

  “Where… where are we?” he said.

  “It’s a holding facility,” said Kennet. “You won’t have heard about it before, but it’s where we send some of the worst offenders. The murderer you caught is here – and others like him. I thought you’d like to say ‘goodbye’. He’ll get a good send off.”

  Kennet smiled again but this time there was a fierce quality to his expression, at odds with his general world-weary expression.

  The lift doors opened and Max could tell that they were a long way underground. For a start, the air was unbearably hot and for another, he couldn’t hear the rumble of the Underground trains that were a constant background noise when you lived in London.

  “This place is weird,” he said in a voice that was barely louder than a whisper.

  Kennet led him through a warren of rooms, antechambers and winding corridors. Finally they arrived at a glass door. Beyond the door, Max could see the murderer that he’d successfully caught and seen convicted. Max was embarrassed to see that the man was naked.

  “What’s going on?” he said. “Why’s he here? Why isn’t he in prison?”

  “All good questions,” said Kennet, “and ones that deserve an answer. But I thought I’d show you rather than tell you.”

  Max felt the hairs rise on his arm. This was definitely not right.

  Kennet spoke to the prisoner. “Hello, Claude. Time for you to be repatriated, I think.”

  The prisoner turned his bored eyes towards them.

  “Chief Inspector, do we really have to go through this charade?” he said, his voice deep and well-educated.

  “Think of it as a learning opportunity,” said the old man, mildly. “And a reminder not to murder innocent people.”

  Kennet walked up to the man he had addressed as ‘Claude’. The murderer was considerably larger and heavier than the frail looking Chief Inspector.

  Max took a step into the room in case the murderer tried anything.

  But Kennet moved surprisingly quickly for an old guy, suddenly lashing out at the prisoner. Max was appalled to see the old man had thrust a small, silver knife into the man’s chest.

  “No!” he yelled, running forward, but Kennet held him back.

  Max was a policeman who believed in justice: this wasn’t it.

  To his surprise, the prisoner didn’t scream or thrash about, he just looked annoyed.

  “Oh, if you insist!” he said.

  Max stared with disbelieving eyes as the skin slowly peeled from the murderer’s bod
y, leaving an iridescent purple monster exposed to view.

  “What the...?”

  Max was too shocked to finish his sentence.

  “He’s a demon,” said Kennet, his tone without emotion. “A Level Two demon in actual fact, but I’ll explain the details later.”

  He turned his pale, blue eyes on Max.

  “Evil exists in this world, PC Darke. Demons are real and living amongst us, peaceably, for the most part, but every now and then one goes native and then it’s up to me – and I hope you – to put them away.”

  Max thought he was going to faint. Perhaps somebody had put some hallucinogenic drugs in his beer. This couldn’t be real! Could it?

  Kennet smiled, a gleam of fervour enlivening his lined face.

  “I want you on my team, Max. I want you to join me in the Yard’s Demon Division. We’d manage the demon population – and hunt down the renegades. Of course, you’d be made up to a Detective.”

  He placed a firm hand on Max’s shaking arm.

  “You’ve got the nose for it – a nose for evil. You’ve got a special gift and I want to help you use it.”

  Max felt like he was between a rock and a hard place: he didn’t want this damned job – but how could he go back to his life knowing that things that hide under your bed at night, the terrors that live in your worst nightmares, that they were all real.

  “What are you going to do with him... it?” said Max.

  “I told you,” said Kennet. “I’m going to have him sent down.”

  The old man muttered a few words, closing his eyes and folding his hands as if praying. Max felt the ground tremble beneath his feet and watched aghast as a crack appeared across the floor. It widened rapidly and huge, purple flames leapt out. The heat was unbearable and Max staggered back. Kennet carried on chanting and the demon began screaming and tearing at his own flesh with long, scimitar-shaped claws.

  Fiery tendrils reached out of the chasm and wrapped their flaming tongues around the beast and dragged the murderer down in the depths of Hell below. A faint smell of burning flesh lingered on the air as the floor shuddered shut.

  And that was how Max had been recruited to the Demon Division of Scotland Yard. His colleagues were simply told that he was on ‘special assignment’. Max had trained under Kennet and had learned much from the old man in the past fourteen months.

  Today Max had come close to getting killed. Even though he had eliminated one nest of Brood already, experience told him that it was unlikely to carry on being that easy. There was bound to be another nest somewhere in the city – the terminated Brood demons had told him as much – and it would be hard work to get rid of the rest of them. For the umpteenth time he wished that Kennet was still there to help him.

  Max knew that the first lot of Brood had been careless and that he had been very lucky. The way this day was going, he felt pretty sure that he couldn’t count on his luck lasting.

  He sighed, remembering Sophie. He was genuinely sorry that he’d had to terminate her. But that was the trouble with demons – you just couldn’t trust them. They didn’t have a sense of what was right and wrong. Spawn today just weren’t what they used to be.

  Home Comforts

  Max finished his coffee and left a handful of change on the table. The waitress smiled and waved as he left. Next time, she told herself.

  He walked back to his office, deep in thought. He turned on his computer but there were no new emails or text messages and his voicemail informed him, “You have no new messages”.

  The smart detective would let his fingers do the walking, Max decided. He looked up the Brood on his demon database. There really hadn’t been any major Brood infestations for several hundred years. In fact the last time they’d been in London had been 1666. Their involvement in the Great Plague and the Fire of London had been hushed up. That happened a lot – in fact, if Max thought about it, that was pretty much his job: to hush things up.

  It was interesting but it didn’t explain why the Brood were back in town now. And had they been telling the truth when they’d said that more were on their way?

  Word of Sophie’s termination had spread rapidly. It would be a while before any Level Twos risked contacting Max again.

  He wondered if it was worth calling Walter J. Caspar, his counterpart in Langley. But it seemed a bit over the top for what was, in all probability, purely a local matter.

  He sighed. This day just wasn’t getting any better.

  “I’m going to have to do things the old fashioned way,” he said.

  He wandered down to the canteen. It was almost empty, just a tired looking pair of Community Service Officers talking in quiet voices over a plate of bacon sandwiches. They ignored Max as he collected a week’s worth of dusty newspapers and carried them back to his office.

  He scrutinised the papers for any unexplained disappearances or mysterious occurrences. Nothing out of the ordinary. Max sighed heavily.

  It was the same on the internet: the demon message boards were quiet and nothing of note had been reported in the forums. Max was at a loss.

  Without any leads to follow up and none of the demon population willing to talk to him, Max was out of answers – well, just about. There was one place he could go and know that he’d be welcome.

  * * * *

  The house was small and neat, located in a quiet street at the end of a long terrace. Old-fashioned net curtains hung at the window. Max watched them twitch as he knocked at the door.

  “Better safe than sorry,” he muttered to himself.

  The door opened and a little old lady with thin, white hair opened the door.

  “Max, dear! What a lovely surprise,” she said. “Come in, come in!”

  “Thanks, Gran,” said Max wearily.

  She fussed around him, tutting over the state of his overcoat and pressing a mug of hot tea into his hands.

  “Dear me!” she said. “That overcoat of yours has seen better days. I don’t think I can repair it anymore. Well, I was saving this until your birthday.”

  She pulled a large carrier bag out from under the stairs.

  “Twenty! I can hardly believe it. How did you get to be so grown up?”

  “Gran!” Max ducked his head in embarrassment.

  She smiled. “But I can see that you need this now.”

  She handed him a soft, heavy parcel, wrapped in blue tissue paper that whispered against her lined hands.

  Max ripped off the paper. Inside lay a bulky package of smooth, black leather. He shook it out to reveal a smart, full-length overcoat.

  “Wow, Gran! This is fantastic! Thank you!”

  He hugged her gently, towering over her, careful not to hurt her bird-like bones.

  “Yes, well,” she said happily, “it should last a bit longer than the last one. Plus I put a few protection spells on it so that should help as well. There’s power in words.”

  “How do you know about protection spells, Gran?” said Max curiously.

  “Oh, really, Maximilian,” she said. “I wasn’t born yesterday!”

  Max laughed.

  “Now, tell me what’s bothering you?” she said.

  Max frowned. “What makes you think there’s something bothering me?”

  “Max, dear, I don’t need to have second sight to know that you’ve come all this way because you’ve got something on your mind. Not that I don’t enjoy a surprise visit...”

  “I don’t like talking about work,” grumbled Max.

  “Nonsense!” said his gran. “Who else are you going to talk to about it? Besides, I heard that some Level Threes are in town.”

  Max was shocked.

  “Who told you that? I mean, how do you know about Level Threes?”

  She smiled thinly.

  “Nobody told me, dear. I listen. I lurk. Who notices a little old lady on the streets? And if they did, they wouldn’t care. You young people are all alike – you think us oldies are useless just because we’re not as nippy on our pins as we u
sed to be, but there’s nothing wrong with my hearing – or my brain.”

  Max smiled. Even grown up detectives have grans who tell them off. And his gran seemed to know more than he could ever have guessed. She’d been holding out on him.

  “So what have you heard, Gran?”

  “The demons are frightened – and I don’t just mean of the Brood. Something’s got them all in a lather. Some of the lower Levels are leaving town. It would have to be a Big Evil to make them do that. Have the PTBs given you any information?”

  Max couldn’t believe he was having this conversation with his gran!

  “No,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Nothing – and they haven’t responded to my messages either.”

  His gran shook her head. “You mustn’t rely on them too much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The PTBs have their own agenda – always have done. So far it’s been to keep the status quo on this side of the Gateway and keep the netherworldlings in order, but if their agenda changed, might they decide not to tell you?”

  “If I can’t trust the PTBs then I’m really up the creek without a paddle,” said Max, feeling worried.

  She patted his knee. “I wouldn’t worry too much: this world was born to have balance.”

  “Yeah, I know – you’ve told me that before: good and evil; light and dark; ying and yang.”

  That was true, but Max had never guessed at the knowledge hidden behind the wise words.

  “But if you’re right about the PTBs, then the world is screw... seriously in trouble.”

  She smiled.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Who do the PTBs answer to?”

  Max shook his head. “I’ve no idea. What makes you think they answer to anyone? They’re the Powers That Be.”

  His gran looked thoughtful.

  “Possibly, but doesn’t it make you wonder? If the PTBs maintain the balance, where does good and evil come from? And if the PTBs keep a demon register, don’t you think maybe they keep checks on the other side, too?”

  Max raised his eyebrows. “You mean... like angels and that stuff?”