Not much in there. They'd take the computer, check that out, but that'd go off to some nerds who knew what to do with a hard drive. Coleridge could barely type with two fingers. He wasn't even sure what a hard drive was, unless it was something to do with porn. Crime scene people would be checking stuff over for fingerprints, checking clothes for fibers, anything that might have been touched.

The cards had been dusted. One set of fingerprints that matched Henry Meakings. Nothing from the killer. But that wasn't what Coleridge was interested in.

He took the evidence bag over to a table with a harsh fluorescent light burning overhead and sat down. The chair groaned but held together beneath his burgeoning mass.

There was a picture of the Queen of Wands on the front. A few examples of other artwork on the back. Universal Tarot printed on the front.

He was slowly becoming an expert on Tarot.

Beth told him the card she'd seen had been Rider-Waite. Same as the Universal Tarot. The most widely used card.

All the murdered mediums had the same pack. Meakings' pack was the only one out on show. In a scrupulously tidy home. One inconsistency.

Inconsistent because he'd used them and not put them away. Like he'd only just used them. Maybe telling someone's fortune?

But then, what? Off to watch some porn with the killer?

Not unless the killer had put him there. But then he'd never bothered setting a scene up before.

Coleridge got it. Meakings had been watching porn. Knock at the door. Pause. Down to see who it was. Someone who could call on a moment's notice, maybe. Finish up, or maybe get the cards out...back upstairs to turn off the PC, killer follows him up...

Could work. Did it matter?

Maybe. Maybe not.

It might be an answer, but it wasn't the answer. Like the porn was a footnote. Something you could skip over when you were reading a book, if you wanted to, and still get the gist of the story.

The cards were part of the story. They weren't a footnote. The more he thought about it, the surer he became.

Coleridge took the cards from the pack and checked them. It didn't mean much to him. But the cards might still be in the order they were dealt. Might mean something to someone who knew. Like a medium.

Coleridge didn't mind not knowing things. That's what he was good at. But then he asked people who did know things, then he knew, too.

Beth Willis would know things.

He sat back and the chair complained loudly, but he didn't hear it. He was listening for footsteps, breathing, conversation.

Nothing.

He slipped the pack back in the evidence bag. He rolled the bag tight around the pack, then put it in his pocket. He walked along the quiet aisles full of dead people's things, people's stolen things, people's dirty secrets, past the desk at the front of the evidence room after signing out.

Darkness had fallen while Coleridge was in the basement. He checked his watch as he stepped out into the night. Time yet. He walked across town toward his favorite restaurant, a little Italian eatery off Tombland Street.

An old drunk sat in a doorway, wrapped up tight. Rush hour traffic was dwindling. Drinking time was beginning.

He stopped in at a courier's he used sometimes, like when he didn't want things going through the office.

"It'll be extra, you want it done tonight," said the guy behind the counter. He had a piercing through his nose, circles of what looked like rubber through his earlobes that left massive holes. He wore a T-shirt with some kind of heavy metal design on the front.

Coleridge could've been an asshole. Kicked up a fuss. Shown his badge.

He figured tonight, in the morning, didn't make much difference.

"Morning'll be fine," he said with a shrug. "Got a pen and paper?"

"There's an office supply store down the road."

There was a limit to patience, though.

He flashed his badge.

"Just give me a pen and a bit of paper, eh?"

The guy didn't look happy about it. He shook his head and reached under the counter.

Coleridge wrote a note. Thought about what he was writing, what he was doing. Decided once and for all that it was worth the risk.

He went to the restaurant and ate mussels, calzone, spaghetti with anchovies and capers and some kind of creamy sauce. Washed it down with coffee.

Then he went home and slept under the pink duvet with flowers on it that his ex-wife had chosen and dreamed a black bird watched him from the window, only it wasn't really a bird. It was something else. Something that frightened him, so he shifted and muttered in his sleep, but when he woke he didn't remember, and his first thought was how much he hated his quilt cover.

Chapter Nine.

Wednesday 12th November The package came after Beth's usual post. She ripped it open and took out a Ziploc bag. There was a pack of cards in the bag, and without even touching them she got a bad feeling.

She didn't often get bad feelings. What was there to be scared of, when you came right down to it? She knew there was life after death. Knew without any doubt whatsoever. Once she might have called it a matter of faith, but now it was just a fact, indisputable. You couldn't dispute it, not when you saw dead people most days you were awake.

She threw the package and envelope on the small table in the hallway where she kept the phone and the keys. There was a letter in the envelope that she held onto.

Dear Mrs. Willis, I've sent you something found at the scene. You know more about these than me, I guess. Let me know if you get something. I'll be by to pick them up in person.

D.I. Coleridge.

Below his signature he'd written down his cell phone number. So she figured he wasn't supposed to be sending out evidence to strange women.

She figured a couple more things from that. He was desperate. That was the first. The second was that he didn't care. He didn't care if he got the can. The third was that he'd checked her out, because if he was involved in the investigation into a serial killer, he wasn't an idiot. Whether he cared or not, he wouldn't just send evidence out on a whim.

She didn't know how she felt about that. Just how much he'd found out about her. She was in the phone book. She was on Yell.com, for Christ's sake. He could find out she was a medium, easy enough, not some crackpot. But just how deep had he dug? She didn't like it. She'd suddenly gone from being a nobody in a tiny seaside town to being in the middle of a murder case.

That wasn't her scene at all.

OK, so he probably knew something about her.

What did she know about him?

Plenty, she figured, and the rest she knew about him had nothing to with messages from the dead, not even his partner who was standing right there in the hallway pointing at his fucking wrist.

He was a fat man. He was probably depressed. Fat men aren't usually fat because they're happy. His partner had killed himself. Coleridge probably wasn't that bad that'd you'd want to blow your head off to get away from him. So he'd feel bad about his partner.

Could she trust him? Would he fuck her over?

The long and short of it was, she didn't know.

She put the letter down with the rest of the things. Made herself some lunch and didn't look at the pack. She ate her lunch, right there at the table, without so much as a glance at the Tarot deck in the clear plastic bag. She tidied up her dishes, washed them, stacked them upside down on the draining board, and the pack didn't bother her in the slightest.

"What are you doing, Beth?"

She knew full well what she was doing. She was in way over her head already and she hadn't even done anything wrong. She was messing with something she didn't understand, something that couldn't be.

She needed to get out. Now. While she still could.

But the deck was right there. In the bag.

The killer had touched the deck. She could feel it.

Something was pulling her into this. She could feel that lightning again. A kind of holy bolt, cracking down straight from the spirits and into her head. She could almost imagine her hair standing on end, fillings melted into her mouth, her body ten feet away from smoking shoes.

"Don't go off half-cocked, Beth."

The only trouble with giving herself sound advice was that she never listened to it.

Dead people can't kill people. Fact. Dead people could move things around. Maybe a dead person might throw a plate, or appear in the road and make a car swerve and crash. It could happen. It might have happened, somewhere in the world. Mostly the dead came back because they couldn't let go. Not because they wanted to kill people.

But then she thought about the one experience she'd had with the angry dead. The only time she'd been afraid of a spirit.

It had been in church. She'd been a guest speaker. She gave an address, then moved on to readings.

There was a man in the middle of the group with a dead man at his shoulder. She had gone to him, expecting to deliver him a message. But the man at his shoulder had taken her over. Like a trance, but not exactly. She knew what she was doing, what she was saying, but she was powerless to stop him. She tried to push the spirit out. To deny it. But she hadn't been strong enough.

In her own voice, but with the spirit's words, she told the man in the chair two rows from her that she would kill his daughter, that she would cut her with everything he could find until she bled from a thousand holes and then fuck those holes.

She had talked that way for over a minute, but the whole cutting and fucking thing had probably been the clincher. People had left as she spoke, powerless to stop. The man she addressed turned pallid and the only thing that stopped her and freed her was when he punched her in the face and broke her nose.

She thanked him.

She didn't have anyone around to punch her in the nose if she got lost when she touched the Tarot deck in the bag. Her son, Miles?

She laughed. He was good for Xboxing late into the night, but otherwise?

No. No good. She couldn't rely on him.

Peter?

Her ex wasn't local, not anymore. Could she call him, get him over? He'd do it. He loved her despite everything she was, all the things she'd done. But she couldn't ask him to do this.

No. She'd have to do it herself. The hardest step was always the one you were taking alone.

Seemed like she was always sitting at her kitchen table these days, and for all the good Miles was, she might as well have been alone. She took the bag in her hands, pulled the plastic open, and exhumed the deck.

Chapter Ten.

She put the bag down, pushed herself up. There was something she had to do before she started.

She reached into the cabinet and took out a tumbler. It wasn't her favouritea"that was in the garbage. This would do. Comfort, if nothing else. She placed her tumbler on the tablecloth. Took the bottle of cheap whiskey from under the sink and poured until it hit the top. She watched the liquid settle. Wanted it. Wanted it so bad. But it was nearly time for her appointment and she had work to do. She didn't work drunk. Drunk was how you finished, not how you started.

She pushed the tumbler carefully across the table, rucking the cloth. Then she took the deck in her hands, laid it on the table in front of her, took a deep breath and opened it.

She pulled the pack of Tarot cards from the bag and laid the cards, tidy in their pack, on the table. She held the pack, turned it this way and that in her hands. She didn't get anything from it. No sense of whose it was. Better that she didn't know whose pack it was. It was easy to see what her mind already knew, make it into something she believed.

She took the cards from the pack. The pack had been dusted, but it hadn't been cleaned since. The owner's fingers had touched this pack. She knew the owner. Henry Meakings. She'd met him a few times, when she used to speak at church. She'd liked him.

Now he was dead.

Killed by some psychopath. It wouldn't have been an easy death. Being murdered was hard on the soul. He'd be adrift. Violent, sudden death could be confusing for a spirit.

She understood that people cried for their dead. She knew he had a son. She felt bad for him. Left behind. Left to pick up the pieces.

She didn't feel bad herself. She was cold.

She had to be.

Pain was hot, hard and sharp. The cold protected her.

She stopped thinking about Henry and started thinking about the pack. The last hands to touch these cards were the killer's, not Henry's. The police had yet to find any fingerprints. They probably thought he wore gloves. Beth suspected he didn't need to, but she just couldn't understand it.

He'd killed three people so far. Three mediums. Like her. Maybe not like her. Just mediums. Speakers for the dead. Beth was somewhat different, but in line, maybe. In danger?

Maybe.

Scared?

She didn't scare easily, not anymore. But a little? Yeah. Probably.

She fanned the cards out, face up. Looked at the artwork. Rider-Waite Tarot. The same as her deck.

She dealt out eleven cards, in a neat figure of eight, face down. One for the top, middle, and bottom. Four for the top of the circle, four for the bottom. Eleven cards.