“Talk to me about scabbing, Dane,” Wati said. “Do I need to talk to your Teuthex about this?”

“No!” Dane shouted. People looked. He slid down, spoke quietly again. “You can’t. Can’t tell them where I am. I’m out, Wati.” He looked into the statue’s unmoving face. “Shunned.”

The plaster of the chef, unchanging, took on shock. “Oh my gods, Dane,” Wati said at last. “I heard something, someone said something, I thought it was garbled bullshit, though…”

“They’re not going to do anything,” Dane said. “Nothing. I needed help, Wati, and I needed it fast. They were going to kill Billy. And whoever’s took it’s doing something with the kraken that’s bringing up this badness. That’s when it started. That’s the only reason I did what I did. You know me. I’ll do whatever I have to to fix this. What I’m saying is I’m sorry.”

DANE TOLD WATI THE STORY. “IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN THIS LOT brought it up, put it in their tank.” Billy was shocked at the anger with which Dane stared at him, suddenly. He had never seen that before. I thought you liked the tank, he thought. The Teuthex said… “But since it’s gone it’s got worse. We have to find it. Billy knows things. I needed to get him out. Wati, it was Goss and Subby.”

There was a long silence. “I heard that,” the statue said. “Someone said he was back. I didn’t know if it was true.”

“Goss and Subby are back,” Dane said. “And they’re working for the Tattoo. They’re on the move. They’re doing their work. They were taking Billy to the workshop.”

“Who is he? Who are you?” Wati said to Billy. “Why are they after you?”

“I’m no one,” Billy said. He saw himself talking to a plastic or plaster pizza man. Could almost have smiled.

“It was him who preserved the kraken,” Dane said. “Put it behind glass.”

“I’m no one,” Billy said. “Up until a couple of days ago I…” How to even start.

“He likes to say he’s no one,” Dane said. “Tattoo and Goss and Subby don’t think so. He knows things.”

There was quiet for seconds. Billy played with his coffee.

“A squirrel, though?” Wati said.

Dane stared at the frozen delighted face of the chef, risked a snorting laugh. “I was desperate, bro,” he said.

“You couldn’t have got, like, an adder or a jackdaw or something?”

“I was looking for a part-timer,” Dane said. “All the best familiars are union, I didn’t have much choice. You should be pleased. You’re solid. I had to go with whatever dregs were around.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“I’m sorry. I was desperate. I shouldn’t have done it. I should’ve asked.”

“Yeah you should,” said Wati. Dane breathed out. “You only get one fuckup like that. And that only because I known you since time.” Dane nodded. “Why did you come see me?” Wati said. “You didn’t just come to apologise, did you?”

“Not only that,” said Dane.

“Cheeky bugger,” said Wati. “You’re going to ask for help.” He started to laugh, but Dane interrupted.

“Yeah,” he said without humour. “You know what, I am, and I ain’t going to apologise. I do need your help. We do. And I don’t just mean me and Billy, I mean everyone. If we don’t find the god, whatever’s coming’s going to get here. Someone’s doing something with that kraken they really shouldn’t oughter.”

“We’re out, Dane,” Wati said. “What do you even want from me?”

“I understand,” Dane said. “But you have to understand too. Whatever it is… If we don’t stop it it won’t matter if you win your strike. I’m not saying call it off. I would never tell you that. I’m saying you can’t afford to ignore this. We have to find God. We ain’t the only ones looking. The longer it’s out there it’s meaning more and more, and that means it’s more and more powerful. So more and more people are after it. Imagine if Tattoo gets his hands on it.” On the corpse, corpus, of an emergent baby god, traveller from below to above.”

“What’s your plan?” Wati said.

Dane brought out his list. “I reckon this is all the people in London could port something as big as the kraken. We can track down who got it out.”

“Hold it up,” Wati said. Dane, making sure he was not watched, held the list in the statue’s eyeline. “There’s, what… twenty people here?” Wati said.

“Twenty-three.”

“Going to take you a while.” Dane said nothing. “Have you got a copy of that? Wait.”

There was a gust, a palpable leaving. Dane began to smile. After a minute a sparrow flew down and landed on Billy’s hand. He started. Even his jump did not dislodge the bird. It looked him and Dane up and down.

“Go on then, give her the list,” said Wati in the statue again. “She’s not your familiar, you get it? Not even temporarily. She’s my friend, and she’s doing me a favour. Let’s see what we can find out.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

HER BOSS WAS SYMPATHETIC BUT COULD NOT HOLD THINGS forever. Marge had to return to work.

Leon’s mother said she was coming to London. She and Marge had never met, nor even spoken until the awkward phone call Marge had made to tell her about Leon’s disappearance. The woman obviously neither knew nor wanted to know details of Leon’s life. She thanked Marge for “keeping her up to date.”

“I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it,” she had said when Marge suggested they work together to try to find out what had happened.

“I don’t feel like the police…” Marge had said. “I mean I’m sure they’re doing what they can, but, you know, they’re busy and we might be able to think of stuff that they can’t. We could keep on looking, you know?” His mother had said she would contact Marge if she found anything out, but neither of them thought she would. So Marge did not mention Leon’s last message.

When she said, “I’ll let you know if I find anything out, too,” she was aware abruptly that she was not making a promise to the woman as much as to herself, to the universe, to Leon, to something, to not leave this, to not stop. Marge went through anger, panic, resignation, sadness. Sometimes-how could she not?-she tried out the thought that she had been very wrong about him, that Leon had just deserted her and his entire life. Maybe he had been involved in a scam gone wrong, was mentally ill, baying somewhere on a Cornish coast or Dundee, was no longer who he had been. The ideas did not stick.

She sent Leon’s mother the keys to his flat that she had had cut, but cut more copies first. She sneaked in and went from room to room, as if she might soak up some clue. For some time each room was as she remembered it, down to the mess, even. She turned up one day and the flat was a shell: his family had taken Leon’s things away.

The police to whom Marge spoke, those to whom she could speak, still implied that there was little to worry about, or, as time went on, little they could do. What Marge wanted was to speak to those other, odder police visitors. Repeated calls to the Scotland Yard would not yield any confirmation that they existed. The Barons whose numbers she was given were none of them the right man. There were no Collingswoods.

Were they who they had claimed? Were they a gang of miscreants hunting Leon for some infraction? Was it from them that he was in hiding?

Her first day back her coworkers were sympathetic. The paperwork she dealt with was easy and not important, and though the hesitancy of her colleagues’ greetings was wearing it was also touching, and she put up with it. She returned to her flat in the same reverie that had taken over as her default mood since Leon disappeared.

Something troubled her. Some part of the city’s afternoon noise, the car grumbling, the children shouting, the mobile phones singing polyphonic grots of song. Repeatedly whispered, getting louder until she could no longer mistake it, someone was saying her name.

“Marginalia.”

A man and boy had arrived, appeared silently before she had her keys out. One was to either side of her front door, leaning with a shoulder to the bricks, facing each other with the door in between them so they boxed her in. The young staring boy in a suit; a shabbier, weatherbeaten man. The man spoke.