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  ‘Not Ben and Johnnie?’

  Ophelia shrugged. ‘They’ll probably just submit. Len’s…well, when you meet him you’ll understand.’

  Neo-authoritarianism, I thought. Natural leaders. It fitted.

  There was the sound of feet in the corridor. ‘Hey, did you know there’s a floater…Danny!’

  A slightly grease-stained hug from Hippolyta (she must have been working on the generator again), a drier peck on the cheek from Yorik, a wave in passing from Romeo as he gathered up the rest of the corn muffins and another from Juliet, as he dumped a load of slug-ridden lettuces in the sink and sat down to eat the muffins with Romeo. I remembered Ophelia saying they had made up their tiff. I could hear the yells of the kids outside, then sudden silence.

  ‘That’s your floater outside?’ asked Yorik, joining us at the table.

  I nodded.

  ‘Okay if Gloucester takes the kids for a ride then?’

  ‘Sure.’ I stood up. ‘I’ll just go and…’

  Hippolyta motioned me to sit back down. ‘No need. They’ve already gone. There’s an ancient car engine down by the old highway. I asked him if he’d mind picking it up for me.’ She shrugged. ‘Give him something to do.’

  ‘How is he?’

  Did I imagine it or did the atmosphere tense slightly? Hippolyta pulled out the chair beside me. ‘He’s all right. Hey, coffee! Realcoffee!’

  ‘Danny brought it,’ said Ophelia. ‘There’s more things on the bench too.’

  I’d brought all the Realcoffee I’d had in the house, plus chocolate and Truesugar and wheat flour. Black Stump ate well enough from their gardens and orchards, but anything that wasn’t home-grown tended to run out long before they got their harvest credits.

  ‘Coffee,’ breathed Hippolyta happily, lifting her sandalled feet up onto the empty chair beside me. ‘Yorik, put the kettle on the stove, there’s a love. Has anyone done anything about lunch? Oh, I forgot—I took a call for you earlier.’

  ‘Who was it? Neil?’

  ‘A Water Sprite. She seemed very anxious to get hold of you.’ Hippolyta gazed at me wickedly. ‘A gorgeous girl she was too. What do you get up to at your Utopia?’

  ‘Nothing that involves Water Sprites,’ I said. ‘She probably just wants to know when the beach will be ready.’

  ‘Beach?’ asked Juliet, his arm wrapped cosily around Romeo’s shoulders.

  ‘Just a project I’m working on,’ I said shortly, suddenly embarrassed at having so much time and money to spend on something that was purely for pleasure.

  ‘Do you want me to call her back for you?’ asked Hippolyta, hopefully.

  I shook my head. ‘She can wait until I get home. One thing at a time…’

  Hippolyta grinned. ‘So, you’re going to solve our murders then?’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘But I’ll try.’

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ Romeo patted my shoulder. ‘It’s good to see you, you know.’

  I grinned at them. At one time I had thought that I might live here, if things hadn’t worked out with Neil. It would be fun, I’d thought, sharing their happiness and squalor. Black Stump had a comradeship that was almost Forest-like.

  I looked around the kitchen, at the shelves of sticky jam (no one had ever got round to putting doors on them to turn them into cupboards), Hippolyta’s cracked purple toenails, the lines of laughter and fifty years of arguments on Yorik’s face, the cat, Spot, investigating yesterday’s saucepans on the sink.

  It wouldn’t have been fun, of course. It would have been sheer hell.

  Chapter 8

  Gloucester arrived back with the children, most of a rusty engine and my floater, with oil on its seat and a skull and crossbones chalked on its door. I wondered whether to explain that unlike my last floater, this one had been hired in my name and I was responsible for any damages.

  But why bother? I could afford them.

  ‘We were a pirate ship,’ explained Portia, elbowing me in the breast as she scrambled onto my lap.

  ‘In the floater?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Portia looked at me scornfully, as though to say, ‘of course!’. She had good eyes for looking scornful, bright blue and slightly slanted.

  ‘Did you find any treasure?’

  ‘Some,’ Portia looked uninterested. ‘No gold or jewels though. Do you have any gold and jewels at home?’

  ‘Me? No.’ I was going to ask why I’d have gold and jewels, then realised that as I had chocolate and floaters, it might make sense to a child if I had jewels too.

  Would the Black Stump kids like a real pirate ship, I wondered? One that seemed to sail…

  ‘We made the prisoners walk the plank!’ declared Portia, reaching over for a pumpkin fritter. ‘Then the sharks came and ate them and all the waves were red with blood.’ She bit into her fritter happily.

  ‘Sharks?’ I asked.

  ‘Gloucester said sharks always ate people who walked the plank. They tear their arms off then they eat their legs then…’

  ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ said Romeo quickly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the food goes all over the table.’

  I glanced at Gloucester. He shrugged, expressionless. He’d lost weight since I’d seen him last. His eyes were shadowed, as though they still saw last year’s events.

  ‘Lunch,’ said Yorik, dumping a platter of boiled corn cobs next to the pumpkin fritters on the table.

  Coriolanus, Viola and Horatio scrambled up beside the adults. Portia stayed on my lap and Malvolio sat on Juliet’s and spat leftovers into his beard while Romeo fed him spoonfuls of cornmeal mush.

  ‘Do you want to hear me recite?’ demanded Portia, her mouth full again. ‘“The quality of mercy is not strained”—did you know we’re going to strain the honey later? You can help if you like,’ she added generously. ‘“It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…”’

  ‘Recite it for her after lunch, honey,’ suggested Yorik. ‘Did anyone pick any salad?’

  No one answered, so it seemed no one had.

  ‘Do the people at the Tree know I’m coming?’ I asked, shifting Portia to another knee. My right one had pins and needles.

  ‘I called them this morning,’ said Ophelia, putting another fritter on Gloucester’s plate. He picked it up absently. ‘They’re expecting you to stay with them. I explained you’d need a base to find out who really did the killings.’

  I blinked. I’d expected to stay at Black Stump, not in the heart of werewolf territory. ‘I hope you didn’t lead them to expect too much.’

  ‘You could have stayed here, of course,’ added Juliet, wiping cornmeal mush from his beard. ‘But when people see you’re staying up at the Tree, they’ll know that you think they’re innocent.’

  ‘I don’t know anything of the sort yet!’ I protested.

  ‘Of course they’re innocent,’ said Yorik. ‘You should see Uncle Dusty with the kids. He pretends to be a pony and gives them rides around the orchard!’

  ‘Uncle Dusty!’ bleated Malvolio from Juliet’s lap.

  ‘I like Uncle Dusty’s hair,’ stated Portia. She passed me the biggest corn cob in the bowl, probably as a bribe for another ride in my floater.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s nice and long. Can I have some more fritters?’

  Gloucester held the fritter platter out to her. ‘It’s all beside the point!’ he cried passionately. ‘We should be concentrating on finding the murderer! Don’t you realise? While she’s up there, he could kill again!’

  Yorik mouthed, ‘Not in front of the kids.’

  Gloucester smashed the platter down on the table. ‘Why not? They’ll be safer if they know the danger! It’s no use pretending to them that this is a nice world! We need to get organised! Start patrolling the valley properly! There are monsters out there, psychopaths…oh, what’s the use?’ He pushed his chair back and flung himself out of the room.

  ‘What’s a psychopath?’ asked
Portia.

  ‘Someone who’s sick in the head,’ said Ophelia absently, her eyes still on the door as though she expected Gloucester to come back in. ‘It makes them do bad things.’

  ‘Sweet!’ said Portia appreciatively. ‘Can we play pirate ships again after lunch?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘I’ll take them,’ offered Hippolyta, pushing her chair back too. ‘Come on, last one in the floater has to feed the parrot.’

  ‘What parrot?’ demanded Portia.

  ‘Pirates always have parrots.’ Hippolyta patted Ophelia’s shoulder as she passed. ‘I’ll pick up Gloucester on the way,’ she promised. ‘He won’t have gone far.’

  Ophelia nodded.

  No one spoke for a while after they left. Then Yorik said, ‘He’s right you know. We’re tackling this the wrong way. We need to find who did it, not prove the wolves innocent.’

  ‘We’ve been through this a million times before,’ said Ophelia wearily. ‘The person who did this is probably long gone. If there was some crazed killer living round here they’d have struck before. It must have been some Wanderer…’

  ‘Didn’t you say you had a Wanderer here?’ I asked.

  ‘Lucy?’ Yorik grinned. ‘She wouldn’t even eat the deer after she saw Gloucester gut it!’

  ‘Yes, she did!’ said Ophelia

  ‘Only after the poor boy spent an hour persuading her.’

  ‘Where’s Lucy now?’

  ‘She left after the second murder. She told Mummy and Daddy all about it, and Mummy and Daddy sent a dikdik to bring her home.’

  ‘She was all right,’ said Ophelia tolerantly. ‘Just young.’

  ‘It was a good bit a venison though,’ said Yorik, looking wistfully at the last of the pumpkin fritters. ‘Take a bag of corn up with you, will you? We could do with a bit of meat.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever eaten deer meat,’ I said.

  ‘You will tonight,’ said Romeo. ‘Emerald’s a great cook. Great big roasts every night. You’ll have a lovely time,’ he promised me. ‘Won’t she Julie, sweetheart?’

  ‘Of course she will,’ said Juliet, picking bits of Malvolio’s spat-out corn off the table.

  Werewolves. A house that was a Tree. Uncle Dusty who had long hair and gave the children rides. Eleanor the management consultant who had created the doctrine of neo-authoritarianism. Two murder victims, one with his throat ripped out and the other with his heart left resting by his body. And me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be fantastic’.

  Chapter 9

  When you think of a tree house you think of Pooh and Piglet and their house in the wood, small and cute and ‘let’s have honey for tea’.

  The Tree wasn’t like that at all.

  The werewolves’ house grew on on a rocky hill surrounded by cliffs, streaked with wedgetail eagle droppings and littered with the occasional stubborn bush that hadn’t heard it was more comfortable to have soil around your roots.

  In the midst of this barreness a single Tree towered over the landscape. It was as wide as my house at its base, but taller, taller, taller, so the top branches looked ready to fight the cliffs if they came any closer.

  It was only as the floater drew closer that I could see the door at the base, the windows set within the trunk, the flattened lower branches that were presumably rooms and corridors.

  Somewhere back in my past life I’d scrolled data on a building like this: a Newsteel framework that has the Tree cells force-grown around it, so that they eventually swallow the ‘steel and then keep growing to branch out above and around it.

  Someone—or some werewolf—had spent a lot of money to create this—they must have bioengineering contacts too.

  The rest of the werewolves’ valley looked green, even in the drought, though as I grew closer I realised the green wasn’t grass at all, but some small-leafed ground cover that Neil would probably have recognised but was foreign to me. Whatever it was, it must have been expensive to seed the whole valley with it. The werewolves were doing well…

  There were no gardens. A few shrubs sat calmly among alien greeness as though they’d wandered out of the bush beyond the valley ridges and decided to stay. There was no sign of deer, or any paddocks or fences for that matter, apart from the tall stone wall that stretched from cliff to cliff.

  Presumably there was a gate somewhere, unless the inhabitants jumped the wall every time they wanted to leave their valley. Perhaps, I thought, that was exactly what they did.

  Not that my floater needed gates either. We rose above the wall then descended again and crept over the close-cropped green towards a floater pad, apparently set on open signal. Without my telling it to, my floater circled around the Tree and landed in a rough courtyard bounded by blank-faced stone sheds.

  I opened the door. The Tree rose above me, its branches casting dappled shadows around my feet. There were steps leading to a door and next to the door, a giant boulder, angled so it caught the afternoon sun.

  A dog lay on the boulder, its head on its paws. It watched me as I crossed the courtyard. Its coat was black and grey and very long. A watch dog, I thought. From its vantage point on the boulder the dog could see the entire valley, as well as a close-up view of anyone arriving across the paddocks or from the floater pad.

  I hesitated. What is the etiquette when you meet a dog in a house of werewolves? Click your fingers and say, ‘Here, boy! Good dog!’ Or say ‘Good morning, lovely weather isn’t it?’, then blush when the dog says ‘Woof’ and the human-shaped inhabitants giggle—or worse—are offended, as they peer at you through the window?

  I compromised. ‘Hi,’ I said.

  The dog raised its head, and suddenly and horribly I realised it wasn’t a dog at all.

  The face was human. Human? No, the nose was too long. It was a snout, not a nose at all. The chin was almost nonexistent. The face was hairy too. But the eyes were human. They stared at me, intelligent and amused.

  The dog—wolf—person—stood up stiffly, and suddenly, now it was upright, it became more recognisably human. Yes, long hair covered his legs and body, his shoulders looked too narrow and the joints looked subtly wrong. But now he was standing I could see he wore shorts that the long hair had covered before. He padded over to the floater and held out a hairy paw.

  ‘I don’t bite,’ he said.

  ‘I…I didn’t think you did.’

  He grinned. ‘You wondered,’ he said. ‘Admit it. Could smell your fear.’

  ‘I wasn’t afraid.’

  ‘Don’t lie to a wolf. We’ve expert noses. I’m Dusty.’ He shrugged, which looked odd as well, though it was hard to tell why. Were the arms too long? ‘Uncle Dusty,’ he added.

  ‘Oh…Portia says hello then. She says you have nice hair.’

  Dusty laughed. His teeth were long and white and the tongue looked just a little too flat, too wet, too red…what was the normal colour for a tongue? Somehow I knew it wasn’t this.

  ‘Precious kid,’ he said. ‘Adorable at that age. Pity they grow up.’

  I nodded agreeably. As far as I was concerned the sooner kids grew up and stopped spitting cornmeal mush at you and clambering on laps with their grubby feet, the better. But it wasn’t a point I felt like arguing. Not given the size of the teeth and the hands that were too curled and clawed to really be called hands.

  I glanced down. His feet were bare. And the nails were claws too.

  He noticed. He grinned, and though his tongue lolled wetly the grin didn’t have quite the humour he’d shown before. ‘Please come in,’ he said formally. ‘Kind of you to help us,’ he added.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know how much help I’ll be,’ I said. ‘Black Stump and Michael have an inflated idea of my abilities.’

  I had sent a brief message to Michael to tell him where I’d gone. I had been grateful that his comsig was on message mode. I had no wish to speak to him.

  ‘Michael?’ said Uncle Dusty vaguely. ‘Right, yes, City bloke Ele
anor works for.’ Another grin, this time with the faintest edge of wet tongue hanging out. ‘Don’t matter if you’re no help,’ he said frankly. ‘Gesture of solidarity. Shows neighbours that Black Stump trusts us. Reminds them we’ve influential friends.’

  I blinked. ‘Ophelia? Romeo?’

  He grinned at me damply. ‘The City.’

  ‘But I’m not from the City.’ Well not now, I added in my mind.

  ‘City friends. City floater. City influence. I’ll take your bag.’

  He managed it quite well, despite the malformed—no, wolf-formed—hands. I reached to open the front door for him, but there was no need. The door slid open automatically at our approach. Uncle Dusty grinned wetly again. ‘Retinal scan. Opens for any of us. You too when Eleanor programs you in. Hate doorhandles. Doors at Black Stump usually open.’

  I stepped inside and blinked.

  The room was enormous, and eerily dim, despite the windows that looked out over the valley. The room was simply too large for their light to penetrate the gloom.

  At first glance it seemed a normal room. Then slowly my eyes began to pick out differences. A smell of dog, and fur and damp fresh wood. Walls that curved to an irregularly rounded ceiling. Scattered massive sofas, far too low and wider than the norm, as though the inhabitants curled up on them more often than they sat. There was a wide hearth before the giant fireplace, where even in today’s heat the remnants of a fire burnt.

  There was a table too—Japanese, or maybe werewolf-style—low to the ground, with big cushions instead of chairs. The mats and cushions on the floor had a slightly tattered, chewed quality.

  It looked like a room someone had tried to make normal, but it hadn’t worked. Or maybe they hadn’t known quite what a Truenorm room should look like.

  There was no Terminal. No paintings on the stone walls, not even the kids’ sketches that covered the walls at Black Stump. I could smell cold ashes too, and fur and something sharp and pungent and almost familiar—a bit like the fertiliser pellets we fed into the irrigation system back home.