Neither was the man they were looking for.
They moved into the kitchen, where they found a third corpse, face down on the floor. Were his head not twisted all the way around, he would have been looking up at the ceiling. A bottle lay beside his hand, smashed against the tiles, and the smell of beer was still strong.
The rest of the ground floor was clear of corpses, so they went to the stairs. The first one creaked, and Skulduggery stepped back off it. He wrapped his arms around Valkyrie’s waist, and they rose off the ground and drifted up to the body on the landing. It was a woman, who had died curled up in a foetal position.
There were three bedrooms and one bathroom. The bathroom was empty, as was the first bedroom they checked. The second bedroom had scorch marks on the wall and another dead woman halfway out of a window. Valkyrie guessed this woman was the one responsible for the scorch marks – she’d tried to defend herself, then tried to run. Neither attempt had worked.
There was someone alive in the last bedroom. They could hear whoever it was in the wardrobe, trying not to make a sound. They heard a deep breath being taken as they approached, and then there was absolute silence for all of thirteen seconds. The silence ended with a ridiculously loud gasping for air. Skulduggery thumbed back the hammer of his gun.
“Come out,” he said.
The wardrobe burst open and a shrieking madman leaped out at Valkyrie. She batted down his arm, grabbed his shirt and twisted her hip into him, his shriek turning to a yelp as he hit the floor.
“Don’t kill me,” he sobbed as he lay there. “Oh God, please don’t kill me.”
“If you had let me finish,” Skulduggery said, slightly annoyed, “you would have heard me say, ‘Come out, we’re not going to hurt you’. Idiot.”
“He probably wouldn’t have said idiot,” Valkyrie told the sobbing man. “We’re trying our best to be nice.”
The man blinked through his tears, and looked up. “You’re … You’re not going to kill me?”
“No, we’re not,” Valkyrie said gently, “so long as you wipe your nose right now.”
The man sniffled into his sleeve and she stood back, trying not to shiver with revulsion. He got up.
“You’re Skulduggery Pleasant,” he said. “I’ve heard about you. The Skeleton Detective.”
“Season’s greetings,” Skulduggery nodded. “This is my partner, Valkyrie Cain. And you are …?”
“My name is Ranajay. I live here with my … with my friends. It’s so nice, living next to all these normal people. We really liked living here. Me and my … Me and my friends …”
Ranajay looked like he was going to start sobbing again, so Valkyrie cut in quickly. “Who did this? Who killed everyone?”
“I don’t know. A big guy. Huge. He wore a mask, and spoke with an accent. His eyes were red.”
“What did he want?” Skulduggery asked.
“He came here looking for a friend of mine.”
Valkyrie frowned. “Ephraim Tungsten?”
“Yes,” Ranajay said. “How did you know?”
“That’s who we want to talk to. We believe he’s been in contact with a killer we’ve been tracking for five months.”
“Davina Marr, right? That detective who went bad, blew up the Sanctuary? That’s why the big guy wanted Ephraim too.”
“Do you know if Marr has been in touch with Ephraim?” Skulduggery asked.
“Oh, she has, yes. Paid him to make her a false ID and arrange to get her out of the country. That’s what Ephraim does. When people have to disappear, he takes care of it. Only this time he didn’t. I think after he realised what she’d done, he didn’t want any part of it. The detective, Marr, she came looking for everything she’d paid for after the Sanctuary fell into the ground, but he was gone. She tore this place up three times in the same month looking for him. Haven’t seen her since then. Haven’t seen Ephraim either. We all thought it’d be safer if we stayed away from him, you know? Fat lot of good that did my friends.”
“The man who killed them,” Skulduggery said, “did you tell him where Ephraim is?”
Ranajay shook his head. “Didn’t have to. I knew what he wanted to know. I think that’s the only reason he didn’t kill me. Ephraim had told me, ages ago, that the only thing he’d done for Marr was to set up places for her to stay in three spots across the city. That’s all the information the big guy wanted, just to know where Marr was staying.”
“Can you tell us the three spots?”
“Are you going after him?” asked Ranajay.
“Our main priority is Davina Marr, but the man who killed your friends has just made it to number two on our list.”
“You’ll stop him?”
“If we can.”
“You’ll kill him?”
“If we have to.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell you.”
She hit the ground and rolled, shards of broken glass accompanying her down. She reached into her jacket, found the trigger device, flicked the safety off with her thumb and pressed the red button without even taking it out of her pocket. He was up there, right now, and she would only get one chance at this.
But when there was no big explosion, she looked up to see him climbing out of the window overhead. He’d dismantled the explosives. Of course he had. Davina Marr didn’t even bother to curse. She just ran.
The ground was wet with recent rain, and she slipped in the mud and scrambled up again. All that time and effort spent fortifying this pitiful excuse for a dwelling, all for nothing. The security measures she’d placed at every conceivable entrance to the disused construction site had turned out to be useless. The traps she’d set on the metal stairs to the foreman’s office in which she’d been living had turned out to be less than useless. The big brute had entered silently and it had only been pure luck that she’d happened to look up in time.
She ran to her car, but if he was as meticulous as she thought he was, he’d already have sabotaged the engine, so she broke left, running for the tall fence that bordered the east side of the site. She heard quick footsteps behind her and decided to try to lose him in the maze of cargo containers. It was a moonless night, too dark to see much of anything, and she hoped he was finding it as difficult in this gloom as she was. There was a heavy clang, followed by footsteps on metal, and he was moving above her, across the top of the containers, aiming to cut her off before she reached the fence.
Marr doubled back, wishing that she’d had time to grab her gun off the table before she’d made that jump. Magic was all well and good, she often thought, but having a loaded gun in your hand was a reassurance like no other.
She