Free Book 3 - The Spy Who Haunted Me by Simon R. Green Page A

tall and elegant and more regal than any queen. She had been a famous beauty once, and you could still see the force of it in her strong bone structure. She wore country tweeds, twin set, and pearls, and her long gray hair was piled up on top of her head in the style of times past. My grandmother, though she’d never let that get in the way of doing whatever needed to be done. She’d tried to have me killed, but we’d got over that . . . mostly. She had to be in her early seventies now, but there wasn’t an ounce of weakness in her. She studied me with calm, calculating gray eyes, waiting for me to acknowledge her, so I deliberately nodded cheerfully to the Armourer.
    A bald, middle-aged man with thick tufty white eyebrows and a permanent scowl, Uncle Jack looked sulky and put-upon, as he always did when called away from his beloved Armoury. Devilishly talented when it came to creating dangerous and devious devices, but he just couldn’t be bothered with people skills anymore. He used to be a field agent, and a great one in his day, but he rarely left the Armoury now.
    I prefer things to people, he once told me. You can fix things when they go wrong.
    The long lab coat wrapped around his spindly frame had presumably been white once, but it was now disfigured with rips and tears, chemical stains and burns, and the occasional splash of someone else’s blood. And what might have been mustard. Under the lab coat, the Armourer was wearing a grubby T-shirt with the legend Weapons of Mass Destruction R Us. He had large, bony, engineer’s hands and kind eyes.
    “Hi there, hi there, hi there!” said Ethel, her words seeming to burst out of everywhere at once. “Welcome home, Eddie! Great to have you back; everyone else here is so stuffy! They just don’t know how to have fun, the great bunch of stiffs. The Hall is always so much more lively when you’re around. How was London? How was the Tower? Did you bring me back a present?”
    “I never know what to get you,” I said. “You’re so hard to buy for, but then I find that’s true for most immaterial other-dimensional entities.” I ignored Ethel’s giggles and looked at the Matriarch. “Where’s the rest of the council? Are we waiting for them?”
    “No,” said Martha, her voice calm and even and utterly devoid of any kind of warmth. “For the time being, we are the council. Your cousin Harry is out in the field with his partner Roger Morningstar, infiltrating one of the more dubious Paris nightclubs in pursuit of the notorious Fantom. I can’t believe that madman’s on the loose again so soon after we put him away. If the French authorities can’t build a prison strong enough to hold their most notorious and appalling criminal, I shall have the Armourer build them something special. And make them pay through the nose for it.”
    “I thought we blew the Fantom up last year,” said the Armourer, frowning.
    “We did,” said the Matriarch. “It didn’t take. Harry and Roger will be back when they can.”
    “And William?” I said.
    “The Librarian is hard at work, in the old library,” said the Armourer. “Hardly ever leaves the place. Got a cot set up in there, and a chemical toilet, and has all his meals sent in.”
    “Normally I wouldn’t allow such behaviour,” said the Matriarch. “But we need him.”
    “It’s not healthy,” the Armourer said firmly. “I mean, I love my Armoury, but at the end of the day I lock the door behind me and go home.”
    “William is doing good and necessary work,” the Matriarch said. “And that is all that matters.”
    “To us,” said the Armourer. “But what about him?”
    “Hush, Jack.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    I nodded glumly. “I did hope he’d improve, after I got him out of that asylum for the criminally insane and brought him home, but . . . the Heart really did a number on his head. Give him time; he’ll bounce back. He’s a tough old stick.”
    “Of course,” said Martha. “He’s a