Free The Glass God by Kate Griffin

the glare the druid shot at his back.
    They made their way down one row of parking bays, then back past another. The shutters were nearly all down and locked in place by rusting padlocks, the keys long since lost, but one or two had been broken open in recent years, and gaps left for the wind to explore. Now and then Sharon paused to peer into one of the darkened bays, looking for, at best, a sign declaring “Swift was ’ere” and, at the very least, a drop of blood, an abandoned gun or perhaps a smoking umbrella. Rhys carried the big blue umbrella under one arm. The shaman herself hadn’t wanted to go near it, but he was already wondering whether having an umbrella didn’t give him a distinguished look which his tendency towards oversized shirts and saggy jeans had never quite achieved.
    At the end of the quay, the river was hidden beneath the sharp drop of a concrete embankment. Its waters slapped muddily at low tide. Ships drifted by as though floating on air: the little police boat bouncing on its way to another call; a sleek catamaran powering round the Isle of Dogs in a roar of speed; a tug dragging three floating pallets of metal boxes and rubber pipes. The world slid by, busy and uninterested.
    Then Sharon stopped, and stared.
    A unit like any other, the metal shutter pulled down and locked tight. There were no graffiti, no blood pooled on the ground, not even a helpful note pinned up and explaining everything, though Sharon had lived in hope. What there was, however, was a very shiny, very new, padlock holding the shutter down.
    “So,” she said, “call me, like, Sherlock friggin’ Holmes, but how many new padlocks have you guys seen in this place?”
    Miles seized the padlock, testing it. “Ah,” he declared. “Now, I have just the spell for this sort of occasion…⁠”
    But Sharon had already walked straight through the nearest wall.
     
    Darkness, reduced a little by two high, narrow windows so dirty it was a miracle any daylight made it through the grime. There was a strong smell of bleach. The walls were white-painted breeze blocks; and a notice by the door warned employees not to smoke.
    Sharon peered at the cement floor. Great pale streaks had been washed across its settled dirt, and recently, too: cloud-like patterns of grubby and clean had been made by the rubbing of a cloth, the swirling of a mop, the scrubbing of a brush.
    A moment later, light flooded in as Miles unlocked the shutter and rolled it up, letting in daytime and the smell of the river. As Rhys stepped inside, his nose crinkled in distaste at the raw smell of chemical detergents.
    “Cleaned recently?” mused Miles.
    “Recently scrubbed bare,” corrected Sharon. “Which sucks for the investigation thing, but is kinda cool in the at-least-there’s-a-cover-up sorta sense.”
    Rhys raised a hand in enquiry. “Are we pleased there’s a cover-up?” he asked.
    “Well, it’s better than there being nothing . Positive thinking!” Sharon beamed to hear herself speak such reassuring words. “Positive thinking is the way to… to do stuff. Positively.”
    Rhys’s smile was strained. “What we need,” she persisted, “are clues . Maybe a mystic anorak, that’d be kinda in the zone, or a letter beginning ‘dear reader’ and ending with ‘so I confess to everything’ – I mean, we’d get fewer brownie points for investigative coolness, but it’d save a lot of time.”
    “How about a burnt telephone line?”
    Miles was squatting to look at something by the back wall. There were two electrical sockets, and a single, scorched-looking telephone line, with no wires attached but a great scar of soot still curling from its interior. The Alderman sniffed, and beamed. “I love the smell of fried circuitry in the morning.”
    The others hurried over to look. Sharon brushed her fingers against the edge of the outlet, and there was
    WE TOLD YOU SO!  
    a shout, gone as quickly as it had come, in a voice that was strange, unnatural,