Read an Exclusive Excerpt from The Wolves of London

A haunted past bears painful memories, but the ghosts of the mind can be controlled. For ex-convict Alex Locke, though, the bygone days he'd rather forget physically re-enter his world. The first of a trilogy, Mark Morris' The Wolves of London sees Alex pursued by otherworldly killers after he steals the Obsidian Heart, a relic capable of time travel, and Titan Books has provided us with an exclusive excerpt.

"A psychology professor living with his young daughter, Alex Locke is an ex-convict who’s been able to put his past behind him. When his older daughter is threatened with violence, however, he is forced back into that world in an effort to secure the cash to save her. After a botched theft of an obsidian heart for a young woman named Clover Munro, Alex and Clover are forced to go on the run. They are pursued by a variety of unearthly assassins known collectively as the ‘Wolves of London’. As the Wolves close in, Alex finds out the Obsidian Heart can enable him to travel through time, and that whilst it bestows him with his own dark powers it also corrupts, both physically and mentally…"

To learn more, visit:

• http://titanbooks.com/the-wolves-of-london-obsidian-heart-book-1-7174/

TEN

ABATTOIR

I’m not the sort of person normally given to panic. Then again, I’m
not the sort of person normally given to stabbing old men through
the cranium and killing them stone dead. It wasn’t until I had retraced
my steps across the garden and reached the gate that the full impact
of what had happened hit me. For the second time that day I started
to shake and the strength went out of my legs. I staggered over to the
hedge, squatted down and threw up.

For a minute or so afterwards I kept going hot and cold, shivering
like I’d come down with a fever. For Kate’s sake I knew I had to get
myself together. I pulled off one of the gloves and brought my hand
up to wipe the sweat from my forehead, and that was when I felt the
stickiness on my face and neck and remembered how I’d been spattered
by McCallum’s blood as the spike had gone into his brain.

It was the shock of this, more than anything else, which brought
me back to my senses. What would have happened if I had gone out
on to the high street with blood all over me? There might have been
some parts of London where no one would have batted an eyelid, but
Kensington was not one of them. I had to think this through, cover my
tracks – both for Kate’s sake and my own.

Pulling a handkerchief from my pocket, I used it to wipe off as
much of the blood as possible. I could have done with checking myself
in a mirror, but there was no way I was going back into McCallum’s
house to search for one. I wondered how much forensic evidence I’d
left at the scene – footprints, hairs – but knew it was pointless worrying
about things I could do nothing about. I was certain I had left no fingerprints,
which was something at least.

Unsure whether you could get DNA from someone’s puke, I kicked
soil over mine just in case, burying all traces. The last thing I did
before opening the gate and stepping out on to the pavement was take
off the baseball cap Clover had lent me and stuff it into my pocket
along with my bloodied handkerchief. I might be more recognisable
without the cap, but I was more suspicious-looking (and therefore
more memorable) wearing it. Plus there might have been some of the
old man’s blood on it, which someone might remember later if they
saw a news report about his murder.

Hoping I wouldn’t walk smack into someone exercising their dog or
on their way back from the pub, I took a deep breath, then pulled open
the gate. I stepped smartly on to the pavement, tugged the gate shut
behind me and began to walk away from the scene of the crime. Every
nerve in my body screamed at me to run, but I kept to a steady pace.
It took a real effort to keep looking ahead instead of glancing around,
but somehow I managed it.

Fortunately the street was empty, though that didn’t mean there
might not have been someone looking out of a nearby window. Again,
though, there was nothing much I could do about it. I would just have
to face that problem if and when it arose. By then, at least, I hoped to
have fulfilled my part of the bargain and done enough to secure Kate’s
release. At that moment nothing else mattered.

I walked as far as Campden Hill Road, where I spotted an empty
bus shelter. Stepping into it, I sat on one of the plastic flip-up seats.
Even though I hadn’t been running I was sweating and panting with
tension. I put my head back against the Perspex wall and tried to will
myself to calm down, but my heart was going like crazy. Eventually I
took the A–Z out of my pocket, gripping it tightly in both hands in
an effort to stop them from shaking. Instead of walking back down
towards the high street, where even at this hour there would be people
around, I decided to skirt around the edge of Holland Park and head
north to Notting Hill.

I kept away from the high-population areas around Holland Park
and Notting Hill Gate tubes, and called a cab from a street off Ladbroke
Grove. When it arrived I ducked into the back and told the driver to
take me to Dean Street, which ran parallel to Frith Street. The driver
was middle-aged, Asian, jowly and unshaven. He glanced at me once
disinterestedly in his mirror, then nodded.

Luckily he wasn’t the chatty type, and apart from constant pick-up
requests over the tinny radio from a woman with an Essex accent the
journey passed in silence. By the time we arrived in Dean Street it was
after 1 a.m., and I was feeling a bit more together. I paid my fare, giving
the driver a decent tip, but not one so big that he’d remember it, and
looked around, wondering how to kill the next fifty minutes.
Incognito was only a few minutes’ walk away, but I couldn’t face the
thought of explaining to Clover what had happened. In any case, I was
reluctant to deviate from the plan; the last thing I wanted was to do
anything that would give email man a reason to get twitchy. I walked up
Dean Street and spotted an all-night café across the road beneath an
overhang of darkened offices. It looked like a dive, but that was fine.
The grottier the clientele, the less I’d stand out.

The first thing I did when I stepped through the door was to duck
into the toilets. I hoped there would be a mirror on the wall, and there
was – part of one at least, in the form of a jagged triangle clinging to a
single screw. I checked myself out, and noticed a couple of smears of
now mostly-dried blood just under my jaw line, which I’d missed. After
cleaning myself up with a wet paper hand towel and flushing away the
evidence, I went back out into the café and ordered tea and toast.
The tea was pantile-red and the toast soggy and hard to stomach,
but I stolidly worked my way through it. I sat at a corner table furthest
from the door, my back to a transparent display case, where cheese
and ham pasties, slices of limp pizza and greasy-looking doughnuts
offered themselves to the hungry and desperate. Over the heads of the
few other customers – a pair of bleary-looking students and a browntoothed
old woman in a filthy headscarf – I watched the comings
and goings in the street outside. Already what had happened an hour
before was starting to seem unreal, like a vivid nightmare that it had
taken me a while to shake myself out of.

Ironically, however, it was then – just as I was feeling a little calmer,
and the incident was turning dream-like in my head – that the brutal
reality of what I’d done suddenly side-swiped me. I realised, as if for
the first time, that I was now a murderer, and that nothing I could do
would ever change that. Whether I had meant it or not, I had ended the life
of a man who had been on this planet for eighty or ninety years, a man who had
been well into his fifties when I was born. And what made it even worse was
that this man – Barnaby McCallum – had, from all accounts, lived a life of
colour and variety and excitement; he had taken risks and grasped
opportunities and worked hard for his achievements. Surely, I thought,
such a man deserved to die peacefully in bed surrounded by his family
and friends? And yet, thanks to me, his flame had been abruptly and brutally
snuffed out, and he was now lying all alone on a cold, hard floor in a pool
of his congealing blood.

The thought made my gorge rise and I lowered my head, breathing
hard in an effort to stop my tea and toast from making a re-appearance.
I couldn’t believe how, in the space of a couple of days, my life had
turned to shit. Maybe email man would let Kate go, and maybe I hadn’t
left enough evidence at the scene for the cops to catch me, but at that
moment it felt like the walls were closing in. Eventually my stomach
settled and I slowly raised my head – only to see a police car slowing to
a stop at the kerb outside.

My heart lurched, and I almost dived under the table, before
realising that the car wasn’t stopping, but was simply slowing down as
a result of the natural ebb and flow of the London traffic. Logically I
knew that even if I had left evidence at the murder scene, there was no
way the police would get to me this quickly.

Not unless I had been set up.

Thinking about that, I suddenly wondered why the old man had
been sitting in the dark. It was almost as if he’d been expecting me to
break in. Had he had a tip-off that I was coming? Or had he just been
paranoid since being offered a quarter of a million for the heart? In
which case, why hadn’t he moved it to a more secure place?

As before, my mind was full of questions. Had McCallum known
what the heart was capable of? And what about the people who wanted
to get their hands on it? Did they know? Then again, what was it capable
of – apart, obviously, from what I had seen it do? Was it a weapon or…
I couldn’t think what else the heart might be apart from a weapon,
and to be honest I didn’t want to ponder it too much. The thing gave
me the creeps, and the sooner I was able to hand it over and get it out
of my life, the better.

The clock on the wall said 1.41. I watched the minute hand creeping
round until it got to 1.50 and then I stood up. Walking to Frith Street,
I half-expected to be intercepted or apprehended, but less than five
minutes later I was standing outside the Royal Gloucester Hotel.
Despite its name it wasn’t that grand. But neither was it a dump.
In fact, it was pretty nondescript, which I suppose made it ideal for
an illegal transaction. I entered through a set of revolving doors and
found myself in a lobby with a spinach-green carpet. The reception
desk to my left was dark, gleaming wood and the wallpaper was a
lighter shade of brown imprinted with an over-fussy pattern of tangled
leaves. A couple of sprawling, over-large pot plants completed the
impression that I had walked into a building that wanted to be a
forest. I spotted a set of lifts over to my right and strode towards them
with the confidence of a paying guest.

No one tried to stop me or ask what I was doing, but it wasn’t until
the lift was ascending that I breathed a sigh of relief. None of the lift
buttons had said ‘Suite’ next to them, so I just pressed the button for
the top floor and hoped for the best.

My hunch turned out to be right. I stepped out of the lift on to a
landing with three widely spaced doors. Above the door closest to me
was a wooden sign with the words ‘Suite 4’ carved into the wood and
highlighted in gold paint. Half a dozen steps brought me to ‘Suite
5’. I checked my watch. 1.57 a.m. Perfect timing. I raised a hand and
knocked gently.

It was so silent that you could almost hear the air hum. When
I leaned forward to put my ear to the door, the rustle of my jacket
seemed to reverberate from the beige walls.

I couldn’t hear anything from inside the room. I waited a few more
seconds, then knocked again. My tongue rasped across lips which were
dry with nerves. I shifted from one foot to the other – and then, for the
first time since stepping out of the lift, I heard a sound.

It didn’t come from behind the door of Suite 5, though. It came
from above me. I looked up at the ceiling, not that I expected to see
anything. The sound was like claws scrabbling on a rough surface. I
imagined an owl landing on a roof a few metres above my head. Maybe
even rats running about in the air conditioning ducts.

The sound continued for a few seconds and then stopped. I looked at my watch.
1.59. Raising my fist, I knocked louder. Glancing up and down the corridor, I leaned forward again, my face so close to the door that I could have kissed it, and in a low, urgent voice, said, ‘Hello?’

Still no answer. ‘Fuck,’ I said, though so quietly that the only
audible sound was the wet ‘ck’ in my throat. I knocked again, louder.
‘Hello?’ I repeated. ‘Anyone there?’

2.01. My anxiety was turning to paranoia. What if I’d got it wrong –
the time, the place? What if I’d not read the email properly?

But I had. I knew I had. Not only had I read it properly, I’d read it
at least twenty times. The details were seared into my brain. There was
no way I’d made a mistake.

Email man had told me and Clover not to ring anyone – that if we
did, he’d know – but surely that didn’t apply to us ringing each other?
I took my phone out of my pocket. A quick call, just to double-check
the details. Before thumbing the buttons, however, I tried the handle
of the door.

It opened.

I was so surprised I jerked back, almost yanking the door shut
again. I managed to stop myself, and for a few seconds just stood there,
my hand wrapped around the handle, the door open half an inch. I
couldn’t see much. A line of light, a sliver of something brownish that
might have been a desk or a table.

‘Hello,’ I said into the gap. ‘I think you’re expecting me. I’ve got
something for you.’

Silence. I sighed and pushed the door open. Hesitated for a
second, then stepped forward into a typical hotel sitting room, nice
but anonymous. Desk to the left, three-piece suite, low table, TV, rustcoloured
curtains billowing in the wind.

It was empty, but there were signs of recent occupation. A folded
Japanese newspaper on the brown leather settee, a china cup containing
half an inch of what looked like weak, milkless tea on the low table.

‘Hello?’ I called again, but I’d now pretty much accepted the fact
that there was no one here. I wandered over to the window, which
was open as far as it would go, and looked out. From here London
was a mass of lights, some moving, some not, with dense patches of
blackness in between. I debated what to do. Wait here till the people
I was supposed to meet came back? Leave the heart where it would be
easily seen and vacate the premises? Call Clover to find out whether
there’d been a change of plan?

I decided on the last option, but first I wanted to check out the
other rooms. There were doors on opposite walls, to my left and right.
The one on my right was closest, so I tried that first. I opened the door
on to a bedroom containing a king-sized double bed, which looked
not to have been slept in, or even sat on. In fact, there was no sign that
anyone had been in here at all – no luggage, no clothes, no glass or
book on the bedside table.

I went back into the sitting room. The door on the opposite wall
was just beyond the desk. I crossed to it, guessing that it must be the
bathroom. I was reaching for the handle when I heard the scrabbling
sound again. It seemed to come from directly above my head, and
I got the odd feeling that whatever was up on the roof was tracking
my movements. Again I looked up, but there was nothing to see
except a white ceiling. I glanced across to the open window, where
the curtain was still billowing like a listless ghost. Suddenly I felt the
urge to be as quiet as I could. Gritting my teeth, I pushed the handle
of the door down slowly and eased it open. The first thing I saw was
white walls streaked and spattered with red. A single word jumped
into my head: abattoir .

The shock made my fingers spring apart, jerk away from the handle.
Letting go didn’t stop the door from swinging all the way open, though.
Inch by inch the room was revealed. I stood, stunned and gaping, my
mind like an expanding balloon that was being filled not with air but
terrible images. I wanted to recoil, but instead felt myself taking a step
forward, as if tugged by invisible wire. The door gave a final creak and
came to a halt.

The light was on in the bathroom, and its barely audible hum was
like a tiny, almost subliminal scream. A scream that went on and on, as
if reacting to what it illuminated.

There were two men in the bathroom. Both were dead. They were
not just dead though – they had been taken apart, piece by piece. Their
blood was pooled on the floor, spattered up the walls and across the
mirror, and was even dripping from the ceiling.

Their heads were in the sink, cheek to cheek like lovers, glazed-eyed
and open-mouthed. Their torsos and severed limbs were stacked in the bath like
firewood – except for one hand, which was resting on the
lowered toilet seat, dead fingers still curled around the butt and trigger
of a chunky black handgun.

The instant effect of seeing so much carnage was like a stinging,
open-handed slap across the face. It was a flash of sensation, so awful
and vivid and unexpected that I felt almost blinded by it. It was only
little by little that I noticed specific details associated with the two men
and how they had died. Even then, shocked as I was, it struck me that
some of the details were very odd indeed.

The first detail – the obvious and most mundane one – was that
the men were Japanese. Their faces were slack, blood-flecked, horribly
distorted by death, but there was no mistaking their nationality. The
second detail was that they had been smartly dressed in suits and ties
and crisp white shirts. They looked like businessmen. But businessmen
with guns. Which is where it began to get odd.

The gun in the severed hand resting on the lowered lid of the
toilet seat had not been fired. If it had been, there would have been
evidence – a bullet hole in the wall or door or ceiling, or, if the bullet
had embedded itself in the killer, a trail of blood leading from the
bathroom, across the floor of the sitting room and presumably out
into the corridor. But there were none of these things – which seemed
to indicate that although one of the dead men had had his gun in his
hand, he and his companion had been attacked so swiftly and savagely
that he hadn’t even had time to pull the trigger.

Maybe I was being paranoid, but I couldn’t help thinking, as I
stared down at the hand, that the killer wanted me – or whoever else
might have found the bodies – to know this. That was why the hand
had been placed so carefully where it was – as evidence of the killer’s
incredible speed and agility.

He’s showing off . I was still so shocked that I wasn’t sure whether I
actually whispered these words or merely thought them. I wasn’t so
shocked, though, that I didn’t notice another detail. And again, like
the unfired gun, this was one that seemed so impossible that, despite
the evidence, it couldn’t be true.

Admittedly I haven’t seen many dismembered corpses in my time,
but it still looked pretty obvious to me that the men hadn’t been taken
apart in the normal way. There were no clean cuts that I could see, no
evidence of the kinds of marks made by axes or swords or chainsaws.
No, these men seemed to have been ripped apart, their skin stretched
and torn, their exposed bones shattered and twisted. I thought of roast
chicken, the gristly sound of sinews snapping as the legs were wrenched
off the bird.

Oddly it was this thought, rather than what I was looking at, which
nearly made me throw up for the second time that night. I managed
to keep my gorge down through sheer willpower, telling myself what a
bad idea it would be to puke at two separate murder scenes on the same
evening. Leaning forward, so as not to get blood on my boots, I grabbed
the door handle and pulled the bathroom door shut. As it clicked I
heard a flapping sound behind me and almost jumped out of my skin,
but it was only the curtain blowing in a particularly strong breeze.

With the door shut, my mind went into a sort of automatic selfpreservation
mode. I’d already used my handkerchief to clean blood
off my face, so now I untied my right boot, pulled off my sock and
used it to wipe all the door handles I’d touched. I wished I’d had the
foresight to put my gloves back on before entering the room, but it
had never occurred to me that I would have to worry yet again about
leaving physical evidence behind. When I’d done all I could to cover
my tracks, I left quickly, using the stairs this time instead of the lift.
The fact that I didn’t meet anyone on the way down or crossing the
lobby was a stroke of luck, I suppose, though after the day I’d had it
felt like the very least that the universe owed me. I stepped out into the
street and started walking up the road, and it was only when I’d taken
a couple of dozen steps that I wondered where the hell I was going.