Kraken by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

you might say, under certain circumstances. Certain sorts of crime. The disappearance of your squid. Plus there are aspects of what’s downstairs that are … relevant. Like for example the fact that the diameter of that jar’s opening isn’t big enough to have got that gentleman inside.”
    “What?”
    “But what really clinched our interest,” Baron said, “what really rang my bell—and I mean that literally, there’s a bell on my desk—is when you drew us that picture.”
    From his briefcase Vardy pulled a photocopy of the druggily exaggerated asterisk.
    “I know what that is,” said Billy. “Kubodera and Mori—”
    “So,” Baron said, “I head up a specialist unit.”
    “What unit?”
    Vardy pushed another piece of paper across the table. It was the sign again, the ten-armed spread with two longer limbs. But not the one Billy had drawn. The angles, the lengths of the arms, were slightly different.
    “That was drawn a little over a month ago,” Baron said. “A bookshop got busted into one night and a bunch of stuff was taken. Bloke wearing this sign had come in a couple of days running beforehand, not buying anything, looking around. Nervous.”
    “If this were a question of a couple of kids both wearing Obey Giant T-shirts, we’d not be bothered,” Vardy said, quickly, in his deep voice. “This is not a bloody meme. Though it may be going that way and thank you very much that’ll complicate things very nicely.” Billy blinked. “Are you a graffiti aficionado? It’s started to crop up. Early days. It’ll be on stickers on lampposts and student rucksacks soon. Turns out that this”—he flicked the paper—“is appropriate for the times.”
    “It just fits,” said Baron.
    “But not quite yet,” Vardy said. “So when it turns up twice, we sniff a pattern.”
    “The guy who was burgled,” Baron said. “It’s Charing Cross Road. He stocks a lot of junk and a little bit of proper antiquarian stuff. Six books nicked that night. Five had just come in. Maybe two, three hundred quids’ worth. They were all on the desk up front, waiting to be sorted. At first he thought that was all that was gone.
    “But where there are locked cabinets, the glass’s broken and something’s missing from a top shelf.” He held up a finger. “One book. From a bunch of old academic journals. He worked out what it was was gone.”
    Baron looked down and read laboriously. “For-hand-linger … ved de Skandinav —something,” he said. “The 1857 volume.”
    “How’s your Danish, Billy?” said Vardy. “Ring any bells?”
    “Some villain wants to make it look like he’s rushed in and snagged at random,” Baron said. “So he grabs a load of books off the counter. But he then runs twenty feet down a corridor, to one specific locked bookshelf, breaks one specific pane of glass, takes one specific old book.” Baron shook his head. “It was that one journal. That ’s what this was all about.”
    “So we asked the Danish Royal Academy for the contents,” Vardy said. “Too old to be on databases.”
    “To be honest, we didn’t think much of it at the time,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a priority. It only got passed to us because we’d seen that symbol knocking around a bit. When the list came in from Copenhagen nothing stood out. But. When we heard the symbol’d turned up here, and just what’d happened, one of those articles nicked weeks ago came back sharpish.”
    “Pages one eighty-two to one eighty-five,” Vardy said.
    “I won’t try the Scandiwegian,” Baron said, reading. “It’s an article about blaeksprutter , so they say. Translation: Japetus Steenstrup. ‘Several Particulars about the Giant Cuttlefish of the Atlantic.’”
    “T O RECAP ,” B ARON SAID . “W EEKS BEFORE YOUR SQUID WAS SNAFFLED , someone pinched an original copy of that article.”
    “You’ll have heard of the author,” Vardy said. Billy’s mouth was open. He had. The giant squid was Architeuthis dux , but