False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  She was thin-faced and blue-eyed with a sharp nose and a thin expressive mouth which broke into a wide smile as soon as we’d passed muster.

  “At last,” she said. “You two have deigned to visit our humble abode.”

  Not that humble, I thought, as she led us into a wide hallway with an antique walnut hat and coat stand and a red and green tiled floor.

  “I’m Stacy, of course,” she said, taking our coats and then pausing at her first proper sight of the Bulge.

  “How far gone are you?” she asked, and whistled when Bev told her. “Twins?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Bev.

  Stacy grinned. “I wouldn’t be afraid yet, love,” she said. “Fear comes later when they get mobile.” Her smile dropped for a moment. “No problems, right? Nothing medical?”

  Beverley assured Stacy that everything was proceeding to order and that so far, touch wood, nothing had gone wrong. I knew from the NCA’s background check that Stacy had suffered three late-term miscarriages in her early thirties.

  The hallway smelled faintly of floor polish and damp coats. Lining the walls on both sides were pictures of young men and women in formal head and shoulder poses. Most of them were black or mixed race, but a couple were desi and at least one was white. They were all smartly turned out and half of them were holding up certificates or trophies. Directly ahead, Tyrel Johnson appeared in the kitchen doorway dressed in a rugby shirt in Richmond FC colors. He was holding a spatula, which he waved at us in greeting.

  “Well,” he said, having got an eyeful of Beverley, “this explains why Peter is such a cheerful lad, doesn’t it?”

  “Get back in the kitchen,” said Stacy. “Before we all die of starvation.” She turned to us and told us not to let Johnson’s appearance in the kitchen fool us. “I do most of the cooking round here.”

  The front and back ground-floor rooms had been knocked into one to form what an estate agent would have described as a Reception/Dining Room. Normal people don’t routinely eat in their dining room, but in this case the outsized pine table, which easily sat ten, had a battered look. It was in the process of being laid by a sullen-looking white teenager with brown hair cut into a skinhead and an obviously handmade biro tattoo on her cheek that must have really hurt.

  This was Keira Slater, whose mum had left the family home one evening, when Keira was nine, and never returned. She’d lived on her own and managed to maintain a semblance of normality, including attending school for nine months until the council sent the bailiffs round to collect the unpaid council tax. She’d then been placed with two homes and three foster families, but had either run away or been rejected as too disruptive. She’d run away from Stacy and Johnson’s home at least three times in the two years she’d been placed there, but always came back.

  “This is Keira,” said Stacy.

  Keira acknowledged us with a grudging tilt of the head and then went back to laying the knives and forks.

  Stacy looked over to where a skinny young black man was standing hesitantly in front of a glass-fronted mahogany bookshelf. He had the top of his hair in dreads with a fade on the sides. It made him look like he was auditioning for an American cable show as the quirky but tragically expendable best friend.

  “Oliver,” said Stacy, “be a love and fetch a couple of cushions for the recliner.”

  Oliver Partridge, aged seventeen, had been given up for care by his mother when he was twelve, after he’d knifed the neighbor’s dog and tried to strangle the family cat. He’d spent a couple of years in a secure psychiatric unit. The NCA couldn’t access his confidential records but, judging by his track record since he was discharged, he was fine providing he stayed on the meds.

  Oliver gave Beverley a shy smile and slipped out of the living room.

  Stacy asked Beverley if she’d like a drink.

  “We’ve got lemonade, Coke, ginger beer,” she said, and turned to me. “Would you like a beer?”

  I said I’d have a ginger beer because I was driving, although of course as a rule of thumb you should never drink while undercover, anyway. How to unobtrusively dump your drink was one of the few bits of tradecraft Silver thought it was worth spending time teaching me.

  Oliver returned with a pair of linen-covered foam pillows, which he arranged on the recliner so that Beverley could sit down with suitably grateful cries of comfort, and once enthroned accept a glass of lemonade.

  Beverley’s personality and Bulge dragged the center of the room over to her and soon Stacy and Keira were copping a feel and exchanging bladder anecdotes. I found myself having a non-conversation with Oliver who, despite answering in an astonishing range of monosyllables, told me nothing at all. I did ask him what he wanted to do when he left school, and was relieved when he said he wanted to start a YouTube channel rather than something like, say, taxidermy.

  I was saved from conversational death by the arrival of Chef Johnson, who barged into the dining room brandishing a soup tureen.

  “Places everyone,” he said. “Dinner c’est arrive.”

  Oliver and Keira jumped to it while Stacy helped Beverley out of her seat and hovered while she got her legs under the table. A rich smell was wafting from the tureen, bypassing my brain and causing my stomach to growl.

  “Cow heel soup,” Johnson said with glee as he served it up.

  But if he was thinking either me or Beverley were going to be appalled by eating the wrong bit of the cow, he was going to be disappointed. I’ve eaten sweetmeats and brawn, and if you don’t know what they are you’re better off not knowing. Trust me on this.

  It’s easy enough to make tasty soup; you just follow the instructions. But making delicious soup takes skill. And, judging by the delicate taste of the dumplings, that is what Johnson had. It isn’t easy making delicate dumplings. Mine tend to be a bit on the loft insulation side, so I know what I’m talking about.

  Conversation proceeded about where I’d expected it to—some baby chat, some “how are you finding it at work?” chat. Keira would interrupt every so often to say sarky and irrelevant things. Oliver said nothing, but I did catch him smiling at a joke once. It was a surprisingly shy smile for a young man teetering on the verge of violent psychopathy.

  The report had been very clear, Stacy and Tyrel were his last chance. One more violent incident and it was good-bye Roehampton and hello Broadmoor.

  The main course, again presented with some ceremony by Johnson, was curried prawns, with beef pelau for Keira, who didn’t like seafood, cassava, sweet potato, glazed carrots and steamed peas.

  “Can you write this down?” I asked. “I want to give this to my mum.”

  Johnson looked pleased, but Stacy gave me a calculating look thinking, I guessed, that I was sucking up to the boss. Which was true, sort of, but I still wanted that recipe.

  “You’ll notice he’s made enough for eight people,” said Stacy. “He always makes twice as much as we need.”

  “I’ll have seconds, then,” said Beverley, and so did everyone else except for Keira who said she was watching her weight.

  “You’ll notice the pot is empty,” said Johnson when we’d finished.

  Stacy clapped her hands and Oliver and Keira sprang up and started clearing away.

  “So what’s for pudding?” asked Beverley.

  “Ice cream,” said Stacy. “Or there’s some banana cake.” She jerked her thumb at Johnson. “He doesn’t do pudding.”

  “I had nine brothers and sisters,” he said. “We weren’t dirt poor, but I didn’t know what pudding was until I came over here to live with my aunt.”

  We all had ice cream and banana cake, which Stacy admitted came from Marks & Spencer. Stacy’s body language had subtly shifted. She had been tentative, almost formal, with Beverley. But now she’d lost her caution. She was leaning over the table toward her, and I saw her briefly put her hand on Beverley�
�s arm.

  I’d been asking Johnson what it was like running security for Terrence Skinner when into a pause dropped Stacy’s next question.

  “I’ve got to ask,” said Stacy. “Peter’s a nice enough lad. But, be honest, what is it in him that attracts you?”

  Beverley gave me a sly smile.

  “He’s a world-class shagger,” she said.

  Stacy grinned and Oliver looked at me wide-eyed.

  “No, I mean it,” said Beverley. “Olympic standard shagging. Morning, noon and night. I knew it as soon as I saw him the first time. That man, I thought, will go like a dredger at high tide.”

  “Is he hung?” asked Keira.

  “Like a—”

  “Hey,” I said quickly.

  “You notice he doesn’t deny the shagging,” said Beverley, and I realized that she now had Keira in the palm of her hand. “Even if he doesn’t think it’s true.”

  Maddeningly, I was actually blushing, and in winter that shows. Certainly I think Johnson noticed, because he made a credible stab at being an old-fashioned West Indian patriarch by frowning at his wife and foster children.

  “Now then,” he said. “We shall have none of that at the table.”

  Beverley and Stacy exchanged looks and then burst out laughing.

  “Chance would be a fine thing,” said Stacy.

  After pudding we manhandled Beverley back into her chair and had coffee in the sitting room. Oliver and Keira vanished upstairs to their rooms to—hopefully, given the alternatives—log on to unsuitable websites. I wondered if Stacy and Johnson monitored their web activity.

  Of course they would, I thought. And Johnson will have access to state-of-the-art monitoring software, as well.

  I asked Stacy how she got into fostering.

  “We can’t have kids of our own,” she said breezily. “We were looking to adopt and one of my mates, who’s a social worker, suggested we foster a couple of kids. She said it was for practice, but looking back she needed carers that could deal with the older kids she had on her books.”

  “You obviously took to it,” said Beverley.

  “It’s like having a tattoo,” she said. “It’s painful, but when you see the result you start thinking about having another one.”

  Like a lot of ex-coppers, Stacy and Johnson had gone into business as private detectives and had made a decent enough living at it. But Stacy found fostering satisfying in a way that being a private detective never was, and gradually it became a full-time job.

  “Wandsworth started sending us their problem cases. And, to be honest, everything I learned in the Job was more useful for dealing with the kids than it was digging into people’s marriages and dodgy employees.”

  “It can’t pay, though,” said Beverley.

  “You get an allowance from the council but that doesn’t really cover expenses.” Stacy pointed at Beverley’s Bulge. “As you are about to find out.”

  Things had got a bit parlous, but then Johnson got his job at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation and solved all their financial problems. Especially since, as part of the senior management team, Johnson was getting stock options. Something to keep them solvent in the future.

  “Thank God for Skinner,” she said.

  Beverley turned and gave me a strange look I couldn’t interpret, before turning back and asking about the photos of the young people hanging in the hallway. Since obviously Beverley couldn’t be dragged out to examine them. Stacy produced a tablet on which the pictures were all conveniently stashed. Only her obvious pride in their achievements, however minor, stopped the experience from being the single most boring thing that has ever happened to me.

  Rescue arrived when Johnson invited me out to admire the garden and join a conspiracy to, if not exactly pervert the course of justice, certainly help put a thumb on the scales.

  “You know the guys from Belgravia, right?” he said as we stood on the porch.

  With the road blocked out by the house and the garden wall bounded by a golf course, this could have been a country garden.

  The ultimate English dream, my dad calls it, to have your own country garden—but in the city.

  I said I’d worked with some of them, including DS Guleed.

  “Do you know the SIO?” he asked.

  “Who, Seawoll?” I said. “He shouted at me once—does that count?”

  “Do you think Guleed would be willing to talk to you?” asked Johnson. “You know—unofficially.”

  “I think she might,” I said, and wondered if this operation could possibly get more tangled than it already was. “But Guleed’s ambitious. She’s going to want something in return.”

  Johnson jammed his hands in his pockets—I’ve seen that gesture before. He really wanted a cigarette, or a drink, or something other than the conversation he was having.

  “Anything in particular?” he asked.

  “Inside information,” I said. “What William Lloyd was really working on in Bambleweeny, maybe. Something we won’t tell them.”

  “I don’t know what they’re doing in Bambleweeny,” he said. “But if I look the other way, you’re welcome to do a bit of careful digging.”

  “Okay.”

  “Careful digging. And anything you find,” said Johnson, “you run past me before you take it anywhere else.”

  * * *

  —

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” asked Beverley once I’d cautiously pulled out into the late evening traffic. “Lying to people like Stacy and Tyrel?”

  “A bit,” I said. “But it can’t be helped.”

  “Stacy’s really making a difference to some lives,” she said.

  “More power to her,” I said.

  “And you heard her—she relies on Tyrel’s job to keep them afloat.”

  I paused while I negotiated the Stag Lane roundabout and then asked where she was going with this.

  “What if you bring down this company?” she asked. “What’s going to happen to Tyrel and Stacy and all the future Keiras and Olivers they might have helped?”

  Rain started splattering on the windscreen—I turned on the wipers.

  I said that she was assuming that the company was dirty.

  “And even if it is,” I said, “corporate cases are a pain and these companies never face any serious consequences.”

  Silver had given me that lecture—a long list of corporate malfeasance that went all the way back to the Bow Street Runners. Most of it unpunished.

  “Maybe, babes,” said Beverley, “I’ve got more faith in the forces of law and order than you do. So the company goes down the toilet leaving Stacy and Tyrel . . . ?”

  “If the company goes down, Tyrel will get himself another job,” I said. But I was thinking he was exactly the sort of guy who’d be thrown to the wolves to save the guilty. “They’re both grown-ups—they can look after themselves.”

  “Yeah,” said Beverley, that long drawn-out “yeah” that I had learned to dread. “But I think I’m going to take an interest.”

  “If you’re that interested in the victims of crime, I can introduce you to hundreds. Or, better still, call up Victim Support.”

  “But, love, it’s a matter of prioritization and resource allocation,” she said. “One, it helps prevent future crime. Two, they live within shouting distance of me.” She meant Beverley Brook, the medium-sized South London river, rather than the heavily pregnant woman in the seat next to me. “And three . . .” She drew out the three. “You and I are together—so what happens because of you happens because of me.”

  I had to think about that one.

  “Does that mean that the next time you flood Worcester Park, it’s my fault too?”

  “Of course it is,” she said. “Mind you, it was your fault last time as well—indirectly.”

  We probabl
y could have continued the conversation all the way home and into our bed. But just then my phone rang and Beverley answered.

  “It’s Thomas,” she said, and put it on speaker.

  “Hello, Peter,” said Nightingale. “I apologize for interrupting your evening, but I thought you might want this information as soon as possible.”

  “Nothing good then,” I said.

  “Let’s say interesting,” said Nightingale.

  So, yeah, nothing good.

  “I visited the would-be assassin, Mr. Lloyd, this afternoon in the company of Jennifer and Abdul and, after an initial assessment, persuaded his doctors to release him for tests at UCH.”

  “So, what did you find out?”

  “As you know, this kind of assessment is always subjective. But for my own part I’m confident that William Lloyd had been subjected to either the glamour or some form of sequestration,” said Nightingale. “You understand the implications, of course.”

  That somebody or something powerful had chosen William Lloyd to carry out its wishes.

  “Yes,” I said, and then asked if he knew which of those two options it was.

  “I couldn’t make that determination,” he said. “But Abdul says that there are minor but definite signs of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.”

  Hyperthaumaturgical degradation was the nice long word Dr. Walid had invented to describe the damage magic does to your brain. If it was present, it meant that either William Lloyd was a practitioner or he’d been sequestrated.

  But sequestrated by what and where?

  Nightingale was well ahead of me.

  “I’ll check his home address,” he said. “But investigating his workplace falls to you, I’m afraid.”

  Which meant we really needed to get into Bambleweeny—and soon.

  At least that should make Stephen the Librarian happy.

  Afterward, as I was helping Bev out of the car, I told her that she could take an interest in Johnson and Stacy’s foster kids. But only if she was subtle about it.

  “Relax,” she said as she waddled toward the front door. “I shall move in a mysterious way.”