The October Man

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The October Man

  Copyright © 2019 by Ben Aaronovitch.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration

  Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Walters.

  All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design

  Copyright © 2019 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-909-1

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Technical Notes

  Acknowledgements

  This book is dedicated to Lola Shoneyin because she threatened to beat me if I didn’t

  Das Leben ist viel zu kurz, um schlechten Wein zu trinken.

  Life is too short to drink bad wine.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Komplexe und diffuse Angelegenheiten (KDA)—Complex and Diffuse Matters.

  Bundeskriminalamt (BKA)—the Federal Criminal Police.

  Abteilung KDA—the department of the Bundeskriminalamt that deals with same.

  Chapter 1:

  Potato

  Fire

  In late September, as the nights close in, a strange madness possesses my father. Much to the outrage of our neighbours, he builds a bonfire in the back garden and invites friends, colleagues and, yes, even the neighbours in for beer and baked potatoes. Despite being certain that lighting a bonfire in Gartenstadt is, if not illegal, certainly inconsiderate, the neighbours never complain. This may be because my father is the city’s Polizeipräsident but it’s also because he cooks a mean steak and is generous with the beer. Spiritually my father is a big, jolly, red-faced man who grew up on a farm in Lower Saxony and fondly remembers the comely potato queens of his youth. In reality, my father is a slender narrow-shouldered man from Ludwigshafen whose attempts to grow a moustache fizzled out in the mid-1970s.

  “Uncle” Stefan, who came up the ranks just behind my father and has been his right-hand man and confidant for thirty years once told me that he is the most remarkable unremarkable man who ever lived. My mother says that she married my father because he was the most grown-up man she’d ever met, and if once a year he wanted to turn our back garden into a beer garden that was fine with her.

  I’ve always enjoyed our annual potato fire, especially now I’m old enough to have a beer. Also these days, because I’m older, and police, I’m allowed to sit with the grown-ups and tell war stories. Not that I’ve got any. Or, at least, none that I’m allowed to tell outside of the Abteilung KDA. Stefan tells the best stories—like the one about the armadillo and the Dutchman. Or the time he had to arrest a nun for disorderly conduct.

  And the time he found two decomposing bodies in a cupboard—a young boy and a girl.

  “Police work,” said Stefan, “is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent bullshit and one per cent horror.” He gazed at me over his beer. He had a blunt face with small grey eyes that could shift from humour to intimidation with frightening speed. Must have been very handy in an interview room back when he was still getting his hands dirty.

  I must have looked slightly impressed, because my father got all cautionary.

  “Policing is a noble profession, Tobi,” he said. “But it’s still just a job, and you’re supposed come home at the end of the shift to the important stuff.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Family,” said Papa. “Friends. The house, the hearth—the dog.”

  “He just wants to know when you’re going to get married,” said Stefan. “He’s worried you’ll meet the wrong case before you meet the right girl.”

  Papa snorted but I could tell he was glad Stefan had said it.

  “You’re worried I’m going to get killed?” I asked.

  Papa shook his head.

  ‘“The wrong case’ isn’t about danger. You only have to spend a couple of nights with Traffic to know that anybody can die suddenly,” said Stefan, proving once again that he was the joyful heart of any social event.

  “True,” said my father into his beer.

  “So what is ‘the wrong case’,” I asked.

  “The one where you go over the line,” said Stefan. “Where the job becomes an obsession and the next thing you know it’s hello bottle and goodbye family.”

  Since Stefan had three grandchildren already and six gigs of pictures on his phone that he’d show at the slightest excuse, you had to assume that either he’d never had “the wrong case”, or he’d got over it.

  “I’ll have you know that I don’t take my job at all seriously,” I said, which was a sign that I’d definitely had too many beers.

  That night I slept in my old room, which my mother has partly converted into a home office. There were wallcharts showing availability and training schedules for the teachers under her administration and, between them, pictures drawn by kids from her school. One of which I recognised as mine—your classic stick-legged, sausage-bodied horse ridden by an equally deformed figure in a cowboy hat. When I looked closer I saw that either someone had shot an arrow into its head, or the horse had a horn growing from its brow.

  Cowboys and unicorns, I thought as the beer carried me away to sleep. No wonder my father worries about me.

  I woke up earlier than I expected the next morning and took myself out for a run. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the diligent professionals of Mannheim’s most boring suburb were already up and climbing into their Mercedes and BMWs to ensure that they were waiting at their desks when the rest of the office arrived. Some of them had thermal travel mugs containing the morning’s second cup of coffee so they could finish it on the move. A Mercedes C-class went past me with a forgotten mug still on the roof—the smell of coffee mingling with the exhaust. I watched with amazement as the mug stayed on as the car took a hard left—perhaps it was magnetised.

  I ran on, wondering whether the mug would make it all the way to the office, coffee still in it, to provide a refreshing beverage for the startled driver when they got out.

  At the end of my parents’ street is the wildlife park which I’ve been using as a running circuit since I was thirteen. It’s a mere three kilometres, a good distance if you’re just looking for something to wake you up before breakfast.

  I was halfway around when I got a call on my mobile—it was the boss. It couldn’t be good news for her to be up this early.

  “Tobias,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Mannheim,” I said. “On leave.”

  “Not any more,” she said. “We have a possible infraction in Trier. Get over there and check it out. We should have an information package waiting for you when you get there.”

  “What kind of infraction?” I asked.

  “A suspicious death,” said the Director, “with unusual biological characteristics.”

  “My favourite.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” she said. “Jump to it.”

  “Yes, boss,” I said, but I finished my run and had breakfast with my family first.

  Once I’d given up my dreams of being an astronaut at age seven, a professional footballer at ag
e nine and, in a final crushing of those dreams, a rock musician at the age of fourteen, I decided to be a policeman like my father before me.

  I joined the Bundeskriminalamt rather than the Polizei Baden-Württemberg so Papa wouldn’t be able to order me about at work. Just so we’re clear, he doesn’t order me about at home—Mama does that to both of us.

  I ended up in the Abteilung KDA because I didn’t talk myself out of it fast enough, and because the Director has a vile sense of humour. I ended up learning magic because you can’t trust the British to keep to an agreement over the long term.

  Mama looked up from her breakfast and took the news that my visit was being cut short with a shrug. She said she hoped that I’d be able to come back again when the job was done. I know he claims to have been scrupulous about returning home on time, but she must have done this with my father at least a couple of times. It’s the nature of the job.

  Despite the esoteric nature of my work, I spend most of my time in my car. Recently I managed, through some impressive paperwork, to get assigned a silver Golf VI GTI with assorted police modifications. It’s dull, but at least it’s comfortable and reliable—unsurprisingly, my father approves. Once I’d waved my parents off to their respective jobs, I checked I had enough changes of clothes in my overnight bag, that my scene of crime kit was fully stocked, and that the batteries in the Geiger counter were charged. Then I strapped on my shoulder holster, fetched my pistol from the family gun safe, made sure that my thermal mug of coffee was not still sitting on the roof of my car and pulled out of my parents’ drive.

  Trier is not famous as a policing hotspot, having been voted Germany’s Quaintest Town five years in a row in the poll of popular destinations conducted by the Deutsche Zentrale für Tourismus. It has perhaps two murders a year and its greatest public order challenge is the annual wine fair. By the time the Golf and I rolled into the Mosel valley and headed south, the Director had texted me the name of my police liaison in Trier. I’d have suspected a prank, only the Director doesn’t have that kind of a sense of humour.

  My liaison’s name was Vanessa Sommer.

  It might have been a coincidence but someone, I just knew, somewhere, was enjoying a laugh at my expense.

  The Kriminalpolizei in Trier were located in an ugly office block right by the train station. Presumably this was so that the detectives, after a hard day on the mean streets of Trier, could commute home to somewhere even smaller and quainter.

  Because I was in a hurry to get back to my leave, I’d called ahead. And so I was met in the car park by a stout young woman with a round face, hazel eyes and a mop of brown curls which must have been a pain to control when she was in uniform. My liaison, I assumed.

  “Tobias Winter?” she asked and I said I was.

  “Frau Sommer?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and then, quickly, “Vanessa.”

  We shook hands—she had a strong grip and a strange pattern of calluses on her fingertips.

  “Do you want the briefing first?” she asked. “Or to go straight to the scene?”

  I asked whether a package had arrived from Meckenheim yet, but she said no. The Director never sent anything important by email or fax. It all had to be delivered by a courier, who was probably stuck behind an elephant race near Wittlich.

  “Why don’t we take my car?” I said. “And then you can brief me on the way.”

  Vanessa directed me onto the A602, which runs up the valley and then off onto a newish looking bridge to the west bank. Ehrang is a cluster of slightly depressing houses and shops to the north of Trier proper, just beyond the point where the River Kyll joins the Mosel. Above the district rose some of the area’s famously steep vineyards, with an unsurfaced lane running along the bottom parallel to the railway tracks.

  It was good body-dumping country, I thought when we arrived.

  A long, low-use lane, with the houses on the other side of the railway blinded by the orange and green sound baffles, and at night nobody would be working the vineyard above.

  “A dog walker found him,” said Vanessa.

  “Where would we be without dog walkers?” I said.

  “Called it in at 21.17,” she said. “It had already been dark for two hours by then.”

  I looked up. It had started to drizzle during the drive over and the clouds were low enough to brush the top of the ridge. If one were sufficiently bold, I thought, the deed could have been done in daylight. Assuming the victim had been dumped and not murdered on the spot. I was handicapped by the fact that the body had been taken away, leaving only an empty white forensic tent behind.

  “The paramedics declared it a biohazard,” said Vanessa.

  That explained why the pair of uniforms left on guard were standing a whole six metres away from the tent. There must have been one of those controlled panics that evening, as everyone cracked open their emergency procedure folders and attempted to push the problem as far up the chain of command as it could realistically go.

  One of those folders had contained the KDA checklist and, when enough boxes were ticked, a call was made to our HQ at Meckenheim and my boss was woken up. That’s assuming she ever sleeps—nobody’s certain she does. Exactly which other boxes had been ticked to have me dragged off leave was probably detailed in the briefing document that was still stuck in traffic somewhere.

  “Were you involved in any of this kerfuffle?” I asked Vanessa.

  “No,” she said. “It was a normal day until I got to the office.”

  I opened the back of the VW and unpacked my forensic suit, a disposable mask and the Geiger counter. When I pulled on the suit I made a point of checking the seals at my wrists, the Velcro strip that covered the zip, and ensuring that the drawstring of the hood was nice and tight.

  “Has anyone taken samples?” I asked.

  “K17 did a full sweep,” said Vanessa. That was Kommissariat 17, the section of the Trier criminal police who dealt with forensics. Every state police force has its own way of doing things, and the Rheinland-Pfalz Police obviously liked to have lots of little departments.

  I unpacked my sample case, just to be on the safe side, and took it and the Geiger counter over to the forensic tent. Vanessa sensibly stayed as far away as she could without looking unprofessional.

  I opened the tent and stepped into the quiet interior.

  The body had been found in the storm culvert that ran alongside the road and the tent had been positioned right up against the fence so that the ditch filled a quarter of the floor area. Before I did anything else, I unshipped the Geiger counter and checked the bottom of the ditch—nothing. I’ve never actually got a positive reading but, as Mama says, far better to be safe than radioactive. Mama used to be a radical Green, which is how she met my father. She assaulted him, he arrested her—it was love at first handcuffing.

  There was no body, obviously, but K17 had left half a dozen yellow evidence tags scattered around to mark where they’d taken samples. I followed their lead and took duplicate samples from the same locations, carefully noting the tags and taking reference pictures. It was largely leaf mould, some random bits of slime, and what looked like tiny white flowers. I did find a small blackened lump of lead that might have been the deformed remains of a bullet or possibly a fishing weight. I bagged it with the rest of the samples. Rain started pattering on the PVC roof and Vanessa called that she was going to sit in my car if that was all right with me.

  “Sure,” I called back, and finished packaging the samples ready to ship to the labs at Wiesbaden. Then, with the mundane preliminaries out of the way, I moved on to the magical assessment.

  The modern magical tradition was founded in the seventeenth century by Sir Isaac Newton. But, despite his work being refined by the scholars of the Weimar Academy in the nineteenth century, most of the basic terminology is in Latin. This was, says the Director, because Latin remained the international language of science—particularly amongst learned gentlemen who never had to wash their own socks
. Thus, the trace magical activity leaves behind in the environment is called vestigia in the plural and vestigium in the singular, and the procedure I was about to undertake was called a Umkreis-Magieerfassung—Perimeter Magic Sweep.

  Have you ever had a random thought or feeling that seemed to come from nowhere? That might have been a vestigium. Or it might have been a random thought or feeling generated by your brain. The first thing you learn when you train as a practitioner is how to tell them apart.

  I lay flat on the ragged grass of the lane, let my head hang over the edge of the culvert with the green smell in my nostrils, and closed my eyes. As a general rule of thumb, any magic strong enough to kill a human being directly leaves an obvious vestigium. It fades over time although concrete, like stone and brick, retains it almost indefinitely.

  And I wasn’t sensing anything that strong from the ditch.

  For a moment I thought I was going to get back to my parents’ house and my annual leave, but then I felt it. It was quiet and cold, like a breath of wind brushing against my cheek. I thought I caught the smell of the soil and the slow-motion wriggling of roots and sprouts as they struggled into the light.

  Not what I was expecting. And slightly creepy.

  I got to my feet and wrote down my findings with the word inconclusive underlined at the end. Still, I decided, unless the effect was amazingly subtle, that much magic was unlikely to have killed someone on its own. Nevertheless, I’d have to check the body myself. But with any luck our victim had died of something nice and safe like anthrax. Maybe I could still get home before dark.

  I found Vanessa reading something on her phone in my car. The rain was hammering off the roof by then and she stayed right where she was while I stripped off my forensic suit and packed my gear away in the back. I was slightly impressed by that.

  When I climbed into the driver’s seat beside her she handed me a Thermos mug full of coffee, which impressed me even more.