The October Man

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “That was about fairies and werewolves,” said Vanessa. “My source says you can actually cast spells.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Is this a problem?”

  Vanessa was too police just to take my word for it.

  “Show me,” she said.

  I told her to stand back.

  “Is it dangerous?” she asked.

  “It might damage your phone and your watch if you’re too close,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I sighed. “Do you want this demonstration or not?”

  She said yes, and stood back, so I conjured a palm-light. This is a luminous globe the size of a golf ball that floats above your palm. It’s actually the first spell you ever learn. Versatile and, in this form, relatively low-powered. Which reduces the risk of collateral damage.

  Vanessa took an involuntary step backwards and slapped both hands to her face.

  “My God,” she said. “My God, my God.”

  “You asked me,” I said. “And I told you. I even made a Harry Potter joke.”

  Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who’ve figured out how to start a sentence but don’t know how it ends.

  She lowered her hands and took a step forward and the palm-light illuminated the wonder on her face. Then she laughed and looked me straight in the eyes.

  “Fuck me,” she said. “You’re the magic police.”

  “It’s not nearly as much fun as you think it is,” I said.

  But I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  The KDA travel section, which to my knowledge consisted of one old lady from Swabia, had booked me into the Ibis Flyer. It had big rooms, a weird Roman theme and a breakfast that started at six o’clock. The charm of the all-you-can-eat breakfast wore off for me after a nasty bout of food poisoning in Halberstadt, so I stuck to coffee, bread and jam. Then I drove the short distance back to the Kriminaldirektion where Vanessa met me in the car park.

  Fortunately she’d calmed down overnight and had taken up the habitual mantle of light-hearted cynicism that is the birthright of every well brought up police officer. I knew she had lots of questions but was biding her time.

  The sun was still behind the hills as we drove back towards Ehrang. Mist rose from the dark river and the green folds of the landscape, but the sky was a powdery blue.

  At Trier the western ridge of the Mosel valley sweeps close to the river, save for a notch where the River Kyll joins the main course. There the railway line and the roads split, one branch continuing up the valley of the Mosel towards Koblenz and the other following the line of the Kyll towards Kordel. The sides of the valley were steep and forested, but not cultivated for grapes.

  “They don’t face south,” said Vanessa. “This far north you need as much sunlight as you can get.”

  We parked next to a derelict house that stood oddly isolated on the far side of the main road. It was tall and pink and probably at the centre of a planning dispute. Beyond was a low white block beside the sluice gate which was plastered with yellow warning signs including caution—risk of death.

  We found the way across to the island, just where Frau Stracker said it would be, and even the path she’d described was visible—just—winding through the stands of sycamore, birch and oak. We picked our way along until we reached the far side of the island. The railway tracks were clearly visible across the river and there were at least three suitable candidates for the wine sacrifice tree.

  “Which one?” asked Vanessa.

  “It’s not the exact tree that matters,” I said, so we chose an oak with a branch conveniently at head height. I hung the Aldi bag with the wine offering by its handles and pinned my business card to the top where it wouldn’t be missed.

  We waited a moment. The mist had burned away with the rising sun, but the air was still and there was no sound apart from the river and the wind in the treetops. There’d been no vestigia associated with the tree, but trees are tricky that way.

  “Who are we leaving the wine for, anyway?” asked Vanessa.

  “The location spirit of the river,” I said.

  A dirty red DB Regional train whined past on the opposite bank and I missed Vanessa’s response.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “Location spirit?”

  “What you might call the tutelary deity or the genius loci,” I said. “The goddess of the river—if Frau Stracker was telling the truth.”

  “You know this is the Kyll,” said Vanessa, as we made our way back to the sluice gate. “Not the Mosel.”

  “That would make sense,” I said.

  “Why would that make sense?”

  “Because the Mosel is listed in our files as ‘gesäubert’.”

  “Cleaned out?”

  “Eliminated,” I said. “By the Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften of the Ahnenerbe.”

  Vanessa waited until we’d negotiated the tricky climb over the low concrete wall that guarded the sluice gate building and were heading back to the car before asking the inevitable follow-up question.

  “How do you kill a goddess?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That knowledge is forbidden.”

  “So how do you know the goddess is dead?”

  I sighed once more and when we got back to my car I pulled out the security case, entered the six-digit code to open the mechanical lock, did the spell that opened the magic lock, and hauled out the dossier to show Vanessa.

  It was a standard Leitz lever-arch folder in which about a hundred pages of carefully photocopied pages were separated into sections by standard tab dividers.

  “Why is it yellow?” asked Vanessa.

  “Somebody ordered black but got yellow instead and I suppose somebody else thought it was a waste not to use them.”

  I opened it up to show her the relevant pages that dealt with the Mosel, headed with the entry:

  Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften ------Gesäubert

  Deutsche Volksforschung und Volkskunde ------NR

  Volkserzählung, Märchen und Sagenkunde ------NR

  Klassische Archäologie ------NR

  “What’s all this? And what does NR stand for?” asked Vanessa.

  “Not relevant,” I said. “It means that no relevant information as to the Mosel valley was found within the records of the organisation listed.”

  “That seems a bit redundant,” said Vanessa.

  Explaining this to colleagues is tricky and, frankly, often quite embarrassing.

  I told her that the KDA sits on several tonnes of what they like to call “historical materials” recovered over the years from Ahnenerbe offices and werewolf caches. When I get an assignment my colleagues downstairs in the Rechercheabteilung, the Research Department, go through the various files looking for anything that might be relevant to the case. If they find something useful they photocopy the relevant pages and compile a file. Then the head of the section types up the list of the sections and notes whether they contain information pertinent to the case.

  “Wait,” said Vanessa. “They photocopy the documents—all of this is on paper?”

  “And stored in filing cabinets,” I said. “Those great big steel ones from the East.”

  “Why hasn’t it been transferred into a database?”

  “They considered putting it on microfiche in the sixties, but they decided it was too much of a risk,” I said.

  “Too much of a risk of what?”

  “This is all forbidden knowledge that was not supposed to be kept,” I said. “Too much risk that other countries will know we kept it.”

  “Then why are you telling me?”

  “I don’t believe other countries give a sausage,” I said. “To be honest. It’s like with germ warfare. They weaponise germs for aggression and we say we study weaponised germs purely for defensive purposes. Nobody likes to admit they’re doing it but everybody knows everybody else is doing it.”

  It was obvious that Vanessa had only just started asking questions, so I put
the folder back in its armoured suitcase as a hint. She started to ask whether magic was as dangerous as germ warfare but fortunately her phone rang and it was her boss, Förstner.

  She listened and nodded before turning to me.

  “They’ve identified the tattoo studio where our victim got his ink,” she said. “Do you want to conduct a follow-up interview?”

  I said yes—not least because it would keep Vanessa occupied as well.

  Chapter 4:

  Location

  Spirit

  The tattoo studio was located halfway down Balduin-Passage, a dank mini-arcade just off Theodor-Heuss-Allee, less than two hundred metres from Kriminaldirektion HQ. Sensibly, they’d started their search close to home and got lucky with the first candidate. I suspected the officers assigned had probably spent more time moaning about the job over their morning coffee than they had actually doing it. The studio had metal-framed glass walls that had been completely obscured with hundreds of pictures of tattoos pasted on the inside. A neon sign, also attached to the inside of the window, gave the studio’s name as All Art is Transitory in English. Leaning with her back to the window under the sign was a thin-faced blonde PHKin a sensible black skirt suit—this was Lisa Ziegler. She was there to brief us while colleagues hunted down further leads.

  “He came in three months ago with a group of friends,” she said. “Paid with a card.”

  “I love it when they do that,” I said.

  His name was Jörg Koch. Ziegler filled us in on the other details of his life: aged forty-four, locally born, he worked for the MSW Steelworks in Trier-Pfalzel, divorced, two kids—twins. The wife and kids had a home address in Leipzig.

  “Jörg Koch has a flat on the other side of the river,” said Ziegler.

  Somebody would already be heading for the flat, just as somebody else would be checking for witnesses in the African-American hairdresser’s opposite and the internet café next door. On the TV a senior colleague is always barking out instructions while the juniors jump to it, but in real life the police already know what tasks they’re supposed to be doing next, especially at the start of an investigation. Except for Vanessa, of course, but that was my fault.

  “So what do we do?” she said.

  “Everything else,” I said.

  The proprietor and sole employee of All Art is Transitory was called Gaston, although his ID card listed him as Dominique Farandis from Luxembourg, who’d been working in Germany long enough to have picked up a Berlin accent.

  “Although, oddly,” he said, “I’ve never lived in Berlin.”

  Gaston was a short, bulky man in his late fifties who favoured tight jeans, studded belts and sleeveless T-shirts, the better to show off the tattoos on his own arms. Only the absence of a mullet or a purple Mohican saved him from a breach of the EU directive against egregious cliché embodiment.

  The floor was a clean yellow lino that I guessed Gaston had inherited from the last business to occupy the unit. Apart from a full-length mirror, the walls were completely covered with pictures split evenly between design exemplars neatly arrayed against white backgrounds and photographs of customers proudly showing off Gaston’s work. There was a green leather dentist’s chair, a chrome office operator’s chair and a stool. Gaston had the chair. I took the stool and Vanessa stayed standing, apparently absorbed in the art on the walls.

  “I notice you don’t do piercings,” she said.

  “Nah,” said Gaston. “I’m squeamish, aren’t I? Also it may look good, but it’s not exactly art, now, is it?”

  One wall had a wide ledge covered in pink Formica that served Gaston as an equipment store and desk. On it were his pattern books, the topmost of which was opened to the page displaying the image that matched Jörg Koch’s tattoo. Without the distortion it was easier to make out the grapes woven into the hair, and the mad staring eyes.

  “Dionysus,” said Gaston. “The Greek god of wine.”

  In the pattern book there was a motto in Latin—In Vino Veritas. I tapped my finger on it and asked why Jörg Koch had omitted the tag.

  “He wanted a different motto—a quote in German,” said Gaston. “But they couldn’t agree on the exact wording, so he said he’d come back after he’d looked it up and have me finish it.”

  The quote had been something about drinking bad wine.

  “Goethe?” I asked. “Life is too short to drink bad wine?”

  Gaston shrugged.

  “And who were they?” asked Vanessa.

  “They” were the group of friends who’d come to watch Jörg get his ink. We asked for descriptions, Gaston complained that he’d already done that for the first set of police, and we asked him to humour us.

  “One of them was black,” he said. “African, I think.”

  I asked whether he had an accent.

  “Didn’t notice,” said Gaston. “But he sounded like he was from Hamburg.”

  We were basically asking the same questions as Ziegler’s team, but with a slightly different emphasis. In routine policing you do this in case it jogs the witness’s memory or uncovers a lie. But in my line of work you look for a pattern of reactions that indicates whether they’ve been exposed to the supernatural.

  Not that the three are mutually exclusive. Like any trauma, exposure to magic or the inexplicable can cause people to misinterpret reality.

  Gaston did betray an abstracted quality that might have been the result of magic. But was more likely down to consuming, I suspected, a tremendous amount of recreational chemicals. When I first started with the KDA I nearly sanctioned a woman in Munich as suffering from possession when it was actually an adverse reaction to hay fever medication. I’m much more careful these days.

  I would have done another round, but Ziegler stuck her head through the door and reminded me that I’d asked to look at Jörg Koch’s flat.

  This was across the river in Trier-West. It was part of a dirty pink four-storey block of former workmen’s apartments with its own car park and bedraggled green area. I’d asked Förstner to hold off the initial search until I’d had a chance to assess the location myself. As a result, the search and forensic teams were waiting patiently in the car park—they seemed perfectly happy for me and Vanessa to go in first. Perhaps they were still worried about biohazards.

  We ignored a tiny lift that appeared to have been retrofitted into the block for the use of gnomes and took the clean but worn cement stairs up to the third floor. After a quick breather on the landing we found the flat’s front door guarded by a dark young man in uniform.

  “Morning, Max,” said Vanessa, and he let us in.

  It was a two-bedroom family flat with views east downslope to the river and the town centre beyond. The hall smelt of fresh paint and turpentine and the floor was laid with that fake parquet flooring that comes in rolls. We found more of the stuff stacked in the living room—obviously ready to be used. There was a newly bought sofa still in its protective plastic covering and paint-splattered sheets had been spread across the floor. A row of orange Hornbach bags was arrayed neatly under the windows. Vanessa poked around cautiously with a gloved finger—looking for receipts.

  “Paint, brushes, rollers,” she said. “Those plastic things that you use to hang curtains.”

  “He seemed a bit keen on home improvement,” I said.

  “And recently too,” said Vanessa, holding up a receipt. “This was three weeks ago.”

  Inside the kitchen, the cooker was a brand new stainless steel cube but the fridge was old, cream coloured with rounded corners. The cupboards had all been recently installed, so recently in fact that the cutlery and a meagre selection of battered pots and pans were still piled on a rickety kitchen table. It was a typical bachelor’s assemblage, heavy on tin and bottle openers and light on whisks, colanders and other things you really need to make a decent meal.

  As far as we could tell, the only room not halfway through a transformation was the main bedroom. The bed was old and unmade, although the shee
ts were clean. There were piles of Blu-rays, tattered magazines, books, two old toolboxes and three cardboard boxes full of random bric-à-brac, including battered Christmas decorations and old chocolate tins. I checked the books.

  “Anything interesting?” asked Vanessa.

  “They’re mostly technical manuals from his work,” I said.

  Vanessa found an A3 artist’s sketchpad tucked behind a box of vinyl LPs. Half the pages had been used, all nudes, all seemingly drawn from life and most of them terrible.

  “I think he was getting better,” said Vanessa as she flicked through to the last picture. “Perhaps he was taking classes?”

  It seemed an odd thing for a steelworker to have taken up.

  The most telling room in the flat was the second bedroom. Here the decorating had been finished, the walls painted a pale yellow, brand new white shag carpet laid down and a teenager-sized bunk bed assembled.

  “Two kids, right?” said Vanessa.

  “Shit,” I said.

  We didn’t need to wait for the inevitable follow-up inquiry and the interview with the estranged wife in Leipzig. I was willing to bet good money that Jörg Koch hadn’t seen much of his kids in the last few years, and that recently he’d made a concerted effort to get in contact. Obviously, a visit had been planned, or at least hoped for. And all the home improvement had been for his kids. Or, more likely according to Vanessa, to convince his ex-wife he was a reformed character and a safe pair of hands.

  As police you can live with the violence, the squalor and the stupidity—it’s the waste of people’s futures that really grinds you down.

  But, unless his ex had cast a spell on him, this was nothing to do with me.

  I had Vanessa wait outside with Max while I did an initial vestigia assessment, but there was just the usual background you expect from a seventy-year-old house. Brick and stone retain vestigia well and the mere fact of human occupancy generates a magical effect. Not the large immediate effect you get from a spell or an infraction by something supernatural, but over the years it accumulates. It’s what makes houses feel lived in. Some things—let’s call them revenants—drain their surroundings of vestigia. These things can be hideously dangerous, so if I find an old house without vestigia I usually pop back to the car and fetch my flamethrower.