The October Man

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Have you noticed,” I said, “that if you drew a straight line from our crime scene to where we left the wine sacrifice, this restaurant would be right on it?”

  “Is that significant?” asked Vanessa as she banged on the door again—harder this time.

  If you crossed the road you could follow the ridge as it rose behind the town and just see the beginnings of the Stracker vineyards.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Let’s check around the back, then,” she said.

  This part of Ehrang had been built on the old medieval pattern so that the individual buildings had a relatively narrow frontage, but extended back from the road much further than you might expect. This meant that there wasn’t a back as such, but there was an alley leading to a courtyard. It was neatly kept but a couple of industrial-sized waste bins gave the space a fruity rotten smell. There was a back door that gave direct access to the kitchens, and we could have used that as an excuse to enter the premises without a warrant. If we hadn’t just tripped over a body.

  Because he was lying face down, it was impossible to say more than that it was an adult male dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

  I pulled my gun from its holster and stood watch while Vanessa checked his neck for a pulse. She shook her head.

  “He’s still warm,” she said. And, getting her phone out, called it in.

  Chapter 7:

  Special

  Circumstances

  With a homicide the first job of the cops on the spot is to secure the crime scene and, if possible, check to make sure there are no witnesses and/or suspects trying to sneak off without fulfilling their civil obligation to help the police with their inquiries.

  Just to be on the safe side, we did this with our pistols in our hands—although we kept them by our sides and our fingers out of our trigger guards. You don’t want to shoot somebody’s cat by accident.

  Inside, the restaurant was dim and echoing. Daylight filtered in to gleam off varnished pine tables and the archaic brass fittings and hunting prints hung on the walls. The canvas shoulder bag and keys were where we’d seen them through the door. We didn’t waste time checking the bag—better to leave that to the colleagues from K17. We cleared kitchen, stores, dining room and toilets as quickly as we could and went back to guard the corpse.

  Vanessa timed how long it took Ziegler to arrive.

  “Fifteen minutes on a Sunday,” she said. “That’s got to be a record.”

  I stepped back and let them get on with it. I’d already done a survey for vestigia and found nothing. Although, as I told Vanessa, it didn’t mean the crime wasn’t supernatural.

  “If it is a crime,” I said, since there were no obvious signs of foul play.

  “I’m sure it’s just a total coincidence,” said Vanessa.

  Still, I didn’t formally declare the case an infraction because the Director has drummed it into me that the KDA is not there for the local police to palm their work off on.

  At least the victim was considerate enough to be carrying identification in his wallet. His name was Jason Agnelli, aged twenty-six, a British citizen and, presumably, the wonder chef brought in to put the Restaurant Eifel on the map.

  “He’s certainly going to do that,” said Vanessa.

  We agreed with Ziegler that, since we already had a relationship, Vanessa and I would bring in Frau Stracker for an interview while Ziegler stepped up the hunt for the other members of the Good Wine Drinking Association.

  “Do you think they’re potential suspects?” asked Ziegler.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “In that case,” she said, “do you think that they’re at risk?”

  “Better safe than sorry,” I said. Which earned me a disgusted look from Ziegler.

  Unfortunately Frau Stracker wasn’t at her winery when we drove up, but one of the workers pointed us down a lane to the top of one of the vineyards. The one, we couldn’t help noticing, that sloped down to the track where Jörg Koch’s body had been found.

  We encountered her climbing up the steep path and she seemed oddly pleased to see us.

  “Thank God,” she said, “I was wondering what to do next.”

  She turned smartly about and led us down to the bottom of the vineyard. There was no grass here; instead the soil between the rows of vines was bare and covered with flat pieces of blue slate. You wouldn’t want to slide down this hill on your back, I thought, you’d be cut to pieces.

  We were halfway down when we saw the problem.

  “That can’t be good,” said Vanessa.

  Modern vines are strung along metal wires suspended between metal or wood uprights. The green tops are cropped to ensure that the vine’s energy budget—that’s what Frau Stracker called it, the energy budget—goes into the fruit as much as possible. It also meant that it was easy to see the bunches of grapes—and the grey fuzz that laced them together like old cobwebs.

  Even worse was the way the affected area radiated out in a rough semicircle from the bottom of the field. The centre was right at the point where Jörg Koch’s body had been found. I could see the police tape marking the spot.

  I asked Frau Stracker whether she’d touched anything with her bare hands. She looked alarmed and raised her right hand to stare at it, which answered that question. Vanessa dug out a small bottle of anti-bacterial hand gel and passed it over. I asked Frau Stracker when she’d last checked this particular field.

  “Yesterday morning,” she said. “There was no sign of infection then.”

  So, at a rough estimate the fungus had covered a hundred and fifty square metres in just over twenty-four hours.

  As Frau Stracker washed her hands I had a closer look at the area of infection. It looked like the pictures of infected grapes that Vanessa had dug up on the internet. It also looked like the grapes held by the statue of Staphylos. Which meant, I was willing to bet, that the sculptor Ferdinand Tietz had seen such infected grapes in person. I pulled on my evidence gloves and the white filter mask I keep in my pocket for emergencies, and got as close as I could without touching an infected plant.

  I caught the vestigia immediately, the same wriggling organic vitality I’d felt both at the crime scene and Jörg Koch’s autopsy. Only now the violin sound felt more human, or at least more organic, like the wailing at a foreign funeral or some animal keening far away in the night.

  The Director has always stressed the need to remain rational in the face of the inexplicable.

  “You can’t let fear drive you,” she says. “But you can’t let it paralyse you either. You must know when to take decisive action, even when it seems extreme, to prevent future harm.”

  I stepped back, stripped off my gloves and, being careful not to touch their exterior, tossed them into the affected area. Then I called the Director and said that I needed her to authorise a sterilisation.

  “What is it, and how large?” she asked.

  In the background I could hear cheering and an excited commentary in Spanish. At a guess the Director had been settling in to watch football.

  “A possible malignancy spread over two to three hundred square metres,” I said, to allow for a safety margin. “A large section of a vineyard.”

  “How public?”

  “People are going to see the smoke,” I said.

  Somebody must have scored a goal because the roar of the crowd and the commentator having hysterics drowned out the sound of the Director swearing.

  “All right,” she said finally. “But I want you to stay on site and supervise. We don’t want a repeat of what happened in Lüneburg—Deutsche Bahn still haven’t forgiven us for that.”

  You’d think those locomotives were made of solid gold they way they carried on.

  “Understood.”

  We finalised our plans to ruin everyone’s Sunday and the Director went back to her football. I returned to Frau Stracker to give her the glad tidings, but before I could speak she asked me whether it was true Jason Agnelli
was dead.

  I looked over her shoulder at Vanessa, who mimed answering a phone to show it wasn’t her fault.

  “I’m afraid he was found dead this morning,” I said.

  “How did he die?”

  “We don’t know,” I said.

  “Is it related to the other death,” she asked, and then pointed at the infected area of her vineyard. “Is it related to that?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “But just to be on the safe side we’re going to incinerate half the field.”

  Frau Stracker stared at me and her mouth formed the word incinerate. Then she looked first at the affected area and then back at me.

  “Will there be compensation?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The rest of your crop won’t be destroyed by an uncontrolled fungal infection.”

  She looked back at the affected area, lips pursed.

  “How can I help?” she said finally.

  I asked if she had any machinery, such as a mini-digger, that could work on the sheer slope. But she shook her head.

  “Far too steep. This is all worked by hand.”

  “We’re going to need a fire break around the burn area,” I said.

  She nodded and said she could get her people to clear a break that morning. Sunday not being a day of rest in the wine industry—at least not during harvest.

  “But afterwards you and I are going to have a conversation,” she said.

  I said of course we would, but left out the fact that Frau Stracker’s family history was now an official line of inquiry. I was sure I could slip that into the conversation at an appropriate time.

  Vanessa watched Frau Stracker stride back up the slope and walked over to ask what next. I told her about the sterilisation, which she took with the same unnerving calm she had taken everything so far. I’d have asked the Research Department back at Meckenheim to dig into her family background for signs of ancestral connections to the supernatural if I wasn’t pretty certain that the Director had already started that process.

  “I have to stay here,” I said. “So you’ll have to go with the body to Mainz and supervise the autopsy.”

  “But it’s Sunday,” she said.

  Unlike us poor foot soldiers on the front line, the rest of the state apparatus of justice likes to work office hours. That usually included pathologists but not, I told Vanessa, Professor Doktor Carmela Weissbachmann.

  “For her this will be Christmas morning,” I said. “She won’t want to wait.”

  I briefed her on how to handle Carmela, and a couple of things to look for, and then watched as she puffed her way up the slope. Then I was alone with just the fungus for company. The slope was really so steep that one only had to lean back ten centimetres to sit down. I made myself comfortable, because when the Director says she wants you to supervise she means that she doesn’t want you to take your eyes off the problem until the problem is solved.

  “You can always pee in a bottle if you have to,” she says.

  Not that I had a bottle.

  It was just past noon and the sky was full of scattered clouds sweeping their shadows up the valley. Beyond the lane at the bottom of the field, and the railway that ran alongside, the houses of Ehrang gave way to a patchwork of green and yellow fields that covered the flood plain to the hills in the distance.

  Jörg Koch had died in a ditch in the lane below me, covered in Botrytis cinerea fungus and suffocated when it grew into his lungs. The fast growth and the suffocation both apparently impossible events. Or at least, impossible without a bit of supernatural help.

  Magic could do such things, according to Dr. Hugo Braun, whom the Director rates as the most reliable of the Weimar practitioners. In his Wechselwirkungen zwischen der physischen und metaphysischen Sphäre he wrote that “Whatever the ultimate source of the power we call magic proves to be, it seems capable of interacting with the material world at the atomic level. Therefore it seems a trivial matter for this power to be deployed at the cellular level to accelerate or alter the fundamental nature of the organism.”

  Reliable, perhaps. Easy to read? Not so much.

  The older romantics of the White Library in Cologne had talked about the transformative power of magic and how it interacted with nature to create wonders. I looked at the white fungal infection that radiated out from the point where Jörg Koch had died.

  Wonders indeed, I thought.

  But even those misty-eyed lovers of the untrammelled mountain peaks recognised that magic could imbue nature with a hostile spirit, one that actively sought to kill, maim and destroy. When such things took the forms of animals or people they attracted names for each category—revenants, feasters, eye thieves. And everybody’s gothic favourite—the vampire.

  When it’s still—when it’s the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it’s called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.

  The death of Jörg Koch had triggered a malignancy. But why? We knew that the year before Herr Koch had teamed up with a bunch of other middle-aged male losers to accidentally form the Good Wine Drinking Association. I was willing to bet that this had led to the change in his life—the reconnection with his wife and kids. Kurt Omdale, fellow Good Wine imbiber, had also found new connections in the form of a fiancée. Had the other members of the association had similar transformations? And, if they had, were these improvements in their lives a natural or a supernatural phenomenon? And was that change related, directly or indirectly, with the malignancy that festered in the vineyard less than five metres from where I sat? I felt a chill that had nothing to with the weather.

  I looked at the edge of the infection. Had the lacy white strands of fungus jumped to the next vine? I had the horrible sensation that it was growing right in front of my eyes, and I wished I’d thought to put down a marker to judge whether that was true.

  Peter Grant would have put down a marker, I thought. He probably would have used a laser rangefinder to measure the rate of growth in millimetres per hour.

  It occurred to me that while I knew everything the embassy and the BND in London could gather on Detective Constable Grant, he probably didn’t know I existed. It was a comforting thought—I had enough problems in my life without letting the English get involved.

  I counted vines from the edge of the malignancy to the next uncontaminated metal upright and made a mental note. If it was expanding rapidly I might have to improvise before help arrived. You can’t use magic against something that feeds off magic, but you can use magic to slosh petrol over a wide area if you don’t mind burning your eyebrows off.

  Or causing a bit of collateral damage.

  Morgane had said that Kelly, Goddess of the River Kyll, had once tried to make a mortal lover, an ancestor of Frau Stracker no less, immortal. But it had gone wrong. A long, long long time ago, she’d said. Had that been when Kelly was posing for Ferdinand Tietz as a model for Methe? Had the statue of Staphylos, Methe’s husband, been modelled on Kelly’s lover?

  That was a series of shaky assumptions. But if we could interview Kelly again…

  Had the statue been defaced out of rage, mischief, or to hide the lover’s identity? Morgane had said that the lover had died. But there are people, and things that look like people, for whom death is just the beginning of a long career.

  We needed to find a photograph of the statue of Staphylos with its face intact. That was a job for the Research Department back in Meckenheim.

  We needed to trace the other members of the Good Wine Drinking Association and make a timeline of all their social events—most of which I could leave to the Trier police. Then we needed to assess whether any of those events had acted as a trigger to an infraction that had led to Jörg Koch’s death and this malignancy—that would be my job.

  Not for
getting the need to discover whether the tragic love affair between the ancestral Stracker and the laughing goddess of the River Kyll had any bearing on the case at all. Although my bet was that it did.

  You can’t pressure a river goddess unless you want to bankrupt your local flood insurance scheme. But Kelly was in loco parentis to Morgane, and Morgane wanted a play date with Vanessa.

  I looked over at the malignancy and tried to judge whether it had spread down the row I’d mentally earmarked. I was sure it might have advanced a centimetre or two. Perhaps, I thought, I can requisition a laser rangefinder after the job’s done.

  My phone pinged with a text with a caller ID of Besondere Umstände, telling me that they would arrive in approximately eighty minutes. The Special Circumstances team were on their way. I sent them the location on Google Maps and asked them to pick up snacks on the way, and received a thumbs up emoji by way of reply. Then I went down the slope to where a stand of vines screened me from both the road and anyone up on the ridge above, and had a piss.

  Besondere Umstande—Special Circumstances, also known as the fire brigade and/or reality control—is the KDA’s rapid response team. In the fifties and sixties there were half a dozen teams based around the country and each had its own armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. As all the main werewolf caches and “sites of historical interest” were cleared and neutralised, their numbers shrank. And despite a brief surge of activity following reunification, they were down to one team based in a small industrial park outside Wiesbaden.

  They’d also lost the helicopters and the army surplus armour, but gained a fleet of nondescript Mercedes Sprinter vans that caused a great deal less comment. Likewise, they dropped their forest green uniform in 2003 and instead turn out in jeans, corduroys and, ironically, army surplus jackets. Which made them almost indistinguishable from Frau Stracker’s workers, who were currently clearing the firebreak at the top of the field. These days when Special Circumstances roll into town, people start asking what band they roadie for.

  Earth, Wind & Fire, I thought, as I saw the first of the Mercedes park on the lane below. Which, strangely, was the band I reckon was the one thing my parents must have had in common all those years ago, because it sure as hell wasn’t the role of nuclear energy in the economic development of the nation.