Lies Sleeping

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I told Camilla Turner that everything was going to be fine as long as she co-operated, and sent her off to have Stephanopoulos turn her life inside out. My main worry was that Martin Chorley might take his usual ‘direct’ approach to operational security, but I had some hope that he might regard Camilla as too unimportant to take the risk. Especially if we kept her stashed at Belgravia.

  I got back to the Folly that evening to find that Abigail had gone to sleep on the couch in the reading room – it wasn’t the first time.

  She’d left her laptop open and around it a sprawl of papers. And, because I’m a nosy bastard, I sat down and had a good shufti. Judging from its position, the last thing she’d been working on was her notebook – open at a page with clusters of words written in Cyrillic.

  Varvara and Nightingale had agreed, when teaching Abigail, to stick to classical Newtonian spell notation, in Latin. But this looked suspiciously like a spell notation to me – the giveaway being фоз in Cyrillic, which I recognised as φῶς or phos in Greek. I thought I recognised ἐλαύνω followed by the abbreviation ел in Cyrillic – the notation for Impello. This was the notation that Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina had been taught during the Second World War, but following it was another notation which I didn’t recognise. It looked like a doodle of ф linked by an upward curving line ел – the line representing the upwards spin you put on lux when combining it with impello to make a fireball.

  Nightingale had been taught to write out in spells in full, using parentheses to indicate which formae were affected by which subordinate modifiers. He’d passed that system on to me.

  ‘This way encourages clarity and precision,’ he’d said, when I asked if there was a shorthand notation. ‘Aim for perfection of form – speed comes later.’

  He wasn’t going to like this at all.

  ‘My principal concern,’ Nightingale had told me, ‘is that she will run ahead of herself and put herself in danger.’

  We were going to have to have the safety talk again.

  I looked up to find Molly staring at me from the other side of the table. I glanced over at Abigail and saw that somebody had covered her with a red and green tartan blanket without me noticing. I looked back at Molly, who tilted her head to the left.

  ‘Her dad’s doing nights and her mum is at the hospital with her brother,’ I said. ‘She’s going to text me when they’re finished and I’ll take her home.’

  Molly’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘She can’t live here,’ I said. ‘Even if it was allowed, it wouldn’t be right.’

  Molly gave me a reproachful look, as if that was my fault, then turned and went gliding out the door.

  In among Abigail’s notes I spotted the initials VGC and the sentence Montana Territory Campaign 1877. I had a rummage through the pile of books and found a thin, yellowing pamphlet titled Devil River by Robert Sharp. Along the top somebody had paper-clipped a handwritten note on good quality paper that read: I thought you gentlemen should know how things go in the former colonies. Signed with the initials RS.

  This was probably the American material Nightingale was thinking of. I opened it up and had a look.

  Robert Sharp claimed that an – unnamed – participant of the expedition had related the story to him a year after the events portrayed. I personally couldn’t tell whether it was totally made up, or a heavily fictionalised account of a true story. Abigail had attached yellow Post-it Notes to strategic passages with references to proper Newtonian practice – although this was referred to in the text as ‘proper knowledge’, ‘true magic’ and on one occasion as ‘white sorcery’.

  The story itself purportedly followed the adventures of a group of bold gentlemen from Virginia, accompanied by scouts and experienced Indian fighters, as they sought out the legendary ‘Devil’ of Yellowstone River in the Montana Territory. This was somehow in revenge for the death of General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn the previous summer.

  I was too knackered to get into the story or the personalities, but fortunately Abigail’s Post-it Notes indicated the details we’d been looking for. The target was obviously, from the description, a genius loci which took the form of a well-made Chief with a handsome countenance which belied his savage nature.

  The take-down was a classic. The gentlemen from Virginia lured out Yellowstone by formally asking for an audience and then presented him with gifts, including a red hatbox containing the very spirit of death itself. As soon as Yellowstone opened the box he was struck down into a swoon and while the rest of the company ‘held off’, i.e. shot the attendant locals, the leader of the Virginians – one Captain Nathanial Buford – stepped forward to deliver the coup de grâce with his pistol. He then took great pains to recover the red box and its contents even as the fighting raged around him.

  So the sixty-four thousand dollar question – what was in the box?

  The very spirit of death itself.

  Again Abigail had picked out the clues. Somebody, probably Postmartin, would have to check her work, but on past form I doubted she’d missed anything. The unnamed narrator of Devil River was equally curious about its contents, but Captain Buford remained cagey.

  On one occasion I thought to touch the box myself only to receive a severe rebuke from the Captain who called me a “D— fool!” And asked if I did not feel the evil contained within. I admitted that I had felt only a strange chill.

  Buford tells the narrator that anything capable of rendering a devil senseless would make short work of a man. But when the narrator presses him as to what that thing might be, he replies only that it is an evil brought over from a corrupt and degenerate Europe: An infection of the old world that we have bent to God’s purpose.

  ‘Infection’ was written on the Post-it Note which marked the page.

  There were two more references to infection in the book, including one that made reference to inoculation as a simile, which only proved that neither the narrator nor Captain Buford knew how inoculation worked. Or the difference between a metaphor and a simile, for that matter.

  A page ripped from her notebook marked this passage and had written on it – infection, cold, drain of power, tactus disvitae, vampires.

  And then, underneath:

  Weaponized vampires?

  I idly corrected the z in weaponised and then realised what I’d done.

  I’ve been spending way too much time with librarians, I thought.

  I made a note to action a scan of Devil River so I could send a copy to Reynolds, along with Abigail’s conclusions. Also a query to Postmartin to see if he could find similar American material in the Oxford stacks.

  Abigail rolled over in her sleep and said somebody’s name – I think it was Simon, whoever that was – and then subsided.

  Nightingale had once told me that the Germans had carried out experiments to weaponise vampirism during World War Two. Maybe they’d got the idea from the Americans. Or maybe everyone had tried it – although Nightingale denied that the British had.

  And that research was probably sitting less than fifteen metres below me, hidden behind some face-hardened steel and God knew what kind of magical defences. The Black Library, the poisoned fruit of the raid on Ettersberg, with the details of the genocidal experiments carried out by the Ahnenerbe in an attempt to change the course of the war.

  ‘It didn’t help the fascists,’ Varvara said once. ‘There’s nothing in there that would be any use to you.’

  Still, you had to wonder.

  My phone pinged – Abigail’s mum was heading home from Great Ormond Street.

  ‘Hey,’ I said to Abigail. ‘Wake up – time to go home.’

  20

  A Slave’s Flattery

  The next day I spent the morning going through Camilla Turner’s email archive. I started by identifying as many of her contacts as possible to add to her nomi
nal file – I did a preliminary cross-check against her colleagues at MOLA and requested that the Inside Inquiry Office run them through the PNC to see if anything nefarious popped out. Then I checked through all the messages from John Chapman’s email address. There was no obvious difference in the writing style between the early emails and the ones sent after he was shot to death in Cleveland.

  Then I went hunting with a variety of keyword searches: Dark Ages and various spellings of sub- and post-Roman, which turned up in three quarters of the emails – so no real help there. I had more luck with Excalibur. Here there were a couple of exchanges where Chapman was pushing the Saxon sword-in-the-lake theory. There were similar discussions around the historicity of Arthur and Merlin, but nothing about Lancelot. Presumably because he was too French.

  And, probably because I was spooked by Abigail’s discovery the night before, I tried ‘Genius Loci’ and the names of the rivers. The results were sparse and mostly related to digs located near watercourses. But one exchange caught my eye.

  >I’m curious did you ever find offerings to a tutelary spirt associated with the river walbrook

  Nothing that indicates a specific religious ceremony but it can be hard to separate offerings from lost items and outright rubbish.

  And then, on the next exchange, ‘John’ makes a point of asking Camilla to keep a look out for evidence. And again in the next email he offers a bonus if she can point him in the right direction. The overture is much more blatant than previous requests and since Chapman was dead by this point I had to assume that the request was coming, directly or indirectly, from Martin Chorley.

  I tagged the exchange and linked it to the prep notes for Camilla’s upcoming interview. Guleed was taking it that afternoon, so she might find it a useful angle of approach. Multiple angles of approach being what we use nowadays as a replacement for proffered cigarettes and/or physical intimidation.

  He liked to fling a wide net, did our Martin Chorley. From magically inclined lawyers to cash-strapped archaeologists. From predatory development firms to old-fashioned criminal gangs. But what the fuck was it all in aid of? Even Carey, who took a more results-orientated approach to policing, wanted to know that.

  Kill Punch and use the released potential magic to . . . what? Take over the world? The city? The Tri-State area? Cover all the world in a second darkness?

  I finished up a couple of minor actions that mostly involved phoning confused archaeologists and asking them whether they knew a certain John Chapman or the Paternoster Society. And had anyone approached them asking for details about the London Mithraeum dig? Which netted a ton of names, including journalists and a couple of ‘nutters’ – the archaeologist’s word not mine – who claimed to be practising Mithraists and wanted support to claim back their temple from Bloomberg.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ the archaeologist had told them. ‘Let me know how it works out.’

  The mystery cultists had never come back but I got their names off the archaeologist and made a note. I also got a contact address which sparked my interest because it was on Carter Lane – right next to St Paul’s. So, after a couple of hours of mixed training and a shower I grabbed the Hyundai and headed for the City.

  I let the City Police know I was prowling around on their patch and parked up in Dean’s Court. The address turned out to be the St Paul’s Youth Hostel, which sits in the Square Mile like an ideal from an earlier age. It’s a surprisingly large late Victorian building which takes up almost a block just south of the cathedral. That this potential exciting new retail and office development was currently occupied by the Youth Hostel Association was probably a source of psychic pain for every right-thinking developer that walked past it.

  They hung the YHA flag from a short pole over the front door just to rub in.

  Inside the walls were painted all cheerful reds and blues with sturdy modern fittings and corkboards smothered in flyers and personal messages.

  At the reception desk was a cheerful Asian guy in a red sweatshirt who, once I’d made it clear I wasn’t there to arrest him, or anyone else, fell over himself to be helpful. Back when I was less experienced I’d have found that behaviour suspicious but now I know it’s actually how most of the public behaves when the constabulary drops unexpectedly into their lives.

  He introduced me to his manager, a short white guy called Daniel, who explained that the Paternoster Society did indeed rent a section of the building known as the annexe.

  ‘I always thought it was a strange arrangement,’ he said. ‘We could have used that space to expand. But every time I brought up the subject I was told that there was an “arrangement”.’

  He assumed that the rent was still being paid, because they hadn’t been evicted, but said that the whole thing was above his pay grade. I got him to give me the name of his supervisor – presumably the person at the correct pay grade – and mentally actioned a financial search to see where the money was coming from. According to Special Constable Nguyễn, the deliberate complexity that shields businesses from investigation can backfire.

  ‘They get so confusing that the perpetrators lose track of their own assets,’ she’d said over drinks after a training session. ‘All it takes is one forgotten string and you can unravel the whole scheme.’

  The moral of that story being never run a game of Hide the Lady if you can’t remember where you’ve put the queen, because some people embrace forensic accounting as a blood sport.

  The supervisor showed me around to a side door which opened to reveal a staircase going straight up two floors. The lack of a hallway was a key indicator that it had been retrofitted into the original building, but the high quality hardwood skirting board and the finished quality of the riser suggested that the refit dated from the 1930s. The energy saving bulb that dangled from a cord overhead was still warming up, so the blue painted walls looked faded and grey.

  I asked the supervisor to give me the keys and stay at the bottom of the stairs.

  The youth hostel, according to its website, had been built as a school for St Paul’s choirboys. Which might explain the faint sense of soprano singing and nervous wee that I got when I brushed the walls of the staircase with my hand on the way up. At the top was another exterior style panelled door with a Chubb lock – fortunately one of the keys fitted, so I didn’t have to cut that.

  Just to be on the safe side I pushed the door open with my extendable baton and checked the threshold for tripwires, light cells and demon traps. The floor was a scuffed herringbone parquet that desperately needed polishing. The wood was a light brown and there were no obvious patterns of discolouration or stains to mark where a booby trap might go. Once I was sure the floor wasn’t going to kill me, I paused in the doorway to have a look around.

  It looked old, but felt off. And at first I couldn’t tell why. It was a high-ceilinged first floor room with large sash windows sealed with internal wooden shutters. I cautiously left the lights off as I crossed the shadowy room, lifted the latch and opened the first of the shutters. The furniture was antique, nineteenth century and early twentieth century walnut tables and the sort of overstuffed armchairs that littered the Folly. A series of glass-fronted bookshelves lined two walls while the remaining wall space was taken up with a random collection of prints and paintings, mostly views of St Paul’s and surrounding streets and a big reproduction of Sir James Thornhill’s 1712 portrait of Sir Isaac Newton. I recognised it because we have a reproduction of the same painting in the lecture room back at the Folly. The great man is wearing his own hair for a change and without his wig he looks scrawny, vexed and a dead ringer for Ian McDiarmid in Revenge of the Sith – just before Samuel L. Jackson rearranges his face for him. Underneath was a plaque inscribed with the words:

  Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

  Which was when I realised what was troubling me. The room w
as like a bad copy of the Folly, done up by somebody who’d been there a couple of times and fancied the ambience.

  I noticed a glass-fronted case mounted on the wall opposite the Newton portrait. It was made of dark mahogany varnished to a warm glow. The sort of thing where you might display a large fish. I looked inside. It was empty and there was a silver strip with the words IN CASE OF BRITAIN’S GREATEST NEED – BREAK GLASS.

  Not a fish, then – a sword. And three guesses which one.

  I pulled on my evidence gloves and did a quick rummage through the drawers and bookcases. There wasn’t much in the way of dust; the corners had been swept regularly and there were no spiderwebs in the corners or between the bookcases and the walls. Somebody, and I doubted it was the people who thought that an Excalibur joke was funny, had cleaned the place regularly.

  We did track her down later – a Romanian woman who insisted her name was Lana Stacey – but she’d had her own key and always cleaned first thing Saturday morning. She’d never met any of the members of the Paternoster Society. Neither had any of the youth hostel staff.

  There were obvious gaps on the shelves where books had been removed, either singly or in groups. There was a lot of archaeology and history. Mostly what Postmartin calls the ‘barbarian wave’ school of historiography. I called him in Oxford and sent him some pictures – he said he would be down that afternoon. Then I contacted Nightingale and the Inside Inquiry Office in case they thought it worth sending a forensic team over. I doubted it, but you never know.

  I cautiously touched the case where the sword had probably been kept.

  I couldn’t sense anything, but wood is terrible at retaining vestigia.

  Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that Arthur would return.

  What if he needed a bit of help?