I nodded, which seemed to satisfy him.
Go hard, I thought as I headed for my room. What did that even mean in this context?
Kitting up consisted of me climbing into a pair of jeans, my public order boots, utility belt and keeping my Metvest with me at all times. I considered borrowing a taser. But you know, despite Stephanopoulos’ good example, I’d never had that much luck with them.
I ended up in the atrium trying to finish the copy of The Silmarillion I’d downloaded onto my phone. Fuck all else happened, except that Foxglove turned up and did some preliminary sketches for the now famous Hither Came Peter, the Librarian which is currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.
Around five o’clock I took Toby out for a walk and then I did paperwork until seven.
Go hard – but I felt soft, mushy, as if I was walking around on a thick carpet of pink polyurethane foam. I wanted to cross the river and climb into what I realised I now thought of as our bed – mine and Bev’s. Instead I let Seawoll know where I was and lay down fully dressed in my room upstairs.
It was dark when I was woken up by Nightingale’s call from Glastonbury.
‘He’s definitely been here sometime in the past,’ he said. ‘He bought a farmhouse nearby and he’s practised magic in St Michael’s Tower at the top of the hill – I recognised his signare.’
‘Recently?’ I asked.
‘Hard to say,’ said Nightingale.
It always was with vestigia, which faded or were retained according to a complex set of interactions with material, environment and source, and whether something supernatural had been subsisting off them. Nightingale had sensed no trace of Lesley’s signare, so the magic could have happened any time in the last twenty years.
‘He might have regarded it as his country retreat,’ I said.
‘Quite. I’ve checked for booby traps and handed it over to the local boys. Alexander is sending a search team tomorrow.’
He asked after Stephanopoulos and I passed on the assurances that Dr Walid had given me. I asked if he was heading back tonight and he said he was.
‘Anything else to report?’ he asked.
‘A creeping sense of existential dread,’ I said. ‘Apart from that I’m good.’
‘Chin up, Peter. He’s on his last legs – I can feel it.’
Once Nightingale had rung off I called Guleed, who’d been arriving as a nasty surprise to bell foundries and metal casting companies from Dudley to Wolverhampton all that day.
She said she’d been just about to phone.
‘I was right,’ she said. ‘There’s another bell.’
My mum’s done a lot of shit jobs – literally, in the case of that gig she had cleaning the toilets of that gym in Bloomsbury – but I’ve never seen her hesitate. During the period of my life I like to refer to as ‘that year when I fucked around doing sod all useful’ I used to supplement the dole by tagging along on cleaning gigs. She’d been taking me to work since I was seven, whenever she couldn’t get a babysitter and my dad was too stoned to be reliable. This particular time I was getting the going rate, such as it was, and I was expected to work for it.
You should have seen those men’s loos – I don’t know what they were eating but I remember walking in one time to find that some poor unfortunate had pebble-dashed the walls of a stall to thigh height. I kid you not. The gym staff had taken one look, sealed the stall off with yellow and black hazard tape and left it for the overnight cleaners. I really didn’t want to go in there.
‘Why are you wasting time?’ my mum had said. ‘You are here to do a job and it’s not going to go away on its own.’
So in I went clutching my Domestos and my spray bottle of generic own-brand surface cleaner and got on with it. Pausing a couple of times to throw up while I did.
Sometimes you’ve got to go hard to get the job done.
Although not always in the way that people are expecting.
Parking in the City of London is always a nightmare even with a warrant card, so I got Caffrey to drive me to London Bridge in his van and drop me off in the middle.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry. It’s just magic stuff,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a cab back.’
The sun was long gone by the time I got there and sky was overcast. Beyond Tower Bridge the sawn-off blocks of Canada Water were ochre silhouettes against a murky orange sky. The Thames was in flood and HMS Belfast rode high. I could smell salt water and petrol fumes and the onset of rain. When I put my hands on the railings I got a shock of static electricity.
And I heard a thin, high-pitched giggle.
‘You want to watch it, bruv,’ I said. ‘There’s some people who want you dead.’
The giggle grew into a howl of laughter that I was amazed they weren’t hearing as far away as Canary Wharf.
‘Or deader than you are already.’
The merriment got a bit grimmer, but no less manic then before.
‘They already had a go at your little girl,’ I said, and the laughter stopped.
So the Lord of Misrule is a hypocrite just like everyone else – quelle surprise.
Then Punch spoke, but not with the rasp I was used to. This time softly and sadly.
‘Of all the girls that are so smart,
There’s none like pretty Polly:
She is the darling of my heart,
She is so plump and jolly.’
Plump and jolly, I thought, like a child.
I hauled myself up and sat on the railing with my legs dangling over the parapet – trying to make it look as casual as possible.
‘It looks likes you and me have got a beef with the same people,’ I said.
Punch laughed – this time it sounded rueful and ironic.
‘Why don’t we see if we can sort this out?’ I said.
And that’s when we came to our agreement. Although at the time I couldn’t be sure I’d done what I thought I’d done. Practical metaphysics being a pretty uncertain process, especially when you’re dealing with a hysterical psychotic like our Mr Punch.
I was brought back to reality when my phone rang – it was Beverley.
‘What are you doing up there?’ she asked.
I looked down and saw Beverley three storeys below me, standing hip deep in the water in that impossible way she and her sisters do. She held a phone in one hand and waved with the other.
‘I’m communing with the numinous,’ I said.
‘You can do that when you get home,’ she said. ‘Which is going to be when, exactly?’
‘If I jumped, would you catch me?’
‘No. But I might fish you out afterwards. Get off the railing, babes. You’re making me nervous.’
The rain started in earnest, big summer drops coming straight down and slapping my hands where they rested on the cool metal of the railing.
I sighed and climbed down and onto the pavement.
Even from a distance I could see Beverley’s shoulders relaxing and I realised that she’d been genuinely worried I’d jump. I considered explaining what I’d been up to, but I was worried that might make me sound even crazier. Even to Bev, who once rescued me from fairyland.
‘And when you do come home, bring some of your mum’s chicken,’ said Beverley. ‘I know you’ve got some stashed in the fridge.’
‘No probs,’ I said.
She told me that she loved me and to call her when I got off duty – whenever that might be.
There’s always a bit in a TV series where the detective or whatever has a final revelation that solves the case. You get the close-up on House or Poirot as the light of comprehension dawns in their eyes – usually accompanied by a soft but insistent musical cue.
I didn’t get a musical cue or a close-up, so I didn’t know I’d just solved the
case until it was much too late. I just remembered that Lesley had been shopping around the Covent Garden area, so I decided to catch a cab there and have a look round before returning to the Folly.
That’s how I found myself standing out of the rain in the fake portico on the west side of the Covent Garden Piazza, wondering if the ghosts were ever going to come back. Which was why I put my hand against one of the pillars and felt for their vestigia and got, very faintly, the ringing tone of the bell.
All right, I’ll admit – that was a musical cue.
I called Seawoll on his personal number and that’s something I’ve never done before.
He must have clocked my ID on his phone because he said ‘Oh fuck,’ without preamble and then, ‘This can’t be fucking good.’
‘It’s the bloody Actors’ Church,’ I said. ‘It’s been the Actors’ Church all along.’
All that shit about the Temple of Mithras and St Paul’s had been a distraction. I told him where I was, and what I’d learnt.
‘Nightingale is at least an hour away,’ he said. ‘And Guleed is unavailable. So what we’ll do is this: I’ll put in a perimeter, nice and quiet like, while you, very carefully, ascertain the full extent of the shit we’ve landed in.’
‘It’s a plan,’ I said.
‘It’s a bloody cock-up, is what it is,’ said Seawoll. ‘And can I make it clear that when I say very carefully I mean very fucking carefully. I’m all for courageous action, in moderation, Peter. But you have an alarming tendency towards heroics. I do not want to be getting the justified hairy eyeball from your mum at any memorial service other than my own. Is that clear?’
‘Crystal, guv,’ I said.
‘However, should you spot a window of opportunity to deploy your undoubted talents at bolloxing things up for Chorley et al, feel free to proceed. But carefully.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Off you go.’
When the fourth Earl of Bedford hired Inigo Jones to build him an Italianate piazza on land that Henry VIII had ‘appropriated’ from the local convent, for some reason the 7th Earl decreed that a church be built, on the cheap, on the west side of the square. Since the business end of an Anglican church is supposed to be at the east end of the nave, the portico that sticks out into the square is a fake, as is the door in its centre. The main entrance is at the west end, opening into the old cemetery, now a pleasant urban garden enclosed by the tall former houses that are now all shops and offices. The main entrance is on the far side of the park, on Bedford Lane. But you can climb over the spiky fence on the piazza providing you are both careful and very stupid.
Or slightly desperate. Like me.
I made my way past the sunken steps and pressed myself to the wall so I could peer around the corner. The west end of the church is plainer than the east, being all brick and square doors and lacking those fake classical flourishes that no Renaissance landowner could live without. It still has a pediment, though, this one with a ridiculously wide lower cornice that jutted out like a particularly unsafe balcony.
Parked on the flagstones was a vintage white Ford Transit van, back doors open to show emptiness. I texted Seawoll what I was seeing and, as I pressed Send, I felt a magic detonation from the opposite side of the church. Sand, gravel and a couple of half bricks bounced off the pediment and onto the roof of the van.
‘Try it now,’ said Chorley – I judged he was standing on the left side of the cornice.
‘That did it,’ said Lesley, more muffled – so probably inside.
I texted Seawoll that the crime was ongoing and I was moving to disrupt – TOO LATE, GOING IN.
The main doors were unlocked and I slipped into the narthex, which is the fancy term for that bit of a church with the collection box and the pamphlets and souvenir stand. This being the Actors’ Church, there was a lot of stuff you could buy. There were also two staircases going up – one to the belfry on the left and one to the belfry on the right.
I didn’t have to pause long before I heard a thump and someone swearing up on the left. I went up the stairs as quietly as I could, pushed through the door at the top and nearly got the drop on both of them.
If only the bloody bell hadn’t started humming.
The Punch-summoning bell was larger than the church bell it was replacing, so Chorley had had to knock a big hole in the wall to get it into position. It hung from the original headstock while the original bell perched precariously on the landing.
Lesley was holding the sword occasionally known as Excalibur, while Chorley stood out in the rain on the cornice.
He saw me first.
‘Ah, Peter,’ he said. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘So much for Plan B,’ said Lesley.
They were both dressed in boiler suits and blue nylon cagoules, all the better to pass as council workers or contractors.
I was going to say something clever, but Lesley put the point of Excalibur against my chest and pushed gently so that I was forced out onto the cornice with Chorley. The rain had eased off a bit, but the cement was slick. There was no safety rail and the courtyard was a good twelve metres straight down. There was a clock with a blue face in the middle of the pediment and in the distance I heard a roll of thunder – all we were missing was a DeLorean.
‘Do you believe in fate, Peter?’ asked Chorley.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘And yet despite all our efforts to the contrary – here we are.’
Lesley climbed out to join us. I caught her eye. She’d transferred the sword to her left hand and in her right was the compact semi-automatic she’d used to shoot Stephanopoulos. She held it pointed down by her side with her finger safely outside the trigger guard as Caffrey had taught us both.
‘There’s no—’ I said, but Chorley cut me off with a bark of laughter.
‘No Arthur, no Merlin, no one sword,’ he said. ‘It’s all dull old socio-economic forces acting on an undifferentiated mass of semi-evolved primates.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Is he right?’ asked Lesley.
‘Why don’t you ring the bell, and we’ll find out?’ said Chorley.
‘Am I right, Marty?’ I said. ‘I think I am.’
‘You’re a bright boy, Peter,’ said Chorley. ‘I’ve always thought so. But you’ve never understood the limitations of your own viewpoint. It doesn’t matter whether there was an actual Round Table, a king, a sword, a mighty magician. Because we can make it so.’
‘And how do we do that?’ I asked, because Chorley liked the sound of his own voice and so did I – especially when I was playing for time.
‘Magic is about man reshaping reality itself,’ he said. ‘That’s what the formae do, that’s what a spell is. A tool to reshape the universe.’
‘And you think you can just wish Merlin into existence?’ I asked.
‘No.’ Chorley gave me a disturbingly confident grin. ‘I think we can change existence so that Merlin is real. Given enough magic – enough juice, so to speak.’
‘Wow. I didn’t realise we were going to have to section you – I was hoping for a trial.’
But I was wondering whether he was right. There were definitely moments when I suspected that Beverley somehow warped the world into a more congenial shape around her. But she was a goddess, and did things beyond mortal ken. And anyway, if it were that easy Lady Ty’s husband would be ageless and her daughter slightly less gullible.
‘Martin,’ said Lesley, pocketing her pistol, ‘he’s stalling.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Chorley. ‘Are you ready?’
Lesley transferred the sword to her right hand.
‘Lesley, this is insane,’ I said. ‘He’s talking bollocks.’
Lesley ignored me and caught Chorley’s eye.
‘I do this and, whatever else, Punch dies
?’
‘Dead as a doornail,’ said Chorley.
‘Good enough for me,’ said Lesley and swung the sword.
As I told the subsequent inquiry, I wasn’t sure what I thought I was doing, but I wanted to try and disrupt Chorley’s insane bit of ritual. Given that Lesley was armed with a sword, and Chorley wasn’t, my choice was obvious. While Lesley was swinging I tensed. And as she hit the bell I threw myself at Chorley.
There was a flash that had nothing to do with reflected photons, and a beautiful sound.
The sword is a singing sword, I thought, as the chime struck me like a wave of freezing water. My shoulder struck Chorley just below the armpit and he staggered. I was counting on him being more centred, but he must have been distracted by the beauty of the chime. Because he went over backwards, off the side of the cornice.
And me with him.
I’ve got to stop doing this, I thought, as I fell into the rainy black.
A much shorter distance than I was expecting. And onto mud, not flagstones.
I’d lost my grip on Chorley, so I rolled away on general principle. But not fast enough to avoid getting a kick in the head. I rolled some more but managed to hit a tree – and that’s when I knew where I was.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ said Chorley. Of course he didn’t. Because we were still falling and sooner or later real gravity was going to forcefully introduce us to the real flagstones of real London. ‘Deal with him,’ he said.
Not liking the sound of that, I used the tree trunk to pull myself up.
I was standing in light woodland, in dim grey light, morning or evening – I couldn’t tell – with a light drizzle and mist. Three metres in front of me was a short white man in a yellow buff coat, matching trousers and big floppy cavalry boots. He wore a breastplate over his coat and I just had time to register the pistol he was pointing at me when there was a click, a hiss, a loud bang and a cloud of smoke. Nothing else happened.
Matchlock pistol – effective range five metres in ideal conditions. Which these weren’t.
My cavalier didn’t seem at all surprised at the miss. He calmly stuffed the pistol in his belt, and pulled out a rather fine cavalry sabre with a basket hilt and an effective range of whatever it got close to.
Lies Sleeping Page 30
