Rivers of London rol-1

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘What do you want, Captain?’ asked De Veil. His voice was thin and distant, and around him I could sense rather than see the faint outlines of furniture: a desk, a chair, a bookcase. Legend had it that De Veil had a special private closet where he conducted ‘judicial examinations’ of female witnesses and suspects.

  ‘I’m looking for a warrant,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘On the usual terms?’ asked De Veil.

  ‘Of course,’ said Nightingale. He drew a roll of heavy paper from his jacket pocket and proffered it to De Veil. The ghost reached out a transparent hand and plucked it from Nightingale’s fingers. For all that he did it casually, I was certain that the effort of moving a physical object must be costing De Veil something. The laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject — all debts must be paid in full.

  ‘And which miscreant are we looking to apprehend?’ asked De Veil, and placed the paper on the transparent desk.

  ‘Henry Pyke, Your Honour,’ said Nightingale. ‘Who goes by the name of Punch, and also by the name of Pulcinella.’

  De Veil’s eyes glittered and his lips twitched. ‘Are we arresting puppets now, Captain?’

  ‘Let us say that we are arresting the puppet master, Your Worship,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘And the charge?’

  ‘Murder of his wife and child,’ said Nightingale.

  De Veil tilted his head. ‘Was she a shrew?’ he asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Your Worship?’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Come now, Captain,’ said De Veil. ‘No man strikes his wife without provocation — was she a shrew?’

  Nightingale hesitated.

  ‘A most terrible shrew,’ I said. ‘Begging Your Worship’s pardon. But the babe was an innocent.’

  ‘A man can be driven to terrible acts by the tongue of a woman,’ said De Veil. ‘As I can testify for myself.’ He winked at me and I thought, nice, there’s an image that will never fade. ‘However, the babe was innocent and for this he must be arrested and brought before his peers.’ A quill appeared in De Veil’s ghostly hand, and with a flourish he scratched out a warrant. ‘I trust you’ve remembered the prerequisite,’ said De Veil.

  ‘My constable will take care of the formalities,’ said Nightingale.

  Which was news to me. I looked to Nightingale who made the Lux gesture with his right hand. I nodded to show that I understood.

  De Veil made a show of blowing the ink dry before rolling the warrant into a tube and handing it back to Nightingale.

  ‘Thank you, Your Worship,’ he said, and then to me: ‘In your own time, Constable.’

  I created a werelight and floated it over to De Veil, who cupped it gently in his right hand. Although I was still maintaining the spell the light dimmed as, I presumed, De Veil sucked up the magic. I kept it going for a minute before Nightingale made a cutting motion with his hand and I ended the spell. De Veil sighed as the light faded and nodded his thanks to me. ‘So little,’ he said wistfully, and vanished.

  Nightingale handed me the roll of paper. ‘You are now duly warranted,’ he said. I unrolled the warrant and found, as I had suspected, that the paper was still blank. ‘Let’s go and arrest Henry Pyke,’ said Nightingale.

  Once we were well clear of the storeroom I slapped the battery back into the Airwave handset and called up Lesley. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ she said. ‘We’re quite happy to be waiting around for you to get your finger out.’ Behind her I could hear voices, glasses and Dusty Small’s latest single. I didn’t have any sympathy; she was in the pub. I suggested that it might be time for her and the rest of the back-up team to go on standby.

  Police work is all about systems and procedures and planning — even when you’re hunting a supernatural entity. When me, Nightingale, Seawoll, Stephanopoulos and Lesley worked out the details of the operation it took less than fifteen minutes because what we were doing was a standard identify, contain, track and arrest. It was my job to identify Henry Pyke’s latest victim. Once I’d done that, Nightingale would do his magic trick and track Henry’s spirit back to his grave. Seawoll’s people would provide containment in case things went pear-shaped, while Dr Walid stood by with a mobile trauma team to help any poor bastard who had the bad luck to have their face fall off. Meanwhile, DS Stephanopoulos was ready with a van full of builders on time and a half and, I found out later, a mini-JCB to dig up the grave wherever they might find it. She had another van full of uniformed bodies to handle crowd control in case Henry Pyke turned out to be buried under something inconveniently populated such as a pub or a cinema. Seawoll was technically in charge of the whole thing, which I’m sure put him in a wonderful mood.

  Everything was supposed to be in place by the time Nightingale and I emerged from the Royal Opera House’s stage door and stepped back on to Bow Street. Given that Henry Pyke was beaten to death by Charles Macklin less than ten metres up the road, we both figured that this would be the ideal spot to start our little fishing expedition. Reluctantly I opened my carryall and donned my uniform jacket and my bloody stupid helmet. For the record, we all hate the bloody helmet, which is useless in a fight and makes you look like a blue biro with the top still on. The only reason we’re still wearing it is because the alternative designs all seem to be worse. Still, if I was going to act the part of a constable, I supposed I’d better look like one.

  It was coming up to midnight, and the last of that evening’s opera devotees had trickled out of the House and headed for the tube station and taxi stands. Bow Street was as quiet and empty as any street in central London ever gets.

  ‘You’re sure you can track him?’ I asked.

  ‘You do your bit,’ he said, ‘and I’ll do mine.’

  I tightened the strap on my helmet and checked in with the Airwave. This time I got Seawoll, who told me to stop faffing around and get on with it. I turned to ask whether I looked the part, which is how I came to be looking straight at the man in the good suit when he stepped out of the shadows by the stage door and shot Nightingale in the back.

  Chapter 10

  The Blind Spot

  He was a middle-aged white man in a good-quality but otherwise nondescript bespoke suit. He held what looked like a semi-automatic pistol in his right hand and a Kobbé’s opera guide in his left. He wore a white carnation in his buttonhole.

  Nightingale fell down quickly. He just slipped to his knees and flopped forward onto his face. He let go of his cane and it rattled on the paving stones.

  The man in the good suit looked at me, his eyes pale and colourless in the sodium light of the streetlamps, and winked. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ he said.

  You can run away from a man with a handgun, especially in poor lighting conditions, provided you remember to zigzag and can open the range fast enough. I’m not saying that option wasn’t tempting, but if I ran then there was nothing to stop the gunman from stepping forward and shooting Nightingale in the head. I was trained to placate the gunman while edging backwards; talking establishes a rapport and keeps the suspect’s focus on the officer so that the civilians can get clear. Ever see The Blue Lamp with Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde? During our training at Hendon, they made us watch the scene where PC Dixon, Warner’s character, is shot dead. The film was written by an ex-copper who knew what he was talking about. Dixon dies because he’s a dinosaur who stupidly advances on an armed suspect. Our instructors were clear: don’t crowd, don’t threaten, keep talking and backing away, a suspect has to be particularly stupid, political or, in one memorable case, protected by diplomatic immunity to think that killing a police officer will in any way make their situation any better. At the very least you’re buying enough time for an armed response team to arrive and blow the silly bugger’s head off.

  I didn’t think that backing off was an option. This was one of Henry Pyke’s sequestrated puppets, and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me or Nightingale no matter how calmly I was talking.

  To be honest, I didn’t think at all. My brain went: N
ightingale down — gun — spell!

  ‘Impello!’ I said as calmly as I could, and levitated the man’s left foot one metre in the air. He screamed as his body was catapulted upwards and to the right. I must have lost concentration because I heard the distinct crack of a bone breaking in his ankle. The gun fell out of his hand and his arms flailed as he tumbled to the ground. I stepped forward and kicked the gun down the street, then kicked him once in the head, hard, just to make sure.

  I should have cuffed him, but Nightingale was lying in the road behind me making wet breathing sounds. It was what they call a ‘sucking chest wound’, and they’re not being metaphorical in their description. There was an entry wound ten centimetres below Nightingale’s right shoulder, but at least when I gently rolled him on his side I couldn’t find an exit wound. My first-aid training was unequivocal about sucking chest wounds — every second you spend faffing around is another second that the London Ambulance Service hasn’t arrived.

  I knew that the back-up teams couldn’t have heard the gunshot because they’d have been there already, and I’d blown my Airwave when I levitated the gunman off his feet. Then I remembered the silver whistle in the top pocket of my uniform jacket. I fumbled it out, put it in my mouth and blew as hard as I could.

  A police whistle on Bow Street. For a moment I felt a connection, like a vestigium, with the night, the streets, the whistle and the smell of blood and my own fear, with all the other uniforms of London down the ages who wondered what the hell they were doing out so late. Or it could just have been me panicking; it’s an easy mistake to make.

  Nightingale’s breath started to falter.

  ‘Keep breathing,’ I said. ‘It’s a habit you don’t want to break.’

  I heard sirens coming closer — it was a beautiful sound.

  The trouble with the old boy network is you can never really be sure whether it’s switched on or not, and whether it’s operating in your interest or some other old boy’s. I began to suspect that it wasn’t operating in my interest when they brought a cup of coffee and a biscuit to the interview room. Fellow police officers being interviewed in a friendly manner get to go to the canteen and fetch their own coffee. You only get room service when you’re a suspect. I was back in Charing Cross nick, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the way to the canteen.

  Inspector Nightingale was still alive, they told me that much before they sat me down on the wrong side of the interview table, and had been taken to the brand new trauma centre at UCH listed as ‘stable’, a term which covered a multitude of sins.

  I checked the time. It was three thirty in the morning, less than four hours after Nightingale had been shot. If you work for any time in a large institution you start to get an instinctive feel for its bureaucratic ebb and flow. I could feel the hammer coming down, and since I’d only been a copper for two years, the fact that I could feel it coming meant that it was a very big hammer indeed. I had a shrewd idea about who’d put the hammer in motion, but there was nothing I could do but stay sitting on the wrong side of the interview table with my cup of bad coffee and two chocolate biscuits.

  Sometimes you have to stand still and take the first blow. That way you can see what the other man has in his hand, expose his intentions and, if that sort of thing is important to you, put yourself unequivocally on the right side of the law. And if the blow is so heavy that it puts you down? That’s just a risk you have to take.

  The blunt instrument chosen caught me by surprise, although I made sure I kept my face neutral when Seawoll and Detective Sergeant Stephanopoulos entered the interview room and sat down opposite me. Stephanopoulos slapped a folder down on the table. It was far too thick to have been generated in the last couple of hours, so most of it must have been padding. She gave me a thin smile as she ripped the cellophane off the audio cassettes and slotted them into the dual tape machine. One of those tapes was for me, or my legal representative, to prevent me being quoted out of context; the other was for the police to prove that I had copped to the charge without them having to beat me around the back, thighs and buttocks with a sock full of ball bearings. Both of the tapes were redundant because where I sat was neatly framed in the viewfinder of a CCTV camera mounted just above the door. The live feed went to the observation room down the corridor where, judging from the theatrical way Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had made their entrance, someone of ACPO rank was watching — the Deputy Assistant Commissioner at the very least.

  The tape machine was turned on, Seawoll identified me, himself and Stephanopouois as being present and reminded me that I was not under arrest but merely helping police with their inquiries. Theoretically I could stand up and walk out any time I liked, provided I didn’t mind kissing my career in the police goodbye. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted.

  Seawoll asked me, for the record, to outline the nature of the operation that Nightingale and I had been running when he was shot.

  ‘You really want that on the record?’ I asked.

  Seawoll nodded, so I gave the full account: our theory that Henry Pyke was a revenant, a vampire ghost bent on revenge who was acting out the traditional story of Punch and Judy using real people as puppets, and that together we had devised a way to put ourselves into the story so that Nightingale could track Henry Pyke’s bones and destroy them. Stephanopoulos couldn’t suppress a wince when I talked about the magical aspects of the case — Seawoll was unreadable. When we got to the shooting he asked me whether I recognised the gunman.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Christopher Pinkman,’ said Seawoll, ‘and he denies that he shot anyone. He claims he was walking home from the opera when two men attacked him in the street.’

  ‘How does he explain the gun?’ I asked.

  ‘He claims there wasn’t a gun,’ said Seawoll. ‘He stated that the last thing he remembers was leaving the opera, and the very next thing is being kicked in the head by you.’

  ‘That and the excruciating pain from the fractured bones in his lower leg,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Plus some serious bruising and contusions from when he was thrown to the ground.’

  ‘Was he tested for gunshot residue?’ I asked.

  ‘He teaches chemistry at Westminster School,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘Bugger,’ I said. The gunshot residue test was notoriously unreliable, and if the suspect handled chemicals for a living then no forensic witness on earth was going to testify in court that it was likely, let alone conclusive, that he’d fired a gun. A horrible suspicion formed in my mind.

  ‘You did find a gun — right?’ I asked.

  ‘No firearm was recovered from the scene,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘I kicked it along the pavement,’ I said.

  ‘No firearm was recovered,’ said Stephanopoulos slowly.

  ‘I saw it,’ I said. ‘It was a semi-automatic pistol of some sort.’

  ‘Nothing was found.’

  ‘Then how did Nightingale get shot?’ I asked.

  ‘That,’ said Seawoll, ‘is what we were hoping you could tell us.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I shot him?’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

  My mouth was suddenly dry. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t shoot him, and if there’s no gun, what am I supposed to have not shot him with?’

  ‘Apparently you can move things around with your mind,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘Not with my mind,’ I said.

  ‘Then how?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

  ‘With magic,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, with magic,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘How fast can you move something?’ said Seawoll.

  ‘Not as fast as a bullet,’ I said.

  ‘Really,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘How fast is that?’

  ‘Three hundred and fifty metres per second,’ I said. ‘For a modern pistol. Higher for a rifle.’

  ‘What’s that in old money?’ asked Seawoll.

  ‘I don�
��t know,’ I said. ‘But if you lend me a calculator I can work it out.’

  ‘We want to believe you,’ said Stephanopoulos, playing the role of most unlikely ‘good cop’ in the history of policing. I made myself pause and take a deep breath. I hadn’t done any advanced interview courses but I knew the basics, and the conduct of this interview was far too sloppy. I looked at Seawoll and he gave me the ‘at last he wakes up’ look so beloved of teachers, senior detectives and upper-middle-class mothers.

  ‘What do you want to believe?’ I asked.

  ‘That magic is real,’ Seawoll said, and gave me a knowing smile. ‘Can you give us a demonstration?’

  ‘That’s not a good idea,’ I said. ‘There could be side effects.’

  ‘Sounds a bit too convenient to me,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘What kind of side effects?’

  ‘Probably destroy your mobile phones, palm pilot, laptop or any other electronic equipment in the room,’ I said.

  ‘What about the tape recorder?’ asked Seawoll.

  ‘That too,’ I said.

  ‘And the CCTV?’

  ‘Same as the tape recorder,’ I said. ‘You can protect the phones by disconnecting them from their batteries.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Stephanopoulos, and leaned forward aggressively, neatly masking from the camera behind her the fact that she was popping the battery from her very ladylike Nokia slimline.

  ‘I think we’re going to want a demonstration,’ said Seawoll.

  ‘How much of a demonstration?’ I asked.

  ‘Show us what you’re made of, son,’ said Seawoll.

  It had been a really long day and I was knackered, so I went for the one forma I can reliably do in a crisis — I made a werelight. It was pale and insubstantial under the fluorescent strip lighting and Seawoll wasn’t impressed, but Stephanopoulos’s heavy face broke into such a wide smile of unalloyed delight that for a moment I saw her as a young girl in a pink room full of stuffed unicorns. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

  One of the tapes unspooled messily inside the tape machine while the other just stopped dead. I knew from my experiments that I needed to up the strength of the werelight to take out the camera. I was going for a brighter light when the ‘shape’ in my mind went wrong and suddenly I had a column of light hitting the ceiling. It was a bright blue colour, and focused. When I moved my hand the beam played across the walls — it was like having my own personal searchlight.