False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Beverley had of course asked what kind of propitiation, because she’d got a Kia from the New Malden Conservation Society the year before last and was always looking to see if her sisters could top that.

  ‘Just the usual,’ Fleet had said. ‘Alcohol in large amounts.’

  The number of showmen wintering at the Vale of Health has been steadily declining in the last thirty years, but there were still enough to fill the site and force me to park outside the gate on the access road. This being Hampstead, the chances of some neighbourhood busybody phoning in and making a complaint were high.

  Henry ‘Wicked’ Collins was waiting for me by the gate. Behind him the caravans were lumpy grey shapes with an occasional rectangle of warm light marking a window. Sound was muffled by the fog and we could have been standing in a field somewhere remote and outside the M25.

  Wicked was a blunt little white man in his sixties, wearing a flat cap and a big camel-hair coat. He grinned when he saw me and stepped forward to shake my hand. His palm was rough and calloused.

  ‘The lady at 999 said I might have to wait a week,’ he said.

  ‘You know we turn out for you, Wicked,’ I said. ‘Even on a Monday morning.’

  ‘Come this way,’ said Wicked and I followed him through the blocky shadows to where a big red, green and gold trailer sat on its jacks. I’d been around enough fairgrounds by then to know an attraction when I saw one boxed up for travel. Because it’s never wise to pass up free advertising it had BERNOULLI’S MIGHTY ORGAN written across the side in big circus lettering. Beneath the title was a cartouche with a picture of organ pipes in gold, red and blue.

  ‘A fairground organ,’ I said.

  ‘More than that,’ said Wicked. ‘This is your actual Gavioli. Originally made for Prince Albert, or so they say.’

  It had to weigh five tons at the very least.

  ‘They obviously didn’t steal this,’ I said. ‘Did they?’

  ‘If I could just draw your attention to this lock here,’ said Wicked, and pointed to a lock a third of the way up the side of the box. I realised that the side itself was segmented so that the bottom third could fold down and the remainder could swing up. Like many old-fashioned fairground attractions, its travelling box also formed part of its superstructure.

  I peered at the lock and asked what was wrong with it.

  ‘It’s been jimmied, hasn’t it?’ said Wicked.

  I pulled out my pen torch and had a closer look. The keyhole was blocked by the brass sheet part of the lock mechanism. Forcibly displaced to the left, I guessed, dragging the deadbolt with it and out of its socket. I knew this lock-breaking technique and it wasn’t something you could do with a set of picks or a drill.

  I took the glove off my right hand and rested the tips of my fingers against the lock. The metal was cold but bearable, and I breathed out slowly and let my mind go as blank as possible.

  Vestigia is the trace left behind by the supernatural; there’s more of it about than you might think but you have to be trained to spot it. After that it’s just a matter of practice.

  I felt a sharp little jolt, like a static electric shock, and a sherbet-flavoured fizz. Somebody had definitely used magic to force the lock, but not with a spell I recognised.

  ‘What’s behind here?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Wicked.

  He had to undo heavy-duty latches at each end of the trailer, and the siding was a couple of centimetres thick and heavy enough that I had to help him let it down safely. Once down, the siding formed a decorative apron covering the trailer’s undercarriage, wheels and jacks. It was painted in the traditional baroque showman style, all gilt and vivid blues, greens and reds. The bottom of the organ was revealed, the lower sections of the pipes with their mouths gaping silently in a row. There was a series of horizontal snare drums mounted in recesses and what looked like a mechanical glockenspiel fitted below the centre of the pipes.

  ‘Was there any other damage?’ I asked.

  There was a row of evenly spaced keyholes about fifteen centimetres above the bottom of the trailer. Looking closely, I saw they each served a large shallow drawer, as if of an enormous desk, the seams and handles cunningly hidden by gilt embellishments. I touched each in turn and on each I felt the same tiny shock I had with the main lock.

  Wicked bent down and carefully pulled open the leftmost drawer. Inside, it was subdivided into compartments. Each was tightly filled by a stack of heavy cards roughly twenty centimetres per side. They were bound like a cartoon Christmas present by beige muslin tape tied into a bow at the top. Wicked pointed to an empty compartment at the back of the drawer.

  ‘That’s what they stole,’ he said.

  ‘What was it?’ I asked.

  Wicked pulled one of the stacks out of its compartment and untied the bow. The words bohemian rhapsody were written in felt tip on the top card. Wicked lifted it to show how it was attached at one end to the next card, and that to the next so that the stack folded up like an accordion. The card stock was heavy, expensive and yellowing with age. Each card had a pattern of holes and slots drilled through it.

  ‘Looks just like a punch card, right?’ said Wicked.

  ‘What’s a punch card?’ I asked.

  It all started with a French weaver, Joseph Marie Jacquard, who invented a way to automatically change the patterns on a loom by means of big cards with holes in them. These were linked together to form a sequence and, voila, everyone gets to wear a fancy shirt. C’est très bon.

  We’d retreated into the warmth of Wicked’s caravan for tea and history.

  ‘A loom is a complicated bit of kit,’ said Wicked. ‘So if you can control a loom, why not a piano or an organ?’

  The caravan was a nearly new Sprite Quattro, with the front end converted into an office by the removal of one of the sofas and the addition of stacked ranks of storage bins that blocked out the left-hand windows. As the guest I got the remaining sofa, while Wicked leant against the sink. The fog was still heavy enough that I could have used my reflection in the front window to shave.

  Given that the goal of every entertainment entrepreneur is to eliminate all those expensive and temperamental performers, it wasn’t long before some bright spark of an organ maker applied the technology to music. Anselme Gavioli, of the famous Gavioli family, patented the system in 1892. But there were already instruments such as the Bernoulli’s Mighty Organ that used the mechanism. The stack of cards was called a music book. The cards unfurled and ran through a thing called a key frame, which read the slots and holes and opened valves in sequence, which drove the pipes, drums and cymbals of the mechanical organ.

  Mechanical music for a steam-powered age.

  ‘And a punch card?’ I asked.

  Wicked waved a rich tea biscuit at me.

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t know what a punch card is,’ he said. ‘I thought it was part of geek culture.’

  ‘Depends on the geek, don’t it?’ I said.

  ‘In my old life,’ said Wicked, ‘when I was a student, I used to programme computers with them.’

  Because that’s how they did it back in the days when computers filled rooms and the Lunar Lander touched down using hardware less powerful than my mum’s thermostat. Wicked used to write his program out by hand and then use a machine that translated the instructions into lots of holes in lots of cards which were then literally ‘compiled’ and fed into an optical reader. And, behold, your program ran and you got the results you wanted – often as early as the tenth or eleventh time you tried it.

  ‘If you were really careful,’ said Wicked.

  I thought we might be digressing a bit, and asked him whether this was really relevant to the theft.

  ‘I just couldn’t believe you didn’t know,’ he said. ‘But also it is a little bit related. The music book that was stolen was called The
Enchantress of Numbers.’

  That actually prodded something in my memory.

  ‘Ada Lovelace,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not a total loss, then,’ said Wicked.

  Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician and, reputedly, the first ever computer programmer.

  ‘So a song about her?’ I asked. ‘Who by?’

  ‘We don’t know whether it’s a song or not,’ said Wicked, ‘let alone who wrote it, although my money’s on Charles Babbage.’

  Who was famous for designing, but failing to build, the first ever universal computing machine. A monster of gears, wheels and drive chains that would have ushered in the information age a hundred years early – assuming you could get it to work.

  ‘How can you not know whether it’s a song?’ I asked. ‘Haven’t you played it?’

  ‘Can’t do that,’ said Wicked. ‘Wrong number of keys.’

  Because each organ was rated as having a certain number of keys.

  ‘Old Benny out there is 84 keys,’ said Wicked. ‘Others are 101 keys or 112 keys or more. And that’s without getting into whether it’s a keyed or keyless system. You can’t run a music book made for 84 keys in a 112-key organ, or vice versa.’

  ‘So, how many keys does the stolen book have?’

  ‘137,’ said Wicked. ‘Which, as I’m sure you’ve spotted, is a prime number.’

  Which I totally hadn’t, but I felt my geek cred had been impugned enough for one day.

  ‘So, who has a 137-key organ?’ I asked

  ‘Nobody,’ said Wicked. ‘That’s the mystery.’

  Burglary, which is defined in law as entering someone’s gaff and nicking stuff, is a pain to investigate. Violent crime often involves poor impulse control and people having a go because someone had it coming, and frequently happens in front of CCTV or witnesses. Burglary is generally a crime of opportunity and stealth, and worse – it’s done by strangers. Most men are murdered by their mates and most women are murdered by their partners. Most burglaries are done by someone who couldn’t pick their victim out of a line-up.

  The best scheme the Met ever had for recovering stolen goods was setting up a fake fencing operation and arresting anyone stupid enough to try and flog their ill-gotten gains. Somehow, I didn’t think that approach was going to work in this case.

  On the other hand, this burglary had obviously been precise, targeted and probably to order.

  Although I’d sprung for a SOCO to dust for fingerprints, I didn’t expect my burglar to leave any viable prints. And I wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘They wore gloves,’ said the SOCO. ‘Based on the pattern, probably made from kidskin.’

  The pattern of smudges was instructive, though. Judging by where they clustered, it was clear that the burglar opened each drawer in turn until they found what they were looking for. There was no sign that they touched anything else – they certainly hadn’t rifled through any of the other music books.

  This told me that they’d known the name of the music book they wanted, where it was stored generally, but not the precise drawer.

  Once the SOCO had signed off on the site I asked Wicked whether anyone had recently inquired about The Enchantress of Numbers or even about music books in general.

  ‘Somebody wanted to buy Bernoulli’s Mighty Organ, the whole shebang, including the music books,’ said Wicked. ‘Said they wanted to ship it to America for a theme park.’

  ‘When was this?’ I asked.

  We were back in Wicked’s caravan, this time for coffee and witness statements. I had my notebook out, which Wicked eyed with the deeply engrained cultural suspicion of the travelling man.

  ‘Last month,’ said Wicked and, when prompted, gave me the exact date and time.

  ‘Did he say which theme park it was for?’

  ‘He was talking fast and I really wasn’t listening,’ said Wicked. ‘There was something shifty about him, so when he told me to name my price I told him two million cash up front. Sterling, not dollars.’

  ‘And what do you think it’s really worth?’ I said. Not two million, that was for certain.

  ‘Technically it’s priceless,’ said Wicked. ‘But I doubt I’d get more than fifty grand for it – not these days.

  ‘Anyway, he thought about it. We haggled for a bit, but I really didn’t like him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There was something off about him, but I couldn’t say what,’ said Wicked.

  ‘Something uncanny?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Wicked. This went into my notebook as Fae?

  ‘Who did he say he was working for?’ I asked.

  ‘Just a mo,’ said Wicked, and he pulled out a brown leather wallet that barely closed around the amount of random stuff wedged into it. He emptied out various compartments and sorted through the pile of visitor cards, special offers, credit cards, his NHS card, Oyster card and a special offer on Audible that had expired a year before.

  ‘Damn,’ said Wicked. ‘I meant to use that.’

  After a bit of sorting he found and handed over a visitor’s card, plain black letters on thick white card stock. It read Mitchel West, Acquisitions, Guffland Entertainment – followed by a phone number, URL, email and Twitter address. I made a note of the numbers and dropped the card into a paper evidence envelope – because you never know your luck.

  I got a description from Wicked, which amounted to average-sized youngish white guy with brown, possibly light brown, hair. He was dressed in a casual navy blazer, a long khaki coat that was possibly Burberry, and even if it wasn’t it seemed posh to Wicked.

  ‘But fake posh,’ said Wicked. ‘He said that since I was asking so much I should at least show him the goods. Which I did. Including the storage areas.’

  Had Mitchel West shown a particular interest in the music books?

  ‘Not that I noticed,’ said Wicked. ‘Not that I was paying attention.’

  He had noticed the silver Audi A6 that Mitchel West had arrived in.

  ‘Still had that new car smell,’ said Wicked. ‘Wafted out when he opened the door.’

  He hadn’t noticed it enough to remember the licence plate number – nobody ever does.

  I finished up the crime reporting checklist, gave Wicked a crime number and promised to get in touch if there were any developments. Had this been an ordinary robbery, that is about as far as it would have gone. Not counting my suspension, I’d been out of normal operational policing for over three years, but I’d noticed that things had definitely got tighter while I wasn’t looking. Still, the obviously magical nature of the burglary meant that I had to follow it up.

  I drove up the steep lane that connected with East Heath Road and looked around for CCTV – nothing. Libertarians and criminals complain about the surveillance state when they see a camera. Police officers complain about it when they don’t. I’d been hoping to catch that brand-new silver Audi so I could run its number plates, but the nearest reliable CCTV was at South End Green and there were too many alternative routes out of the area. For a major crime you would have put a team on looking anyway, however futile. But this was burglary – wholesale crime that has to be solved at a discount.

  Still, the burglar had used magic. Which made it my business.

  Five minutes on my phone had determined that Guffland Entertainment was an entirely imaginary company, and while there were some Mitchel Wests on Facebook and Twitter none of them seemed likely candidates. I had another look at the card and was just wondering whether it was worth breaking out my own fingerprint kit and giving it a quick dust, when I noticed that there was something printed on the reverse. It read in tiny letters PrettyPrint. As my old governor used to say, a copper’s one true comfort in life is that criminals are mostly thicker than pig shit.

  Another five minutes on my phone confirmed that not only were P
rettyPrint a chain of high-street printers, but that they were nice and small – five branches in the Greater London area, and the nearest one down in Old Street.

  I called my governor, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, to let him know what I was up to and ask whether Gavioli was in our files.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he said. In the background I could hear hammering and shouting. Obviously work on the upgrades at the Folly had started. ‘I’ll pass it on to Harold and see what he knows.’

  Professor Harold Postmartin, D.Phil, FRS, was our tame historian and archivist. Even if he couldn’t dig anything up he was bound to be interested in a connection to the Gaviolis – obscure historical connections were a major passion.

  Call finished, I made a note of my current actions in my daybook and set out.

  Not wanting to slowly survey the permanent roadworks at Kings Cross, I went east and then down the New North Road. I couldn’t find parking near Old Street roundabout so I slipped into Shoreditch and found a place behind the Charles Square Estate and cut through to Old Street.

  PrettyPrint was jammed in between a wholesale fashion jewellers and a kebab shop in a surprisingly undeveloped one-storey row of retail units. It was painted the mandatory blue and white of all print shops, which I’ve always presumed is to make sure the lumpy grey copiers and printing machines fit in with the décor. The young Asian man in the blue company T-shirt looked pleased to see me for all of the five seconds it took me to identify myself, before passing me on to the manager. This was a painfully thin black woman in her early thirties, who gave me a disapproving look. Not disapproving of anything in particular, you understand, just routine scepticism. For some reason I’ve been getting it all my life, so I’ve learnt to ignore it.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said.

  I explained about the fake cards and how they’d been used in the commission of a burglary.

  ‘So?’ she asked.

  So could she look up any details of the customer in question, you know, so I could catch them.

  ‘I’m not sure I should,’ she said, and cocked her head to one side. ‘Commercial confidentiality, and that.’