False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Really?’

  Beverley pushed herself up against her pillows, the better to stare down at me and shake her head sadly.

  ‘You would have been a terrible scientist,’ she said. ‘You’ve got no objectivity at all.’

  ‘It’s hard to be objective about this.’

  I kissed the Bulge for the last time and crawled up the bed to lie by Beverley’s side. She took my hand, interlaced her fingers in mine and placed it on her belly. There was a last push against my hand and then they were still.

  ‘Is it going to be dangerous?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘It’s not Trident or drugs. It’s white-collar crime.’

  ‘White-collar magic crime,’ said Beverley.

  ‘It’s still intelligence gathering,’ I said. ‘There’s not going to be any rough stuff.’

  ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep,’ she said. ‘And be careful.’

  Part Two

  The Colossus

  Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

  Like a Colossus; and we petty men

  Walk under his huge legs, and peep about

  To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II

  7

  No More Soap Opera

  It’s weird watching an investigation from the wrong side of the blue and white tape. Johnson had asked me to monitor this and it was like watching a particularly well-researched TV show. I found myself nodding approvingly at the way everyone entered the crime scene via the single line of approach with their masks and goggles in place.

  Bad for audience identification in TV dramas, but vital for avoiding cross-contamination in real life.

  It was also theatre. The suspect had been led away from the scene in handcuffs, there were eyewitnesses and internal CCTV showing the attack. The police didn’t need source-level forensics to put him at the scene and the only inceptive evidence required to put him away was the knife and the gun – and they were already bagged and tagged.

  The mice had all been cleared out and sent home, the suspect had been whisked off and Skinner and the wounded bodyguard had retired to one of the conference rooms. But not before her ballistic vest – and, presumably, the bullet – had been politely but firmly taken away.

  She hadn’t liked that, I’d noticed, but she had been sensible enough not to withhold evidence.

  I suspected the whole Silent Witness routine was more about the police imposing themselves on the company and having a good sniff around. There was a tall woman in a noddy suit who might have been Silver, but I couldn’t tell with the mask and goggles.

  ‘Do you know any of this lot?’ asked Johnson when he joined me later.

  ‘Some of them,’ I said. ‘That’s DI Stephanopoulos.’

  Even in an anonymous noddy suit there was no mistaking the set of her shoulders or the slight limp that was the legacy of a gunshot wound.

  ‘The Stephanopoulos?’ said Johnson. ‘I’ve heard of her.’

  ‘If she’s here then it means DCI Seawoll is the SIO,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve heard of him too,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Who was the suspect?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘His name was William Lloyd,’ said Johnson. ‘Software engineer is what it says in his folder. I don’t think I met him more than once.’

  That was unusual. Johnson had retained the copper’s habit of getting to know everyone by sight – just in case you have to arrest them later.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He worked upstairs in Bambleweeny,’ he said. ‘Looked at his personnel file. He’s from Harborne.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Birmingham,’ said Johnson. ‘Went to Cambridge, lasted a year before dropping out to work for various game companies. Good references from all of them. No security flags or criminal record.’

  I remembered the way he’d burst into tears when I’d restrained him. He’d been full of fury and tension when he attacked, but it had drained away the instant it was done.

  ‘Did you get a look at the weapons?’ asked Johnson. ‘They wouldn’t let me get close.’

  ‘A knife and an improvised firearm,’ I said. ‘They both looked like they were made out of plastic.’

  ‘Any idea where they might have come from?’

  ‘Do we have any 3-D printers on the premises?’

  Johnson frowned.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he said.

  ‘In Bambleweeny?’

  Johnson said nothing. His own exclusion from Bambleweeny had to rankle something rotten. Policing is about ownership – officers are expected to take ownership of a problem and thus be responsible for the outcomes. It didn’t matter if that was a dipping in Covent Garden, an attempted murder in Old Street or maintaining the security at the headquarters of a tech start-up. Being made responsible without proper ownership is the sort of thing that causes dissatisfaction amongst the rank and file. Although I admit closing half the canteens in London probably ranks higher.

  ‘Have they said what they want from you?’ asked Johnson.

  ‘When they’ve finished faffing about, they want me to go down to Belgravia to give a statement,’ I said.

  ‘Not a problem,’ said Johnson. ‘One thing about Mr Skinner is that when it comes to legal he’s got your back.’

  I was interviewed by a young Somali DS in an expensive green and gold hijab and a beautifully tailored navy-blue suit that I knew for a fact had been conjured out of a backstreet tailor’s in Hong Kong. I knew this because her name was Sahra Guleed and we’d been colleagues for over three years. I was dying to ask how her visit to see her fiancé’s family had gone, but unfortunately Terrence Skinner wasn’t about to let one of his employees speak to the po po without an expensive lawyer present. So the catch-up was going to have to wait.

  Guleed put enough bite into it to make it convincing, but my role was pretty clear-cut – quick-thinking saviour of the day. Don’t thank me, ma’am, just doing my job. We were done in less than an hour and at the end Guleed shook my hand and thanked me for my co-operation without a hint of irony. I deliberately dawdled in the corridor on the way out so that the expensive lawyer could pass out of earshot.

  ‘This is getting confusing,’ said Guleed quietly. ‘I heard you were reinstated, I go on holiday and when I get back they tell me you’d left the job.’

  ‘That was part of my cover,’ I said. ‘So I could apply for the job at SCC.’

  ‘So you’re undercover?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As yourself?’

  ‘It saves on having to memorise stuff,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Nightingale will arrange a briefing as soon as he can.’

  Silver and Nightingale read in Guleed’s bosses DCI Seawoll and DI Stephanopoulos on the details of the Terrence Skinner case – something I was glad to get out of. I’d worked with them before and the pair had a very clear idea about the distinction between what they considered honest coppering and what we were doing on behalf of the NCA.

  I provided a more informal briefing for Guleed in the upstairs lounge at the Folly where the cakes and coffee were free, although there was still a faint smell of cement around the place and some patches on the restored staircase that needed snagging.

  ‘I really missed this place,’ said Guleed as she picked out a second slice of Citrus Madeira cake. ‘The canteen at AB just doesn’t have the same ambience.’

  She asked after Beverley and the Bulge and we caught up on her sisters and her trip to Hong Kong to meet the ‘potentials’, as she referred to her fiancé’s family.

  I asked what they were like.

  ‘Strangely familiar,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to tell you about how big extended families work.’

  ‘What do they think about Mi
chael converting?’

  ‘We glossed over that bit.’

  ‘And the melanin part?’

  Guleed shrugged. ‘They don’t have much choice in the matter, do they?’ she said, which was my cue not to press too hard.

  ‘And did they strike you as particularly magical?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean where did Michael pick up his legendary swordsmanship?’

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  ‘Not his mum and dad, but I got the impression there were some uncles and aunties who were practiced. I didn’t meet them, though.’

  Molly came gliding in with a silver tray and coffee service. Dressed in a viciously starched black and white Edwardian maid’s uniform, she let her straight black hair cascade down her back all the way to the waist. Pale-skinned, she had a narrow face with sharp features and black, almond-shaped eyes. She would have looked like something from Downton Abbey but only if they’d had a Halloween special directed by Guillermo del Toro.

  Noiselessly she placed two cups of Turkish coffee, plus sugar and accoutrements, on the table before us. As she swept out I realised that her sister Foxglove had sneaked in and was sitting cross-legged on a nearby overstuffed leather armchair and peering at us over the top of her A2 sketchpad.

  Guleed said ‘Hi’, but Foxglove remained focused on her sketch.

  ‘Ignore her,’ I said. ‘She won’t say hello until she’s knocked off a couple of likenesses for her collection.’

  While Guleed posed for a picture that would later hang in an art gallery in Gateshead, I read the notes on would-be assassin William Lloyd’s interview. Or, more precisely, his evaluation. Because he remained uncommunicative and was sectioned to the secure mental health facility at Northwick Park.

  He claimed that he was asleep when the attack happened. When confronted by the overwhelming evidence of his actions, he said he couldn’t explain it unless he was sleepwalking.

  ‘I woke up with some black guy holding me down,’ he said.

  ‘Does that look like the glamour to you?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Or something like it,’ I said, because it’s better not to make assumptions. ‘And he could still be faking it.’

  I wondered if I could get Beverley to glamour me and try to replicate that sensation of sleepwalking. But she’d refused such experiments in the past on mental health grounds. And there was a third possibility.

  ‘He could have been sequestrated,’ I said.

  Guleed shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  ‘Like what happened to Lesley?’ she asked.

  PC Lesley May, who’d been at Hendon and Charing Cross with me and had worked with Guleed at Belgravia. Who had picked up an unwanted mental hitchhiker in the form of Mr Punch – otherwise known as the Spirit of Riot and Rebellion. A ‘sequestration’ that left her physically disfigured and mentally scarred.

  Once I’d have called her my best mate, but now . . . wanted for murder was just the start.

  ‘Do you think Nightingale could do an assessment?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I think he’s going to have to,’ I said. ‘And you know Abdul and Jennifer will want to have a look, too.’

  And no doubt stick his head in an MRI.

  Dr Jennifer Vaughan and Dr Abdul Haqq Walid being the Folly’s combination pathologists and medical officers. Both had a keen interest in just what the overuse of magic does to someone’s brain to make it resemble a diseased cauliflower.

  Guleed nodded and poured herself another cup of coffee.

  ‘Did he seem weird when you tackled him?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ I said. ‘It reminded me a bit of Leicester Square on a Saturday night. He was shouting, I was shouting, everyone was making a noise.’

  ‘He said something a couple of times that stuck in my mind,’ said Guleed.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘He said “It talks to you but nothing is ever logged.” Mean anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t ask whether she’d tried to follow up because of course she had.

  ‘Have we had a report on the weapons?’ I asked.

  ‘I had to phone up and threaten people this morning to get some answers,’ said Guleed. ‘They think both the gun and the knife were produced on a 3-D printer but they don’t want to say definitely.’

  The gun design itself appeared to be the famous ‘Liberator’, which was intended to be manufactured on a 3-D printer and help bring about the armed citizenry that would return the US to its past glory – when governments were small, men were real men and women were grateful. Only the general consensus was that, even if you got the thing to work, it was more likely to blow your hand off than hit anything.

  No more a firearm, said the report, than any other short piece of plastic pipe.

  What the report didn’t find was a cartridge. The design, as downloaded from the internet, required a standard pistol cartridge which provided bullet and propellant. Once the round was out of the ‘barrel’ – the forensics team actually put quotes around barrel – the casing should have been left behind. Worse, not only couldn’t they find a casing but there was no trace of any propellant on the weapon.

  ‘Also,’ said Guleed, ‘they said the thermoplastic used to print the knife wasn’t capable of keeping an edge. At least not one consistent with the injuries inflicted on Ian Cobwright.’

  Cobwright being the mouse who’d got sliced.

  ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘Who, Cobwright?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Guleed. ‘Superficial cut. Your fake boss paid for a private room, flowers, hot and cold running nurses but weirdly no grapes.’

  ‘Speaking of fake bosses,’ I said. ‘Tyrel Johnson has invited me to his house for supper.’

  Guleed frowned.

  ‘Don’t get too involved with these people,’ she said. ‘You might have to arrest some of them.’

  Tyrel Johnson lived in a 1930s semi in Roehampton that had six bedrooms, two bathrooms and more mock Tudor than an episode of Blackadder II. Given the neighbourhood and the rear view over Richmond golf course, it should have been worth at least a couple of million if the A3, in all its dual carriageway’d glory, hadn’t run less than a metre from its front gate. It was also less than two hundred metres from Beverley Brook where she crossed from Wimbledon Common over into Richmond Park. Bev could have swum it in less than five minutes – something that she pointed out when we got caught in traffic on the Kingston bypass. More than once.

  Still, we arrived on time and pulled into the neatly paved car park which was all that remained of a large front garden. Bev didn’t approve of that either, although she didn’t say where we would have parked otherwise. A Nissan Leaf was stationed at a charging point next to a Citroën people carrier and a battered black Range Rover. I knew all about the house, all about the cars, and all about the short white woman with the mousey hair who opened the front door to let us in.

  Even so, I would have pegged Stacy Carter as Job or ex-Job by the reflex way she scanned Bev and me up and down before smiling and letting us in. It’s something we do automatically to make sure we can give an accurate description later, on the off chance a casual acquaintance goes off the deep end and does something arrestable.

  She was thin-faced and blue-eyed with a sharp nose and a thin expressive mouth which broke into a wide smile as soon as we’d passed muster.

  ‘At last,’ she said. ‘You two have deigned to visit our humble abode.’

  Not that humble, I thought, as she led us into a wide hallway with an antique walnut hat and coat stand and a red and green tiled floor.

  ‘I’m Stacy, of course,’ she said, taking our coats and then pausing at her first proper sight of the Bulge.

  ‘How far gone are you?’ she asked, and whistled when Bev told her. ‘Twins?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,�
�� said Bev.

  Stacy grinned. ‘I wouldn’t be afraid yet, love,’ she said. ‘Fear comes later when they get mobile.’ Her smile dropped for a moment. ‘No problems, right? Nothing medical?’

  Beverley assured Stacy that everything was proceeding to order and that so far, touch wood, nothing had gone wrong. I knew from the NCA’s background check that Stacy had suffered three late-term miscarriages in her early thirties.

  The hallway smelt faintly of floor polish and damp coats. Lining the walls on both sides were pictures of young men and women in formal head and shoulder poses. Most of them were black or mixed race, but a couple were desi and at least one was white. They were all smartly turned out and half of them were holding up certificates or trophies. Directly ahead, Tyrel Johnson appeared in the kitchen doorway dressed in a rugby shirt in Richmond FC colours. He was holding a spatula, which he waved at us in greeting.

  ‘Well,’ he said, having got an eyeful of Beverley, ‘this explains why Peter is such a cheerful lad, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Get back in the kitchen,’ said Stacy. ‘Before we all die of starvation.’ She turned to us and told us not to let Johnson’s appearance in the kitchen fool us. ‘I do most of the cooking round here.’

  The front and back ground-floor rooms had been knocked into one to form what an estate agent would have described as a Reception/Dining Room. Normal people don’t routinely eat in their dining room, but in this case the outsized pine table, which easily sat ten, had a battered look. It was in the process of being laid by a sullen-looking white teenager with brown hair cut into a skinhead and an obviously handmade biro tattoo on her cheek that must have really hurt.

  This was Keira Slater, whose mum had left the family home one evening, when Keira was nine, and never returned. She’d lived on her own and managed to maintain a semblance of normality, including attending school for nine months until the council sent the bailiffs round to collect the unpaid council tax. She’d then been placed with two homes and three foster families, but had either run away or been rejected as too disruptive. She’d run away from Stacy and Johnson’s home at least three times in the two years she’d been placed there, but always came back.