False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Nightingale says that his headmaster, when he was at school, called the werelight a better teacher of magic than any master in the school.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked, and I felt a sudden unexpected rush of panic at the question. It took me so by surprise that I practically stuttered the answer.

  ‘Yes,’ I managed.

  ‘Why?’

  Because pheromones, because beauty, because laughter and joy when she was near and loss and emptiness when she was gone. Because of shouting at unicorns and braving faeries. The way her brow furrowed when she was reading something tricky in a textbook. The smell and feel of her skin. The warmth of her body, the sunshine of her smile and the thrilling depths of her eyes.

  ‘It was your knees,’ I said.

  Beverley sighed and shook her head.

  ‘No, seriously,’ I said. ‘You opened the door to your mum’s house and you were wearing that T-shirt and flip-flops and had the most beautiful knees I’d ever seen.’

  ‘Peter,’ said Beverley.

  ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off them,’ I said. ‘And when I saw the dimples at the back – I was lost.’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  ‘They are such knees as dreams are made of.’

  I felt a sharp shove at the point where her belly was pressed against mine.

  ‘Ow,’ said Beverley. ‘Now you’ve set them off.’

  ‘You asked.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I? I should have known better.’

  We both paused and waited, but it seemed the budding centre forwards were done with practice for the moment.

  ‘We don’t do it on purpose,’ she said, and must have seen my expression because she quickly added, ‘Okay, sometimes on purpose. It’s like Beyoncé. Imagine Beyoncé goes into a recording studio and she’s handed a latte and it has too many sugars in it. Now imagine that Beyoncé mentions to – I don’t know, her PA – that the coffee is too sweet and people rush around getting her a fresh latte with the right amount of sugar. Which she sips gratefully, thanks everyone, and takes it into the recording booth to do whatever genius singers do.’

  ‘Sing,’ I said, wondering where this was going. ‘Mostly.’

  ‘Now Beyoncé could probably pop round to Starbucks herself and, assuming she’s not recognised, get her own damn coffee. But this would cause the people around her even more disruption. So she doesn’t.’

  ‘So you think you’re a pop star?’

  ‘For one thing, Beyoncé Knowles is not just a pop star, she is a goddess in her own right.’ She saw me open my mouth and quickly added, ‘A metaphorical goddess. What we’re talking about here is power – and power has consequences. I am an òrìs· à, an actual goddess of an actual geographical feature. If you were an ancient Briton you’d be dropping the heads of your enemies into my watercourse and begging me to bring you victory in battle. The power is there, it will express itself, and I have to deal with the consequences.’

  ‘What about the intern?’ I asked.

  ‘What intern?’

  ‘The one that got the coffee order wrong, the one that got fired five minutes after Miss Prima Donna sashayed into the recording booth,’ I said. ‘That intern – what about her?’

  Beverley gave a strange little strangled half-laugh, then grabbed me and pulled me close. First for a kiss and then to press her forehead against mine.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, and I was shocked to feel her tears on my cheek. ‘You have no idea how much I love you, do you?’

  I thought I was willing to find out, but even I know when to keep my mouth shut.

  ‘The intern, Peter . . .’ said Beverley, pulling away a bit so that I could see she had her serious face on. ‘The intern is why you have to be careful. Why you have to be restrained.’

  ‘You just held court in the middle of Richmond Park,’ I said. ‘My fake boss and his family were there. Not to mention Mrs Chin and Stephen. My dad provided the entertainment. Dennis Yoon was there, for God’s sake.’

  ‘He came with the Rees,’ said Beverley. ‘I’ve known them since I was little. How was I to know he was staying with them?’

  ‘My point is that it wasn’t what I’d call restrained,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because you’re making a category error, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Think of these courts and ceremonies being like a water meadow or a flood plain. Sometimes you’ve got to let a river escape her banks to prevent more serious flooding downstream.’

  ‘That’s what that was?’ I said. ‘Tyburn doesn’t hold court.’

  ‘’Course she does,’ said Beverley. ‘All those meetings she chairs, those seminars, the charity committees, her soirées and dinner parties? Especially the dinner parties. If she ever invites us just say no, thank you, politely.’

  ‘And your mum?’

  ‘Mum and the Old Man are a different class entirely,’ said Beverley. ‘They’re always in flood.’ And she added before I could object, ‘Metaphorically speaking. So they have to be all ceremony all the time. My mum couldn’t walk down Oxford Street without it spontaneously becoming a parade – that’s why she has to send us out for her shoes.’

  I wondered where the tipping point was. Was it the total volume of water, flow rate or maybe how old they got? Would Beverley ever become that powerful, that distant?

  ‘You and I are entangled now,’ she said. ‘Your family, your friends are all mixed up with me and mine – this is what happens in relationships. It’s just that with people like us, the externalities tend to be a bit more theatrical.’

  ‘Externalities?’

  ‘See,’ said Beverley. ‘Police-speak is catching.’

  ‘At least you didn’t say going forward,’ I said.

  ‘You are my love,’ she said, and then in passable Krio, ‘We don commor far, so natin nor dae wea we nor go able overcam.’

  She glanced up at the werelight. On its own it would be good for at least another hour.

  ‘Do you want it off?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ she said, and with a theatrical little wave caused a sphere of water, the size of a toy football, to coalesce around it.

  The werelight shone through the water to cast a cool, rippling light across the room, so that it seemed we were sleeping under the waves. Satisfied with what she’d done, she put her hand on my bum and pulled me closer.

  ‘Now we can both sleep,’ she said, and kissed me.

  And sleep we did – eventually.

  13

  I am the Business

  Sunday morning by instant tradition was study morning so, after I’d oiled the Bulge – which always made Beverley giggle – I cracked open my Blackstone’s manuals, bought second-hand for economy, while she lay on her back in the living room and read papers off her Kindle.

  Every so often, one or other of us would sigh and decide it was time for yet another cup of coffee.

  After a lunch assembled from yesterday’s leftovers we had a nap, followed by more competitive pelvic floor exercises – Beverley won by two falls and a submission – then I did magic practice down the end of the garden where I wouldn’t destroy any electronics. I was working to perfect my first fifth order spell, clausurafrange, which was supposed to neatly pop out a lock but was currently just making damp holes in the riverbank, when Beverley waddled down the garden towards me waving my phone.

  Half an hour later I was in the Asbo and heading for Gillingham.

  In an ideal world PC Robert Maginty would have been called Kent Police’s Falcon Liaison Officer, or FLO. But that acronym has been taken by Family Liaison Officers and even the police try to avoid having TLAs with double meanings. Not to mention that, while senior officers in the regional forces have accepted the need for Falcon liaison, they try to make the structures as unofficial as possible. I think they’re hoping that if they don’t talk about Falcon, then Falcon
will hardly ever happen. Ironically, this is known as magic thinking.

  Up until six months ago, Maginty had been a member of the Medway Community Safety Unit, based out of the Rainham Contact Point on Station Road. A contact point is what you get when you keep making ‘savings’ to a police budget until the actual police stations start to disappear.

  ‘Still am CSU,’ he said when I asked. ‘But then they called me into Sutton Road and the Deputy Chief Constable, no less, informs me that I am now official liaison to something called the Special Assessment Unit and sends me for a training course in London.’

  Where Nightingale put him through our patented three-day magic-orientation and vestigia-awareness course and sent him home to the Medway CSU. Where he got on with the job of stopping the local community biting lumps out of each other.

  He was a tall white man with thinning brown hair who was starting to fill out his stab vest more than he would have probably liked. But since the cuts everyone was working double shifts – not just double jobs.

  ‘Fuck all anything weird happens,’ he said. ‘I was just beginning to think it was all a bit of a jolly . . . And then I walk into this.’ He ushered me into the shop.

  It was like sticking my face in a bowl of rotting shrimp.

  The person or persons unknown responsible for the drones and the demon trap had definitely been doing some serious magic on the premises. The vestigium was powerful enough to make my skin crawl and want to put on my noddy suit – despite the fact that forensics had already been and gone.

  The shop had been an internet café on the high street by Gillingham Station until the previous year and had stood empty since then. The windows were smeared into opacity with Windolene on the inside and dotted with posters on the outside. The one on the door was for a band called Red Butler. A second plastered next to it urged us to fight the cuts. They’d missed a trick – they should have put that one up outside Robert Maginty’s Contact Point.

  ‘The landlord investigated after EDF started legal action for an electricity bill he swore blind he’d never received,’ said Maginty. ‘We found a pile of letters just there.’

  He pointed to one of the café tables that still filled the front of the shop. I recognised them as wooden garden furniture with holes in the centre for placing sunshades. Or, I noticed, for running cables down into connector boxes on the floor. There were still cables sprouting from a few of the tables like headless daffodils.

  Maginty pointed out that unlike the other tables, which sported a layer of dust, the tables with the cables were clean.

  ‘They were online,’ he said. ‘But they didn’t bother to pack up the cables when they left.’

  About half the café tables had been disassembled and replaced with two long rows of free-standing pine shelving. Wood doesn’t retain vestigia at all well, but the metal screws that held them together radiated a metaphysical reek that was beginning to seriously erode my love of the fruit of the sea.

  There was a huge whiteboard along one wall. Judging by the chalkboard poking out from under one side, it had just been mounted straight onto whatever had been hanging on the wall at the time. At the other end there was just enough of a noticeboard to see that somebody had left their keys behind, and that somebody had a van and was willing to drive anywhere for money.

  A grid was drawn with geometric precision on the whiteboard – not as easy a task as you might think. Along the top were days of the week, Monday to Sunday, and on the leftmost column a row of names or more probably nicknames – Baz, Yax, JC, Jade and Solid. Neatly written into the rows and columns were two or three letter combinations – Cit, Mtp, Qut, Flx, Stl, Prz and Sht. Most of the boxes had just the one abbreviation repeated for all seven days, although Jade had Mtp/Ctp in her boxes and, for whoever Yaz was, someone had had to write very tiny letters to get all of them in.

  Every box had a neat diagonal line drawn through it except for those in the Friday column.

  ‘Any idea what all that’s about?’ I asked.

  ‘The top is obviously days of the week,’ said Maginty. ‘And at a guess the left-hand column are all names or nicknames, so going out on a limb I think the abbreviations are all drugs.’

  I smelt bollocks but you’ve got to let your fellow officers have their bit of fun or they get tetchy.

  ‘How do you figure that, then?’

  ‘Ctp is obviously Citalopram,’ he said.

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Mtp is Mirtazapine, Flx has to be Fluoxetine, Stl Sertraline,’ said Maginty. ‘All of those are anti-depressants while Quetiapine, Qut, is also used to treat bipolar disorders.’

  ‘That’s really impressive,’ I said. ‘You working all those out just from the abbreviations.’

  ‘Just good deductive reasoning,’ he said. ‘And we found some empty pill bottles in a wastepaper bin.’

  ‘And the names or nicknames?’

  ‘I think I know who Baz is,’ said Maginty. ‘Cautioned him a couple of times.’

  Which offered some interesting possibilities. But it wasn’t why Maginty had called me all the way down to the Medway Ports on a miserable Sunday afternoon. That was in the grubby storeroom at the back of the shop, with off-white walls and racks of blue metal shelving. I touched the metal frames but there wasn’t a hint of vestigia. Whatever the magic was, it had happened out in the shop.

  ‘When the landlord came in to check, he found these,’ said Maginty.

  Neatly stacked up against the wall were columns of grey plastic reels, each twenty centimetres across and five deep. I recognised them as the spools used to store plastic threads for 3-D printers.

  ‘I saw your Falcon alert regarding 3-D printers,’ said Maginty. ‘Stuck in my mind because usually all your stuff is mystic, isn’t it? When the landlord called us in I saw this and called you.’

  There were two rows of six columns, all over head height. I did a rough mental calculation and estimated that I was looking at just under half a ton of plastic feedstock. ABS, according to the labels on the reels.

  Half a ton, I thought. That’s a lot of something.

  Whatever they were making, they were making it in what used to be the shop’s kitchen and toilet area. Both had been ruthlessly ripped out to make room for at least two large commercial 3-D printers. We could estimate their rough size by the neat rectangular clear spaces on the scarred orange and white lino floor. One of the scene-of-crime techs had estimated that both units were the size of an upright fridge-freezer. There still was a faint whiff of heated plastic in the air, but Maginty said it would have been worse if they hadn’t crudely widened what had once been the toilet window and run out a tube for the extractor hoods.

  ‘Could have been very bad for their health,’ said Maginty.

  It was good to see criminal organisations taking health and safety regulations to heart.

  ‘Landlord wasn’t best pleased by the modifications,’ said Maginty. ‘He blamed homeless squatters and wanted to know what we were doing about it.’

  The answer being ‘fuck all’, because apart from anything else, such as lack of resources, there was no sign that anyone was squatting.

  ‘No sleeping bags, no old clothes, no ratty furniture from a skip.’

  I thought of Beverley’s salvaged throne and winced.

  You can get some swish internet cafés with lots of wood trim, but this was even a step down from a faux KFC chicken joint with good Wi-Fi, being essentially a down at heel greasy spoon with a couple of high-capacity lines run in. Squatters probably would have raised the tone slightly.

  In front of the counter where customers had once queued to buy their minutes, plus what was probably truly horrible coffee, two of the round tables had been pushed together and a crude tabletop created by lashing a door-sized slab of laminated chipboard on top. The tabletop was pink and heavily scored in places – and marked with silver blobs that t
urned out to be solder. On the floor around it were scattered slivers of plastic insulation, bits of wire and more plastic shavings.

  ‘They were definitely making something,’ said Maginty.

  I had a horrible feeling I knew what. But I didn’t want to make assumptions.

  ‘They weren’t squatting,’ I said. ‘It’s a workshop. So they were coming in every day to work?’

  ‘Buying coffee on the way in – just like ordinary people,’ said Maginty. ‘Building what, though?’

  I glanced at the whiteboard.

  ‘You said you had some of the pill bottles,’ I said. ‘Could you trace these people through their prescriptions?’

  ‘That’s an enormous faff, and you know it,’ said Maginty.

  Medical confidentiality being just the start of it.

  ‘Like I said, I think I know who Baz is. But there’s a problem,’ he said. And that problem was money. ‘There’s no budget for it – I got into huge trouble for ordering the forensics this morning. Some Chief Super I’ve never even heard of phoned me up and gave me a bollocking.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It was a really good bollocking,’ said Maginty. ‘I am now seriously deficient in the bollock area as a consequence.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘To paraphrase,’ said Maginty. ‘You want this case, you’re going to have to pay for it.’

  The Folly has financial reserves that are the envy of other operational command units, but we’d eaten a big chunk of it the previous year on Operation Jennifer. And what was left was funding our expansion.

  ‘Any chance of tracking down this Baz today?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon at the earliest,’ said Maginty. ‘Even if you do take the case.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said.

  I called Nightingale and Belgravia and then hung around the shop, poking my nose into nooks and crannies, while I waited for someone to show up. I was expecting Guleed, but to my horror got Seawoll instead.

  ‘Oh joy,’ he said as he walked in. ‘The fucking Medways.’ He sniffed. ‘I don’t know what they’ve been cooking here, but I think it’s past its sell-by date. In my younger days I used to run joint operations against organised crime down here. You used to be able to get a decent fish supper – definitely seen better days.’