False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Did you do that?’ I asked Mrs Chin.

  ‘Patricia Chin,’ she said formally. ‘Chief Librarian, 020.131.’

  What with giving the fire brigade and the London Ambulance Service priority, finding an alternative access to the emergency stairwell, and then making sure Mrs Chin and Stephen were led out separately but with appropriate Falcon-capable escorts – i.e. me and Nightingale – it took two hours to quit the building. By that time Tyrel Johnson had turned up along with Bradley Michael Smith, and a couple of other SCC employees were out the back. I got a glimpse of Johnson’s face as I accompanied Stephen to the prisoner transfer van. He didn’t look happy.

  The van with Nightingale and Mrs Chin arrived at the Folly first, which meant we had to park in Bedford Place while it manoeuvred in and then out of the Folly’s courtyard. While we waited, Stephen sat quietly with his handcuffed hands in his lap. I sat opposite and kept my eyes on him. I had no doubt that he was perfectly capable of blowing the doors off the van if he wanted to, but he stayed suspiciously subdued even when it was our turn to unload.

  In a nice purpose-built nick, your prisoner vans back up to a rear door carefully recessed so that the suspects are funnelled into the building. It’s as much a psychological ploy as anything else – resistance is futile, and all that. Retrofitting a building that had been designed as a gentleman’s club in the middle of central London meant compromises – starting with the fact that we could only unload one prisoner van at a time.

  We were still short of uniforms, so it was Guleed who threw open the van’s back doors and grinned as I helped Stephen out.

  ‘Welcome to the Folly,’ I said, but if he knew the name he gave no reaction.

  I led him down the brand-new access ramp to the basement where a large steel door had been set into a reinforced concrete casing. On the other side, where the Folly’s small gym used to be, was a little vestibule with clean whitewashed walls, a second fuck-off steel door, and on the other side of that, our brand new PACE-compliant custody suite. You could still smell the fresh paint.

  As the designated Falcon-qualified officer I had to continue with Stephen to the search room, where he surrendered any personal possessions, assured me he wasn’t carrying anything up his bum – we took his word for it – and stripped him down to his knickers so he could be inspected under UV light. There was a long painful-looking scar on his upper left arm and a puckered circular scar on his stomach.

  ‘Not a bullet hole,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ I asked.

  ‘Crossbow bolt,’ he said.

  Because he was only our second paying customer, he got a choice of brand-new alternative raiment and went for the grey tracksuit bottoms with matching grey sweatshirt, all still in their plastic wrappers. Once he had some paper slippers on he was ready to meet his new best friend and guardian of his well-being – the custody sergeant.

  Probably the only advantage of belonging to an organisation that is being relentlessly downsized in the name of austerity is that if you do have a budget, it’s easy to pick up some talent. In this case, Sergeant Anthony Finnegan, who was a large, imposing white man with no neck and, in a savage response to a burgeoning bald patch, no hair. We picked him because his performance reviews were littered with words like ‘solid’, ‘dependable’ and, more than once, ‘unflappable’. When, as the final part of the interview process, Nightingale demonstrated how unexpected magic could be by conjuring a werelight in front of Finnegan’s face, he’d merely nodded.

  ‘You learn something new every day,’ he’d said.

  He was one of four custody sergeants we kept on the books for twenty-four-hour cover, although we lent them to various other London nicks when our cells were empty – which up until now had been all the time.

  Finnegan was still processing Mrs Chin when we emerged from the search room.

  She’d opted for the stylish navy blue tracksuit bottoms and a soft cotton smock and was explaining that no, she had no allergies or urgent medical needs, but she did want a lawyer and a phone call.

  Finnegan explained that once she was processed all that could be arranged, and the sooner she was processed the sooner it would all happen.

  ‘I could call the American embassy if you like,’ I said.

  Mrs Chin shot me a poisonous look.

  ‘Where’s your master?’ she asked me.

  ‘Gone back out,’ I said. ‘Why? Are you ready to answer some questions?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Chin with a tight smile. ‘And much as I appreciate the change of clothes, I believe it’s time Stephen and I were leaving.’

  She raised her right hand, little finger extended – and nothing happened.

  In the Newtonian magic tradition you don’t actually have to make a gesture to cast a spell – it’s all in the way you line the formae up in your head – but everyone does, even Nightingale.

  Mrs Chin’s gestures became more emphatic, but you don’t get to be a master of the forms and wisdoms without being quick on the uptake. She gave me an accusing look.

  ‘How are you doing that?’ she asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ I said.

  The answer, of course, was that I wasn’t doing it at all.

  Along with the gym and the showers, we’d sacrificed the Folly’s underground shooting range to install a custody suite of six modern cells with toilets, one medical examination suite, an exercise room, prisoner showers and, located at the north end of the suite so it could have windows into the front area, a large airy studio. Here Foxglove, when she wasn’t running naked through the Folly or sketching people in the park, worked and slept. And generated a sort of field that negated magic. We call it the MSA – the Magical Suppression Area – and we’d put in some work hours testing its limitations, although none of us had any idea how it actually worked.

  Now, my theory was that this field was a boundary effect caused when Foxglove draws one of David Mellenby’s allokosmoi, specifically the one colloquially known as Fairyland, closer to our reality. But I haven’t devised a way of testing that hypothesis yet. At least, not a safe one.

  Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

  Mrs Chin and Stephen exchanged horrified looks and for a moment Mrs Chin looked like a frightened old woman – but only for a moment.

  Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

  Mrs Chin took a deep breath and then nodded at Stephen, who sighed. After that the pair allowed themselves to be fingerprinted, cheek-swabbed and photographed but refused to answer any questions beyond their names.

  Once Stephen and Patricia Chin were safely banged up, I went upstairs, wrote up my notes and changed into my emergency work suit. I looked at my face in the mirror as I attached my clip-on tie. Judging by my expression, I wasn’t happy about something.

  My shrink has ‘suggested’ that it might be ‘useful’ if I were to spend more time exploring where my emotions originate. This has always struck me as good advice, so having determined that I was, in fact, discontented, I set out to track down the source.

  After popping downstairs to check that Foxglove’s Magical Suppression Area was still working, I went looking for answers – starting with what was left of the top floor of Bambleweeny. I arrived via Clare Street and slipped in through the police cordon – I wasn’t ready to run into Everest or Victor. And I certainly didn’t want to meet Johnson just yet.

  The fire brigade had declared the building structurally sound, forensics had finished their sweep and the three computers with intact chipsets had been carted off for analysis. The rest of the electronics had been powered up during the fight and their insides reduced to a fine glittery sand.

  ‘That last blow was deliberately noisy,’ said Nightingale. ‘Mrs Chin was making sure that nothing electronic survived.’

  He was stalking aro
und the middle of the room, slowly retracing the fight from Mrs Chin’s perspective, stepping where she stepped and holding his arms as she had. Occasionally he would rewind, reversing his steps, before making the same move again – it looked a little like minimalist t’ai chi.

  ‘That last spell was completely out of character,’ he said. ‘Loud, flashy, destructive. Pointless.’ He stopped moving and straightened up. ‘She was the best practitioner I have ever fought, Peter.’

  ‘Better than you?’ I asked.

  ‘Overall, who can say?’ he said as he checked his cuffs. ‘In combat magic – no. Although we were close enough that I believe she initially thought she might win. It was only when it became clear the outcome was inevitable that she changed tactics.’

  He looked at the pattern of cracks in the ceiling and down at the matching set on the floor. At the precise centre there was a rectangle of undamaged carpet tiles where the Mary Engine had sat in its bag.

  ‘She destroyed the Mary Engine so we wouldn’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘It might be wise to find out why.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem keen to talk to us,’ I said. ‘And Stephen even less so.’

  ‘Perhaps your Mr Skinner can enlighten us,’ said Nightingale.

  But Mr Skinner didn’t want to talk to us either, and Silver, who’d already had a go, warned us off making another approach.

  ‘It’s possible we might be able to salvage our investigation,’ she said, ‘But Skinner’s going to be on his guard now – we need to calm things down.’

  It was sensible advice. While we hadn’t recovered the Mary Engine, or the Rose Jars, or the Enchantress of Numbers music book, they were definitely no longer missing – so that had to be something. Right?

  I was missing a night’s sleep by then, so in the absence of any useful work I went home. Beverley was out at a lecture, so I flopped down on the bed and went out like a light.

  The next morning I had one of those vivid half-dreams you can get when you’ve just woken up to the happy revelation that you don’t have to get out of bed just yet and you have time to snuggle up to a friendly neighbourhood river goddess and go back to sleep.

  I was back on the top floor of Bambleweeny, only it had been redesigned by Ken Adams, the Faraday cage replaced by a useless Perspex cylinder enclosing a clanking mechanical Difference Engine from which a tangle of fantasy lab glassware sprouted into two huge jars the size of telephone boxes. Around the cylinder were arrayed ranks of fridge-freezer-sized, reel-to-reel magnetic tape drives and amongst them men and women, many I thought I half-recognised from the SCC, all dressed in Lycra catsuits, wandered with clipboards or stared at blinking lights.

  ‘So we meet at last, Mr Bond,’ said a voice.

  The huge jars were filled with a swirling mixture of amber and yellow liquids and curled inside each, like a wizened foetus, was the shrunken body of a man. In my persona as James Bond – as played by Colin Salmon – I stepped forward and one of the curled figures lifted its head to stare at me with glowing red eyes.

  I got the strong impression that the man in the jar was about to tell me his dastardly plan, but my bladder woke me and I had to get up. Once I was in the bathroom I thought I might as well have a shower, and after that I was up and ready for action. It might have been a Saturday, but below the rank of chief inspector weekends are an entirely notional concept.

  Also that day, I was back on the job as proper police which, as any modern copper will tell you, starts with an hour in front of an AWARE terminal catching up with your emails and trying to interpret the gnomic and often contradictory directives that flow downhill from senior management.

  Then I had a meeting with the duty solicitor, who’d been drafted in to represent Stephen and Mrs Chin.

  ‘I didn’t even know there was a station here,’ she said.

  I explained that we’d been reactivated due to the general sell-off of police assets – an explanation she found all too plausible. You can always get on the right side of legal aid lawyers by having a mutual moan about austerity. It’s one of the many ways that adversity helps bring people together.

  I then had a meeting with the CPS about what to charge Stephen and Mrs Chin with, in which we decided that obstruction, fraud and various immigration offences would do to keep them banged up for the duration.

  What duration that was depended on them, and so far it was going to be the maximum the law allows followed by deportation.

  I spent the rest of the day up in Hornchurch being debriefed by Silver’s mob. One of the advantages of the circumstances surrounding my particular covert operation was that I was able to keep my notes up to date during the course of the investigation. My main problem during the debrief was explaining the difference between a pen and paper RPG, a console-based JRPG and a board game such as Firefly. And why the gaming sessions had served as an important intelligence-gathering platform.

  ‘Couldn’t you have got them drunk?’ asked one of the interviewers.

  ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘This was more effective.’

  Silver herself was off at an inconveniently scheduled wedding, but arrived back in the evening to tell me to go home and take the next day off. Which suited me perfectly right up until the moment I got home and Bev told me that Skinner had fired Tyrel Johnson for cause.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘They needed his salary.’

  I wouldn’t count on you bowing out gracefully, Silver had told me. These operations always end messily and nobody likes to be betrayed – however good the cause.

  ‘Did you know that before Tyrel got that job they were this close –’ she held her finger and thumb a centimetre apart – ‘to selling their house?’

  Unwisely I asked whether social services didn’t pay them to foster, which got me a glare, the cold shoulder and the growling Bulge. Although the last one might have been hunger, since I was still cooking dinner at the time.

  ‘You’ve seen those kids,’ she said. ‘They need special care and that costs – you know that.’

  I wanted to say it wasn’t my fault, but it sort of was – or at least close enough for me to feel guilty about it.

  ‘You lot are always complaining that everyone expects you to be social workers,’ she said. ‘You saw what happened with Oliver – you know with boys like that it’s one slip and they’re sucked into the prison ecosystem. They don’t get second chances.’

  She wasn’t mollified even when I plonked a hill of rice topped by my mum’s patented groundnut chicken – spontaneous tongue combustion guaranteed – in front of her. Although the Bulge stopped growling.

  ‘Is he going to be charged with anything?’ she asked.

  ‘Tyrel?’

  Beverley waved a half-eaten drumstick at me.

  ‘Yes, Tyrel,’ she said.

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘One slip,’ muttered Beverley and then louder. ‘I liked them.’

  ‘Maybe you should visit,’ I said.

  ‘I did,’ said Beverley. ‘But Stacy told me to go away.’

  ‘Go away?’

  ‘I’m paraphrasing.’

  ‘And you didn’t just charm your way in?’ I asked, which got me a hard look.

  ‘That wouldn’t have been proper,’ she said. ‘There’s limits.’

  ‘On me too,’ I said, and she nodded sadly.

  We ate in silence for a bit until Beverley finished her plate and asked if there was seconds. Force of habit meant I’d cooked enough rice for three times as many people and the fridge held a stack of Mum’s Tupperware. A couple of these regularly arrived with my mum’s twice-weekly visits and despite our best efforts, we were falling behind. To deal with the overspill, Maksim was planning to install a second freezer cabinet in the laundry room next to Beverley’s biological sample fridge – the one with the yellow and black
biohazard sign on the front.

  I microwaved the backup beef knuckle and cassava leaf soup, poured it over another small hill of rice and placed it before my beloved – who was suitably grateful. Outside it started to rain, and I scraped my leftovers into the organic recycle bin and rinsed my plate before putting it in the dishwasher.

  Policing doesn’t really deal in aftercare – at least not for the victims.

  Beverley dropped a denuded knuckle on a side plate and sighed.

  ‘We can sort something out later,’ she said. ‘Once the dust has settled.’

  I started rooting in the fridge for the chocolate cake I’d cunningly hidden in amongst the plastic containers and felt better. Sometimes, when all else fails, a vague aspiration will see you through.

  Well, through to morning anyway.

  Ten minutes later Guleed called to say that Leo Hoyt had been found dead.

  17

  I Don’t Belong to Anyone Any More

  His body was found on Whitmore Road in Hackney, wedged between two parked cars. He had been discovered mid-evening when the owner of one of the cars tried to drive it away and hit an obstruction.

  I recognised the location from Leo Hoyt’s file as being less than twenty metres from his home address – an ex-council flat on the Colville Estate that had once belonged to his granny. She’d stayed in London when the rest of her family moved to Essex, bought her flat in the first throes of Right to Buy and left it to Leo in her will.

  It was also less than five metres from where the Whitmore Road crossed Regent’s Canal.

  Belgravia MIT were handling the case and if they wanted me contaminating their crime scene they would call me. Besides, Nightingale had already done an initial Falcon assessment which included popping down to the nearby canal moorings to see if anyone had seen anything unusual, or whether anyone unusual had seen anything at all. He promised to let me know if he uncovered anything pertinent.