Tales from the Folly

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘No it isn’t,’ I said—although technically speaking I suspected it was.

  ‘It’s because I’m a rat,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re not really a rat,’ I said.

  ‘I’m a rat and this is a violation of the human rights act.’

  I really wish members of the public would bother to read that bloody act before quoting from it.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ I said. ‘Apart from anything else, if you really are a rat, then the Human Rights Act doesn’t apply.’

  ‘Typical,’ said Melvin.

  I suppose he did look a bit rat-like, being a small white guy with a scraggly beard, and big yellowy front teeth, which he persistently displayed by exaggerating his overbite. Personally, had a simile been required, I would have gone with ferrety. But that would have been to ignore the rat costume he was wearing. It was like an adult-sized pyjama suit, complete with a hood and fake ears. It looked like it had originally been made of felt but had since been covered in so many layers of shit that it was impossible to tell for sure. Literally shit—judging from the smell.

  Melvin’s head twitched from side to side looking for a way out, but it was in vain—me and Kumar had him well and truly stitched up. Backed into what had once been a storage room of the main maintenance depot of the old Mail Rail.

  Back in the good old days of 1911 when London’s streets were covered in horse manure and traffic congestion could give you a parasitic infection as well as a headache, the Post Office decided to utilise two new cutting edge technologies—electric rail and the Greathead Shield Tunnel Boring System—to create a mini railway for the post. It would run from Whitechapel to Paddington and allow the mail to glide from one side of the city to the other, untroubled by traffic jams, inclement weather or, during the occasional world war, high explosives. It opened in 1924 and was only closed in 2003 because ‘being awesome’ no longer registered on the Royal Mail’s balance sheet.

  Even narrow gauge trains weigh several tons and, unlike its big brother, the Mail Rail didn’t conveniently surface in the suburbs to allow maintenance under an open sky. So under Mount Pleasant sorting office an engineering depot was decreed, a great long artificial cavern currently filled with enough spiky cast iron, Bakelite and rheostat-using technology to cause the most jaded industrial archaeologist to swoon.

  Running just beside the Engineering Depot is the River Fleet. So when the current owners, the British Postal Museum and Archive, decided that it would make a wonderful corporate entertaining spot, stroke heritage train ride, Fleet naturally took an interest. And where Fleet takes an interest her sister Lady Ty is rarely far behind. It’s a Hampstead watershed thing. Which is why when the first planned event—a sort of proof of concept soiree with an obscure literary bent—was gate-crashed by a man in a rat suit, I got called in. Me being the Met’s current expert on high maintenance river deities.

  I’d dragged in Jaget because ever since we’d invented the triple sewer luge with a visiting FBI agent he’d been my go-to guy for all matters concerning the Underground.

  ‘Is this going to take long?’ called Fleet from behind us. She and her sister had found Melvin skulking in a half-flooded maintenance pit just to the left of where they were going to serve canapés.

  It’s a police rule of thumb that anything involving members of the public takes twice as long as you think it will, so I told Fleet to give us some room to work. No custody sergeant in the city would be happy with me dumping someone this smelly in their nice clean custody suite—not until I’d at least made an effort to palm them off on the mental health system. Plus he didn’t look all that compos mentis to me, what with the sniffing and twitching.

  ‘How long have you been a rat?’ I asked.

  Melvin twitched and rubbed his hand across his cheek.

  ‘About a month,’ he said.

  ‘And before that?’ I asked.

  ‘Before that what?’

  ‘Well you told us your name was Melvin,’ I said. ‘What’s your surname?’

  ‘Norvegicus,’ he said.

  ‘Rattus norvegicus,’ said Jaget. ‘Latin for rat.’ And, it turned out, an LP by a band called The Stranglers—although Jaget admitted that he didn’t think that last fact was relevant.

  ‘Did you have a different name before you were a rat?’ I asked, proving once more that politely asking the same bleeding question again and again is the backbone of modern policing.

  ‘Starkey—my name was Starkey.’

  ‘Melvin Starkey?’

  Melvin nodded and Jaget wrote it down.

  ‘What do you do for a living Melvin?’ asked Jaget.

  ‘I scurry,’ said Melvin. ‘And hurry and fight the dogs and kill the cats.’

  Jaget made another note—obviously thinking that we should check with Islington Environmental Health and the RSPCA.

  ‘What about before you were a rat?’ asked Jaget.

  ‘I was an estate agent,’ he said.

  ‘And where did you live?’

  He gave us an address in Primrose Hill.

  Me and Jaget stepped back so we could talk amongst ourselves. Melvin stayed where he was, squatting on his haunches, nose twitching and his pathetic felt ears bobbing back and forth.

  ‘I think we have enough for an ID,’ I said.

  ‘Can you handle him on your own?’ asked Jaget.

  I said I could and he trotted off to find a place where his airwave would work.

  Fleet and Lady Ty glided forward, champagne glasses in their hands and a determined look in their eyes.

  ‘So is it to be a prisoner transport?’ asked Fleet. ‘Or an ambulance?’

  ‘Or pest control?’ said Lady Ty. ‘I’m sure Fleet would be happy to whoosh him down to the Thames if you wanted a discreet disposal.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Is that something you’ve done that before?’

  Fleet smiled at her sister. ‘He’s so suspicious these days.’

  ‘We’re just offering.’ said Lady Ty. ‘I’m sure you have better things to do.’

  ‘You called me. Remember?’

  ‘Fair point,’ said Fleet. ‘Do you think he’s under the influence?’

  He was under the influence, alright. I just couldn’t tell what of: drugs, alcohol, misfiring brain cells—magic?

  ‘Why don’t you stand back and let me work,’ I said.

  Lady Ty looked at Fleet and they both giggled. I hoped that it was the alcohol because I didn’t like the idea of the Goddess of the River Tyburn giggling—it was disturbing on so many levels.

  I went back to Melvin the Rat and tried to narrow down the possibilities.

  ‘So when did you decide to become a rat?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not a question of wanting to be a rat,’ said Melvin. ‘It just sort of happens to you. All of a sudden you realise that’s what you want to be.’

  ‘And this realisation came a month ago?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Melvin. ‘Have you got any cheese?’

  ‘My colleague has gone to fetch some,’ I said. ‘Can you remember what you were doing?’

  ‘I was asking about a house,’ he said.

  Specifically: making inquiries into whether a particular person might want to sell their four storey Georgian terrace on St. Mark’s Crescent near Regent’s Park. Melvin thought it was worth a go because the same person had owned the house since 1956 and in that period the value had risen from merely expensive to ludicrous.

  ‘I was hoping it would be an old lady,’ said Melvin who explained that he was particularly skilled at talking the old dears into relinquishing their property. ‘I play fair, though,’ he said. ‘I make sure they get a good price.’

  Presumably the ‘old dears’ then headed for Hastings or Bournemouth with a nice capital nest egg and the streets of Camden were made safe for the super-rich.

  ‘So did you persuade her to sell?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Melvin. ‘And in any case, that’s when I realised my true na
ture.’

  ‘Do you remember going up to the front door?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember that.’

  ‘Did you ring the doorbell?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Melvin and explained that he remembered the door opening and there being a smell, a strong animal smell, like something from a zoo.

  And then his true nature as a rat became clear and off he scampered towards his office on Camden Parkway.

  He couldn’t remember anything about the woman who answered the door.

  He’d acquired the rat suit at Escapade’s costume shop in Chalk Farm and had naturally found himself drawn to the sewers. I asked him how he ended up underneath Mount Pleasant and he said it was an accident—he’d been searching for a bite of cheese and had just followed his nose.

  ‘This is your lucky day,’ I said. ‘Not only am I going to introduce you to a nice Scottish doctor, so you can be checked out, you’re going to be provided with cheese and old rope and whatever else it is your little ratty heart desires.’

  And you’ll stick your head in an MRI, give blood samples and throw the gauntlet of science into the face of the inexplicable. Although I expected Dr Walid might want to get him washed up first. The key thing being that it wouldn’t be me trying to get him into a shower.

  So when Jaget got back we arranged for Dr Walid to come and take Melvin to a place of safety under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. Jaget had confirmed Melvin’s identity and that he had been reported missing a month earlier. Once we had him wrapped in a blanket and stuffed into the back of an ambulance I popped back inside.

  I asked Fleet and Lady Ty whether they knew anything about the address on St Mark’s Crescent.

  ‘No, nothing,’ said Lady Ty.

  ‘I never go down that way,’ said Fleet. ‘I’m not really a Primrose Hill, Regent’s Park person. When I want to go for a walk, I go up the heath. Although the view from the top of the hill is really good.’

  Which just goes to show that Lady Ty is a much better liar than Fleet.

  Still I knew better than to try the direct approach with these two. So off I went, with my constabulary duty still to be done.

  * * *

  St Mark’s Crescent was Georgian semis down one side and a slightly later terrace on the other. According to Google Earth the semis all backed onto the Grand Union Canal which would have been enough to raise my suspicions even if Jaget’s IIP check hadn’t thrown up that the ground rent, mortgage, rates and then council tax had all been paid by London Zoo since the early 1960s.

  So we swapped my Asbo for Jaget’s even more inconspicuous Vauxhall Corsa and staked out the house. We were just getting bored enough to consider playing ‘how much do you reckon that house is worth?’—a favourite game amongst Londoners—when a Forest Green Range Rover pulled up outside and Lady Ty and Fleet disembarked.

  We let them get halfway up the front stops before making ourselves known in the time honoured police manner.

  ‘Oi!’ I called. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Fleet.

  ‘Told you,’ said Lady Ty.

  ‘We just want to have a quiet word,’ said Fleet. ‘No need for this to get all official.’

  ‘A quite word with who?’ I asked.

  ‘Whom,’ said Jaget.

  ‘With whom?’ I asked, taking Jaget’s word for it.

  ‘We think she’s the spirit of the Grand Union Canal,’ said Fleet.

  ‘Like you are with the rivers?’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Ty firmly, ‘not like us.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Fleet. ‘Canals are tricky and, anyway, she may also have something to do with London Zoo.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said Jaget obviously remembering who was paying the council tax. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘She’s an orang-utan,’ said Fleet.

  On that we all withdrew to a safe distance while Fleet and Lady Ty explained.

  ‘We think she was brought over to be a mate of Charlie—the first orang-utan to be kept in the monkey house. But she escaped before she could be settled in.’ The Grand Union Canal actually bisects the zoo and it was feared that she’d gone into it. Word of the escape was kept secret and, this being the 1950s, the secret was kept.

  ‘We only found out about her when we went for a walk down the tow path,’ said Fleet. ‘We were minding our own business when this ape woman came out of nowhere and started haranguing us.’

  Apparently she had some kind of aggro with Mama Thames, but the sisters had never found out how it started.

  ‘You don’t ask Mum about that kind of stuff,’ said Fleet. ‘Not unless you want to be on suicide duty for a year straight.’

  ‘But this is the last straw,’ said Lady Ty. ‘Unless you believe it was a coincidence that Melvin the Rat turned up at a party we were hosting.’

  Actually I thought it probably was, but I found that when people are nursing a grievance it’s a waste of time trying to explain the ubiquitous nature of coincidence in the universe. People always want things to happen for a reason.

  ‘So, to recap,’ said Jaget. ‘A female orang-utan who may be the goddess…’

  ‘Spirit,’ said Lady Ty and Fleet together.

  ‘…who may be the spirit of the Great Western Canal and/or London, is the most likely suspect to have convinced Melvin that he is a rat?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a word with her.’

  ‘You should leave this to us,’ called Fleet after us as we headed towards the house. ‘She’ll have you for breakfast.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ I called back as Jaget rang the bell. ‘If we’re not out in half an hour, you can come and rescue us.’

  Introduction: A Rare Book of Cunning Device

  (Set between The Hanging Tree and Lies Sleeping)

  I am a great believer in libraries and so I jumped at a chance to do an exclusive audio story for Audible with the proceeds going to a library charity. Obviously the story had to be about a library and what better library to choose than the British Library with its five underground levels full of rare books.

  A Rare Book of Cunning Device

  ‘Aha,’ said the Librarian. ‘You must be Mamusu’s boy.’

  The Librarian was a tiny round faced white woman who appeared to be dressed in several layers of brightly-coloured cardigans.

  I confirmed that I was that Peter Grant and she beamed at me.

  ‘I knew your mum back in Freetown when she was just a wee slip of a girl,’ she said.

  ‘Did you?’ I asked stupidly, because I was having trouble code-shifting from job to family acquaintance. Especially one who used my mum’s Sierra Leonean name. Most white people that know her call her Rose—even my dad.

  ‘I came to your christening,’ she said. ‘Enormous party, food was brilliant.’

  ‘I’ll tell her we met,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder if she’ll remember me,’ she said.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven’t said, have I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she held out a hand for me to shake. ‘Elsie Winstanley. I’m the Specialist Collection Manager. Thank you for coming.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ I said. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  ‘We appear to have acquired a poltergeist,’ she said.

  This seemed unlikely.

  According to the massed wisdom of the practitioners who came before me—which was corroborated, at least in part, by my own research—ghosts, poltergeists and other incorporeal phenomena fed off the vestigia that accumulates in the fabric of the material world. This build-up takes time and while stone, brick and even concrete retain vestigia well, a building generally had to be at least thirty years old before acquiring any ghosts. More than a hundred years for a poltergeist or something more exotic.

  The British Library had been built in 1997 and was less then seventeen years old.

  It was an odd building,
too. A sort of collision between the monumental brick-built bulk of a 1930s power station and the strange post-modernist desire to recreate that famous Escher interior. You know, the one with all the perspective-defying staircases.

  Ms Winstanley had met me in the foyer where I was issued with a security pass, because not even a warrant card gets you backstage at the second largest book collection in the world.

  Behind the reception desk rose the King’s Library—a six storey glass tower containing 65,000 books donated by King George III during a rare fit of sanity. There are theories that he feared, in his madness, that they were possessed of unquiet spirits and felt he could not sleep soundly under the same roof. Or, more likely to my mind, he felt the palace needed the shelf space. Still, that was a lot of historical material. So I wasn’t about to dismiss the claim out of hand.

  ‘What makes you think you’ve got a poltergeist?’ I asked.

  ‘Things have been moved around during the night,’ she said. ‘Doors that should be closed have been left open and some books have been found on the wrong shelf.’

  ‘You’re sure it isn’t just…’

  ‘Yes, we’re sure,’ she said. ‘We’re librarians. We notice this sort of thing. And in any case while books may, occasionally, mislay themselves, priceless sixteenth century globes do not.’

  ‘It was stolen?’

  ‘It was moved from one end of the basement to the other,’ she said.

  ‘Well, perhaps somebody needed the space,’ I said.

  ‘This—,’ began Ms Winstanley, and then changed her mind. ‘I think it will be easier just to show you the basement.’

  Which she did—all four sodding floors. All with very tight security, particularly the top-secret sections where they keep the classified maps from the Ministry of Defence.

  ‘Things don’t move about of their own accord,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘Not in this library.’

  So I did a preliminary IVA, or Initial Vestigia Assessment, and because it was a sodding big building with four floors of basements it took me most of the afternoon.

  ‘It mostly manifests itself at night,’ said Ms Winstanley when we stopped for coffee.