Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve still got the taste in my mouth.’

  We were both trembling and I wanted to scream but I knew I had to be strong for Lesley’s sake. I was trying not to think about it, but the red ruin of Brandon Coopertown’s face kept sneaking up on me.

  ‘Hey,’ said Lesley. ‘Keep it together.’

  She was looking concerned, and she looked even more concerned when I started to giggle – I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But you’re being strong for me and I’m being strong for you and— Don’t you get it? This is how you get through the job.’ I got my giggles under control and Lesley half-smiled.

  ‘All right,’ said Lesley, ‘I won’t freak out if you don’t.’ She took my hand, squeezed it and let go.

  ‘Do you think our back-up is walking from Hampstead nick?’ I asked.

  The ambulance arrived first, the paramedics rushing into the garden and spending twenty minutes trying futilely to resuscitate the child. Paramedics always do this with children, regardless of how much it damages the crime scene. You can’t stop them, so you might as well let them get on with it.

  The paramedics had just got started when a transit van’s worth of uniforms arrived and started milling around in confusion. The sergeant approached us cautiously – mistaking us for civilians covered in blood and therefore potential suspects.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  I couldn’t speak – it seemed like such a stupid question.

  The sergeant looked over at the paramedics, who were still working on the baby. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s been a serious incident,’ said Nightingale as he emerged from the house. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at a luckless constable, ‘get another body, go round the back and make sure nobody gets in or out that way.’

  The constable grabbed a mate and legged it. The sergeant looked like he wanted to ask for a warrant card but Nightingale didn’t give him a chance.

  ‘I want the street closed and tapped off ten yards in both directions,’ he said. ‘The press are going to be all over this any minute, so make sure you’ve got enough bodies to keep them back.’

  The sergeant didn’t salute because we’re the Met and we don’t salute, but there was a touch of the parade ground in the way he swivelled round and marched off. Nightingale looked over to where Lesley and I stood shivering. He gave us a reassuring nod, turned on one of the remaining constables and started barking orders.

  Soon after that, blankets appeared, a place was found in the transit van and cups of hot tea with three sugars thrust into our hands. We drank the tea and waited in silence for the other shoe to drop.

  It took less than forty minutes for DCI Seawoll to reach Downshire Hill. Even with the Saturday traffic it meant he must have been doing blues and twos all the way from Belgravia. He appeared in the side doorway of the van and frowned at Lesley and me.

  ‘You two all right?’ he asked.

  We both nodded.

  ‘Well, don’t fucking go anywhere,’ he said.

  Fat chance of that. A major investigation, once it gets under way, is as exciting as watching reruns of Big Brother, although possibly involving less sex and violence. Criminals are not caught by brilliant deductive reasoning but by the fact that some poor slob has spent a week tracking down every shop in Hackney that sells a particular brand of trainer, and then checking the security-camera footage on every single one. A good Senior Investigating Officer is one who makes sure their team has dotted every I and crossed every T, not least so that some Rupert in a wig can’t drive a defendant’s credit card into a crack in the case and wedge it wide open.

  Seawoll was one of the best, so first we were taken out separately to a tent that the forensic people had erected near the front gate. There, we stripped to our underwear and traded our street clothes for a stylish one-piece bunny suit. As I watched my favourite suit jacket being stuffed into an evidence bag I realised I’d never bothered to find out whether you ever got things like that back. And if they did give it back to me, would they dry-clean it first? They took swabs of the blood on our faces and hands and then were nice enough to hand us some wipes so we could get the rest off.

  We ended up back in the transit van for lunch, which was a couple of shop sandwiches, but this being Hampstead they were pretty high-quality. I found myself surprisingly hungry, and I was thinking of asking for a second round when DCI Seawoll climbed into the van with us. His weight caused the van to sink down on one side, and his presence caused Lesley and me to push ourselves unconsciously into our seat backs.

  ‘How are you two bearing up?’ he asked.

  We told him that we were fine and ready, in fact dead keen, to get back up on that horse and go to work.

  ‘That’s a load of wank,’ he said, ‘but at least it’s convincing wank. In a couple of minutes we’re going to take you down Hampstead nick, where a very nice lady from Scotland Yard is going to take your statements – separately. And while I’m a believer in veracity in all things, I want to make it clear that there isn’t going to be any fucking mumbo-jumbo voodoo X-Files shit in any fucking statement. Is that understood?’

  We indicated that he had indeed adequately communicated his position.

  ‘As far as anyone else is concerned, normal fucking policing got us into this mess, and normal fucking policing will get us out of it.’ And with a creaking of the van’s suspension, he left.

  ‘Did he just ask us to lie to a senior officer?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Just checking,’ I said.

  So we spent the rest of the afternoon bearing false witness in separate interview rooms. We were careful to make sure that while our accounts broadly agreed, there were lots of authentic-looking discrepancies. No one can fake a statement the way a policeman can.

  After lying, we borrowed some section-house castoffs to wear and headed back to Downshire Hill. A serious crime in an area like Hampstead was always going to be big news, and the media was out in force not least because half the presenters could have walked to work that afternoon.

  We let a suspiciously quiet Toby out of the Honda Accord, spent an hour or so cleaning up the back seat and then drove all the way back to Charing Cross with the windows down. We couldn’t really blame Toby, since we’d been the ones who’d left him in the car all day. We bought him a McDonald’s Happy Meal, so I think he forgave us.

  We went back to my room and drank the last of the Grolsch. Then Lesley peeled off her clothes and climbed into my bed. I climbed in behind her and put my arms around her. She sighed and spooned against me. I got an erection, but she was much too polite to mention it. Toby made himself comfortable on the end of the bed, using our feet as a pillow, and we all went to sleep like that.

  When I woke up the next morning Lesley was gone and my phone was ringing. When I answered, it was Nightingale.

  ‘Are you ready to go back to work?’ he asked.

  I told him I was.

  Back to work. Back to the Iain West Forensic Bar and Grill, where Inspector Nightingale and I were booked in for a guided tour of Brandon Coopertown’s horrible injuries. I was introduced to Abdul Haqq Walid, a spry, gingery man in his fifties who spoke with a soft Highland accent.

  ‘Dr Walid handles all our special cases,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘I specialise in cryptopathology,’ said Dr Walid.

  ‘Salem,’ I said.

  ‘Al salam alaikum,’ said Dr Walid, shaking my hand.

  I’d been hoping that this time we’d used the remote monitoring suite, but Nightingale didn’t want a visual record of this stage of the autopsy. Once again in aprons, masks and eye protectors, we entered the lab. Brandon Coopertown, or at least the man we thought was Brandon Coopertown, lay naked on his back on the table. Dr Walid had already opened up his torso with the standard Y-shaped incision and, after rummaging around for whatever pathologists look for
in there, closed him back up again. We had confirmed his identity via the biometrics on his passport.

  ‘Below the neck,’ said Dr Walid, ‘he’s a physically fit man in his late forties. It’s his face that’s holds our interest here.’

  Or rather what was left of his face. Dr Walid had used clamps to splay open the torn flaps of skin so that Brandon Coopertown’s face looked horribly like a pink and red daisy.

  ‘Starting with the skull,’ said Dr Walid, and leaned in with a pointer. Nightingale followed suit but I contented myself with peering over his shoulder. ‘As you can see, there’s extensive damage to the bones of the face – the mandible, maxilla and zygomatic bones have been effectively pulverised and the teeth, those normally reliable survivors, have been shattered.’

  ‘A heavy blow to the face?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘That would have been my first guess,’ said Dr Walid, ‘if not for this.’ He used a clamp to seize one flap of skin – I guessed what had once covered the cheek – and draw it over the face. It reached right across the breadth of the skull and flopped down to cover the ear on the other side. ‘The skin has been stretched beyond its natural capacity to retain its shape, and while there’s not much left of the muscle tissue, that too shows lateral degradation. Judging from the lines of stress I’d say something pushed out his face around the chin and nose, stretching the skin and muscle, pulverising the bone and then holding it in position. Then, whatever it is holding it in that shape vanishes, the bone and soft tissues have lost all their integrity and basically his face falls off.’

  ‘Are you thinking dissimulo?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Or a technique very like it,’ said Dr Walid.

  Nightingale explained, for my benefit, that dissimulo was a magic spell that could change your appearance. Actually he didn’t use the words ‘magic spell’, but that’s what it amounted to.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Dr Walid, ‘it essentially moves the muscles and skin into new positions, and this can cause permanent damage.’

  ‘Never was a popular technique,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You can see why,’ said Dr Walid, indicating the remains of Brandon Coopertown’s face.

  ‘Any signs that he was a practitioner?’ asked Nightingale.

  Dr Walid produced a covered stainless-steel tray. ‘I knew you’d ask that,’ he said, ‘so here’s something I whipped out earlier.’ He lifted the cover to reveal a human brain. I’m no expert, but it didn’t look like a healthy brain to me; it looked shrunken and pitted, as if it had been left out in the sun to shrivel.

  ‘As you can see,’ said Dr Walid, ‘there’s extensive degradation of the cerebral cortex and evidence of intracranial bleeding that we might associate with some form of degenerative condition, if Inspector Nightingale and I were not already familiar with the true cause.’

  He sliced it in half to show us the interior. It looked like a diseased cauliflower.

  ‘And this,’ said Dr Walid, ‘is your brain on magic.’

  ‘Magic does that to your brain?’ I asked. ‘No wonder nobody does it any more.’

  ‘This is what happens if you overstep your limitations,’ said Nightingale. He turned to Dr Walid. ‘There wasn’t any evidence of practice at his house. No books, no paraphernalia, no vestigium.’

  ‘Could someone have stolen his magic?’ I asked. ‘Sucked it out of his brain?’

  ‘That’s very unlikely,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s almost impossible to steal another man’s magic.’

  ‘Except at the point of death,’ said Dr Walid.

  ‘It’s much more likely that our Mr Coopertown did this to himself,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Then you’re saying he wasn’t wearing a mask during the first attack?’ I asked.

  ‘That seems likely,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘So his face was mashed up on Tuesday,’ I said. ‘Which explains why he looks blotchy on the bus cameras, then he flies to America, stays three nights and comes back here. And all that time his face is essentially destroyed.’

  Dr Walid thought it through. ‘That would be consistent with the injuries and the evidence of the beginnings of regrowth around some of the bone fragments.’

  ‘He must have been in some serious pain,’ I said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Nightingale. ‘One of the dangers of dissimulo is that it hides the pain. The practitioner can be quite unaware that he’s injuring himself.’

  ‘But when his face was normal-looking – that was only because the magic was holding it together?’

  Dr Walid looked at Nightingale.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘When you fall asleep, what happens to the spell?’ I asked.

  ‘It would probably collapse,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘But he was so badly damaged that once the spell collapsed his face would fall off. He’d have had to keep the spell up the whole time he was in America.’ I said. ‘Are you telling me he didn’t sleep for four days?’

  ‘It does seem a bit unlikely,’ said Dr Walid.

  ‘Do spells work like software?’ I asked.

  Nightingale gave me a blank look. Dr Walid came to his rescue. ‘In what way?’ he asked.

  ‘Could you persuade somebody’s unconscious mind to maintain a spell?’ I asked. ‘That way, the spell would stay running even when they were asleep.’

  ‘It’s theoretically possible but, morality aside, I couldn’t do it,’ said Nightingale. ‘I don’t think any human wizard could.’

  Any human wizard— Okay. Dr Walid and Nightingale were looking at me, and I realised that they were already there and waiting for me to catch up.

  ‘When I asked about ghosts, vampires and werewolves and you said I hadn’t scratched the surface, you weren’t joking, were you?’

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  Dr Walid smiled. ‘I said exactly the same thing thirty years ago,’ he said.

  ‘So whatever did this to poor old Mr Coopertown was probably not human,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to say for certain,’ said Dr Walid. ‘But that’s the way to bet.’

  Nightingale and I did what all good coppers do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day – we went looking for a pub. Just round the corner we found the relentlessly upmarket Marquis of Queensbury looking a little bedraggled in the afternoon drizzle. Nightingale stood me a beer and we sat down in a corner booth beneath a Victorian print of a bare-knuckle boxing match.

  ‘How do you become a wizard?’ I asked.

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘It’s not like joining the CID,’ he said.

  ‘You surprise me,’ I said. ‘What is it like?’

  ‘It’s an apprenticeship,’ he said. ‘A commitment, to the craft, to me and to your country.’

  ‘Do I have to call you Sifu?’

  That got a smile at least. ‘No,’ said Nightingale, ‘you have to call me Master.’

  ‘Master?’

  ‘That’s the tradition,’ said Nightingale.

  I said the word in my head and it kept on coming out Massa.

  ‘Couldn’t I call you Inspector instead?’

  ‘What makes you think I’m offering you a position?’

  I took a pull from my pint and waited. Nightingale smiled again and sipped his own drink. ‘Once you cross this particular Rubicon there will be no going back,’ he said. ‘And you can call me Inspector.’

  ‘I’ve just seen a man kill his wife and child,’ I said. ‘If there’s a rational reason for that, then I want to know what it is. If there’s even a chance that he wasn’t responsible for his actions, then I want to know about it. Because that would mean we might be able to stop it happening again.’

  ‘That is not a good reason to take on this job,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Is there a good reason?’ I asked. ‘I want in, sir, because I’ve got to know.’

  Nightingale lifted his g
lass in salute. ‘That’s a better reason.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing happens now,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s Sunday. But first thing tomorrow morning we go and see the Commissioner.’

  ‘Good one, sir,’ I said.

  ‘No, really,’ said Nightingale, ‘he’s the only person authorised to make the final decision.’

  New Scotland Yard was once an ordinary office block that was leased by the Met in the 1960s. Since then the interior of the senior offices had been refitted several times, most recently during the 1990s, easily the worst decade for institutional decor since the 1970s. Which was why, I suppose, the anteroom to the Commissioner’s Office was a bleak wilderness of laminated plywood and moulded polyurethane chairs. Just to put visitors at their ease, photographic portraits of the last six Commissioners stared down from the walls.

  Sir Robert Mark (1972–1977) looked particularly disapproving. I doubt he thought I was making a significant contribution.

  ‘It’s not too late to withdraw your application,’ said Nightingale.

  Yes it was, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t wishing it wasn’t. Typically, a constable only sits in the Commissioner’s anteroom when he’s been very brave or very stupid, and I really couldn’t tell which one applied to me.

  The Commissioner only made us wait ten minutes before his secretary came and fetched us. His office was large and designed with the same lack of style as the rest of Scotland Yard, only with a layer of fake oak panelling on top. There was a portrait of the Queen on one wall and another of the first Commissioner, Sir Charles Rowan, on the other. I stood as close to parade-ground attention as any London copper can get and nearly flinched when the Commissioner offered me his hand to shake.

  ‘Constable Grant,’ he said. ‘Your father is Richard Grant, isn’t he? I have some of his records from when he was playing with Tubby Hayes. On vinyl, of course.’

  He didn’t wait for me to answer but shook Nightingale’s hand and waved us into our seats. He was another Northerner who’d come up the hard way and done that stint in Northern Ireland which appears to be obligatory for would-be Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, presumably because violent sectarianism is thought to be character-building. He wore the uniform well and was judged by the rank and file as possibly not being a total muppet – which put him well ahead of some his predecessors.