Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Her name was Celia Munroe, resident of Finchley, who had brought her daughters Georgina and Antonia and their two friends Jennifer and Alex to the West End as a special treat. The dispute started when Ms Munroe proffered five Voyager Film Fun vouchers as part payment for the tickets. Mr Ranatunga regretfully indicated that the vouchers were not valid at this particular cinema. Ms Munroe asked why this might be so, but Mr Ranatunga was unable to say, since his management had never bothered to brief him on the promotion in the first place. Ms Munroe expressed her dissatisfaction with a degree of forcefulness which surprised Mr Ranatunga, Lesley and me, and, according to her later statement, Ms Munroe herself.

  It was at that point that Lesley and I decided to intervene, but we hadn’t even had time to step forward and ask what the problem was, when Ms Munroe made her move. It happened very quickly, and as is often the case with unexpected events it took us a few moments to register what was going on. Fortunately we were both sufficiently street-seasoned not to freeze, and we each grabbed a shoulder and tried to drag the woman off poor Mr Ranatunga. Her grip on his neck was so strong that Mr Ranatunga was pulled back across the counter as well. By now one of the girls was hysterical and apparently the eldest, Antonia, started beating me across the back with her fists, but I didn’t feel it at the time. Ms Munroe’s lips were drawn back in a rictus of rage, the tendons standing out on her neck and forearms. Mr Ranatunga’s face was darkening, his lips turning blue.

  Lesley got her thumb into the pressure point on Ms Munroe’s wrists and she let go in such a hurry that we both went sprawling backwards onto the floor. She landed on top of me, so I tried to pin her arms but not before she got a vicious elbow into my ribs. I used my weight and strength advantage to tip her off and roll her face down into the popcorn smelling carpet. Of course, I didn’t have my cuffs with me, so I had to hold her with both hands behind her back. Legally speaking, once you’ve laid hands on a suspect you pretty much have to arrest them. I gave her the caution and she went limp. I looked over at Lesley, who had not only tended to the injured man but had corralled the children and called in the incident to Charing Cross.

  ‘If I let you up,’ I asked, ‘are you going to behave?’

  Ms Munroe nodded. I let roll over and sit up where she was.

  ‘I just wanted to go to the pictures,’ she said. ‘When I was young you just went to the local Odeon and said “a ticket please”, and you gave them money and they gave you a ticket. When did it become so complicated? When did these disgusting nachos arrive? I mean, what the fuck is a nacho, anyway?’ One of the girls giggled nervously at the profanity.

  Lesley was writing in her official notebook. You know in the caution when it says ‘anything that you do say may be used in evidence against you’, well, this is what they’re talking about.

  ‘Is that boy hurt?’ She looked at me for reassurance. ‘I don’t know what happened. I just wanted to talk to someone who could speak English properly. I went on holiday to Bavaria last summer and everyone spoke English really well. I bring my kids down to the West End and everyone’s foreign. I don’t understand a word they’re saying.’

  I suspected that some total bastard at the CPS could parlay that into a racially aggravated crime. I caught Lesley’s eye and she sighed but stopped taking notes.

  ‘I just wanted to go to the pictures,’ repeated Ms Munroe.

  Salvation arrived in the form of Inspector Neblett who took one look at us and said, ‘I just can’t let you two out of my sight, can I?’ He didn’t fool me. I knew he’d been rehearsing that line the whole way over.

  Nonetheless, we all trooped back to the nick to complete the arrest and do the paperwork. And that’s three hours of my life I won’t get back in a hurry. We ended up, like all coppers on overtime, in the canteen where we drank tea and filled in forms.

  ‘Where’s the Case Progression Unit when you need it?’ said Lesley.

  ‘Told you we should have seen Seven Samurai,’ I said.

  ‘Did you think there was something odd about the whole thing?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Odd, how?’

  ‘You know,’ said Lesley, ‘middle-aged woman suddenly goes bonkers and attacks someone in a cinema, in front of her children. Are you sure you didn’t feel any … ?’ She waved her fingers.

  ‘I wasn’t paying attention,’ I said. Looking back, I thought there might have been something, a flash of violence and laughter, but it felt suspiciously retrospective; a memory I’d conjured up after the fact.

  Mr Munroe arrived with a brief, and the parents of the other children, around nine and his wife was released on police bail less than an hour later. Considerably earlier than Lesley and I finished the paperwork. I was too knackered by then to try anything clever, so I said goodbye and caught a lift in the fast-response car back to Russell Square.

  I had a brand new set of keys, including one for the tradesmen’s entrance round the back. That way I didn’t have to sneak past the disapproving gaze of Sir Isaac. The main atrium was dimly lit, but as I climbed the first flight of stairs I thought I saw a pale figure gliding across the floor below.

  You know you’re staying somewhere posh when the breakfast room is a completely different room and not the same place where you had dinner, only dressed up with different china. It faced south-east to catch the thin January light, and looked out over the coach house and mews. Despite the fact that only Nightingale and I were eating, all the tables had been laid and bore laundry-white tablecloths. You could have seated fifty people in there. Likewise the serving table sported a line of silver-plated salvers with kippers, eggs, bacon, black pudding and a bowl full of rice, peas and flaked haddock that Nightingale identified as kedgeree. He seemed as taken aback by the amount of food as I was.

  ‘I think Molly may have become a little overenthusiastic,’ he said and helped himself to the kedgeree. I had a bit of everything and Toby got some sausages, some black pudding and a bowl of water.

  ‘There’s no way we can eat all this,’ I said. ‘What’s she going to do with all the leftovers?’

  ‘I’ve learned not to ask these questions,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I’m not sure I want to know the answers,’ he said.

  My first proper lesson in magic took place in one of the labs at the back of the first floor. The other labs had once been used for research projects but this one was for teaching, and indeed it looked just like a school chemistry lab. There were waist-high benches with gas taps for Bunsen burners placed at regular intervals and white porcelain basins sunk into the varnished wooden tops. There was even a poster of the periodic table on the wall missing, I noticed, all the elements discovered after World War Two.

  ‘First we need to fill up a sink,’ said Nightingale. He selected one and turned the tap at the base of its long, swan-necked spout. There was a distant knocking sound, the black swan neck shook, gurgled and then coughed up a gout of brown water.

  We both took a step backwards.

  ‘How long since you used this place?’ I asked.

  The knocking grew louder, faster and then water poured from the spout, dirty at first but then clear. The knocking faded away. Nightingale put the plug in and let the basin fill three-quarters before closing the tap.

  ‘When you’re attempting this spell,’ he said, ‘always have a basin of water ready as a safety precaution.’

  ‘Are we going to make fire?’

  ‘Only if you do it wrong,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m going to make a demonstration and you must pay close attention – as you did when searching for vestigia. Do you understand?’

  ‘Vestigia,’ I said. ‘Got it.’

  Nightingale held out his right hand palm upwards and made a fist. ‘Watch my hand,’ he said and opened his fingers. Suddenly, floating a few centimetres above his palm was a ball of light. Bright, but not so bright that I couldn’t stare right at it.

  Nightingale closed his fingers and the globe vanished. ‘Again?
’ he asked.

  Up until then I think a bit of me had been waiting for the rational explanation, but when I saw how casually Nightingale produced that werelight I realised that I had the rational explanation – magic worked. The next question of course was – how did it work?

  ‘Again,’ I said.

  He opened his hand and the light appeared. The source seemed to be the size of a golf ball with a smooth pearlescent surface. I leaned forward but I couldn’t tell whether the light emanated from inside the globe or from its skin.

  Nightingale closed his palm. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to damage your eyes.’

  I blinked and saw purple blotches. He was right – I’d been fooled by the soft quality of the light into staring too long. I splashed some water in my eyes.

  ‘Ready to go again?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Try and focus on the sensation as I do it – you should feel something.’

  ‘Something?’ I asked.

  ‘Magic is like music,’ said Nightingale. ‘Everyone hears it differently. The technical term we use is forma, but that’s no more helpful than “something”, is it?’

  ‘Can I close my eyes?’ I asked.

  ‘By all means,’ said Nightingale.

  I did feel a ‘something’, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation. We repeated the exercise until I was sure I wasn’t imagining it. Nightingale asked me if I had any questions. I asked him what the spell was called.

  ‘Colloquially it’s known as a werelight,’ he said.

  ‘Can you do it underwater?’ I asked.

  Nightingale plunged his hand into the sink and despite the awkward angle, demonstrated forming a werelight without any apparent difficulty.

  ‘So it’s not a process of oxidisation, is it,’ I said.

  ‘Focus,’ said Nightingale. ‘Magic first, science later.’

  I tried to focus, but on what?

  ‘In a minute,’ said Nightingale, ‘I’m going to ask you to open your hand in the same manner as I have demonstrated. As you open your hand I want you to make a shape in your mind that conforms to what you sensed when I created my werelight. Think of it as a key that opens a door. Do you understand?’

  ‘Hand,’ I said. ‘Shape, key, lock, door.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Start now.’

  I took a deep breath, extended my arm and opened my fist – nothing happened. Nightingale didn’t laugh but I would have preferred it if he had. I took another breath, tried to ‘shape’ my mind, whatever that meant, and opened my hand again.

  ‘Let me demonstrate again,’ said Nightingale. ‘And then you follow.’

  He created the werelight, I felt for the shape of the forma and tried to replicate it. I still failed to create my own light, but this time I thought I felt an echo of the forma in my mind like a snatch of music from a passing car.

  We repeated the exercise several times until I was certain I knew what the shape of the forma was, but I couldn’t find the shape in my own mind. The process must have been familiar to Nightingale because he could tell what stage I was at.

  ‘Practise this for another two hours,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll stop for lunch and then two more hours after that. Then you can have the evening off.’

  ‘Just do this?’ I asked. ‘No learning of ancient languages, no magic theory?’

  ‘This is the first step,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you can’t master this then everything else is irrelevant.’

  ‘So this is a test?’

  ‘That’s what an apprenticeship is,’ said Nightingale. ‘Once you’ve mastered this forma then I can promise you plenty of study. Latin of course, Greek, Arabic, technical German. Not to mention you’ll be taking over all the legwork on my cases.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now I’m incentivised.’

  Nightingale laughed and left me to it.

  By the River

  There are some things you don’t want to be doing less than ten minutes after waking up, and doing a ton down the Great West Road is one of them. Even at three in the morning with the spinner going and a siren to clear the way and the roads as empty of traffic as London roads ever get. I was hanging onto the door-strap and trying not to think about the fact that the Jag, with its many vintage qualities of style and craftsmanship, was sadly lacking in the airbag and modern crumple-zone department.

  ‘Have you fixed the radio yet?’ asked Nightingale.

  At some point the Jag had been fitted with a modern radio set, which Nightingale cheerfully admitted he didn’t know how to use. I’d managed to get it turned on but got distracted when Nightingale put us around the Hogarth Roundabout fast enough to smack my head against the side window. I took advantage of a relatively straight bit of road to key into Richmond Borough Command, which was where Nightingale said the trouble was. We caught the tail end of a report delivered in the slightly strangulated tone adopted by someone who’s desperately trying to sound like they’re not panicking. It was something about geese.

  ‘Tango Whiskey Three from Tango Whiskey one: say again?’

  TW-1 would be the Richmond Duty Inspector in the local control room, TW-3 would be one of the Borough’s Incident Response Vehicles.

  ‘Tango Whiskey One from Tango Whiskey Three, we’re down by the White Swan being attacked by the bloody geese.’

  ‘White Swan?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a pub in Twickenham,’ said Nightingale. ‘By the bridge to Eel Pie Island.’

  Eel Pie Island I knew to be a collection of boatyards and houses on a river islet barely 500 metres long. The Rolling Stones had once played a gig there, and so had my father – that’s where I knew it from.

  ‘And the geese?’ I asked.

  ‘Better than watchdogs,’ said Nightingale. ‘Ask the Romans.’

  TW-1 wasn’t interested in the geese; she wanted to know about the crime. There’d been multiple 999 calls twenty minutes earlier, reporting a breach of the peace and possible fighting between groups of youths, which in my experience could turn out to be anything from a hen night gone wrong to foxes turning over rubbish bins.

  TW-3 reported seeing a group of IC1 males dressed in jeans and donkey jackets fighting with an unknown number of IC3 females on Riverside Road. IC1 is the identification code for white people, IC3 is black people and if you’re wondering, I tend to jump between IC3 and IC6 – Arabic or North African. It depends on how much sun I’ve caught recently. Black versus white was unusual but not impossible, but I’d never heard of boys versus girls before, and neither had TW-1, who wanted clarification.

  ‘Female,’ reported TW-3. ‘Definitely female, and one of them is stark naked.’

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Afraid of what?’ I asked.

  There was a rush of emptiness outside the Jag as we shot across the Chiswick Bridge. Upstream of Chiswick, the Thames throws a loop northwards around Kew Gardens and we were cutting across the base and aiming for Richmond Bridge.

  ‘There’s an important shrine nearby,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think the boys might have been after that.’

  When he said shrine, I guessed he wasn’t talking about the rugby stadium.

  ‘And the girls are defending the shrine?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Nightingale. He was a superb driver, with a level of concentration that I always find a comfort at high speed but even Nightingale had to slow down when the streets narrowed. Like a lot of London, Richmond town centre had been laid out back when town planning was something that happened to other people.

  ‘Tango Whiskey one from Tango Whiskey four; I’m on Church Lane by the river and I’ve got five or six IC1 males climbing into a boat – in pursuit.’

  TW-4 would be Richmond’s second Incident Response Vehicle, meaning that just about every available body was now dealing.

  TW-3 reported that there was no sign of the IC3 females, naked or otherwise, but that they could see the boat and it was heading for the opposite bank.
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br />   ‘Call them and tell them we’re on our way,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘What’s our call sign? I asked.

  ‘Zulu One,’ he said.

  I keyed the microphone. ‘Tango Whiskey One from Zulu One; show us dealing.’

  There was a bit of a pause while TW-1 digested this. I wondered if the duty inspector knew who we were.

  ‘Zulu One from Tango Whiskey One; copy that.’ The Inspector had sounded flat, neutral. She knew who we were, all right. ‘Be advised that the suspects seem to have crossed the river and may now be on the south bank.’

  I tried to acknowledge but it came out strangulated when Nightingale put us the wrong way down the one-way system on George Street, which you’re not supposed to do even with your lights and siren on. Not least because of the risk of coming face to face with something heavy and designed to clean streets in the middle of the night. I braced my legs in the footwell as our headlights lit up a two-metre, cherry-red Valentine’s heart in the window of Boots.

  TW-3 called in: ‘Be advised that the suspect boat is now on fire, I can see people jumping off.’

  Nightingale put his foot down, but mercifully we turned a corner and were back going the right way down the street. On the right was Richmond Bridge, but Nightingale went straight across the mini-roundabout and down the road that ran beside the Thames. We heard TW-1 calling in the London Fire Brigade fire boat – twenty minutes away at least.

  Nightingale threw the Jag into a right-hand turn that I hadn’t even noticed and suddenly we were racing through pitch darkness, jolting along a track with gravel pinging off the bottom of the chassis. A sudden turn to the left and we were running right along the water’s edge, following the river as it curved north again. A line of cabin cruisers was moored close to the opposite bank, and beyond them I could see yellow flames – our burning boat. This was no modern pleasure cruiser, it looked more like a half-length narrowboat, the kind owned by homeopathic entrepreneurs that was supposed to have hand-painted gunwales and a cat asleep on the roof. If this boat had a cat, though, I hoped it could swim because it was on fire from stem to stern.