Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘There,’ said Nightingale.

  I looked ahead and saw figures caught on the fringes of our headlights. I called it into TW-1: ‘Confirm suspects on the south bank near … where the hell are we?’

  ‘Hammerton’s Ferry,’ said Nightingale and I passed it on.

  Nightingale braked the Jag and we pulled up opposite the burning boat. There were torches in the glove compartment, vulcanised monstrosities with old-fashioned filament bulbs. Mine proved reassuringly heavy in the hand when Nightingale and I stepped out into the darkness.

  I swept my light along the path but the suspects – assuming that’s what they were – had scarpered. Nightingale seemed more interested in the river than the path. I used my torch to check the water around the narrowboat which, I saw, was drifting slowly downstream, but there was nobody in the water.

  ‘Shouldn’t we check there’s no one left on board?’ I asked.

  ‘There had better be no one on that boat,’ said Nightingale loudly, as if speaking to the river rather than to me. ‘And I want that fire put out right now,’ he said.

  I heard a giggle out in the darkness. I pointed my torch in the direction it came from but there was nothing to see except the boats moored on the far bank. I turned back to see the burning boat being sucked down into the river as if someone had grabbed hold of the bottom and yanked it under the surface. The last of the flames guttered out and then, like an escaping rubber duck, it bobbed up to the surface, the fire entirely doused.

  ‘What did that?’ I asked.

  ‘River spirits,’ said Nightingale. ‘Stay here while I check further up the bank.’

  I heard another laugh from across the water. Then, very clearly and not three metres from where I was standing, someone, definitely a woman and a Londoner, said, ‘Oh, shit!’ Then came the sound of metal being torn.

  I ran over. At that point the bank was a muddy slope held together with tree roots and bits of stone reinforcement. As I got close I heard a splash, and got my torch on it just in time to see a sleek curved shape vanish beneath the surface. I might have thought it was an otter, if I was stupid enough to think otters were hairless and grew as big as a man. Just below my feet was a square cage made out of chickenwire, part of an anti-erosion project I learned later, one side of which had been torn open.

  Nightingale returned empty-handed and said that we might as well wait for the fire boat to come and take the remains of the narrowboat under tow. I asked him if there was such a thing as mermaids.

  ‘That wasn’t a mermaid,’ he said.

  ‘So there are such things as mermaids,’ I said.

  ‘Focus, Peter,’ he said. ‘One thing at a time.’

  ‘Was that a river spirit?’ I asked.

  ‘Genii locorum,’ he said. ‘The spirit of a place, a goddess of the river, if you like.’ Although not the Goddess of Thames herself, Nightingale explained, because her taking a direct part in any aggro would be a violation of the agreement. I asked whether this was the same agreement as ‘the agreement’, or a different agreement entirely.

  ‘There are a number of agreements,’ said Nightingale. ‘A great deal of what we do is making sure everyone keeps to them.’

  ‘There’s a goddess of the river,’ I said.

  ‘Yes – Mother Thames,’ he said patiently. ‘And there’s a god of the river – Father Thames.’

  ‘Are they related?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘And that’s part of the problem.’

  ‘Are they really gods?’

  ‘I never worry about the theological questions,’ said Nightingale. ‘They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace – that makes them a police matter.’

  A searchlight stabbed out of the darkness and swept over the river once, twice, before swinging back to fix on the remains of the narrowboat – the London Fire Brigade had arrived. I smelled diesel exhaust as the fire boat gingerly manoeuvred alongside, figures in yellow helmets waiting with hoses and boathooks. The searchlight revealed that the superstructure had been completely gutted by the fire, but I could see that the hull had been painted red with black trim. I could hear the firemen chatting to each other as they boarded and made the narrowboat safe. It was all reassuringly mundane. Which brought me to another thought. Nightingale and I had scrambled out of bed, into the Jag and headed west before there was any indication that this was nothing more than the tail end of an average Friday night.

  ‘How did you know this was our shout?’ I asked.

  ‘I have my own sources,’ said Nightingale.

  One of the Richmond IRVs arrived with the Duty Inspector onboard and we all indulged in a bit of bureaucratic strutting to establish our respective bona fides. Richmond won on points, but only because one of them had a flask full of coffee. Nightingale briefed the locals – it was a gang thing, he said. Some IC1 youths, no doubt drunk, had stolen a boat, sailed down from beyond Teddington Lock and picked a fight with a local group of IC3 youths – some of whom were female. When they tried to escape, the Teddington gang had managed, accidentally, to set their boat on fire, had abandoned ship and escaped on foot down the Thames pathway. Everybody nodded their heads – it sounded like a typical Friday night in the big city. Nightingale said he was sure nobody had drowned, but the Richmond Duty Inspector decided to call in a search-and-rescue team just in case.

  Then, our two inspectors having marked their respective trees, we went our separate ways.

  We drove back up to Richmond but stopped well short of the bridge. Dawn was at least an hour away, but as I followed Nightingale through an iron gate I could see that the road we were on cut through a municipal gardens that sloped down to the river. There was an orange glow ahead of us, a hurricane lantern hung on the lower branches of a plane tree, and it illuminated a row of red-brick arches built into the revetment that supported the roadway. Inside these artificial caves I glimpsed sleeping bags, cardboard boxes and old newspaper.

  ‘I’m just going to have a chat with this troll,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I think we’re supposed to call them rough sleepers.’

  ‘Not this one we don’t,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s a troll.’

  I saw movement in the shadow of one of the arches, a pale face, ragged hair, layers of old clothes against the winter cold. It looked like a rough sleeper to me.

  ‘A troll, really?’ I asked.

  ‘His name is Nathaniel,’ said Nightingale. ‘He used to sleep under Hungerford Bridge.’

  ‘Why did he move?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently he wanted to live in the suburbs.’

  Suburban troll, I thought, why not?

  ‘This is your snout, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘He tipped you off.’

  ‘A policeman is only as good as his informants,’ said Nightingale. I didn’t tell him that these days they were supposed to be referred to as Covert Human Intelligence Sources. ‘Stay back a bit,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t know you yet.’

  Nathaniel ducked back into his lair as Nightingale approached and crouched politely at the threshold of the troll’s cave. I stamped my feet and blew on my fingers. I’d been sensible enough to grab my uniform jumper, but even with that on under my jacket three hours by the river in February was edging me into brass monkey territory. If I hadn’t been so busy jamming my hands into my armpits I might have noticed much sooner that I was being watched. Actually, if I hadn’t spent the last couple of weeks trying to separate vestigium from ordinary random paranoia I wouldn’t have noticed at all.

  It started as a flush, like embarrassment, like the time at the Year Eight disco when Rona Tang marched across the no man’s land of the dance floor and informed me, in no uncertain terms, that Funme Ajayi wanted me to dance with her, but there was no way I was going to dance with a conspiracy of teenage girls watching me while I did it. It was the same scrutiny – defiant, mocking, curious. I checked behind myself first, as you do, but I could see nothing but sodium streetlights up the road. I thought I
felt a puff of warm breath against my cheek, a sensation like sunlight, mown grass and singed hair. I turned and stared out over the river and for a moment I thought I saw movement, a face, something …

  ‘Seen something?’ asked Nightingale, making me jump.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said.

  ‘Not on this river,’ said Nightingale. ‘Not even Blake thought that was possible.’

  We returned to the Jag and the fickle embrace of its 1960s heating system. As we returned through Richmond town centre, the right way round the one-way system this time, I asked Nightingale whether Nathaniel the troll had been helpful.

  ‘He confirmed what we suspected,’ he said. That the boys in the boat had been followers of Father Thames, had come downstream to raid the shrine at Eel Pie Island and been caught by followers of Mother Thames. They were doubtless well tanked up, and probably did set their own fire while trying to make their escape. Downstream, the Thames was the sovereign domain of Mother Thames, upstream, it belonged to Father Thames. The dividing line was at Teddington Lock, two kilometres downstream from Eel Pie Island.

  ‘So you think Father Thames is making a grab for turf?’ I asked. It made these ‘gods’ sound like drug dealers. Traffic was noticeably heavier heading back – London was waking up.

  ‘It’s hardly surprising that the spirits of a locality would exhibit territoriality,’ said Nightingale. ‘In any case, I think you might have a unique insight into this problem. I want you to go and have a word with Mother Thames.’

  ‘And what do me and my unique insight say to Mrs Thames?’

  ‘Find out what the problem is and see if you can find an amicable solution,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘And if I can’t?’

  ‘Then I want you to remind her that, whatever some people may think, the Queen’s peace extends to the whole Kingdom.’

  Nobody got to drive the Jag except Nightingale, which was understandable. If I had a car like that I wouldn’t let anyone else drive it either. However I did have access to a ten-year-old Ford Escort in electric blue which had ex-Panda car written all over it. Nightingale shopped at the same used-car showroom as Lesley. You can always tell an old cop car because however hard you scrub, it always smells of old cop.

  Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Wapping – the old and the new East End were mashed up together by money and intransigence. Mother Thames lived East of the White Tower in a converted warehouse just short of the Shadwell Basin. It was just the other side of the slipway from the Prospect of Whitby, an ancient pub that was a legendary jazz venue back in the day. My dad had sat in there with Johnny Keating but had managed, with his finely tuned ability to sabotage his own career, missed performing with Lita Roza – I think they got Ronnie Hughes to replace him.

  To the main road the warehouse showed a blind face of London brick pierced by modern windows, but on the Thames side the old loading wharves had been converted into a car park. I parked up between an orange Citroën Picasso and a fire-brick red Jaguar XF with an Urban Dance FM sticker in the windscreen.

  As I stepped out, I had the clearest sense of vestigia so far. A sudden smell of pepper and seawater as quick and shocking as the scream of a gull. Hardly surprising, since the warehouse had once been part of the Port of London, the busiest port in the world.

  A bitterly cold wind was sweeping up the Thames so I hurried for the entrance lobby. Someone somewhere was playing music with the bass turned up to Health and Safety-violating levels. The melody, assuming there was one, wasn’t audible but I could hear the bass line in my chest. Suddenly, above it there was a trill of feminine laughter, wicked and gossipy. The neo-Victorian lobby was guarded by a top-of-the-line entryphone. I pressed the number Nightingale had given me and waited. I was about to try the number again when I heard the slap of flip-flops on tile approaching the door from the other side. Then it opened to reveal a young black woman with cat-shaped eyes, wearing a black t-shirt that was many sizes too big for her with the words WE RUN TINGZ printed on the front.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Grant,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Mrs Thames.’

  The girl looked me up and down and, having judged me against some theoretical standard, folded her arms across her breasts and glared at me. ‘So?’ she asked.

  ‘Nightingale sent me,’ I said.

  The girl sighed and turned to yell down the communal hall way. ‘There’s some geezer here says he’s from the Wizard.’ Printed on the back of her t-shirt was TINGZ NUH RUN WE.

  ‘Let him in,’ called a voice from deep inside the building. It had a soft but distinctive Nigerian accent.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ said the girl, and stood aside.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘My name’s Beverley Brook,’ she said, and cocked her head as I walked past.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Beverley,’ I said.

  It was hot inside the building, tropical, almost humid, and sweat prickled on my face and back. I saw the front doors in the communal corridor were wide open and the heavy bass beat came floating down the wrought-iron staircase that linked the floors. Either this was the most neighbourly block of flats in English history, or Mother Thames controlled the whole building.

  Beverley led me into a ground-floor flat, and I tried to keep my eyes off the long legs that emerged slender and brown below the hem of the t-shirt. It was even hotter inside the flat proper, and I recognised the smell of palm oil and cassava leaf. I knew exactly the style of home I was in from the walls, painted hint of peach, to the kitchen full of rice and chicken and Morrison’s own-brand custard-cream biscuits.

  We stopped at the threshold to the living room. Beverley beckoned me down so she could murmur in my ear: ‘You show some respect now.’ I breathed in cooked hair and cocoa butter. It was like being sixteen again.

  During the 1990s, when the architect who built this place had been commissioned, he had been told that he was designing luxury apartments for thrusting young professionals. No doubt he envisioned power suits, braces and people who would furnish their home with the bleak minimalist style of a Scandinavian detective novel. In his worst nightmare he probably never considered the idea that the owner would use the generous proportions of the living room as an excuse to cram in at least four World of Leather three-piece suites. Not to mention a plasma television, currently showing football with the mute on, and a huge plant in a pot, which I recognised with a start as being a mangrove tree. An actual mangrove tree, whose knobbly-kneed roots spilled over the edges of the pot and had gone questing through the shagpile carpet. I looked up and saw that the topmost branches had thrust up through the ceiling. I could see where the white plaster had flaked away to reveal the pine joists.

  Arrayed on a leather sofa was as fine a collection of middle-aged African women as you’d find in a Pentecostal church, all of whom gave me the same once-over that Beverley had. Seated incongruously among them was a skinny white woman in a pink cashmere twinset and pearls, looking as perfectly at home as if she’d wandered in on her way into town and had never left. I noticed that the heat wasn’t bothering her. She gave me a friendly nod.

  But none of this was important because also in the room was the Goddess of the River Thames.

  She sat enthroned on the finest of the executive armchairs. Her hair was braided and threaded with black cotton and tipped with gold, so that it stood above her brow like a crown. Her face was round and unlined, her skin as smooth and perfect as a child’s, her lips full and very dark. She had the same black cat-shaped eyes as Beverley. Her blouse and wrap skirt were made from the finest gold Austrian lace, the neckline picked out in silver and scarlet, wide enough to display one smooth plump shoulder and the generous upper slopes of her breasts.

  One beautifully manicured hand rested on a side table, at the foot of which stood burlap sacks and little wooden crates. As I stepped closer I could smell salt water and coffee, diesel and bananas, chocolate and fish gu
ts. I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me I was sensing something supernatural, a glamour so strong it was like being washed away by the tide. In her presence I found nothing strange in the fact that the Goddess of the River was Nigerian.

  ‘So you are the wizard’s boy,’ said Mama Thames. ‘I thought there was an agreement?’

  I found my voice. ‘I believe it was more of an arrangement.’

  I was fighting the urge to fling myself to my knees before her and put my face between her breasts and go blubby, blubby, blubby. When she offered me a seat I was so hard it was painful to sit down.

  I caught Beverley snickering behind her hand. So did Mama Thames, who sent the teenager scuttling for the kitchen. This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ asked Mama Thames.

  I declined politely. Nightingale had been very specific: don’t eat or drink anything under her roof. ‘Do that,’ he’d said, ‘and she’ll have her hooks in you.’ My mum would have taken such a refusal as an insult, but Mama Thames just inclined her head graciously. Perhaps this too was all part of the arrangement.

  ‘Your Master,’ she said. ‘He is well?’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ I said.

  ‘He does seem to get better as he gets older, does our Master Nightingale,’ she said. Before I could ask what she meant, she had asked after my parents. ‘Your mother is a Fula – yes?’ she asked.

  ‘From Sierra Leone,’ I said.

  ‘And your father no longer plays, I believe?’

  ‘You know my father?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and gave me a knowing smile. ‘Only in the sense that all the musicians of London belong to me, especially the jazz and bluesmen. It’s a river thing.’

  ‘Are you on speaking terms with the Mississippi, then?’ I asked. My father always swore that jazz, like the blues, was born in the muddy waters of the Mississippi. My mother swore that it came from the bottle, like all the devil’s best work. I’d been taking the piss a little bit, but it suddenly occurred to me that if there was a Mother Thames, why not a god of the Old Man River, and if that was so, did they talk? Did they have long phone calls about silting, watersheds and the need for flood management in the tidal regions? Or did they email or text or twitter?