Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Like musical notation?’ I asked.

  Nightingale grinned. ‘Exactly like musical notation,’ he said.

  ‘So why not use musical notation?’

  ‘Because in the main library there are thousands of books detailing how to do magic, and all of them use the standard Latin forms,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Presumably all this was invented by Sir Isaac?’ I asked.

  ‘The original forms are in the Principia Artes Magicis,’ said Nightingale. ‘There have been changes over the years.’

  ‘Who made the changes?’

  ‘People who can’t resist fiddling with things,’ said Nightingale. ‘People like you, Peter.’

  So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography. I wondered if there was a translation.

  ‘Not of the Artes Magicis,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Wouldn’t want the hoi polloi learning magic, would we?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘In the other books, it’s not just the forms. Everything is written in Latin.’

  ‘Except for the stuff that’s in Greek and Arabic,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘How long does it take to learn all the forms?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten years,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you work at it.’

  ‘I’d better get on.’

  ‘Practise for two hours and then stop,’ said Nightingale. ‘Don’t do the spell again until at least six hours have passed.’

  ‘I’m not tired, you know,’ I said. ‘I can keep this up all day.’

  ‘If you overdo it there are consequences,’ said Nightingale.

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all. ‘What kind of consequences?’

  ‘Strokes, brain haemorrhages, aneurysms …’

  ‘How do you know when you’ve overdone it?’

  ‘When you have a stroke, a brain haemorrhage or an aneurysm,’ said Nightingale.

  I remembered Brandon Coopertown’s shrunken cauliflower brain, and Dr Walid saying, This is your brain on magic.

  ‘Thank you for the safety tip,’ I said.

  ‘Two hours,’ said Nightingale from the doorway. ‘Then meet in the study for your Latin lesson.’

  I waited until he had gone before opening my hand and whispering, ‘Lux!’

  This time the globe gave off a soft white light and no more heat than a sunny day.

  Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.

  The Coach House

  During the day, if I wasn’t in the lab or studying, or out, it was my job to listen for the bell and answer the front door when it rang. This happened so infrequently that the first time it occurred it took me a minute to work out what the noise was.

  It turned out to be Beverley Brook in an electric-blue quilted jacket with the hood up.

  ‘You took your time,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing out here.’

  I said she should come in but she looked shifty and said she couldn’t.

  ‘Mum says I’m not to, she says that it’s inimical to the likes of us.’

  ‘Inimical?’

  ‘There’s, like, magic force fields and stuff,’ said Beverley.

  That would make sense, I thought. It would certainly explain why Nightingale was so relaxed about security.

  ‘Why are you here, then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Beverley, ‘when a mummy river and a daddy river love each other very much …’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘Mum says there’s some weird stuff at the UCH you should check out.’

  ‘What kind of weird stuff?’

  ‘She said it was on the news.’

  ‘We don’t have a TV,’ I said.

  ‘Not even Freeview?’

  ‘No kind of TV at all,’ I said.

  ‘Brutal,’ said Beverley. ‘You coming out, or what?’

  ‘I’ll go see what the Inspector says,’ I said.

  I found Nightingale in the library making notes on what I strongly suspected was tomorrow’s Latin homework. I explained about Beverley, and he told me to check it out. By the time I got back to the lobby Beverley had risked coming just inside the door, although she stood as close to the threshold as she could get. Surprisingly Molly was standing beside her, their heads close together as if exchanging confidences. When they heard me coming they separated with suspicious speed – I felt my ears burning. Molly scurried past me and vanished into the depths of the Folly.

  ‘Are we taking the Jag?’ asked Beverley as I put my coat on.

  ‘Why, are you coming with me?’ I asked.

  ‘I have to,’ said Beverley. ‘Mum told me to facilitate.’

  ‘Facilitate what?’

  ‘The woman that called it in is an acolyte,’ said Beverley. ‘She won’t talk to you without me there.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Are we taking the Jag?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘UCH is walking distance.’

  ‘Aw,’ said Beverley. ‘I wanted to take the Jag.’

  So we took the Jag and got caught in a traffic jam on the Euston Road, and then spent another twenty minutes looking for a parking space. It took us, I estimated, twice as long to drive as it would have to walk.

  University College Hospital takes up two whole blocks between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. Founded in the nineteenth century, its main claim to fame was as the teaching hospital for the University College of London and the birthplace of one Peter Grant, apprentice wizard. Since that momentous day in the mid-1980s, half the site had been redeveloped into a gleaming blue and white tower that looked as if a bit of Brasilia had crash-landed in the middle of Victorian London.

  The lobby was a wide, clean space with lots of glass and white paint marred only by the large numbers of sick people shuffling around. Police officers spend a lot of time in A&E, since you’re either asking people where they got their knife wounds, dealing with the violently drunk or being stitched up yourself. It’s one of the reasons so many coppers marry nurses – that, and the fact that nurses understand about unreasonable shift systems.

  Beverley’s acolyte was a nurse, a pale skinny one with purple hair and an Australian accent. She stared at me suspiciously.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she asked Beverley.

  ‘This is a friend,’ Beverley said and put her hand on the woman’s arm. ‘We tell him everything.’

  The woman relaxed and gave me a smile full of hope. She looked like one of the Pentecostal teenagers from my mum’s second-from-last church. ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be part of something real?’ she said.

  I agreed that being part of something real was indeed wonderful, but it would be groovy if she could tell me what she’d seen. I actually used the word ‘groovy’ and she didn’t even flinch, which was worrying on so many levels.

  According to her, a cycle courier had been brought in by ambulance following a road traffic accident, and while he was being treated he’d kicked the attending doctor in the eye. The doctor had been stunned rather than seriously injured and the cycle courier had run out of A&E before Security could nab him.

  ‘Why bring it to us?’ I asked.

  ‘It was the laughing,’ said the nurse. ‘I was going back to the treatment bay when I heard this screeching laugh, like a mynah bird. Then I heard Eric – Dr Framline, that’s the doctor who was injured – I heard him swearing, and then the cycle courier comes charging out of the bay and there’s something wrong with his face.’

  ‘Wrong, how?’ I asked.

  ‘Just wrong,’ she said, displaying precisely the characteristic that makes eyewitnesses such a useful part of any police investigation. ‘He went past so fast I didn’t see much but it just looked … wrong.’

  She showed me the treatment bay where it happened, a white and beige cubicle with an examination bed and a curtain for privacy. The vestigium – note
that I’m using the singular here – slapped me in the face as soon as I walked in. Violence, laughter, dried sweat and leather. It was the same as poor William Skirmish when he was lying in the mortuary, only minus the annoying yappy dog.

  Two months previously I would have walked into that treatment bay, shivered, thought, ‘That’s weird’ and walked right back out again.

  Beverley stuck her head in and demanded to know whether I’d found anything.

  ‘I need to borrow your phone,’ I said.

  ‘What happened to yours?’ she asked.

  ‘I blew it up in a magic accident,’ I said. ‘Don’t ask.’

  Beverley pouted and handed over a surprisingly chunky Ericsson. ‘You have to top it up,’ she said. The casing had latex seals and the buttons were large and protected by a layer of clear plastic. ‘It’s designed to go underwater,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Can you get your acolyte to find out Dr Framline’s address for me?’

  Beverley shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘And remember, you talk, you pay!’

  While Beverley was distracted with her task I took her phone outside to Beaumont Place, a quiet pedestrianised road that ran between the old and the new bits of the hospital, and called Nightingale. I described the incident and the vestigium and he agreed that it was worth stepping up the search for the courier.

  ‘I want to keep an eye on the doctor,’ I said.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Nightingale. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m thinking of the sequence of events around Skirmish’s murder,’ I said. ‘Toby bites Coopertown on the nose, that’s when it starts. But Coopertown doesn’t go postal until later when he runs into Skirmish in Covent Garden.’

  ‘You think it was set off by a chance meeting?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘Lesley says that the Murder Team haven’t found a reason for Skirmish even to be in Covent Garden that night. He gets a bus down to the West End, meets Coopertown and gets his head knocked off. No meetings, no friends – nothing.’

  ‘You think both parties were affected?’ asked Nightingale. ‘You think an outside agency made them meet?’

  ‘Is such a thing possible?’

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ said Nightingale. ‘If your dog was affected along with his master and Coopertown, then it would explain why he was so sensitive to the vestigia.’

  I noticed Toby was my dog now. ‘So it’s possible?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale, but I could tell he was sceptical.

  ‘What if the cycle courier is playing Toby’s role and the doctor is taking Coopertown’s?’ I asked. ‘At the very least it wouldn’t hurt to keep an obbo on the doctor until the courier is caught.’

  ‘Can you handle that?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘No problem,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ said Nightingale, and offered to coordinate the search for the cycle courier. I hung up as Beverley Brook sauntered over from the hospital, the swing of her hips dragging at my eyes. She grinned when she caught me looking and handed me a slip of paper – Dr Framline’s address.

  ‘What next, guv?’ she asked.

  ‘Where can I drop you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Beverley said quickly. ‘Mum says I was to facilitate.’

  ‘You’ve facilitated,’ I said. ‘You can go home now.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘Mum’s got the whole entourage round, Ty and Effra and Fleet, not to mention all the old ladies. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  Actually I knew exactly what it was like, but I wasn’t going to tell Beverley that.

  ‘Come on, I’ll be good,’ she said, giving me the big eyes. ‘I’ll let you borrow my phone.’

  I gave in before she escalated to the trembling lip. ‘But you have to do what I say.’

  ‘Yes guv,’ she said, and saluted.

  You can’t do an obbo in a vintage Jag, so, much to Beverley’s disappointment, we drove back to the Folly to swap it for the ex-Panda. The Folly’s garage is out the back of the building and takes up the entire bottom floor of the converted coach house. From the mews you can see where the original doors, wide and high enough to accept a coach and four, had been bricked in and replaced with a more modest sliding door. The Jag and the ex-Panda rattled around inside a space big enough for four carriages.

  Unlike the entrance hall, the coach house didn’t seem to bother Beverley at all. ‘What happened to the inimical magic force fields?’ I asked.

  ‘Not in here,’ she said. ‘Bit of protection on the garage door and that’s it.’

  Nightingale had left the building, but Molly met me in the lobby with a Tesco’s carrier bag full of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied up with string. I didn’t ask what was in them but I doubted it was chicken tikka masala. Back in the coach house, I threw my bag and sandwiches in the back of the ex-Panda, made sure Beverley had her seat belt on and headed off to harass a junior doctor.

  Dr Framline lived in a two-storey Victorian terrace off the Romford Road in Newham. It was further east than I like to go but not a bad neighbourhood. I found a parking space with decent sightlines of the front door and got out – I knew no force on earth was going to keep Beverley in the car, so I let her come with me on the strict understanding that she’d keep her mouth shut.

  There was only one doorbell and the small front garden was given over to gravel, the dustbins and a couple of empty, bright red plant pots. I was thinking that either Dr Framline owned the whole place or he was sharing with friends. I pressed the bell and a cheerful voice said it was on its way. The voice belonged to a plump, round-faced woman of the sort that develops a good personality because the alternative is suicide.

  I showed her my warrant card. ‘Good afternoon. My name’s Peter Grant, I’m from the police and this is my colleague Beverley Brook, who’s a river in south London.’ You can get away with stuff like that with civilians because their brains lock in place on the word ‘police’.

  Actually I think I may have overdone it because the woman frowned at Beverley and asked, ‘Did you just say she was a river?’ Which is why you should never show off when on duty.

  ‘It’s an office joke,’ I said.

  ‘She seems a bit young to be police,’ said the woman.

  ‘She’s not,’ I said. ‘She’s on work experience.’

  ‘Can I see your identification again?’ asked the woman.

  I sighed and handed it over. Beverley sniggered.

  ‘I can give you the number of my superior if you like,’ I said. This normally does the trick, since members of the public are generally lazier than they are suspicious.

  ‘Are you here about what happened at the hospital?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, relieved. ‘That’s exactly why we’re here.’

  ‘Only Eric’s gone into town,’ she said. ‘You just missed him; he went fifteen minutes ago.’

  Of course he has, I thought, no doubt to some spot less then five hundred metres from where Beverley and I started out. ‘Do you know where he was going?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘We think we have a line on the man who attacked him,’ I said. ‘We just need him to confirm a few details. If we do this quickly we may be able to make an arrest tonight.’

  That perked her up, and got me not just the name of the gastropub Dr Framline was heading for but also his mobile number. Beverley had to trot to keep up with me as we headed back to the car.

  ‘What’s the rush?’ she asked as we climbed in.

  ‘I know the pub,’ I said. ‘It’s on the corner of Neal Street and Shelton Street.’ I pulled out without waiting for Beverley to buckle up. ‘Right across from there is the pedestrian space outside Urban Outfitters.’

  ‘Urban Outfitters, eh,’ said Beverley. ‘That explains the Dr Denim shirt.’

  ‘My mum bought me that,’ I said.

  ‘And you think that’s less embarrassing?’

  I gunned t
he ex-Panda, or at least I came as close to gunning it as you can with a ten-year-old Ford Escort, and went through a set of lights on red. There was a yell behind me. ‘Cycle couriers like to hang out there,’ I said. ‘It’s convenient for the pub and cafés, but also close to most of their clients.’

  Rain began to splatter on the windscreen and I had to ease up – the streets were getting wet. How long would it take Dr Framline to reach Covent Garden by public transport? Not less than an hour, but he had a head start and this was London, where the tube was often faster than the car.

  ‘Call Dr Framline,’ I told Beverley.

  She grumbled, dialled, listened and said, ‘Voice mail. He’s probably underground.’

  I gave her Lesley’s number. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you talk, you pay.’

  ‘That’s the way it works,’ I said.

  Beverley held the phone to my ear so I could keep both hands on the controls. When Lesley picked up I could hear the incident room at Belgravia in the background – proper police work.

  ‘What happened to your phone?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been trying to ring you all morning.’

  ‘I broke it doing magic,’ I said. ‘Which reminds me: I need you to book me out an Airwave.’ Airwave was the all-singing, all-dancing digital radio handset for coppers.

  ‘Can’t you get one from your nick?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re joking,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Nightingale’s got the hang of Airwave yet. Or even radios, for that matter. In fact, I think he might be a bit hazy on telephones.’

  She agreed to meet us at Neal Street.

  The rain was sheeting down as I crawled up the semi-pedestrianised length of Earlham Street and stopped on the corner, where we could get a good view of the pub and the cycle-courier hangout. I left Beverley in the car and popped across to check inside the pub. It was deserted; Dr Framline hadn’t arrived yet.

  My hair was soaked through when I got back in the car but I had a towel in my obbo bag, and I used it to squeeze most of the water out. For some reason Beverley found this hilarious.

  ‘Let me do that,’ she said.

  I handed her the towel and she leaned over and started rubbing my head. One of her breasts pushed against my shoulder and I had to resist an urge to put my arm around her waist. She dug her fingers into my scalp.