Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Don’t you ever comb this?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t be bothered,’ I said. ‘I just shave it down to stubble every spring.’

  She ran her palm over my head and let it rest, lightly, on the back of my neck. I felt her breath close, on my ear.

  ‘You really got nothing from your dad, did you?’ Beverley sat back in her own seat and tossed the towel into the back. ‘Your mum must have been disappointed. I bet she thought you’d have big curls.’

  ‘It could have been worse,’ I said. ‘I could have been a girl.’

  Beverley unconsciously touched her own hair, which was straightened and side-parted into wings that reached to her shoulders. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she said. ‘Which is why you ain’t going to get me out into that.’ She nodded at the rainswept streets.

  ‘If you’re so supposed to be a goddess …’

  ‘Orisa,’ said Beverley. ‘We’re Orisa. Not spirits, not local geniuses – Orisa.’

  ‘Why can’t you do something about the weather?’ I asked.

  ‘For a start,’ she said with exaggerated slowness, ‘you don’t mess with the weather, and second, this is north London and this manor belongs to my older sisters.’

  I’d found a seventeenth-century map of the rivers of London. ‘That would be the Fleet and the Tyburn?’ I asked.

  ‘You can call her Tyburn if you want to spend the rest of the day dangling from a noose,’ said Beverley. ‘If you ever meet her, you better make sure you call her Lady Ty. Not that you ever want to meet her. Not that she ever wants to meet you.’

  ‘So you don’t get on with them?’ I asked.

  ‘Fleet is okay,’ she said. ‘But nosy. Ty is just stuck up. She lives in Mayfair and goes to posh people’s parties and knows “people that matter”.’

  ‘Mum’s favourite?’

  ‘Only because she fixes stuff with the politicians,’ said Beverley. ‘Has tea on the terrace at the Palace of Westminster. I get to sit in a car with Nightingale’s errand boy.’

  ‘If I remember, you’re the one who didn’t want to go home,’ I said.

  I spotted Lesley’s car pulling up behind us. She flashed her lights and got out. I quickly leaned back to open the passenger door for her. Rain hit me in the face hard enough to make me splutter, and Lesley practically threw herself onto the back seat.

  ‘I think it’s going to flood,’ she said and seized my towel, using it to dry her face and hair. She jerked her head at Beverley. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Beverley, this is PC Lesley May.’ I turned to Lesley. ‘This is Beverley Brook, river spirit and winner of the London Regional All-comers Continuous Talking Championship five years running.’ Beverley punched me in the arm. Lesley gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Her mother is the Thames, you know.’

  ‘Really,’ said Lesley. ‘Who’s your dad, then?’

  ‘That’s complicated,’ said Beverley. ‘Mum said she found me floating down the brook by the Kingston Vale dual carriageway.’

  ‘In a basket?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘No, just floating,’ said Beverley.

  ‘She was spontaneously created by the midichlorians,’ I said. Both women gave me blank looks. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Has your man arrived yet?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Nobody’s arrived since we got here,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know what he looks like?’ said Lesley.

  I realised that I didn’t have the faintest idea what Dr Framline looked like. I’d been expecting to interview him at home before I followed him. ‘I have a description,’ I said. Lesley gave me a pitying look and pulled out A4 hard copy of the photo from Dr Framline’s driving licence. ‘He’d be a decent copper,’ she told Beverley, ‘if he could just keep his mind on the details.’

  She handed me something that looked like the chunky mutant offspring of a Nokia and a walkie-talkie – an Airwave handset. I stuffed it in the inside pocket of my jacket. The handset is a bit heavier than a mobile phone, and was going to make me lopsided.

  ‘Is that him?’ asked Beverley.

  We peered out into the rain and saw a couple approaching from the Covent Garden end of Neal Street. The man’s face matched the photograph apart from the bruising around his left eye and the railway track of adhesive strips holding the cut on his cheek together. He held an umbrella over himself and his companion, a stocky woman in a lurid orange waterproof. They were both smiling and seemed happy.

  We watched in silence as they reached the gastropub and, with a pause to shake out his umbrella, went inside.

  ‘Remind me why we’re here again?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Have you found the cycle courier yet?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Lesley. ‘And I don’t think my governor likes your governor treating him as his errand boy.’

  ‘Tell him, welcome to the club,’ I said.

  ‘You tell him,’ said Lesley.

  ‘So what’s in the sandwiches?’ asked Beverley.

  I opened the Tesco’s bag and unwrapped the packets to find crusty white bread filled with roast beef and mustard pickle garnished with horseradish – very nice, but once my packed lunch had been fried calves’ brain, so I tended to approach Molly’s sandwiches with caution. Lesley, who eats without fear and thinks eels in jelly are a delicacy, dived in but Beverley hesitated.

  ‘If I eat these, you’re not going to expect an obligation, are you?’ asked Beverley.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I have an air freshener in the bag.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ said Beverley. ‘There’s a geezer at my mum’s flats who turned up to repossess some furniture in 1997. One cup of tea and a biscuit later, and he’s never left. I used to call him Uncle Bailiff. He does odd jobs around the place, fixes stuff and keeps the place clean and my mother will never let him go.’ Beverley jabbed me in the chest with her finger. ‘So I want to know what your intentions are with this sandwich.’

  ‘I assure you, my intentions are honourable,’ I said, but part of me was thinking about how close I came to eating that custard cream back at Mama Thames’s flat.

  ‘Swear it on your power,’ said Beverley.

  ‘I don’t have any power,’ I said.

  ‘Good point,’ said Beverley. ‘Swear it on your mum’s life.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is childish.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Beverley. ‘I’ll get my own food.’ She got out of the car and stomped away, leaving the door open. I noticed that she’d waited for the rain to ease up before throwing a fit.

  ‘Is that true?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Which bit?’ I asked.

  ‘Spells, food, obligations, wizards – the bailiff,’ said Lesley. ‘For God’s sake, Peter, that’s false imprisonment at the very least.’

  ‘Some of it’s true,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how much. I think becoming a wizard is about discovering what’s real and what isn’t.’

  ‘Is her mum really the goddess of the Thames?’

  ‘She thinks she is, and I’ve met her and I’m beginning to think she might be,’ I said. ‘She’s got real power, so I’m going to treat her daughter as the real thing until I find out different.’

  Lesley leaned over the seat back and looked me in the eyes.

  ‘Can you do magic?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I can do one spell,’ I said.

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘If I do it now I’ll blow the Airwave sets, the stereo and possibly the ignition system. That’s how I busted my phone – I had it in my pocket when I was doing my practice.’

  Lesley tilted her head to the side and gave me a cool look.

  I was about to protest when Beverley banged on my window – I rolled it down.

  ‘I just thought you ought to know that it’s stopped raining,’ she said. ‘And there’s a cycle courier walking down the street.’

  Me and Lesley piled out of the car, which shows how inexperienced we really were at basic surveil
lance, remembered that we were trying to be unobtrusive and pretended to be having a casual chat with each other. In our defence we’d just spent two years in uniform, and being obtrusive is what a uniformed constable is all about.

  Beverley must have had good eyes because the courier was at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Neal Street and was approaching at a slow, deliberate pace. He was pushing his bike, which was suspicious, and I saw that the back wheel was bent out of shape. I felt a deep sense of unease, but I couldn’t tell if that was me or something external.

  In the near distance a dog started barking. Behind us, a mother told off a child who wanted to be carried. I could hear rain draining into a gutter somewhere and I found myself straining to hear – I’m not sure what. Then I heard it: a thin, strangled, high-pitched giggle that seemed to float in from far away.

  The cycle courier looked normal enough, dressed in painfully tight yellow and black Lycra, a messenger bag with a radio attached to its shoulder strap and a street helmet in blue and white. He had a narrow face and a mouth that was a thin line under a sharp nose, but his eyes were worryingly blank. I didn’t like the way he was walking. The twisted back wheel was scraping the forks and the man’s head seemed to bob unnaturally on his neck in time with every revolution. I decided it would be a bad idea to let him get any closer.

  ‘Bastard!’ There was a shout behind me and a rattling crash.

  I turned and saw nothing until Lesley pointed to the glass double doors of Urban Outfitters. A man was being slammed violently against the inside of the doors. He was jerked out of sight and then smashed against the doors again – hard enough to pop one of the hinges and make a gap large enough for the man to escape. He looked like a tourist or foreign student, well dressed in the European style – dirty blond hair cut the respectable side of too long, a blue Swissair complimentary knapsack still hooked over one shoulder. He shook his head as if bewildered, and flinched back as his attacker smacked open the doors and strode towards him.

  This was a short, plump man with thinning brown hair and round, wire-framed glasses. He was wearing a white shirt with a manager’s tag clipped to the pocket. He was sweating and his shining face was red with rage.

  ‘I’ve fucking had it,’ he screamed. ‘I try to be polite, but no, you’ve got to fucking treat me like I’m some fucking slave.’

  ‘Oi,’ shouted Lesley, ‘police.’ She advanced on them, warrant card in her left hand, her right hand resting on the handle of her extendable baton. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  ‘He attacked me,’ said the young man. Definitely an accent. German, I thought.

  The enraged shop manager hesitated and turned to look at Lesley, his eyes blinking behind his specs. ‘He was talking on the phone,’ said the manager. The violence seemed to have drained out of him. ‘While he was at the till. It’s not even like he got a call – he dialled it himself while he was paying. I’m expected to have a mutually beneficial and courteous interaction with him, and the fucker ignores me and makes a phone call.’

  Lesley stepped between the two men and gently edged the manager backwards. ‘Why we don’t go inside,’ she said, ‘and you can tell me all about it.’ It really was a delight to watch her work.

  ‘I mean, why?’ said the manager. ‘What was so important it couldn’t wait?’

  Beverley smacked me in the arm. ‘Peter,’ she said. ‘Over there.’

  I turned just in time to see Dr Framline charge up the street brandishing a stick half as tall as he was. Behind him came his date from the gastropub, yelling his name in confusion. I ran as fast as I could, passing the woman quickly, but there was no way I could get to Dr Framline before he reached his target.

  The courier didn’t even put an arm up to defend himself when Dr Framline clubbed him hard on the shoulder with the stick. I saw the man’s right arm jerk brokenly and his hand lose its grip on the bike, which began to topple sideways.

  ‘The more you take,’ yelled the doctor, raising the stick again, ‘the better it is for you.’

  I hit him low, getting my shoulder into the sweet spot just above his hips so that he went sideways and down and broke my fall instead of the other way round. I heard the bike hit the street and then the stick skittering across the pavement. I tried to pin Dr Framline but he seemed amazingly strong, and jammed an elbow into my chest hard enough to leave me gasping for breath. I made a grab for his legs and got a knee in the face that made me swear.

  ‘Police,’ I shouted. ‘Stop fighting.’ Amazingly, he did. ‘Thank you,’ I said; it seemed only polite. I tried to get up but somebody fetched me such a blow that I was face down on the pavement again before it even registered I’d been hit. In a street fight, no matter how hurt you are the pavement is not your friend, so I rolled over and tried to get back up again. As I did I saw the cycle courier grab the outsized stick off the ground and swing at Dr Framline. The doctor flinched out of the way but the stick caught him on the upper part of his arm. He slipped over and went down, gasping in pain.

  A wave of emotion washed over me: elation, excitement and an undertone of violence, like that of the home crowd at a football match when their team gets a chance at the goal.

  I saw the dissimulo as it happened that time: the courier’s chin seemed to bulge, I heard the distinct cracking of bone and teeth as it jutted forward into a sharp point. The lips twisted into a snarl as the nose stretched until it was almost as long. It wasn’t a real face, it was a caricature man-in-the-moon face that no human could have in real life. The mouth opened and I could see inside to the red ruin of his jaw.

  ‘That’s the way to do it!’ he shrieked and lifted his stick.

  Lesley’s baton hit him in the back of the head. He staggered, Lesley hit him again and with a gurgling sigh he fell forward in front of me. I crawled over and rolled him on his back but it was too late. His face slumped like wet papier mâché. I saw the skin tearing around the nose and chin and then a great dripping flap peeled open and lolled over his forehead. I tried to make myself do something, but nothing in my first-aid training had prepared me for someone’s face flopping open like a starfish.

  I slid my palm under the flap of skin, flinching at the warm wetness, and tried to fold it back over the face. I had some vague idea that I should at least try and stop the bleeding.

  ‘Let me go,’ yelled Dr Framline. I looked over and saw that Lesley already had him in handcuffs. ‘Let me go,’ he said. ‘I can help him.’ Lesley hesitated.

  ‘Lesley,’ I said, and she started uncuffing the doctor.

  Too late. The courier went suddenly rigid, his back arched and a tide of blood welled up from his neck and forced itself out through the rips in his skin and the gaps between my fingers.

  Dr Framline scrambled over and jammed his finger into the courier’s neck. He shifted their position, looking for a pulse, but I could see in his expression that there was none. Finally he shook his head and told me to let go. The courier’s face flopped open again.

  Somebody was screaming and I had to check it wasn’t me. It could have been me. I certainly wanted to scream, but I remembered that, right then and there, Lesley and I were the only coppers on the scene, and the public doesn’t like it when the police start screaming: it contributes to an impression of things not being conducive to public calm. I got to my feet and found that we’d attracted a crowd of onlookers.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said, ‘police business. I need you to stand back.’

  The crowd stood back – being covered in blood can have that effect on people.

  We preserved the scene until back-up arrived, but two-thirds of the crowd had their phones out and were taking video and stills of me, Lesley and the mutilated remains of the cycle courier. The images had already hit the internet before the ambulance arrived and the paramedic had covered the poor sod with a sheet. I spotted Beverley hanging around near the back of the crowd and when she saw that, she caught my eye, gave me a little wave, turned and walked away.

  Me
and Lesley found a place under a shop awning and waited for the forensic tent, the swabs and the replacement bunny suit.

  ‘We can’t keep doing this,’ said Lesley. ‘I’m running out of clothes.’

  We laughed – sort of. It’s not that it gets easier the second time, it’s just that by then you know you’re still going to wake up the next morning the same person who went to sleep.

  A DS from the Murder Team arrived and took charge. She was a squat, angry-faced middle-aged woman with lank brown hair who looked like she fought Rottweilers for a hobby. This was the legendary Detective Sergeant Miriam Stephanopoulos, Seawoll’s right-hand woman and terrifying lesbian. The only joke ever made at her expense goes: ‘Do you know what happened to the last police officer who made a joke about DS Stephanopoulos?’ ‘No, what did happen to him?’ ‘Nobody else knows, either.’ I said it was the only joke, not a good one.

  She seemed to have a soft spot for Lesley, though, so we got processed much faster this time, but as soon as we were done we were bundled into an unmarked car and driven to Belgravia. Nightingale and Seawoll debriefed us in an anonymous conference room at which nobody took notes, but at least we were offered tea.

  Seawoll glared at Lesley; he wasn’t happy. Lesley glared at me; she wasn’t happy that Seawoll wasn’t happy. Nightingale wasn’t anything except distracted; he only seemed interested when I reported my sense impressions just prior to the attack. After the briefing we trooped over to the Westminster mortuary, where surprisingly both Seawoll and Stephanopoulos attended the autopsy. Lesley and I made a point of standing behind them in the hope they wouldn’t notice us.

  The cycle courier lay on the table with his face splayed open in a way that was becoming horribly familiar. Dr Walid was giving his conclusion that, somehow, person or persons unknown had managed to trick the victim into changing his face with magic and then set him to attacking random strangers. DS Stephanopoulos gave Seawoll a sharp look at the word magic, but her boss gave a small shake of his head that said, Later, not here.