Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘And you want to fight Mama Thames’s daughters for the privilege?’

  ‘You think they’re too fearsome for us?’ asked Oxley.

  ‘I don’t think you want it badly enough,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’m sure arrangements could be made.’

  ‘An excursion by coach, perhaps?’ asked Oxley. ‘Will we need passports?’

  Despite what you think you know, most people don’t want to fight, especially when evenly matched. A mob will tear an individual to pieces, and a man with a gun and a noble cause is happy to kill ever so many women and children. But risking a fair fight – not so easy. That’s why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of the ‘don’t hold me back’ while desperately hoping someone likes them enough to hold them back. Everyone is always so pleased to see the police arrive because we have to save them whether we like them or not.

  Oxley wasn’t a pissed young man, but I could see he was just as keen to find someone to hold him back. Or maybe his father?

  ‘Your father,’ I said. ‘What does he really want?’

  ‘What any father wants,’ said Oxley. ‘The respect of his children.’

  I nearly said that not all fathers were worthy of respect, but I managed to keep my gob shut, and anyway, not everyone had a dad a like mine.

  ‘It would be nice if everyone could chill for a bit,’ I said. ‘Keep everything relaxed while the Inspector and I sorted something out.’

  Oxley looked at me over his teacup. ‘It is spring,’ he said. ‘Plenty of distractions upstream of Richmond.’

  ‘Lambing season,’ I said. ‘And what not.’

  ‘You’re not what I expected,’ said Oxley.

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘I was expecting Nightingale to choose someone more like himself,’ said Oxley. ‘Upper-class?’

  ‘Solid,’ said Isis, pre-empting her husband. ‘Workmanlike.’

  ‘Whereas you,’ said Oxley, ‘are a cunning man.’

  ‘Much more like the wizards we used to know,’ said Isis.

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ I asked.

  Oxley and Isis laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ said Oxley. ‘But it will be interesting finding out.’

  It was strangely hard to leave the fair. My legs felt heavy, as if I was wading out of a swimming pool. It wasn’t until we were back at the Jag and the funfair sounds had started to fade that I felt I had escaped.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked Nightingale as we climbed into the car.

  ‘Seducere,’ he said. ‘The Compulsion, or, as the Scots say, “the Glamour”. According to Bartholomew, many supernatural creatures do it as a form of self-defence.’

  ‘When do I learn how to do it?’ I asked.

  ‘In about ten years,’ he said. ‘If you pick up the pace a bit.’

  As we headed back through Cirencester for the M4, I told Nightingale about my meeting with Oxley.

  ‘He’s the Old Man’s consigliere, isn’t he?’ I asked.

  ‘If you mean his consiliarius, his advisor,’ said Nightingale, ‘then yes. Probably the second most important man at the camp.’

  ‘You knew he’d talk to me, didn’t you?’

  Nightingale paused to check for traffic before pulling out onto the main road. ‘It’s his job to press for an advantage,’ he said. ‘You had the Battenberg cake, didn’t you?’

  ‘Should I have refused?’

  ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘He wouldn’t try to trap you while you’re under my protection, but you can’t always take common sense for granted when dealing with these people. It makes no sense for the Old Man suddenly to be pushing downstream. Now that you’ve met them both – what do you think?’

  ‘They both have genuine power,’ I said. ‘But it feels different. Hers is definitely from the sea, from the port and all that. His is all from the earth and the weather and leprechauns and crystals, for all I know.’

  ‘That would explain why the border’s at Teddington Lock,’ he said. Teddington is the highest point the tide reaches. The river below that point is called the tideway. It’s also the part of the Thames administered directly by the Port of London – I doubted that was a coincidence.

  ‘Am I right?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe you are,’ he said. ‘I think there may always have been a split between the tideway and the freshwater river. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for Father Thames to abandon the city.’

  ‘Oxley was hinting that the Old Man doesn’t really want anything to do with the city,’ I said. ‘That he just wanted some respect.’

  ‘Perhaps he would be content with a ceremony,’ said Nightingale. ‘An oath of fealty, perhaps.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘A feudal oath,’ said Nightingale. ‘A vassal pledges his loyalty and service to his liege lord, and the lord pledges his protection. It’s how mediaeval societies were organised.’

  ‘Mediaeval is what it would get if you tried to make Mama Thames swear loyalty and service to anyone,’ I said. ‘Let alone Father Thames.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Nightingale. ‘It would be purely symbolic.’

  ‘Symbolic just makes it worse,’ I said. ‘She’d see it as a loss of face. She sees herself as the mistress of the greatest city on earth, and she’s not going to kowtow to anyone. Particularly not some yokel in a caravan.’

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t marry them off,’ said Nightingale.

  We both laughed out loud at that, and bypassed Swindon.

  Once we were on the M4, I asked Nightingale what he and the Old Man had talked about.

  ‘My contribution to the conversation was cursory at best,’ said Nightingale. ‘A great deal of it was technical, groundwater overdrafts, aquifer delay cycles and aggregate catchment-area coefficients. Apparently all these will affect how much water goes down the river this summer.’

  ‘If I was to go back two hundred years and have that same conversation,’ I said, ‘what would the Old Man have talked about then?’

  ‘What flowers were blooming,’ said Nightingale. ‘What kind of winter we’d had – the flight of birds on a spring morning.’

  ‘Would it have been the same Old Man?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was the same Old Man in 1914, I can tell you that for certain.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Nightingale hesitated, then he said, ‘I’m not quite as young as I look.’

  Myphonerang. I really wanted to ignore it but the tune was ‘That’s Not My Name’, which meant it was Lesley. When I answered she wanted to know where the hell we were. I told her we were just going through Reading.

  ‘There’s been another one,’ she said.

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Really bad,’ she said.

  I put the spinner on the roof as Nightingale put his foot down and we topped 120mph back into London with the setting sun behind us.

  There were three appliances parked up in Charing Cross Road, and the traffic was backing up as far as Parliament Square and the Euston Road. We arrived at St Martin’s Court to the smell of smoke and the chatter and squawk of emergency radios. Lesley met us at the tape line and handed us bunny suits. I could see while we were changing that half of J. Sheekey’s frontage had been burned out, and that there were three forensic evidence tents set up in the alley. Three bodies, at least.

  ‘How many inside?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘None,’ said Lesley. ‘They all went out the back emergency doors – minor injuries only.’

  ‘Something to be thankful for,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’re sure this is our case?’

  Lesley nodded and led us over to the first tent. Inside we found that Dr Walid had got there before us and was crouched beside the body of a man dressed in the distinctive saffron robes of a Hare Krishna devotee. The body lay on its back where he’d fallen, legs straight, arms stretched out to either side as if he’d participated in one of those trust-building exercises where you let yourself fall backwards – only no
one had been there to catch him. His face was the same bloody ruin as Coopertown’s and the cycle courier’s had been.

  That answered that question.

  ‘That’s not the worst of it,’ she said, and beckoned us over to the second tent. This one had two bodies. The first was a dark-skinned man in a black frock coat, his hair stuck up in clumps and stiff with blood. He’d been hit hard enough to crack open the skull and expose a section of his brain. The second body was another devotee of Krishna. A random good samaritan had tried to help by putting him in the recovery position, but with his face split open the gesture had been futile.

  I was aware of a thudding in my ears and a shortness of breath. Blood, presumably from the blow struck to the other man, had splattered the devotee’s robes and made a bloody tie-dye pattern on the orange cloth. The interior of the forensic tent was stifling, and I started sweating inside my bunny suit. Nightingale asked a question but I didn’t really hear Lesley’s answer. I stepped outside the tent, gagged once, swallowed it and stumbled to the tape line where, to my own amazement, I managed to keep my Battenberg cake down.

  I wiped my mouth on the cold plastic sleeve of the bunny suit and leaned against the wall. Opposite me was a poster for the Noël Coward Theatre where they were showing a farce called Down With Kickers!.

  Two victims with their faces half off meant that the ‘possession’ had affected two individuals at the same time. There was one more tent left. I asked myself, how much worse could that be?

  Stupid question.

  The third body was seated with its legs crossed but like a child, not a yogi for all that his hands were resting on his knees palm upwards. His robes were drenched in blood and ribbons of red ropey stuff covered his shoulders and upper arms. His head was completely gone, leaving a ragged stump of a neck. There was a flash of white buried amid the torn muscle – I assumed it was his spine.

  Seawoll had been waiting for us in the tent. He grunted when Lesley led us in. ‘Somebody’s just taking the piss now.’

  ‘It’s escalating,’ I said.

  Nightingale gave me a sharp look but said nothing.

  ‘But what’s escalating?’ asked Lesley. ‘And why can’t you stop it?’

  ‘Because, Constable,’ said Nightingale coldly. ‘We don’t know what it is.’

  There were plenty of witnesses and suspects, and people who were helping the police with their inquiries. We paired off to conduct the interviews as fast as possible. I worked with Seawoll while Nightingale paired with Lesley. That way there’d be someone in the room who could spot a vestigium when it slapped him in the face. Sergeant Stephanopoulos handled the collecting of physical evidence and collating the CCTV coverage.

  It was a bit of a privilege to watch Seawoll work. He wasn’t nearly so intimidating with the suspects as he was with other policemen. His interrogation technique was gentle – never chummy, always formal but he never raised his voice. I took notes.

  The sequence of events, as we reconstructed them, was depressingly familiar but on a larger scale than we’d seen before. It had been a mild spring Sunday afternoon, and St Martin’s Court had been moderately crowded. The Close itself is a pedestrianised alleyway that has access to three separate stage doors, the back entrance to Brown’s and the famous J. Sheekey’s Oyster Bar. It’s where the theatre staff go for a coffee and a crafty fag between performances. J. Sheekey’s is a thespian landmark, which isn’t surprising if you sell food late at night within walking distance of the most famous theatres in the West End. Sheekey’s also employs uniformed doormen in top hats and black frock coats, and that’s where the trouble started that afternoon.

  At two forty-five, about the same time as I was sitting down for tea with Oxley and Isis, six members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness entered the Close from the Charing Cross Road end. This was a common route for the bhaktas, the aspirant devotees to the god, as they traversed from Leicester Square to Covent Garden. They were being led by Michael Smith, his identity later confirmed through fingerprint evidence, a reformed crack addict, alcoholic, car thief and suspected rapist, who had lived an unblemished life since joining the movement nine months previously. ISKCON, as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness likes to be known, is aware that there is a fine line between drawing attention to yourself and provoking active hostility from passers-by. The intention is that through dancing and chanting in public, potential converts may be attracted to the movement, and not to provoke an angry confrontation. Thus, ‘dwell time’ in a particular locality had to be judged carefully to avoid trouble. Michael Smith had proved particularly good at judging what the devotees could get away with, and that was why he was leading the saffron crocodile that afternoon.

  Which was why, according to Willard Jones, former Llandudno lifeguard and lucky survivor, everyone had been surprised when they came to a halt outside J. Sheekey’s, and Michael Smith said he wanted to hear some noise. Still, making a noise and attracting attention was what they were on the street for, so they started making a noise.

  ‘A harmonious noise,’ said Willard Jones. ‘In this age of materialism and hypocrisy, no other form of spiritual realisation is as effective as the chanting of the maha-mantra. It is like the genuine cry of the child for his mother …’ He went on like this for some time.

  What was not harmonious was the cowbell, which Willard Jones knew was a genuine cowbell because his father and brothers were genuine failing Welsh hill farmers. ‘If you’ve ever heard a cowbell,’ said Jones, ‘you’d realise that they are not designed to be harmonious.’

  At approximately two fifty, Michael Smith produced a huge cowbell from somewhere about his person and started ringing it with great sweeping movements of his arm. On duty as uniformed doorman that day was Gurcan Temiz of Tottenham via Ankara. As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit and the name of that limit is ‘taking the piss’. Ringing a huge cowbell outside the restaurant and disturbing the patrons certainly constituted taking the piss, so Gurcan stepped up to remonstrate with Michael Smith, who clubbed him repeatedly with the bell around the head and shoulders. According to Dr Walid, the fourth blow was the one that killed him. Once Gurcan Temiz was on the ground two more devotees, Henry MacIlvoy of Wellington, New Zealand and William Cattrington of Hemel Hempstead rushed over and proceeded to kick the victim. This didn’t cause the damage it might have, because both devotees were wearing soft plastic sandals.

  At that point an incendiary device exploded behind the bar inside J. Sheekey’s. The clientele, despite being a mix of thespians and tourists, evacuated the premises in an orderly but rapid fashion. Those that went out the back fire exits dispersed via Cecil Court; those that went out the front streamed past the bodies of Gurcan Temiz, Henry MacIlvoy and William Cattrington, who were already dead. Most registered that there were bodies and that there was blood, but they were all vague about the details. Only Willard Jones had a clear view of what happened to Michael Smith.

  ‘He just sat down,’ said Jones. ‘And then his head exploded.’

  There are a couple of mundane things that can make your head explode, high-velocity rifle shot for one, so the Murder Team spent some time eliminating them from our inquiries. Meanwhile, I’d figured out what had caused the explosion inside J. Sheekey’s, which was just as well because by that time the Anti-Terrorist Squad and MI5 were starting to sniff around the case, which nobody wanted.

  The answer came from the experiments I’d been conducting, semi-covertly, into why my phone broke. I had no intention of using my laptop or even another phone as a guinea pig, so a quick trip to Computers For Africa, who refurbish abandoned computers and donate them abroad, netted me a bag full of chips and a motherboard that I suspected came from an Atari ST. I used masking tape to set marks at twenty-centimetre intervals along the length of a bench and once I
had a chip placed at every mark, I carefully positioned my hand and cast a werelight. The trick in science is to try and change only one variable at a time, but I felt I’d gained enough fine control to produce the same intensity of werelight consistently each time. I spent an entire day conjuring up lights and then checking each chip for damage under the microscope. All to no avail, except for pissing off Nightingale who said that if I had that much time to waste I should be able to tell him the difference between propositions of the accusative and the ablative kind.

  Then he distracted me by teaching me my first Adjectivum, which is a forma which changes some aspect of another forma. This Adjectivum was called Iactus, which combined with Impello should, theoretically, have allowed me to float an apple around the room. After two weeks of exploding apples I’d got to the point where I could reliably whoosh an apple down the length of the lab with a fair degree of accuracy. Nightingale said that the next stage was catching things that were thrown towards me, which took us back to exploding apples, and that’s where we were the day the clocks went forward and we paid our respects to Father Thames.

  It was while I was in the interview room watching Seawoll gently pluck the facts from Willard Jones’s testimony that I had my breakthrough. Magic, it turned out, was just like science in that sometimes it was a question of spotting the bleeding obvious. Just as Galileo spotted that objects accelerate under gravity at the same rate regardless of their weight, I spotted that the big difference between my mobile phone and the various microchips I’d been experimenting on was that my mobile phone was connected up to its battery when it got fried.

  Just connecting up my collection of second-hand microchips to a battery seemed far too random and time-consuming, but luckily you can a get ten generic calculators for less than a fiver – if you know where to go. Then it was just a matter of laying them out, casting the werelight for precisely five seconds and sticking them under the microscope. The one placed directly under my hand was toast and there were decreasing levels of damage out to the two-metre mark. Was I emitting power as a waste product, which was damaging the electronics – or was I sucking power out of the calculators, and was it that that was doing the damage? And why was the damage principally to the chips, and not the other components? Crucially, despite the unresolved questions, it implied that I could now carry my mobile phone and do magic – providing I took the battery out first.