Honeysuckle had been planted along the side wall of the house, making a sweet-scented corridor that opened up into a wide, sunny garden. A neatly mown lawn was bordered by formal beds planted with surfinia petunias, marigold and tulips. Two huge terracotta pots bursting with spring flowers guarded the steps down to a sunken patio at the centre of which the afternoon sunlight pooled around a fountain. Even I could see that this wasn’t some piece picked up in a garden store or hypermarket. It was a delicate marble birdbath with a central statue of a nude carrying water; Italian Renaissance, maybe – I didn’t have enough art history to know. It was antique and battered, the marble chipped in places, and the nymph had a discoloured streak running from her shoulder to her groin made by the water trickling out of her gourd.
The water smelled sweet and enticing, just the thing after my long, slow walk up the hill. A handsome middle-aged woman was waiting for me by the fountain. She was dressed in a yellow cotton sundress, straw hat and open-toed sandals. As I drew closer I saw she had her mother’s eyes, black and slanted like a cat’s, but that she was lighter than Beverley with a nice, straight media-friendly nose.
There was once a gallows, close to where Marble Arch now stands, where they used to hang the criminals of old London town. The gallows was named after the village, whose inhabitants profited so greatly from the grisly spectacles that they built viewing stands to bring in the punters, which was named after the river that ran through it. The river was named the Tyburn. They hanged poor Elizabeth Barton there and Gentleman Jack, for all that he’d escaped four times before, and the Reverend James Hackman for the murder of pretty Martha Ray. I knew all this because after Beverley’d dropped her sister’s name into the conversation as the one who knows people who matter, I made a point of finding out.
‘I thought it was time you and I had a little chat,’ said Tyburn.
I offered her the flowers, which she took with a delighted laugh. She pulled my head down and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled of cigars and new car seats, horses and furniture polish, Stilton, Belgian chocolate and, behind it all, the hemp and the crowd and the last drop into oblivion.
I’d traced the sources, as well as I could anyway, of all the lost rivers of London. Some, like the Beverley Brook, the Lea or the Fleet were easy to find, but the location of the Tyburn, the legendary Shepherd’s Well, had got lost in the mad Victorian steam-powered expansion of London in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This fountain was obviously at the source, but the fountain itself, I suspected, had been looted by an enterprising official in the last days of the Empire.
I was thirsty – I would have liked a drink.
‘What would you like to talk about?’ I asked.
‘For a start,’ said Tyburn, ‘I’d like to know what your intentions are with regards to my sister.’
‘My intentions?’ I asked. My mouth was very dry. ‘My intentions are purely honourable.’
‘Really?’ she said, and crouched down to retrieve a vase from behind the fountain. ‘Is that why you took her to see the pikeys?’
Pikey is not a word a well brought-up young policeman is supposed to use. ‘That was just a preliminary, exploratory investigation,’ I said. ‘And Oxley and Isis are not pikeys.’
Tyburn drew the back of her hand down the back of the marble water carrier, and the trickle from the gourd thickened into a strong stream from which she filled the vase. ‘Still,’ she said as she unwrapped the roses, ‘not the sort of people one wants one’s sister associating with.’
‘We don’t get to choose our family,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Thank God we can choose our friends.’
Tyburn gave me a sharp look and started arranging the roses. The vase was unremarkable, fat-bottomed like a volumetric flask and made from green lacquered fibreglass, the sort of thing you can pick up for fifty pence at a car boot sale. ‘I’ve got nothing against the Old Man or his people, but this is the twenty-first century and this is my town, and I haven’t busted a gut for thirty years so that some “gentleman of the road” can move back in and take what’s mine.’
‘What do you think is yours?’ I asked.
She ignored me and, having arranged the last of the roses, placed the vase on the patio wall close by. When I’d bought them the roses had been the last of the stock and were beginning to wilt on the stand. Once Tyburn placed them in the vase they perked up, becoming full, rich and even darker.
‘Peter,’ she said, ‘you’ve seen the way the Folly is organised, or rather not organised. You know that it has no official standing in Government, and its relationship with the Metropolitan Police is entirely a matter of custom and practice and, God help me, tradition. It’s all held together with spit and sealing wax and the old boy network. It’s a typical British mash-up, and the one time it was asked to step up it failed horribly. I have access to files you don’t even know exist, Peter, about a place in Germany called Ettersburg – you might want to ask your mentor about that.’
‘Technically he’s my Master,’ I said. ‘I swore a guild oath as his apprentice.’ My tongue felt thick and dry, as if I’d just spent the night sleeping with my mouth open.
‘I rest my case,’ she said. ‘I know it’s against the national character but don’t you just wish we were a little bit more organised about these things, just a tad more grown-up? Would it kill us to have an official branch of government that handled the supernatural?’
‘A Ministry of Magic?’ I asked.
‘Ha-bloody-ha,’ said Tyburn.
I wanted to know why she hadn’t offered me a cup of tea. I’d brought her flowers, and figured the least I could expect in return would be a nice cup of tea or a beer, or even a drink of water. I cleared my throat and it came out a bit wheezy. I glanced at the fountain and the water streaming into the basin.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked. ‘The basin is a rather crude seventeenth-century knock-off of an Italian design, but the central figure was excavated when they were building Swiss Cottage station.’ She rested her hand on the statue’s face. ‘The marble’s from Belgium, but the archaeologists assure me that it was carved locally.’
I was having trouble working out why I didn’t want to drink the water. I’ve drunk water before, when beer, or coffee or Diet Coke weren’t available. I’ve drunk it from bottles, occasionally from a tap. When I was a kid I used to drink from the tap all the time. I’d run back into the flat all hot and sweaty from playing and didn’t even bother putting it in a glass, just turned the tap on and stuck my mouth underneath it. If my mum caught me doing it she used to scold me, but my dad just said that I had to be careful. ‘What if a fish jumped out?’ he used to say. ‘You’d swallow it before you knew it was there.’ Dad was always saying stuff like that and it wasn’t until I was seventeen that I realised it was because he was stoned all the time.
‘Stop that,’ I mumbled.
She gave me a pretty smile. ‘Stop what?’
I don’t mind getting drunk, but there always comes a moment in the evening when I find myself watching myself bumping into things and thinking, I’m bored of this, can I have full control of my brain back, please? I was getting equally irritated by my sudden need to deliver flowers to Hampstead and drink water from strange fountains. I tried to take a step backwards but the best I could manage was a minor shuffle.
Tyburn’s smile vanished. ‘Why don’t you have a nice drink?’ she asked.
She’d gone too far and she knew it, and she knew I knew she knew it too. Whatever influence she’d put on me must have been too subtle to handle a suggestion that obvious. Plus I’ve always wondered about that fish.
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘There’s a pub down the road. Let’s go there.’
‘You cunning bastard,’ she said, and I didn’t think she was talking about me. She leaned in closer and stared into my eyes. ‘I know you’re thirsty,’ she said. ‘Drink the water.’
I felt my body lurch forward towards the fountain. It was involuntary, just like when you get a tw
itch in your leg or the hiccups, but now it was my whole body working to a purpose that wasn’t mine – it was terrifying. I realised then that the Old Man and Mama Thames hadn’t even been trying to control me and, had they wanted to, they could have had me doing cartwheels around the room. There had to be a limit to the power, or else what was to stop Mama Thames or the Old Man walking into Downing Street and dictating terms? I think people would notice if that happened – the Thames would be a lot cleaner, for a start.
It had to be Nightingale, I realised. The counterweight, the human balance to the supernatural, and that meant that they couldn’t control him. The only thing that separated Nightingale from an ordinary guy was his magic, which meant that the magic must supply a defence. It was a stretch, but it isn’t easy thinking things through when the personification of a historic London river is mentally trying to overwhelm you.
To try and buy time I attempted to throw myself backwards. It didn’t work, but it did stop my next lurch towards the fountain. Nightingale hadn’t taught me a block to the magic yet, so I reached for Impello instead. Lining up the forma in my mind was so much easier than I expected – later I speculated that whatever it was Tyburn was doing acted on the instinctive bit of my brain, not the ‘higher’ functions – that I got carried away.
‘Impello,’ I said, and tried to lift the statue off its pedestal.
Tyburn’s eyes widened at the sound of cracking marble. She whirled to look and as her eyes left mine I staggered back, suddenly free. I felt the shape in my mind slip out of control and the statue’s head disintegrated in a spray of marble chips. I felt a blow to my shoulder and a sharp cut on my face and a chunk of marble the size of a small dog slammed into the patio tiles by my feet.
I saw that the birdbath had also cracked, and that water was escaping and spreading across the patio like a bloodstain. Tyburn turned back to look at me. There was a cut on her forehead and her sundress was torn just above her hip.
She’d gone very quiet, and that was not a good sign. I’d seen that quiet before, on my mum and on the face of a woman whose brother had just been knocked down by a drunk driver. People are conditioned by the media to think that black women are all shouting and head-shaking and girlfriending and ‘oh, no you didn’t’, and if they’re not sassy then they’re dignified and downtrodden and soldiering on and ‘I don’t understand why folks just can’t get along’. But if you see a black woman go quiet the way Tyburn did, the eyes bright, the lips straight and the face still as a death mask, you have made an enemy for life: do not pass go, do not collect two hundred quid.
Do not stand around and try and talk about it – trust me, it won’t end well. I took my own advice and backed away. Tyburn’s black eyes watched me go, and as soon as I was safely in the side passage I turned and legged it as fast as I could. I didn’t exactly run down the hill to Swiss Cottage, but I did make it a brisk walk. There was a payphone near the bottom which I needed since the battery had been in my mobile during my statue demolition. I called the operator, gave my identification number and got a call routed to Lesley’s mobile. She wanted to know where I’d been because apparently it had all gone pear-shaped without me.
‘We saved the blind guy,’ she said, ‘no thanks to you.’ She refused to give me any details because ‘your boss wants you down here yesterday.’ I asked her where ‘here’ was and she told me the Westminster Mortuary, which made me cross because we may have saved the blind man but some poor bastard had still lost his face. I told her I’d be there as soon as possible.
I caught a lift in the local area car down to Swiss Cottage tube and hopped a Jubilee Line train into town. I doubted that Lady Ty had the manpower or the inclination to have the stations covered, and one of the few advantages of blowing out my phone was that it couldn’t be jacked, ditto any trackers she might have stashed about my person. I’m not being paranoid, you know. You can buy those things off the internet.
Rush hour was almost in full flood when I got on the train, and the carriage was crowded just short of the transition between the willing suspension of personal space and packed in like sardines. I spotted some of the passengers eyeing me up as I took a position at the end of the carriage with my back to the connecting door. I was sending out mixed signals, the suit and reassuring countenance of my face going one way, the fact that I’d obviously been in a fight recently and was mixed race going the other. It’s a myth that Londoners are oblivious to one another on the tube: we’re hyper-aware of each other and are constantly revising our what-if scenarios and counter strategies. What if that suavely handsome yet ethnic young man asks me for money? Do I give or refuse? If he makes a joke do I respond, and if so will it be a shy smile or a guffaw? If he’s been hurt in a fight does he need help? If I help him will I find myself drawn into a threatening situation, or an adventure, or a wild interracial romance? Will I miss supper? If he opens his jacket and yells ‘God is great’, will I make it down the other end of the carriage in time?
All the time most of us were devising friction-free strategies to promote peace in our time, our carriage and please God at least until I get home. It’s called, by people over sixty, common courtesy, and its purpose is to stop us from killing each other. It was like vestigia: you weren’t always aware of them but you instinctively shaped your behaviour in response to the accumulation of magic around you. This is what kept ghosts going, I realised; they lived off the vestigia like LEDs off a long-life battery, powering down to ration it out. I remembered the dead space that was the vampire house in Purley. According to Nightingale, vampires were ordinary people who became ‘infected’, no one was sure how or why, and started feeding off the magic potential, including the vestigia, of their surroundings.
‘But it’s not enough to sustain a living being,’ Nightingale had said. ‘So they go hunting for more magic.’ The best source of that, according to Isaac Newton, was human beings, but you can’t steal magic from a person, or any life more complex than slime moulds, except at the point of death and even then it isn’t easy. I’d asked the obvious question – why the blood-drinking? He said that nobody knew. I asked him why hadn’t anyone done any experiments, and he gave me a strange look.
‘There were some experiments done,’ he’d said after a long pause. ‘During the war. But the results were considered unethical and the files were sealed.’
‘We were going to use vampires during the war?’ I’d asked, and been surprised by the look of genuine hurt and anger on Nightingale’s face. ‘No,’ he’d said sharply, and then, with more moderation, ‘Not us – the Germans.’
Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere it’s better not to go there.
The genii locorum, like Beverley, Oxley and the rest of the dysfunctional Thames family, were also living beings on one level, and also got their power from their surroundings. Bartholomew and Polidori both suggested that they drew sustenance from all the diverse and myriad life and magic within their domains. I was sceptical, but I was willing to accept that they lived in symbiosis with their ‘domains’, whereas vampires were clearly parasitical. What if that was mirrored by ghosts? If Thomas Wallpenny was in some way part of the vestigia he inhabited and drew power from, a symbiont, then the revenant could be a parasite, a ghost vampire. That would explain the shrunken cauliflower brains of the victims – they’d had the magic sucked out of them.
Which meant that the summoning I’d done with the calculators had achieved nothing more than to feed Henry Pyke’s appetite for magic. But I also wondered if you couldn’t attract a revenant by spilling magic around like laying a chum line for shark. By the time the train pulled into Baker Street, I was already beginning to formulate a plan.
The tube is a good place for this sort of conceptual breakthrough because, unless you’ve got something to read, there’s bugger all else to do.
This time when I arrived at Westminster Mortuary I didn’t even have to show my warrant card. The guards on the gate just waved me through. Nightingale was waiting
for me in the locker room. While I was kitting out, I gave him a brief explanation of my meeting with Tyburn.
‘It’s always the children,’ said Nightingale. ‘They’re never satisfied with the status quo.’
‘How did you save the blind man?’ I asked.
‘Apparently they’re not blind,’ said Nightingale. ‘They are in fact visually impaired. A very forceful young lady pointed this out to me at some length while we were waiting at the hospital.’
‘How did you save the visually impaired man then?’
‘I wish I could take the credit,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was his guide dog. As soon the sequestration began …’
‘Sequestration?’ I asked.
Apparently this was the term Dr Walid had invented to describe what happened when a normal human being was taken over by our revenant. It’s a legal term that refers to the process by which a person’s property is seized in order to pay off debts, or because it’s considered to be the proceeds of crime. In this case the property sequestrated was the person’s body.
‘As soon as sequestration commenced,’ said Nightingale, ‘the guide dog, who I believe is called Malcolm, went berserk and dragged the potential victim away. Inspector Seawoll already had his people covering charity collections in the area, and one of them intervened before our poor sequestrated Punch could follow the blind man.’
Rivers of London Page 20
