It began when I started a practice session without taking my phone out of my jacket pocket. I even noticed a little flare in intensity when I formed the werelight, but I’d only been reliably casting for two days so it didn’t register as significant. It was only later, when I tried to call Lesley and found my phone was busted that I opened up the case and saw the same trickle of sand I’d noticed at the vampire house. I took it down to the lab and prised out the microprocessor. As it came loose, the same fine sand streamed out of its plastic casing. The gold pins were intact, as were the contacts, but the silicon bit of the chip had disintegrated. The cupboards in the lab were full of the scent of sandalwood and the most amazing range of antique equipment, including the Charles Perry microscope, all put away with such precision and tidiness that I knew no student had been involved. Under the microscope I found the powder to be mostly silicon with a few impurities which I suspected was germanium or gallium arsenide. The chip that handled RF conversion was superficially intact but had suffered microscopic pitting across its entire surface. The patterns reminded me of Mr Coopertown’s brain. This was my phone on magic, I thought. Obviously I couldn’t do magic and carry a mobile phone, or stand near a computer or an iPod or most of the useful technology invented since I was born. No wonder Nightingale drove a 1967 Jag. The question was how close did the magic have to be? I was formulating some experiments to find out, when Nightingale distracted me with my next form.
We sat down on opposite sides of the lab bench and Nightingale placed an object between us. It was a small apple. ‘Impello,’ he said, and the apple rose into the air. It hung there, rotating slowly, while I checked for wires, rods and anything else I could think of. I poked it with my finger, but it felt like it was embedded in something solid.
‘Seen enough?’
I nodded, and Nightingale brought out a basket of apples – a wicker basket with a handle and a check napkin, no less. He placed a second apple in front of me, and I didn’t need him to explain the next step. He levitated the apple, I listened for the forma, concentrated on my own apple and said, ‘Impello.’
I wasn’t really that surprised when nothing happened.
‘It does get easier,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s just that it gets easier slowly.’
I looked at the basket. ‘Why do we have so many apples?’
‘They have a tendency to explode,’ said Nightingale.
The next morning I went out and bought three sets of eye protectors and a heavy-duty lab apron. Nightingale hadn’t been kidding about the exploding fruit, and I’d spent the afternoon smelling of apple juice and the evening picking pips out of my clothing. I asked Nightingale why we didn’t train with something more durable like ball bearings, but he said that magic required the mastery of fine control right from the start.
‘Young men are always tempted to use brute force,’ Nightingale had said. ‘It’s like learning to shoot a rifle: because it’s inherently dangerous you teach safety, accuracy and speed – in that order.’
We went through a lot of apples in that first session. I was getting them in the air but sooner or later – splat! There was a brief phase when it was fun and then it got boring. After a week of practice, I could levitate an apple without it exploding nine times out of ten. I wasn’t a happy little wizard, though.
What worried me was where the power was coming from. I never was very good at electricity, so I didn’t know how much power it took to make a werelight. But levitating one small apple against the earth’s gravity – that was essentially the standard definition of one newton of force, and it should be using one theoretical joule of energy every second. The laws of thermodynamics are pretty strict about this sort of thing, and they say that you never get something for nothing. Which meant that that joule was coming from somewhere – but from where? From my brain?
‘So it’s like ESP,’ said Lesley during one of herperiodic visits to the coach house. Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension. Besides, apart from a couple of unconfirmed cases around the same time as the Neal Street attack, nothing had come to our attention.
‘Like that guy on that show who could move things around,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t feel like I’m moving things around with my mind,’ I said. ‘It’s like I’m making shapes with my mind, which affects something else, which makes stuff happen at the other end. Do you know what a theremin is?’
‘It’s that weirdo sci-fi musical instrument with the loops,’ she said. ‘Right?’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘The point is, it’s the only musical instrument you don’t physically touch. You make shapes with your hands and you get a sound. The shapes are completely abstract, so you have to learn to associate a particular shape with a note and tone before you can get the thing to make a tune.’
‘What does Nightingale say?’
‘He says that if I stopped letting myself get distracted I might spend less time covered in bits of apple.’
At the end of March, the clocks go forward one hour to mark the start of British Summer Time. I woke up late to find the Folly feeling weirdly empty, the chairs in the breakfast room still tucked beneath the tables and the buffet counter unlaid. I found Nightingale reading the previous day’s Telegraph in one of the overstuffed armchairs that lined the first-floor balcony.
‘It’s the change in the clocks,’ he said. ‘Twice a year she takes the day off.’
‘Where does she go?’
Nightingale pointed up towards the attic. ‘I believe she stays in her room.’
‘Are we going on a road trip?’ I asked. Nightingale was wearing his sports jacket over a cream-coloured Arran sweater. His driving gloves and the keys to the Jag were lying on a nearby occasional table.
‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Do you think you know where the Old Man of the Thames is today?’
‘Trewsbury Mead,’ I said. ‘He’ll have arrived there round about the Spring Equinox, which was last week, and he’ll stay until All Fool’s Day.’
‘Your reasoning?’ asked Nightingale.
‘It’s the source of his river,’ I said. ‘Where else is he going to go in the spring?’
Nightingale smiled. ‘I know a nice little transport café off the M4 – we can have breakfast there.’
Trewsbury Mead, early afternoon under a powder blue sky. According to the Ordnance Survey, this is where the Thames first rises 130 straight-line kilometres west of London. Just to the north is the site either of an Iron Age hill fort or a Roman encampment, the exact nature of which is awaiting an episode of Time Team. Apparently there is a soggy field, a stone to mark the spot and a chance, after a particularly wet winter, that you might see some water. You approach down a minor road that turns to gravel once you’re past the private houses it was built to serve. The line of the river is marked by a dense stand of trees, and the source of the Thames is beyond that.
In the field beyond was the Court of the Old Man of the River. We could hear it before we saw it, the rumble of diesel generators, steelwork clanking, the bass beat of music thumping, tannoys barking, girls screaming, glimpses of neon over the treeline and the whole round-the-corner thrill of a travelling funfair. I had a sudden Bank Holiday memory of holding my father’s hand in one fist and clutching a precious handful of pound coins in the other. Never enough, and quickly gone.
We left the Jag by the side of the road and walked the rest of the way. Beyond the line of trees I could see the tops of the big wheel and that ride where they fling you into the air on the end of a rope which I really don’t see the point of. The track crossed a stream bed on a modern concrete culvert which had recently been scored by the passage of heavy trucks, and for a moment we were in the shade of the trees.
The first line of parked caravans began as soon as we were back in the sunlight. Most of them were old-fashioned with humpbacked roofs and mean little doors and windows. A few were modern with sloped fronts and go-faster stripes. I even caught sight, through the thickets of Calor gas bottles, deckchairs, guy ropes and sleeping Rottweilers, of the horseshoe roof of a wooden gypsy caravan – something I thought was only for tourists. Although the caravans seemed to be parked randomly I was struck by the notion that there was a pattern, a deep structure that nagged at the edge of perception. There was definitely a perimeter, and nothing illusive about the heavyset man who guarded it from the doorway of his caravan.
The man had thick black hair greased into a quiff and a set of long sideburns that had last been fashionable when my dad was doing regular sessions with Ted Heath in the late 1950s. He also had a totally illegal twelve-bore shotgun propped up against the side of his caravan.
‘Afternoon,’ said Nightingale, and kept walking past.
The man nodded. ‘Afternoon,’ said the man.
‘Good weather we’re having,’ said Nightingale.
‘Looks to be fair,’ said the man in an accent that was either Irish or Welsh, I couldn’t tell, but definitely Celtic. I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. A London copper doesn’t like to intrude upon a traveller camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear – it’s considered disrespectful otherwise.
The residential caravans formed a semicircle around the fair proper. There, the big beasts of the fairground world roared and clanked and blared out ‘I Feel Good’ by James Brown. Every copper knows that the funfairs of Great Britain are run by the Showmen, a collection of interwoven families so clannish they officially constitute a separate ethnic group of their own. Their family names were painted on the generator trucks and blazoned across the tops of hoardings. I counted at least six different names on six different rides and half a dozen more as we walked through the fair. It seemed that each family had brought one ride to the spring fair at Trewsbury Mead.
Skinny young girls ran past, trailing laughter and streamers of red hair. Their older sisters paraded in white hot pants, bikini tops and high-heeled boots, checking out the older boys through Max Factor lashes and clouds of cigarette smoke. The boys tried to hide their awkwardness by playing butch or walking the moving rides with studied indifference. Their mums worked the booths painted with the rough murals of last decade’s film stars and festooned with banners and health and safety warnings. Nobody seemed to be paying for the rides or the candyfloss, which probably explained why the kids were so happy.
The fair proper formed another semicircle, and at its centre was a rough-hewn wooden corral like those you see in Westerns, and in the centre of that was the source of the mighty River Thames. Which looked to me like a small pond with ducks on it. And, standing at the fence rail, was the Old Man of the River himself.
There was once a statue of Father Thames at the Mead, now transported to the more reliably wet stretch of the river at Lechlade, which showed a muscular old man with a William Blake beard reclining on his plinth with a shovel over his shoulder, crates and bundles arranged at his feet – the fruits of industry and trade. Even I can spot a bit of Empire spin when I see it, so I didn’t really expect him to look like that but I think I was still hoping for something grander than the man at the fence.
He was short, with a pinched face dominated by a beaky nose and a heavy brow. He looked old, in his seventies at least, but there was a sinewy vigour in the way he moved, and his eyes were grey and bright. He wore an old-fashioned, double-breasted suit in dusty black, the jacket unbuttoned to show off a red velvet waistcoat, a brass fob watch and a folded pocket handkerchief the bright yellow of a spring daffodil. A battered homburg was jammed on his head, wisps of white hair escaping from underneath, and a cigarette dangled from his lip. He stood leaning on the fence, one foot on the lowest rail, talking out of the side of his mouth to a crony, one of several frighteningly spry old men who shared the fence with him, gesturing at the pond or taking a long pull on his cigarette.
He glanced up as we approached, frowning at the sight of Nightingale before turning his attention to me. I felt the force of his personality drag at me: beer and skittles it promised, the smell of horse manure and walking home from the pub by moonlight, a warm fireside and uncomplicated women. It was a good thing I’d had practice with Mama Thames and had mentally prepared on the walk up because otherwise I would have marched right up and offered him the contents of my wallet. He winked at me and turned his full attention on Nightingale.
He called out a greeting in a language which could have been Skelta or Welsh, or even authentic pre-Roman Gaelic for all I knew. Nightingale answered in the same language, and I wondered whether I was going to have to learn that one too. The cronies shuffled along to make a space at the fence – only wide enough for one, I noticed. Nightingale joined Father Thames and they shook hands. With his height and good suit, Nightingale should have looked like the lord of the manor mixing with the commoners but there was no deference in the way Father Thames sized him up.
Father Thames was doing most of the talking, emphasising his words with little twirls and flicks of his fingers. Nightingale leaned on the fence deliberately minimising the height difference and nodding and chuckling, I could tell, at all the right moments.
I was considering whether to edge forward so that I could understand what they saying more clearly when one of the younger men at the fence caught my eye. He was taller and thicker-set than Father Thames, but had the same long sinewy arms and narrow face.
‘You don’t want to be bothering with that,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a good half-hour before they get past the pleasantries.’ He reached out a large calloused hand to shake mine. ‘Oxley,’ he said.
‘Peter Grant,’ I said.
‘Come and meet the wife,’ he said.
The wife was a pretty woman with a rounded face and startling black eyes. She met us on the threshold of a modest 1960s caravan that was parked in its own little space to the left of the funfair.
‘This is my wife Isis,’ said Oxley, and to her, ‘This is Peter, the new apprentice.’
She took my hand. Her skin was warm, and with the same unreal perfection that I’d noticed on Beverley and Molly. ‘Delighted,’ she said. Her accent was pure Jane Austen.
We sat on folding chairs around a card table with a cracked linoleum top, decorated with a single daffodil arranged in a slender vase of fluted glass.
‘Would you like some tea?’ Isis asked, and when I hesitated said, ‘I, Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger Isis solemnly swear on the life of my husband,’ which got a chuckle from Oxley, ‘and the future prospects of the Oxford rowing team that nothing you partake of in my house will place you under any obligation.’ She crossed her heart and gave me a little-girl smile.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Tea would be nice.’
‘I can see you’re wondering how we met,’ said Oxley.
I could see he wanted to tell the story. ‘I presume she fell into the river,’ I said.
‘You would presume wrong, sir,’ said Oxley. ‘Back in the day I had a great fondness for the theatre, and would often smarten myself up and row up to Westminster for an evening’s entertainment. Quite the peacock I was back then, and attracted, I like to think, many an admiring gaze.’
‘What with him traversing the cattle market at the time,’ said Isis, returning with the tea. The cups and teapot were modern porcelain, a very clean design with a stylish platinum strip around the lip, not chipped at all, I noticed. I suspected I was getting the VIP treatment, and I wondered why.
‘I first set eyes on my Isis at the old Royal on Drury Lane, this being the new one that burned down not long after. I was in the gods, and she was in a box with her dear friend Anne. I was smitten, but alas she already had her fancy man.’ He paused long enough to pour the tea. ‘Although he suffered a terrible disappointment, I can tell you.’
‘Hush my love,’ said Isis. ‘The young man doesn’t want to hear about that.’
I picked up my teacup. The brew was very pale, and I recognised the aroma of Earl Grey. I hesitated with the cup at my lips but trust has to start somewhere, so I took a resolute sip. It was a very fine cup of tea indeed.
‘But I am like the river,’ said Oxley. ‘I may run but I am always there.’
‘Except during droughts,’ said Isis, and offered me a slice of Battenberg cake.
‘I’m always lurking under the surface,’ said Oxley. ‘I was, even then. Her friend had a very nice house at Strawberry Hill, beautiful place, and back in those days not surrounded by mock-Tudor semis. If you’ve seen the place then you’ll know that it’s built like a castle, and my Isis was a princess held captive in its tallest tower.’
‘Having a long weekend at a friend’s house, actually,’ said Isis.
‘My chance came when they held a great masquerade at the castle,’ said Oxley. ‘Dressed in my finest, my features cleverly disguised with a swan mask, I slipped in through the tradesman’s entrance and soon found myself mingling with the fine people inside.’
I figured that I was already in trouble for the tea, so I might as well have the cake. It was shop-bought and very sweet.
‘It was a grand ball,’ said Oxley. ‘Lords and ladies and gentlemen all dressed in Josephine gowns or tight breeches and velvet waistcoats, and every one of them thinking wicked thoughts while safe behind their mask. And most wicked was my Isis, for all that she was wearing the mask of the Queen of Egypt.’
‘I was Isis,’ said Isis. ‘As you well know.’
‘So I boldly stepped up and marked her card for every dance,’ said Oxley.
‘Which was a cheek and an effrontery,’ said Isis.
‘I saved you from the left feet of many a swain,’ said Oxley.
She put her hand on his cheek. ‘Which I cannot deny.’
‘The thing you have to remember about a masquerade is that at the end of the night the masks have to come off,’ said Oxley. ‘At least in polite company, but I had been thinking …’
‘Always a worrying development,’ said Isis.
‘Why did the masquerade have to end?’ said Oxley. ‘And as the son follows the father, I let action follow thought and seized my darling Isis, threw her over my shoulder and was away across the fields towards Chertsey.’
‘Oxley,’ said Isis. ‘The poor boy is an officer of the law. You can’t be telling him you kidnapped me. He’d be honour bound to arrest you.’ She looked at me. ‘It was entirely voluntary, I can assure you,’ she said. ‘I was twice married and a mother, and I’d always known my own mind.’
‘It is certain that she proved to be an experienced woman,’ he said and, much to my embarrassment, winked at me.
‘You wouldn’t think he was once a man of the cloth,’ said Isis.
‘I was a terrible monk,’ he said. ‘But that was a different life.’ He rapped the table. ‘Now that we’ve fed, watered and bored you senseless, why don’t we talk some business? What is it that the Big Lady wants?’
‘You understand that I’m strictly the go-between in this,’ I said. We actually did a course on conflict resolution at Hendon, and the trick is always to stress your neutrality while allowing both parties to think you’re secretly on their side. There were role-playing exercises and everything – it was one of the few things I was better at than Lesley. ‘Mama Thames feels that you may be looking to move downstream of Teddington Lock.’
‘It’s all one river,’ said Oxley. ‘And he’s the Old Man of the River.’
‘She claims he abandoned the tideway in 1858,’ I said. More precisely during the Great Stink – note the capitals – when the Thames became so thick with sewage that London was overwhelmed with a stench so terrible that Parliament considered relocating to Oxford.
‘Nobody stayed in London that summer who could move away,’ said Oxley. ‘It wasn’t fit for man or beast.’
‘She says he never came back,’ I said. ‘Is that true?’
‘That is true,’ said Oxley. ‘And in truth, the Old Man has never loved the city, not since it killed his sons.’
‘Which sons were these?’
‘Oh, you know who they are,’ said Oxley. ‘There was Ty and Fleet and Effra. All drowned in a flood of muck and filth and finally put out of their misery by that clever bastard Bazalgette. Him that made the sewers. I met him, you know, very grand man with the finest set of chops this side of William Gladstone. Knocked him on his arse for the murdering bastard that he was.’
‘You think he killed the rivers?’
‘No,’ said Oxley. ‘But he was their undertaker. I’ve got to hand it to the daughters of the Big Lady, for they certainly must be hardier than my brothers.’
‘If he doesn’t want the city, why is he pushing downstream?’ I asked.
‘Some of us still have a hankering for the bright lights,’ said Oxley, and smiled at his wife.
‘I dare say it would be nice to attend the theatre again,’ she said.
Oxley refilled my cup. A crackly voice on a tannoy somewhere behind me yelled, ‘Let’s get this party started.’ James Brown was still feeling nice, sugar and spice now.
‘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.
‘But what does all that mean?’ asked Lesley.
I took a pull on my Becks and waved the bottle at the TV. ‘It means that I’ve just figured out how the fire was started.’
The next morning Lesley emailed me the fire report, and after I’d checked that I tracked down a retail equipment store that could deliver a till just like the one used in J. Sheekey’s Oyster Bar. Because of Nightingale’s No Visitors in the Folly, Not Counting the Coach House rule, I had to carry the bloody thing from the tradesman’s entrance down into my lab all by myself. Molly watched me staggering past and covered her smile with her hand. I figured Lesley didn’t count as a visitor in this instance, but when I called and invited her over for the demonstration she said she was busy running errands for Seawoll. Once I had everything in position I asked Molly to ask Nightingale to meet me in the lab.
I cleared an area in the corner, away from any gas pipes, mounted the till on a metal trolley and plugged it in. When Nightingale arrived I handed him a lab coat and eye protectors and asked him to stand on a mark six metres from the till. Then, before I did anything else, I removed the battery from my mobile phone.
‘And the purpose of this is what, exactly?’ asked Nightingale.
‘If you’ll just bear with me sir,’ I said, ‘It’ll all become clear.’
‘If you say so Peter,’ he said, and folded his arms. ‘Should I be wearing a helmet as well?’
‘That’s probably not necessary, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m going to count down from three, and on zero I’d like you to do the strongest magic consistent with safety.’
‘The strongest?’ asked Nightingale. ‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready when you are.’
I counted down, and on zero Nightingale blew up the lab – at least, that’s what it felt like. A ball of burning fire, like a werelight spell gone horribly wrong, formed over Nightingale’s outstretched palm. A wave of heat washed over me and I smelled crisping hair. I almost threw myself behind a bench before I realised that the heat wasn’t physical. It couldn’t have been, or Nightingale would have caught fire. Somehow the heat was all contained within the sphere above his hand – what I’d felt was vestigia on a grand scale.
Nightingale looked at me and calmly raised an eyebrow. ‘How long do you want me to keep this up?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How long can you keep it up?’
Nightingale laughed. I caught a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision and I turned to find Molly standing in the doorway, eyes shining with reflected fire and fixed on Nightingale.
I turned back just in time for the till to explode. The top blew right off and a spray of burning plastic fountained out, black smoke billowed upwards and raced across the ceiling. Molly gave a delighted shriek and I ran forward with the fire extinguisher and sprayed the CO2 over the till until it went out. Nightingale shut down his sphere of flaming death and switched on a set of extractor fans I didn’t even know the lab was equipped with.
‘Why did it explode?’ he asked.
‘The rapid breakdown of the components releases a volatile gas, hydrogen or something,’ I said. ‘I only got a C in chemistry, remember. The gas mixes with air inside the casing, there’s an electrical spark, and boom. The question I need you to answer is, does doing a spell suck magic out of an object or put magic into an object?’
The answer was, of course, both.
‘You don’t normally cover this until you’ve mastered the primary forma,’ said Nightingale. Magic, as Nightingale understood it, was generated by life. A wizard could draw on his own magic, or on magic that he’d stored by enchantment, which sounded interesting but not relevant to exploding cash tills. However, life protected itself, and the more complex it was the more magic it produced, but the harder it was to draw off. ‘It’s impossible to draw on magic from another human being,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or even a dog, for that matter.’
‘The vampires,’ I said. ‘They sucked the life out of everything in the house, didn’t they?’
‘The vampires are obviously parasitical in that way but we don’t know how they do it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nor do we know how people like your friend Beverley Brook draw power from their environment, either.’
‘The vampire house is where I first noticed the effect on the microchips,’ I said.
‘As machines become more like men,’ said Nightingale, ‘I suppose it follows that they might start producing magic of their own. I’m not sure I see how this helps us.’ I tried not to wince at the pseudoscience, and decided now was not the time to get into that.
‘In the first instance,’ I said, ‘it means we know that whatever is doing this is sucking down enormous amounts of power, and second, it gives us another thing to look for.’
Not that we were actually finding anything. In the meantime, Seawoll’s Murder Team were assigned a particularly pointless stabbing in a pub off Piccadilly Circus. I had a sniff around but there were no vestigia, and a stupid but comprehensible motive. ‘Cheating boyfriend,’ Lesley explained one night when she came round to watch a DVD. First, boy meets girl, girl sleeps with second boy, first boy stabs second boy and runs away. ‘We think he’s hiding in Walthamstow,’ she said. Many would say that was punishment enough.
The murders outside J. Sheekey’s were blamed on Michael Smith, who had supposedly shot three people in the head with an illegal firearm before killing himself with the same gun. The media might have taken more of an interest had not a soap star been caught cottaging with an equally famous footballer in the loos of a club in Mayfair. The resulting media white-out blotted out any real news for two weeks and was, according to Lesley, far too convenient to be a coincidence.
I spent April practising my forma, my Latin and experimenting with new ways to blow up microchips. Every afternoon I’d take Toby out for a walk in the area around Covent Garden and Cambridge Circus to see if either of us picked up a sniff, but there was nothing. I called Beverley Brook a couple of times, but she said that her mother had told her not to have anything to do with me until I’d done something about Father Thames.
May started in typical Bank Holiday fashion, with two days of rain and three of drizzle, until the next Sunday dawned bright and fair. It’s on a day like this that a young man’s mind turns to romance, ice cream and Punch and Judy shows.
It was the day of the Covent Garden May Fayre, which celebrates the first ever recorded performance of Punch and Judy with a brass-band parade, a special puppet mass at the Actors’ Church and as many Punch and Judy shows as can be crammed into the church grounds. While I’d been a probationary constable at Charing Cross, I’d always been on crowd control that day, so I called up Lesley and asked if she wanted to try the fayre from the civilian point of view. We got ice cream and Cokes from the Tesco Metro and dodged around the tourists until we reached the front portico of the church. A single ‘professor’s’ booth had been set up not half a metre from where poor old William Skirmish had had his head knocked off.
‘Four months ago,’ I said out loud.
‘It hasn’t been boring,’ said Lesley.
‘You’re not the one who’s had to learn Latin,’ I said.
Mats had been put down for the kids to sit on while we adults stood at the back. A man in jester’s motley stepped forward and warmed up the audience. He explained that over the centuries there had been many versions of the Punch and Judy show but today, for our education and our entertainment, the renowned Professor Phillip Pointer would perform The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy as told to John Payne Collier by Giovanni Piccini in 1827.
The story started with Punch being bitten on the nose by Toby the dog.