False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Is he going to be charged with anything?” she asked.

  “Tyrel?”

  Beverley waved a half-eaten drumstick at me.

  “Yes, Tyrel,” she said.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “One slip,” muttered Beverley and then louder. “I liked them.”

  “Maybe you should visit,” I said.

  “I did,” said Beverley. “But Stacy told me to go away.”

  “Go away?”

  “I’m paraphrasing.”

  “And you didn’t just charm your way in?” I asked, which got me a hard look.

  “That wouldn’t have been proper,” she said. “There’s limits.”

  “On me too,” I said, and she nodded sadly.

  We ate in silence for a bit until Beverley finished her plate and asked if there was seconds. Force of habit meant I’d cooked enough rice for three times as many people and the fridge held a stack of Mum’s Tupperware. A couple of these regularly arrived with my mum’s twice-weekly visit and despite our best efforts, we were falling behind. To deal with the overspill, Maksim was planning to install a second freezer cabinet in the laundry room next to Beverley’s biological sample fridge—the one with the yellow and black biohazard sign on the front.

  I microwaved the backup beef knuckle and cassava leaf soup, poured it over another small hill of rice and placed it before my beloved—who was suitably grateful. Outside it started to rain, and I scraped my leftovers into the organic recycle bin and rinsed my plate before putting it in the dishwasher.

  Policing doesn’t really deal in aftercare—at least not for the victims.

  Beverley dropped a denuded knuckle on a side plate and sighed.

  “We can sort something out later,” she said. “Once the dust has settled.”

  I started rooting in the fridge for the chocolate cake I’d cunningly hidden in among the plastic containers and felt better. Sometimes, when all else fails, a vague aspiration will see you through.

  Well, through to morning anyway.

  Ten minutes later Guleed called to say that Leo Hoyt had been found dead.

  17

  I Don’t Belong to Anyone Anymore

  HIS BODY WAS found on Whitmore Road in Hackney, wedged between two parked cars. He had been discovered mid-evening when the owner of one of the cars tried to drive it away and hit an obstruction.

  I recognized the location from Leo Hoyt’s file as being less than twenty meters from his home address—an ex-council flat on the Colville Estate that had once belonged to his granny. She’d stayed in London when the rest of her family moved to Essex, bought her flat in the first throes of Right to Buy and left it to Leo in her will.

  It was also less than five meters from where the Whitmore Road crossed Regent’s Canal.

  Belgravia MIT were handling the case and if they wanted me contaminating their crime scene they would call me. Besides, Nightingale had already done an initial Falcon assessment which included popping down to the nearby canal moorings to see if anyone had seen anything unusual, or whether anyone unusual had seen anything at all. He promised to let me know if he uncovered anything pertinent.

  “But in the morning, Peter,” he said.

  It’s hard to detach from a case. So over the years I’ve developed various techniques to help me sleep. In this instance I adopted the “very boring but necessary book” method—what with my preparation for a sergeant’s qualification I was spoiled for choice. But in the end I settled on The Role of the Father in Child Development, which one of Beverley’s big sisters had given me—I suspect ironically. The joke was on her, because as I settled down with Beverley beside me I barely made it through the preface before dropping off.

  * * *

  —

  It’s much harder to keep your detachment at a post-mortem if you know the corpse personally, even if you didn’t like them much. So I let Guleed make the trip to the Iain West Memorial Forensic Suite and watch Leo Hoyt be unzipped, but I did agree to meet her at Belgravia nick since they were handling the case.

  There’s something very comforting about an outside inquiry office when a case has pushed you off balance. You’re surrounded by loads of coppers working the phones or the computers, tracing, interviewing, eliminating and grinding down leads until either they vanish or the truth is revealed. Or at least something close enough to the truth to get you a result.

  It’s like the sea washing onto a beach, soothing, regular and unstoppable.

  When I’m working at Belgravia I share a desk with Guleed, so while she was enjoying Leo Hoyt’s post-mortem I logged into HOLMES and started going through the action list to see if anything popped up. I started with a keyword search for any mention of Leo Hoyt. Most of them were in the reports I’d written for Silver, but I read them anyway. When I’d finished all that, I felt a weird little discontent like an inaccessible itch. But it wasn’t until I was tracing the reconstructed timeline of our raid on Bambleweeny that I realized what it was.

  There was no record of Leo calling the police.

  “Don’t worry,” he’d said to me. “I hit the panic button.”

  But not the one installed by the security company the SCC had contracted to wire up the alarms on every floor except Bambleweeny. Nor, according to the interview Guleed had conducted with Tyrel Johnson, had Leo contacted him. I even called CCC and asked them to check their records in case he’d made a direct 999 call. They had no record of any 999 calls until the flurry that followed Mrs. Chin’s explosive demolition of the Mary Engine.

  So what panic button did he push? And to who, or even whom, was it connected?

  Guleed arrived bearing coffee and demanding fritters. I opened the plastic container I’d brought specially and offered the contents to Guleed, who immediately popped a whole one in her mouth and chewed slowly. Post-mortems, however fresh the corpse, leave a unmistakable and persistent smell in the nostrils. Guleed and me had recently discovered that slowly eating one of my mum’s cowpea fritters served to completely obliterate that horrible combination smell of disinfectant and off meat. True, it obliterated the rest of your sense of smell as well, but that was a small price to pay.

  I have to hide them from Beverley, though. Otherwise there’d be none left for operational use.

  “They think he was electrocuted,” said Guleed, when she’d finished swallowing. “But they’re not sure.”

  There’d been two contact burns on Leo’s neck, as if he’d been tasered. But no gross physiological damage to any organs that Vaughan could find.

  “Your boss said he could sense a faint vestigium consistent with the drones that attacked you in South Tottenham,” said Guleed. But vestigia, like most physical evidence, was subject to cross-contamination and was often ambiguous. And, unlike most forensic evidence, it was definitely, definitely not admissible in court.

  “He also wants to see you at the Folly when you finish here,” she said. “It’s all go in the magic police.”

  Together we went through Leo Hoyt’s timeline, working back from his death.

  “He walked down from Dalston,” said Guleed.

  There had been a timed and dated receipt from the Tesco Express on Kingsland Road—they found a plastic bag with the purchases underneath a nearby car.

  “One loaf extra thick sliced white bread, one pint of Tesco own brand semi-skimmed milk and a 700 ml bottle of passion fruit and mango flavored alcopop,” said Guleed sadly. “Made with real fruit juice.”

  According to the electoral register he lived alone, and there was no sign at his flat that he had regular visitors.

  I pulled up Google Maps and marked the location of the crime scene, the Tesco Express and the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. Leo Hoyt’s flat was roughly fifteen minutes’ walk southwards from the Tesco and about twenty minutes’ walk north of the SCC. You might hop on a bus up the old Ro
man road to Dalston if you wanted to visit Ridley Road market, but a Tesco Express? They were located all over London—there was one less than a hundred meters from the SCC itself on City Road. Nobody has a favorite Tesco Express.

  “Unless he fancied someone in the shop,” said Guleed.

  So checking that possibility went on the action list.

  Guleed listed his known friends, the majority of them dating back to his schooldays, and their known addresses and I marked them up. Most of them still lived in Essex, although two of them had moved further afield—to Chester and Hastings. All of them would have to be talked to and calling them went on to the action list. Stephanopoulos was likely to bounce some of the routine interviews back in our direction, so we both laid plans to be out of the office when she came in on Monday.

  Dalston has two Overground stops, Dalston Kingsland which connects to the east-west route from Stratford to Richmond, and Dalston Junction that runs south across the river. We were going to have to check the CCTV at both stations and when I say “we,” I of course mean some freshly minted DCs attached to Belgravia MIT. They’d work backward from the time stamp on the Tesco Express receipt, and if they spotted him emerging from the station we’d know which train he came on. And once they had that we could, hopefully, track him back to where he got on.

  Guleed made an appointment to meet with Seawoll and the case manager to discuss the new actions, and then wrestled the container of fritters from my grasp.

  “You’ve got an unlimited supply,” she said.

  So, bereft of fritters, I schlepped over to the Folly to see what my governor wanted.

  On my way in I took the opportunity to ensure the MSA was still in place. After all, this was its first extended test. And it relied on Foxglove, who had an alarming tendency to run out of the Folly and chase down random passersby who she thought had interesting faces. I’d installed some Mark II magic detectors around the custody suite, just in case. But, having watched the fine control Mrs. Chin exercised in her craft, I wasn’t sure she couldn’t stealth her way past those if she chose.

  Once I’d confirmed both she and Stephen were still safely banged up, I went in search of Nightingale, who I found in the number two teaching room—the one he and Abigail had transformed into a metal workshop. Besides the forge, the centerpiece here was a thick oak workbench which had been scored by over a century of careless metal bashing. Nightingale had cleared this and laid out what I recognized as the remains of the Mary Engine.

  He grinned when he glanced up.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Come and have a look at this.”

  I joined him in front of the table and he asked me whether I could sense any vestigia. I let my finger brush against a beautifully tooled steel and brass camshaft—there was a trembling, almost imperceptible, chime that I recognized as Mrs. Chin’s signare and the clockwork tick and willow tree smell that was pure Nightingale.

  But nothing else—no other vestigia at all.

  To be thorough I checked all the assembled pieces, and bent down to get my face as close as possible.

  “Oh, shit,” I said as the implications sank in.

  “Precisely,” said Nightingale.

  Metal retains vestigia very well. And, never mind what it was built for, the Mary Engine had been around enough magic to pick something up.

  “I don’t suppose the vestigia could have been hoovered up?” I asked.

  Revenants and vampires, in their quest to sustain themselves, could suck all the vestigia out of a locality. Along with, in the case of vampires, all the life as well.

  “That’s always a possibility,” said Nightingale. “But in this particular instance I think not.”

  “Which means this was—a decoy?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  And realistically only one person could have arranged to have a decoy in place on the top floor of hyper-secure Bambleweeny.

  “Skinner,” I said. “So he knew I was a plant?”

  “Did he?” said Nightingale, falling unconsciously into his teacher voice. “It’s never wise, Peter, to assume that events revolve around oneself. We’ve seen ample evidence Skinner was up against formidable opposition. He may have instituted the deception right from the start. The real Mary Engine may never have entered the building on Tabernacle Road at all. He may have been as utterly surprised at your disclosure as Mr. Johnson was.”

  “But the effect is the same,” I said. “Whatever the intention, and whoever the target was, the decoy worked on both of us. And the Librarians.”

  “And presumably whomever was the original target.”

  “Bugger,” I said.

  “Quite,” said Nightingale.

  Because Skinner was currently untouchable—hidden behind a wall of lawyers and accountants, many of whom were currently resident in other countries. In time Officer Silver could probably chip away at the money fortress, but her Judicial Disposal was over the policing event horizon and accelerating.

  Needless to say, we were not going to be her favorite people.

  “Well, you know what you do when you need to look something up,” I said.

  Nightingale’s lip twitched.

  “You ask a librarian.”

  * * *

  —

  My attitude to modernizing the Folly was that if you were going to break with tradition you might as well go all the way. So instead of the scarred laminated table so beloved of the Metropolitan Police and television crime dramas, our interview room was large, airy and devoid of tables of any kind. Instead, three metal chairs are bolted to the ground facing three equally bolted down chairs. The suspect—sorry, the interviewee—sits in the middle chair while their brief and/or appropriate adult sit on either side. With no table to hide behind, the interviewee’s body language is on full display. So any compulsive leg twitching, foot tapping or other obvious tell can be assessed by the interviewing officer. Just to add insult to injury, the middle chairs are placed five centimeters forward of the others—to make the subject feel that little bit more exposed. Or at least that’s the theory.

  It didn’t seem to be working on Mrs. Chin, although the duty solicitor, a pinched-faced white woman in a smart but easy to maintain navy skirt suit, obviously resented not having somewhere to rest her notepad.

  Once we’d finished the preliminary sparring, I brought out a heavy-duty clear plastic bag and held it out for Mrs. Chin to see. Inside were a selection of bits from the Mary Engine.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Mrs. Chin sighed, glanced over at her solicitor and said, “No comment.”

  I held the bagged remains out until they almost touched Mrs. Chin’s knees. The solicitor frowned at me and made a note, but Mrs. Chin only looked puzzled.

  “That can’t be,” she said, paused, and then reached out to brush her fingertips across the plastic surface. She glanced up and gave me a sharp look.

  “This is not good,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Mrs. Chin was silent for a moment before turning to her solicitor and asking her to leave. Having had long experience with police methods, the woman was reluctant to abandon her client and in the end it took Mrs. Chin’s best librarian glare to drive her off.

  Once the solicitor was gone, Mrs. Chin turned to me.

  “Have you heard of the Rose of New Orleans?” she asked.

  “Only that the Rose Jars are named after her,” I said. “And that she was active in London in the late eighteenth century.”

  “That’s it?” said Mrs. Chin. “That’s all you Brits know?”

  “That’s all I know,” I said. “I make no claims for anyone else.”

  “Well, she was a woman of color,” said Mrs. Chin. “Why should she be remembered here?”

  As opposed to the statues erected to her all over the States, I thought, but I kept m
y mouth shut because knee-jerk nationalism is something you’re supposed to keep out of the interview room.

  “Her name, as far as we know,” said Mrs. Chin, “was Rosemarie Louise Moreno.”

  Born in New Orleans to a prosperous “free colored” family sometime after 1750, she was definitely educated in Paris and inducted into the Académie Royale de Philosophie Occulte. Founded in 1682, it had—unlike the Folly, its British counterpart—enjoyed official royal patronage. Or at least enjoyed it until the royals had their heads cut off.

  “In a hundred years only twelve women were ever admitted to the Academy,” said Mrs. Chin.

  Rosemarie Louise Moreno was resident in Paris until the French Revolution shut the Academy down, after which the Librarians believed she surfaced in London.

  “Or to be precise,” said Mrs. Chin, “ a certain Rosemary of New Orleans is mentioned in the letters of Elizabeth Montagu.”

  The original bluestocking and famous society hostess. Certainly, this Rosemary was the right age, nationality and color—coincidence? The Librarians didn’t think so.

  They also thought she had brought certain techniques to London from Paris.

  “Some argue that she was building off her New Orleans magical heritage,” said Mrs. Chin. “But it’s much more likely that it was knowledge developed at the Academy.”

  Knowledge that was lost to the French when Napoleon reconstituted the Académie de Philosophie Occulte in 1804, but without its female members. And presumably never gained by the Folly because they were a bunch of stuffy white aristocrats.

  I personally think Mrs. Chin would have been surprised by the collection of chancers, quacks, mountebanks and dilettantes that coalesced into the Society of the Wise around the same period. But I wasn’t in that interview room to discuss comparative historiography.

  The knowledge brought over by Rosemary included the eponymous Rose Jars, although Professor Postmartin, who we outsource our erudition to, pointed out later that we had evidence of their use decades prior to the French Revolution.