Lies Sleeping

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Lucy was back on shift when we arrived outside Richard Williams’s room. He’d been put in one of the max isolation wards. Designed for ebola outbreaks and the like, it had its own atrium with a big white sink and a couple of jumbo waste bins with big biohazard symbols painted on their lids.

  Lucy was positioned in the corner of the room with a clear field of fire on anyone coming in through the heavy fire door to the corridor – the square window in the door had been blacked out with a sheet of cardboard. Someone opening the door would be in Lucy’s sights before they even knew she was there.

  ‘Warrant cards,’ she said as me and Guleed walked in.

  We’re trained not to argue with stressed people with guns – especially our own people – so we dutifully pulled the cards out of our jackets and showed her.

  ‘Your governor’s a bit scary, isn’t he?’ said Lucy as she checked them.

  She’d obviously been given the Nightingale lecture – that explained the increase in caution.

  ‘He’s a big softy, really,’ said Guleed with a straight face.

  ‘Of course he is,’ said Lucy, and settled back into her guard stance as we pushed open the inner door and went in.

  Richard didn’t find Lucy’s presence half as reassuring as we did.

  ‘He’s going to kill me,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop it.’

  We gave the usual reassurances, but everybody’s watched way too many films to trust our word. He was your classic amateur – your proper professional criminal would have been screaming for a brief and demanding to know by what right we were holding him against his will, but Richard had cracked before we’d stepped into the room.

  We’d done the caution plus two – which is when we caution you and then rush to assure you that you aren’t under arrest while we make it clear, through subtle non-verbal communication, that arrest was totally an option.

  Richard seemed happy to talk, eager even, as if none of it was important any more. Looking back, perhaps that should have raised more alarm bells than it did.

  We started with the basics, like did he know the current location of Martin Chorley.

  Richard swore he didn’t. It’s not like they’d been mates. But a friend of a friend had introduced them after he’d graduated from Oxford. He just did Chorley the occasional ‘favour’ in return for some lucrative contracts and a bit of cash under the table.

  What kind of favours? we asked.

  Providing video equipment, arranging to move packages around.

  ‘It didn’t occur to you that any of this might be dodgy?’ I asked.

  ‘It didn’t seem that dodgy,’ said Richard. ‘Not illegal as such.’

  I wanted to press on, but we had to pause there to get names, dates and as many details of the people involved in the ‘favours’ as Richard would admit to. It’s tedious stuff but it all goes into the great mill that is HOLMES 2, the better to grind the flour of truth and produce the wholesome bread of justice.

  And then, while they’re busy thinking about something else, you go down a different track.

  ‘Who was the friend who introduced you to Martin Chorley?’

  ‘Gabriel,’ said Richard. ‘Gabriel Tate. We were at Oxford together.’

  The other name on the film script I’d found.

  ‘Was he a Little Crocodile?’ I asked – keeping it casual.

  ‘No way,’ said Richard. ‘He was mad into Oxford Revue and OUDS.’

  ‘OUDS?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Oxford University Dramatic Society,’ said Richard. ‘He always wanted to write.’

  ‘But you were a member of the Little Crocodiles?’ I asked.

  Richard sighed. I think he’d already planned to tell us everything, but old habits die hard and we suspected that all the Little Crocodiles had been sworn to secrecy. Even perhaps with a little supernatural something to seal the deal.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t take the magic seriously.’

  Nobody does, I thought, until it smacks them in the face.

  Guleed asked if the Little Crocodiles had stayed in touch after graduation.

  ‘God, no,’ said Richard. ‘We just did it for fun – well, most of us. Some people took it more seriously than others.’

  We asked if he could remember the names of the ones who took it more seriously and then, because that was just as valuable, the names of the ones who didn’t. The analysts in the Annexe were going to be up all night cross-referencing and some poor sod was going to find their colourful university days knocking on their door and asking for help with its inquiries.

  ‘What’s the bell for?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘The bell?’ asked Richard.

  Ah, I thought, not that keen on telling us everything.

  ‘The bell,’ said Guleed firmly.

  ‘The bell.’ Richard shifted uncomfortably in his bed. ‘The bell is complicated. You saw the quotation written on the side?’

  ‘Something in Greek,’ said Guleed, who’d pioneered the use of intersectionality theory as an interview technique. Richard took the bait – no matter what the evidence, the posh ones always think they’re smarter than you.

  ‘It’s from Euripides,’ he said. ‘He’s a Greek playwright, an ancient Greek playwright, and he wrote a play called The Bacchae and it’s a quote from it. That’s why we nicknamed it “the drinking bell”.’ He gave us reassuring nods. ‘It’s about Dionysus, the god of winemaking.’

  We knew this, of course. Because I’d texted Dr Postmartin, our archivist and a noted classicist, who had not only recognised the quote but also criticised the translation. He’d then given me a ten-minute lecture on Euripides, The Bacchae and Dionysus that was really quite soothing considering I was less than twenty metres from an unexploded magical device.

  And Dionysus was the god of winemaking, fertility and the theatre.

  I didn’t miss that last little wrinkle, although looking back I possibly should have followed up a bit harder.

  Dionysus had your standard Greek mythological bio – son of Zeus, mortal mother who burst into flames while pregnant, sewn into his father’s thigh as a foetus, torn apart by Titans and then resurrected. Famously, his worshippers met in forests where they got pissed, laid, and tore unsuspecting small woodland animals apart. Unfortunately, anything that much fun is bound to be frowned upon by the ruling class. And so they got a stern lecture from Livy and were seriously suppressed by the Roman state.

  ‘What’s the bell for?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Richard.

  ‘You weren’t curious?’ asked Guleed.

  Richard gave a startled bark of a laugh that turned into a cough. I offered him some water but he waved me off.

  ‘Of course I was curious,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t ask questions – at least not more than once. Not if you knew what was good for you.’

  ‘Did Chorley say anything about the bell at all?’ I asked. ‘Anything that might indicate what it’s for?’

  ‘All he said was that it was a bell for ringing in the changes,’ said Richard. ‘To wake the nation.’

  ‘Which nation?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I don’t think he was thinking about the French,’ said Richard.

  I’m sure I had a snappy comeback, but I can’t remember what it was, because just then we heard Lucy challenge someone outside. Then, before I could react, there were three gunshots, astonishingly loud, a pause, and before we could react to that, two more.

  I was out the door first, with shield spell half prepared, but it was too late.

  Lucy stood in the far corner of the atrium, gunstock against her shoulder, barrel angled down to cover a figure on the floor. It was the Pale Nanny, dressed as a nurse, lying on her back gasping for breath while a dark stain welled up on the chest of her blue uniform tunic.

 
I dropped to my knees beside her and grabbed her hand and squeezed. Her skin felt hot, feverish, and she turned her head a fraction to stare at me. Her eyes were wide and uncomprehending.

  I was vaguely aware of Guleed going for help and of Lucy keeping a clear line of fire – just in case.

  You’re supposed to say the casualty’s name. They teach you that, to keep them focused on you, but they never say whether it actually helps. And we still didn’t know her name.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hey, what’s your name? You’ve got to have a name.’

  I saw her eyes focus on my face and she looked puzzled, as if surprised to see me there.

  ‘Is it Claire?’ I said – babbling. ‘Barbara? Aya? Maureen?’

  People were moving around me. There was a whisper of cotton against my shoulder, voices calling back and forth, all the jargon you don’t want to be hearing while in a prone position.

  ‘Tell me your name,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing happened that we can’t sort out.’

  Her lips parted and I thought she might be about to speak, but suddenly there was a blur of green and blue arms between us and, when they’d moved out of the way, she’d been intubated and masked. Her eyes still held mine for a moment and her hand squeezed one last time. Then her eyes unfocused and her grip went slack and she was gone.

  Just like that.

  I stayed where I was – mostly because I couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do – but Guleed shook my shoulder to get my attention.

  ‘Peter,’ she said. ‘Richard Williams is dead.’

  7

  Brand Loyalty

  Supernatural creature of the night or not, this was a DSI, death or serious injury, while in contact with a member of the police force and therefore triggered a mandatory referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission under Section 2 of the Police Reform Act 2002.

  That meant it was the Department of Professional Services that arrived to secure the scene and take statements while we waited for the notoriously slow IPCC investigators to get their arses in gear. I knew a couple of the people from the DPS from my many, many visits there and they all shook their heads upon seeing me.

  We all knew that this was going to be a full-on independent inquiry conducted exclusively by IPCC investigators, so we didn’t try and co-ordinate our stories or anything foolish like that. It was obvious to me that Lucy had done the right thing, both legally and morally, and any attempt to put the fix in would create more problems than it solved.

  Or at least that’s what I told myself, while I waited to be interviewed.

  The police don’t like being policed any more than your average member of the public does. But I’ve had more experience of being investigated than most officers my age and have learnt to sit still, be polite and give short, precise answers to any questions. Do not get clever, do not volunteer information and do not offer a helpful critique of your questioner’s interviewing technique – no matter how justified it might be.

  One bonus is that you get to keep a copy of the interview tape so you can hone your own interviewing technique, anticipate further lines of inquiry, or auto-tune your responses while you wait for your contact to get back to you.

  I did ask if there was any word on Richard Williams’s cause of death. He’d just been lying there, eyes closed, mouth open, left arm limp across his chest, the other lying by his side. There was no sign of violence that me and Guleed could see and definitely nobody else in the room.

  ‘We’re still waiting on the PM,’ the IPCC investigator told me, and sent me home.

  The IPCC were going to want a pathologist of their own choosing to do the PM. Never mind about what they were going to make of the Pale Nanny’s teeth, what were they going to make of Doctors Vaughan and Walid?

  So I went back to the Folly, which has the advantage of being both home and work at the same time. Guleed went home because she has, she says, a deep and mystical understanding of the work-life balance. A concept I once tried to explain to Nightingale with the aid of the big whiteboard in the visitors’ lounge. I think he grasped it in the end, and said he was all in favour as long as I understood that this in no way applied to apprentices.

  ‘And I’ve had quite enough time doing nothing,’ he said.

  The main shift in the Annexe was just leaving as I settled into the Tech Cave to see if I couldn’t tie up some loose ends. In deference to the spirit of the balance, however, I had a can of Special Brew while I was doing it.

  The Annexe had already produced an IIP check of Gabriel Tate and John Chapman and had determined that both of them had left the country a year earlier. Chapman had left no forwarding address, although Border Force had a record of him boarding a flight to JFK. Gabriel Tate had been much easier to track, not least because he had a webpage advertising his brand new company in Brisbane, Australia. I fired off a formal request for assistance to Australia, who would be fast asleep. It was the middle of the day in the States so I called a contact of mine at the FBI to see if she could help.

  I was going through the action list to see if there was anything I could do sitting down when I got a call from Dr Walid, who invited me to an autopsy. I said that I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my evening and called Nightingale to see if he wanted to come.

  ‘I think I’d rather stay here,’ he said.

  ‘Here’ being the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where Nightingale was keeping an eye on the bell just in case. I knew he was hoping that Martin Chorley would turn up in person to try and get his bell back. He’s gone one round with Chorley already and, whatever he says, he’s dead keen to go round two. And, as an operational plan, it had a certain merit. Providing collateral was kept down to – what, a two-to -three block radius?

  I doubted Martin Chorley would be that stupid – I also could hear a rhythmic metallic clanking sound down the line.

  ‘Are you forging?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought,’ said Nightingale, ‘that since there was all this good metal lying around, I might lay down some enchantments – just in case.’

  So it was off down the Horseferry Road to the Iain West Memorial All You Can Stomach Forensic Suite, which is state of the art and a good place to impress outside pathologists who have been requested by the IPCC. Out of tact I waited until the IPCC lot had buggered off, and as a result this was my favourite kind of autopsy. The kind where the conclusions have already been drawn and the bodies have all been sewn up and covered tastefully with a sheet.

  Dr Vaughan and Dr Walid were waiting for me in the space between the bodies with faint smiles that were only sinister because of the context. At least I hope it was the context. We started with the cause of death determination for Richard Williams.

  ‘We don’t have one,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘For what it’s worth, we can call it heart failure. But that’s not particularly useful, now, is it? Just about everything is heart failure when you get down to it.’

  Cause of death can be hard to determine even when the victim has a knife sticking out of their forehead, let alone with no visible wounds or gross pathology. Half a litre of Richard Williams’s blood was now distributed among labs from Euston to Cambridge, but unless you know what toxin you’re looking for, you can’t screen for it. Besides, I could tell from the ever more sinister smiles on Dr Vaughan’s and Dr Walid’s faces that they had a theory – and not one that involved a neurotoxin.

  ‘Voila,’ said Dr Walid.

  He twitched the sheet off Richard Williams’s leg to reveal a large abstract tattoo – almost one of those faux Maori sleeves, but not. The lines were too angular and yet very familiar. I thought one patch looked fresher until I realised that its darkness was not fresh ink but burnt flesh.

  ‘Burnt down to a depth of two centimetres,’ said Dr Walid. ‘We were just about to excise it so we could have a closer look.’

  ‘You can watch if you like,�
� said Dr Vaughan.

  I barely heard her because I’d just recognised the shape of the tattoo. A long upright stroke with two right-hand strokes going diagonally up.

  ‘G for Gandalf,’ I said.

  Specifically G in Tolkien’s imaginary Dwarvish runes or actually, as I learnt from a bit of googling, his imaginary early Elvish. I explained this to the doctors, which at least had the effect of wiping that sinister smile off their faces.

  ‘And I suppose you’re fluent in Elvish?’ said Dr Vaughan, by way of retaliation.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But G is what Gandalf stamps on his fireworks. Gandalf is the wizard, by the way.’

  ‘I know who Gandalf is, thank you,’ said Dr Vaughan.

  ‘I think we can assume that this is Martin Chorley’s work,’ said Dr Walid.

  He was right. Martin Chorley really did have a sick sense of humour. He’d once labelled a demon trap in Elvish script.

  ‘And the rest of the tattoos?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

  ‘It’s all Dwarvish iconography,’ I said. ‘From the films, though, not the books.’

  ‘We’re still waiting on the lab work,’ said Dr Walid. ‘But Jennifer here thinks there may have been metallic particles under the skin.’

  ‘A small demon trap, I was thinking,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘Or something working along the same principles. I’d like to see if your boss knows something about it.’

  I said I’d set up a meeting.

  ‘If there was a remote trigger of some kind,’ I said, ‘it must have quite a short range. Why else would Chorley sacrifice his killer nanny as a distraction if he didn’t have to get close himself?’

  Which meant someone was going to have to go back over the hospital CCTV looking for Chorley. More work for some unlucky sod in the Annexe, or perhaps lucky sod, if they had no social life and needed the overtime.

  ‘We’re calling her Charlotte Green,’ said Dr Vaughan primly.