Lies Sleeping

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The Goat and Crocodile was a classic flat roof pub, and the fact that it sat squarely under the brand new concrete viaduct that linked the London Overground to the station at Shoreditch High Street marked it out from the start.

  The sign looked even older than the pub, and in patches had been bleached blank by the weather. There was enough left to make out the image of a goat standing on its hind legs, head tilted upwards, jaws open as if screaming. The bleaching made it hard to see, but there was a suggestion that the goat had its forelimbs around the shoulders of figures to either side – as if it were dancing in a chorus line. There was no sign of the crocodile. The more I stared, the more I was convinced of the mad gleam in the animal’s eye. The paintwork was very fine and if ever a pub sign was ripe to be restored and hung in a museum, this was it.

  The interior décor of the pub, on the other hand, couldn’t have been dumped in a skip fast enough. In fact, quite a lot of it looked like it had been salvaged from skips in the first place. The floor was a patchwork of different coloured lino, faded blue in one corner, scuffed brown in front of the bar. A mismatched collection of fabric-covered benches, stools and repurposed wooden kitchen chairs were clustered around chipboard tables with genuine wood-finish laminated tops. The light coming in the dirty windows was a dusty brilliance on one side of the pub and cast the other side into shadow. In those shadows I saw two figures hunched over a table playing dominoes. The pieces clacking down in a demure English style. The players seemed to be the only patrons.

  The place couldn’t have been more demi-monde if it had changed its name to Biers and had a sign saying Do not ask for normality, as postmodernism often offends.

  The bar was the only solid bit of furnishing, an old-fashioned wooden pub bar with a brass foot rail that looked like it had been looted during the Blitz and cemented awkwardly into place by someone on work experience.

  As I walked towards the bar I felt a strange wave of vestigia – the smells of burnt earth and incense, and behind them a wash of sound like an outdoor market, with shouting and calls to buy and haggling, and the sound of anvils ringing like bells.

  I blinked and realised that there was a young woman waiting behind the counter. She was tiny and dressed in orange capri pants and a purple T-shirt with a scorpion printed on the front. I couldn’t tell if she was mixed race or Portuguese or something like that, but she had a straight nose and hair and light brown skin.

  And black eyes, and a disturbingly unwavering gaze.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ she said in an old-fashioned cockney accent.

  I introduced myself as Detective Constable Peter Grant – because I’m allowed to do that now.

  ‘Yeah, you’re the Starling, ain’t you?’ she said, and managed to work an improbable glottal stop into the word ‘starling’.

  I figured, if we were going to play it that way . . .

  ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘So who are you, then, when you’re at home?’

  ‘Where do you think you’re standing?’ she said. ‘From a topographical point of view?’

  The answer was, well, in the shallow valley carved by the second most important river in London.

  ‘So, you’re the Walbrook?’

  ‘You can call me Lulu,’ she said.

  ‘I know your mum. And a couple of your sisters.’

  A hush fell all around me and there was a sound like wind chimes – the bottles along the back of the bar tinkling into each other.

  ‘If you want to stay on my good side,’ said Lulu, ‘you might not want to be name-dropping in this pub – especially not those names.’

  My mum maintains a couple of rotating feuds with the vast cloud of family and semi-family that now stretches across four generations and eleven time zones. I know for a fact that one Aunty Kadi hasn’t spoken to another Aunty Kadi for six years, although, just to confuse people, she gets on fine with a third Aunty Kadi. Which is why most introductions in my family start, ‘This is your Aunty Kadi who lives in Peckham and married my half-brother from Lunghi, but is not the Aunty Kadi who said that thing about me which was totally not true’. Not all my aunties are called Kadi – some of them are called Ayesha, and one of them, on my dad’s side, is called Bob. The upshot of this is I’m well skilled at keeping my head down in the face of intra-familial wrangling.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said and, because I thought it might be a spectacularly bad idea to ask for a drink, I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.

  Lulu gave me a crooked smile.

  ‘High Fae?’ she asked.

  ‘You know,’ I said. ‘The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.’

  ‘You mean them what step between worlds?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?’

  ‘Them sort of people,’ I said. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not in here, squire,’ she said. ‘I run a respectable pub.’

  Later that evening, when I got Beverley alone in the big bath at her house, I asked about Walbrook.

  ‘She doesn’t mix with us,’ she said, leaning forward while I soaped her back.

  ‘Why not?

  ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘If she doesn’t want to mix with us we can’t exactly ask her why, can we?’

  ‘You don’t seem very curious about what she’s like.’

  ‘I am curious, but . . .’ She shifted and a wave of cool water from the other end of the bath sloshed over me. ‘It’s like the back of your head. Apart from after your yearly haircut, do you ever look at the back of your head?’

  ‘That makes no sense at all,’ I said, and used my toes to open the hot tap.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Beverley, and leant back against my chest. She had her locks all tied up on the crown of her head and they brushed my face, smelling of lemons and clean damp hair. ‘Some things we do are never going to make sense to you. They barely make sense to us half the time.’

  ‘What does your mum say?’

  ‘She says, “When you are older these things will be clearer. Now go away and stop bothering me with all these questions”.’

  ‘Helpful,’ I said, and managed to get the hot tap off before the bath overflowed.

  There was a pause.

  ‘If I tell you something can you keep it a secret?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Nah, nah, nah, you said that too quickly,’ she said. ‘I mean really secret. You don’t tell nobody, not your boss, not your mum, not Toby, not nobody.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Swear on your mum’s life.’

  ‘Not my mum’s life.’

  ‘Yes, on your mum’s life.’

  ‘I swear on Mum’s life I won’t tell nobody,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think Walbrook comes from my mum at all,’ said Beverley. ‘I think she’s way older than that.’

  ‘Older than Father Thames?’

  ‘Nobody’s that old.’

  9

  Two Plus Two

  Unlike most of the Folly’s cases, Operation Jennifer was a full-on major investigation with a full-on inside inquiry room stuffed with analysts and data entry specialists and lorded over by a case manager. The case manager keeps track of what goes into HOLMES and what comes out. It is their job to keep an investigation on the rails even when the senior officers have all been sidetracked by an unfortunate fatal shooting.

  Stephanopoulos used to do this job for Seawoll and our case manager, Sergeant Franklin Wainscrow, had been picked on her say-so. So it’s not surprising that when we came in on Friday morning fresh lines of inquiry were waiting on our desks in the visitors’ lounge.

  David Carey had been busy at the bell foundry, and while we were failing to save Richard Williams he’d been conducting a properly thorough interview with Dr Cony
ard. One of the questions he’d asked was – had Richard Williams supplied any special instructions or materials for the construction of the bell? Turns out that Richard had provided several sacks of aggregate for use in making the mould. One of the analysts had spotted this, linked it to the brick thefts and pushed it back to Wainscrow, who generated an action for Carey, which he fobbed off on to me over breakfast by pretending to need my advice. The cheeky sod.

  ‘You’d be amazed to know what they use to make the moulds,’ said Carey. ‘Not just the clay and the loam, which I get by the way, but manure?’

  ‘What kind of manure?’ asked Guleed, who was having an omelette with toasted crumpets.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What kind of manure – horse, cow . . . human?’

  ‘I didn’t think to ask,’ said Carey. ‘I’m not sure it’s relevant to this particular line of inquiry.’ He poked at his kippers a bit and sighed. ‘Anyway – one of the analysts wanted to know whether it was possible the aggregate had come from the bricks stolen from those archaeological sites.’

  I paused with a forkful of kedgeree halfway to my mouth and kicked myself for not thinking of that myself.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That would be interesting.’

  ‘Lucky for you,’ said Carey, ‘there was enough of the mould left to get samples.’

  ‘And?’

  Carey frowned down at his plate, shook his head and reached for his tea.

  ‘We’ll know when we get the results. Two weeks to a month, depending.’

  ‘Depending on what?’ I asked.

  ‘Just depending,’ he said, and pushed his plate away.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Guleed.

  Carey shook his head.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘No offence, Peter, but when this case is done I’m going back to my nice horrible murders.’ He shook his head. ‘I used to think that a six-week floater was horrible, but the shit you deal with . . . Fuck.’

  Toby, who had an instinct for abandoned breakfasts, materialised beside Carey’s chair and gave him the big eye special. Carey did a quick scan to make sure Molly wasn’t watching and put his plate on the floor under the table.

  ‘She hates it when you put the plates on the floor,’ I said.

  ‘Gets them clean though, don’t it?’ said Carey, retrieving his suddenly gleaming plate. He looked at me. ‘I reckoned that since you were already in with the archaeologists you’d want to take that over that line of inquiry.’

  See what I mean? The sly sod.

  I had another round of IPCC interviews where I got the distinct impression that they wanted rid of this case as fast as possible. Contrary to what you might think the IPCC, being understaffed and poorly resourced, try to avoid being assigned cases. Which is probably why the Police Federation tries to dump as many on them as they can – the better to educate them about the nature of most complaints. Still, even with my Federation rep glaring at them, the interviews took up most of the day.

  After which I headed back to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to spell Nightingale, who was practically camping in their foundry room and no doubt swapping manly stories about hitting pieces of metal together.

  While he went back to the Folly I sat guard in the corner of the furnace room, partly because of its good lines of sight but mostly because it was the only place I could get a decent Wi-Fi signal.

  Given that all three named authors had died suspicious deaths, I had another look at the PDF of the script fragment I’d found in Richard Williams’s home office.

  Judging by the surviving fifteen pages, Against the Dark was a historical horror or supernatural mystery. It started with a simple Saxon herder being stalked through the ruins of Londinium by an unseen horror before being horribly killed. We then cut to our hero, a chiselled, devil-may-care adventurer who tells the first person he meets that he’s from Ireland, presumably so they could cast an American, before neatly talking himself into a fight. He’s only saved at the last minute by the arrival of his companion, a blackamoor, whose dark skin confuses the Saxons long enough for a messenger from the king to rescue them. Although I ran out of script one page into their audience with the king, you didn’t have to be a master of TV tropes to see where the story was going.

  I didn’t think it was very good. But it wasn’t so bad that you’d kill the writers.

  I like the Dark Ages, Martin Chorley had said when he was monologuing in the basement of One Hyde Park. When a man could make himself a myth.

  Or, more precisely, the Post-Roman period. Or, if you like your history fast and loose, the Age of Arthur.

  You get a lot of stuff like this in an investigation – things that look suggestive but could just be coincidences. Which happen more often than people think they do.

  Yet . . . three people were dead – all of them suspiciously close together.

  Bev, who’d been doing lab work down the road at Queen Mary’s, turned up with takeaway, which passed the time until Nightingale returned and I drove her back to SW20 and spent the night at her place.

  I woke up at six in the morning to find that Nicky had arrived and had wormed herself into the covers between me and Bev. She smelt faintly of diesel oil and left mud stains on the duvet cover.

  ‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

  ‘Uncle Max let me in,’ she said, meaning Maksim, the former Russian mobster who’d forgone crime in favour of being Beverley’s one and only acolyte/handyman.

  Bev had reacted to Nicky’s intrusion by muttering, rolling over and going back to sleep.

  ‘I thought you were staying with Effra?’

  ‘Was,’ said Nicky. ‘But she won’t be awake for ages.’

  ‘Does she know you’re here?’ I asked, and Nicky gave a little uncaring shrug.

  ‘Want to play water balloons in the garden?’ she asked.

  ‘Is there any chance of you letting me go back to sleep?’

  Nicky solemnly shook her head.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just as soon as I’ve left a message for Effra.’ Flinging magical water balloons around was as good a practice session as Nightingale could ask for. ‘And I’ve had some coffee.’

  ‘Can I have pancakes?’ asked Nicky.

  Saturday I had off but I had to head back to the Folly Sunday morning. Now that I was properly PIP2 qualified, Nightingale felt I would have time to concentrate a bit upon my magical studies. Since he was still guarding the drinking bell, that meant Latin and Greek and two hours on the firing range alternating between perforating cardboard cut-outs and fending off paintballs.

  Since the police staff mostly work office hours, the Folly had started to feel a bit empty on the weekends. Sometimes the only sound was Toby barking or Molly humming a happy little tune as she tenderised a steak or beat a carpet to death. The place, at least, has thick walls to keep the heat out, and the magical library on the second floor gets a good cross breeze if you open the right windows. Abigail might be outpacing me, but my Latin’s got to the point where I just need a dictionary for the vocab. Cicero wouldn’t approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.

  Unlike the clergy of the Middle Ages, who were halfway to speaking Italian by the end of the fourteenth century. As soon as I went looking for the Post-Roman period I found some eighteenth-century references to Roger Bacon, old Doctor Marvellous himself. His Latin was remarkably good, so it’s just a pity that he wrote what I was looking for in Greek. For extra confusion it was called the Opus Arcanum, which is Latin. I’ve never really got the hang of Greek, but with the aid of a dictionary, a 1922 edition of Smyth and Messing’s Greek Grammar, and Google, I think I got the gist. I also scanned the relevant passage and sent it off to Professor Postmartin in Oxford.

  According to Bacon, the Prophetiae Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth had originally contained a section relating to the original foundation
of St Paul’s in circa ad 604 and, even more interestingly, the use of bells to either signal or usher in – the translation wasn’t clear – a change, or the fulfilment of a prophecy.

  A bell for ringing in the changes, Martin Chorley had called the bell in the Whitechapel foundry. Or maybe the fulfilment of a prophecy? A bell made with the help of ancient stones taken from pagan and Christian religious sites. Imbued with vestigia, perhaps.

  People had died to protect the secrets of that bell. I doubted that Chorley had it made to indulge a hitherto unreported interest in campanology.

  The trouble was that I was beginning to suspect that Bacon’s Greek was as bad as mine and, deciding that I had reached the limit of my Greek, I dumped it all on Professor Postmartin – who loves this sort of thing anyway.

  But, to keep Nightingale happy, I read a big chunk of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae – the bits about Uther Pendragon and his son Arthur.

  10

  The Mandate of the Masses

  The following Tuesday was taken up with the American first lady’s visit to a school in Whitechapel. The American Secret Service were already unhappy about having their second biggest target at a largely Muslim school in London’s most Muslim area. Even more so since the Home Office wouldn’t let them park a couple of Abrams main battle tanks on Commercial Road. We all had to work extra hard to convince them security was tight.

  The Commissioner requested on the spot Falcon coverage – just in case.

  ‘I didn’t want to ask him what contingencies he had in mind,’ said Nightingale. ‘I felt he might be a tad preoccupied.’

  And it might have been a fun day out for all, if it hadn’t been necessary to guard the bell at the foundry. Striking while everyone is distracted is Martin Chorley’s signature move, so I didn’t argue when Nightingale selected me for the job.