‘After myself you are the most powerful practitioner we have,’ he said. ‘If I am to cover the first lady then it follows that you should guard the bell.’
As we did the preliminary operational planning I had a clever idea about how we might turn the event to our advantage. Nightingale didn’t like it, but he couldn’t argue with my logic. Which is why Guleed has a selfie with Michelle Obama and I don’t.
Martin Chorley being the dangerous criminal he was, Nightingale insisted on some additional contingency planning. Which was just as well, because just as Michelle was going peak-first lady down the road, the bell began to sing.
I’d camped out beside the bell where a work table and several tons of heavy brass wrangling tools formed an improvised barricade between me and the main gates. There I’d made myself comfortable with a coffee and a takeaway from the Café Casablanca and waited for something to happen.
I tried to concentrate on my PIP3 reading list, Professionalism in Policing Level Three being what you do after you’ve qualified for PIP2 – the fun never stops in the Metropolitan Police. Unfortunately ‘Assessing scenes of crime for their potential to provide useful evidence’ kept on slipping out of my brain. Still, I was just grappling with the best practice for determining my restricted access area when I noticed that the bell had started to softly hum.
The hum of a bell is two octaves below its nominal pitch, and is one of the partial tones that give traditionally built bells that sense of depth when they ring. It’s why they ring out danger and celebration and the call to prayer and don’t go ting the way triangles do – however big they are.
I put down the book on Major Incident Room Standardised Administrative Procedures (MIRSAP) that I’d borrowed from Guleed and made sure I switched off my expensive main phone. By the time I was ready, the bell had started to sing quietly in the prime, tierce and quint partials, going in and out like a toddler playing with a wah-wah pedal.
And then Lesley was standing in the gateway.
‘Please, sir,’ she said, ‘can we have our bell back?’
‘What do you want it for anyway?’ I asked.
Lesley hesitated before entering the yard. She was pausing to seem less of a threat, and also to let her eyes adjust to the lower light levels inside the foundry.
She was dressed in a nondescript blue tank top, black leggings and blue trainers. She carried no bag, or anything else that I could see, and she let her hands hang, relaxed, by her sides. The foundry yard was littered with recently cast bells and crates and Lesley was forced to take her eyes off me to pick her way between the obstacles.
It was enough of a disadvantage that I could have probably knocked her down with a sudden strike, but we’d agreed I wouldn’t try. For one thing, probably isn’t definitely. For another, we had other options. And, finally, we thought we might have an opportunity. Well, I thought we might have an opportunity – everybody else thought I was bonkers.
I stood up to mask the movement my hand made as it came to rest on the old-fashioned walkie-talkie I’d Sellotaped to the table, low down enough so it would be out of Lesley’s eye line.
She stopped safely out of baton swing range and gave me a crooked smile. She was pausing for effect, but I wasn’t having that.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
There was a fractional hesitation before she asked, ‘Does what hurt?’
When she spoke, I noticed that the bell hummed in sympathy. You’d have to be listening carefully to be sure, but it was definitely there.
‘When you change your face,’ I said. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘No,’ she said, but there was a twinge around the eyes that made her a liar.
‘Show me?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘I showed you mine, remember?’ I said.
Back in that seaside shelter in Brightlingsea a million million years ago, when we were both on the same side. At least I hoped we were still on the same side back then. Otherwise? ‘Otherwise’ didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Peter, we don’t have much time here,’ said Lesley. ‘Let me have the bloody bell.’
This time the bell sang loud enough to make it clear it was echoing her words.
‘It’s fricking eight tonnes,’ I said. ‘How are you even going to get it out of here?’
‘Let me worry about that.’
‘Why do you stay with him?’ I said. ‘You got your face back.’
‘You think I did it for that?’ asked Lesley.
‘Fuck yeah, I thought you did it for that,’ I said. ‘I’d have done it for that.’
‘Liar,’ said Lesley – this time with real heat, and the bell sang loud enough for her to notice. ‘Fucking liar.’
‘Then why?’
I made sure I kept my left hand nice and still where it rested on the walkie-talkie. We didn’t want to get premature – not now. Not now.
Lesley’s lips twisted.
‘You think this is a game, Peter,’ she said. ‘You find out there’s a whole world full of weird shit, and you want to make a form for it. A form? Like you can control gods by ticking off boxes. Like you can make a procedure for dealing with monsters. You’re so blind.’
‘I’m just trying to do the job—’
‘You don’t even fucking know what the job is!’ shouted Lesley, and the bell rang in sympathy. ‘You used to make me sad listening to you talk about fucking engagement and fucking whatnot while the whole city turned to shit around us. Do you remember the baby, Peter? Do you even remember his fucking name?’
His name had been Harry Coopertown, and not saying it out loud hurt more than I expected – but I was so close.
‘So what are you saying?’ I said. ‘If you can’t beat them, join them?’
‘Yeah. Or maybe I’ve got something better. You ever think of that? Did that ever even occur to you, that I might have found something not just for me – you pillock – but for everybody. Including you and, you know, your mum, and maybe even Beverley.’
‘I doubt that,’ I said but, actually, I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t doubt that she believed it. I couldn’t trust the face, but her eyes were bright and confident.
‘Why are you stalling me?’ said Lesley. ‘Everyone is busy with Mrs Obama. SCO19 and Diplomatic Protection are fully deployed elsewhere. It’s just you and me, isn’t it?’
Her eyes flicked left and right, and then up and to the left to the gantry which would serve as the best vantage point for a sniper on overwatch.
She didn’t know – but she suspected.
‘We could slope off for a pint,’ I said. ‘You and me. Have a chat. Sort things out.’
‘It’s really simple, Peter. If you hand over the bell now he won’t have to make another one. Nobody else has to get hurt.’
‘How many people got hurt making the first one?’
‘None,’ said Lesley. ‘But that’s because nobody got in the way.’
‘I tell you what. You tell me what it’s for and I’ll think about it.’
I could actually feel my finger trembling as it hovered over the call tone button on the walkie-talkie.
‘Okay, I’m backing off now,’ said Lesley. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘You can always call me,’ I said as she backed away. ‘You know that, right?’
She gave me a strange half smile and stepped out the gate.
I ripped the walkie-talkie off the table and thumbed the push to talk button.
‘Anybody got eyes on?’ I asked.
One of the spotters had her, and reported that she’d been picked up by a moped, had crossed the main road and disappeared up Greatorex Street. I told everyone to maintain position just in case Martin Chorley tried to catch us off guard with an immediate follow-up.
Frank Caffrey climbed down from his position in the overhead gantry and
joined me. His SA80 assault rifle was cradled in the ‘ready’ position. I didn’t like using Caffrey’s merry band of reserve Paras for operations, but Lesley had been right about the overstretch on SCO19.
And Nightingale had insisted.
‘I’m not sure I approve of making a lure of yourself and casting yourself out into the water,’ he’d said, when I sketched out the plan. ‘I’m not sure the catch will be worth the cost.’
We’d let today’s Falcon deployment ‘leak’ onto the police intranet over the weekend. We knew that somewhere some bent bastard was leaking operational details to Martin Chorley. DPS were monitoring the intranet in the hope they might catch him, and then we were going to turn the fucker and use him or her to feed disinformation back to Chorley.
‘You should have let me take the shot,’ said Caffrey, who had a very straightforward approach to these things.
‘There’ll be a truck somewhere nearby,’ I said. ‘A flatbed with its own crane.’
And it would have been stolen first thing this morning from somewhere which wouldn’t notice it was gone until at least this afternoon. Martin Chorley was that methodical. But still, even he couldn’t account for the human factor.
My phone rang as soon as I turned it on.
‘Well?’ said Nightingale. I could hear excited cheering in the background.
I remembered the way the bell had resonated when Lesley spoke, and how she’d felt it worth trying to justify herself. If not a new face and all the sociopathy she could eat, then what was Martin Chorley offering her?
Something she believed in?
Something she might want me to believe in, too?
‘I think we’re in with a chance,’ I said.
11
Against the Dark
In the end we broke up the bell.
Dr Conyard’s lads did it with sledgehammers under his grim supervision while Nightingale watched for any supernatural funny business. It hadn’t been an easy decision to destroy something so special, whatever its true purpose. We considered bringing it into the Folly for safekeeping, but even the non-classically educated among us were thinking Trojan horse.
I suggested the British Museum, not least because it’s possible to lose just about anything in their storage area. They’re still looking for a mummy that went missing in 1933 – staff believe it was stolen but Nightingale said he’d always had a sneaking suspicion that it got bored one day and walked away.
‘I don’t think we want to expose the museum to the risk,’ he said.
There were any number of army bases and security installations we might have called, but they had even less experience with the uncanny than the British Museum. We’d also considered leaving it in place and using it as bait, but decided the risk to members of the public was too great.
So, smashed it was. And the scrap pieces transported to the Folly to be distributed widely to randomly selected scrap metal recycling companies across the Midlands. We weren’t going to take any chances with it being reassembled on the sly.
The bell sang with the first hammer and screamed with the second. And within the scream I heard a familiar laugh and the jingle of merry bells.
What do you want, you hook-nosed bastard? I asked in my head, but the third blow cracked the bell and Mister Punch fell silent. I turned away to find Nightingale watching me.
‘What did you hear?’ he asked.
‘Mr Punch,’ I said, and asked Nightingale if he hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head.
Oh, me and Punch go way back, I thought. We have a special relationship.
Kimberley Reynolds skyped me from the States to save money and to make the NSA work for their intercept. Behind her I could see a wood veneer headboard and horrible magnolia painted walls – so I guessed she was sitting on a hotel bed. Eating doughnuts, as it turned out.
‘Cleveland PD gifted them,’ she said, taking a bite.
The local police being caught up in a Department of Justice investigation into their tendency to shoot people first and make up answers second. All Kimberley had to do, she said, was roll her eyes and make it clear that if it were up to her they could shoot as many people as they liked.
‘I used to be a straight arrow,’ she said. ‘This is your bad influence.’
‘What was that whole unauthorised operation in our sewers, then?’
‘That,’ said Kimberley, waving half a chocolate frosted doughnut at the camera, ‘was me being patriotic and can-do under difficult foreign circumstances.’
‘So, did you find out about our John Chapman, then?’
‘Oh, you really don’t want him to be your John Chapman,’ said Reynolds. ‘I had a professor like him in college.’
Kimberley’s low opinion of Chapman was shared by his colleagues and most of his students. Sexually harassing his female students and failing to turn up for lectures was bad enough. But worse, according to his faculty colleagues, he was a snob and put on airs.
‘Acted like he was better than them,’ said Kimberley. ‘Refused to socialise.’
Never invited people round to his home, not even the gullible coeds. They had all been shocked by his violent death, of course, but had managed to get on with their lives regardless.
Kimberley had interviewed a lot of the students. A few had ended up in one of several economically priced motels – never more than twice. The general consensus among those so blessed was that John Chapman had given the impression that he was enjoying the experience even less than they were.
Six months following his death, Chapman’s rented apartment had been re-let and redecorated and nobody was sure where his personal effects had disappeared to. Luckily, Cleveland PD had recovered the contents of his car. Including his laptop.
‘Want to guess why that was a waste of their time?’ asked Kimberley.
I said I was all agog, but I wasn’t surprised when it turned out that the microprocessors had inexplicably been turned to sand. As had those in the gas station pumps, the cash register, the CCTV camera and the phone recovered off Chapman’s body.
‘And you remember the thing I told you about when I was last over?’ asked Kimberley. ‘The thing with the bear.’
That had been Kimberley’s first probable encounter with vestigia. And I knew from experience that once you knew what you were looking for, separating vestigia from the brain’s own random background noise got easier with practice.
‘You sensed something?’ I asked.
She had – although she wasn’t sure what it was.
‘Just something,’ she said.
I’d liked to have asked whether Kimberley could make it over the Pond for a bit of training. But we were still waiting for a determination from the Commissioner as to whether we could offer our newly minted vestigia awareness course to non-UK nationals.
Still, I trusted she had enough experience to at least know it when she felt it.
‘Would there really be a trace after six months?’ she asked.
I explained that concrete retained vestigia almost as well as stone or brick.
‘But the initial incident must have been significant,’ I said. ‘For you to sense it over such a wide area.’
My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn’t exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms. I’m particularly proud of ‘initial incident’ although ‘subjective perception threshold’ runs a close second.
‘Still, there were a couple of flash drives among his effects,’ said Kimberley.
USB drives can survive fairly heavy doses of magic providing they’re not plugged into a powered slot at the time. I asked if any data had been recovered.
‘Just a lot of unmarked essays and what looks like a TV script.’
‘What’s the title?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.
‘Against the
Dark,’ said Kimberley. ‘You interested?’
I’d never read a film script all the way through before, so I bounced off it a couple of times before I got used to the conventions. I got the distinct impression that there were two separate voices involved, one more concerned with historical accuracy than the other. Or at least it read that way. But what did I know of sixth-century London — except it didn’t really exist as such. At least not inside the Roman walls. I emailed a copy to Postmartin to see what he thought of it.
While the Saxon king Sæberht and his court spoke in that strange stilted non-contracted English that indicates the writer is trying to take his period seriously, Aedan, our intrepid Irish hero, and Cyrus, his black sidekick, spoke modern vernacular, cracked wise and were generally hip and groovy.
Straight to Netflix, I thought, if it ever got made at all.
And the three people listed on the front cover were all suspiciously brown bread.
In the script itself, something was killing locals that strayed within the London walls after dark. King Sæberht believes it to be an evil spirit, Oswyn his advisor says dangerous wild animal, while Mellitus, the papal emissary, agrees with the king but might just be saying that to get him into the baptismal font. Aedan and Cyrus, with the aid of the phenomenally strong yet stupid Henric and the major babe Hilda – it actually said that in the scene directions, MAJOR BABE – track down the mysterious killer.
It went all the places I expected it to go, although the set piece in the trap-infested maze inside the abandoned Temple of Mithras probably would have been exciting with the right director. The revelation that it was, in fact, an evil spirit rather than a creature, came at page seventy-six, shortly after Cyrus, to nobody’s surprise, copped it in a suitably heroic way. They trace the spirit to its lair atop the highest hill in ancient Londinium amid the ruins of the old Roman amphitheatre. There it turns out to have been created by the last of the Romans through mass human sacrifice in an attempt to repel the invading Saxons.
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