Oxley shrugged – conceding.
‘Now, Peter, what is it you wish to know?’
‘King Arthur,’ I said. ‘Camelot, Merlin, Excalibur – is any of it real?’
‘Define real,’ said Oxley.
‘Real as all this is real. As you and me are real, as the Old Man is real, as Nightingale is real.’
Oxley opened his mouth – no doubt to split another hair – but his wife cut him off.
‘Peter, love,’ said Isis. ‘Your goddess is trying to get your attention.’
The rain had slackened off and Beverley had appeared on the deck of the Pride of Putney and was beckoning me over.
After the rain, the day turned hot so suddenly that the grass practically steamed and some terrifyingly pale skin was suddenly exposed to direct sunlight. Although I did notice that a great deal of factor 30 and above was being slathered on children by parents and randomly concerned adults. Beverley and Abigail got straight into their swimming gear while I kept my nice lightweight summer suit on just long enough to pay my respects to Father Thames.
This involved me nodding politely and extending the respects of myself, the Folly and Nightingale to the rumpled old white man who was holding court with his cronies on the covered stern deck of his boat. Despite the old suit and the tarnished watch fob, there was no mistaking the intensity of the eyes, or the quick promise of hard work and open skies, or the smell of clean water and breath of the wind on your face.
‘Ave, Petre Grande, incantator. Di sint tecum et cum tuis,’ he said and there was a stir amongst the cronies, and a muttering – he’d never spoken to me in Latin before.
‘Tibi gratias ago, Tiberi Claudi Verica,’ I said, which is like from Chapter One of My First Latin Primer. Still, it got the job done and I backed out without engendering a major diplomatic incident or, worse, a major flood.
After that I stripped off, had Beverley slap the sunscreen on my back, and we headed off to do some community outreach. This involves meeting people, listening to their stories and memorising their names and faces in case you had to come back and arrest them at a later date.
Occasionally we’d catch a glimpse of Abigail in her pink, blue and red Nakimuli one-piece.
‘Did you get her that?’ I asked Beverley.
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘I think Fleet did.’
‘I didn’t even know she knew Fleet.’
‘Well, obviously she does,’ said Beverley.
I watched Abigail talking to a pair of kids her own age, a boy and girl, with the sort of patchwork tans that white people get when they spend summer outdoors in a variety of different tops.
She caught us looking and waved, and her two friends turned to stare briefly before returning their complete attention to whatever Abigail was saying.
‘If you’re like this with your cousin,’ said Beverley, ‘what are you going to be like with your own children?’
‘Oh, I’m going to be a tyrant,’ I said.
‘You’re so not,’ said Beverley, and took my hand. ‘Their poor mother’s going to have to do all the work.’
Later that evening we trooped over to an adjacent field where a circle of trestle tables had been arranged into a circle around a bonfire. I was seated next to Isis, three seats around from the Old Man himself. Beverley was on his other side, as befitted a guest of honour. As we ate I counted the sons of the Old Man and came up four short. Ash, I knew, was celebrating with Mama Thames in Wapping, but three of the heaviest hitters, Ken, Cher and Wey were notably absent.
‘We sent Ken to see Sabrina and Avon,’ said Oxley. ‘Cher is in Herefordshire seeing the three sisters, and Wey’s all the way up in Scotland making merry with the Tay.’ His grin was full of mischief. ‘We thought it was time to renew old friendships.’
‘What brought all this on?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that would have been you and your good example,’ said Oxley.
‘Cross-community partnerships,’ said Isis.
I resolved to keep my mouth shut for the rest of my life, or at the very least around Oxley and Isis.
At some point close to midnight, when we’d all drunk way too much, the Old Man of the River stood and silence rolled out across the company, so that even the children fell quiet.
He held up a straight half pint glass filled with something amber that was definitely not beer. We all climbed to our feet and raised our own glasses. He said something in a language that I suspect hadn’t been spoken widely since the Romans left Britain, and we all cheered and drained our glasses.
Once we’d sat down Oxley translated.
‘Roughly,’ he said, ‘eat loads, drink to excess, screw your partner’s brains out and be thankful the bard isn’t singing.’
‘You’re lying about the last bit,’ I said.
‘How dare you,’ said Oxley, and grinned.
After that, the toasts started in earnest and I couldn’t leave until I’d delivered mine. I’d been warned in advance, so I’d given it some thought. When it was my turn and I stood up and called for life, liberty and peace and managed to sit down before I added a hard-boiled egg to the list.
Shortly afterwards Beverley came and rescued me by dragging me off to her boat.
‘Before you’re too pissed to be useful,’ she said.
I was in the early stages of proving my worth when the first of the youths thundered past on the pontoon bridge. Five minutes later the next group sneaked past with exaggerated care and the giggling and clink of what sounded to me like underage drinking.
‘You think it’s an accident they’ve got their one fed moored alongside the kids’ field?’ said Beverley. ‘They’ll be sneaking and giggling past us all night.’
Later, at a fairly crucial moment, Beverley stopped moving and shushed me. I stifled a frustrated yelp with great willpower and lay perfectly still and listened.
It was more giggling and furtive movement, only this time one of the voices was far too low to be one of the teens. I was trying to work out who it might be when a woman laughed nearby – low, throaty, distinctively dirty.
‘Isis?’ I whispered.
I felt Beverley’s suppressed laughter as a ripple along her stomach and thighs.
‘Quiet,’ said the man, who I was reasonably sure was Oxley. ‘Or the Isaacs will get thee.’
This from a man who’d been around at the coronation of Æthelred the Unready, for all that he claimed he couldn’t remember the details.
Isis said something that was probably rude and there was a slow splash, which I recognised as a water deity falling into the river. I’ve watched Beverley do that, the water sort of rises up to cushion the blow and she goes in with just a ripple.
‘Bumptious fool,’ said Isis.
I was about to shout out something, just to startle them, when Beverley kissed me and I decided that I had better things to do.
Later, as we lay there with the cabin door open to catch the breeze, we heard Abigail talking to someone, although whoever it was pitched their voice too low for us to identify. I reckoned they were outside her tent. Occasionally there was a laugh and, horrifically, the ting sound of beer cans.
After a while the conversation died down and we heard the distinctive sound of a tent door being zipped closed. What we didn’t hear were any footsteps moving away.
I went to get up and check but Bev put her arm across my chest to stop me.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said quietly.
‘Just a quick look,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘What do you think the Summer Court is for?’
‘But I’m responsible,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Beverley. ‘And so is she.’
‘People say that, you know,’ I said. ‘But if something goes tits up suddenly everybody wants to know why the polic
e weren’t intervening at an earlier stage.’
‘Relax,’ said Beverley, ‘She’s Nightingale’s apprentice and my friend. People round here would gnaw their own foot off before doing anything with Abigail that Abigail didn’t want them to.’
It still took me a while to drift off.
One other thing the Summer Court was definitely for was creating a tremendous mess. But fortunately Father Thames, or more precisely Oxley, had organised a clean-up crew almost entirely composed of pale young men with hangovers. Soon the drifts of bottles, pink and blue plastic wrappers, and happily unidentifiable organic leftovers were scooped up into bin bags and dumped in an open-topped river barge that had arrived first thing that morning.
‘The Old Man took the Keep Britain Tidy campaign very seriously,’ said Oxley, as we supervised the hard work from deckchairs and drank coffee.
‘Where’s Isis?’
‘Upstream with the rest of the women,’ he said. ‘It’s customary.’
The women and girls got the morning off during the clean-up and traditionally bathed in the symbolically clean waters upstream.
‘And have a picnic and gossip and all the other important mysteries of the better half. It’s all to do with the female principle and that style of thing.’ He caught my expression. ‘This is what Isis tells me. I just keep my eye on the boys and mind my own business.’
Which was obviously the theme for the weekend.
Oxley’s current mental state, caught in that transition between alcohol and caffeine, would have made it a good time to get some social history questions answered – including what the hell they did before coffee was invented – but my phone started ringing. It was Stephanopoulos.
‘City of London need you to do a Falcon Assessment at a crime scene,’ she said.
I asked whether it was urgent.
‘As soon as pos,’ said Stephanopoulos.
Nightingale was obviously busy and neither Guleed or Carey were qualified.
‘I’m on my way,’ I said.
I called both Bev and Abigail, but their phones went straight to voicemail
I asked Oxley to ask Beverley to bring Abigail home. Then I showered, changed and drove back to London.
And if you’re the woman who, driving along the A4155 that afternoon, found herself inexplicably picking up a pair of hitchhikers and driving them all the way into London, I’m really, really sorry – I assumed Beverley would organise a lift from one of her relatives.
13
Probably Goat
Despite being the oldest part of London, the Square Mile has a faster architectural churn than anywhere else in the city. Occasionally it throws up something exciting, innovative and modern . . . but mostly it doesn’t. Architects like a bit of volume, and financiers like floor space. The easiest way to maximise both is to build a cube – which is why ninety-nine per cent of all office buildings are boxes with lobbies.
The New Bloomberg building on Queen Victoria Street was going to be yet another steel-framed Metsec affair but was still half built, with plastic sheeting protecting the gaping open sides. Once the cladding and windows were in, I suspected it wasn’t going to be much of an aesthetic improvement on the 1950s modernist boxes it was replacing. The site hoarding had ‘Improving the Image of Construction’ signs at regular intervals along its length.
Great, I thought, now can we do something about the construction itself?
It was obviously my month for wearing hard hats because the site safety officer insisted I put one on before pointing me at the temporary staircase that was bolted onto the front of the building. I nodded at the City of London PC on guard at the bottom and made my way up.
Waiting for us at the top was a small Vietnamese woman in a City of London Police uniform with SC tags denoting that she was a special constable. This was Geneviève Nguyễn who had attended the Sorbonne and worked in Paris before being headhunted by Citigroup and moving to London. There she had discovered that any citizen of the European Economic Area could swear an oath, don a uniform and enforce the law with the same authority as their full-time colleagues.
Most of the time she stays in her expensively tailored suit and helps with fiendishly complicated fraud cases, but the City Police allow her out on the streets once in a while. She also triples up as their liaison with the Folly, and was one of the first officers to do my patented vestigia awareness training seminar. She didn’t seem at all fazed by my wild talk of ghosts and magic – which made me really suspicious. But all she would admit to was having heard a lot of stories from her grandmother.
‘Definitely a spy,’ said Carey, who never knowingly left a stereotype unturned.
‘What gives her away?’ asked Guleed.
‘It’s the accent,’ said Carey.
Police tape marked out the entry point for the single designated approach to the crime scene, although fortunately it was booties and gloves only – not the full noddy suit.
‘What’s your opinion of animal sacrifice?’ asked Nguyễn as she led me further into the building.
‘Well, I’ve got this annoying dog,’ I said.
‘I meant from a Falcon point of view,’ said Nguyễn, who had once patiently explained to me that while she understood that the British liked a laugh, she didn’t understand why we felt it necessary to inject it into every single aspect of life, no matter how inappropriate.
‘Ritual sacrifices can have power,’ I said. ‘But usually it’s something for the RSPCA.’
We went down an unfinished corridor smelling of cement dust and cut plasterboard and out into a large internal room whose newly fitted walls were a pristine white. Except for the blood spatter on every vertical surface. With some on the ceiling as well. It was definitely blood – the reek gave it away – and some of it had been sprayed with force.
It was hard to sense anything over the smell, but I got flickers of shouting and feet stamping and a rhythmic pulse like a mad rave heard from far away.
‘Tell me this is animal blood,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Nguyễn. ‘We confirmed that this morning. That is why you’re talking to me and not Major Crime.’
‘We’re not that far from Smithfield,’ I said – the market being a good source of offal, blood, and the sort of high-spirited young people who might think flinging it about was a bit of a laugh.
I noticed that the floor was devoid of any spatter, and Nguyễn noticed me noticing.
‘They put down plastic sheeting,’ she said.
But hadn’t covered the walls – had things got out of hand? I took a longer look at the spatter on the walls. I’m not an expert, but some of it looked like arterial spray – and there were voids. Or rather there were what looked like spaces outlined by an initial spray – that of blood projected out by a beating heart – which had then been partially filled in by blood spattered later. If you squinted you could see that the voids formed the outlines of people standing against the walls when they were hit by the spray.
‘Did you find anything else?’ I asked.
‘Not much.’
Nguyễn took me over to where the portable finds were spread out in separate bags on a sheet of white paper.
‘Not much’ summed it up. A couple of condom packets, a pill that had lodged in a crack at floor level and looked suspiciously like MDMA, and samples from some non-blood stains on the walls – mainly alcohol.
‘Red wine,’ said Nguyễn.
‘Do we know what kind of animal?’
‘Tentatively goat,’ said Nguyễn. ‘The lab will confirm it in a couple of days.’
The ravers had turned up for a party and had taken forensic countermeasures in the form of plastic sheeting on the floor and policing up condoms, bottles, cups and anything else that might contain useful DNA. Even vomit, pointed out Nguyễn, although uniforms were out searching the surrounding streets
in case someone had thrown up on their way out or was careless enough to dump their rubbish nearby.
So they’d . . . What? Gathered together with booze and condoms and slaughtered a goat. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like they’d sprayed the poor thing’s blood around like champagne from a winner’s podium.
And then, covered with blood, they’d danced and shagged the merry night away.
Actually, it might have just been shagging since nobody had reported any loud music.
But you get vestigia at the site of any major live music festival, and even a little bit at your average gig. The Notting Hill Carnival generates enough potential magic that I know of at least one Russian witch who takes part in the parade just to bask in it. Football matches, Christmas shelters, village fêtes and light engineering works all generate magic – or at least enough to make Toby bark. Which is my current benchmark.
It was the forward planning and the forensic countermeasures that were dragging at my attention.
That and the goat.
‘This was definitely a ritual,’ I said. ‘Why here?’
‘It’s probably the temple,’ said Nguyễn. And then, off my blank look, ‘The Temple of Mithras.’
‘I thought it was over on Victoria Street?’
Contrary to what people think, I haven’t actually memorised the location of every historically significant building in London. I did know that the temple had been discovered nearby during construction work in the mid-1950s and moved to another location for preservation. There’d been talk of moving it back, but I thought that had been kiboshed by the great financial collapse five years back.
‘Bloomberg took over the project,’ said Nguyễn. ‘Reinstated the complete return.’
Back to its original location on the banks of the Walbrook.
‘I wonder if they’ll put in a labyrinth,’ I said out loud, by accident.
Ritually sacrificed goats, Roman temples, bells infused with the power of ancient stones, and dead wannabe scriptwriters.
‘Do you think this is one of yours?’ asked Nguyễn.
‘I don’t know yet. Are you going to pursue the vandalism side?’
Lies Sleeping Page 10