I made a note of the uncle and tried not to sigh out loud – yet another loose thread.
‘And Tony Harden?’ asked Nightingale.
‘John got him interested,’ said Gale. ‘I taught him most of what I know.’
‘Did you warn him of the dangers?’
Patrick Gale blinked.
‘What dangers?’
‘Practising magic can damage your health,’ I said.
Patrick Gale’s façade cracked and he gave me a horrified look.
‘You’re joking,’ he said.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘That’s what killed Tony Harden.’
Gale glared.
‘You told me he died of natural causes,’ he said.
‘He did,’ I said. ‘Caused naturally, by his overuse of magic.’
‘Surely it should have been characterised as death by misadventure?’ said Gale. ‘You withheld information from the coroner’s court.’
‘Would you rather we had pressed for “unlawful death”?’ asked Nightingale. ‘As his teacher you were surely negligent in not informing him of the risks.’
‘But I didn’t—’ Gale started, but wisely thought better of it.
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘We may return to that point later, but first there is the matter of the Dionysian ritual you officiated at last Saturday. You did officiate, didn’t you? I can’t imagine you left that honour to somebody else.’
Gale nodded to show that he had, in fact, taken the role of priest in the bacchanal and I had to stop myself from asking him to verbalise it for the recording. But of course there was no recording because, legally, this was not happening.
‘Have you been indulging in these revels long?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Since 2011,’ said Gale. ‘And they’re not just a rave.’
He flicked his eyes at me to emphasise how different it was from the drum and bass and MDMA fuelled excesses indulged in by the urban youth of today. Chance would be a fine thing, I thought.
‘We have a serious purpose,’ he said.
Nightingale ignored that thread because when the suspect – I mean interviewee – wants to talk about something it’s a good idea to frustrate them a little bit. That way you can get more later than they intended. Seawoll calls it the ‘fuck all the cows’ interview approach.
‘Would you say they have a magical effect?’ asked Nightingale.
Gale’s face lost some of its habitual caution.
‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘You could sense it lighting up the group as if it was jumping from person to person.’ He said he could feel it flowing back and forth like a wave bouncing off the edges of a swimming pool. ‘Only instead of fading away, it grows stronger with every wave. Tremendous rush.’
‘And the sex?’ I asked.
‘I’ve heard that’s extraordinary too,’ he said.
‘Heard?’
‘My wife,’ said Gale, ‘wouldn’t approve. And she doesn’t like to attend herself.’
‘She doesn’t like the goat?’ I asked.
‘She’s a vegetarian,’ he said.
‘Does the sacrifice actually make a difference?’ I said. ‘Have you tried the ceremony without it?’
‘Again,’ said Gale, ‘I have no doubt that it increases the mystical potency of the ritual.’ His initial fright was wearing off and he was getting his bottle back. ‘Have you not tried it yourselves?’
‘This ceremony . . .’ said Nightingale, before I could answer. ‘This ceremony that you claim has a serious purpose. Might we ask what that is?’
‘It keeps London from falling into riot and disorder,’ said Gale. ‘And I might add it seems a great deal more effective than the police in this regard.’
John Chapman had suggested as much after the summer riots in 2011.
‘He thought they were suspiciously sudden,’ said Gale. ‘He suggested that there might be a spiritual malaise behind the violence.’
And when Chapman said ‘spiritual malaise’ he wasn’t thinking that the youth of today should respect their elders and go to church more often. He meant a vengeful evil spirit that had plagued London since the Romans.
‘And this seemed credible to you?’ asked Nightingale.
‘That the riots were inspired by a vengeful spirit? No – quite apart from the fact that the underclass riots on a regular basis, it wouldn’t explain why the riots spread to other cities. What changed my mind was that madness in Covent Garden. I knew some of the people involved and they were not the Molotov cocktail set.’
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.
They were the sort of people who have people to do their violence for them, I managed not to say. And not without some effort, I might add.
‘And you’ve held the ritual ever since?’ asked Nightingale.
Patrick Gale confirmed that they had been holding it twice a year– at the summer and winter solstices. John Chapman had suggested these would be the most effective dates. When Nightingale asked where Chapman had acquired all this esoteric knowledge, Gale told us about the Paternoster Society.
‘A secret society,’ he said. ‘They used to meet in a house on Paternoster Row near St Paul’s, until it was knocked down.’
And suddenly annoying little alarm tweets and chirps were going off in my head.
Where the pattern-welded Anglo-Saxon Excalibur candidate had been dug up. Next to the cathedral where John Chapman’s script – and I was pretty certain that all the historical stuff in the script had been his – situated its revenant spirit.
What we desperately needed was some accurate historical sources.
I thought of Father Thames, who was old enough to remember. But when a person like Oxley cautions you about the potential cost of asking such questions it’s wise to pay attention. Especially when you’d just thought of a cheaper alternative.
‘Now, Mr Gale,’ said Nightingale. ‘We reach the question of what to do about you.’
‘I’m not sure there’s any legal action you can take,’ said Gale, with unwise smugness.
Nightingale tapped his fingers and I felt the tick, tick, swish of a subtle little surge, and Patrick Gale sat up straight in his chair and clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him.
‘Mr Gale,’ said Nightingale, ‘the practice of magic is hard and dangerous. Sooner or later you will overstep your bounds and suffer serious injury or death.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Now, I for one would be perfectly happy to let you to take the consequences of your own actions. Were it not for the fact that you have already proved yourself a danger to others.’
‘In what way—’ started Gale.
‘You were Anthony Harden’s teacher,’ said Nightingale. ‘And you were negligent in his training. Now he is dead. I’m afraid that I’ll have to require you to place yourself under my authority for remedial training until such time as I judge you both competent and responsible enough to practise magic on your own recognisance.’
Patrick Gale was doing a good impression of a stunned kipper, but I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave – a chance to be exclusive.
‘Or else?’ he asked.
Yes please, I thought, let’s have option two.
‘We take steps to prevent you practising again,’ said Nightingale.
Cake or death, I thought – three guesses as to which it will be.
‘What sort of schedule are we talking about?’ asked Patrick Gale. ‘For the training, that is.’
But me and Nightingale didn’t get a chance to follow up on the mysterious Paternoster Society, or even get preliminary intelligence on the list of revellers that Patrick Gale had been pleased to supply, once Nightingale had released his hands long enough to write it down. Because we had to prepare for Operation Strong Tower – the Met�
��s all-singing, all-dancing terrorist attack exercise. In this we were expected to use our ‘special’ abilities to conjure up some bangs and whistles to keep the response teams on their toes.
‘Frightened, but not too frightened,’ were our instructions.
It did mean, during a refs stop at the Café Rouge on Kingsway, that I got a chance to tackle Nightingale about his sudden bout of, to my mind, inappropriate inclusiveness.
‘So what?’ I said. ‘We keep them happy with a clubhouse and a secret handshake?’
‘Well,’ said Nightingale, ‘I hadn’t thought of a handshake, but if you think it might help . . .’
‘These people are not to be trusted,’ I said.
‘These people?’
‘People with . . .’ I looked over at the poshest person I’ve ever met and tried to think of the right word. ‘Entitlement,’ I said. ‘They’re not good at keeping promises.’
Nightingale paused with a forkful of salmon halfway to his mouth and gave me an amused look.
‘Entitlement?’ he said.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘We can always have them swear an oath,’ said Nightingale. ‘Something suitably restrictive and modern – like the attestation you fellows took to become constables.’
Historically, the constable’s attestation mainly concerned his loyalty to the monarch. But the modern version includes a promise to be diligent, honest, respect human rights and apply the law without fear and favour. The new wording has been known to provoke hilarity amongst old lags and defence lawyers.
‘Think of it as one of your community outreach programmes,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the resources to enforce our will upon them, but perhaps we can bribe them into submission with Molly’s cooking.’
‘You think that’ll work?’
‘It has with everyone so far.’
I frowned.
‘You don’t approve?’
‘I was thinking of the paperwork,’ I said. ‘Assuming that Patrick Gale is not the last stray we’re going to round up, at the very least we need to develop a safety programme to ensure they don’t melt their brains by accident.’
‘That at least we can leave to Abdul and the irrepressible Dr Vaughan,’ said Nightingale. ‘Who no doubt will be delighted to extend the boundaries of their empire of information.’
‘Their knowledge base,’ I said.
‘I believe that’s what I said.’
‘We can’t keep this up,’ I said. ‘It’s unsustainable.’
‘Which of the many unstable aspects of our professional life are you referring to now?’
‘The secrecy surrounding magic,’ I said. ‘Leaving aside our lack of statutory authority, and the fact that the public have no say whatsoever in our conduct of operations.’
‘They do in a general sense,’ said Nightingale, ‘through the office of the Commissioner and, beyond him, the Home Office.’
‘That is not accountability,’ I said.
‘Do you think the general public would make good decisions?’
‘That’s not the point. Sooner or later this stuff always comes back to bite you in the arse.’
‘You think we should make ourselves public?’ said Nightingale. ‘Step out of the cupboard and into the limelight?’
‘I think we need to be ready for when it happens,’ I said.
‘No other nation has officially acknowledged the existence of magic, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘It might be prudent to ask yourself why.’
14
Human Intelligence Assets
On the following Friday we had a meeting in the incident room of the interested principals to discuss the progress of Operation Jennifer. Seawoll wasn’t happy with the progress we were making. Or, more precisely, he was even less happy than he usually was.
‘We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster,’ he said, which went into the official log as – DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive.
He wanted to go after Lesley.
‘We know Chorley needs her for whatever evil bollocks he has planned,’ he said. ‘If we grab her he’s got to be fucked – right?’ He went on to argue for a proactive intelligence-led approach going forward.
‘And we know how to find her because she’s knocking off that nasty little scrote from Notting Hill,’ he said.
Utilising known human intelligence assets.
Easier said than done.
We had a ‘bloody expensive’ surveillance team on Zachary Palmer, which he evaded every so often to slope off for what we assumed was a sly leg-over with Lesley May.
‘We’re going to look well stupid if he’s doing something else,’ said Guleed.
‘A negative result is almost as good as a positive one,’ said Seawoll. ‘Isn’t that so, Peter?’
I hate it when people listen to what I say in an inappropriate fashion.
We hadn’t pushed the issue before in the hope that Zach, who was skittish – literally supernaturally skittish – would get complacent about losing his followers. The idea was that we would use a second, presumably even sneakier team, to track him after that.
‘That would be me and Sahra,’ said Nightingale. ‘With Peter and David as perimeter and backup.’
It had to be Nightingale in case we did run into Lesley.
‘I have the best chance of a clean capture,’ he said. ‘But I need Peter to deal with any external interference.’
‘Do you think that’s likely?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
‘It’s always best to be prepared,’ said Nightingale.
Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones adopting a proactive posture going forward and, before we could get the operation out of the planning stage, Martin Chorley raided the MOLA finds warehouse at their HQ in Islington.
Given the previous thefts from archaeological sites we’d guessed that MOLA was a likely target. I’d left half a dozen magic detectors around the building and warned their security, so they’d double-checked their alarms and cameras. We’d also done a discreet review of everyone who worked there, but none had a connection with Martin Chorley or the Little Crocodiles. Then we organised an alert so that CCC would call us to any incident within 400 metres of the address.
But in the end it was all over before me and Nightingale were out the garage door.
It’s less than three kilometres from Russell Square to the MOLA offices. At three in the morning you can do it in less than ten minutes in the Jag with blues and twos and Nightingale driving. I spent the journey wondering, as I always do in this situation, whether it’s possible to retrofit an airbag into the Jag’s glove compartment.
Technically that would be an act of gross sacrilege, but it wouldn’t half have been a comfort when my governor practically stood her on two wheels turning off the City Road just by the drive-through McDonald’s. At least we had a couple of modern light-bars fitted either side of the windscreen so we no longer had to worry about the spinner flying off the roof on the corners.
MOLA HQ was one of a string of old warehouse/factory units built in the functional brick shithouse style made popular in the Victorian era, when the main safety criterion for an industrial building was that it didn’t fall down when the steam boiler exploded. Since those happy days of light touch regulation such fripperies as fire exits and safety ladders have been added, but it still showed a stern yellow brick face both front and back.
Its recessed loading bay was guarded by a sturdy metal gate and the roll-up door to the main warehousing was solid, durable and fastened down with heavy-duty padlocks.
We were expecting devious and subtle. We weren’t expecting our perpetrators to tool up with a bin lorry to wrench the gates off, a JCB to clear a way through the interior yard and smash down the roll-up door, and a fucking skip lorry to carry away just over a to
n and a quarter of archaeological material.
‘Lesley’s behind this,’ I said, as we watched forensics futilely checking for trace evidence. ‘She guessed we’d be primed for subtle, and she knows we’re don’t have the resources to guard against this kind of direct approach.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Nightingale.
A heavy fog had rolled in just as the sun rose – the rubbish truck was a grey shadow halfway up the Eagle Wharf Road, where it had been abandoned. The heavy-duty chain was still trailing behind it, with the gate attached. Later we learned it had been stolen the previous evening in Walthamstow. There weren’t any matching theft reports for the JCB, so we might have to trace that through its serial numbers. The skip lorry was nowhere to be found.
Guleed arrived with coffee and word that Stephanopoulos had turned up at the Folly and was getting people in early. She was wearing a brand new black silk bomber jacket with a white tiger and Chinese writing embroidered on the back and sleeves in white and gold, and black jeans. Not her normal work wear – I wondered if she hadn’t had a chance to change.
‘Were you out last night?’ I asked.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ she said.
I would like to know, but I knew better than to ask intrusive personal questions of colleagues – especially when I also knew that Beverley would ferret out the latest gossip before the end of the week.
‘Ah, Sahra, excellent,’ said Nightingale when he saw her. ‘I think they’re ready for us to go in.’
Like the building site with the goat sacrifice, it was generally considered forensically sufficient for us to wear booties and gloves. Although Guleed obviously didn’t want to risk her nice new jacket, and left it in the Jag. And not on the back seat, either – where Toby tends to ride.
‘This is not what I expected from a museum,’ she said, as we followed the forensically cleared path through the space where the gates had been.
The covered loading area beyond had been crowded with red plastic picking bins full of rubble and those heavy-duty white PVC buckets with safe-seal lids. Some of them had burst as they were pushed aside, to spray sand and water across the dirty cement floor.
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