He smelt of kebab and wet wool and hunting and woodsmoke.
He let go of me and held me at arm’s length.
‘I knew you couldn’t stay away.’
I was standing on the bank of a river, too narrow to be the Thames proper and choked with reeds. It was a warm overcast day and away from the water the land rose up to be crowned by a couple of thatched roundhouses. Around them spread a confusion of herb gardens, drying racks, woodpiles, small animal pens and stretches where the ground had been worn away to dusty brown tracks.
On the far bank of the river the reeds gave way to trees that might have been oak and ash and alder, and all the other varieties that Beverley says would cover the lowlands of England if given half a chance.
‘Welcome to Thorney Island,’ said William Tyburn. ‘Much better without that pseudo-Gothic monstrosity, isn’t it?’
Not as monstrous as his yellow and red check trousers, I thought, although the matching red and brown check tunic had faded to the point where it no longer hurt the eyes. He had grass stains at the elbows and his front was wet with sweat. The lowly man of the soil look was undone by the torc around his neck – a thick braided coil of gold terminating in clusters of what might have been snakes, or perhaps ropes or tangles of tree roots.
‘Checking the bling, right?’ said Tyburn. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Got it totally tax free too.’
The humidity was stifling and I tried to catch my breath.
‘I’d offer you a beer. But since you’re not actually here that would be a bit of a waste, wouldn’t it?’ He grinned and stepped back and opened his arms. ‘How else may I serve you, or are you stuck under another pile of rubble?’
‘I was looking for some information,’ I said.
‘Indoor plumbing,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be big.’
‘And you wonder why no one takes you seriously.’
‘Seriously enough that you’re willing to pony up to have a chat.’
‘What did you think of my gifts?’
He cocked his head at an angle and then shook it slowly from side to side.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But giving what it must be costing Mrs High and Mighty Muckity Muck to send you here, they must have been princely gifts indeed.’
Which was interesting – it never occurred to me that transporting me here, wherever here really was, would cost Lady Ty any effort. Something to think about later.
I still felt out of breath and tried to inhale deeply a few times to clear the feeling. As I did, I noticed a young white woman in a garish blue and red check skirt and a loose linen tunic emerge from one of the roundhouses. She paused to glance curiously at me before nodding and smiling at Tyburn. They exchanged pleasantries in a language that could have been Ancient British, or gibberish for all I knew, before she headed off over the rise in the land.
A pale young white man emerged from the same roundhouse, and gave me a similar once-over to the woman before waving a greeting to Tyburn and heading down the slope towards the river a few metres downstream of where we stood.
This man was dressed only in what were obviously his last chance trousers, the pattern faded to a light yellow and orange check and held up with a rope at his waist. He was shirtless and torcless and carried a metre-long spear over his shoulder. The tip, I noted, had a sharp point and double barbs and, judging from the whitish yellow colour, was carved from bone.
‘Do they know who you are?’ I asked, as we watched the young man wade into the river with his spear.
‘Of course they do,’ said Tyburn.
The young man took position a couple of metres out into the current with his spear held ready to strike.
‘Who you really are?’ I said.
‘They have a much better idea of who I really am than you do.’ He held up a hand for silence. ‘Wait for it,’ he said softly and then – ‘Fish!’
The spear darted down and I saw it tremble as it struck. The young man leant on it to make sure of the kill before squatting down to pick the fish up with both hands. It took both hands because the thing was half a metre long and thrashing around vigorously. The young man wrestled it through the reeds and up the slope to dry ground, where he plonked the fish down, picked up a rock and gave it a good smack. Then again, to be on the safe side.
Once he was satisfied that the fish was thoroughly dead the young man hoisted it to his shoulder and, pausing a moment to nod respectfully at Tyburn, carried it up towards the houses.
‘What, no tribute?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Tyburn. ‘What do I want with a bit of raw fish?’
‘Really?’
‘Really. I’m going to pop up later and have it when it’s cooked.’
‘Cushy,’ I said. ‘What does he get out of it?’
‘He got a fish, didn’t he?’ Tyburn grinned. ‘A big fish.’
‘And you arranged that. How?’
Mysteriously,’ he said. ‘Have you ever considered becoming a god?’
‘I don’t fancy the hours.’ I wondered if he was being serious.
‘You get a free fish supper.’
There was a tightness in my chest that no amount of breathing seemed to help. I had to fight not to pant – soon I was going to have to fight not to panic.
‘You can’t catch your breath,’ said Tyburn, ‘because you’re asphyxiating. Sooner or later Her Sewership will have to pull you out – hopefully before you go into cardiac arrest.’
‘You could have told me this earlier,’ I said.
He smiled and opened his mouth but I cut him off – I’d wasted enough breath already.
‘Mr Punch,’ I said. ‘Where did he come from?’ I held up my hand. ‘And if you try to tell me he has roots in the sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte you’ll be amazed at how long and painful the comeback will be.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘It’s a sad story.’
‘I’m the police, Ty – they’re all sad stories.’
‘Imagine this geezer,’ said Tyburn. ‘Let’s call him Cata. He’s like the fifth living son of an Atrebates sub-chief, a bit weedy, raised to ride a chariot and handle a spear but you know, heart’s not in the family business. Only a teen when the Romans turn up and his old man goes, “Fuck me, underfloor heating? That’s the shit for me!” and they all go Roman faster than a Basildon girl in an Italian discotheque.
‘Now you’re thinking about the glories of Rome and all that painted stonework, but back at the start London’s essentially a bridge with a shanty town attached. Not that it stayed that way with all the silver denarii flooding in to pay the legions. There’s three legions, remember. That’s fifteen thousand men, plus the same again in auxiliaries. And these are professional soldiers, so they like to get paid. And they like to get fed too. Anyone with a couple of acres, a plough and some manpower is going to be coining it. Hence docks and warehouses and some tasty new dwellings. Still wattle and daub, but in the modern rectangular style where you get separate bedrooms and don’t have to shag in front of the rest of the family.’
‘And what were you doing when all this was going on?’ I asked.
‘I was pretty incoherent with rage at the time,’ said Tyburn, ‘but this isn’t about me, this is about our boy Cata, who’s sharing a Greek tutor with his brothers and learning reading, writing and rhetoric. Now, his brothers spend their lessons dreaming of their chariots and the thunder of the hooves. But Cata finds being Roman is the dog’s bollocks. He loves the poetry, loves the gear, loves the not-having-to-literally-fight to maintain your position. Rest of the family, they’ve got the house and the togas but it’s still all piss-ups, hunting and mistreating the servants.’
‘So our boy hightails it up the brand new road to Londinium back when, like I said, the place is still basically a muddy field with a bridge attached to one end. Rents some land cheap,
builds a house and pops down the market to buy himself a foreign wife from Alexandria. Sets himself up as a middleman between the clueless Roman importers at the docks and the dangerous barbarian-infested hinterland that is Britannia. Foreign wife speaks Latin and Greek and drops four sons and two daughters into his lap.
‘Ten years later he’s holding literary salons with guests from Alexandria, Ephesus and the Capital itself.’
A band was tightening around my chest but I didn’t dare break the flow.
Tyburn gave me a fierce look. ‘He liked being a Roman and he was good at it,’ he said. ‘Loyal, but not too loyal, to his patron. Generous with his largesse, diligent in his religious observance. He was a true believer in law and order and all the benefits that brings a man born without a taste for violence.
‘And then one day it all came crashing down. Queen Boudicca lost her rag and led an army of seriously pissed-off Trinis and Iceni down through Camulodunum and ground the useless fucks of the Ninth into dog meat – literally, in some cases.
‘Londinium is next. But Suetonius, the governor, doesn’t fancy his chances so he buggers off with what troops he has and leaves the city to its fate.’
I’ve read my Tacitus – I knew what was coming next.
‘The gentry always buggers off when London’s in danger. Have you noticed that?’ he said. ‘One whiff of the plague, some social unrest, a bit of light bombing and the Establishment’s nowhere to be found.’
Like your dad, I thought. But darkness was seeping into the corners of my eyes so I told him to get on with it.
‘But our boy Cata still had faith. That the army would defend him and his family. That civilisation would save him.’ Tyburn spat on the ground. ‘He ended up there in the Temple of Jupiter with the rest of the schmucks when the Iceni rolled up and murdered the lot of them.
‘The story is that they killed his wife and his kids in front of him to force him to reveal where he’d buried his treasure. Slowly and painfully, and one by one, because they didn’t believe him when he said nothing was buried. Because he believed in truth, justice and the Roman way – so why would he need to bury anything? By the time they were working on his youngest they say he was laughing like a madman. And this started to freak them out, those big, brave Iceni child-killing warriors, so they slit his belly and left him to die.’
The pain in my chest had driven me to my knees, but it was the waves of panic that made it hard to concentrate.
‘You’ve met Oberon and the Old Soldiers like him,’ said Tyburn. ‘You know what can happen when a lot of people get slaughtered in the same place. All that life has to go somewhere.’
Sometimes, about one time in a hundred thousand, it goes into some poor sod dying slowly of something long and terminal . . . and he becomes something else. What, we haven’t worked out. But something stronger, tougher and very long-lived. Only I didn’t think that’s what Tyburn was talking about.
There are some people who believe that if you spill enough blood you can make yourself a god. They’re right, if you don’t mind dying yourself. I had a horrible feeling that I knew where this story was taking me.
‘So up he sprang. A thing full of hatred and mad laughter, capering through the ashes of the city. Because order did not save his children. Law did not save his wife. And, for all his faith in the gods, they did nothing.
‘But London is London, because of the bridge and the river and the north and the south. And so, almost before the ashes were cool, the Romans were back with their groma and their chromates – drawing their straight lines across the world. Cata set about them – waylaying them in the dark places, whispering in the ears of the drunk and foolish, rocking the boats and kicking over amphorae full of fish guts.
‘But they were a canny people, the Romans. The Greeks would have debated and written a play. His own people would have abandoned the city and made it a place of sacred fear. What do the Romans do?’
‘They made him a temple,’ I whispered.
‘They did more than that,’ said Tyburn. ‘They made him a god. They were clever that way, the Romans. They could do things you modern boys can’t even dream of. And they weren’t afraid to slit the occasional throat to do it.’
And suddenly it all made sense: the bloody awful screenplay, the bacchanalia, that terrible unfocused rage, and the reason I was able to pin him to the bridge. Or at least pin his memory to the memory of London Bridge.
And then I thought of the skulls that the archaeologists had pulled out of the Walbrook. The ones they thought might be victims of the Boudiccan sack of Londinium. And I thought of a seemingly young woman with the sort of light brown complexion and features you might inherit if your dad was an ancient Brit and your mum was Egyptian.
Older, Beverley had said.
I used the last of my willpower to pull myself upright and face Tyburn.
‘What happened to his youngest?’ I asked.
‘You what?’
‘You said they killed his wife and kids but they were just starting on the youngest when Cata went mad,’ I said. ‘So what happened to the youngest?’
Sir William grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me close so he could whisper in my ear.
‘They slit her pretty little neck,’ he said. ‘And threw her in the Walbrook.’
He pushed me away and I fell into darkness.
And blinked and opened my eyes in an ambulance.
Allison Conte was riding with me and the paramedic – she didn’t look happy.
‘I don’t care who you think you are. None of you lot are going down alone,’ she said. ‘Ever again.’
She’d found me in the side access alcove, sitting up against the ladder and totally out of it. She’d had to get some help and a rope to drag me out.
The paramedic wanted to know if I’d smelt or ingested anything prior to losing consciousness.
‘Woodsmoke,’ I said.
‘Could have been carbon monoxide,’ said the paramedic, because medical professionals are willing to spout total bollocks in order to maintain their air of authority. Nothing like us police, who always tell it how it is.
Generally speaking, if you’ve fallen unconscious for any length of time it’s best to go to a hospital for blood tests and shit. So I asked them to take me to UCH. Then I called Guleed and arranged to have her pick up the Hyundai, and then go ahead to the hospital so Dr Walid could meet me in casualty. They were used to our ways there by then, and the casualty registrar didn’t blink when Dr Walid ordered up a ton of phlebotomy. He’s hoping to get an understanding of the biochemical consequences of my ‘encounters’, as he calls them. He’d have popped me in the MRI, but it was solidly booked with emergency cases that day.
Bev called me and asked if I wanted her to pick me up. But my mind felt heavy and slow, as if it was waterlogged, and I wanted time to myself. I fell asleep in one of the treatment cubicles and didn’t wake up until after midnight, when the first wave of closing time casualties arrived and the unit needed their cubicle back.
I let them check my pupil reaction and blood pressure and then I walked back to the Folly.
I was walking past the quiet darkness of the park in Russell Square when the full implications of what I’d learnt sank in.
Mr Punch was a god.
And Martin Chorley wanted to sacrifice him.
18
The Tea Committee
We held a meeting of the ‘Tea Committee’ in the upstairs reading room. The Tea Committee consisted of me, Nightingale and other interested parties – in this case Postmartin and Dr Walid – where we thrashed out any policy involving magic. This was part of our agreement with Seawoll to avoid ‘distracting’ his ‘normal’ officers from doing their jobs properly.
‘I have come to the conclusion,’ Seawoll had said during one of the initial planning meetings that set up Operation Jennifer, ‘that i
f we can’t ignore it we can at least paint it pink and make it somebody else’s problem.’
Dr Vaughan was off on a training course, but Abigail was allowed to be present as long as she kept her mouth shut and took notes.
We quickly reached the consensus that despite Lesley’s opinion – that it would make the world a better place – we didn’t think anything good was going to come of offing Mr Punch. Especially now we knew he was a god.
‘Although wouldn’t dealing with Punch in and of itself be a bonus?’ asked Dr Walid, who’d spent a gruesome six months working with what was left of his victims the last time the little hook-nosed bastard had made his presence known.
I pointed out that, according to Bev, half the ecological disasters in the world occurred when people removed ‘pests’ or predators without thinking through the consequences.
Nightingale asked for an example, but all I could think of offhand were snakes – which if eliminated lead to a massive increase in rats. Even as I said it, I had a horrible feeling that I’d read it in a fantasy book once – possibly a comical one.
I looked over at Abigail, who tilted her head to one side in a disturbingly Molly-like way and made a note.
‘You believe removing Punch might disrupt the . . .’ Dr Walid paused to dredge up his medical Greek. ‘Eidolonisphere.’
Nightingale smiled.
‘From Eidolon,’ explained Postmartin. ‘Greek for phantom or ghost – indeed quite apropos because it commonly refers to a phantasm or ghost that possessed the living.’
‘Eidolosphere scans better,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know what effect it will have, but in any complex system if you change one variable it can cause unpredictable effects throughout that system.’
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘But this doesn’t get us any closer to learning what Martin Chorley wants to happen.’
‘We need to find a way to turn Lesley,’ I said.
Nightingale sighed.
‘Our last attempt in that direction hardly went well,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘If anyone knows what Martin Chorley is up to, then it’s going to be her.’
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