Lies Sleeping

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Both me and Chorley knew only one person who could work with that kind of precision, and while Chorley was looking around desperately for Nightingale, I hammered him with an impello-palma combination that should have sent him screaming across the road.

  Without even looking at me, Chorley threw up a hand and my own spell bounced back to smack me in the face. I got a taste of my own signare even as I was knocked off my knees and rolled into the gutter. I tried to get to my feet and slammed my head hard against an anti-parking bollard.

  My ears were ringing and my sight was blurred, but not enough so I couldn’t see Chorley turning to give me his full attention. But suddenly he was sucked backwards off his feet and through an arched window in the office building opposite.

  Then I heard footsteps coming up the road and Nightingale barked:

  ‘On your feet, Grant.’

  And I was up before the command had consciously registered. Nightingale had put himself between me and the broken window.

  ‘Secure the van,’ Nightingale ordered, and suddenly he was surrounded by a globe of rippling air. I didn’t see what happened next, because I had my orders.

  I ran towards the van, sitting on its axles at a crossroad. I could see Walbrook was still in the back, chained to the big fun tin of quality badness, but the driver had climbed out and was lurching towards me.

  He was a big white man, dressed in the traditional garb of the working villain – black cargo trousers, navy blue sweatshirt and donkey jacket, all of it bought from jumble sales and charity shops the better to be discarded when the job’s done. He had a big square face, no neck, and arms about the same size as my thighs.

  He frowned at me and shook his head.

  My extendable baton was back with the flipped car, as was my pepper spray and my speedcuffs. Some backup would have been nice about then, but we’d all agreed the tactics in advance.

  It’s the calculus of magical combat. Masters fight masters while the apprentices secure the objective.

  I flicked a water bomb into his face – a nice cold one, thanks to a trick Varvara taught me – and followed up by kicking him in the bollocks. He gave me a puzzled look and then fell flat on his face. It turned out later that he’d been suffering from a concussion, probably picked up when the wheels came off the van, so it’s probably just as well I hadn’t smacked him on the bonce with a baton.

  I would have paused to put him in the recovery position, but his boss chose that moment to emerge from the courtyard beside the office and fling a quarter of a ton of metal bars – the remnants of the courtyard gate – at Nightingale. The bars twisted as they flew until they formed a whirling mass like the blades of a turbine two metres across.

  Despite being within charging distance of Chorley, I didn’t dare engage. He might be concentrating on Nightingale, but I thought it was better to hop back in the van on the basis that what the eye can’t see the mad supernatural psychopath can’t hit.

  Walbrook’s eyes were open by then, and she pointedly stared at me and then at the purple tin of doom. Chorley had a knack for being insanely over-prepared, and it didn’t surprise me to find that he’d stashed a bolt cutter in a toolbox behind the front seats. Moving carefully to avoid the tin, I cut the chain around Walbrook’s wrist and it had barely hit the floor when she dived over the front seat.

  ‘Stay down,’ I said, and cut the chain holding the tin to the ceiling.

  It dropped with an ominous clonk, as if it was much heavier than it had any right to be. I checked out the back and found Martin Chorley staring at me with an expression that was perversely similar to one my mum used to use.

  ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said.

  The tin did a little jump for emphasis, as if something were bouncing up and down inside.

  I swung the bolt cutters like a golf club and whacked the vampire tin in his general direction. Typically he did an elegant pivot out of the way, but before he could complete his turn his clothes turned white with frost and I saw the hair on his head actually freeze. I assumed this was Nightingale proving that I wasn’t the only one who’d been getting tips off Varvara. I’d have loved to have stood around and watched but, still having my orders, I followed Walbrook over the back of the front seat and out the passenger door.

  I found Walbrook furiously pulling the last of her chains off.

  ‘Where is he?’ she said when she saw me. ‘I’m going to have him.’

  Behind me there was a sudden furnace blast of heat and I saw orange flames reflected in the shop windows behind Walbrook. I ran forward and bore her down to the ground as the van behind me exploded. If that was Chorley getting rid of his frostbite, then it was certainly overkill.

  A bit of van – I learnt later it was a panel torn off the side – wiffled overhead and smashed the windows of the YCN gallery. Walbrook rolled me off – not angrily, but firmly, and we both cautiously got to our feet.

  The van was missing from the chassis up and coils of dark smoke were rising from its blackened engine block. Through the smoke I could see Nightingale dragging the – hopefully unconscious – body of Chorley’s goon away from the fire. He was using his left arm while keeping his right free for action. I did a scan for damage and while there was smouldering debris over a wide area and plentiful broken windows, none of the buildings were on fire.

  I spotted the tin of quality vampire five metres up the road.

  There was no sign of Martin Chorley.

  I asked Walbrook if she could put the fire out.

  She grimaced at me, then sighed and gave a little contemptuous wave with her left hand. I felt a weird sucking sensation from the remains of the van and a wind briefly rushed past my head. A small cloud formed over the van like a time-lapse weather sequence and it proceeded to bucket down for five minutes.

  ‘Nice,’ I said.

  ‘Haven’t done that in a long time,’ said Walbrook. ‘Where’s the Nightingale going?’

  He was sprinting up Rivington Place. Which, I decided, showed a touching faith in my ability to control the scene.

  It doesn’t stop there, of course, with the villain getting away and you looking stupid. I was already talking to Stephanopoulos on my back-up back-up burner phone before Nightingale was out of sight. Chorley went through the back wall of the old Shoreditch Town Hall, but Nightingale had to break off pursuit when he spotted some civilian casualties and had to stop and look after them. No doubt this was what Chorley was counting on.

  Later, as we reconstructed it from CCTV and eyewitness accounts, he calmly stepped out the front of the town hall and flagged down a random Nissan Micra and was driven away. When we traced the driver via his vehicle’s index he had no memory of picking up a strange man at all, and grew quite distressed when we showed him the footage. Thus Chorley was out of the area before we even had a perimeter established.

  The rest of the emergency service circus arrived at our smouldering van less than a minute later. Seawoll, who never passes up a good shouting opportunity, turned up in the first wave, leaving me with only two immediate problems:

  What to do with our bumper fun tin of vampire; and how to stop Walbrook walking off before I had a chance to interview her.

  Fortunately Frank Caffrey turned up with the bomb squad, whereupon they performed what Caffrey was careful to explain was not a controlled explosion.

  ‘You use a controlled explosion to disrupt a device’s detonator,’ he said. ‘This is more like a contained incineration.’

  This involved a big box made of composite armour and surrounded by sandbags into which I, since I stupidly volunteered, used a big pair of tongs to drop the tin. Even with the gloves provided, I felt the horrible not-real cold of the tactus disvitae creeping up through my hands. Needless to say, I was pretty fucking swift. The tin rattled as I swung it over the box, getting frantic just before I dropped it.

  Was th
ere some sentience there? I wondered. It certainly seemed to sense its fate.

  The phosphorus charge had already been laid. It was just a question of plonking on a lid, adding more sandbags, and retiring to a safe distance. Caffrey gave the nod, the bomb squad pressed the button and there was a slightly disappointing wumph sound. A couple of seconds later, wisps of smoke rose from the edges of the box.

  Caffrey said we had to wait at least half an hour to make sure it was cooked, so I went back to see if Walbrook would talk to me. There was a slight delay as I was set upon by militant paramedics, who insisted on dressing the various scrapes I’d forgotten about until they reminded me.

  So, stinging with antiseptic, I found Walbrook up the road with Guleed in the back of Franco’s Takeaway, which had, by strange good fortune, been allowed to stay open despite being just inside our public exclusion zone.

  ‘Funny how that worked out,’ said Guleed around a mouthful of pasta salad.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked Walbrook, whose brush with vampirism hadn’t seemed to dent her appetite none. She nodded and continued to fork spaghetti into her mouth.

  ‘How’s David?’ asked Guleed, and I realised I had no idea where Carey was.

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll check in a minute.’

  I wanted to get a statement from Walbrook, but I realised that my notebook was in my jacket pocket left, probably, somewhere down Shoreditch High Street. I asked if I could borrow Guleed’s, but she gave me a funny look.

  So funny that I started laughing uncontrollably. When I couldn’t stop myself I clamped my hand over my mouth and went outside. The thing about having a stress reaction is that, even when you know you’re having a stress reaction, that knowledge doesn’t seem to do you any good. I found a doorway across the road where a parked police Sprinter van blocked the view from the rest of the street.

  I leant against the door and let myself slip down until I was sitting with my back to it. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing until the giggles stopped. The edge of my Metvest was digging into my armpit, so I unfastened it and pulled it off. Underneath, my nice blue pinstripe shirt was soaked with sweat and ripped at the elbow. Probably beyond even Molly’s skills.

  I closed my eyes again and focused on my breathing. One thing learning magic does teach you is finding your centre, or at least making an educated stab at its location. There was a smell like burnt hair and ground nutmeg and a sensation like wind blowing through the trees. And the coppery taste of blood in my mouth which, on later examination, turned out to be actual blood from where I’d split my lip. There was nothing coherent, nothing I recognised as a vestigium – it was all just random neurons firing in my brain.

  I felt that if I wanted to, I could probably get up and walk around and make a good impression.

  ‘Peter?’

  I looked up to find Guleed looking down at me.

  ‘I’ve called Dr Walid,’ she said. ‘He’s coming down to collect you.’

  ‘Not UCH again,’ I said.

  Guleed was unsympathetic – she pointed out that it was policy that any officer involved in a serious Falcon incident where they may have been exposed to hazardous materials or practices was required to undergo an evaluation by an appropriately trained medical professional.

  I groaned and said I didn’t want to go.

  ‘You probably shouldn’t have written that policy, then,’ she said. ‘Should you?’

  ‘What about Nightingale and Carey?’ I asked, because misery loves company.

  ‘Carey already went in an ambulance. Nightingale is waiting around on the off-chance Chorley pops up again. Plus he’s an inspector and gets to do what he likes.’

  ‘And we need to get a statement from Walbrook,’ I said.

  ‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m the one with a notebook.’

  Bits of my back, arm and leg had woken up to the fact that my hysterical moment had passed and that rational attendance to their needs might be forthcoming if only they could get my attention.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘And make sure you ask whether King Arthur and Merlin were real people.’

  ‘King Arthur?’

  ‘Just make sure you ask.’

  Guleed shrugged.

  ‘If you think it’s important,’ she said, and reached down to help me up.

  23

  The Long Weekend

  ‘I want you to take the weekend off,’ said Dr Walid.

  ‘But it’s only Thursday afternoon,’ I said.

  ‘Then take a long weekend off,’ said Dr Walid.

  But I cheated and went to the briefing on Friday morning.

  ‘I thought you had the weekend off?’ asked Guleed as I sat down beside her. ‘I wish I did.’

  David Carey didn’t make an appearance – obviously he’d been given the same instructions I had. Only he’d been sensible enough to follow them. Stephanopoulos gave an after-action report on our attempted godnapping/deicide/behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.

  I had a strange fancy that my head was made out of rubber and that words were bouncing off them. From what meaning I caught as they boinged past I gathered that, while we’d utterly failed to catch Martin Chorley, we’d managed to thwart – Stephanopoulos actually used the word thwart – his plans. And that was always going to be a good thing. The various analysts reported their progress chipping away at his financial empire, and Nightingale explained what to look for in a vampire infestation. Me and Guleed knew this bit off by heart, so engaged in a bit of competitive doodling while we waited for him to finish.

  ‘Go see your parents,’ Nightingale told me as soon as the briefing broke up. ‘They’re worried about you.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because your mother phoned me this morning and told me so,’ he said.

  So home I went, where my mum promptly made me go out shopping with her down Ridley Road market so I could carry the bags back, including a massive tin of palm oil. I told her you can get palm oil just about anywhere these days, but she claims that Ridley Road is the only place you can get authentic Sierra Leonean palm oil. Shopping with my mum in Dalston is never fast, because every five metres there’s an aunty or an uncle or cousin or old friend. There will be stopping and chatting and asking after people. Plus she made me get a haircut in the barber off Kingsland High Street where they’d cut my hair from the age of five onwards and had, as far as I could tell, never changed the décor in that whole time.

  It was also probably the same guy asking whether I was still police and telling me that he’d heard crime was going down and didn’t that mean I’d be out of a job, but not to worry: he could have me trained up in no time. Finally – a respectable career.

  Since my mum was watching, I got it shorn short but with a nice even fade on both sides. Outside, my head felt far less rubbery and way more naked, so I treated Mum to tea and cake in a Kurdish bakery before dragging a month’s worth of food home. Since I’d carried most of it, I stayed for dinner, where my dad talked about an offer he’d got to record a vinyl exclusive and what did I think.

  I thought I might want to run some checks on the characters making the offer. But what I said was that it sounded brilliant. And I asked whether it was going to make any money. My dad actually looked a bit puzzled at the concept, but judging from my mum’s expression she had that side of the business in hand.

  Bev turned up while I was doing the washing up and insisted on being fed, which meant I had to do two sets of washing up while she and Mum had a conversation pitched too low for me to hear. Not that I was trying that hard to eavesdrop, honest.

  Afterwards we sat on the sofa and cracked open some of the emergency Red Stripe Mum keeps stashed behind the rice barrel. Because just for once there was no live football on anywhere in the world, we watched Twenty Moments That Rocked Talent
Shows, but Mum and Dad went to bed just before Susan Boyle blew Simon Cowell’s socks off. Once they were safely out of the way we lay down on the sofa, muted the TV and listened to the rain. There was a lightning flash and I used Bev’s heartbeat to time the delay before the thunder – she has a very steady heartbeat.

  Nine beats, three kilometres, a loud crash somewhere to the north.

  The council had replaced the windows since I’d left home. In the old days heavy rain used to seep in around the edges and mess up Mum’s DIY. Now it just bounced off the double glazing. There was nothing they could do about the thickness of the interior walls, though, so we could clearly hear Stan Getz’s ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ coming from my parents’ room.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Beverley. ‘Does your dad always play music before sleeping?’

  ‘That’s the arrangement with the Claus Ogerman strings,’ I said. ‘That’s not what my parents sleep to.’

  It took a couple of seconds to sink in, and then Beverley wriggled around in my arms so that she could stare me in the face.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘According to my mum that’s what my dad was playing when she walked into the old 606 Club in 1983,’ I said. ‘So that’s been their tune ever since.’

  Beverley sniggered and wriggled around again to lay her head against my shoulder.

  ‘That’s so sweet,’ she said.

  There was another blue-white flash, a longer interval – maybe ten seconds. The thunder was further away. We listened as the strings fell away and Getz played a final phrase, wrapping it all up with a neat little ribbon.

  ‘You were probably conceived to this,’ said Beverley.

  ‘You had to go there, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Beverley kissed the back of my hand. ‘Yes, I did.’

  And as the thunderstorm grumbled off to the north we both, amazingly, fell asleep.