Lies Sleeping

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘And I’ll just knuckle under, is that it?’

  I yelped as Lesley gave me a final shock before disconnecting the crocodile clips. I turned to find Foxglove blocking any attack on Chorley. Beside him Lesley was methodically wrapping the control cable around the button box.

  ‘Knuckle under?’ he said. ‘I expect you to be my champion – a paladin for justice. We’ll get you a suit of armour and you can wear Lesley’s favour on your lance.’

  ‘It’s all a lie,’ I said. ‘There never was a King Arthur or a Camelot – Geoffrey of Monmouth made him up out of old stories.’

  I reckoned a dive to the side to get away from the hole and then I’d worry about what happened next.

  ‘We shall see,’ said Chorley, and Foxglove pushed me into the hole.

  26

  Of the Captivity of Peter

  Five metres is a leg-breaking drop. And that’s the good option. You’re supposed to relax and roll on impact – which is easier said than done when you’re screaming for your mum. Not that I was screaming for my mum – didn’t have time. My landing was fast and surprisingly soft, followed by a bounce that almost pitched me on my head and killed me that way. I managed to get my hands out in front of my face and ended up lying across a low padded wall like something from a children’s playground. I rolled over, spotted Chorley’s face staring down at me and threw a fireball at it.

  Nothing happened.

  I gave it another couple of goes, but for some reason I couldn’t get a grasp on the formae – they kept slipping away like a common word you know you know but can’t remember.

  ‘As I said,’ said Chorley with a grin, ‘especially made for you.’

  I tried once more – just for luck – and Chorley shook his head sadly and withdrew.

  I got up and looked around. I was in a circular underground cell eight metres wide at the base, with walls that went straight up for two metres before narrowing to form a dome with the entrance at its centre. Because of my misspent youth playing role-playing games I recognised it instantly as an oubliette – a place where you left people who you wanted to forget.

  Though it was a very clean example of the type. With whitewashed walls, two futon beds, one on each side, a toilet, a shower and a sink.

  The bedding on one futon bed was neatly folded up at the end while the other was loosely made up, the duvet clean but rumpled in the traditional manner of someone in too much of a hurry to make their own bed.

  I wondered who that might be and whether they would be pleased to have a cellmate.

  I noticed there were no tables, chairs, fridges or televisions.

  No light fittings either – all the light came in through the entrance above.

  I checked the shower but it consisted of an old-fashioned Psycho-style head cemented at an angle into the wall. Likewise, the sink and the toilet had all been designed with the minimum exposed piping. I flushed and twisted taps and found it all worked. There was a single shelf of white laminated chipboard above the sink with two lidless plastic takeaway trays, each with a toothbrush, toothpaste and a squeeze tube stolen from a hotel with The Best Shower Gel You Will Ever Steal printed on the side. I assumed that the box with the toothbrush still in its packaging was mine.

  No moisturising cream, I noticed – not even some cocoa butter.

  And not much in the way of entertainment.

  ‘Can’t I at least get Wi-Fi?’ I shouted up.

  There was movement above and I jumped back as a hardback book fluttered down from the hole to land in front of me. Cautiously, just in case something heavy was about to join it, I grabbed the book and retreated back towards the unused futon. When I was sure nothing else was forthcoming I had a look. It was old, but not an antique. A 1977 first edition of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. And it might have been worth something if still had its dust jacket, and hadn’t been covered with finger marks and coffee rings and had its page corners turned down to mark the reader’s position. According to the stamp on the inside cover it had once belonged to Macclesfield Library.

  Which is the closest library to Alderley Edge, where Martin Chorley grew up. Which meant it was likely that he’d half-inched it as a boy. I wondered if there were any useful notes in the margin. I retreated until my back was against the wall, then stood still and listened until I was pretty sure nobody was watching before sitting down and starting to read.

  Who I was sharing my oubliette with became clear five pages in when Foxglove jumped down – landing on the drop mat elegantly with a slight bend at the knees. She had a courier’s bag around her shoulders, which she unslung and threw in my direction before loping over to what I now realised was her bed.

  I didn’t have a chance to move, but the bag dropped into my lap. Inside was a white towelling bathrobe of the kind regularly stolen from four star hotels, a packet of Marks and Spencer’s boxers and a pair of plain blue cotton T-shirts. I had a good rummage but couldn’t find any receipts or other identification.

  I looked up to find Foxglove sitting cross-legged on her bed and glaring at me.

  I gave her a friendly smile.

  ‘So when’s dinner then?’ I asked.

  Her eyes narrowed further.

  ‘Being kidnapped makes me hungry,’ I said.

  She tried glaring again, but you’d think people would have figured out that I’m pretty immune to that now.

  Foxglove sprang off the bed, jumped onto the drop mat and, as if it were a trampoline, shot up and out of the oubliette.

  That was definitely magical, I thought. So I got up and tried a range of spells including the snapdragon, whose only purpose was to make a loud noise to scare off wild animals.

  Nothing – the formae just wouldn’t catch. But I was starting to recognise the sensation. It was the same feeling I had when I couldn’t do magic in fairyland. I wondered if the oubliette was also part of an intrusion by fairyland into our world. That would explain why Foxglove could leap about and maybe also why she slept down there.

  I went back to my book.

  Since I was stuck there I’d decided to see if I could get all the way through ‘The Music of the Ainur’, the first bit of The Silmarillion and something I’ve never managed to do before. Tolkien and my dad had weirdly convergent ideas about the musical nature of the universe, although my dad would probably have been more forgiving of Melkor’s improvisation. You know, providing it didn’t step on his solo.

  During the draggy passages I calculated what might be happening while I was tucked into my personal tertiary subspace manifold.

  They knew that I’d encountered Lesley, and where, so there’d be no mucking about or down period while everyone wondered where I was. Say an hour, tops, to pull the CCTV at Wetherspoon’s and Holborn, and confirm that I’d got into a fake police car.

  Or was it a real one? We knew Chorley and Lesley had contacts in the Met.

  If it was real then snatching me would have blown his cover – good. I hope they threw the bastard to the wild Seawoll. That’d learn him.

  A kidnapped police officer, even one as accident-prone as me, is always a priority case. So no more than a couple of hours with ANPR and CCTV to track the police car, fake or otherwise, and work out where the switch to a van took place. The big variable was how long it would take them to identify the van. And I guessed the answer to that, given the operation had been planned by Lesley, was probably never.

  So what next?

  Zach would have been brought in again. Fuck, everyone on the Little Crocodiles list who Seawoll and Stephanopoulos even thought might be worth a tug would be tugged. That would include Patrick Gale and Camilla Turner. And they wouldn’t be interviewed in the ABE suites, either. Nightingale would be out with Guleed, putting the frighteners on the demi-monde. And a whole web of contacts and arrangements that we’d painstakingly built up over the last couple of years would be strain
ed to breaking point.

  I wondered what Beverley was doing, and hoped it didn’t involve major property damage.

  So I reckoned I was on my own. All I had to do was escape from a trap devised by the most devious fucker I’d ever met and a woman who once caught an entire gang selling counterfeit Gucci bags while on her coffee break. A woman who knew me better than I knew myself.

  Or at least thought she did.

  I let the words on the page blur out and let myself sense my surroundings. Assuming I really was in a bubble of fairyland, or more like an interface where the bubble intersected with the real world, then it must be the bubble that interfered with the formae I needed to create to produce a magical effect.

  And if it had an effect on something I created, then it stood to reason that I should be able to detect that effect, the way the fingers can feel the rough surface of the board through the chalk.

  We really were going to have to come up with some terminology one of these days. I supposed we could leave it to Abigail, if we didn’t mind having the basic magical particle called the Wicked and possessed with the qualities of positive or negative charge, pro and anti-ship and bae.

  There. I felt a ripple above me like a raindrop in a puddle – looked up and saw Foxglove drop onto the landing mat with her arms full of flimsy white takeaway bags.

  I jumped up and stepped forward.

  There was a flicker of movement and suddenly I was slammed back against the wall with Foxglove’s face centimetres from my own and an ominously cold line across my throat. I was close enough to see little flecks of silver and gold that surrounded her pupils. Later I would speculate that those colours were unlikely to have been produced by the melanin concentration in her iris or Tyndall scattering in her stroma. But at that precise moment I was a bit more worried about what I assumed was a knife at my throat.

  Behind her on the landing mat the white takeaway bags were still bouncing.

  Without moving my head I glanced down to confirm that she was holding something to my throat with her right arm while pinning me to the wall with her left. I seriously doubted it was a paintbrush.

  I looked back up at Foxglove who, when she was sure she had my full attention, stepped back and raised her knife for my inspection. It had a wickedly curved blade of white stone shading to a translucent pink at the edges – agate, I learnt later. I didn’t even know you could chip and polish a stone to such a beautiful, smooth and, above all, sharp edge.

  Foxglove gave me a meaningful look and tilted her head to one side.

  ‘Never even occurred to me,’ I said.

  Foxglove looked sceptical but backed away, the knife vanishing under her smock.

  ‘And you’ve made a mess,’ I said, straightening my collar to hide the tremor in my hands.

  One of the white bags had split and was leaking orange coloured sweet and sour sauce onto the landing mat. Foxglove frowned at me as if it was my fault.

  ‘I’ll clean it up, shall I?’ I said, and she skipped back to give me room.

  Fortunately it was just the sauce. The rest of the generic plastic food containers had stayed sealed. I surreptitiously checked for receipts or any other identification but there was none.

  Foxglove approached with a roll of kitchen roll held out as a peace offering.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and finished cleaning up, dumped the rubbish into one of the plastic bags and held it out to Foxglove for disposal. She gave it, and then me, a suspicious look.

  ‘There’s no bin down here,’ I said. ‘So you’ve got to get rid of it.’

  After a while I put it down on the mat, took what looked to be half the food and retreated to my bed. Foxglove took her half and retreated to hers. In addition to what was left of the tub of sweet and sour sauce I had pork balls and egg fried rice but no, I noticed, cutlery. I looked across the oubliette at Foxglove, who saw and raised her eyebrow.

  ‘I know a knife and fork are out of the question,’ I said. ‘But what about a spoon?’

  In answer she opened her rice tray and stuck her face in it and methodically ate the whole lot without coming up for air. Towards the end I could see her long tongue through the semi-transparent sides of the tray, snaking around to get the last bits. When it was all done she looked straight at me with a triumphant smile.

  There were bits of rice stuck to her face so I ripped a couple of sheets off the kitchen roll and, cautiously, crossed the floor to hand them over. She took them graciously enough and wiped her face. I went back to my bed and ate with my fingers.

  Afterwards I packed up the rubbish in the last plastic bag and left it pointedly in the middle of the landing mat. Then I washed my hands, unwrapped the toothbrush and cleaned my teeth. Foxglove sat cross-legged on her bed and watched me with interest while picking the occasional sliver of food out of her teeth with her fingernail.

  The daylight coming in through the hole began to fade.

  At this time of year sunset was around nine o’clock, which meant it had been at least twenty-four hours since I’d been taken.

  ‘I’m having a wee,’ I said. ‘You better not be looking.’

  She shrugged and lay down on her futon – I chose to believe that she kept her eyes averted and thank God it was just a wee.

  She was under her duvet by the time I’d washed my hands so I got under mine before it was too dark to see. I lay there with my eyes closed and tried to feel the changes in the vestigia around me. I thought for a moment, while I was drifting off, that I felt a bubble rhythmically expand and contract as if it were breathing.

  But that might just have been my own breath.

  27

  An Unlikely Premise for a Sitcom

  I’m an only child so I’ve never been that comfortable sharing a room. It took me a while to get used to sharing a bed with Beverley. Mind you, Bev is a very active sleeper and, if she’s not trying to snuggle me off one side of the bed, she talks in her sleep. One night I swear she was reciting the Shipping Forecast – Sole, Fastnet, Lundy, Irish Sea. And giggling after every one. She seemed to find the prospect of Thames: gales imminent particularly funny. When I asked her about it in the morning she insisted that I’d dreamt the whole thing up.

  I woke up that first morning in the oubliette feeling sticky in my clothes and decided that I was going to have to ablute and perform bodily functions whether Foxglove was watching or not. Fortunately she seemed just as keen on my cleanliness as I was, or at least that’s how interpreted her pointing emphatically at the shower before leaping up and out of our cosy little home.

  And that became the pattern for the days that followed.

  After my shower she dropped in with breakfast – pitta breads stuffed with cold falafel and a limp salad. More takeaway, so I was definitely within range of a Chinese and kebab place – which narrowed my location down, I calculated, to somewhere in the UK.

  Or possibly the Costa del Sol, although I think I might have noticed a flight.

  Foxglove bounced out of the hole with the rubbish and when she didn’t return after half an hour I sat down and picked up The Silmarillion again.

  I lasted about an hour before the naming of the Valar drove me to exercise.

  One advantage of training in a gym that was last updated in 1939 is that I’ve learnt to do without equipment. You can give yourself a good workout in an hour if you push it, but I broke it up into twenty minute chunks to stretch it through the day.

  Once in a while I’d have a go at creating a forma, because you never know. But they all sputtered out without catching. Even lux, which I can normally reliably do while standing on my head.

  Foxglove returned at lunch with bread, cheese, some loose tomatoes and a bottle of beer, and again later in the evening with half a roast chicken, chips and salad – probably from the same place the falafel had come from. She watched me eat and then left me alone until it was
dark.

  This time I wasn’t knackered from a long day of being kidnapped, so it was much harder to sleep. Still, in the quiet darkness I did my breathing and slowly tried to feel out the parameters of the bubble that held me. I think it rained that night because I could hear drops splattering on the skylights far above the entrance and got ‘May It Be’ by Enya stuck on an endless loop in my head. But I also sensed a ripple as Foxglove dropped through the entrance and onto the landing mat. She stared at me for a long moment and then slipped silently over to her own bed.

  The next day after breakfast – this time a selection of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast bars and a bottle of Lucozade Zero Pink Lemonade – Foxglove reappeared with a basket full of clean bedding, which she dumped in front of me. She stripped her own bed and stood around tapping her foot until I got the message and stripped mine. Then she vaulted away with the basket full of used linen. While she was gone I made both our beds, being particularly careful to do a good job on Foxglove’s. I had a thorough look round while I was doing it, but the thing about futons is that they’re a bit short of hiding places – I suspected that was the point.

  Lunch that day was a steak slice, grated carrot and sultana salad in a clear plastic box, an iced bun. Somebody – I suspect Lesley – had taken care to remove any identifying bags or receipts but I know Greggs when I’m eating it. Another point on the triangulation should I ever get out – especially since the steak slice was still oven warm.

  After the food delivery Foxglove cautiously approached her bed and examined my handiwork. Finding it acceptable, she turned and gave me a polite little nod and a quizzical tilt of her head.

  ‘It’s not like I have anything else to do with my time,’ I said, and waved the remains of my iced bun at her. ‘I like this stuff. Can we have this again for dinner?’

  Foxglove stared at my iced bun for a moment, then shrugged and departed, leaving me alone with Thingol the terminally lost and the rest of the slightly dim-witted Elves of the years before the First Age.