Whispers Under Ground

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Did she introduce herself?’

  I told him all about the mysterious Madame Teng, although I left out the fact that I’d essentially been rescued by Fleet and her Captain of Dogs.

  ‘Good god, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘I can’t leave the city for five minutes.’

  ‘Do you know who she was?’ I asked.

  ‘A Daoist sorceress I would imagine,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘The Chinese have their own traditions, including the practice of magic,’ said Nightingale. ‘As I understand it, Daoist magic is based on writing characters on paper much in the same way that we speak formae aloud. Beyond that I don’t think we ever discovered how it works. Contact was limited, we didn’t want to tell them our secrets and unsurprisingly they didn’t want to share theirs with us.’

  He frowned at the bookcase and swapped two volumes around.

  ‘Do they operate out of Chinatown?’ I asked.

  ‘We have an arrangement with Chinatown,’ he said. ‘They don’t scare the horses and we don’t go in asking questions. Mao pretty much killed all the practitioners during the 1950s and any that survived on the mainland were finished off in the Cultural Revolution.’

  ‘She was from Taiwan,’ I said.

  ‘That would make sense,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  Just to make Nightingale’s day I finished off with a description of Ryan Carroll’s – possibly – magical art installation.

  ‘And there I was hoping that we could leave that case to the Murder Squad and concentrate on the Little Crocodiles,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Anything useful in Henley?’ I asked.

  ‘Apart from the snow?’ said Nightingale. ‘Rather pleasant couple in a converted stable. They were very proud of it and insisted on showing me around the whole thing.’

  ‘A little too helpful?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t take their word for it,’ said Nightingale. ‘I donned the old balaclava and had a scout round their grounds after dark.’ He hadn’t found anything, but sneaking stealthily through the snow had reminded him of an operation in Tibet in 1938. ‘Chasing German archaeologists,’ he said. ‘Complete wild goose chase for them and for us.’

  Lesley stuck her head through the door, spotted us and came in. ‘Have you seen how much that man can eat?’

  ‘He’s a halfling,’ I said which just got me blank looks from the pair of them.

  We divided up the day’s work. While Nightingale supervised Lesley’s morning practice I would file my paperwork with the Murder Team and check the action list on HOLMES to see if anything relevant, i.e.: weird, unusual or uncanny, had come up. Hopefully by the time we’d finished up Zach would have found the goblin market, which me and Lesley would go and check out.

  ‘I’m going to visit the Barbican and re-interview Mr Woodville-Gentle,’ said Nightingale. ‘At the very least my attention might spook him into revealing himself.’

  ‘Assuming he has something to reveal,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he has something to reveal all right,’ said Lesley. ‘I guarantee that.’

  It had stopped snowing during the night and although the sun wasn’t out, the cloud had thinned and the extra warmth had turned the drifts of snow in the courtyard brittle. I still lost skin on the iron handrail of the stairs, though. The interior of the coach house smelt of paraffin and damp paper but the heater had kept the temperature high enough to protect my electronics. The couch had been straightened and the rubbish bin emptied – I can always tell when Nightingale’s been watching the rugby because he leaves the place tidier than normal. I put the kettle on, powered up my laptop and the second-hand Dell I use to run HOLMES and got down to work.

  Police work is just like every other job in that the first thing you do when you sit down in the morning is deal with your emails. Spam elimination followed by humorous cats, followed by ‘requests’ from the Case Manager that I get my arse in gear and hand in my statements. I got out my notebooks and started writing up my visits to Ryan Carroll and Kevin Nolan. I considered writing up my later encounter with Kevin Nolan and Agent Reynolds, but that might have led to questions about why I didn’t contact Kittredge straight away. In the end I informed them that I’d put Zachary Palmer up for the night and that, informally, he’d indicated that there was some kind of bad blood between him and the Nolans. I had not been assigned any further actions, so I looked up the forensics reports on HOLMES.

  The techs had failed to recover anything from James Gallagher’s phone because of the ‘unusually degraded’ state of its chips, although they had hopes that they might be able to do a dump from the relatively undamaged flash memory. I knew from painful experience what had ‘degraded’ the phone. I wondered if the forensics people did too. Nightingale and the Folly bobbed along in the modern world, kept afloat by an interlocking series of arrangements and unspoken agreements many of which, I was certain, really only existed in Nightingale’s head.

  The report on the murder weapon indicated that it was indeed a section from a larger plate, an image of the CGI reconstruction was attached, but that it was not made from china but was instead a type of stoneware – identifiable because of its opacity and semi-vitreous nature – whatever that meant. Chemical analysis indicated that it was seventy per cent clay mixed in with quartz, soda-lime glass, crushed flint and grog. I Googled grog and decided that they probably meant crushed fragments of previously fired china rather than cheap rum mixed with lime juice. It bore a superficial resemblance to Coade Stone but comparative analysis of a sample provided by a specialist restoration company indicated it was not the same material, not least because it was manufactured using inferior London clay rather than the finer Ball clay from Dorset. There was an additional twenty-odd pages on the history of Coade Stone which I put aside against the possibility I might develop insomnia in the near future.

  The pathology report on the weapon was more interesting. Its shape matched the fatal wound track in James Gallagher’s back, a shallower wound in his shoulder, and was a probable match for three cuts to his left and right hands – probably defensive wounds. The blood covering the weapon was a DNA match for James Gallagher and splatter analysis indicated that he might have pulled the weapon out of himself while lying on the tracks. Lovely. However, there were traces of a second blood type on the edges near the ‘handle’ which should be amenable to Low Copy Number DNA testing, the downside being that that the results would take at least until January to come through. An attached note from Seawoll told us to check for hand injuries when taking statements. It takes more force than you think to stab someone to death and the human body is full of pesky obstructions – like ribs for example. Inexperienced knife fighters frequently cut themselves on their own blades when the momentum of their thrust drives their hand down the knife. That’s what a cross guard on a combat knife is there to stop and what makes it relatively easy to catch knife murderers – look for the wounds, match the DNA, it’s a fair cop guv, hello Pentonville. That’s the thing about hard evidence. It’s difficult to wriggle out of in court. No wonder Seawoll and Stephanopoulos weren’t hassling me. They probably figured it was just a matter of time before they swabbed the inside of the right mouth.

  Assuming the DNA turned out to be human.

  The mud on James Gallagher’s boots turned out to be an appetizing mixture of human faeces, shredded toilet paper and a combination of chemicals that placed him in a working sewer within eight hours of his death. I dug out Sergeant Kumar’s number and was routed through to his airwave. I heard crowds and a PA system in the background. He was definitely on duty. I told him about the sewer mud on the boots.

  ‘We’ve already been asked about that,’ said Kumar. ‘There’s a gravity sewer that runs below Baker Street and at the end there’s another which runs below Portland Place. But there’s no direct access anywhere on the stretch of track between the two. You walked it with me – there was no way for him to get onto that section.
’

  ‘What about a secret passage?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Underground was full of them.’

  ‘Secret from members of the public, yes,’ said Kumar. ‘Secret from us – no.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ I asked and Kumar made a rude noise.

  ‘I did find some interesting CCTV footage from last Sunday,’ he said. ‘Very irresponsible behaviour by a man and a woman and what looked suspiciously like a child in an enormous hat. On tracks near Tufnell Park – ringing any bells?’

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Were they easy to identify?’

  There was a pause while a nervous female voice asked for directions to the Underground and Kumar responded. The train companies had finally put their snow countermeasures into effect and people were belatedly flooding into London to do their last-minute shopping. One of my morning emails had been a general alert to this effect, warning of the inevitable increase in theft, road traffic accidents and disgruntled northerners.

  ‘Only if some complete wanker makes an incident out of it,’ said Kumar.

  ‘How can one avoid such total wankery?’ I asked.

  ‘Easy,’ said Kumar. ‘By following basic safety procedures with regard to the transport infrastructure and making sure that next time you get the urge to go walkabouts on the tracks you call me first.’

  ‘Deal,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘A big one,’ said Kumar.

  The Murder Team was bound to ask why I hadn’t statemented Ryan Carroll while I had him there in front of me at the Tate Modern, so I generated a memo indicating that I’d been called away to handle an aspect of a case exclusive to the Folly. Then I popped over to the training lab to get Nightingale to initial it.

  When I got there Lesley had three, count them three, apples doing slow circuits in the air of the lab. Nightingale beckoned me over and, after barely glancing at the clipboard, signed the memo.

  ‘Excellent,’ Nightingale told Lesley, before turning to me and adding, ‘That’s what happens when you don’t allow yourself to become sidetracked and focus on the task at hand.’ Her hair was damp with sweat.

  ‘I see,’ I said and retreated to the open doorway before saying, ‘But can she make them explode?’ And ducked out of sight. Two of the apples slammed into the wall behind me at head height and the third actually made the right turn to whoosh past my ear and down the length of the corridor.

  ‘Missed,’ I called and hurried away before she reloaded. She was getting much better.

  I sent off the copy of the form, duplicated everything four times and put the duplicates in a series of A4 envelopes, to stop them getting mixed up, and dumped them next to the fruit bowl ready to go back to AB. Then I went downstairs to the shooting range for my own workout.

  For me, one of the weirdest things about magic was the way some formae went out of fashion. And a good example of this is aer, which strictly speaking is Latinised Greek and is pronounced ‘air’ and means – well – air. Once you’ve mastered it, and that took me six weeks, it gives you ‘purchase’ on the air in front of your body. But since there’s no actual physical way of measuring the effect, and believe me I tried, your master has to be present to tell you when you’ve got it right. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ve got a forma that’s tricky to do and has, apparently, no effect. It’s not hard to see why it went out of fashion, especially since it was clear by the eighteenth century that it was based on a completely erroneous theory of matter. Nightingale took the trouble to teach me aer because, combined with the equally tricky and out-of-fashion congolare, it creates a shield in front of my body. Both formae were developed by the Great Man, Isaac Newton, himself and have the trademark fiddliness that has led to generations of students writing variations of WTF in the margins of their primers.

  ‘Isn’t a shield useful?’ I’d asked.

  ‘There’s a much more effective fourth-order spell that creates a shield. But you’re at least two years from learning that,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m teaching you this against the chance that you may encounter the Faceless Man again. This should give you some protection from a fireball while you stage a tactical withdrawal.’

  By which he meant run like fuck.

  ‘Will it stop a bullet?’ I had to ask.

  Nightingale didn’t know the answer. So we bought an automatic paintball gun, attached it to a hopper feed and a compressor and mounted it on a tripod at the shooting end of the firing range. To start my training sessions I don my Met-Vest, my old school jockstrap and my standard issue riot helmet with face mask. Then I set the mechanical timer on the gun and walk up the range to stand at the target end. I always feel uncomfortable standing at the wrong end, which Nightingale said was just as it should be.

  The timer was a relic of the fifties, a Bakelite mushroom with a dial like those on a safe except painted pink. It was old and flaky enough to add an exciting element of uncertainty to when it would ring. When it did, I cast the spell and the paintball gun would fire. Originally me and Nightingale had thought we’d have to jury-rig a mechanism to randomly vary the aim. But the gun jiggled so violently on its tripod that it produced a spread wide and random enough to satisfy the most exacting standards of the Imperial Marksmanship School.

  Just as well, because the first time out the only paint-balls that didn’t hit my body were the ones that went wide to either side. I like to think I’ve made significant improvements since then, albeit from a low base, and could stop nine out of ten shots. But as Nightingale says, the tenth is the only one that counts. He also pointed out that the muzzle velocity of the paintball gun is about 300 feet per second and that of a modern pistol over a thousand, and it doesn’t sound any better when you translate it into SI units.

  So just about every day I go down to the basement, take a deep breath and listen for the whir of the timer wind down to that terminal click and see if I can’t get rid of that troublesome outlier.

  Whir, click, splat, splat, spat.

  Thank god for my riot helmet – that’s all I’m going to say.

  After lunch Zach came back with an address and an outstretched hand.

  ‘Get it off Nightingale,’ I said.

  ‘He said you had the rest,’ he said.

  I pulled up my clip and gave him two fifty in twenties and tens. It was most of my clip. In return I got a piece of paper with a Brixton address and a phrase written on it.

  ‘I’m here to cut the grass,’ I read.

  ‘That’s the password,’ said Zach, counting his money.

  ‘Now I need a cashpoint,’ I said.

  ‘I’d buy you a drink,’ said Zach, waving the cash at me, ‘but all this is spoken for.’ He ran upstairs and grabbed his bag. But despite being that keen to leave the Folly, on his way back out he paused to shake my hand.

  ‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘But don’t take any offence if I sincerely hope that we don’t meet again. And give my regards to Lesley.’ He let go of my hand and darted out of the main entrance. I counted my fingers and then I patted myself down – just to be on the safe side.

  Then I went to tell Lesley that we was up.

  11

  Brixton

  The media response to unusual weather is as ritualised and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: ‘I can’t believe there’s so much snow.’ Then anger: ‘Why can’t I drive my car, why are the trains not running?’ Then blame: Why haven’t the local authorities gritted the roads, where are the snow ploughs, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can’t? This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling background moan, enlivened by occasional ‘Asylum Seekers Ate My Snow Plough’ headlines from the Daily Mail, that continues until the weather clears up. Luckily we were spared some of the repetition as the authorities narrowed down the source of the E. coli outbreak to a stall in Walthamstow market.

  Slightly elevated temperatures and no fresh snow had turned the main roads into rivers of brown slush. I was getti
ng the hang of winter driving, which mostly consisted of not going too fast and putting as much room between you and the average driver as humanly possible. Traffic was light enough for me to brave Vauxhall Bridge, but I went on via Oval and the Brixton Road just to be sure. We stopped short of Brixton proper and turned into Villa Road, which forms the northern boundary of Max Roach Park. The snow on the park was still almost white and littered with the half-melted remains of snowmen. We stopped on the park side and Lesley pointed to a terraced house halfway down the road.

  ‘That’s the one,’ she said.

  It was late Victorian with a half basement, orthogonal bay windows and a narrow little front door designed to give the illusion of grand urban living to a new generation of aspirational lower middle class. The same people who would flock into the suburbs a generation or two later.

  There was an arrow painted on to a piece of card that had gone curly with damp. It pointed down a set of iron stairs to the door into the half basement, what used to be the tradesmen’s entrance. The curtains in the bay windows were drawn and when we paused to listen we heard nothing from inside the house.

  I rang the doorbell.

  We waited for about a minute, stepping back to avoid the drips of snowmelt landing on our heads, and then the door opened to reveal a white girl in baggy trousers, braces and pink lipstick.

  ‘What you want?’ she asked.

  I gave her the password. ‘We’ve come to cut the grass,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, no motorcycle helmets, swords, spears, glamours and,’ she said, pointing at Lesley, ‘no masks – sorry.’

  ‘Do you want to wait in the car?’ I asked.

  Lesley shook her head and unclipped her mask.

  ‘I’ll just bet you’re glad to get out of that,’ the girl said and led us into the flat.

  It was your basic dingy basement flat. Despite the modern kitchen conversion and Habitat trim, the low ceiling and poor lighting made it seem pinched and mean. I glanced into the front room as we passed and saw that all the furniture had been neatly piled against the far wall. Heavy-duty power cables snaked out of the rooms and down the hallway. They were securely held down with gaffer tape and plastic safety bridges.