Whispers Under Ground rol-3

by Ben Aaronovitch

  As far as we could reconstruct it, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an undistinguished wizard by all accounts, had retired post-war to teach theology at Magdalen College, Oxford. At some point in the mid-1950s he had sponsored a student dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Dining clubs being what posh undergraduates did in the fifties and sixties when they weren’t having doomed love affairs, spying for the Russians or inventing modern satire.

  To spice up their evenings, Geoffrey Wheatcroft taught a select number of his young friends the basics of Newtonian magic, which he should not have done, and trained at least one of them up to what Nightingale called ‘mastership’ – which he really should not have done. At some point, we don’t know when, this apprentice moved to London and went to the dark side. Actually, Nightingale never calls it the dark side, but me and Lesley can’t resist it.

  He did terrible things to people, I know, I’ve seen some of it – the bodyless head of Larry the Lark and the other denizens of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau – and Nightingale has seen more but won’t talk about it.

  We know from eyewitness accounts that he used magic to conceal his features. He appeared to have become inactive in the late 1970s and, as far as we could tell, his mantle was not taken up until the one we call the Faceless Man burst onto the scene some time in the last three or four years. He came this close to blowing my head off the previous October and I wasn’t in a hurry to meet him again. Not without backup anyway.

  However, having an ethically challenged magician running around on our manor was not on. So we decided to adopt an intelligence-led approach to his apprehension. Intelligence-led policing being when you work out what you’re doing before you run in and get your head blown off. Hence us working our way down the list of possible known associates and looking to winkle out the Faceless Man’s real identity. Because if it wasn’t a vulnerability why would he want to keep it a secret.

  Shakespeare Tower is one of three residential towers that are part of the Barbican complex in the City of London. Designed in the 1960s by adherents to the same Guernsey Gun Emplacement school of architecture as those that built my school, it was another Brutalist tower of jagged concrete that had acquired a Grade II listing because it was that or admit how fucking ugly it was. However, whatever I thought of it aesthetically, Shakespeare Tower had something that was practically unique in London, something that I was very grateful for as I cautiously skidded the Asbo through snow-covered streets – its own underground car park.

  We drove in, waved our warrant cards at the guy in the glass booth and parked in the bay allocated to us. He gave us directions but we still managed to wander around in circles for five minutes until Lesley noticed a discreet sign lost amongst the pipes and concrete abutments. We were then buzzed in by the concierge and guided up to the reception area.

  ‘We’re here to interview Albert Woodville-Gentle,’ I said.

  ‘And we’d much rather you didn’t tell him we were on our way,’ said Lesley as we stepped into the lift.

  ‘It’s just an interview,’ I said to her as the door closed.

  ‘We’re the police, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s always good to arrive as a nasty surprise, makes it harder to keep secrets.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ I said.

  Lesley sighed.

  The lobby of each floor was an identical truncated triangle shape with undressed concrete walls, grey carpeting and emergency fire exits the size and shape of U-boat pressure doors. Albert Woodville-Gentle lived two-thirds up the tower on the 30th floor. It was very clean. This much institutional concrete makes me nervous when it’s clean.

  I rang the doorbell.

  Practically the whole point of being police is that you don’t gather information covertly. You’re supposed to turn up on people’s doorsteps, terrify them with the sheer majesty of your authority, and keep asking questions until they tell you what you want to know. Unfortunately, we at the Folly were under instructions to keep the existence of the supernatural if not exactly secret then certainly low-key – all part of the agreement apparently. This meant starting any interview with the question; Oi did you learn magic at university? was right out, and so we had developed a cunning plan instead. Or rather Lesley came up with a cunning plan instead.

  The door opened immediately, which told us that the concierge had phoned up to warn the inhabitants. A middle-aged woman with a worn face, blue eyes and hair the colour of dirty straw stood in the doorway. She caught sight of Lesley’s masked face and took an involuntary step backwards – works every time.

  I introduced myself and showed my warrant card. She peered at the card, then at me – her eyes were narrow and suspicious. Despite a plain brown skirt, matching blouse and cardigan I noticed she wore an analogue watch hanging upside down from her breast pocket. A live-in nurse perhaps?

  ‘We’ve come to see Mr Woodville-Gentle,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’

  ‘He’s supposed to be resting at this time,’ said the woman. She had a Slavic accent. Russian or Ukrainian, I thought.

  ‘We can wait,’ said Lesley. The woman stared at her and frowned.

  ‘May I ask who you are?’ I asked.

  ‘I am Varenka,’ she said. ‘I am Mr Woodville-Gentle’s nurse.’

  ‘May we come in?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Varenka.

  I had my notebook out. ‘Can I have your surname please?’

  ‘This is an official investigation,’ said Lesley.

  Varenka hesitated and then, reluctantly I thought, stepped back from the doorway.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Come in. I shall see if Mr Woodville-Gentle is awake yet.’

  Curious, I thought, she’d rather let us in than tell us her second name.

  The flat was basically a long box with living room and kitchenette to the left, bedrooms and, I assumed, bathrooms to the right. Bookshelves lined every wall and with the curtains closed the air was stuffy and carried a whiff of disinfectant and mildew. I scoped out the books as Varenka the nurse led us into the living room and asked us to wait. Most of the books looked like they’d come from charity shops, the hardbacks had damaged dustcovers and the paperbacks showed creased spines and covers faded by sunlight. Wherever they’d been bought, they’d been meticulously shelved by subject, as far as I could tell, and then by author. There were two shelves of what looked like every single Patrick O’Brian up until Yellow Admiral and one whole stack of nothing but Penguin paperbacks from the 1950s.

  My dad swears by those Penguins, he said that they were so classy that all you had to do was sit in the right café in Soho, pretend to read one and you’d be hip deep in impressionable young women before you ordered your second espresso.

  Lesley surreptitiously jabbed me in the arm to remind me to look stern and official as Varenka led us into the living room before heading off to disturb Albert Woodville-Gentle.

  ‘He’s in a wheelchair,’ murmured Lesley.

  Judging by the spacing between the furniture and positioning of the dining table the flat had been laid out for wheelchair use. Lesley scuffed the carpet with her shoe to show where thin wheels had worn tracks in the burgundy weave.

  We heard muffled voices from the other end of the flat, Varenka raised her voice a couple of times but she obviously lost the argument because a few minutes later she emerged wheeling her patient down the hall and into the living room to greet us.

  You always expect people in wheelchairs to look wasted so it was a shock when Woodville-Gentle arrived plump, pink and smiling. Or at least most of his face was smiling. There was a noticeable droop to the right-hand side. It looked like the aftermath of a stroke but I saw that he seemed to retain full movement in both his arms – although with a noticeable shake. His legs were concealed by a tartan blanket that fell all the way to his feet. He was clean-shaven, well scrubbed and he seemed genuinely pleased to see us which, in case you’re wondering, is another square of the suspicious behaviour bingo card.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he s
aid. ‘It’s the fuzz.’ He noticed Lesley’s mask and did an exaggerated double take. ‘Young lady, don’t you think you’re taking the concept of undercover work just a tad too seriously? Can I offer you tea? Varenka is very reliable with tea, providing you like it with lemon.’

  ‘As it happens, I’d love a cuppa,’ I said. If he was going to play louche upper crust I wasn’t beyond doing cockney copper.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ he said and gestured us to the pair of chairs arranged by the dining table. He wheeled himself into position opposite and clasped his hands together to keep them still. ‘Now you must tell me what brings you bursting through my door?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but David Faber recently went missing and we’re part of the investigation into his whereabouts,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a David Faber,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘Is he famous?’

  I made a show of opening my notebook and flicking back through the pages. ‘You were both at Magdalene College, Oxford at the same time, from 1956 to 1959.’

  ‘Not quite correct,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘I was there from 1957 and while my memory is not what it was I’m fairly certain I would have remembered a name like Faber. Do you have a photograph?’

  Lesley pulled a picture from her inside pocket, an obviously modern colour print of a monochrome photograph. It showed a young man in a tweed jacket and authentically wavy period haircut standing against a nondescript brick wall with ivy. ‘Does it ring any bells?’ she asked.

  Woodville-Gentle squinted at the picture.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.

  I’d have been amazed if he had, given that me and Lesley had downloaded it off a Swedish Facebook page. David Faber was entirely fictitious and we’d chosen a Swede because it made it extremely unlikely that any of the Little Crocodiles would actually recognise him. It was just an excuse to poke our noses into their lives without alerting any practitioners, if there were any others, that we were after them.

  ‘It was our information that he was in the same social club at Cambridge,’ I flicked through my notebook again. ‘The Little Crocodiles.’

  ‘Dining club,’ said Woodville-Gentle.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘They were called dining clubs,’ he said. ‘Not social clubs. An excuse to go and eat and drink to excess although I daresay we did some charity work and the like.’

  Varenka arrived with the tea, Russian style, black with lemon and served in glasses. Once she’d served us she took up a position behind me and Lesley where we couldn’t see her without turning. That’s a bit of a cop trick and we don’t like it when people do it to us.

  ‘Alas, I am afraid there’s no cake or biscuits in the flat,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘I’m not allowed them on doctor’s orders and I’m much more mobile, and ingenious at ferreting out the things that are bad for me than you might think.’

  I sipped my tea while Lesley asked some routine questions. Woodville-Gentle remembered the names of some of his contemporaries who he knew had been members of the Little Crocodiles, and others who he thought might have been. Most of the names were already on our list but it’s always good to corroborate your information. He did give us the names of some female undergraduates who he described as ‘affiliate members’ – it was all grist to the mill. Five minutes in, I said that I heard there was a brilliant view from the balcony and asked if I might have a look. Woodville-Gentle told me to help myself, so I got up and, after Varenka had shown me how to open the slide door, stepped outside. I’d absently-mindedly tapped my jacket pocket when getting up. I had a box of matches in there to sell the illusion, so I was pretty certain that they assumed I was going out for a smoke. It was all part of Lesley’s cunning plan.

  The view was astonishing. Leaning on the balcony parapet I looked south over the Dome of St Paul’s and across the river to Elephant and Castle where the building affectionately known as the Electric Razor vied for prominence with Stromberg’s infamous poem of concrete and deprivation, Skygarden Tower. And despite the low cloud I could see beyond them the lights of London thinning out as they washed against the North Downs. Turning, I could see right across the jumble of central London to where a trick of the perspective jumbled up the curve of the eye and the spiky gothic shape of the Houses of Parliament. Every high street was bright with Christmas decorations reflected off fresh snow. I could have stood out there for hours except that it was cold enough to freeze my bollocks off and I was supposed to be snooping around.

  The balcony was L-shaped with a wide section by the living room, for afternoon tea in the sunshine I presumed, and then a much thinner long bit that ran the length of the flat. We knew from the floor plans posted by an estate agent that every single room except for the bathrooms and the kitchen had its own French window onto the balcony and we knew from being coppers that the chance of them being locked, thirty storeys up, was remote. The balcony was less than a third of a metre wide and even with a waist-high parapet I felt queasy when if I let my eyes drift too far to the left. Assuming that the nurse would be in the smaller of the two bedrooms I continued to the end of the balcony which terminated in one of the pressure-door-shaped fire exits. I pulled on my gloves and tried the French windows – they slid open with encouraging silence. I stepped inside.

  The bedroom door was open, but the light in the hallway beyond was out and so the room was too dark to see anything. But I wasn’t there to use my eyes. There was a musty sickroom smell overlaid with talcum powder and, weirdly, Chanel number 5. I took a deep breath and felt for vestigium.

  There was nothing, or at least nothing obvious.

  I wasn’t as experienced as Nightingale but I was willing to bet that nothing magical had happened in that flat since it had been constructed.

  Disappointed, I carefully shifted position until I could see out the door, down the length of the hallway and into the dining room where Lesley was still asking her questions. She’d obviously caught Woodville-Gentle’s interest – the old man was leaning forward in his chair, staring at what I realised, with a shock, was Lesley’s uncovered face. Varenka too seemed fascinated, I heard her ask something and saw Lesley’s misshapen mouth frame a reply. She’d joked that as a last resort she could create a distraction by taking her mask off but I never thought she’d do it. Woodville-Gentle reached out a hand in a tentative, gentle gesture, as if to touch Lesley’s cheek but she jerked her head back and quickly fumbled her mask back on.

  I suddenly noticed that Varenka, who’d been standing off to the side watching, had turned to look down the corridor and into the master bedroom. I kept absolutely still, I was in shadow and I was certain that if I didn’t move she wouldn’t see me.

  She turned her head to say something to Woodville-Gentle and I took a step sideways – out of sight. Score one for the Kentish Town ninja boy.

  ‘The things I do to keep you out of trouble,’ said Lesley as we rode the lift down to the car park. She meant taking off her mask. ‘Was it worth it?’

  ‘Nothing that I could feel,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder what the cause of his stroke was,’ she said. A debilitating stroke being one of the many varied and exciting side effects of practising magic. ‘You know if there was a bunch of posh kids learning magic, some of them are bound to have done themselves an injury at some point. Maybe we should ask Dr Walid to look for strokes and stuff amongst our suspect pool.’

  ‘You must really like paperwork.’

  The doors opened and we navigated our way out into the freezing car park.

  ‘That’s how you catch villains, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘By doing the legwork.’

  I laughed and she punched me in the arm.

  ‘What?’ she asked,

  ‘I really missed you when you weren’t around,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and was quiet all the way back to the Folly.

  We weren’t surprised to find that Nightingale hadn’t made it back from Henley or that Molly was haun
ting the entrance waiting for him to return. Toby bounced around my legs as I headed for the private dining room where Molly had optimistically set the table for two. For the first time since I’d moved in, a fire had been lit in the fireplace. I went back out onto the balcony and spotted Lesley heading for the stairs up to her room.

  ‘Lesley,’ I called. ‘Wait up.’

  She stopped and looked at me, her face a mask of dirty pink.

  ‘Come and have dinner,’ I said. ‘You might as well, otherwise it will just go to waste.’

  She glanced up the stairs and then back at me. I know the mask itches and that she was probably dying to get up to her room and get it off.

  ‘I’ve seen your face,’ I said. ‘So has Molly. And Toby doesn’t give a shit as long as he gets a sausage.’ Toby barked on cue. ‘Just take the fucking thing off – I hate eating on my own.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said and started up the stairs.

  ‘Hey!’ I called after her.

  ‘I’ve got to moisturise, you pillock,’ she called back.

  I looked down at Toby who scratched his ear.

  ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner,’ I said.

  Molly, stung perhaps by the amount of takeaway we ate in the coach house, had started to experiment. But tonight, probably for comfort, she’d reached back into the classics. All the way back to ye olde Englande in fact.

  ‘It’s venison in cider,’ I said. ‘She had it soaking overnight. I know because I went down looking for a snack last night and the fumes nearly knocked me out.’

  Molly had served it up garnished with mushrooms in a casserole dish, with roast potatoes, water cress and green beans. The important thing from my point of view was that it was steaks – Molly could be very old-fashioned about things like sweetbreads which I might add are not what a lot of you think they are. After you’ve attended a couple of fatal car accidents, offal loses its appeal. In fact I’m amazed I’ll still eat kebabs.