Rivers of London rol-1

by Ben Aaronovitch

  It was while I was in the interview room watching Seawoll gently pluck the facts from Willard Jones’s testimony that I had my breakthrough. Magic, it turned out, was just like science in that sometimes it was a question of spotting the bleeding obvious. Just as Galileo spotted that objects accelerate under gravity at the same rate regardless of their weight, I spotted that the big difference between my mobile phone and the various microchips I’d been experimenting on was that my mobile phone was connected up to its battery when it got fried.

  Just connecting up my collection of second-hand microchips to a battery seemed far too random and time-consuming, but luckily you can a get ten generic calculators for less than a fiver — if you know where to go. Then it was just a matter of laying them out, casting the werelight for precisely five seconds and sticking them under the microscope. The one placed directly under my hand was toast and there were decreasing levels of damage out to the two-metre mark. Was I emitting power as a waste product, which was damaging the electronics — or was I sucking power out of the calculators, and was it that that was doing the damage? And why was the damage principally to the chips, and not the other components? Crucially, despite the unresolved questions, it implied that I could now carry my mobile phone and do magic — providing I took the battery out first.

  ‘But what does all that mean?’ asked Lesley.

  I took a pull on my Becks and waved the bottle at the TV. ‘It means that I’ve just figured out how the fire was started.’

  The next morning Lesley emailed me the fire report, and after I’d checked that I tracked down a retail equipment store that could deliver a till just like the one used in J. Sheekey’s Oyster Bar. Because of Nightingale’s No Visitors in the Folly, Not Counting the Coach House rule, I had to carry the bloody thing from the tradesman’s entrance down into my lab all by myself. Molly watched me staggering past and covered her smile with her hand. I figured Lesley didn’t count as a visitor in this instance, but when I called and invited her over for the demonstration she said she was busy running errands for Seawoll. Once I had everything in position I asked Molly to ask Nightingale to meet me in the lab.

  I cleared an area in the corner, away from any gas pipes, mounted the till on a metal trolley and plugged it in. When Nightingale arrived I handed him a lab coat and eye protectors and asked him to stand on a mark six metres from the till. Then, before I did anything else, I removed the battery from my mobile phone.

  ‘And the purpose of this is what, exactly?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘If you’ll just bear with me sir,’ I said, ‘It’ll all become clear.’

  ‘If you say so Peter,’ he said, and folded his arms. ‘Should I be wearing a helmet as well?’

  ‘That’s probably not necessary, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m going to count down from three, and on zero I’d like you to do the strongest magic consistent with safety.’

  ‘The strongest?’ asked Nightingale. ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready when you are.’

  I counted down, and on zero Nightingale blew up the lab — at least, that’s what it felt like. A ball of burning fire, like a werelight spell gone horribly wrong, formed over Nightingale’s outstretched palm. A wave of heat washed over me and I smelled crisping hair. I almost threw myself behind a bench before I realised that the heat wasn’t physical. It couldn’t have been, or Nightingale would have caught fire. Somehow the heat was all contained within the sphere above his hand — what I’d felt was vestigia on a grand scale.

  Nightingale looked at me and calmly raised an eyebrow. ‘How long do you want me to keep this up?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How long can you keep it up?’

  Nightingale laughed. I caught a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision and I turned to find Molly standing in the doorway, eyes shining with reflected fire and fixed on Nightingale.

  I turned back just in time for the till to explode. The top blew right off and a spray of burning plastic fountained out, black smoke billowed upwards and raced across the ceiling. Molly gave a delighted shriek and I ran forward with the fire extinguisher and sprayed the CO2 over the till until it went out. Nightingale shut down his sphere of flaming death and switched on a set of extractor fans I didn’t even know the lab was equipped with.

  ‘Why did it explode?’ he asked.

  ‘The rapid breakdown of the components releases a volatile gas, hydrogen or something,’ I said. ‘I only got a C in chemistry, remember. The gas mixes with air inside the casing, there’s an electrical spark, and boom. The question I need you to answer is, does doing a spell suck magic out of an object or put magic into an object?’

  The answer was, of course, both.

  ‘You don’t normally cover this until you’ve mastered the primary forma,’ said Nightingale. Magic, as Nightingale understood it, was generated by life. A wizard could draw on his own magic, or on magic that he’d stored by enchantment, which sounded interesting but not relevant to exploding cash tills. However, life protected itself, and the more complex it was the more magic it produced, but the harder it was to draw off. ‘It’s impossible to draw on magic from another human being,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or even a dog, for that matter.’

  ‘The vampires,’ I said. ‘They sucked the life out of everything in the house, didn’t they?’

  ‘The vampires are obviously parasitical in that way but we don’t know how they do it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nor do we know how people like your friend Beverley Brook draw power from their environment, either.’

  ‘The vampire house is where I first noticed the effect on the microchips,’ I said.

  ‘As machines become more like men,’ said Nightingale, ‘I suppose it follows that they might start producing magic of their own. I’m not sure I see how this helps us.’ I tried not to wince at the pseudoscience, and decided now was not the time to get into that.

  ‘In the first instance,’ I said, ‘it means we know that whatever is doing this is sucking down enormous amounts of power, and second, it gives us another thing to look for.’

  Not that we were actually finding anything. In the meantime, Seawoll’s Murder Team were assigned a particularly pointless stabbing in a pub off Piccadilly Circus. I had a sniff around but there were no vestigia, and a stupid but comprehensible motive. ‘Cheating boyfriend,’ Lesley explained one night when she came round to watch a DVD. First, boy meets girl, girl sleeps with second boy, first boy stabs second boy and runs away. ‘We think he’s hiding in Walthamstow,’ she said. Many would say that was punishment enough.

  The murders outside J. Sheekey’s were blamed on Michael Smith, who had supposedly shot three people in the head with an illegal firearm before killing himself with the same gun. The media might have taken more of an interest had not a soap star been caught cottaging with an equally famous footballer in the loos of a club in Mayfair. The resulting media white-out blotted out any real news for two weeks and was, according to Lesley, far too convenient to be a coincidence.

  I spent April practising my forma, my Latin and experimenting with new ways to blow up microchips. Every afternoon I’d take Toby out for a walk in the area around Covent Garden and Cambridge Circus to see if either of us picked up a sniff, but there was nothing. I called Beverley Brook a couple of times, but she said that her mother had told her not to have anything to do with me until I’d done something about Father Thames.

  May started in typical Bank Holiday fashion, with two days of rain and three of drizzle, until the next Sunday dawned bright and fair. It’s on a day like this that a young man’s mind turns to romance, ice cream and Punch and Judy shows.

  It was the day of the Covent Garden May Fayre, which celebrates the first ever recorded performance of Punch and Judy with a brass-band parade, a special puppet mass at the Actors’ Church and as many Punch and Judy shows as can be crammed into the church grounds. While I’d been a probationary constable at Charing Cross, I’d always be
en on crowd control that day, so I called up Lesley and asked if she wanted to try the fayre from the civilian point of view. We got ice cream and Cokes from the Tesco Metro and dodged around the tourists until we reached the front portico of the church. A single ‘professor’s’ booth had been set up not half a metre from where poor old William Skirmish had had his head knocked off.

  ‘Four months ago,’ I said out loud.

  ‘It hasn’t been boring,’ said Lesley.

  ‘You’re not the one who’s had to learn Latin,’ I said.

  Mats had been put down for the kids to sit on while we adults stood at the back. A man in jester’s motley stepped forward and warmed up the audience. He explained that over the centuries there had been many versions of the Punch and Judy show but today, for our education and our entertainment, the renowned Professor Phillip Pointer would perform The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy as told to John Payne Collier by Giovanni Piccini in 1827.

  The story started with Punch being bitten on the nose by Toby the dog.

  Chapter 8

  The Jackanory Version

  Toby the dog bites Punch, who beats Mr Scaramouch, Toby’s owner, to death. He then goes home and throws his baby out of the window and beats his wife Judy to death. He falls off his horse and kicks the doctor in the eye. The doctor attacks him with a stick, but he grabs that and beats the doctor to death. He rings a sheep bell outside a rich man’s house, and when the rich man’s servant remonstrates with him Punch beats him to death. At that point, my ice cream melted and slopped all over my shoes.

  The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy as told to John Payne Collier by Giovanni Piccini in 1827. Not very hard to get hold of, once you know what you’re looking for. After the show, Lesley and I showed the Professor our warrant cards and he was happy to hand over the hard copy of the script. We took it over to the Roundhouse on the corner of New Row and Garrick Street, and settled in to read it with two double vodkas..

  ‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ I said.

  ‘You think?’ asked Lesley. ‘Something is using real people to act out this stupid puppet show.’

  ‘Your governor’s not going to like this,’ I said.

  ‘Well I’m not going to tell him,’ said Lesley. ‘Let your governor tell my governor that the fucking ghost of Mr Punch is knocking people off on his patch.’

  ‘You think it’s a ghost?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘That’s what you magic cops are for.’

  The Folly has three libraries: one, I didn’t know about back then, number two was a magical library where the direct treatise on spells, forma and alchemy were kept, all of them written in Latin and so all Greek to me, and number three was the general library on the first floor next to the reading room. The division of labour was clear from the start: Nightingale checked the magic library, and I hit the books in the Queen’s English.

  The general library was lined with enough mahogany to reforest the Amazon basin. On one wall the stacks went all the way to the ceiling, and you reached the top shelves by using a ladder that slid along on shining brass rails. A row of beautiful walnut cabinets held the index cards, which were the closest thing the library had to a search engine. I caught a whiff of old cardboard and mildew when I opened the drawers, and it comforted me to think that Molly didn’t go so far as to open them up regularly and clean inside. The cards were arranged by subject, with a master index arranged by title. I started by looking for references to Punch and Judy, but found none. Nightingale had given me another term to search for: revenant. A couple of false passes with the index cards led me to Dr John Polidari’s Meditations on the Matter of Life and Death which, according to the frontispiece, had been published in 1819. The same page had a notation in Latin written in an elegant looping hand: Vincit qui se vincit, August 1821. I wondered what it meant.

  According to Polidari, a revenant is an unquiet spirit who returns from the dead to wreak havoc on the living, usually in reprisal for some slight or injustice, real or perceived, that the person suffered during their life.

  ‘It certainly fits our profile,’ I told Nightingale over lunch — Beef Wellington, boiled potatoes and sautéed parsnips. ‘These little grievances going all postal — it fits Lesley’s idea that the big events have little echoes. ’

  ‘You think it’s infecting them?’

  ‘I think it’s a field effect, like radiation or light from a bulb,’ I said. ‘I think the echoes are inside the field, their brains get charged up with negative emotions and off they go.’

  ‘Wouldn’t more people be affected, in that case?’ asked Nightingale. ‘There were at least ten other people in the cinema foyer, including you and Constable May, and yet only the mother was affected.’

  ‘Could be that it reinforces anger that’s already there?’ I asked. ‘Or acts as a catalyst? It wouldn’t be an easy thing to prove scientifically.’

  Nightingale smiled.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘You remind me of a wizard I used to know called David Mellenby,’ said Nightingale. ‘He had the same obsession.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked. ‘And did he leave any notes?’

  ‘I’m afraid he died in the war,’ said Nightingale. ‘He never did get a chance to do half the experiments he wanted to. He had this theory about how the genii locorum works that would have appealed to you.’

  ‘What was his theory?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe I will make telling you that contingent on you mastering your next forma,’ he said. ‘I did notice that there were discrepancies between the script and Mr Punch’s actions. I’m thinking of Pretty Polly.’

  As laid down in the Tragical Comedy, after killing his wife and kid Mr Punch sings a happy little song about the benefits of wife-murdering and, that done, he presses his suit with Pretty Polly. She’s a character who says nothing but ‘seems nothing loath’ when our cheerful little serial killer starts kissing her.

  ‘We don’t know he’s following that particular script,’ I said.

  ‘True,’ said Nightingale. ‘Piccini was relating an oral tradition, and those are almost never reliable.’

  According to the possibly unreliable Piccini, the next victim was due to be a blind beggar who coughs in Mr Punch’s face and is thrown off the stage for his presumption. The script didn’t specify if he survived the experience or not. ‘If our revenant Pulcinella is following form,’ I said, ‘then the most likely target is going to be a tinny for the RNIB.’

  ‘What’s a tinny?’

  ‘A person with a collecting tin,’ I said, miming a shake. ‘People put their spare change in it.’

  ‘A blind man begging for money,’ he said. ‘It would be more useful to know who the revenant was and where he’s buried.’

  ‘Presumably if we know who he is then we can deal with his issues and lay him to rest peacefully,’ I said.

  ‘Or,’ said Nightingale, ‘we dig up his bones and grind them into dust, mix them with rock salt and then scatter them out at sea.’

  ‘Would that work?’

  ‘Victor Bartholomew says that’s the way to do it,’ Nightingale shrugged. ‘He wrote the book on dealing with ghosts and revenants — literally.’

  ‘I think we may be overlooking a blindingly obvious source of information,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nicholas Wallpenny,’ I said. ‘All the attacks have originated near the Actors’ Church, which I’m guessing means that our revenant is located nearby. Nicholas might know him — for all we know, they hang out.’

  ‘I’m not sure ghosts “hang” quite the way you imagine,’ said Nightingale, and with a quick glance to be sure that Molly wasn’t watching, he slipped his half-full plate under the table. Toby’s tail banged against my legs as he snaffled it down.

  ‘We need a bigger dog,’ I said. ‘Or smaller portions.’

  ‘See if he won’t talk to you tonight,’ said Nightingale.
‘But remember that our Nicholas wasn’t a reliable witness when he was alive — I doubt his veracity has improved since his demise.’

  ‘How did he die?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Died of drink,’ Nightingale said. ‘Very enjoyable.’

  Since Toby was our official ghost-hunting dog, and because he had begun to waddle alarmingly when he walked, I took him with me. It’s a half-hour stroll from Russell Square and the Folly to Covent Garden. Once you’re past Forbidden Planet and across Shaftesbury Avenue, the direct route takes you down Neal Street, where the cycle courier had died. But I figured if I started avoiding certain streets just because somebody’d died on them, I’d have to move to Aberystwyth.

  It was late evening and not all that warm, but there was still a crowd of drinkers outside the gastropub. London had come late to the idea of outdoor café society, and it wasn’t going to allow a bit of a chill to get in the way now — especially since it had become illegal to smoke indoors.

  Toby did pause close to the point where Dr Framline had attacked the courier, but only long enough to pee on a bollard.

  Even at closing time Covent Garden was packed. The post-performance crowd were emerging from the Royal Opera House and looking for somewhere to have a bite to eat and a pose, while clusters of young people on school-sponsored holidays from all over Europe exercised their time-honoured right to block the pavement from one side to the other.

  Once the cafés, restaurants and pubs in the covered market shut down, the piazza emptied quickly and soon there were few enough people about for me to risk a bit of ghost-chasing.

  There was disagreement among the authorities as to what the true nature of a ghost was. Polidori insisted that ghosts were the detached souls of the deceased who clung to a locality. He theorised that they fed off their own spirit and would, unless this spirit was replenished through magic, eventually fade away to nothing. Richard Spruce’s The Persistence of Phantasmagoria in Yorkshire, published in 1860, broadly agreed with Polidori but added that ghosts might draw on the magic in their environment in a similar manner to a moss leaching sustenance from its rocky home. Peter Brock, writing in the 1930s, theorised that ghosts were nothing more than recordings etched into the magical fabric of their surroundings in much the same way music is recorded on a vinyl disk. Personally I figured that they were like crude copies of the dead person’s personality that were running in a degraded fashion in a kind of magical matrix where packets of ‘information’ were passed from one magic node to the next.