Rivers of London rol-1

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Dr Walid’s office was an awkwardly narrow room with a window at the thin end and shelves covering the entire length of both long walls. Every surface was piled with folders, professional journals and reference books. At one end of the narrow shelf that served as a desk, a PC bobbed uncertainly in a sea of hard copy. I dumped my bags and plugged the laptop into the mains to recharge the batteries. The modem was hidden behind a stack of Gut: an International Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. A jaunty subtitle revealed that Gut had indeed been voted Best Journal of Gastroenterology by gastroenterologists worldwide. I didn’t know whether to be worried or reassured by the implication that there were many more magazines devoted to the smooth functioning of my intestines. The socket for the modem looked suspiciously jury-rigged and definitely not standard NHS issue. When I asked Dr Walid about it, he merely said that he liked to keep certain of his files secure.

  ‘From who?’ I asked.

  ‘Other researchers,’ he said. ‘They’re always looking to pirate my work.’ Apparently the hepatologists were the worst. ‘What do you expect from people who deal with so much bile?’ said Dr Walid, and then looked disappointed that I didn’t get the joke.

  Content that work was possible, I let Dr Walid show me to the staff bathroom down the corridor where I showered in a cubicle big enough, and equipped for, a paraplegic, his wheelchair, a care assistant and her guide dog. There was soap provided, a generic lemon-smelling antibiotic cake that felt ferocious enough to strip off the upper layer of my epidermis.

  While I showered, I thought about the mechanics of how Nightingale got shot. Despite the lurid fantasies of the Daily Mail, you can’t just walk into a random pub and buy a handgun, especially not a high-end semiautomatic like the one carried so inexpertly by Christopher Pinkman the night before. Which meant that there was no way that Henry Pyke had manoeuvred Pinkman into place in the time between our arrival at the Royal Opera House and our emergence from the stage door less than twenty minutes later. Henry Pyke must have known that we were planning to trap him on Bow Street, and that left three options: either he foresaw the future, he read somebody’s mind or somebody who knew about the plan was one of his sequestrated puppets.

  I dismissed precognition out of hand. Not only am I a big fan of causality, but Henry Pyke had never done anything else that suggested knowledge of the future. According to my research in the mundane library at the Folly, there was no such thing as mind-reading, at least, not in the sense of hearing someone’s thoughts as if they were narrating a voice-over on television. No: somebody had told Henry Pyke, or told somebody who was sequestrated by Henry Pyke, what the plan was. Nightingale didn’t. I didn’t. Which left the Murder Team. Given that Stephanopoulos and Seawoll were reluctant to talk about magic with its official practitioners, I couldn’t see them discussing it with their people, and Lesley would have followed their lead.

  I stepped out of the shower feeling pleasantly raw, and dried myself off with a towel that had been repeatedly washed to the texture of sandpaper. The clothes I’d retrieved from the coach house weren’t exactly fresh, but at least they were cleaner than what I’d been wearing. After a few missed turnings in the featureless corridors I relocated Dr Walid’s office.

  ‘How’re you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Human,’ I said.

  ‘Close enough,’ he said. After that he pointed out the location of the coffee machine and left me to get on with it.

  Ever since humankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don’t need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on. The more diverse the functions performed by an organisation, the more complex the interlocking systems and subsystems become. If you are responsible, as the Metropolitan Police are, for preventing terrorist attacks, sorting out domestic rows and keeping motorists from killing random strangers, then your systems are very complex indeed.

  One part of the system is the requirement that every OCU, that’s Operational Command Unit, has access to the HOLMES2 and CRIMINT databases either through a dedicated HOLMES suite or via specialised software installed on an authorised laptop. This is handled by the Directorate of Information who, because their responsibility is only to their bit of the system, don’t make a distinction between the Serious and Organised Crime Group (OCU) and the Folly, which was made an OCU only because nobody knew how else to drop it into the Met’s organisational chart. Now, this meant nothing to Inspector Nightingale, but to yours truly it meant that not only could I install a legal copy of the HOLMES2 interface into my laptop, but I was also provided with the same access privileges as the head of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

  Which was just as well, because one of my suspects was Chief Inspector Seawoll, and that’s a target you don’t take aim at unless you’re certain it’s going to go down on the first hit. DS Stephanopoulos, who’d also known about the operation in advance, was an equally hard target, unless I wanted to be joke number two — Do you know what happened to the DC who accused Stephanopoulos of being the unwitting tool of a malicious revenant spirit? Dr Walid was suspect number four, which was why I didn’t tell him what I was up to; Lesley was suspect number five and suspect number six, the one that frightened me the most, was of course myself. There was no way of proving it, but I was reasonably certain that between killing William Skirmish and throwing his child out of the window, Brendan Coopertown had had no inkling that he was anything other than the same man he’d always been.

  I hadn’t sensed anything from Lesley. Was it possible to mask a sequestration? Or, more likely, maybe I just wasn’t as sensitive as I thought I was. Nightingale was always telling me that learning to distinguishing vestigia from the vagaries of your own senses was a lifetime’s endeavour. I’d made an assumption about who was to be trusted — I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

  After my shower I’d spent some time staring at my face in the mirror, working up the courage to open my mouth and look inside. In the end I closed my eyes and dug my fingers into my cheeks — I’ve never been so happy to fondle a bicuspid in my life. All that meant for certain is that Henry Pyke hadn’t stretched my face out yet.

  I booted up HOLMES and typed in my access code and password. Technically both belonged to Inspector Nightingale and, technically, both should have been revoked as soon as he became inactive, but obviously nobody had got round to doing it yet — inertia being another key characteristic of civilisation and bureaucracy. I started at the beginning with the murder of William Skirmish, Covent Garden, 26 January.

  I found what I was looking for three hours and two coffees later, when I was reviewing the Framline case. That attack had started with the cycle courier being knocked off his bike on the Strand and being taken to UCH for treatment, where he attacked Dr Framline. A uniformed PC had actually taken a statement from him at the scene of the accident while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He’d claimed that a driver had overtaken him and deliberately forced him off the road. Lesley had told me that the accident had taken place in a rare CCTV blind spot on the Strand, but according to the initial report, the courier had been forced off the road outside Charing Cross Station. There hasn’t been a camera blind spot outside a London rail terminus since the IRA declared them legitimate targets in the 1990s. I went rummaging in the bowels of the HOLMES archive, where some demented soul on the Murder Team had uploaded the relevant footage from every single operable camera from Trafalgar Square to the Old Bailey. None of it was labelled properly, and it took me a good hour and a half to find the video I was looking for. The cycle courier hadn’t specified what make of car
had crowded him, but there was no mistaking the battered Honda Accord that deliberately ran him off the road. The video resolution wasn’t good enough to show the driver or the licence plate, but even before I tracked its progress to the high-resolution traffic camera that guarded the lights at Trafalgar Square, I knew who it belonged to.

  It made sense. She’d been present when Coopertown killed his wife and child, during the incident in the cinema and the attack on Dr Framline. She’d been there when we planned the operation outside the Opera House, and she’d arrived with the back-up in time to pick up the missing pistol.

  Lesley May was my suspect. She was part of it, sequestrated by Henry Pyke as part of his mad play of riot and revenge. I wondered if she’d been part of it from the beginning, from the first night when William Skirmish had his head knocked off and I’d met Nicholas Wall-penny. Then I remembered Pretty Polly from the Piccini script — the silent girl romanced by Punch after he’d killed his wife and child. He kisses her most audibly while she appears ‘nothing loath’. Then he sings, If I had all the wives of old King Sol, I would kill them all for my Pretty Poll.

  There was a mother who lost her son in Covent Garden once. She was very English in an old-fashioned way, good-quality print dress, nice bag, down for a shopping trip to the West End and a visit to the London Transport Museum. Got distracted by a window display for a moment and turned back to find her six-year-old boy had gone.

  I remember very clearly how she looked by the time she found us. A surface veneer of calm, a traditional British stiff upper lip but her eyes gave her away — darting left and right, she was fighting the impulse to run in all directions at once. I tried to keep her calm while Lesley called it in and started organising a search. I don’t know what I was saying, just calming words, but even while I was speaking I saw that she was shaking almost imperceptibly, and I realised that I was watching a human being come apart in front of my eyes. The six-year-old turned up less than a minute later, led up from one of the Piazza’s sunken courtyards by a kindly mime. I was looking right at the mother when the son reappeared, saw the relief laid bare on her face and the way the fear was sucked backwards into her until only the brisk and practical woman in the sundress and the sensible sandals remained.

  Now I understood that fear, not for yourself but for somebody else. Lesley had been sequestrated — Henry Pyke was sitting in her head and had been there for at least three months. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen her. Had her face looked different? And then I remembered her smile, the big grin showing lots of teeth. Had she smiled at me recently? I thought she might have. If Henry Pyke had activated the dissimulo on her, made her over into Pulcinella’s form, there’s no way she could have disguised the ruin of her teeth. I didn’t know how to get Henry Pyke out of her head, but if I could get to her before the revenant made her face fall off then I thought I might know how to stop that, at least.

  By the time Dr Walid returned to his office, I had a plan.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  I told him, and he thought it was a terrible plan as well.

  Chapter 11

  A Better Class of Riot

  The first task was to find Lesley. This I did by the simple expedient of calling her mobile and asking her where she was. ‘We’re in Covent Garden,’ she said. We being her and Seawoll and about half the rest of the Murder Team, the Chief Inspector having gone for the time-honoured police tradition of ‘when in doubt throw manpower at it’ approach. They were going to sweep the Piazza and then do a swift check of the Opera House.

  ‘What does he hope to do?’ I asked.

  ‘In the first instance, contain any problems,’ said Lesley. ‘Beyond that we’re waiting on you, remember?’

  ‘I may have sorted something out,’ I said. ‘But it’s important that you don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘This is me.’

  If only that were true.

  The next thing I needed was wheels, so I called up Beverley on her waterproof mobile and hoped she wasn’t swimming lengths under Tower Bridge, or whatever it was river nymphs do on their day off. She picked up on the second ring and demanded to know what I’d done to her sister. ‘She’s not happy,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind your sister,’ I said. ‘I need to borrow a motor.’

  ‘Only if I get to come along,’ she said. I’d expected that; in fact, I was counting on it. ‘Or you can walk.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, feigning reluctance.

  She said she’d be over in half an hour.

  Third on the list was getting hold of some hard drugs, which proved surprisingly difficult given that I was in a major hospital. The problem was, my tame doctor was having ethical qualms.

  ‘You’ve been watching too much TV,’ said Dr Walid. ‘There’s no such thing as a tranquilliser dart.’

  ‘Yes there is,’ I said. ‘They use them in Africa all the time.’

  ‘Let me rephrase that and talk slowly,’ said Dr Walid. ‘There’s no such thing as a safe tranquilliser dart.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a dart,’ I said. ‘Every minute we leave Lesley sequestrated there’s a chance that Henry Pyke’s going to make her face fall off. To do magic your mind has to be working. Shut down the conscious bit of the brain, and I’m willing to bet Henry can’t do his spell and Lesley’s face stays the way God intended.’

  I could see from Dr Walid’s expression that he thought I was right. ‘But what then?’ he asked. ‘We can’t keep her in a medical coma indefinitely.’

  ‘We buy time,’ I said. ‘For Nightingale to wake up, for me to get back to the Folly library, for Henry Pyke to die of old age … or whatever it is undead people do when they go.’

  Dr Walid went grumbling off and came back a bit later with two disposable syrettes in sterile packaging with a biohazard label and a sticker that said ‘Keep out of the hands of children’.

  ‘Etorphine hydrochloride in solution,’ he said. ‘Enough to sedate a human female in the sixty-five kilogram weight range.’

  ‘Is it fast?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s what they use to trank rhinos,’ he said, and handed me a second package with another two syrettes. ‘This is the reversing agent, narcan. If you stick yourself with the etorphine, then you use this straight away before you call an ambulance, and try to make sure the paramedics get this card.’

  He handed me a card that was still warm from the lamination machine. In Dr Walid’s neat, capitalised handwriting it said: ‘Warning. I have been stupid enough to stick myself with etorphine hydrochloride’, and listed the procedures the paramedics were to follow. Most of them concerned resuscitation and heroic measures to maintain heartbeat and respiration.

  I patted my jacket nervously as I rode the lift down to the reception area, and repeated under my breath that the tranquillisers were in the left-hand pocket and the reversing agent on the right.

  Beverley was waiting for me in the No Waiting zone dressed in khaki cargo pants and a cropped black t-shirt with WINE BACK HERE stencilled across her breasts.

  ‘Ta-da!’ she said, and showed me her car. It was a canary-yellow BMW Mini convertible, the Cooper S model with the supercharger at the back and the run-flat tires. It was about as a conspicuous a car as you can drive in central London and still fit into a standard parking space. I was happy to let her drive — I’ve still got some standards.

  It was hot for late May, an excellent day for driving a convertible even with the rush-hour traffic fumes. Beverley was as averagely terrible a driver as you’d expect in someone who’d passed their test in the last two years. The good thing about London traffic is that your general motorist doesn’t get a chance to pick up enough speed to make fatal mistakes. Predictably we ground to a halt at the bottom end of Gower Street, and I faced the age-old dilemma of the London traveller — get out and walk or wait and hope.

  I called Lesley again, but her phone went straight to voice mail. I called Belgravia nick and got them to patch me through
to Stephanopoulos’s Airwave. In case anyone was monitoring the channel, she duly warned me to go home and await instructions before letting me know that she’d last seen Seawoll and Lesley heading for the Opera House. I told her that I was dutifully heading home, in a way that wouldn’t convince Stephanopoulos or our hypothetical listeners, but which would at least look good on any transcript produced in court.

  The traffic unclogged once we were past New Oxford Street, and I told Beverley to head down Endell Street.

  ‘When we get there you’ve got to stay away from Lesley,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t think I can take Lesley?’

  ‘I think she might suck out all your magic,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ asked Beverley.

  I was guessing, but a genii locorum like Beverley had to be drawing on magic from somewhere, and to a revenant like Henry Pyke that must make them attractive victims. Or maybe they had some natural immunity to that sort of thing and I was worrying for nothing, but I didn’t think that was the way to bet.

  ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I thought we were friends.’

  I was going to say something comforting, but that was strangled off when Beverley shot out of the one-way system by the Oasis Sports Centre and turned into Endell Street without, as far as I could see, any reference to or indeed awareness of other road users.

  ‘Lesley is your friend,’ I said. ‘Henry Pyke is not.’

  The thank-God-it’s-Friday crowds had spilled out of the pubs and cafés onto the pavements, and for a few hours London had the proper street culture that the people who own villas in Tuscany keep calling for. The narrowing road and the prospect of hitting a pedestrian caused even Beverley to take her foot momentarily off the accelerator.

  ‘Watch the people,’ I said.

  ‘Ha,’ said Beverley. ‘People shouldn’t drink and walk at the same time.’