Rivers of London rol-1

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘It’s not that I’m scared of commitment,’ I said to the ceiling. ‘It’s just that I want to know what I’m committing to first.’

  ‘Are you awake then, Peter?’ said a soft voice outside my door — my father.

  ‘Yeah, Dad, I’m awake.’

  ‘Your mum’s left you some lunch,’ he said.

  Lunch, I thought. The day was half-done and nothing achieved so far. I rolled out of bed, squeezed past a stack of cardboard boxes and headed for the shower.

  The bathroom was as hobbit-sized as everything else in the flat, and it had only been by dint of some serious Polish retro-engineering that a power shower was shoehorned into the gap between the sink and the window. It was me that coughed up the cash for it, so I guaranteed I didn’t have to duck my head to get it wet. There was a new soap dispenser mounted beside the shower, the kind you find in the toilets of executive office suites, bought or liberated from a cleaning wholesaler. I’d noticed that the toilet paper and bath towels were much better brands than the ones we used when I was living at home — Mum was cleaning a much better class of office these days.

  I got out and dried myself off with an enormous fluffy towel with ‘Your Institution Here’ embroidered into the corner. My dad was of the ‘real men don’t moisturise’ school of dry skin diseases, and all my mum had was a wholesale tub of cocoa butter. I’ve got nothing against using cocoa butter, it’s just that you end up smelling like a giant Mars Bar for the rest of the day. My skin taken care of, I nipped back into my old room where I cracked open some of the boxes at random until I had a change of clothes. One of my distant cousins was just going to have to go without.

  The kitchen was a narrow slot that could have been used to train a mess crew for a Trident submarine. It was just big enough for a sink, cooker and a work surface. A door at the far end opened out onto an equally vestigial balcony which at least caught enough sun to dry clothes most of the year round. Curls of blue tobacco smoke drifted in from the balcony, which meant that my father was out there having one of his four precious daily roll-ups.

  My mum had left groundnut chicken and about half a kilo of basmati on the cooker. I threw both in the microwave and asked my father if he wanted a coffee. He did, so I made two cups using instant from a catering-sized tin of Nescafé. I topped them up with a centimetre of condensed milk to mask the taste.

  He looked well, my father, which meant that he’d had his ‘medicine’ some time this morning. He’d had a reputation for good grooming in the heyday of his career, and my mum liked to keep him respectable: khaki slacks and linen jacket over a pale green shirt. I always thought of it as Empire chic, and it certainly did something for my mum. He looked suitably colonial in the sunlight, sitting on a wicker chair that was almost as wide as the balcony. There was just enough room left for a stool and white plastic end table. I put the coffees down on the table by the pub-sized Foster’s Lager ashtray and my dad’s tin of Golden Virginia.

  From our balcony, on a clear day, you could see all the way across the courtyard to the net curtains of our neighbours.

  ‘How’s the Filth?’ he asked. He always called the police the Filth, although he turned up for my graduation from Hendon and seemed proud enough of me then.

  ‘It’s not easy keeping the masses down,’ I said. ‘They keep fighting and nicking stuff.’

  ‘That’s the sad condition of the working man,’ said Dad. He sipped his coffee, put the mug down and picked up his tobacco tin. He didn’t open it, just placed it on his lap and rested his fingers on it.

  I asked whether Mum was okay, and where they’d been the night before. She was fine and they’d gone to a wedding. He was hazy as to whose; one of my many cousins, a definition that could range from the child of my aunt to a guy who wandered into my mother’s house and didn’t leave for two years. Traditionally a good Sierra Leonean wedding should last several days, as should a funeral, but in deference to the hectic pace of modern British life the expats liked to keep the celebrations down to just a day, or thirty-six hours, tops. Not counting preparation time.

  As he described the music — he was hazy on the food, the clothes and the religion — my dad opened his tobacco tin, took out a packet of Rizlas and with great care and deliberation made himself a roll-up. Once it was finished to his satisfaction, he put the tobacco, Rizlas and the roll-up itself back in the tin, sealed it up and replaced it on the table. When he picked up his coffee I saw his hand was trembling. My dad would leave the tin on the table for as long as he could stand it before picking it up and putting it on his lap, then he might remake his roll-up or, if he couldn’t stand it any longer, smoke the damn thing. My dad had the early stages of emphysema. The same doctor who supplied him with his heroin had warned him that if he couldn’t stop smoking he should at least keep it down to less than five fags a day.

  ‘Do you believe in magic?’ I asked.

  ‘I once heard Dizzy Gillespie play,’ said Dad. ‘Does that count?’

  ‘It might do,’ I said. ‘Where do you reckon playing like that comes from?’

  ‘In Dizzy? That was all talent and hard work, but I did know a sax player said he got his chops from the Devil, made a deal at the crossroads, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘He was from Mississippi?’

  ‘No, Catford,’ said Dad. ‘Said he made his deal on Archer Street.’

  ‘Was he any good?’

  ‘He wasn’t bad,’ said Dad. ‘But the poor bastard went blind two weeks later.’

  ‘Was that part of the deal?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently so,’ said Dad. ‘Your mum thought it was when I told her. She said that only a fool expects to get something for nothing.’

  That sounded like Mum, whose principal saying was, ‘If it doesn’t cost something, it isn’t worth anything’. Actually her real principal saying was, at least to me, ‘Don’t think you’ve got so big that I can’t still beat you’. Not that she ever beat me, a deficiency that she later blamed for my failure to pass my A levels. Numerous university-bound cousins were held up as shining examples of discipline through physical violence.

  My dad picked up his tobacco tin and put it in his lap. I picked up the mugs and washed them in the kitchen sink. I remembered the groundnut chicken and rice in the microwave. I took that out to the balcony, ate the chicken but left most of the rice. I also drank about a litre of cold water, which is a common side effect of eating my mum’s food. I seriously considered going back to bed. What else was there for me to do?

  I stuck my head out onto the balcony to ask my dad if there was anything he needed. He said he was fine. As I watched, he opened his tin, took out the roll-up and put it in his mouth. He took out his silver-coloured paraffin lighter and lit the fag with the same deliberate ceremony with which he had rolled it. As he inhaled for the first time there was a look of bliss on his face. Then he started coughing, nasty wet coughs that sounded like he was bringing up the lining of his lungs. With a practised twist he snuffed out the roll-up and waited for the coughing to subside. When it had, he put the roll-up back between his lips and lit up again. I didn’t hang about — I knew how it went on from there.

  I love my dad. He’s a walking caution.

  My mum has three landlines. I picked one up and called my voice-mail service. The first message was from Dr Walid.

  ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Just to let you know that Thomas is conscious and asking for you.’

  The broadsheets called it May Madness, which made it sound like a tea dance. The tabloids called it May Rage, presumably because it had one less syllable to fit across the front page. The TV had some good footage of middle-aged women in long dresses tossing bricks at the police. Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force explaining how the riot was caused by whatever socio-political factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society — if only we knew what.

  There was a big police presence in
UCH’s A&E department, most of them loitering in search of overtime or trying to get statements from victims of the riot. I didn’t want to give a statement, so I slipped in the back way by grabbing a mop bucket and passing myself off as a cleaner. I got lost in the upper levels looking for Dr Walid before stumbling onto a corridor that looked vaguely familiar. I opened doors at random until I found Nightingale’s. He didn’t really look any better than last time.

  ‘Inspector,’ I said. ‘You wanted to see me.’

  His eyes opened and flicked towards me. I sat on the edge of the bed so he could see me without moving his head.

  ‘Got shot,’ he whispered.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was there.’

  ‘Shot before,’ he said.

  ‘Really, when?

  ‘War.’

  ‘Which war was that?’ I asked.

  Nightingale grimaced and shifted in his bed. ‘Second,’ he said.

  ‘The Second World War,’ I said. ‘What were you in — the baby brigade?’ To have enlisted even in 1945 Nightingale would have had to have been born in 1929, and that’s if he’d lied about his age. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Old,’ he whispered. ‘Turn century.’

  ‘Turn of the century?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You were born at the turn of the century — the twentieth century?’ He looked as if he was in his bluff mid-forties, which is a neat trick when you’re lying half-dead in a hospital bed with a machine that goes ‘ping’ at regular intervals. ‘You’re over a hundred years old?’

  Nightingale made a wheezing sound that alarmed me for a moment, until I realised that it was laughter.

  ‘Is this natural?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Do you know why it’s happening?’

  ‘Gift horse,’ he whispered. ‘Mouth.’

  I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t want to tire him too much, so I told him about Lesley, the riot and being locked out of the Folly. When I asked him whether Molly could help me track Henry Pyke, he shook his head.

  ‘Dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘Has to be done,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to stop until he’s stopped.’

  Slowly, one word at a time, Nightingale told me exactly how it would work — I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. It was a terrible plan, and it still left the question of how to get back into the Folly.

  ‘Tyburn’s mother,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You want her to overrule her daughter?’ I asked. ‘What makes you think she’ll do that?’

  ‘Pride,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You want me to beg?’

  ‘Not her pride,’ said Nightingale. ‘Yours.’

  Chapter 13

  London Bridge

  It’s not easy manoeuvring an articulated lorry up the Wapping Wall, so I hired a middle-aged man called Brian to do it. Brian was balding, pot-bellied and foulmouthed. The only thing missing from the stereotype was a Yorkie Bar and a rolled-up copy of the Sun. Still, I hadn’t hired him for his erudition, and he did get us all the way to Mama Thames’s house without any extraneous insurance claims.

  We parked up half outside Mama Thames’s block and half outside the Prospect of Whitby. The staff must have thought it was an unexpected delivery because they came tumbling out — I had to tell them it was for a private party, and weirdly they didn’t seem that surprised. I asked Brian to wait, and picking up my crate of samples from the cab, I staggered over to the communal entrance. I put it down and rang the doorbell. This time I was met at the door by the same white lady I’d seen before among Mama Thames’s cronies. She was dressed in a different, but equally nice, twinset and pearls, and carried a small black child on her hip.

  ‘Why Constable Grant,’ she said. ‘How lovely to see you again.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You must be Lea.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Lea. ‘I do like a young man who has his wits about him.’ The River Lea rises in the Chilterns north-west of London, and skirts the top of the city before making a sharp right-hand turn down the Lea Valley to the Thames. It’s the least urbanised of London’s rivers and the largest, so of course it survived the great stink. Lea must have been one of Oxley’s generation of genii locorum, if not older.

  I pulled a face at the child, who looked to be a girl of nursery age, and she pulled a face back. ‘Who’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘This is Brent,’ said Lea. ‘She’s the youngest.’

  ‘Hello Brent,’ I said. She was lighter-skinned than her sisters, with brown eyes that might have been called hazel by a good-natured liar, but the belligerent set of her face was unmistakable. She was wearing a miniature red England away strip, predictably the number 11 shirt.

  ‘You smell funny,’ said Brent.

  ‘That’s because he’s a wizard,’ Lea told her.

  Brent squirmed out of Lea’s grip and grabbed my hand. ‘Come with me,’ she said and tried to drag me through the door. She was surprisingly strong, and I had to brace a little to stay still. ‘I have to bring my crate,’ I told her.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of that,’ said Lea.

  I let Brent pull me down the long cool corridor to Mama Thames’s flat. Behind me I heard Lea calling for Uncle Bailiff, and if he would be a dear, could he take the crate to Mama’s flat.

  According to Dr Polidari, genii locorum ‘behave as if the imperatives of ceremony are to them as necessary as meat and drink is to man’, and furthermore claimed that they ‘anticipate such events with miraculous facility so that they are always appropriately attired, and if surprised or somehow prevented, show signs of great distress’. Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him some slack.

  They were waiting for me in the throne room, and this time I could see it was a throne room, the potted mangrove sheltering the sacred World of Leather executive armchair. There sat Mama Thames, resplendent in her Austrian lace and a headdress of blue and white Portuguese beads. Behind her were arrayed her attendants in batik lappas and headscarves and on her left and right hands, forming an aisle down which I had to walk, stood her daughters. I recognised Tyburn and Fleet on my left standing with a pair of teenage girls wearing thin braids and cashmere jumpers. Beverley was on my right, looking underdressed in Lycra shorts and a purple sweatshirt. When she was sure I was looking she rolled her eyes. Beside her stood an amazingly tall and slender woman with a fox face, electric-blue and blonde extensions and elongated nails painted in green, gold and black. That, I guessed, was Effra, another underground river, who was clearly moonlighting as the goddess of Brixton market. I noticed that it was north London rivers on the left and south London rivers on the right.

  Brent let go of my hand, essayed a curtsey in the direction of Mama Thames and then spoiled the effect by skipping over and hurling herself into her mother’s lap. There was a brief pause in the ceremony as the little girl squirmed her way into a comfortable position.

  Mama Thames turned her full gaze on me, and the undertow of her regard drew me closer to her throne. I had to fight a strong urge to throw myself on my knees and bang my forehead on the carpet.

  ‘Constable Peter,’ said Mama Thames. ‘How nice to see you.’

  ‘It’s nice to be here. As a token of my respect I’ve brought you a gift,’ I said, hoping that it was going to arrive before I ran out of pleasantries. I heard clinking behind me, and Uncle Bailiff arrived with my crate. He was a heavyset white man with a number two skinhead and a faded tattoo of SS lightning bolts on his neck. He set the crate down before Mama Thames, gave her a respectful nod and, with a pitying look at me, left without a word.

  One of the cronies stepped forward to pluck a bottle from the crate and show it to Mama Thames. ‘Star Beer,’ she said. The core product of the Nigerian Breweries PLC, available in the UK from any good stockist, and in bulk if your mum knows someone who knows someone who owes someone a favour.

  ‘How much has he got out there?’ asked Fleet.

 
‘A lorryload,’ said Lea.

  ‘How big a lorry?’ asked Mama Thames without taking her eyes off me.

  ‘Big lorry,’ said Brent.

  ‘Is it all Star?’ asked Mama Thames.

  ‘I put in some Gulder,’ I said. ‘Some Red Stripe for variety, a couple of cases of Bacardi, some Appleton, Cointreau and a few bottles of Bailey’s.’ I’d liquidated my savings doing it, but as my mum says, nothing worth having is free.

  ‘That’s a handsome gift,’ said Mama Thames.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’ said Tyburn.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ty,’ I said. ‘I threw in a couple of bottles of Perrier for you.’

  Someone sniggered — probably Beverley.

  ‘And what can I do for you?’ asked Mama Thames.

  ‘It’s a small matter,’ I said. ‘One of your daughters feels that she has a right to interfere in the business of the Folly. All I ask is that she steps back and lets the proper authorities get on with their jobs.’

  ‘Proper authorities,’ spat Tyburn.

  Mama Thames turned her eyes on Tyburn, who stepped before the throne. ‘You think you have a right to meddle in this?’ she asked.

  ‘Mum,’ said Tyburn. ‘The Folly is a relic, a Victorian afterthought from the same people who gave us Black Rod and the Lord Mayor’s show. Heritage is all very well and good for the tourist industry, but it’s no way to run a modern city.’

  ‘That is not your decision to make,’ I said.

  ‘And you think it’s yours?’

  ‘I know it’s mine,’ I said. ‘My duty, my obligation — my decision.’

  ‘And you’re asking—’

  ‘I am not asking,’ I said, pleasantries over. ‘You want to fuck with me, Tyburn, you had better know who you’re messing with.’

  Tyburn took a step back and recovered. ‘We know who you are,’ she said. ‘Your father is a failed musician and your mother cleans offices for a living. You grew up in a council flat, and you went to your local comprehensive and you failed your A levels …’