Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘What you doing?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘I’m making the world a better place,’ said Macky.

  ‘It’s a ghost,’ said Abigail incredulously.

  ‘You brought us here,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but when I saw him he was thinner,’ said Abigail. ‘Much thinner.’

  I explained that he was feeding off the magic Lesley was generating, which led to the question I always dread.

  ‘So what’s magic, then?’ asked Abigail.

  ‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not any form of electromagnetic radiation. That I do know.’

  ‘Maybe it’s brainwaves,’ said Abigail.

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘Because that would be electrochemical and it would still have to involve some kind of physical manifestation if it was going to be projected out of your head.’ So just chalk it up to pixie dust or quantum entanglement, which was the same thing as pixie dust except with the word quantum in it.

  ‘Are we going to talk to this guy or not?’ asked Lesley. ‘Because otherwise I’m going to turn this off.’ Her werelight bobbed over her palm.

  ‘Oi Macky,’ I called. ‘A word in your shell-like.’

  Macky had returned to his art – finishing up the shading on the H in EACH.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘I’m making the world a better place.’

  ‘How are you planning to do that?’ I asked.

  Macky finished the H to his satisfaction and stepped back to admire his handiwork. We’d all been careful to stay as far from the tracks as possible but either Macky was taking a risk or, most likely, he’d just forgotten. I saw Abigail mouth Oh shit as she realised what was going to happen.

  ‘Because,’ said Macky and then he was hit by the ghost train.

  It went past us invisible and silent but for a blast of heat and the smell of diesel. Macky was swatted off the track to land in a crumple just the below the X in EXCELLENT. There was a gurgling sound and his leg twitched for a couple of seconds before he went quite still. Then he faded, and with him his graffiti.

  ‘Can I stop now?’ asked Lesley. The werelight remained dim – Macky was still drawing its power.

  ‘Just a little bit longer,’ I said.

  I heard a faint rattle and looking back towards the mouth of the tunnel I saw a dim and transparent figure start spraying the outline of a balloon B.

  Cyclical, I wrote in my notebook, repeating – insentient?

  I told Lesley she could shut down her werelight and Macky vanished. Abigail, who had cautiously flattened herself against the wall of the tunnel, watched as me and Lesley did a quick search along the strip of ground beside the track. Halfway back towards the entrance I pulled the dusty and cracked remains of Macky’s spectacles from amongst the sand and scattered ballast. I held them in my hand and closed my eyes. When it comes to vestigia, metal and glass are both unpredictable but I caught, faintly, a couple of bars of a rock guitar solo.

  I made a note of the glasses – physical confirmation of the ghost’s existence – and wondered whether to take them home. Would removing something that integral to the ghost from the location have an effect on it? And if removing it did damage or destroy the ghost, did it matter? Was a ghost a person?

  I haven’t read even ten per cent of the books in the mundane library about ghosts. In fact I’ve mostly only read the textbooks that Nightingale has assigned me and stuff, like Wolfe and Polidori, that I’ve come across during an investigation. From what I have read it is clear that attitudes towards ghosts, amongst official wizards, have changed over time.

  Sir Isaac Newton, founder of modern magic, seemed to regard them as an irritating distraction from the beauty of his nice clean universe. There was a mad rush during the seventeenth century to classify them in the manner of plants or animals and during the Enlightenment there was a lot of earnest discussion about free will. The Victorians divided neatly into those who regarded ghosts as souls to be saved and those who thought them a form of spiritual pollution – to be exorcised. In the 1930s, as relativity and quantum theory arrived to unsettle the leather upholstery of the Folly, the speculation got a bit excitable and the poor old spirits of the departed were seized upon as convenient test subjects for all manner of magical experiments. The consensus being that they were little more than gramophone recordings of past lives and therefore occupied the same ethical status as fruit flies in a genetics lab.

  I’d asked Nightingale about this, since he’d been there, but he said hadn’t spent a lot of time at the Folly in those days. Out and about in the Empire and beyond, he’d said. I asked him what he’d been doing.

  ‘I remember writing a great many reports. But to what purpose I was never entirely sure.’

  I didn’t think they were ‘souls’ but until I knew what they were, I was going to err on the side of ethical conduct. I scrapped out a shallow depression in the ballast just where Abigail had made her mark and buried the glasses there. I made a note of time and location for transfer to the files back at the Folly. Lesley made a note of the location of the hole in the fence but it was me that had to call in to the British Transport Police on account of her still, officially, being on medical leave.

  We bought Abigail a Twix and a can of coke and extracted a promise that she’d stay off the railway tracks, Hogwarts Express or no Hogwarts Express. I was hoping that Macky’s ghostly demise would be enough to keep her away on its own. Then we dropped her off back at the flats and headed back to Russell Square.

  ‘That coat was too small for her,’ said Lesley. ‘And what kind of teenage girl goes looking for steam trains?’

  ‘You think there’s trouble at home?’ I asked.

  Lesley jammed her index finger under the bottom edge of her mask and scratched. ‘This is not fucking hypoallergenic,’ she said.

  ‘You could take it off,’ I said. ‘We’re nearly back.’

  ‘I think you should register your concern with Social Services,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Have you logged your minutes yet?’

  ‘Just because you know her family,’ said Lesley, ‘doesn’t mean you’ll be doing her any favours if you ignore the problem.’

  ‘I’ll talk to my mum,’ I said. ‘How many minutes?’

  ‘Five,’ she said.

  ‘More like ten.’

  Lesley’s only supposed to do so much magic per day. It’s one of the conditions laid down by Dr Walid when he signed off on her apprenticeship. Plus she has to keep a log on what magic she does do and once a week she has to schlep over to the UCH and stick her head in an MRI while Dr Walid checks her brain for the lesions that are the early signs of hyperthaumaturgical degradation. The price of using too much magic is a massive stroke, if you’re lucky, or a fatal brain aneurysm, if you’re not. The fact that, prior to the advent of magnetic resonance imaging, the first warning sign of overuse was dropping dead is one of the many reasons why magic has never really taken off as a hobby.

  ‘Five minutes,’ she said.

  We compromised and called it six.

  Detective Inspector Thomas Nightingale is my boss, my governor and my master – purely in the teacher–pupil teacher sense of the term, you understand – and on Sundays we generally have an early dinner in the so-called private dining room. He’s a shade shorter than me, slim, brown hair, grey eyes, looks forty but is much, much older. While he doesn’t routinely dress for dinner he always gives me the strong impression that he only holds back out of a courtesy to me.

  We were having pork in plum sauce, although for some reason Molly felt that the ideal side dish was Yorkshire pudding and cabbage sautéed with sugar. As usual Lesley chose to eat in her room – I didn’t blame her; it’s hard to eat a Yorkshire pud with dignity.

  ‘I’ve got a little jaunt into the countryside for you tomorrow,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I asked. ‘Where to this time?’

  ‘Henley-on-Thames,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘What’s in Henley?’ I asked.

&
nbsp; ‘A possible Little Crocodile,’ said Nightingale. ‘Professor Postmartin did a bit of digging for us and uncovered some additional members.’

  ‘Everybody wants to be a detective,’ I said.

  Although Postmartin, as keeper of the archives and old Oxford hand himself, was uniquely suited to tracking down those students we thought might have been illegally taught magic. At least two of these had graduated to total bastard evil magician status, one active back in the 1960s and one who was alive and well and had tried to knock me off a roof back in the summer. We’d been five storeys up so I took it personally.

  ‘I believe Postmartin has always fancied himself as an amateur sleuth,’ said Nightingale. ‘Particularly if it’s largely a matter of gathering university gossip. He thinks he’s found one in Henley and another residing in our fair city – at the Barbican no less. I want you to drive up to Henley tomorrow and have a sniff around, see if he’s a practitioner. You know the drill. Lesley and I shall visit the other.’

  I mopped up the plum sauce with the last of my Yorkshire pudding. ‘Henley’s a bit off my patch,’ I said.

  ‘All the more reason for you to expand your horizons,’ said Nightingale, ‘I did think you might combine it with a “pastoral” visit to Beverley Brook. I believe she’s currently living on that stretch of the Thames.’

  On the Thames, or in it? I wondered.

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you might,’ said Nightingale.

  For some inexplicable reason the Metropolitan Police don’t have a standard form for ghosts so I had to bodge one together on an Excel spreadsheet. In the old days every police station used to have a collator – an officer whose job it was to maintain boxes of card files full of information on local criminals, old cases, gossip and anything else that might allow the blue-uniformed champions of justice to kick down the right door. Or at least a door in the right neighbourhood. There’s actually a collator’s office preserved at Hendon College, a dusty room lined wall to wall and top to bottom with index-card boxes. Cadets are shown this room and told, in hushed terms, of the far-off days of the last century, when all the information was written down on pieces of paper. These days, provided you have the right access, you log into your AWARE terminal to access CRIS, for crime reports, Crimint+, for criminal intelligence, NCALT, for training programmes, or MERLIN, which deals with crimes against or involving children, and get your information within seconds.

  The Folly, being the official repository of the stuff that right-thinking police officers don’t want to talk about and, least of all, have floating around the electronic reporting system for any Tom, Dick or Daily Mail reporter to get hold of, gets its information the old-fashioned way – by word of mouth. Most of it goes to Nightingale, who writes it out, in a very legible hand I might add, on paper which I then file after transferring the basics to a 5x3 card which goes into the appropriate section of the mundane library’s index-card catalogue.

  Unlike Nightingale, I type up my reports on my laptop, using my spreadsheet form, print them and then file them in the library. I estimate that the mundane library has over three thousand files, not counting all the ghost-spotting books left uncollated in the 1930s. One day I was going to get it all onto a database – possibly by teaching Molly to type.

  Paperwork done, I did half an hour, all I could stand, of Pliny the Elder, whose lasting claim to fame is for writing the first encyclopaedia and sailing a tad too close to Vesuvius on its big day. Then I took Toby for a walk round Russell Square, popped in for a pint in the Marquis and then back to the Folly and bed.

  In a unit consisting of one chief inspector and one constable it is not the chief inspector who is on call in the middle of the night. After accidentally burning out three mobiles I’d taken to leaving mine turned off while inside the Folly. But this meant that in the event of a work-related call Molly would answer the phone downstairs and then inform me by silently standing in my bedroom doorway until I woke up out of sheer creepiness. Leaving a ‘please knock’ sign on my door had no effect, nor did locking it firmly and wedging a chair under the doorknob. Now, I love Molly’s cooking but she nearly ate me once. So the thought of her gliding into my room uninvited while I was kipping meant I found myself getting very little in the way of useful sleep. So by dint of a couple of days of hard work and with the assistance of a curator from the Science Museum I ran a coaxial extension up into my bedroom.

  Now when the mighty army for justice that is the Metropolitan Police needs my specialist services it sends a signal up a jacketed copper wire and sets off an electromagnetic bell in a bakelite phone that was manufactured five years before my dad was born. It’s like being woken up by a musical jackhammer but it’s better than the alternative.

  Lesley calls it the bat phone.

  It woke me up just past three o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Get up, Peter,’ said Detective Inspector Stephanopoulos. ‘It’s time for you to do some proper policing.’

  Monday

  2

  Baker Street

  I miss the company of other police. Don’t get me wrong, my assignment at the Folly has given me a shot at Detective Constable at least two years ahead of schedule, but what with the current unit complement being me, Detective Inspector Nightingale and, possibly soon, PC Lesley May it’s not like I go about my duties mob-handed. It’s one of those things you don’t miss until it’s gone, the smell of wet waterproofs in the locker room, the rush for a terminal in the PCs’ writing room on a Friday morning when they put the new jobs on the system, grunting and joking at the six AM briefing. That feeling of there being a lot of you in one place all mainly caring about the same stuff.

  Which was why, when I saw the sea of blue lights outside Baker Street Underground Station, it was a little bit like coming home. Rising out of the lights was the three-metre statue of Sherlock Holmes complete with deerstalker and hash pipe – there to oversee our detective work and ensure that it was held to the highest fictional standards. The metal lattice gates were folded back and a couple of PCs from the British Transport Police were tucked inside as if hiding from Sherlock’s stern gaze but more likely because it was freezing. They barely looked at my warrant card, waving me through on the basis that nobody else but a police officer would be stupid enough to be out this early.

  I went down the stairs to the main ticket hall where the automated Oyster barriers were all locked in the open ‘fire’ position. A bunch of guys in high-vis jackets and heavy boots were standing around drinking coffee, chatting and playing games on their phones. That night’s routine engineering work was definitely not getting done – expect delays.

  Baker Street opened in 1863 but most of it is retrofitted cream tile, wood panelling and wrought iron from the 1920s itself overgrown with layers of cables, junction boxes, speakers and CCTV cameras.

  It isn’t that hard to find the bodies at a major crime, even one at a complicated scene like an Underground station – you just look for the highest concentration of noddy suits and head that way. When I stepped out onto platform 3 the far end looked like an anthrax outbreak. It had to be foul play then because you don’t get this much attention if you’re a suicide or one of the five to ten people that manage to accidentally kill themselves on the Underground each year.

  Platform 3 was built in the old cut-and-cover system in which you got a couple of thousand navvies to dig a bloody great big trench, then you put a railway at the bottom and covered it over again. They ran steam trains back then, so half the length of the station was open to the sky to let the steam out and the weather in.

  Getting onto a crime scene is like getting into a club – as far as the bouncer is concerned, if you’re not on the list you don’t get in. The list in this case being the crime scene log and the bouncer being a very serious-looking BTP constable. I told him my name and rank and he glanced over to where a short stocky woman with an unfortunate flat top was glowering at us from further up the platform. This was the newl
y minted Detective Inspector Miriam Stephanopoulos and this, I realised, was her first official shout as a DI. We’d worked together before, which is probably why she hesitated before nodding to the constable. That’s the other way you get into the crime scene – by knowing the management.

  I signed into the log book and availed myself of one of the noddy suits draped over a folding chair. Once I was kitted out I walked over to where Stephanopoulos was supervising the Exhibits’ officer as he in turn supervised the forensics team that was swarming over the far end of the platform.

  ‘Morning, boss,’ I said. ‘You rang?’

  ‘Peter,’ she said. Around the Met she’s rumoured to keep a collection of human testicles in a jar by her bed – souvenirs courtesy of the men unwise enough to express a humorous opinion about her sexual orientation. Mind you I’ve also heard that she has a big house outside the North Circular where she and her partner keep chickens but I’ve never worked up the nerve to ask her.

  The guy lying dead at the end of platform 3 had once been handsome but he wasn’t anymore. He was lying on his side, his face resting on his outflung arm, his back half curled and his legs bent at the knees. Not quite what the pathologists call the pugilistic position, more like the recovery position I’d been taught in first aid.

  ‘Was he moved?’ I asked.

  ‘The station manager found him like that,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  He was wearing pre-faded jeans, a navy suit jacket over a black cashmere roll-neck. The jacket was good-quality fabric cut really well – definitely bespoke. Weirdly though, on his feet he wore a pair of Doctor Martens, classic type 1460 – work boots, not shoes. They were encrusted with mud from their soles to the third eyelet. The leather above the mud line was matt, supple, uncracked – practically brand-new.

  He was white, his face pale, straight nose, strong chin. Like I said, probably handsome. His hair was fair and cut into an emo fringe that hung lankly across his forehead. His eyes were closed.