December: Changes in a State of Mind
It almost ended for me right there in the doorway of a two-bedroom flat in Palmers Green, and the last thing I would have seen in life was a Gustav Klimt poster in a cheap plastic frame. It was only because experience had taught me to go carefully through a suspect’s door that I caught the little tingle under my foot when I stepped in. I’d been worried that Jacob Astor might have been hiding in the bathroom, but that was nothing compared to the icy clutch I felt in my stomach. That bit was psychosomatic – the sinister flash of sensation like someone dragging clammy fingers across my thigh was not.
Back in the good old days, when deeply misunderstood Scandinavians sought to alleviate the limitations of arctic agriculture by murdering foreigners and taking their stuff, there arose a powerful tradition of enchanting objects. Their smiths turned out swords, staves, axes and belt buckles, all imbued with a supernatural keenness or strength or – in a couple of cases you can still see in museums – resistance to rust.
They also discovered a way to weaponise ghosts. We don’t know the details – or more precisely, we don’t want to know the details – but those peaceful world traders would start by torturing a human being to death over an extended period of time. Driven into a mindless frenzy by the torture, this ‘demon spirit’ was then trapped in an enchanted object and used to power a number of different magical effects – all of them destructive. There are stories of axes with minds of their own and rings that drive their wearer mad, but I know the technique from what Nightingale calls its twentieth-century apotheosis – the demon trap. Essentially a magical landmine.
And, as when you’re stupid enough to set foot on a conventional landmine, the first rule is don’t move.
That was the easy bit.
The second is to concentrate on the here and now and not be distracted by wondering how you got yourself into the shit in the first place.
That I found harder.
As soon as I realised I’d lost Jacob Astor round the back of the London Library, I’d called Nightingale. I wanted to get a response car parked up outside his flat in Palmers Green and needed Nightingale to authorise the overtime. Back in the dim and distant noughties before our Lady Theresa of the Wheat Field hacked up the Met’s budget, you used to be able to just ask a Borough Command to send a couple of uniforms round. These days, response officers were thin on the ground and you generally had to bribe their shift commanders with externally sourced overtime payments to get any help.
While Nightingale was organising that, I popped back into the London Library to reassure the director, a tall hyperactive man in a very good suit, that there was nothing to worry about and then secure Jacob Astor’s workspace, bag up the jacket and the bag he’d left behind and take initial statements from his colleagues. This is why police investigations take time. You have to be thorough, consistent and you have to write everything down. It was dark before I could pile into my trusty Ford Asbo with my evidence bags and fight my way north through rush-hour traffic to Palmers Green, stopping off at the letting agency to collect the keys.
They made me show my warrant card and called 101 to confirm my identity before they handed them over. By the time I drew up outside the house my bought-and-paid-for uniformed PCs were on their third hour of overtime and halfway through a family-sized bucket of KFC. I blagged a drumstick and some chips off them and let them finish their coffees before we went in.
Once through the front door the uniforms were tasked with securing the neighbour while I opened the main door to the flat. I walked cautiously up the dimly lit narrow staircase, carefully opened the door at the top and stepped on a demon trap.
From a very long distance away I heard one of the uniforms asking me if I still needed them.
‘I’ve just stepped on a Falcon IED,’ I said.
There was a suitably horrified silence from behind me.
‘Back off,’ I said. ‘Call my boss and evacuate everyone downstairs.’
I barely heard them agree and move off. I was too busy not moving.
Step Two: don’t panic.
When Nightingale was training me he said that if you’re not dead in the first instance, then your chances of survival are much improved.
‘By how much?’ I’d asked.
‘That depends,’ said Nightingale.
‘On what?’
‘On what happens next,’ he said.
I wasn’t dead in this first instance because Nightingale had trained me by leaving fake demon traps around the Folly. The fakes were army surplus training devices that we’d found while clearing out the gun room in the basement, and they gave you a nasty static electric shock when activated.
‘Why the delay?’ I’d asked. ‘Why not go off on first contact?’
‘You need two definite contacts,’ Nightingale had said. ‘One to prime the demon, the second to set it off.’
Step Three: determine what it is you’re standing on. What is it, exactly, the demon is primed to do?
Easier said than done. But again, practice. We’d done lots of practice. I took a deep breath and cleared my head. I looked for the vestigium amongst the random thoughts, memories and phantom sense impressions that fill the waking mind.
I felt it – a strange pulsing mindless sensation. I’ve experienced demon traps powered by tortured dogs and at least one by the traditional murdered human, but this was weird, alien and repellent in a whole different way. There was no hint of personality. Not even the twisted remnant of a person tortured until their mind snapped. Instead it was amorphous and diffuse, like a cloud of gas.
So, bollocks to Step Three and onto Step Four: establish your conduit.
The magical tradition I belong to exists in the gap between the observable universe and the rational clockwork creation of the Enlightenment. There’s this power. We don’t know where it comes from or why it follows the rules it does, but it definitely exists and there are definite ways to manipulate it. Further advances in science have done little to help our understanding, except to add a growing temptation to attach the word ‘quantum’ to everything.
Nightingale says the simplest form of demon trap provides a physical attack on the body. This can take the form of crushing or thermal damage, and the effect is often indistinguishable from an ordinary anti-personnel mine.
‘However,’ Nightingale had said, ‘if all you want to do is blow your opponent to bits, then a high-explosive landmine is much more effective and cheaper.’
More likely this one was a trap left specifically for a practitioner, and keyed to go off at the first use of magic. If that was the case, all I had to do was step off the demon trap and nothing would happen. According to a certain military-trained Russian witch I know, the Red Army had done a statistical analysis with demon traps just as they had with conventional minefields. The conclusions had been the same in both cases – you lost fewer troops charging across a minefield than allowing the Germans to funnel you into a killing ground. Which was good solid Russian pragmatism and no bloody use at all when it’s you standing with your foot on the prospect of an agonising death.
So, Soviet statistical models aside, your options are to step off the plate and hope for the best, or to do the counter-spell even though that might be the trigger that sets off the trap. So, obviously you have to do the counter-spell. But the counter-spell, despite being refined by teams of experienced practitioners, is a fourth order spell. This means it consists of four separate formae, the building blocks of Newtonian magic, plus various embellishments. A forma is essentially a shape in your mind that causes an effect in the physical universe, for reasons that one day will indeed probably turn out to have the word quantum in them. To do sı¯pho¯ nem you have to run through each of the formae in turn, in the right sequence and with the right modifications.
And you have to do this faster than the demon trap can release its magical payload.
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Below me I heard big police feet moving backwards and forwards as they cleared the downstairs flat.
It had been six months since I’d last practised sı¯pho¯nem, so I ran through it a couple of times while I waited for the house to empty.
Once the uniforms had called, from a safe distance, to say that a perimeter had been established, I took another deep breath and executed the spell. The best way to describe it would be as a funnel that has its pointy end on the demon trap and its broad end pointing upwards. The larger you make the outlet, the more dispersed the energy. And the less likely it is to kill you.
During the war, Nightingale says, about one in a hundred diffusion attempts killed the practitioner carrying it out.
A tickle started in my throat and, very slowly and carefully, I clamped my hand over my mouth. Just in time. I tried not to move as my chest spasmed and I coughed, once, twice and, one irritating little gap later, a third time.
I waited a moment to see if my body was going to make another spirited attempt to kill me and, when I was sure it wasn’t, I executed the spell before I could lose my nerve.
I was barely through the first two formae when the trap uncoiled like a snake striking out of its basket. It rushed up my body in a whirl of salt spray, hot sun and a terrifying sensation of smothering as if I’d been wrapped in fish guts. Then a prickle, as if a thousand needles had pierced the skin all over my body. The fear was primal and suffocating and I nearly stumbled over the fourth and last forma.
But Nightingale is a good teacher and suddenly his tiresome insistence on getting the formae precisely right time after bloody time made total sense.
Just as the pinpricks grew sharper, the formae locked into place and the counter-spell unfurled over my head and the fish stink rushed upwards and out like a geyser of rotting seafood.
A car alarm went off outside and there was suddenly a chorus of barking dogs in the distance.
Step Five: check for secondaries before you move.
I got my breathing back under control and spent another long five minutes making sure some total bastard hadn’t added a backup demon. Once I was certain I wasn’t going to explode, I stepped backwards off the device.
Then I sat down at the top of the stairs and had a bit of a breather.
The stairs themselves were narrow and gloomy with a main door into the communal hallway at the bottom and a second door, which I had foolishly stepped through without checking, at the top. It had one of those pop-out light switches powering a naked low-energy LED bulb. Ironically I hadn’t pushed in the light switch on the way up in case it was booby-trapped.
I pulled my phone and gave it a shake – it made the sandy rainmaker sound that indicated it had been fried by the magical discharge. I don’t even bother putting numbers into any of my mobiles any more, I just memorise them instead.
This was also why I always carry a backup pay-as-you-go phone in the same pocket as my evidence gloves, pen torch and hand sanitiser. I pulled it out now, switched it on and called Nightingale’s mobile.
‘I’ve disarmed it,’ I said when he picked up. Judging by the roar of the straight-6 engine and the siren, he’d been proceeding at an unsafe speed in a built-up area.
‘Good work,’ he said, and I heard the Jaguar’s siren give a last little whoop before shutting off. ‘I’ll be with you soon.’
It seemed a viciously lethal trap for a man who’d warned me against damaging books in the London Library, but criminals often have a sentimental streak for dogs and rabbits while being total bastards to people.
‘Detective,’ called a voice from the bottom of the stairs – one of the uniforms. ‘Are you all right up there?’
I shouted down that I was fine and that the device had been neutralised.
I considered waiting for Nightingale before checking the rest of the flat, but I’m supposed to be able to do this basic stuff on my own. That said, when I did start my search I did it very slowly and carefully.
It was a furnished flat rented from an agency for £250 a week. The furnishings were at the John Lewis end of cost and looked relatively new and unworn. The second bedroom had obviously not been used and I wondered what kind of librarian could afford such a rent without a flatmate – even if we were dangerously far outside the North Circular.
There were no books or Blu-rays on the bookshelves, no CDs and no music centre or iPod dock to play music on. The bed was neatly made – too neatly, in fact – with the sheets perfectly cornered and the pillows neatly aligned with the imitation teak headboard. Some people are naturally obsessive about their bed linen, but more often it was a sign that they’d been institutionalised – borstal, military, prison, take your pick. The wardrobe was similarly neat, with ranks of high-quality cotton shirts grouped by colour hanging on the left, a couple of smart casual jackets, one tan, one navy, in the middle and a collection of jeans and chinos hanging from specialised clothes hangers on the right. Everything ironed to the sort of supernatural tolerances that Nightingale’s housekeeper would approve of.
On the coffee table was a copy of QX Magazine with a group photo of actors and the headline oh no they didn’t – apparently it was the Panto Special. I checked the date – it was the previous week’s issue.
There was no sign of the stolen music book – we’d bring in a proper POLSA team of course, but I was willing to bet money that they wouldn’t find anything.
Nightingale arrived while I was finishing up in the living room. I walked back into the hall to find him on his hands and knees with his face as close to the demon trap as he could get without touching it.
‘Curious,’ he said.
I asked if he recognised the model.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But it does remind me of a type that started appearing late in the war.’
The consensus amongst the boffins, according to Nightingale, was that the Germans had discovered a way to power their demon traps without recourse to torturing someone to death.
Nightingale pulled his clasp knife from his pocket and started cutting away the carpet to expose the device.
‘A humane demon trap?’ I said.
The device was smaller than I expected, a square twenty centimetres on a side but, most surprisingly of all, made of plastic only a few millimetres thick. Thin enough to have dented under the pressure of my foot.
‘Not at the receiving end,’ said Nightingale. ‘They were supposed to be particularly unpleasant.’
I squatted down to join him. The surface of the trap was smooth and the colour of an unpainted Airfix model, except for a blackened triangle at its centre. That would be what Nightingale always referred to as the payload, the actual trap that gave the demon trap its name. The top surface was devoid of any inscriptions or etched symbols. It looked like a prop from 1970s Doctor Who.
‘Plastic,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ve never seen a plastic demon trap before.’
‘We know some plastics hold magic better than metal,’ I said.
Nightingale ran his finger lightly along an edge and then looked up at me and grinned.
‘Good work on the diffusion,’ he said. ‘And your dispersal was excellent. There’s hardly any residue at all.’
‘I almost ballsed it up,’ I said.
‘Everyone always does the first time,’ said Nightingale. ‘Let’s have a look on the other side.’
Which proved to be as featureless as the top, only with a matt finish.
There was an impression once more of old fish and the seaweed-and-salt smell of the seashore.
I asked Nightingale if he recognised the signare, but he shook his head.
‘Why don’t we secure this first?’ he said.
So I fetched the bubble wrap from the boot of the Asbo. During my recent suspension, I’d had time to experiment with what materials served as the best insulating matter for packaging dangerously magical
items. Green wood is the traditional choice, but I found that polystyrene and bubble wrap were just as good.
Me and Nightingale carefully wrapped the demon trap and slid it into a large-sized evidence bag and put it in the back of the Jag. We split up our actions so that Nightingale would drop the trap off at the Folly and then interview Jacob’s workmates, while I interviewed the downstairs neighbour and canvassed the street.
‘Is it safe to go back in?’ asked the downstairs neighbour, whose name was Mrs Chaudry. I assured her it was, and asked if I might ask her a few questions. We ended up in a reassuringly cluttered kitchen with the toddler in its high chair sucking on a bottle and giving me suspicious looks.
Mrs Chaudry made the tea while I pulled out my notebook and got on with it.
After the warm-up questions about her upstairs neighbour, about which she knew the normal London amount – that is, nothing at all – I asked if anyone had visited the house after I’d spoken to her the first time.
‘Some men came around about an hour later,’ she said. ‘Said they were roofing contractors.’
‘Said they were,’ I said. ‘But you don’t think so.’
‘Not now, I don’t,’ she said. ‘I mean they had a white van and clipboards and everything but . . .’
‘But?’
‘The van was a bit too clean, to be honest, and they were a bit sus themselves.’
‘In what way?’
‘One of them was pretending to be Irish, for a start,’ said Mrs Chaudry. ‘The other one didn’t say anything.’
I asked how she knew he was pretending.
‘Because his accent was terrible,’ she said. ‘It was like a bad film. I mean, he didn’t say “top of the morning” but I think he really wanted to. I thought he was taking the piss, to be honest, but I didn’t have time to waste on him.’
She looked at her child, who looked back with a wide-eyed innocence that wasn’t fooling anyone.
I asked whether she could guess what accent the man really had.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘American, maybe, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.’
False Value (Rivers of London 8) Page 6