False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The fake roofing contractors had said they had keys from the landlord and, apart from the dodgy accent, seemed plausible.

  ‘I wasn’t really paying as much attention as I should of,’ she said. ‘Does that make me liable?’

  I said I doubted it, and asked whether she’d actually seen them use their keys on the door to the upstairs flat. She admitted that she’d been called away to a domestic emergency – she gave the child another hard look – and let the ‘roofers’ get on with it.

  I noted down their appearance, but beyond them both being male and IC1 the description was too bland for immediate circulation. Just to be on the safe side, I made a note of the landlord’s details so I could ask if he’d hired any roofing contractors.

  He hadn’t, nor had any of the neighbours next door or across the road. I considered expanding the house- to-house all the way down the street, but we were already paying overtime for one set of uniforms and, if I wanted an overnight guard on the house, would have to pay for the next shift as well. Plus none of the response officers had Falcon training, and the only other remotely qualified detective I knew was currently on holiday in Hong Kong.

  Still, I did a couple more houses to show willing, but it was getting dark and cold and then Nightingale called me from the London Library and said he’d found something.

  ‘He had an inordinate interest in the works of Ada Lovelace,’ said Nightingale.

  We’d commandeered the London Library director’s office on the ground floor. This was a stark white-painted room with black wooden bookcases and a black desk that looked suspiciously self-assembly to me. A couple of the bookcases had lockable doors where, Nightingale explained, they kept rare books. There was also a black dining table doing its best to pretend it was there for executive conferences, whose pretensions were further undermined by the blue folding chair that had wandered in from a different library entirely.

  On the table was the remains of a plate of biscuits and couple of empty coffee mugs. Safely away from the dangerous liquids were a pair of black cardboard boxes.

  ‘Do we know which particular works?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s where it gets interesting,’ said Nightingale, and he checked his notes. ‘The Library has little in the way of material by Lovelace save for certain correspondence with one Ludovico Gavioli. Or, more precisely, his correspondence with her.’

  ‘Gavioli?’ I said. ‘As in the famous Italian organ makers?’

  ‘The very same. I’d never heard of them until they cropped up in your investigation,’ said Nightingale. ‘But they’re really quite fascinating. Ludovico was reputedly the business brains of the family and he was behind their move to Paris.’

  Which was, Nightingale had learned, the mechanical-organ making centre of the world – at least back in 1852 when the Gavioli family had moved there.

  ‘The letters themselves were singularly frustrating,’ said Nightingale. ‘My Italian is not really up to scratch, but they seem to relate to a device for reading music books. There was even a blueprint sketched on one of the sheets.’

  He carefully unfolded one of the cardboard boxes to reveal a sheaf of yellowing paper. Selecting a pair of sheets, he laid them on the table in front of me.

  ‘In 1838 Ludovico is said to have built a life-size automaton called David who could play the harp, and these here –’ Nightingale indicated the sheets – ‘were sent to Ada Lovelace in 1842.’

  Now, my Italian is non-existent, but I’d spent enough time looking at old books to puzzle out the fine but scratchy diagrams. There wasn’t enough detail to be sure, but they looked suspiciously like the pneumatic key frames that read music books for fairground organs. The system that Ludovico’s son Anselme had patented in the 1890s.

  I took a picture of the diagram with my phone and zoomed in on the image to see if I could count the number of holes. I needn’t have bothered, because Ludovico had helpfully labelled them in thirteen groups of ten and one group of seven, making 137 ‘keys’. Undoubtedly this was the key frame designed to read the music book stolen by Jacob Astor from the showmen’s camp at the Vale of Health.

  ‘How long has Astor been working here?’ I asked.

  ‘Since late October,’ said Nightingale. ‘As far as anyone can recall, he examined these letters shortly after.’

  ‘So he finds out about the 137-key frame, then presumably tracks down the music book, fakes being an interested buyer and organises a theft – all in the space of a couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘That’s fast work.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Nightingale. ‘The speed may also explain his oversight with the printed cards. Paying with a credit card was certainly a basic error.’

  ‘Has anyone else shown an interest in these letters?’ I asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Nightingale, ‘yes, they have.’

  In 1851 Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage met up for the last time when they, along with six million other people, visited the Great Exhibition together. Housed in a fantastic purpose-built glass pavilion on Hyde Park called the Crystal Palace, it was designed to showcase the achievements of British industry and all the stuff we’d nicked from overseas. Babbage, who never let an occasion get in the way of a grievance, was less impressed because not one of his amazing engines was on display.

  Running south and downhill from where the Crystal Palace once stood is Exhibition Road where, for an encore, those proud Victorians built some suitably grandiose museums, the better to educate the masses and keep them out of mischief.

  It certainly worked on me when I was in my early teens – I practically lived in the Science Museum, which was full of brilliant stuff and totally free. There was an entire gallery of model ships and rockets and aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling. In the shipping gallery there had been a mock-up of a ship’s bridge, complete with a fake transistor-era radar display in which the sweep rotated endlessly around, illuminating mysterious green blobs. You could stand with your hands on the disappointingly small ship’s wheel and imagine that you had set course for New York or Murmansk or Alpha Centauri.

  ‘That gallery was taken out in 2012,’ the curator told us.

  The curator, whose name was Cherise Desroche, was a white dwarf-woman with her straight shoulder-length hair dyed a lurid anime red. She was so small I wondered how she could see into some of the display cases – I assumed she must make arrangements.

  I must have sighed because she looked up at me and Nightingale and smiled.

  ‘Only about three per cent of our exhibits can be displayed at any one moment in the museum,’ she said. ‘The rest are all in storage.’

  On the way to her office we stopped to admire the 1995 reconstruction of Babbage’s Difference Engine Number 2 in all its brass, steel and mahogany glory. It was two metres tall, three metres long and driven by a hand crank that I suspected would have been a bugger to turn. No doubt Babbage would have hired in some labour to help with that – had he ever finished it.

  ‘This particular engine was designed to calculate log tables and the like,’ said Cherise. ‘It’s been tested and it works very well indeed.’

  The next step would have been an Analytical Engine, a mechanical general purpose computing machine which would, if you like wearing goggles with your top hat, have kicked off the IT revolution a hundred years early.

  As Cherise led us away, Nightingale asked if anyone had tried to reconstruct one of those.

  ‘The Analytical Engine would have been much larger,’ she said. ‘And as far as we know Babbage never completed the plans. Also there’s some doubt that a mechanical device of that complexity could ever work efficiently enough to be useful.’

  ‘But has someone made the attempt?’ asked Nightingale, as Cherise led us through a door marked staff only into an abruptly utilitarian passage painted 1930s bureaucratic green.

  ‘Someone certainly evinced an interest,’
she said.

  I glanced at Nightingale, who gave me a small smile as we passed through another door and down a high-ceilinged corridor into an equally high-ceilinged office with beautiful Regency mouldings half hidden by suspended fluorescent lighting strips. There was enough room for half a dozen desks, half of which were empty. Heavy-duty plastic moving crates with translucent sides and red lids were littered around the room, most already stuffed with papers and books. I looked out of the tall windows – across Exhibition Road was the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The Mormons’ London HQ.

  ‘Do you mind telling us who that was?’ asked Nightingale.

  Cherise starting digging in one of the moving crates.

  ‘We’re being turfed out, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘The Dyson Institute has acquired the building. Just a sec.’ She emerged with a black cardboard document folder which she opened to reveal a sheaf of papers. These were, Cherise revealed, pages cut from a notebook. ‘Of nineteenth-century Parisian manufacture,’ she said, ‘judging by the paper.’

  More diagrams, but of fragments of a device. More notes, this time written in French.

  ‘But not by one of the Gaviolis,’ said Cherise. ‘The handwriting is distinctly different. They’re part of a package that has been traced back to Ada Lovelace and they relate to her work on Bernoulli numbers. We think . . .’ Cherise gave a little theatrical pause. ‘That it’s something to with her further work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine.’

  She said someone had asked to see the Gavioli letters because of a reference to a 137-key reader in the margins of one of the pages. She spread the pages and pointed to the faded scratchy writing.

  ‘La symétrie les rend réticents,’ Nightingale read aloud. ‘Symmetry makes them reluctant.’

  ‘Nobody seems to know who is supposed to be reluctant,’ said Cherise, and she gave a false little laugh.

  ‘So, who wanted to do the reconstruction?’ I asked, and the laugh cut off abruptly.

  ‘Ah,’ said Cherise. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.’

  ‘It seems an innocuous question,’ said Nightingale.

  And the mere fact that you didn’t want to tell us, I thought, means we really want to know.

  ‘Are you under some form of duress?’ asked Nightingale when Cherise stayed silent.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And no. Kind of. There’s a fairly ferocious NDA involved.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘This is a criminal investigation and a non-disclosure agreement doesn’t preclude you from giving information to the police. In fact, if the information proves critical, then not providing it in a timely fashion could be considered aiding and abetting after the fact.’

  I was fairly certain that this was mostly bollocks but Cherise bought it – I think it was my strategic use of the word ‘preclude’ that did the trick.

  ‘You’ve probably heard of him,’ she said. ‘Terrence Skinner – the Silicon Valley guy. He funded a preliminary feasibility study.’

  He’d suggested that if a working Analytical Engine could be built, then it might form the centrepiece of a new gallery – sponsored by his new UK venture, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. It was at his behest that they’d tracked down the letters at the London Library, amongst a mass of other documents, and scanned them into a digital database. Minions of the tech giant swarmed over the project for reconstructing the Difference Engine and asked detailed questions about manufacturing tolerances, the long-term utility of brass cogs and whether they could use an actual steam engine to drive the mechanism.

  She showed us an artist’s impression of the Analytical Engine in action, and the sodding thing came in at just under eight metres long.

  ‘Unfortunately the project never went any further,’ said Cherise, which didn’t surprise me. There was no way that monstrosity was going to work for more than a couple of seconds before grinding to a halt like the gearbox on an Austin Allegro. The funding dried up and Terrence Skinner withdrew his interest, leaving nothing but a slightly improved filing system and non-disclosure agreements behind.

  On our way out, Nightingale took a detour to look at the Apollo capsule displayed in the Making of the Modern World gallery. The great bronze cone was mounted so that it tilted forward, allowing a view through the missing hatch and into the interior. He stood staring at the flimsy looking acceleration couches even as a troop of hyperactive primary schoolkids swirled around his legs.

  ‘You know, Peter,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t think I’ve visited this museum since 1924.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone that,’ I said. ‘Or they’ll put you in a case.’

  ‘They’d be too late – I’ve already promised my brain to science.’

  The Folly is the sleeping heart of the Special Assessment Unit. A big square Regency building on the south side of Russell Square, it was first built as combination meeting hall, club house and library for the Society of the Wise. Having spent the last hundred years being regarded as mountebanks, charlatans and quacks, the Society of the Wise had grabbed hold of respectability with both hands and had no intention of letting go short of death. Above the front door were the words scientia potestas est and a cartouche with the Folly’s coat of arms. If you look carefully you can see the space they left against the day the monarch granted them the honour of becoming the Royal Society of the Wise.

  It never happened – neither Queen Victoria nor her consort were interested in the practical uses of magic.

  The sadly deficient coat of arms, the motto, front door, and in fact the whole façade, was shrouded in scaffolding and plastic. Through a gap in the sheeting loomed a conveyor belt shrouded in wood that warns the neighbours that basement extensions are underway.

  Since the first rule of a good investigation is to check that somebody else hasn’t done the work for you, I headed round the back and over to the coach house. On the first floor is the Tech Cave where I keep my work computer, the Airwave charger, widescreen TV and a hotel fridge stocked with water and my emergency supply of Red Stripe. The mews itself currently looked like a particularly neat builders’ yard, with pallets of aerated concrete blocks, precast lintels, bags of mortar, a cement mixer jammed into a corner and what looked like a brand-new pair of Portaloos. The scaffolding would be staying up for another week at least, making me glad I was staying with Bev.

  The cement smell followed me up the external spiral staircase and into the Tech Cave. Once everything was powered up I logged into AWARE with my warrant number and went rummaging about to see if Terrence Skinner or the Serious Cybernetics Corporation had cropped up somewhere other than the pages of Wired magazine. About a minute later I was looking at a flag warning me off, a case number and contact details for the National Crime Agency.

  I recognised the name of the officer listed – Alona Silver. We’d worked together on a street-racing case earlier in the year. I wondered if that was a coincidence – I really hoped it was.

  Somewhere there’s a document, probably a PDF, with a protocol for junior Met officers regulating inter-agency contacts. And one day I’m sure somebody might read it. I still had Officer Silver’s personal mobile number from that summer. I looked it up and called her directly.

  ‘Who is this?’ she snarled.

  ‘Peter Grant,’ I said.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ The snarl modulated down to mere impatience.

  ‘What’s your interest in Terrence Skinner and the Serious Cybernetics Corporation?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  5

  January: Some Cats are Grey

  The Moshi Moshi sushi bar at Liverpool Street Station sits in a Perspex box suspended over the platforms. It’s conveniently located near the station’s rear entrance via the Sun Street Passage, less than half a kilometre from the Serious Cybernetics Corporation on Tabernacle Street. And it’s the sort of place that a busy undercover police
officer might, at the end of the day, pop into for a bit of plausibly deniable conversation with his handlers. And, of course, have a bit of cold fish wrapped in seaweed.

  ‘Does this American wizard know you’re a police officer?’ asked Silver.

  ‘I keep telling him,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know if he believes me or not.’

  Silver tapped her bento box with her chopsticks. She was a thin white woman with a light brown Mediterranean complexion and a Roman nose along which she had perfected the art of looking down at people.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.’

  ‘Then what on earth does he think you are?’ said Nightingale, who had opted for the black cod.

  Personally, I’d gone for the sashimi platter and had to finish a mouthful of tuna before I could speak. Beyond the transparent walls of the restaurant the commuters passed in an endless stream.

  ‘I think he thinks I belong to an NGO,’ I said. ‘Like he does. And that I operate independently of the criminal justice system.’

  Silver tapped her bento box again – a nervous habit, I decided.

  ‘Wherever did he get that idea?’ she said, and gave Nightingale the side eye.

  ‘He thinks he’s starring in a spy film,’ I said.

  Nightingale frowned.

  ‘In some ways he’s right,’ said Silver. ‘Although his tradecraft is abysmal.’

  The NCA recruits its officers from the police, HM Customs, Border Force and the wider civil service. Rumour had it they’d gone shopping for talent at the intelligence agencies as well. And, judging by Silver, I found those rumours easy to believe.

  ‘I can see a number of ways he’ll be more use to us if he continues to believe that,’ she said brightly. ‘Do you think you can sell him on it?’

  I said no problem.

  Silver narrowed her eyes at me.

  ‘You’ve taken remarkably well to undercover work,’ she said.