‘You’re only in for the short term,’ she said. ‘If you make friends they’re going to see it as the betrayal it is when they find out. And they won’t ever, ever, forgive you. If you can’t handle that, we’re going to have to abort the operation.’
And I’d said, ‘No problem. I can handle it.’ Because I’m an idiot.
I loitered for another five minutes until I judged the rush to be over and then used the mouse-tracking app on my Vogonphone to find Stephen. He was in one of the cubicle fields on the ground floor of Betelgeuse. So I adjusted my tie and set off to find him.
I was three paces out of the loo when I was intercepted by Ms Side-eye. No doubt I was being tracked just like all the mice. I knew from Guleed that the name on her passport was September Rain – not her birth name, which was actually Sylvia Makowicz. But she’d changed that when she got off the bus from Cherry Tree, Oklahoma, aged nineteen.
Obviously Belgravia MIT, or more likely Silver and the NCA, had some excellent contacts inside American law enforcement.
‘How’s the ribs?’ I asked.
September gave me an ambiguous tilt of the head and offered me an envelope. It was high-quality posh stationery with a linen finish, and inside was a compliments slip with the SCC logo in the corner.
Scrawled across the slip was Dinner my place tonight 1900 – although the handwriting was so bad I had to check with September as to the last couple of words.
‘So, where does he live?’
September told me. And as an address it was suitably high-end, anonymous and expensive. Then, with a laconic half-salute, she walked off – still favouring her side, I noticed.
By the time I reached Betelgeuse, Stephen had moved to the first floor and was in Lamuella, one of the many meeting rooms on that level. The door had a narrow vertical glass panel that allowed me to see in. Around an oval birch conference table a dozen mice were arranged in various stages of existential despair. I estimated that they’d only been in there for a quarter of an hour, but already one of the mice, a white woman with purple hair and a Winter Is Coming T-shirt, was gently banging her forehead on the table top. I wasn’t even sure she was aware of what she was doing. Most of her colleagues were caught up in their own misery, but a guy next to her was looking down at her with increasing alarm. I spotted Stephen, who had positioned himself at the far end of the table and had the glazed expression I recognised as that of a practitioner mentally running through his formae in an effort to stay awake.
I left them to it, but as I walked away I was sure I heard a deep collective groan behind me.
‘Specification change,’ said Stephen when he caught up with me, much later that morning. ‘Three months into the build, they’ve decided they want to embed a voice recognition system.’
‘Embed it into what?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’m not actually a coder, I just play one on TV. But I think it’s a gateway or access to a network. There’s a log-in page. That’s what I’m supposed to be coding, but fortunately my partner has the hots for me and insists on doing the work.’
‘Convenient,’ I said.
‘Not if I have to sleep with him,’ he said.
‘Not your type?’
‘I’m strictly a case by case kind of guy. But if I had a type it wouldn’t be him.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
Stephen shrugged.
‘Them’s the breaks,’ he said. ‘Good work with the active shooter.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Did you know him?’
Stephen shook his head.
‘What was his deal?’ he asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘Mentally unstable,’ I said.
‘Nothing to do with us, right?’
‘Why would it have something to do with us?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Stephen. ‘In any case, you need to get your ass in gear and get us into Bambleweeny.’
‘Working on it,’ I said.
‘Working on it how?’
‘Carefully,’ I said. ‘And what’s the rush for you? Apart from the sexual harassment angle.’
Stephen looked around and leant in.
‘Can you come over after work?’ he asked.
‘Not until late,’ I said. ‘Is it important?’
‘There’s somebody you need to meet,’ he said.
I took a late lunch outside so I could check in with Beverley and Nightingale, in reverse order. At least a third of the mice did the same at some point during the day so they could use their own phones to make calls. The run-of-the-mill mice did it out of paranoia or nicotine addiction. I did it because I knew for a fact that every outgoing call was logged and recorded.
Nightingale signed off on both my proposed visits, Skinner and Stephen, and said he would be providing his famous one-man Falcon perimeter should anything go pear-shaped. I thought it unlikely that Skinner would manifest himself as a Bond villain, but Stephen was definitely keeping something hidden in his flat.
‘Perhaps we may get an opportunity to find out,’ said Nightingale.
‘Just in case things kick off, let’s avoid being obviously official. Unless it’s really necessary,’ I said. ‘Let’s not destroy his illusions just yet.’
Nightingale said he would take this under advisement. He used to be much more comfortable with sneaking around – I don’t know what’s come over him. After dealing with one chain of command, I called Bev to deal with the other.
‘I notice that this one didn’t invite me,’ she said.
‘We are but scarab beetles upon the face of the desert to the likes of Skinner,’ I said.
‘I could always invite myself.’
‘Please. Not this time.’
‘Okay.’
‘Besides, you’d probably just decide to make him a godparent or something.’
‘I said okay,’ said Beverley. ‘And where is dinner going to take place?’
I told her, and she laughed.
‘Don’t forget to take some bananas,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’
Terrence Skinner lived modestly in a twelve-million-quid penthouse on Park Road overlooking Regent’s Park on one side and the canal on the other. The building was half a dozen storeys done in the stacked kitchenware school of post-millennial architecture. From the outside it was a clump of cylinders and blocks with all the grace and style of a urinal in an art gallery. Skinner was unusual in that he actually lived in the building full-time. Most of the other flats had been bought as long-term money-laundering investments and spent the bulk of their time empty.
There was a human concierge and he called up so that I could be fetched by Mr Skinner’s security. The concierge actually said ‘Mr Skinner’s security’ and refused to answer any questions. That was despite my best We’re all cheeky cockneys together schtick – which has even worked on Glaswegians, but obviously not on this guy. Silver ran a check on him later and discovered he was from Dagenham, so maybe I was just losing my touch.
I was so rattled that I almost greeted the bodyguard who met me at the door to the apartment with a glad cry of, ‘Wotcha, September,’ but I remembered just in time that I wasn’t supposed to know her name.
The contents of my carrier bag gave her pause.
‘That you’ve bought a snack I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s the toy boat I’m having trouble with.’
‘You wouldn’t want the bananas to get wet, would you?’
She gave me an exasperated look which, through years of practice, I ignored.
‘Arms up,’ she said, and proceeded to give me a thorough and professional pat down that included, I noticed with approval, going all the way up my inner leg.
‘Shoes off,’ she said, and nodded at the two pairs of shoes arrayed neatly on a mat by the wall. I unlaced my DMs, slipped them off and held them up for September’s inspecti
on.
‘Funny,’ she said.
I put my shoes down on the mat next to a pair of pristine Converse. September handed me a pair of white cotton rubber-soled slippers – the kind you get in high-end hotels – and then led me up a curved staircase into what was definitely a reception, not a living, room.
The penthouse was decorated in modern art gallery style with white walls, blocky white furniture and über-expensive wide plank hardwood floors. The corporate bleakness was accented with cream-coloured rugs and throw cushions in muted gold and red. Skinner, who’d been staring out across Regent’s Park when I came in, turned and smiled. Apart from September’s professional suspicion, it was the most genuine thing in the room.
He reached out, a bit tentatively I thought, and we shook hands. His grip was unremarkably firm and didn’t linger. I got the impression he was making an effort, and wondered why.
‘I’m not going to say you saved my life,’ he said. ‘Because September –’ he nodded at the woman standing guard by the stairs – ‘did that. But you probably saved one other person’s life. Maybe more.’
I told him I had reacted according to my training and he laughed.
‘The understatement thing,’ he said. ‘You English think it makes you look clever. But let’s be honest, it’s just stupid.’
I shrugged.
‘It is what it is,’ I said.
‘Would you like a drink? Beer, wine, lager?’
I asked for a beer and got a bottle of Peroni instead. He waved me over to the white armchairs in front of the panoramic windows that looked out on to the balcony. It had started to drizzle, and the lights of the city beyond the park were blurry stars behind our reflections.
We sat in silence and sipped our drinks. From the kitchen behind us I could hear various chopped comestibles being tossed around in a wok. Which at least meant we weren’t going to be having McDonald’s – you hear stories.
The silence continued, and I’m afraid I snapped first.
‘Nice view,’ I said.
‘I used to have a place on the beach near Santa Barbara,’ said Skinner. ‘Used to sit like this and watch the sun set over the ocean.’
Santa Barbara hadn’t been on Silver’s property list, and Skinner had said ‘used to’.
‘What happened to it?’ I asked.
‘I had to sell it,’ said Skinner. ‘The house was good but it was a public beach.’
Which meant that anyone could use it, including the homeless, panhandlers and dog walkers.
‘Not to mention panhandling, homeless dog owners,’ said Skinner.
The local landowners’ association had tried to restrict access, but they’d faced legal action and protests from a coalition of surfers, dog walkers and joggers. None of whom seemed to care about the rights of the people who occasionally lived there.
‘In the end I couldn’t stand it any more and I had to sell up,’ said Skinner. He frowned – the memory was obviously painful. ‘Then I came here. Didn’t know when I was well off.’
I wasn’t going to get a better cue than that, but before I could ask him why – in particular – he had come to London, a large Filipino man in chef’s whites emerged from the kitchen and informed us that dinner was served.
This proved to be one enormous crab each, served simply with butter and lemon. I swear the poor sod was staring at me when I sat down in front of it. So was Skinner, and I wondered whether this was a test of some kind. I know how to eat crab – you pick it up and rip the top from the bottom.
As I carried out this operation, a dim memory of a large brown face came to me.
‘The crab don’t mind,’ the memory said in a West Indian accent. ‘Him dead.’
Skinner nodded approval and ripped open his own crab – test passed, obviously.
I scooped out some flakes of white crab meat – it was delicious.
‘So is it true that you used to work for the Special Assessment Unit?’ asked Skinner.
The bastard had waited until I had a mouthful before asking, presumably hoping I’d spit it out or choke on it in surprise. Instead it gave me a chance to think while I chewed my food.
‘I was attached to them for about a year,’ I said after swallowing.
Skinner stared at me intently.
‘But nobody calls them that, do they?’ he said. ‘Everybody calls them the Folly, don’t they?’
‘Most coppers try not to talk about them at all,’ I said, which was certainly true – although Seawoll could talk about the Folly at length and, impressively, never repeat himself – not once.
‘Is it true they deal with magical crime?’ he asked.
I felt a thud in the hollow of my chest. Skinner obviously had contacts beyond those Johnson had in the Met. The question was, what did Skinner actually know and how close to the truth was I going to have skirt?
Never mind moral and legal ambiguity, I thought, it’s this game of bloody who-knows-what that makes undercover work such a trauma for an honest copper.
‘They deal with weird bollocks,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘The supernatural?’
‘If you like.’
‘So you believe in magic?’
‘I saw some stuff,’ I said. ‘Stuff that was difficult to explain within our theoretical framework.’
‘You worked with the Nightingale?’
This time I nearly did choke on my crab. Only people in the know gave Nightingale the definitive article, and I had to remember that I wasn’t supposed to be one of them.
‘If you mean DCI Nightingale,’ I said, ‘he was my boss when I worked there.’
‘Did you ever see him do magic?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Why are you still keeping secrets for the police?’ said Skinner. ‘It’s not like they treated you well.’
‘I asked first,’ I said. ‘Why do you want to know?’
Skinner took a sip of water from his glass. It was still water, filtered by the artificial reed bed built into the balcony – he’d pointed it out earlier. A start-up project designed to create organic filtering systems for eco-friendly Californian pools. And, as an afterthought, potable water in the developing world.
‘Tyrel is a good bloke in his own way,’ said Skinner. ‘But he’s limited in his viewpoint – conventional, mundane. You’re younger, a product of a different age, and as a result you’ve been exposed to a much wider range of influences. I need someone –’ he took another sip – ‘someone like you to investigate what motivated William Lloyd.’
It was an interesting choice of words – what motivated William Lloyd. Did Skinner suspect that the man had been pushed, or was he thinking of other motivations? There was only one way to find out.
‘I’ll need access to Bambleweeny,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where he worked.’
Skinner nodded.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘I don’t believe in magic,’ I said. ‘Because I’ve seen it in operation. I don’t know how it works, but I know it does.’
Skinner looked down at his poor gutted crab as if surprised to see it so empty.
‘Emil,’ he called. ‘We’re finished.’
I hadn’t, but I don’t think he noticed.
You can access the bank of Regent’s Canal via a footpath just the other side of the bridge from Skinner’s postmodernist penthouse. It runs along the canal before dropping you into the damp urine-scented shadow of the railway bridges further west.
Nobody knows why some systems – rivers, forests, possibly the London Underground but we’re not sure – acquire a genius loci. Not even the genii locorum themselves know the why and the how of it – they only know it happens. Although they don’t call themselves genii
locorum – they say they are spirits, gods and goddesses and, when the mood takes Beverley, òrìs· à.
Why Regent’s Canal had acquired a genius loci was a mystery, and why she was a female orang-utan that escaped from London Zoo in the 1950s is doubly so. But since I’ve met unicorns, talking foxes and a very belligerent tree, I no longer find these things so surprising.
Professor Postmartin says that the most important thing is to keep detailed notes. That way some lucky bugger in the future can get a decent dissertation out of our experiences.
Genii locorum are by definition territorial, so if you think you’re going to spend some time working in their locality it’s best to put in some propitiation. Alcohol works most of the time. But tradition, in this case, suggested bananas.
I was squatting down to put the boat in the water when a canoe came gliding out of the darkness under the bridge. It was open-topped, and while the low light made it difficult to see details it looked to me like it had been hewn from a single log. For a moment I wondered if I’d slipped into that dangerous half-life memory of the city where gods and ghosts mingled with the stone memory of the architecture. But then I noticed that the two passengers were both wearing orange Gore-Tex anoraks. The figure at the front was doing all the paddling while his companion sat cross-legged in the back with an air of placid enlightenment.
I recognised them both, so I stopped trying to float my offering and waited for them to pull in to the bank beside me.
‘Hi, Melvin,’ I said.
The pinched little white man in the bow had once been an estate agent until an unwise grift had propelled him into a brief career as King of the Rats. Now he was estate manager for the Goddess of the Canals and, obviously, her boatman too.
I waved my bananas at the figure seated in the back, who reached out an inhumanly long arm to tap Melvin on the shoulder. He leant back and the goddess murmured something in his ear. He nodded and turned back to me.
‘She says thank you for the bananas, but what she really needs is a toaster.’ I noticed he took the bananas, though.
‘A toaster?’
‘Yes,’ said Melvin. ‘One of the large catering types with eight slots.’
False Value (Rivers of London 8) Page 13