Tales from the Folly: A Rivers of London Short Story Collection
Copyright © 2020 by Ben Aaronovitch
All rights reserved.
Published as an ebook in 2020 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with Zeno Agency LTD.
Cover artwork and design by Jayel Draco. Hand lettering by Patrick Knowles.
ISBN 978-1-625675-00-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Charlaine Harris on Rivers of London
An Introduction to The Introductions
PART ONE: THE PETER GRANT STORIES
The Home Crowd Advantage
The Domestic
The Cockpit
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Granny
King of The Rats
A Rare Book of Cunning Device
PART TWO: THE OTHERS’ STORIES
Introduction
A Dedicated Follower of Fashion
Favourite Uncle
Vanessa Sommer’s Other Christmas List
Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby
Moment One: London September 1966
Moment Two: Reynolds—Florence, Az. 2014
Moment Three: Tobias Winter—Meckenheim 2012
Just One More Thing…
About the Author
Also by Ben Aaronovitch
Charlaine Harris on Rivers of London
Since I wait anxiously for Ben Aaronovitch’s books to be released, I was tickled pink to be invited to write an introduction for this collection of his short stories.
Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant is one of the warmest and most interesting characters in Urban Fantasy. Peter was born an outsider, so being even more of an outsider by dint of his discovered magical ability does not throw Peter off course. He’s doing the job he was born to do, with the legendary Nightingale as his mentor.
We can only stand by and watch breathlessly as Peter copes with bizarre situations, odd people, and creatures that have never been people.
Since we’ve become part of Peter’s life and adventures, we get to meet the most interesting characters as soon as he does.
I understand that the idea for Ben to write some short fiction in the Rivers of London world was originally Waterstones’, so we have them to thank for coaxing Ben Aaronovitch to write much of this collection. I take my hat off to all those who encouraged him to let us have small adventures on top of big ones.
I know you’ll enjoy these stories as much as I did.
—Charlaine Harris
An Introduction to The Introductions
Welcome to the long-awaited Rivers of London short story collection. Like most people I almost never read the introductions to books, so will try and keep this as short, sweet and as useful as possible.
In this volume you will find all the short stories that I’ve written so far that are set in the world of Rivers of London. Most of them were published in special limited hardback editions for Waterstones and the Australian/New Zealand market.
I started writing Rivers of London in 2008 in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy. I really only have one talent and that’s writing but my script writing career had gone bung and you cannot live unassisted in London on what you earn working as a bookseller. When the idea of Peter Grant, policeman, apprentice wizard and story magnet, coalesced in my mind I knew it was a goer—experience taught me that much—what I didn’t know was that it was going to go so far. Several book deals later and I no longer have to hustle printed matter to survive—although I still find myself absentmindedly tidying up other people’s bookshelves.
The short stories came about because of the 2012 Olympics for reasons I will detail below.
I have provided each short story with a brief introduction of its own and an indication of where it falls in the chronological sequence. And to answer your next question—what is the correct chronological order of the books? I have listed the order below…
Action at a Distance (Graphic novel #7)
Rivers of London (strangely retitled Midnight Riot in the US)
Moon Over Soho
Whispers Under Ground
Broken Homes
Body Work (Graphic novel #1)
Foxglove Summer
What Abigail Did that Summer (Novella)
Night Witch (Graphic novel #2)
Black Mould (Graphic novel #3)
The Furthest Station (Novella)
The Hanging Tree
Detective Stories (Graphic novel #4)
Cry Fox (Graphic novel #5)
Water Weed (Graphic novel #6)
Lies Sleeping
The October Man (Novella)
The Fey and the Furious (Graphic novel #8)
False Value
PART ONE
The Peter Grant Stories
Introduction: The Home Crowd Advantage
(Notionally set between Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho)
Write something for the Olympics they said.
Do I have to? I asked.
Yes, they said, we’re going to publish a special edition in 2012 and we want to capitalise on the fact that London is going to host the Olympics.
So that was me told.
Up till then I’d avoided setting the books in a specific year because of the Olympics. Books are written years before they’re published, so I’d either have to guess at the likely outcomes of the events or write a story referencing them after the games had taken place and risk nobody giving a toss what happened when the book finally made its way onto a shelf. The Olympics—that’s so 2012, Grandad!
So when tasked to write a short story which was specifically Olympian, my solution was to set a story built around the events of the 1948 London Games, which were safely over. So, I did some research and came across the France vs USA basketball final and the little idea birdie went ‘ping’.
I’d originally had the idea that Rivers, Moon and Whispers Under Ground were all set in 2011 but that meant Broken Homes would be set during 2012—the Olympic year. Which I wanted to avoid. My solution was to declare that the first three books were always set during 2012 and hope no one noticed.
So strictly speaking ‘The Home Crowd Advantage’ isn’t canon—but I still think it’s fun.
The Home Crowd Advantage
Thanks to the city's diversity, there will be supporters from every Olympic nation. Every athlete will have a home crowd.
—Gold Medallist Denise Lewis during her speech in support of the London 2012 bid.
We were a grumpy lot that summer of 2012.
There’s nothing the police like better than a good moan, but in the run-up to the Olympics the Met had raised its game to world beating levels. What with the pension thing, the fitness thing and the personnel cuts, we were feeling hard done by. And on top of that we had to handle Olympic security.
I say “we” but my role, unofficially handed down from the Commissioner’s office, was to stay as far away from any Olympic venues as was consistent with my duties. I guess they were worried about property damage, what with Covent Garden burning down, the ambulance hijack, that business in Oxford Circus and the thing that happened in Kew that was totally not my fault.
When Nightingale was called north of the border to deal with an unspecified ‘situation’ in Aberdeen, I found myself rattling around the Folly, alone except for Molly—which is, believe me, much creepier than being alone by yourself. As a result, when the phone rang my
response time was pretty much instantaneous.
‘Folly,’ I said and there was a short pause at the other end.
‘This is CCC, I’m looking for ECB9,’ said a female voice.
‘We used to be ECB9,’ I said. ‘But now we’re the SAU or SCD-fourteen.’
The operator sighed—the Met reorganises every three years or so—nobody can keep up. Not even the people who draw up the organisational flow charts.
‘Whoever you are now,’ she said. ‘I have a job for you.’
That was a surprise. The Folly has always operated on an informal word-of-mouth basis. Usually, when a senior officer on the spot thinks they may have a ‘situation’ which might benefit from some ‘specialist’ assistance, they know to call us directly. As part of the Olympic readiness programme, I had responded to a request to define the Folly’s operational parameters, to better facilitate a co-ordinated and timely response. But I never expected it to filter down to CCC.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘You’re the guys who do magic, right?’ asked the operator. She sounded testy.
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘Then this is your shout,’ she said. ‘Green Lanes Shopping Park.’
The operator didn’t tell me much beyond the fact that ‘specialist’ assistance was required and that it was sierra-grade, urgent. So I put my Kojak light on the roof and ‘made progress’ down the Essex Road in an attempt to arrive there in the same geological epoch as I started out. Half an hour later I turned into the access road of the shopping park to be met by blue tape, flashing lights and knots of uniforms standing around and trying to work out how this would improve their overtime pay.
I parked up beside an ambulance that was idling with its back doors open. Inside, a man in a hard hat and high-vis jacket was having his hands bandaged by the paramedic. A tall, spare, athletic white woman with a beaky nose and skipper’s tabs introduced herself as Sergeant Warwick. She didn’t look that pleased to see me.
‘Are you it?’ she asked after looking me up and down.
‘Yes, sarge,’ I said. ‘What were you hoping for?’
‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘someone a bit less cheeky.’
* * *
Green Lanes Shopping Park used to be the location of the famous Haringey Arena where, back in the old days, they used to show everything from ice hockey to the Moscow State Circus. Paul Robeson sang there in 1949 and Billy Graham launched his first British crusade. With a rich history like that there was nothing to be done except flatten it and replace it with a shopping arcade designed in the who-the-fuck-cares school of retail architecture. The result was a two-storey warehouse with a flat roof designed to maximise floor space and nothing else. The corner unit was occupied by a Costa Coffee, sandwiched between a Fitness First and Dreams: Britain’s Leading Bed Specialist.
At approximately quarter past two on this particular day, a well-dressed IC1 male in his late sixties, possibly older, entered the shop, approached the counter and proceeded to shout at the members of staff, in what they thought was probably French. The staff had been given clear instructions on how to deal with such situations, although none of them could remember what these were. Instead, one of them asked the man to leave while a second called the police. It might have been a winning strategy, if another customer, presumably impatient for his coffee, had not intervened to remonstrate with the suspect—going so far as to grab the old man’s arm.
‘That’s when fire came out his hands,’ said Matilda Stümpel, student and part-time barista. ‘His hands didn’t catch fire,’ she gave Sergeant Warwick a poisonous look. ‘It was like a ball of fire, okay?’ She nodded at me. ‘He believes me,’ she said to Warwick, which was true.
‘Can I see your phone?’ I asked her.
She was reluctant to give it up but handed it over. ‘It’s stopped working anyway,’ she said.
I cracked it open and wasn’t surprised to find that the phone’s chipset had been reduced to a fine, brownish powder.
‘That was brand new,’ said Matilda Stümpel, as I dropped the phone, and as much of the powder as I could catch, into an evidence bag. ‘Am I going to get that back?’
I told her it was unlikely.
I didn’t bother with the guy who had his hands burnt, Warwick had his details and the paramedic wanted to take him to casualty. So, I went off to meet the two uniforms who’d attended the scene first.
‘So, you arrived on the scene?’ I asked.
‘That’s right,’ said the large talkative one. His colleague was small, balding but with unusually big hands with which he gestured, rather than talking.
‘You went into the coffee shop and approached the suspect?’
‘The way you do,’ said the talkative one while his colleague nodded agreement.
‘And then you turned round and left the premises?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘We thought,’ said the talkative one, ‘that it was time for a break.’ His colleague made a palms-up gesture as if to say—what can you do?
‘Did you just decide that, or did the suspect say something first?’
‘He said we should go and get a cup of coffee,’ said the talkative one while his partner mimed drinking from a cup with a saucer.
‘So, you left?’
‘Right.’
‘To get some coffee?’
‘Right.’
‘Despite the fact that you were already in a coffee shop?’
The quiet one slowly shook his head at my inability to grasp the obvious. ‘We had to,’ he said in surprisingly deep baritone. ‘All the baristas had run outside.’
‘It’s like hypnotism,’ I told Warwick, after the two had been dispatched off to drink more coffee. But Warwick wasn’t buying.
‘Hypnotism doesn’t work like that,’ she said.
‘And that’s the way it’s not like hypnotism,’ I said. ‘He’s definitely on his own in there?’
‘Everyone in the shop has been accounted for,’ said Warwick.
‘I’d better go get him, then,’ I said.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’
‘It’s that or we call in CO19 and have them shoot him.’
‘Don’t be stupid, that’s out of the question. I couldn’t possibly authorise that,’ she said. ‘CO19 are all on standby for the games. We’d never get them up here.’
* * *
Your Metvest comes in the two basic flavours, the one with a plain white cover for wearing under your jacket and the one you get when you pass out of Hendon which is blue, has POLICE in nice reflective letters, front and back, and lots of useful pockets and clips. Strictly speaking, now that I’m plainclothes I should have traded that one in for the plain cover, but it’s often useful when you’re on a job to look as much like a copper as possible. So, I keep it in the emergency bag in the back of my Ford Asbo, along with other bits of kit from my uniform days, plus a couple of things I’ve added especially for ‘special’ jobs.
I put on the duty belt and taser as well and loaded up with all the kit I had in the bag. I didn’t think I was going to need my notebook or the airwave radio, but members of the public are so used to us waddling around like Batman’s fat younger brother that they often don’t register what we are carrying—that can be useful.
‘I’ve called for another ambulance,’ said Warwick. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’
There’s a comfort, I thought, and started the long walk across the strip of car park to the front of the Costa Coffee. Once the initial excitement of transgression has faded, people are often keen to see a return to order. That’s why they like to see a uniformed police officer. Even the criminals. And sometimes,—if things have escalated out of control and you’re looking at somebody’s dear old mum down the other end of your shotgun and two to six years with good behaviour is ratchetting up to life with a recommendation of thirty years minimum and your face on the front cover of a tabloid—esp
ecially the criminals.
That’s when the uniform comes in handy. That and the ability to walk towards an incident projecting an air of quiet confidence and blokey no nonsense don’t-worry-there’s-nothing-we-can’t-sort-out-ness, when what you really want to do is hide behind a riot shield.
After all that, the suspect wasn’t even visible when I arrived at the shop doorway. There was only the one room, tables on the left, nooks and sofas on the right. A couple of chairs had gone over in the customers’ scramble for the exit and I could smell coffee soaking into the carpet. My mum hates coffee stains. She says you never get them out, not even with the industrial strength solvent she buys under the counter at the cleaning wholesaler.
I stepped slowly into the shop.
‘Hello, police,’ I said loudly, ‘Is there anyone in here?’
‘Your friends are probably waiting for you outside,’ said a voice from behind the counter. ‘Why don’t you go join them?’
Since I became an apprentice, everybody—and I mean everybody—with the slightest bit of magical potential in London has tried to put the glamour on me. I’ve built up an immunity.
‘That’s not going to work,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Merde,’ said the voice. ‘In that case would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘Yes please,’ I said.
‘So would I,’ said the voice. ‘Do you know how to work one of these machines?’
‘I’ll give it a go,’ I said. ‘I’m going to walk around the counter now—if that’s okay with you?’
‘If you can make a cup of coffee you can do what you like.’
I walked slowly and non-threateningly around the counter and got my first look.
He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, out of the line of sight for any possible sniper, but with a good view of the sides should someone try to flank him. Short, I thought, although it was hard to tell with him sitting down. Definitely seventies plus with thin grey hair cut in a side parting, blue eyes and a narrow face that had avoided jowls by not having enough spare flesh to droop.
I introduced myself.
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