Tales from the Folly

by Ben Aaronovitch

  It was already one of the hazards of being police that you became suspicious of the everyday. You didn’t have to spend much time on the job before realising that professional criminals are comparatively rare and that crime is something committed by ordinary people. In fact, the worse the crime the more ordinary the people who committed them—most murderers kill only once, and not just because they’re caught and imprisoned.

  Discovering that there was a whole world of magic and the supernatural hidden in the everyday had only fuelled Vanessa’s professional paranoia. And so, in order to set her mind at rest, she had decided to properly assess her old home. To this end she made a second list of spooky locations from her childhood and, suitably armed with both lists and a back seat full of presents, Vanessa turned her Dacia Duster off the landstraße and up the twisty switchback road to home.

  Sommerscheid, population nine hundred and thirty-three, sat astride the Sommerbach: a tiny tributary of the Kyll, in the one wide spot in an otherwise narrow valley that snaked up into the wooded hills of the Sommerwald. Vanessa’s father swore blind that the village had its origins as a secret bandit camp whose nefarious residents had discovered that it was more lucrative to harvest wood, honey and charcoal from the forest than to mug passersby. Not to mention the famous local game sausage called Sommerwurst, which was less a salami more a wild-whatever we shot when hunting-wurst. Or the fierce homebrewed peach schnapps that, despite technically being illegal, was still drunk on special occasions such as, for example, it being the month of January.

  While her father was proud to proclaim that they were descended from the original bandits, the village was primarily a dormitory for nearby towns, supplemented by a handful of farmers, forestry workers and the sort of people who like the feel of rural isolation without actually being more than an hour’s drive from the nearest Lidl.

  Vanessa drove up through the centre of the village, across the Sommerbach, around the market square and out the other side to where her family home squatted under a heavy red tile roof. Her mother’s Audi was missing from the driveway so Vanessa stole her place next to her father’s VW. He emerged from around the back as soon as Vanessa had parked and helped her inside with her bags.

  ‘Have you found a place in Meckenheim yet?’ he asked once they’d dumped the bags and exchanged hugs.

  She said she’d found somewhere temporary and asked after her mother, who was finishing up some conveyancing work at the office in nearby Hillesheim. Her father had worked at the same office before leaving for a semi-retirement as the village lawyer and guesthouse manager. Vanessa took her stuff up to her old room which, for eight months out of twelve, was rented out to hikers, birdwatchers and whoever else thought getting lost in the woods was a fun time. Here she checked both her lists before going down to see if her father had any of that locally brewed peach schnapps stashed at the back of his wine cellar.

  First thing the next morning Vanessa let herself out through the kitchen door, across the back garden and out the back gate, which opened out into one of the hiking trails that led up into the hills. She followed it for a hundred metres or so before turning off onto a barely discernible path that led down towards the Sommerbach. The path ended where the stream leapt out of a narrow gorge and fell into a deep pool before flowing more sedately down out of the forest and through the town.

  The local kids had been swimming in it since forever. There had once been a tyre swing that her father swore had come from a Mercedes W186 that had belonged to a wealthy hiker who had walked into the Sommerberg one fine spring morning and never returned. Sheltered as it was, the air here was still and mild even in winter. Vanessa remembered it as a magical place, so she took a moment to see if she could sense the vestigia which is the signature of real magic.

  Nothing.

  At least nothing she was sure of.

  The sound of rushing water which might have been the laughter of children…

  …or merely a memory from past summers or, just possibly, the actual sound of the waterfall.

  Vanessa sighed and looked around for somewhere to hang her offering. The tyre swing tree looked suitable, so she hung the peach schnapps in a plastic bag from a low-hanging branch. Then she wrote—Call me if you want to talk—on one of her brand new BKA business cards and carefully attached it to the handle using a clip she’d stolen from her father’s desk.

  Vanessa didn’t need to look at the actual list to mentally check off—Propitiate possible local river goddess.

  Next on the list was the cave.

  It was hard to spot unless you knew the way. You walked down into a hollow choked with silver birch and bushes until you reached a cliff face where the entrance to the cave opened exactly in the shape of a screaming cartoon mouth.

  Vanessa, like most of the village kids, had regarded the cave with a kind of exalted terror, simultaneously repelled and attracted by its mysterious depths. They used to dare each other to venture inside and time how long they lasted before running out screaming. Rumour was that the cave system was endless and that there were underground rivers and packs of albino rats that could strip you down to your bones in seconds.

  It looked smaller to adult Vanessa, and its dangers more prosaic.

  She closed her eyes again and, as she had been taught, let her mind go blank. Again she was disappointed—there was nothing supernatural about the cave. Or at least, she told herself, nothing that she could recognise. She briefly considered having a look inside, but only a fool goes into an unknown cave without a helmet, lights and having first informed colleagues of her plans and when she expected to get back.

  Vanessa mentally ticked off Terrifying Cave and pushed her way through the dripping undergrowth and back down to the trail. Just as she reached it, she heard the sound of an approaching engine and, after a short wait, a mini-tractor came around the corner pulling a trailer full of Christmas trees.

  She recognised the driver, a tall young man with overlong arms and legs and a lugubrious face. He was dressed in an orange waterproof jacket and had a green Tyrolean cap jammed tightly on his head.

  Vanessa waved.

  ‘Hey Fabian,’ she called.

  Fabian Grünewald pulled up and said hello. They’d been at school together and after exchanging polite inquiries about each other’s families he offered her a lift down the hill. As she clung to the back of the tractor she asked about the Christmas trees.

  The Grünewalds had a hectare up the valley by the Brinkerhoff’s place. Fabian had initially tried running it as a ‘cut your own tree’ enterprise, complete with a stall selling mulled wine.

  ‘But it was too far from the road,’ he said. ‘People couldn’t be bothered to walk that far.’ Now he harvested and sold them at the Christmas market—mostly to local families.

  ‘You can have yours now if you like,’ he said.

  So Vanessa hopped off the tractor at the back gate of her parents’ house and chose a suitable tree from the trailer.

  ‘Are you coming down for the market?’ asked Fabian.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Vanessa.

  Sommerscheid was too small to have a month-long Christmas market but managed a week, from the second to third weekends in December. The local farmers and associations set out stalls and the volunteer fire fighters’ association, of which Vanessa’s father was the president, provided the carousel which had pride of place in the open space between the old fountain and the bridge.

  The carousel was the next item on the list. It was old, for one thing. At least a hundred and fifty years old. And, for another, had been found abandoned in the woods by villagers returning from the war in the terrible winter of 1919. It looked splendid when set up, the horses freshly touched up and the brass work polished and gleaming, but Vanessa had once seen it in its lair, in a shed behind the fire station. Disassembled it was a thing of rust and sharp metal corners, horses stacked and shrouded, the pipes of the automatic organ as silent as impaling stakes.

  Watching it whir around
to a mechanical rendition of Ode to Joy, Vanessa had to admit that her negative reaction to the dismembered carousel might have had something to do with her being eight at the time.

  She remembered refusing from then on to ride on the thing and standing sullenly watching while her brothers were whisked round and round. She’d been in such a state of defused, unfocused rage that her parents were forced to dangle iced gingerbread before her eyes to distract her. Looking back, she couldn’t determine what had caused her anger and the actual memory had degraded to the point where she wasn’t sure if it was a true memory or just something she thought she remembered. This sort of thing had not been a problem before she started studying magic, she thought. Still, she made a donation to the fire fighters’ fund and climbed aboard.

  There was no active vestigia that she could detect, but she still thought the wooden horses’ dead-eyed stares were creepy, so she bought some iced gingerbread hearts and set off to find Fabian’s Christmas tree stall. There she recognised a couple of familiar faces from her teen years. Like Vanessa, most had migrated out of the village to far off places like Cologne, Hamburg and Hillesheim—which was just down the L26 and had its own cinema and everything.

  Inevitably, they ended up in the Café Blau drinking coffee and moaning about their parents, just as they had when they were teenagers. It was so normal Vanessa could almost pretend that she hadn’t seen a colleague conjure a light from nothing or met at least two genuine river goddesses and a young man with horns.

  Which thought reminded her to check her phone for messages.

  It was dark and cold by the time they broke up and she went home for supper with her parents. Her mother asked whether she’d been keeping up her harp practise and Vanessa dutifully held out her hands so that her callouses could be felt. They discussed whether her younger brother was going to deliver another grand-child that year or whether his poor wife had finally had enough. Over coffee her father asked about the Abteilung KDA.

  ‘Complex and Unspecific Matters? Sounds a bit complicated,’ he said, and Vanessa and her mother groaned simultaneously.

  Later, when she went up to her room, she found a red and white enamelled plate on the bedside table filled with a heap of sweets and wrapped chocolates. She ate some while she sat up in bed and did the coursework the Director had assigned her. She hid what remained of the sweets in her suitcase so she wouldn’t finish them all off in one go.

  The next morning Vanessa’s phone rang but she didn’t recognise the number.

  ‘Hello, Vani?’ said a voice she did recognise.

  ‘Is that you, Fabian?’

  ‘The one and only,’ he said. ‘Did you know someone’s hung a bottle of peach schnapps from a tree and stuck your phone number on it?’

  ‘That was me,’ she said.

  ‘Any particular reason?’ asked Fabian.

  ‘It was an experiment.’

  ‘What kind of experiment?’

  ‘Do you want to drink it?’ asked Vanessa.

  ‘Do you want to share?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Meet me at the rock at one,’ said Fabian.

  The rock was just that, a slab of something hard that stuck out of the hillside above the village. It formed a flat shelf upon which generations of Sommerscheid teenagers had sat to look down upon their homes and get blind drunk on whatever they could steal from their parents’ liquor cabinets.

  Because neither of them were teenagers anymore, Vanessa made sure to bring a round of sommerwurst sandwiches with her, some napkins, and a couple of plastic glasses. The rain had stopped mid-morning and the sky had cleared to allow some chilly sunlight.

  Fabian’s hat was starting to bother Vanessa, and not just because a Tyrolean hunter’s cap was a bizarre fashion statement for a young German. More because it was always jammed on tight, and he was careful never to dislodge it. The police side of her brain wanted to know what he was hiding.

  Even so, she later doubted she would have done what she did if they hadn’t already drained three quarters of the schnapps. Fabian peered at the bottle.

  ‘Why do they make it out of peaches?’ he said. ‘It’s not like anybody grows peaches up here.’

  ‘It’s one of those mysteries,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘One of what mysteries?’

  ‘One of those,’ said Vanessa. ‘Like: why do you wear a hat all the time?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ asked Fabian in what Vanessa considered an overly defensive manner. ‘You never used to wear a hat when we were kids,’ she said. ‘Come to think of it, your father never took his hat off either.’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ said Fabian and stood up. ‘Never saw him without a hat,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve obviously lost your ability to handle alcohol,’ said Fabian.

  Vanessa stood up and, because she had to know, snatched Fabian’s hat off his head. Fabian stared at Vanessa in speechless outrage and she stared back in astonishment.

  ‘How long has it been like that?’ she asked and held out the hat for him to reclaim.

  ‘Since I was twenty,’ snarled Fabian, and grabbed it back. ‘Satisfied?’ He jammed the hat on his head, hiding a hairline that receded all the way back, past his ears. ‘It happened to my father as well.’

  And, with that, he turned and strode down the path down to the village. Vanessa sighed, but you don’t last long in the police without developing a thick skin. So she finished the schnapps before heading home.

  ‘Why did you make poor Fabian take his hat off?’ asked Vanessa’s mother that night at supper. It turned out she’d been talking to Fabian’s mother who had complained about Vanessa’s strange behaviour. ‘The poor boy is sensitive enough as it is. I thought you were friends.’

  ‘It was a stupid notion,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Oh yes?’ asked her father. ‘What notion was that?’

  ‘It’s too stupid to speak of,’ she said but she knew this would only spark her father’s curiosity.

  ‘Oh, tell me,’ he said. ‘You used to come up with some wonderful nonsense.’

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother. ‘We thought you were going to become a writer.’

  ‘So what was it?’ asked father.

  ‘You’ll laugh,’ said Vanessa.

  ‘We promise we won’t,’ said her mother and solemnly put her hand on her heart.

  ‘I thought he might have horns,’ said Vanessa.

  Both her parents stared at her for a whole second before bursting out laughing.

  ‘Horns!’ said her mother.

  ‘Horns!’ said her father. ‘The Grünewalds don’t have horns.’

  ‘The very idea,’ said her mother.

  ‘That would be the Brinkerhoffs from up the valley,’ said her father. ‘They’re the ones that grow horns.’

  Introduction: Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby

  (Set some time after the next Peter Grant novel following False Value)

  This started as A Moment but quickly got so out of hand that it effectively became a short story. People are always asking me about what happened with the River Lugg after Peter and Beverley’s foray into its waters in Foxglove Summer—I’m glad you asked…

  Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby

  I knew it was a mistake to have the Teme family at the wedding. Not that we invited them exactly, but we’d been warned that a visit was a possibility so I’d factored them into my contingency seating plan. I put them on the table separating my immediate family from Victor’s family. We had a big marquee courtesy of the Young Farmers and so had plenty of room. That’s one of the advantages of marrying a farmer—there’s plenty of space for a marquee and parking on your own land. I also made sure that they shared the table with Peter, Nightingale and Beverley. This is what we call, in the Job, intelligence led contingency forward planning.

  ‘Or what us farmers call the next six months,’ said Victor, but I forgave him because he was having trouble with his poly tunnels.
r />   Between the Teme family, my family, and Victor’s friends up from London, I reckon the only reason the wedding went as smoothly as it did was because at least a quarter of the guests were police officers in full uniform. Including a couple of senior ones that had obviously been told to attend by their community access focus groups with a view to improving West Mercia Police’s profile amongst the LGBTQ community.

  To be fair, their presence kept the junior ranks in line who, since they weren’t allowed to be rowdy, kept a lid on everyone else. So the wedding went remarkably smoothly, apart from the one incident with Aunty Leda and that rogue swan and I’ve promised never to tell anyone about that.

  The Teme sisters turned up in what Beverley assured me was their finest. Miss Tefeidiad wore a dress—an honour, Beverley told me—in pale yellow linen with a square cut neckline, a slim gold necklace and heavy-looking gold bracelets depicting intertwined snakes on each wrist. Her eldest daughter, Corve, came in sensible country tweeds and her youngest, Lilly, in full black goth regalia topped by a half a ton of silver jewellery—most of it stuck through parts of her body.

  Anyway, we made it through the speeches, including the one by Victor’s best man Tarquin—who claimed to be looking forward to following Victor’s example and ‘rusticating’ himself once his city career was finished. This went down about as well as you can imagine with my family and the three quarters of my colleagues who don’t harbour big city dreams. Since every pub and café in the county aspires to, or at least dreams of, earning a Michelin star, the food was of course fabulous and Victor had made a special point of showcasing his almost organic meat and veg. There was a noticeable drop in conversational volume as everyone dug in and we were all feeling suitably merry when the band started up.

  Choosing the music had proved a long and complex operation where Victor and I were forced to consider the complex intersection of rural and urban, policing and farming, mundane and mystical tastes. So, how we ended up with Late September, Ludlow’s one and only Earth, Wind & Fire tribute band I will never know. They dress like Motörhead but sing like the Motor City and, occasionally, Boney M. At our request they opened their set with their famous cover version of ‘Rasputin’ that goes on for eleven minutes.