Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘I thought I’d start at the beginning and work my way up, sir,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a very sensible attitude,’ said Neblett.

  I suddenly had a horrible thought. What if they were thinking of sending me to Trident? That was the Operational Command Unit charged with tackling gun crime within the black community. Trident was always on the lookout for black officers to do hideously dangerous undercover work, and being mixed race meant that I qualified. It’s not that I don’t think they do a worthwhile job, it’s just that I didn’t think I’d be very good at it. It’s important for a man to know his limitations, and my limitations started at moving to Peckham and hanging around with yardies, postcode wannabes and those weird, skinny white kids who don’t get the irony in Eminem.

  ‘I don’t like rap music, sir,’ I said.

  Neblett nodded slowly. ‘That’s useful to know,’ he said, and I resolved to keep a tighter grip on my mouth.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘over the last two years I’ve formed a very positive opinion of your intelligence and your capacity for hard work.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And then there is your science background.’

  I have three C-grade A levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry. This is only considered a science background outside of the scientific community. It certainly wasn’t enough to get me the university place I wanted.

  ‘You’re very useful at getting your thoughts down on paper,’ said Neblett.

  I felt a cold lump of disappointment in my stomach. I knew exactly what horrifying assignment the Metropolitan Police had planned for me.

  ‘We want you to consider the Case Progression Unit,’ said Neblett.

  The theory behind the Case Progression Unit is very sound. Police officers, so the established wisdom has it, are drowning in paperwork, suspects have to be logged in, the chain of evidence must never be broken and the politicians and PACE, the Police And Criminal Evidence Act, must be followed to the letter. The role of the Case Progression Unit is to do the paperwork for the hard-pressed constable so he or she can get back out on the street to be abused, spat at and vomited on. Thus will there be a bobby on the beat, and thus shall crime be defeated and the good Daily Mail-reading citizens of our fair nation shall live in peace.

  The truth is that the paperwork is not that onerous – any half-competent temp would dispose of it in less than an hour and still have time to do his nails. The problem is that police work is all about ‘face’ and ‘presence’ and remembering what a suspect said one day so you can catch them in a lie on the next. It’s about going towards the scream, staying calm and being the one that opens a suspect package. It’s not that you can’t do both, it’s just that it’s not exactly common. What Neblett was saying to me was that I wasn’t a real copper – not a thief taker – but I might play a valuable role freeing up real coppers. I could tell with a sick certainty that those very words ‘valuable role’ were rushing towards the conversation.

  ‘I was hoping for something a bit more proactive, sir,’ I said.

  ‘This would be proactive,’ said Neblett. ‘You’d be performing a valuable role.’

  Police officers, as a rule, don’t need an excuse to go to the pub, but one of the many non-excuses they have is the traditional end-of-probation booze-up when members of the shift get the brand new full constables completely hammered. To that end, Lesley and me were dragged across the Strand to the Roosevelt Toad and plied with alcohol until we were horizontal. That was the theory, anyway.

  ‘How did it go?’ Lesley asked over the roar of the pub.

  ‘Badly,’ I shouted back. ‘Case Progression Unit.’

  Lesley pulled a face.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you,’ she said. ‘It’ll piss you off.’

  ‘Hit me,’ I said. ‘I can take it.’

  ‘I’ve been temporarily assigned to the murder team,’ she said.

  I’d never heard of that happening before. ‘As a detective?’

  ‘As a uniformed constable in plain clothes,’ she said. ‘It’s a big case and they need bodies.’

  She was right. It did piss me off.

  The evening went sour after that. I stuck it out for a couple of hours but I hate self-pity, especially mine, so I went out and did the next best thing to sticking my head in a bucket of cold water.

  Unfortunately it had stopped raining while we were in the pub, so I settled for letting the freezing air sober me up.

  Lesley caught up with me twenty minutes later.

  ‘Put your bloody coat on,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

  ‘Is it cold?’ I asked.

  ‘I knew you’d be upset,’ she said.

  I put my coat on. ‘Have you told the tribe yet?’ I asked. In addition to her mum, her dad and nan, Lesley had five older sisters, all still resident within a hundred metres of the family home in Brightlingsea. I’d met them once or twice when they’d descended upon London en masse for a shopping expedition. They were loud to the point of constituting a one-family breach of the peace, and would have merited a police escort if they hadn’t already had one, i.e. Lesley and me.

  ‘This afternoon,’ she said. ‘They were well-pleased. Even Tanya, and she doesn’t even know what it means. Have you told yours yet?’

  ‘Tell them what?’ I asked. ‘That I work in an office?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with working in an office.’

  ‘I just want to be a copper,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Lesley. ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I want to help the community,’ I said. ‘Catch bad guys.’

  ‘Not the shiny buttons, then?’ she asked. ‘Or the chance to slap the cuffs on and say, “You’re nicked, my son”?’

  ‘Maintain the Queen’s peace,’ I said. ‘Bring order out of chaos.’

  She shook her head sadly. ‘What makes you think there’s any order?’ she said. ‘And you’ve been out on patrol on a Saturday night. Does that look like the Queen’s peace?’

  I went to lean nonchalantly against a lamp post but it went wrong and I staggered around a bit. Lesley found this much funnier than I thought it really deserved. She sat down on the step of Waterstone’s bookshop to catch her breath.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why are you in the job?’

  ‘Because I’m really good at it,’ said Lesley.

  ‘You’re not that good a copper,’ I said.

  ‘Yes I am,’ she said. ‘Let’s be honest, I’m bloody amazing as a copper.’

  ‘And what am I?’

  ‘Too easily distracted.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘New Year’s Eve, Trafalgar Square, big crowd, bunch of total wankers pissing in the fountain – remember that?’ asked Lesley. ‘Wheels come off, wankers get stroppy and what were you doing?’

  ‘I was only gone for a couple of seconds,’ I said.

  ‘You were checking what was written on the lion’s bum,’ said Lesley. ‘I was wrestling a couple of drunken chavs and you were doing historical research.’

  ‘Do you want to know what was on the lion’s bum?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Lesley, ‘I don’t want to know what was written on the lion’s bum, or how siphoning works or why one side of Floral Street is a hundred years older than the other side.’

  ‘You don’t think any of that’s interesting?’

  ‘Not when I’m wrestling chavs, catching car thieves or attending a fatal accident,’ said Lesley. ‘I like you, I think you’re a good man, but it’s like you don’t see the world the way a copper needs to see the world – it’s like you’re seeing stuff that isn’t there.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lesley. ‘I can’t see stuff that isn’t there.’

  ‘Seeing stuff that isn’t there can be a useful skill for a copper,’ I said.

  Lesley snorted.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Last night while you were distracted by you
r caffeine dependency I met an eyewitness who wasn’t there.’

  ‘Wasn’t there,’ said Lesley.

  ‘How can you have an eyewitness who wasn’t there, I hear you ask?’

  ‘I’m asking,’ said Lesley.

  ‘When your eyewitness is a ghost,’ I said.

  Lesley stared at me for a moment. ‘I would have gone with the CCTV camera controller myself,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Guy watching the murder on CCTV,’ said Lesley. ‘He’d be a witness who wasn’t there. But I like the ghost thing.’

  ‘I interviewed a ghost,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Lesley.

  So I told her about Nicholas Wallpenny and the murdering gent who turned back, changed his clothes and then knocked poor– ‘What was the victim’s name again?’ I asked.

  ‘William Skirmish,’ said Lesley. ‘It was on the news.’

  ‘Knocked poor William Skirmish’s head clean off his shoulders.’

  ‘That wasn’t on the news,’ said Lesley.

  ‘The murder team will want to keep that back,’ I said. ‘For witness verification.’

  ‘The witness in question being a ghost?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Yes.’

  Lesley got to her feet, swayed a bit and then got her eyes focused again. ‘Do you think he’s still there?’ she asked.

  The cold air was beginning to sober me up at last. ‘Who?’

  ‘Your ghost,’ she said, ‘Nicholas Nickleby. Do you think he might still be at the crime scene?’

  ‘How should I know?’ I said. ‘I don’t even believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Let’s go and see if he’s there,’ she said. ‘If I see him too then it will be like corob … like crob … proof.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We wandered arm in arm up King Street towards Covent Garden.

  There was a great absence of Nicholas the ghost that night. We started at the church portico where I’d seen him and, because Lesley was a thoroughgoing copper even when pissed, did a methodical search around the perimeter.

  ‘Chips,’ said Lesley after our second circuit. ‘Or a kebab.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t come out when I’m with someone else,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe he does shift work,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a kebab.’

  ‘You’ll be good at the Case Progression Unit,’ said Lesley. ‘And you’ll be …’

  ‘If you say “… making a valuable contribution” I will not be held responsible for my actions.’

  ‘I was going to say “making a difference”,’ she said. ‘You could always go to the states, I bet the FBI would have you.’

  ‘Why would the FBI have me?’ I asked.

  ‘They could use you as an Obama decoy,’ she said.

  ‘For that,’ I said, ‘you can pay for the kebabs.’

  In the end we were too knackered to get kebabs, so we headed straight back to the section house where Lesley utterly failed to invite me to her room. I was at that stage of drunk where you lie on your bed in the dark and the room goes whirling around you, and you’re wondering about the nature of the universe and whether you can get to the sink before you throw up.

  Tomorrow was my last day off, and unless I could prove that seeing things that weren’t there was a vital skill for the modern police officer, it was hello Case Progression Unit for me.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ said Lesley.

  Neither of us could face the horrors of the kitchenette that morning, so we found shelter in the station canteen. Despite the fact that the catering staff were a mixture of compact Polish women and skinny Somali men, a strange kind of institutional inertia meant that the food was classic English greasy spoon, the coffee was bad and the tea was hot, sweet and came in mugs. Lesley was having a full English breakfast; I was having a tea.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Your loss, not mine.’

  ‘Not that,’ said Lesley, and smacked me on the hand with the flat of her knife. ‘What I said about you being a copper.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken your feedback on board, and having extensively workshopped it this morning I now feel that I can pursue my core career-development goals in a diligent, proactive but, above all, creative manner.’

  ‘What are you planning to do?’

  ‘I’m going to hack HOLMES to see if my ghost was right,’ I said.

  *

  Every police station in the country has at least one HOLMES suite. This is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, which allows computer-illiterate coppers to join the late twentieth century. Getting them to join the twenty-first century would be too much to ask for.

  Everything related to a major investigation is kept on the system, allowing detectives to cross-reference data and avoid the kind of cock-up that made the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper such an exemplary operation. The replacement to the old system was due to be called SHERLOCK, but nobody could find the words to make the acronym work so they called it HOLMES 2.

  Theoretically you can access HOLMES 2 from a laptop, but the Metropolitan Police likes to keep its personnel tied to fixed terminals – which can’t be left in trains or sold to pawn shops. When a major investigation occurs, the terminals can be transferred from the suite to incident rooms elsewhere in the station. Lesley and I could have sneaked into the HOLMES suite and risked being caught, but I preferred to plug my laptop into a LAN socket in one of the empty incident rooms and work in safety and comfort.

  I’d been sent on a HOLMES 2 familiarisation course three months earlier. At the time I’d been excited because I thought they might be preparing me for a role in major investigations, but now I realise they were grooming me for data entry work. It took me less than half an hour to find the Covent Garden investigation. People are often negligent about passwords, and Inspector Neblett had used his youngest daughter’s name and year of birth, which is just criminal. It also got me read-only access to the files we wanted.

  The old system couldn’t handle big data files, but because HOLMES 2 was only ten years behind the state of the art, detectives could now attach evidence photographs, document scans and even CCTV footage directly to what’s called a ‘nominal record’ file. It’s like YouTube for cops.

  The Murder Team assigned to the William Skirmish murder had wasted no time grabbing the CCTV footage and seeing if they could get a look at the murderer. It was a big fat file and I went straight for it.

  According to the report, the camera was mounted on the corner of James Street, looking west. It was low-quality, low-light footage updated at one frame per second. But despite the poor light it clearly showed William Skirmish walking from under the camera towards Henrietta Street.

  ‘There’s our suspect,’ said Lesley, pointing.

  The screen showed another figure – the best you could say was probably male, probably in jeans and a leather jacket – walk past William Skirmish and vanish below the screen. According to the notes, this figure was being designated WITNESS A.

  A third figure appeared, going away from the camera. I hit pause.

  ‘Doesn’t look like the same guy,’ said Lesley.

  Definitely not. This man was wearing what looked like a Smurf hat and what l recognised as an Edwardian smoking jacket – don’t ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let’s just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that. Nicholas had said it was red, but the CCTV image was in black and white. I clicked back a couple of frames and then forward again. The first figure, WITNESS A, dropped out of shot one, two frames before the man in the smurf hat stepped into view.

  ‘That’s two seconds to get changed,’ said Lesley. ‘That’s not humanly possible.’

  I clicked forward. The man in the smurf hat produced his bat and stepped smartly up behind William Skirmish. The wind-up was between frames but the hit was clear. In the next frame Skirmish’s body was halfway to the ground and a
little dark blob, which we decided must be the head, was just visible by the portico.

  ‘My God. He really did knock his head clean off,’ said Lesley.

  Just as Nicholas had said he had.

  ‘Now that,’ I said, ‘is not humanly possible.’

  ‘You’ve seen a head come off before,’ said Lesley. ‘I was there, remember?’

  ‘That was a car accident,’ I said. ‘That’s two tons of metal, not a bat.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lesley, tapping the screen. ‘But there it is.’

  ‘There’s something wrong here.’

  ‘Apart from the horrible murder?’

  I clicked back to where Smurf Hat entered the scene. ‘Can you see a bat?’

  ‘No,’ said Lesley. ‘Both his hands are visible. Maybe it’s on his back.’

  I clicked forward. On the third frame the bat appeared in Smurf Hat’s hands as if by magic, but that could just have been an artefact of the one-second lag between frames. There was something else wrong with it too.

  ‘That’s much too big to be a baseball bat,’ I said.

  The bat was at least two-thirds as long as the man who carried it. I clicked backwards and forwards a few times but I couldn’t work out where he was keeping it.

  ‘Maybe he likes to speak really softly,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Where do you even buy a bat that size?’

  ‘The Big Bat Shop?’ said Lesley. ‘Bats R Us?’

  ‘Let’s see if we can get a look at his face,’ I said.

  ‘Plus Size Bats,’ said Lesley.

  I ignored her and clicked forward. The murder took less than three seconds, three frames: one the wind-up, two the blow and three the follow-through. The next frame caught Smurf Hat mid-turn, his face in three-quarter profile showing a jutting chin and a prominent hook nose. The frame after showed Smurf Hat walking back the way he’d come, slower than the approach, casual as far as I could tell from the stuttering image. The bat vanished two frames after the murder – again, I couldn’t see where it had gone.

  I wondered if we could enhance the faces, and started looking for a graphic function I could use.

  ‘Idiot,’ said Lesley. ‘Murder Team will be all over that.’