Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Two days later Nightingale called me downstairs just as I left the bathroom. Practice was cancelled and so, it seemed, was breakfast. Nightingale was wearing what I recognised as his ‘working suit’, light brown herringbone tweed, double-breasted, leather patches on the elbow. He had his original Burberry trench coat folded over his arm and he was carrying his silver-topped cane – something I’d never seen him do in daylight before.

  ‘We’re going to Purley,’ he said, and to my surprise threw me the keys to the Jag.

  ‘What’s in Purley?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you,’ he said. ‘I’d rather you gathered your own impressions.’

  ‘Is this police business or apprentice stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘Both,’ said Nightingale.

  I climbed behind the wheel of the Jag, turned the key in the ignition and took a moment to savour the sound of the engine. It’s important not to rush the good things in life.

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ said Nightingale.

  She didn’t handle as well as I had expected, but the way the engine responded to my foot on the accelerator made up for any other faults, including the oversteer and the heater that periodically blew hot stale air into my face.

  I took us across Lambeth Bridge. Weekday traffic in London is always bad, and we stop-started all the way past the Oval, through Brixton and on to Streatham. Further beyond, we were into the south London suburbs, hectares of Edwardian two-storey terraced housing interspersed with interchangeable high streets. Occasionally we passed irregular rectangles of green space, the remnants of ancient villages that had grown together like spots of mould on a Petri dish.

  The A23 morphed into Purley Way, and we passed a pair of tall chimneys crowned with the IKEA logo. Next stop was Purley, famous place, Purley, know what I mean?

  A red VW Transporter with LFB trimming was waiting for us in the car park at Purley Station. As we pulled up beside it a big man got out of the side door and raised his hand in greeting. He was in his forties; he had a broken nose and hair cut down to a brown fuzz. Nightingale introduced him as Frank Caffrey.

  ‘Frank works out of the New Cross station. He’s our Fire Brigade liaison.’

  ‘Liaison for what?’ I asked.

  ‘This,’ said Frank, and handed me a canvas satchel. It was unexpectedly heavy and I almost dropped it. Something metal clonked inside.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Nightingale.

  I opened the flap and had a look. Inside were two metal cylinders the size of aerosol cans but much heavier. They were white with No. 80 WP Gren. stencilled around the body. At the top there was a spring-release trigger held in place by a large metal pin. I’m not a military buff, but I know a hand grenade when I see one. I looked at Nightingale, who gave me an irritable wave.

  ‘Put them away,’ he said.

  I closed the satchel and settled it gingerly over my shoulder.

  Nightingale turned back to Frank. ‘Are your people ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Two appliances on standby – just in case.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Nightingale. ‘We should be done in about half an hour.’

  We got back in the Jag and Nightingale directed me across the station bridge and down a couple of identical streets until he said, ‘This one here.’

  We found a parking spot round the corner and walked the rest of the way.

  Grasmere Road ran parallel to the railway and looked utterly normal, a string of detached and semi-detached houses built in the 1920s with mock-Tudor façades and bay windows. There was nobody about, the kids were all at school and their parents were at work and we kept the pace casual, at least as casual as I could manage with a pair of grenades banging against my hip. Anyone watching would have taken us for a pair of feral estate agents out marking their territory.

  Nightingale made a sudden left turn through the gate of a particular house and headed for the wooden door-sized gate that blocked access to the side passage. Without slowing down he thrust his right arm, palm forward, at the gate and with a tiny sound the lock popped out of the wood and clattered onto the pathway beyond.

  We stepped through the open gate and stopped in the blind spot. Nightingale nodded at the gate, and I propped it closed with a big terracotta flowerpot. There was still soil in the flowerpot with a shrivelled black stalk poking out. I checked similar pots lined up on the sunny side of the path; they were all dead too. Nightingale stooped down, grabbed a handful of soil and crumbled it beneath his nose. I followed his lead, but the soil smelled of nothing, sterile, as if it had been left on a windowsill for too long.

  ‘They’ve been here a while,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Who has?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer.

  The house backed onto the railway tracks so we only had to worry about neighbours on two sides. The garden wasn’t a jungle, but the lawn looked like it hadn’t been mown for months and sections of once neat flowerbeds were as dead as the flowerpots. The French doors that led onto the garden patio were locked and the curtains firmly drawn. We worked our way round to the kitchen. The blinds were down across the windows and the door was bolted from the inside. I watched closely, expecting Nightingale to do the lock-popping thing again but instead he just smashed the window with his cane. He reached through the pane, pulled the bolt and opened the door. I followed him inside.

  Apart from the dim light it was a perfectly normal suburban kitchen. Swedish counter tops, gas hob and oven, microwave, faux stoneware jars marked sugar, tea and coffee. The fridge-freezer was switched off, notes and bills stuck to the doors with magnets. The newest bill was six months old. Next to it a note read, Grandad? Below that was a schedule that included nursery collection times.

  ‘There are kids living here,’ I said.

  Nightingale looked grim. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘That was one of the things that alerted us.’

  ‘This isn’t going to turn out well, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not for the family that was living here,’ he said.

  We crept into the hallway. Nightingale indicated that I check upstairs. I extended my baton and kept it ready as I climbed the steps. The window over the stairs had had sheets of black crayon paper crudely sellotaped over to block out the sunlight. One of the sheets had a child’s drawing of a house, square windows, a pig’s tail of smoke from a misshapen chimney and Mummy and Daddy stick figures standing proudly off to one side.

  As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn’t it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain – they absolutely weren’t going to sparkle in the sunlight.

  There was a door on my left. I forced myself to go through it. A child’s bedroom, a boy young enough still to have Lego and action figures scattered on the floor. The bed was neatly made with no-nonsense blue and purple matching pillow cases and duvet cover. The boy had liked Ben 10 and Chelsea FC enough to put their posters on his walls. There was a smell of dust, but none of the mildew and damp that I would associate with a long-abandoned house. The master bedroom was the same, the bed neatly made up, an air of dry dustiness but no cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. The digital alarm clock by the bed had stopped despite being plugged into the mains. When I picked it up, white sand trickled out from a bottom seam. I replaced it carefully and made a mental note to check it later.

  The main room at the back of the house was the nursery. Beatrix Potter wallpaper, a cot, playpen. A hypoallergenic wooden mobile from Galt’s Educational Toys shivered in the draft from the open door. As with the other rooms, there was no sign of a struggle or even a rapid departure; everything was neatly squared away. Unnatural in a child’s bedroom. Equally unnatural was the lack of shower mould in the bathroom, or the dusty non-smell of the water in the cistern.

  The last room on the top floor was what a
n estate agent would call a ‘half-bedroom’ suitable for small children or midgets with agoraphobia. This had been converted into a mini-office with a two-year-old Dell PC and, unsurprisingly, an IKEA filing cabinet and desk lamp. When I touched the computer I got a flash of dust and ozone, a vestigium that I recognised from the master bedroom. I popped open the side of the case and found the same white sand inside. I rubbed it between my fingers. It was very fine, powdery even but definitely granular and flecked with gold. I was about to pull the motherboard when Nightingale arrived in the doorway.

  ‘What the hell are you waiting for?’ he hissed.

  ‘I’m checking the computer,’ I said.

  He hesitated, pushed his hair back off his forehead. ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Only one last place to look.’

  I’d have to remember to come back with an evidence bag and grab the whole computer.

  There was a door in the hallway that led to a set of narrow stairs heading down. The steps were worn hardwood planks that I guessed had been laid down when the house was built. A bare bulb dangled just inside the door, half-blinding me and making the gloom at the base of the stairs more intense.

  The basement, I thought; why am I not surprised?

  ‘Well,’ said Nightingale, ‘we’re not getting any younger.’

  I was happy to let him go first.

  I shivered as we went down the narrow stairs. It was cold, like descending into a freezer, but I noticed that when I breathed out my breath didn’t mist. I put my hand under my armpit but there was no temperature differential. This wasn’t physical cold, this had to be a type of vestigium. Nightingale paused, shifted his weight and flexed his shoulders like a boxer preparing to fight.

  ‘Are you feeling this?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Tactus disvitae,’ he said. ‘The smell of anti-life – they must be down here.’

  He didn’t say what, and I didn’t ask. We started down the stairs again.

  The basement was narrow and well lit, I was surprised to find, by a fluorescent tube that ran half its length. Someone had mounted shelves along one wall and optimistically assembled a workbench underneath. More recently an old mattress had been thrown down on the concrete floor and on that mattress lay two vampires. They looked like tramps, old-fashioned tramps, the kind that dressed up in ragged layers of clothes and growled at you from the shadows. The sensation of cold intensified as Nightingale and I got closer. They looked as if they were asleep, but there were no breathing sounds and none of the fug a sleeping human being would produce in a confined space.

  Nightingale handed me a framed family photograph, obviously looted from a living-room mantelpiece, and transferred his cane to his right hand.

  ‘I need you to do two things,’ he said. ‘I need you to confirm their identities and check them both for a pulse. Can you do that?’

  ‘What are you going to be doing?’

  ‘I’m going to cover you,’ he said. ‘In case they wake up.’

  I considered this for a moment. ‘Are they likely to wake up?’

  ‘It’s happened before,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘How often before?’ I asked.

  ‘It gets more likely the longer we’re down here,’ said Nightingale.

  I crouched down and reached out gingerly to draw back the collar of the closest one’s coat. I was careful not to touch the skin. It was the face of a middle-aged man, white with unnaturally smooth cheeks and pallid lips. I checked him against the photograph, and although the features were the same he bore no true resemblance to the smiling father in the picture. I shifted round to get a look at the second body. This one was female, and her face matched that of the mother. Mercifully Nightingale had chosen a photo without the children in it. I reached out to feel for a pulse and hesitated.

  ‘Nothing lives on these bodies,’ said Nightingale. ‘Not even bacteria.’

  I pressed my fingers against the male’s neck. His skin was physically cool and there was no pulse. The female was the same. I stood up and backed away. ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Back upstairs,’ said Nightingale. ‘Quickly now.’

  I didn’t run, but I wouldn’t call what I did up those stairs casual either. Behind me Nightingale came up backwards, his cane held at the ready. ‘Get the grenades,’ he said.

  I took the grenades from the satchel, Nightingale took one and showed me what to do. My hand was shaking a little and the pin proved harder to pull than I expected – I guess that’s a safety feature on a grenade. Nightingale pulled the pin on his own grenade and gestured down the basement stairs.

  ‘On the count of three,’ he said. ‘And make sure it goes all the way down to the bottom.’ He counted, and after three we threw the grenades down the stairs and I, stupidly, stood watching it bounce down to the bottom until Nightingale grabbed my arm and dragged me away.

  We hadn’t even reached the front door when I heard a double thump beneath our feet. By the time we were out of the house and into the front garden, white smoke was billowing out of the basement.

  ‘White phosphorus,’ said Nightingale.

  A thin scream began from somewhere inside. Not human, but close enough.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked Nightingale.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘And neither did you.’

  Concerned neighbours rushed out to see what was happening to their property values, but Nightingale showed them his warrant card. ‘Don’t worry; we made sure nobody was inside,’ he said. ‘Lucky we were passing, really.’

  The first fire engine pulled up less then three minutes later and we were hustled away from the house. The Fire Brigade recognise only two kinds of people at a fire, victims and obstacles, and if you don’t want to be either it’s best to stay back.

  Frank Caffrey arrived on the scene, and exchanged nods with Nightingale before striding over to the leading fireman to get briefed. Nightingale didn’t have to explain how it would go down; once the fire was out, Frank, as Fire Investigation Officer, would examine the scene and declare that it was caused by something plausible and sanitise any evidence to the contrary. No doubt there were equally discreet arrangements for dealing with the remains of the bodies in the basement, and the whole thing would pass off as just another daytime house fire. Probably an electrical fault, lucky no one was in there at the time, makes you think about getting a smoke detector, doesn’t it?

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we deal with vampires in old London Town.

  *

  It’s hard to describe what success felt like. Even before I managed to produce my first spell I slowly became aware that I was getting closer. Like a car engine turning over on a cold morning, I could sense something catching on my thoughts. An hour into my practice I stopped, took a deep breath and opened my hand.

  There it was, the size of a golf ball and as brilliant as the morning sun: a globe of light.

  That’s when I found out why Nightingale insisted I keep a sink filled with water nearby while I did the exercise. Unlike his globe of light, mine was yellow and was giving off heat, loads of heat. I yelled as my palm burned, and stuck my hand in the sink. The globe sputtered and went out.

  ‘You burned your hand, didn’t you?’ said Nightingale. I hadn’t heard him come in.

  I pulled my hand out of the water and had a look. There was a pinkish patch on my palm but it didn’t look that serious.

  ‘I did it,’ I said. I couldn’t believe it; I’d done real magic. It wasn’t some stage trick by Nightingale.

  ‘Do it again,’ he said.

  This time I held my hand directly over the sink, formed the key in my mind and opened my hand.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Don’t think about the pain,’ said Nightingale. ‘Find the key, do it again.’

  I looked for the key, felt the engine turn over and opened my hand to release the clutch.

  It burned me again, but it definitely wasn’t as hot and my hand was much closer to
the water. Still, I checked my palm – this time it was going to blister for sure.

  ‘And again,’ said Nightingale. ‘Reduce the heat, keep the light.’

  I was surprised how easy I found it to obey. Key, power, release – more light, less heat. Warmth this time, not heat, and a yellow tone like an old 40-watt bulb.

  Nightingale didn’t have to tell me again.

  I opened my palm and produced a perfect globe of light.

  ‘Now hold it,’ said Nightingale.

  It was like balancing a rake on your palm: the theory is simple but the practice lasts five seconds, tops. My beautiful globe popped like a soap bubble.

  ‘Good,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m going to give you a word and I want you to say this word every time you do the spell. But it’s very important that the spell’s effect is consistent.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I’ll explain why in a minute,’ said Nightingale. ‘The word is lux.’

  I did the spell again: key, motor. I spoke the word on the release. The globe sustained for longer – it was definitely getting easier.

  ‘I want you to practise this spell,’ said Nightingale, ‘and just this spell for at least another week. You’ll have the urge to experiment, to make it brighter, to move it around …’

  ‘You can move it around?’

  Nightingale sighed. ‘Not for the next week. You practise until the word becomes the spell and the spell becomes the word. So that to say “lux” is to make light.’

  ‘Lux?’ I said. ‘What language is that?’

  Nightingale looked at me in surprise.

  ‘It’s Latin for light,’ he said. ‘They don’t teach Latin in secondary moderns any more?’

  ‘Not at my school they didn’t.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Nightingale. ‘I can tutor you in that as well.’

  Lucky me, I thought.

  ‘Why use Latin?’ I asked. ‘Why not use English, or make up your own words?’

  ‘Lux, the spell you just did, is what we call a form,’ said Nightingale. ‘Each of the basic forms you learn has a name: Lux, Impello, Scindere – others. Once these become ingrained, you can combine the forms to create complex spells the way you combine words to create a sentence.’