Rivers of London

by Ben Aaronovitch

  We went through a lot of apples in that first session. I was getting them in the air but sooner or later – splat! There was a brief phase when it was fun and then it got boring. After a week of practice, I could levitate an apple without it exploding nine times out of ten. I wasn’t a happy little wizard, though.

  What worried me was where the power was coming from. I never was very good at electricity, so I didn’t know how much power it took to make a werelight. But levitating one small apple against the earth’s gravity – that was essentially the standard definition of one newton of force, and it should be using one theoretical joule of energy every second. The laws of thermodynamics are pretty strict about this sort of thing, and they say that you never get something for nothing. Which meant that that joule was coming from somewhere – but from where? From my brain?

  ‘So it’s like ESP,’ said Lesley during one of herperiodic visits to the coach house. Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension. Besides, apart from a couple of unconfirmed cases around the same time as the Neal Street attack, nothing had come to our attention.

  ‘Like that guy on that show who could move things around,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like I’m moving things around with my mind,’ I said. ‘It’s like I’m making shapes with my mind, which affects something else, which makes stuff happen at the other end. Do you know what a theremin is?’

  ‘It’s that weirdo sci-fi musical instrument with the loops,’ she said. ‘Right?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘The point is, it’s the only musical instrument you don’t physically touch. You make shapes with your hands and you get a sound. The shapes are completely abstract, so you have to learn to associate a particular shape with a note and tone before you can get the thing to make a tune.’

  ‘What does Nightingale say?’

  ‘He says that if I stopped letting myself get distracted I might spend less time covered in bits of apple.’

  At the end of March, the clocks go forward one hour to mark the start of British Summer Time. I woke up late to find the Folly feeling weirdly empty, the chairs in the breakfast room still tucked beneath the tables and the buffet counter unlaid. I found Nightingale reading the previous day’s Telegraph in one of the overstuffed armchairs that lined the first-floor balcony.

  ‘It’s the change in the clocks,’ he said. ‘Twice a year she takes the day off.’

  ‘Where does she go?’

  Nightingale pointed up towards the attic. ‘I believe she stays in her room.’

  ‘Are we going on a road trip?’ I asked. Nightingale was wearing his sports jacket over a cream-coloured Arran sweater. His driving gloves and the keys to the Jag were lying on a nearby occasional table.

  ‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Do you think you know where the Old Man of the Thames is today?’

  ‘Trewsbury Mead,’ I said. ‘He’ll have arrived there round about the Spring Equinox, which was last week, and he’ll stay until All Fool’s Day.’

  ‘Your reasoning?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘It’s the source of his river,’ I said. ‘Where else is he going to go in the spring?’

  Nightingale smiled. ‘I know a nice little transport café off the M4 – we can have breakfast there.’

  Trewsbury Mead, early afternoon under a powder blue sky. According to the Ordnance Survey, this is where the Thames first rises 130 straight-line kilometres west of London. Just to the north is the site either of an Iron Age hill fort or a Roman encampment, the exact nature of which is awaiting an episode of Time Team. Apparently there is a soggy field, a stone to mark the spot and a chance, after a particularly wet winter, that you might see some water. You approach down a minor road that turns to gravel once you’re past the private houses it was built to serve. The line of the river is marked by a dense stand of trees, and the source of the Thames is beyond that.

  In the field beyond was the Court of the Old Man of the River. We could hear it before we saw it, the rumble of diesel generators, steelwork clanking, the bass beat of music thumping, tannoys barking, girls screaming, glimpses of neon over the treeline and the whole round-the-corner thrill of a travelling funfair. I had a sudden Bank Holiday memory of holding my father’s hand in one fist and clutching a precious handful of pound coins in the other. Never enough, and quickly gone.

  We left the Jag by the side of the road and walked the rest of the way. Beyond the line of trees I could see the tops of the big wheel and that ride where they fling you into the air on the end of a rope which I really don’t see the point of. The track crossed a stream bed on a modern concrete culvert which had recently been scored by the passage of heavy trucks, and for a moment we were in the shade of the trees.

  The first line of parked caravans began as soon as we were back in the sunlight. Most of them were old-fashioned with humpbacked roofs and mean little doors and windows. A few were modern with sloped fronts and go-faster stripes. I even caught sight, through the thickets of Calor gas bottles, deckchairs, guy ropes and sleeping Rottweilers, of the horseshoe roof of a wooden gypsy caravan – something I thought was only for tourists. Although the caravans seemed to be parked randomly I was struck by the notion that there was a pattern, a deep structure that nagged at the edge of perception. There was definitely a perimeter, and nothing illusive about the heavyset man who guarded it from the doorway of his caravan.

  The man had thick black hair greased into a quiff and a set of long sideburns that had last been fashionable when my dad was doing regular sessions with Ted Heath in the late 1950s. He also had a totally illegal twelve-bore shotgun propped up against the side of his caravan.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said Nightingale, and kept walking past.

  The man nodded. ‘Afternoon,’ said the man.

  ‘Good weather we’re having,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Looks to be fair,’ said the man in an accent that was either Irish or Welsh, I couldn’t tell, but definitely Celtic. I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. A London copper doesn’t like to intrude upon a traveller camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear – it’s considered disrespectful otherwise.

  The residential caravans formed a semicircle around the fair proper. There, the big beasts of the fairground world roared and clanked and blared out ‘I Feel Good’ by James Brown. Every copper knows that the funfairs of Great Britain are run by the Showmen, a collection of interwoven families so clannish they officially constitute a separate ethnic group of their own. Their family names were painted on the generator trucks and blazoned across the tops of hoardings. I counted at least six different names on six different rides and half a dozen more as we walked through the fair. It seemed that each family had brought one ride to the spring fair at Trewsbury Mead.

  Skinny young girls ran past, trailing laughter and streamers of red hair. Their older sisters paraded in white hot pants, bikini tops and high-heeled boots, checking out the older boys through Max Factor lashes and clouds of cigarette smoke. The boys tried to hide their awkwardness by playing butch or walking the moving rides with studied indifference. Their mums worked the booths painted with the rough murals of last decade’s film stars and festooned with banners and health and safety warnings. Nobody seemed to be paying for the rides or the candyfloss, which probably explained why the kids were so happy.

  The fair proper formed another semicircle, and at its centre was a rough-hewn wooden corral like those you see in Westerns, and in the centre of that was the source of the mighty River Thames. Which looked to me like a small pond with ducks on it. And, standing at the fence rail, was the Old Man of the River himself.

  There was once a statue of Father Thames at the Mead, now transported to the more reliably wet stretch of the river at Lechlade, which showed a muscular old man with a William Blake beard reclining on his plinth with a shovel over his shoulder, crates and bundles arranged at his feet – the fruits o
f industry and trade. Even I can spot a bit of Empire spin when I see it, so I didn’t really expect him to look like that but I think I was still hoping for something grander than the man at the fence.

  He was short, with a pinched face dominated by a beaky nose and a heavy brow. He looked old, in his seventies at least, but there was a sinewy vigour in the way he moved, and his eyes were grey and bright. He wore an old-fashioned, double-breasted suit in dusty black, the jacket unbuttoned to show off a red velvet waistcoat, a brass fob watch and a folded pocket handkerchief the bright yellow of a spring daffodil. A battered homburg was jammed on his head, wisps of white hair escaping from underneath, and a cigarette dangled from his lip. He stood leaning on the fence, one foot on the lowest rail, talking out of the side of his mouth to a crony, one of several frighteningly spry old men who shared the fence with him, gesturing at the pond or taking a long pull on his cigarette.

  He glanced up as we approached, frowning at the sight of Nightingale before turning his attention to me. I felt the force of his personality drag at me: beer and skittles it promised, the smell of horse manure and walking home from the pub by moonlight, a warm fireside and uncomplicated women. It was a good thing I’d had practice with Mama Thames and had mentally prepared on the walk up because otherwise I would have marched right up and offered him the contents of my wallet. He winked at me and turned his full attention on Nightingale.

  He called out a greeting in a language which could have been Skelta or Welsh, or even authentic pre-Roman Gaelic for all I knew. Nightingale answered in the same language, and I wondered whether I was going to have to learn that one too. The cronies shuffled along to make a space at the fence – only wide enough for one, I noticed. Nightingale joined Father Thames and they shook hands. With his height and good suit, Nightingale should have looked like the lord of the manor mixing with the commoners but there was no deference in the way Father Thames sized him up.

  Father Thames was doing most of the talking, emphasising his words with little twirls and flicks of his fingers. Nightingale leaned on the fence deliberately minimising the height difference and nodding and chuckling, I could tell, at all the right moments.

  I was considering whether to edge forward so that I could understand what they saying more clearly when one of the younger men at the fence caught my eye. He was taller and thicker-set than Father Thames, but had the same long sinewy arms and narrow face.

  ‘You don’t want to be bothering with that,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a good half-hour before they get past the pleasantries.’ He reached out a large calloused hand to shake mine. ‘Oxley,’ he said.

  ‘Peter Grant,’ I said.

  ‘Come and meet the wife,’ he said.

  The wife was a pretty woman with a rounded face and startling black eyes. She met us on the threshold of a modest 1960s caravan that was parked in its own little space to the left of the funfair.

  ‘This is my wife Isis,’ said Oxley, and to her, ‘This is Peter, the new apprentice.’

  She took my hand. Her skin was warm, and with the same unreal perfection that I’d noticed on Beverley and Molly. ‘Delighted,’ she said. Her accent was pure Jane Austen.

  We sat on folding chairs around a card table with a cracked linoleum top, decorated with a single daffodil arranged in a slender vase of fluted glass.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ Isis asked, and when I hesitated said, ‘I, Anna Maria de Burgh Coppinger Isis solemnly swear on the life of my husband,’ which got a chuckle from Oxley, ‘and the future prospects of the Oxford rowing team that nothing you partake of in my house will place you under any obligation.’ She crossed her heart and gave me a little-girl smile.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Tea would be nice.’

  ‘I can see you’re wondering how we met,’ said Oxley.

  I could see he wanted to tell the story. ‘I presume she fell into the river,’ I said.

  ‘You would presume wrong, sir,’ said Oxley. ‘Back in the day I had a great fondness for the theatre, and would often smarten myself up and row up to Westminster for an evening’s entertainment. Quite the peacock I was back then, and attracted, I like to think, many an admiring gaze.’

  ‘What with him traversing the cattle market at the time,’ said Isis, returning with the tea. The cups and teapot were modern porcelain, a very clean design with a stylish platinum strip around the lip, not chipped at all, I noticed. I suspected I was getting the VIP treatment, and I wondered why.

  ‘I first set eyes on my Isis at the old Royal on Drury Lane, this being the new one that burned down not long after. I was in the gods, and she was in a box with her dear friend Anne. I was smitten, but alas she already had her fancy man.’ He paused long enough to pour the tea. ‘Although he suffered a terrible disappointment, I can tell you.’

  ‘Hush my love,’ said Isis. ‘The young man doesn’t want to hear about that.’

  I picked up my teacup. The brew was very pale, and I recognised the aroma of Earl Grey. I hesitated with the cup at my lips but trust has to start somewhere, so I took a resolute sip. It was a very fine cup of tea indeed.

  ‘But I am like the river,’ said Oxley. ‘I may run but I am always there.’

  ‘Except during droughts,’ said Isis, and offered me a slice of Battenberg cake.

  ‘I’m always lurking under the surface,’ said Oxley. ‘I was, even then. Her friend had a very nice house at Strawberry Hill, beautiful place, and back in those days not surrounded by mock-Tudor semis. If you’ve seen the place then you’ll know that it’s built like a castle, and my Isis was a princess held captive in its tallest tower.’

  ‘Having a long weekend at a friend’s house, actually,’ said Isis.

  ‘My chance came when they held a great masquerade at the castle,’ said Oxley. ‘Dressed in my finest, my features cleverly disguised with a swan mask, I slipped in through the tradesman’s entrance and soon found myself mingling with the fine people inside.’

  I figured that I was already in trouble for the tea, so I might as well have the cake. It was shop-bought and very sweet.

  ‘It was a grand ball,’ said Oxley. ‘Lords and ladies and gentlemen all dressed in Josephine gowns or tight breeches and velvet waistcoats, and every one of them thinking wicked thoughts while safe behind their mask. And most wicked was my Isis, for all that she was wearing the mask of the Queen of Egypt.’

  ‘I was Isis,’ said Isis. ‘As you well know.’

  ‘So I boldly stepped up and marked her card for every dance,’ said Oxley.

  ‘Which was a cheek and an effrontery,’ said Isis.

  ‘I saved you from the left feet of many a swain,’ said Oxley.

  She put her hand on his cheek. ‘Which I cannot deny.’

  ‘The thing you have to remember about a masquerade is that at the end of the night the masks have to come off,’ said Oxley. ‘At least in polite company, but I had been thinking …’

  ‘Always a worrying development,’ said Isis.

  ‘Why did the masquerade have to end?’ said Oxley. ‘And as the son follows the father, I let action follow thought and seized my darling Isis, threw her over my shoulder and was away across the fields towards Chertsey.’

  ‘Oxley,’ said Isis. ‘The poor boy is an officer of the law. You can’t be telling him you kidnapped me. He’d be honour bound to arrest you.’ She looked at me. ‘It was entirely voluntary, I can assure you,’ she said. ‘I was twice married and a mother, and I’d always known my own mind.’

  ‘It is certain that she proved to be an experienced woman,’ he said and, much to my embarrassment, winked at me.

  ‘You wouldn’t think he was once a man of the cloth,’ said Isis.

  ‘I was a terrible monk,’ he said. ‘But that was a different life.’ He rapped the table. ‘Now that we’ve fed, watered and bored you senseless, why don’t we talk some business? What is it that the Big Lady wants?’

  ‘You understand that I’m strictly the go-between in this,’ I said. We actually di
d a course on conflict resolution at Hendon, and the trick is always to stress your neutrality while allowing both parties to think you’re secretly on their side. There were role-playing exercises and everything – it was one of the few things I was better at than Lesley. ‘Mama Thames feels that you may be looking to move downstream of Teddington Lock.’

  ‘It’s all one river,’ said Oxley. ‘And he’s the Old Man of the River.’

  ‘She claims he abandoned the tideway in 1858,’ I said. More precisely during the Great Stink – note the capitals – when the Thames became so thick with sewage that London was overwhelmed with a stench so terrible that Parliament considered relocating to Oxford.

  ‘Nobody stayed in London that summer who could move away,’ said Oxley. ‘It wasn’t fit for man or beast.’

  ‘She says he never came back,’ I said. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘That is true,’ said Oxley. ‘And in truth, the Old Man has never loved the city, not since it killed his sons.’

  ‘Which sons were these?’

  ‘Oh, you know who they are,’ said Oxley. ‘There was Ty and Fleet and Effra. All drowned in a flood of muck and filth and finally put out of their misery by that clever bastard Bazalgette. Him that made the sewers. I met him, you know, very grand man with the finest set of chops this side of William Gladstone. Knocked him on his arse for the murdering bastard that he was.’

  ‘You think he killed the rivers?’

  ‘No,’ said Oxley. ‘But he was their undertaker. I’ve got to hand it to the daughters of the Big Lady, for they certainly must be hardier than my brothers.’

  ‘If he doesn’t want the city, why is he pushing downstream?’ I asked.

  ‘Some of us still have a hankering for the bright lights,’ said Oxley, and smiled at his wife.

  ‘I dare say it would be nice to attend the theatre again,’ she said.

  Oxley refilled my cup. A crackly voice on a tannoy somewhere behind me yelled, ‘Let’s get this party started.’ James Brown was still feeling nice, sugar and spice now.