Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (15 page)

Low sample size – one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile.

Zach kept his attention on his food while I told Nightingale about James Gallagher’s visit to Powis Square and the
vestigium
I’d sensed there.

‘Sounds like a floating market,’ said Nightingale.

‘A nazareth?’ I asked.

‘Like a nazareth only for those that live in our world, rather than your average criminal,’ said Nightingale. ‘We used to call them goblin markets.’ He turned to Zach. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘Not me, guv,’ said Zach. ‘I’m strictly persona non grata amongst them kind of people.’

‘Could you find it, though?’

‘Maybe,’ said Zach. ‘What’s it worth?’

Nightingale leaned forward and, whip-fast, grabbed Zach’s wrist and twisted it palm up so that Zach had to half rise out of his chair to avoid breaking it.

‘You’re in my house, Zachary Palmer, eating at my table, and I don’t care how modern you think you are, I know you know that’s an obligation you can’t avoid.’ He smiled and released Zach’s wrist. ‘I’m not asking you to put yourself at risk, just find us the current location. We’ll do the rest.’

‘You only had to ask,’ said Zach.

‘Can you find it by this afternoon?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Course,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to need some readies – for transport, washing some hands, that sort of thing.’

‘How much?’

‘Pony,’ said Zach, meaning £500.

Nightingale pulled a silver money clip from his jacket pocket and peeled off five fifties and handed them to Zach, who disappeared them so fast I didn’t see where they went. He didn’t protest the shortfall, either.

‘Let’s take our coffee to the library,’ said Nightingale.

‘Will you be all right here?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Zach who was already eyeing up the salvers for a return visit.

‘One does rather wonder if he will stop before he explodes,’ said Nightingale as we walked along the balcony.

‘It’s one of those paradox thingies,’ I said. ‘What happens when the unstoppable cook meets the unfillable stomach?’

The General Library is where me and Lesley do most of our studying. It’s got a couple of ornate reading desks with angular brass reading lamps and an atmosphere of quiet contemplation that is totally spoiled by the fact that we both have our headphones on when we’re studying.

Nightingale strode over to the shelves that I’d come to know as the eccentric naturalist section. He tapped his finger along a line of books before pulling one out and inspecting it. ‘Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly is probably the authority,’ he said. ‘How’s your French?’

‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘I’m barely keeping up with my Latin.’

‘Pity,’ said Nightingale and replaced the book. ‘We should get that translated one day.’ He pulled out a second, thinner, volume. ‘Charles Kingsley,’ he said and handed the book to me. It was titled
On Fairies and Their Abodes
.

‘Not as comprehensive as Barbey d’Aurevilly,’ said Nightingale. ‘But reasonably sound, or at least so my tutors assured me when I was at school.’ He sighed. ‘I did prefer things when we all knew what we were doing and why.’

‘Before I ran into Zach I ran into Fleet,’ I said. ‘And before I ran into Fleet I ran into a Chinese woman who I’m pretty sure was a practitioner.’

‘Did she introduce herself?’

I told him all about the mysterious Madame Teng, although I left out the fact that I’d essentially been rescued by Fleet and her Captain of Dogs.

‘Good god, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘I can’t leave the city for five minutes.’

‘Do you know who she was?’ I asked.

‘A Daoist sorceress I would imagine,’ said Nightingale.

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘The Chinese have their own traditions, including the practice of magic,’ said Nightingale. ‘As I understand it, Daoist magic is based on writing characters on paper much in the same way that we speak
formae
aloud. Beyond that I don’t think we ever discovered how it works. Contact was limited, we didn’t want to tell them our secrets and unsurprisingly they didn’t want to share theirs with us.’

He frowned at the bookcase and swapped two volumes around.

‘Do they operate out of Chinatown?’ I asked.

‘We have an arrangement with Chinatown,’ he said. ‘They don’t scare the horses and we don’t go in asking questions. Mao pretty much killed all the practitioners during the 1950s and any that survived on the mainland were finished off in the Cultural Revolution.’

‘She was from Taiwan,’ I said.

‘That would make sense,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ll look into it.’

Just to make Nightingale’s day I finished off with a description of Ryan Carroll’s – possibly – magical art installation.

‘And there I was hoping that we could leave that case to the Murder Squad and concentrate on the Little Crocodiles,’ said Nightingale.

‘Anything useful in Henley?’ I asked.

‘Apart from the snow?’ said Nightingale. ‘Rather pleasant couple in a converted stable. They were very proud of it and insisted on showing me around the whole thing.’

‘A little too helpful?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t take their word for it,’ said Nightingale. ‘I donned the old balaclava and had a scout round their grounds after dark.’ He hadn’t found anything, but sneaking stealthily through the snow had reminded him of an operation in Tibet in 1938. ‘Chasing German archaeologists,’ he said. ‘Complete wild goose chase for them and for us.’

Lesley stuck her head through the door, spotted us and came in. ‘Have you seen how much that man can eat?’

‘He’s a halfling,’ I said which just got me blank looks from the pair of them.

We divided up the day’s work. While Nightingale supervised Lesley’s morning practice I would file my paperwork with the Murder Team and check the action list on HOLMES to see if anything relevant, i.e.: weird, unusual or uncanny, had come up. Hopefully by the time we’d finished up Zach would have found the goblin market, which me and Lesley would go and check out.

‘I’m going to visit the Barbican and re-interview Mr Woodville-Gentle,’ said Nightingale. ‘At the very least my attention might spook him into revealing himself.’

‘Assuming he has something to reveal,’ I said.

‘Oh, he has something to reveal all right,’ said Lesley. ‘I guarantee that.’

It had stopped snowing during the night and although the sun wasn’t out, the cloud had thinned and the extra warmth had turned the drifts of snow in the courtyard brittle. I still lost skin on the iron handrail of the stairs, though. The interior of the coach house smelt of paraffin and damp paper but the heater had kept the temperature high enough to protect my electronics. The couch had been straightened and the rubbish bin emptied – I can always tell when Nightingale’s been watching the rugby because he leaves the place tidier than normal. I put the kettle on, powered up my laptop and the second-hand Dell I use to run HOLMES and got down to work.

Police work is just like every other job in that the first thing you do when you sit down in the morning is deal with your emails. Spam elimination followed by humorous cats, followed by ‘requests’ from the Case Manager that I get my arse in gear and hand in my statements. I got out my notebooks and started writing up my visits to Ryan Carroll and Kevin Nolan. I considered writing up my later encounter with Kevin Nolan and Agent Reynolds, but that might have led to questions about why I didn’t contact Kittredge straight away. In the end I informed them that I’d put Zachary Palmer up for the night and that, informally, he’d indicated that there was some kind of bad blood between him and the Nolans. I had not been assigned any further actions, so I looked up the forensics reports on HOLMES.

The techs had failed to recover anything from James Gallagher’s phone because of the ‘unusually degraded’ state of its chips, although they had hopes that they might be able to do a dump from the relatively undamaged flash memory. I knew from painful experience what had ‘degraded’ the phone. I wondered if the forensics people did too. Nightingale and the Folly bobbed along in the modern world, kept afloat by an interlocking series of arrangements and unspoken agreements many of which, I was certain, really only existed in Nightingale’s head.

The report on the murder weapon indicated that it was indeed a section from a larger plate, an image of the CGI reconstruction was attached, but that it was not made from china but was instead a type of stoneware – identifiable because of its opacity and semi-vitreous nature – whatever that meant. Chemical analysis indicated that it was seventy per cent clay mixed in with quartz, soda-lime glass, crushed flint and grog. I Googled grog and decided that they probably meant crushed fragments of previously fired china rather than cheap rum mixed with lime juice. It bore a superficial resemblance to Coade Stone but comparative analysis of a sample provided by a specialist restoration company indicated it was not the same material, not least because it was manufactured using inferior London clay rather than the finer Ball clay from Dorset. There was an additional twenty-odd pages on the history of Coade Stone which I put aside against the possibility I might develop insomnia in the near future.

The pathology report on the weapon was more interesting. Its shape matched the fatal wound track in James Gallagher’s back, a shallower wound in his shoulder, and was a probable match for three cuts to his left and right hands – probably defensive wounds. The blood covering the weapon was a DNA match for James Gallagher and splatter analysis indicated that he might have pulled the weapon out of himself while lying on the tracks. Lovely. However, there were traces of a second blood type on the edges near the ‘handle’ which should be amenable to Low Copy Number DNA testing, the downside being that that the results would take at least until January to come through. An attached note from Seawoll told us to check for hand injuries when taking statements. It takes more force than you think to stab someone to death and the human body is full of pesky obstructions – like ribs for example. Inexperienced knife fighters frequently cut themselves on their own blades when the momentum of their thrust drives their hand down the knife. That’s what a cross guard on a combat knife is there to stop and what makes it relatively easy to catch knife murderers – look for the wounds, match the DNA, it’s a fair cop guv, hello Pentonville. That’s the thing about hard evidence. It’s difficult to wriggle out of in court. No wonder Seawoll and Stephanopoulos weren’t hassling me. They probably figured it was just a matter of time before they swabbed the inside of the right mouth.

Assuming the DNA turned out to be human.

The mud on James Gallagher’s boots turned out to be an appetizing mixture of human faeces, shredded toilet paper and a combination of chemicals that placed him in a working sewer within eight hours of his death. I dug out Sergeant Kumar’s number and was routed through to his airwave. I heard crowds and a PA system in the background. He was definitely on duty. I told him about the sewer mud on the boots.

‘We’ve already been asked about that,’ said Kumar. ‘There’s a gravity sewer that runs below Baker Street and at the end there’s another which runs below Portland Place. But there’s no direct access anywhere on the stretch of track between the two. You walked it with me – there was no way for him to get onto that section.’

‘What about a secret passage?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Underground was full of them.’

‘Secret from members of the public, yes,’ said Kumar. ‘Secret from us – no.’

‘You sure about that?’ I asked and Kumar made a rude noise.

‘I did find some interesting CCTV footage from last Sunday,’ he said. ‘Very irresponsible behaviour by a man and a woman and what looked suspiciously like a child in an enormous hat. On tracks near Tufnell Park – ringing any bells?’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Were they easy to identify?’

There was a pause while a nervous female voice asked for directions to the Underground and Kumar responded. The train companies had finally put their snow countermeasures into effect and people were belatedly flooding into London to do their last-minute shopping. One of my morning emails had been a general alert to this effect, warning of the inevitable increase in theft, road traffic accidents and disgruntled northerners.

‘Only if some complete wanker makes an incident out of it,’ said Kumar.

‘How can one avoid such total wankery?’ I asked.

‘Easy,’ said Kumar. ‘By following basic safety procedures with regard to the transport infrastructure and making sure that next time you get the urge to go walkabouts on the tracks you call me first.’

‘Deal,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

‘A big one,’ said Kumar.

The Murder Team was bound to ask why I hadn’t statemented Ryan Carroll while I had him there in front of me at the Tate Modern, so I generated a memo indicating that I’d been called away to handle an aspect of a case exclusive to the Folly. Then I popped over to the training lab to get Nightingale to initial it.

When I got there Lesley had three, count them three, apples doing slow circuits in the air of the lab. Nightingale beckoned me over and, after barely glancing at the clipboard, signed the memo.

‘Excellent,’ Nightingale told Lesley, before turning to me and adding, ‘That’s what happens when you don’t allow yourself to become sidetracked and focus on the task at hand.’ Her hair was damp with sweat.

‘I see,’ I said and retreated to the open doorway before saying, ‘But can she make them explode?’ And ducked out of sight. Two of the apples slammed into the wall behind me at head height and the third actually made the right turn to whoosh past my ear and down the length of the corridor.

‘Missed,’ I called and hurried away before she reloaded. She was getting much better.

I sent off the copy of the form, duplicated everything four times and put the duplicates in a series of A4 envelopes, to stop them getting mixed up, and dumped them next to the fruit bowl ready to go back to AB. Then I went downstairs to the shooting range for my own workout.

For me, one of the weirdest things about magic was the way some
formae
went out of fashion. And a good example of this is
aer
, which strictly speaking is Latinised Greek and is pronounced ‘air’ and means – well – air. Once you’ve mastered it, and that took me six weeks, it gives you ‘purchase’ on the air in front of your body. But since there’s no actual physical way of measuring the effect, and believe me I tried, your master has to be present to tell you when you’ve got it right. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ve got a
forma
that’s tricky to do and has, apparently, no effect. It’s not hard to see why it went out of fashion, especially since it was clear by the eighteenth century that it was based on a completely erroneous theory of matter. Nightingale took the trouble to teach me
aer
because, combined with the equally tricky and out-of-fashion
congolare
, it creates a shield in front of my body. Both
formae
were developed by the Great Man, Isaac Newton, himself and have the trademark fiddliness that has led to generations of students writing variations of WTF in the margins of their primers.