Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (17 page)

We took our seats opposite.

‘I shall buy this round,’ he said. ‘And on my oath as a soldier there shall be no obligation upon you and yours for this gift.’ He lifted his hand and clicked his fingers just once and a waitress turned towards us. ‘But you can get the next round in, though,’ he added.

The waitress skipped across the plank bridges to our platform without looking down, which was a neat trick for someone in white high-heeled sandals. Oberon ordered three ‘Macs’ and a Perrier.

‘Fleet says you’ve shown a sudden interest in the finer things in life,’ said Effra. ‘She was well startled to find you in the gallery last night, called me straight away and wouldn’t shut up about it.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘You’re thinking it’s south versus north London, aren’t you? That we don’t talk to each other? She’s my sister. I taught her to read.’

I love the Rivers, upstream or downstream, they like to chat and if you’re sensible you just keep your mouth shut and eventually they’ll tell you what you want to know.

‘And here you are in my ends,’ said Effra. ‘My manor.’

I shrugged.

‘It’s all our manor,’ said Lesley. ‘The whole bleeding city.’

Whatever Effra planned to say was cut short by the drinks arriving, three brown and one green bottle.

‘You’ll like this beer,’ said Oberon. ‘It’s from a micro-brewery in the States. The management brings it over a crate at a time.’ He handed the waitress a fifty. ‘Keep the change,’ he said. ‘It’s damned expensive, though.’

‘So are you king of the fairies?’ I asked Oberon.

He chuckled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My master fancied himself a man of the Enlightenment and a scholar and thus I was named Oberon. It was the practice in those days, many of my friends were called similar – Cassius, Brutus, Phoebe who truly was as beautiful as the sun, and of course Titus.’

I’d done the Middle Passage in year eight at school – I knew slave names when I heard them. I sipped the beer. It was thick and nutty and should have, I decided, been drunk at room temperature.

‘Where was this then?’ I asked.

‘New Jersey,’ said Oberon. ‘When I was a cowboy.’

‘And when was that?’ I asked.

‘Why are you here?’ asked Effra and gave Oberon such a look that even he couldn’t ignore. I winced in sympathy and his lips twitched but he didn’t dare smile.

I considered pushing it, but I was conscious of how hard Lesley was restraining herself from slapping me upside my head and yelling ‘focus’ in my ear. I showed Oberon and Effra a printed picture of the statue and another of the fruit bowl.

‘We’re trying to trace where these came from,’ I said.

Effra squinted. ‘The bowl looks handmade but the statue is a nineteenth-century knock-off of a Florentine Aphrodite by one of those gay Italians whose name escapes me. Not one of the biggies though, it’s competent but it’s not exactly inspiring. I remember I saw the full-size version in the
Galleria dell’ Accademia
. Still can’t remember the name of the artist.’

‘How come Fleet does the art galleries then?’ I asked.

‘Fleet is the one that goes on the radio but I’m the one with the BA in History of Art,’ said Effra.

‘Not that this is a source of bitterness, you understand,’ said Oberon.

‘I only did it because Mum insisted that we all get a degree and History of Art seemed liked the easiest,’ said Effra. ‘And you did a year in Italy.’

‘Meet any nice Italian rivers?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Effra with a sly smile. ‘But down South on the coast every other beach and inlet has a spirit sitting on a Vespa with a body like Adonis and a voice like the way you’d expect Robert De Niro to speak Italian, if he weren’t from New York. The Church never gets all the way to the toe of the boot
Cristo si èfermato a Eboli
and all that jazz.’ It was notable that Effra’s accent was shifting up and down the class scale at more or less random intervals.

‘Moving on,’ said Lesley.

‘The bowl looks like the stuff the Beales used to sell,’ said Oberon. ‘Empire Ware, Empire Pottery or some such name. It was supposed to be unbreakable and good for Darjeeling and darkest Africa.’

‘You want Hyacinth,’ said Effra. ‘She does the figurines.’

‘And where do we find Hyacinth?’ I asked.

Hyacinth, it turned out, was the goth girl running the stall with death masks. It was noticeable that attitudes towards us had changed while we’d been upstairs having a beer. The stallholders definitely had us pegged as Old Bill now, and the customers, of which there were many more by then, had obviously got the same memo. Not that anyone was surly and rude, instead we moved in our own little bubble of silence as the punters hurriedly shut up while we passed by. We kind of like surly and rude, by the way, because when people are busy being affronted they often forget to watch what they’re saying, which is why me and Lesley whipped out our warrant cards before asking Hyacinth about the statue.

‘You people don’t come here,’ she said.

‘Give us your official address,’ I said. ‘We’ll come visit you there.’

‘Or,’ said Lesley, ‘you could come down to the station and give a statement.’

‘You can’t make me,’ said Hyacinth.

‘Can’t we?’ I asked Lesley.

‘Trading without a licence,’ she said. ‘Criminal trespass, receiving stolen goods, wearing heavy black mascara in a built-up area.’

Hyacinth opened her mouth, but Lesley leaned forward until what was left of her nose was centimetres from Hyacinth’s.

‘Say something about my face,’ said Lesley. ‘Go on, I dare you.’

Code of the police – you always back your partner in public even when they’ve obviously gone insane – but that didn’t mean you had to be stupid about it.

‘Look, Hyacinth,’ I said in my I’m-the-reasonable-one voice. ‘The guy who bought the statue was murdered and we’re just interested in knowing whether there’s a connection or not. We’re not interested in anything else, I swear. Just tell us and we’ll get out of your face.’

Hyacinth deflated and held up her hands. ‘I got them off Kevin,’ she said.

‘Kevin who?’ asked Lesley, but I’d already started writing the capital N in my notebook when Hyacinth confirmed it.

‘Kevin Nolan,’ she said. ‘The wanker.’

‘Did he say where he got them from?’ asked Lesley.

‘Nobody ever says where they get their goods from,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And if they do say, you figure they’re lying.’

‘So what did Kevin Nolan say?’ I asked.

‘He said he got them from Mordor,’ she said.

‘Morden?’ asked Lesley. ‘What, in Merton?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Mordor as in “where the shadows lie” from
Lord of the Rings
.’

‘Is that the place with the volcano?’ asked Lesley.

‘Yes,’ said me and Hyacinth at the same time.

‘So probably not the source of the goods,’ said Lesley.

I was about to say something incredibly geeky when we felt the demon trap go off.

It came as a shock, a sensation like a machete being hacked into the side of a carcass, like biting an apple and tasting maggot, like the first time I’d met a dead body.

Last time I’d felt anything like this had been in the decaying grandeur of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau, when Nightingale had done his IED routine. It was so strong I could turn my head to face the direction it came from.

So could at least two thirds of the denizens of the nazareth, including Hyacinth. I couldn’t be certain, but I had a sick feeling that we were all facing across the river towards the City and Shakespeare Tower. Where Nightingale had gone to interview Woodville-Gentle.

‘Demon trap,’ I heard someone whisper. ‘Demon trap,’ it was repeated fearfully around the garden.

And then everybody turned to look expectantly at me and Lesley.

Lesley looked back with as much of a curled lip as her injuries would allow.

‘Oh,
now
you want the police,’ she said.

12

Barbican

w
hen you need to get somewhere fast you go blues and twos. It’s just like TV. You turn on your siren and stick the spinner on the roof of your car so that the average driver knows to get the fuck out of the way. What they don’t show is that the spinner keeps falling off the roof and usually ends up dangling by its wire from the passenger window and that there’s always someone on the road in front of you who think the rules apply to someone else. A sheet of glass, a pile of empty boxes, an inexplicable fruit stall – I wish. I nearly rear-ended a BMW on Borough High Street and had to swerve around a Toyota with a Blind Driver on Board sticker in its rear window, but I had her up to sixty as we crossed London Bridge. There was a strange random gap in the traffic and we sailed over an iron-grey Thames in a weird bubble of peace.

Because I went via Moorgate we couldn’t see Shakespeare Tower, despite its height, until we were as close as Chiswell Street. I don’t know what I’d expected, streets littered with broken glass and fluttering paper, a gaping hole in the side of the block. We’d felt the concussion six kilometres away – surely there must be something. But we didn’t even find a police presence until we turned into the underground car park and found a City of London Police van waiting for us.

A uniformed sergeant clambered out of the van as we drew up.

‘Grant and May?’ he asked.

We showed our warrant cards and he said that we were expected and that Nightingale had said we’d know our way up to the flat.

‘He’s okay?’ I asked.

‘He looked just fine to me,’ said the sergeant.

Me and Lesley, being both English
and
police, managed to avoid any outward sign of the massive sense of relief we felt. Madame Teng would have been proud.

‘Be discreet on your way up,’ said the sergeant, ‘we haven’t had to evacuate yet and we don’t want to start a panic.’

We promised we’d be good and headed for the lifts. Along the way we passed a familiar fire-engine-red VW transporter with LFB livery and Fire Investigation Unit stencilled on its side.

‘That’ll be Frank Caffrey,’ I told Lesley. Ex Para, Nightingale’s contact in the Fire Brigade and, if necessary, head of the Folly’s own Armed Response Unit. Or, depending on which end of the barrel you were standing at, its very own extra-legal death squad.

He was waiting for us when the lift opened; a solid man with a broken nose, brown hair and deceptively mild blue eyes.

‘Peter,’ he said nodding. ‘Lesley. You got here fast.’

The lobby had been turned into a staging post for the forensics techs. Caffrey said they’d caught a break because the inhabitants of the other two flats on the floor were away for the Christmas holidays.

‘Cape Town,’ said Caffrey. ‘And St Gervais Mont-Blanc. All right for some, isn’t it? Good thing, too, otherwise we’d probably have to evacuate the whole tower.’ According to Frank if you evacuate one set of families from a block all the others will want to know why they weren’t evacuated too. But if you go and evacuate everyone as a precaution then a good quarter will refuse to leave their flats on principle. Plus, if you evacuate them you become responsible for finding them a safe haven and keeping them fed and watered.

‘Shouldn’t we evacuate them anyway?’ I asked as I suited up.

‘Your boss says there’s no secondary devices,’ said Frank. ‘That’s good enough for me.’

I really wished it was good enough for me.

‘Did he ever tell you what a demon trap was?’ asked Lesley.

‘I got the impression they were like a magical landmine but he never said how they worked. It’s probably more fourth-order stuff.’

‘Oh, strictly second order, I assure you,’ said Nightingale, who was standing in the doorway watching us. ‘Any fool can make a demon trap. It’s rendering them safe that takes skill.’

He beckoned; we followed.

It was even stuffier than on our first visit and there was a strong odour of spoiling fish. ‘Is that real?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Nightingale. ‘Salmon left out in the kitchen. A very bright young man estimated that it had been there since Monday evening.’

‘Which means they scarpered right after we interviewed them,’ said Lesley.

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.

I noticed something odd about the bookshelves in the hallway. ‘These are out of order,’ I said. ‘The O’Brians are mixed up with the Penguins.’ Somebody must have taken them all out and then put them all back, hurriedly and out of order. No – it was simpler than that, I saw. ‘They took out a block of Penguins and a block of the O’Brians but put them back the wrong way round.’

I lifted out the mismatched block and found nothing. Neither was there anything behind the second block of books. Well, obviously there was nothing there because whoever had moved the books had taken what was behind them. But if they’d been in a hurry? I started stripping books on either side until I found something. It was a 5 cc disposable syringe, empty but with the cap seal broken. I removed the cap and sniffed the needle to find a faint medicinal smell. Used and discarded, then. I showed it proudly to Nightingale and Lesley.

‘She was a nurse,’ said Lesley. ‘It could be legitimate?’

‘Then why is it hidden in the gap behind the books?’ I asked. ‘It’s not very secure, so it must be something she needed to access in a hurry.’

‘They’re on the higher shelves,’ said Lesley. ‘Out of reach of someone in a wheelchair. So not for him.’

I sniffed it again, to no avail. ‘I wonder if it’s a sedative?’ I said. ‘Perhaps our Russian nurse was there to do more than look after him?’

I put the syringe back where I’d found it.

Lesley pointed down the corridor behind me where a couple of men and women in noddy suits were systematically pulling books off shelves and checking carefully for voids and hiding places.

‘You do know the search team would have found it,’ said Lesley.

‘It’s not good to become reliant on specialists,’ I said.

‘Hear hear,’ said Nightingale.

‘And we’re not specialists?’ asked Lesley.

‘We’re indispensable,’ I said. ‘That’s what we are.’