Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (18 page)

We had to wait while a couple more techs finished up in the living-room area before we could go in. Nightingale, despite being vacuum-packed in an earlier era, had taken to advances in forensic science like a man who knew a magic bullet when he saw one. He might be hazy about what DNA actually was, but he understood the concept of trace evidence and took everything else on trust.

Actually I tried to explain DNA fingerprinting to him once, but found I had to look most of it up myself. The biology I could understand. It was the various probability calculations that stuffed me – they always do. I’d have been a
bad
scientist.

Once the techs were out, Nightingale led us inside, making us aware of the circle of blue police tape surrounding a burnt patch on the carpet and the numbered tags scattered around the room.

‘I brought you two here,’ said Nightingale, ‘because I wanted you to have experience of this while the
vestigium
was strong enough to be identified.’

He had us close our eyes and think about nothing, which is, of course, impossible. But it was from that jumble of random thoughts that you picked out the uncanny. In this case the
vestigium
was quite startling, like a shrieking voice, almost but not quite human. Like when cats fight outside your window and for a moment you can swear it’s a person screaming. Not once you’ve been police for any length of time, though – you soon learn to tell the difference.

‘Screaming,’ I said.

‘Is that a ghost?’ asked Lesley.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Nightingale.

‘A demon?’ I asked.

‘In the biblical sense of a fallen angel no,’ said Nightingale. ‘But it can be thought of as a spirit that has been driven into a state of malevolence.’

‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

‘Torture some poor soul to death,’ said Nightingale. ‘And then trap the spirit at the point of death.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Weaponised ghosts?’

‘The Germans invented this,’ said Lesley. ‘Didn’t they?’

‘Not invented,’ said Nightingale. ‘Refined perhaps. We believed that the technique is actually very old and originated in Scandinavia during the first millennia.’

‘Vikings,’ said Lesley.

‘Precisely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Bloodthirsty, but surprisingly erudite in a limited fashion.’

Well that made sense, what with those long winter nights, I thought. Once you’d exhausted the possibilities of drinking, feasting and wenching, torturing someone slowly to death probably helped break the monotony.

Nightingale handed me a stick.

‘I want you to bang gently on the carpet and find the edges of the device,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley can mark the outside with this.’ He handed her a piece of chalk.

The stick was thirty centimetres long, knobbly and still covered in bark. It looked like something you might pick up while walking in the woods with a small annoying dog.

‘Very high-tech,’ I said.

Nightingale frowned at me. ‘Wood is best,’ he said. ‘The greener and younger the better. Pull a branch off a sapling if you can. Much less likely to set it off.’

My mouth went dry. ‘But this one isn’t live,’ I said. ‘Is it? You disarmed it?’

‘Not disarmed,’ said Nightingale. ‘Discharged and dissipated – think of it as a controlled explosion.’

One that we’d ‘heard’ all the way across the river in Brixton.

‘But it’s inert now?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But it was common for these devices to have two separate components, one to cause the initial damage and a second to catch any rescuers or medical teams.’

‘So be careful,’ said Lesley.

I thumped the carpet a safe distance from the burn mark just to get a feel for what the normal floor surface felt like – concrete decking with a layer of hard insulator on top if I was any judge. I worked the stick back towards the centre until I felt it come down on something unmistakably metallic.

I froze.

‘Find the edge,’ said Nightingale.

I forced myself to backtrack until I was tapping concrete again. Lesley marked the spot with the chalk. I worked my way around the edge – it seemed to match the circular burn on the carpet but Nightingale said that you could never take that for granted. Once we’d established that there were no trigger pads outside the burnt area Nightingale handed Lesley a Stanley knife and we watched as she cut out a square of carpet and peeled it away.

The demon trap was a disc of metal the size of a riot shield, the kind you use for snatch arrests. The metal was a dull silver and looked like stainless steel. At the centre two circles had been incised side by side. One circle was filled with a glittering sand that reminded me of what happened to microprocessors when they were exposed to magic.

‘I’m guessing that the empty one is the first component,’ I said.

‘Top marks, Peter,’ said Nightingale.

‘So the intact circle is the second component,’ I said.

‘What we call a double-boss device,’ said Nightingale.

‘What’s this scratched into the edge?’ asked Lesley.

I looked where she was pointing and saw that there were marks etched neatly around the rim of the disc. Nightingale explained that they’d often found runic inscriptions on demon traps and the theory was that in the original Viking designs the runes had been part of the enchantment.

‘Like the Daoists?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ said Nightingale. ‘Comparative thaumatology is a discipline still in its infancy.’

This was a familiar Nightingale joke – meaning that I was the only one currently interested in it.

‘We spent a great deal of effort having the runes translated only to find it was mostly insults – “die English scum,” that sort of thing,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sometimes the messages were more ambiguous – “this is not a moral argument” was one of my favourites and of course there was the unknown craftsman who wrote “Greetings from Ettersberg”.’

‘What did that mean?’

‘Come and put me out of my misery,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or so we interpreted it. They’d conscripted a lot of practitioners from all over Europe, many couldn’t face what they were being made to do, some suicided, some suffered from a strange illness where they just stopped eating and wasted away. Others were tougher, undertook acts of sabotage or tried to contact the outside world. It must been a desperate hope that someone would hear them.’

‘And somebody did,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘We did.’

I recognised the markings and they weren’t Nordic runes.

‘This is Elvish script,’ I said.

‘I doubt that,’ said Nightingale.

‘Not real elves,’ I said, wondering if there were such a thing. ‘Elves as in
Lord of the Rings
elves, Tolkien. He developed his own language and alphabet for his books.’

‘This is all very interesting, boys,’ said Lesley. ‘And much as I like hanging around lethal devices, I haven’t had my dinner yet – so can we get on with the IED.’

‘IDD,’ I said. ‘Improvised Demonic Device.’

‘It doesn’t look improvised, anyway,’ said Lesley. ‘It looks custom-built.’

‘When you two are quite finished,’ said Nightingale.

Lesley looked outraged but kept her mouth shut.

Nightingale pointed at the empty boss. ‘This one was primed to go off at the first use of formal magic inside the flat,’ he said. ‘I think it was deliberately left behind to kill either of you two. Fortunately it was me that triggered it and I had time to contain and dissipate the effect.’

‘Or what would have happened?’ I asked.

‘It would have killed me certainly,’ said Nightingale. ‘And anyone in the flat with me. And probably would have shortened the life of anyone within twenty yards of here.’

I opened my mouth to ask what the deaths would have looked like, but Lesley silenced me with a glare – it’s impressive how much expression she can project out of those eye holes.

‘Luckily this is a nice modern building made of concrete,’ said Nightingale. ‘Not much in the way of
vestigium
in situ and concrete’s very absorbent. I’m going to channel the demon into the structure around us, much more slowly than I did with the first one. The spell I do will be far too fast for you to follow but I want you two to concentrate on the nature of the demon – that might give us a lead as to where it came from.’

Nightingale took a deep breath and in a weirdly ecclesiastical gesture brought two fingers down towards the second boss – he paused with his fingertips hovering above the metal.

‘This may be somewhat unpleasant,’ he said and pressed his fingers down.

Fucking major fucking understatement.

We didn’t throw up, pass out or burst into tears, but it was a close thing.

‘Well?’ asked Nightingale, who was obviously made of sterner stuff.

‘A dog, sir,’ said Lesley hoarsely. ‘Pitbull, Rottweiler, some ugly bastard thing like that.’

The second boss had crumbled into sand and one part of my brain was wondering whether that was the same phenomena that kept destroying my phones. And the other part of my brain was screaming that I was never going to eat meat again.

There had been blood and pain and mad exultation and concrete walls and rotting straw and then it started to drain away, exactly the way a nightmare does on waking. Leaving the memory of terror unwinding in your stomach.

‘Dog fight,’ I said.

I got to my feet a little unsteadily and helped Lesley to hers. Nightingale sprang up, his face as angry as I’ve ever seen him.

‘He used a dog,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I approve of that at all.’

‘At least it wasn’t a human being this time,’ said Lesley.

‘Is it safe to take samples?’ I asked.

Nightingale said yes, so I borrowed a couple of tamper bags from the forensics techs, who I noticed hadn’t felt a thing, and bagged samples from each of the bosses. Then I switched my phone on and took pictures of the script around the edges.

‘Did the Germans ever use dogs?’ I asked.

‘Not that we know of,’ said Nightingale. ‘But then they had an unlimited supply of people.’

‘Do you think he was connected to the Faceless Man?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I think he may have been the original,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s certainly the right age to be the man who decapitated Larry the Lark and established the place in Soho.’

‘He looked like he might be a stroke victim to me,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe he overdid the magic. That would explain why he dropped out of sight.’

The Faceless Man I’d met, the one who had effortlessly kicked me around the rooftops of Soho, had been young, I was sure of it, in his thirties at most. If Wood-ville-Gentle had gone into medical retirement in the 1970s when his successor was still in short trousers then that would explain the gap. Nightingale agreed.

‘But I do wonder what the connection between them is,’ he said.

‘The connection could be anything,’ I said. ‘Family, apprentice, someone he ran into at the bus stop.’

‘I think we can discard that last one,’ said Nightingale.

‘But now we know one end of the connection,’ said Lesley. ‘We can track him through his medical records, through that Russian nurse’s immigration status, the syringes, the money trail from this flat. Now that we have a name to work with – that could take us anywhere.’

It’s going to take us there bloody cautiously,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s obvious to me that the demon trap was left here to kill you and Peter should you have made a return visit. Follow the paper trail by all means but from now on there will be no more direct encounters with potential Little Crocodiles without me present. Is that understood?’

Strangely, neither Lesley or I rejected this change in strategy. There’s nothing like a brush with death to instil caution in a person. Nightingale, no doubt perfectly aware that he had made his point, sent us home. But I wasn’t ready for the quiet of the Folly just yet.

‘Do you want to go to the pub?’ I asked as we were going down in the lift. ‘We haven’t gone out drinking in ages.’

‘There might be a reason for that,’ said Lesley tapping the mouth hole of her mask.

‘So use a straw,’ I said.

How could she say no?

‘Where are we going?’ asked Lesley as we sped down the Embankment.

‘I thought we’d go to the AB local,’ I said.

Lesley jerked. ‘You … bastard,’ she said.

‘They want to know how you are,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to … meet them sooner or later.’

‘You were going to say “face them” weren’t you?’

‘Face them,’ I said. ‘Yes, face them. And more importantly neither of us will have to pay for our drinks all night.’

13

Sloane Square

Q
uite simply, to be police is to drink. Unless you’re DC Guleed of course, in which case to be police is to learn how to be sociable amongst a bunch of drunk colleagues. It starts when you’re an ordinary PC, because after twelve hours of having the general public wind you up, you need something at the end of the day to wind you down. If marijuana was legal the first thing my generation of coppers would do after knocking off would be to light up a spliff of unusual size but, since it isn’t, we go to the pub instead. It was only after I’d sunk my first pint that I realised I was going to be designated driver that night and thus it was I who was playing the role of virtuous abstainer.

The AB local was your classic Victorian corner pub that was hanging on to its traditional ambience by the skin of its teeth, and the fact that it wasn’t fronting the main road. It wasn’t totally overrun by police but it really wouldn’t have been a good place for a random member of the public to pick a pocket or start a fight. You could tell lower ranks because the suits were from D&C and Burtons while senior officers splashed out on bespoke – it wasn’t just that they could afford it, it was also because they were less likely to get random bodily fluids on it.

Seawoll was holding court at one end of the bar and putting them away in the sure and safe knowledge that his most competent DI, Stephanopoulos, was running the case. When he spotted Lesley he beckoned her over. When I moved to follow he stopped me with a raised finger. Lesley had always been his favourite. Still, he sent that first and only pint down the bar to me, so the evening at least got off to the right start.