WEDNESDAY
CHAPTER 10
Russell Square
IT WAS the yelling that woke me up the next morning. I rolled out of my bed, grabbed my extendable baton, and was out the door before I was fully awake. All those nights being terrorized by Molly had obviously paid off. It was still early enough to be dark, so the first thing I did was hit the hallway lights.
I stood there in my boxers, chilling quickly in the winter air, thinking that maybe it had been a nightmare, when the next door along slammed open and Zach ran out wearing nothing but a pair of purple Y-fronts and swearing at the top of his voice. He saw me and waved something in my face.
“Look at this,” he said.
It was his filthy gym bag, the one that had stunk up my car, only now it was marvelously clean, the frayed seams stitched and reinforced with leather and the Adidas logo touched up with blue thread. Angrily he yanked it open to display the clean and neatly folded clothes inside within a waft of lemon and wildflowers. Only one person I know folds clothes to that level of precision.
“Molly must have cleaned it,” I said.
“No shit,” he said. “She didn’t have no right. It’s my stuff.”
“Smells nice, though,” I said.
He opened his mouth to say something but it snapped shut when Lesley came running around the corner carrying her baton in one hand and a heavy-duty torch in the other. She’d taken the time to fasten on her mask, but nothing else, and was dressed in a pair of skimpy red-and-white polka dot low-rise shorts and a sleeveless thermal vest under which her breasts bounced distractingly. Me and Zach both stared like a pair of teenagers, but I managed to drag my eyes back up to her mask before she could hit me with the baton.
“Good morning,” said Zach brightly.
I introduced Zach to Lesley and gave her the potted history. “I couldn’t leave him in the snow,” I said.
She told us to stop making so much noise and that she was going back to bed. As she walked away I realized I’d forgotten just how shapely her thighs were and how beautiful the dimples that formed in her buttocks when she walked.
We both watched in rapt silence until she’d gone around the corner.
“That was amazing,” said Zach.
“Yes, she is,” I said.
“So,” said Zach. “Are you two fucking?”
I glared at him.
“Does that mean you’re not?”
“No,” I said. “She’s—”
“Sex on legs,” said Zach, and took a moment to sniff his armpit. Apparently satisfied, he squared his shoulders, twanged the elastic waist on his Y-fronts, and said, “Good. There’s nothing like an early start.” He made to follow Lesley but I stopped him with a hand on the chest. “What?” he asked.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said.
“You can’t have it both ways, bruv,” he said. “Make up your mind.”
“Did you not notice …” I hesitated. “… the injuries?”
“Some of us look beyond the superficial,” said Zach.
“Some of us look beyond someone’s tits,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Did you see that bum?”
“Do you want me to smack you?”
“Hey,” he said, taking a step back. “Just say you’re interested and I won’t give her another thought. Maybe a couple of other thoughts, difficult not to, given the circumstances. Come on, even you can’t be that blind.”
“It’s none of your business,” I said.
“I’m giving you a week on account of the inalienable laws of hospitality,” he said. “Then I’m going to consider it an open field—okay?”
It seemed a safe bet that something else would have caught his attention by then. “Yeah,” I said. “Whatever.”
Zach slapped his six-pack and looked around. “Now that we’re up,” he said, “what do we do about breakfast?”
“In this establishment,” I said, “we dress for breakfast.”
NIGHTINGALE CERTAINLY did. His only concession to informality was leaving the top button of his shirt undone and draping his blazer over the back of his chair. He was addressing his toast and marmalade when I showed Zach—sweet-smelling and freshly laundered, thanks to Molly—into the breakfast room. Nightingale gave me a quizzical look as Zach fell upon the line of silver salvers with cries of glee and started piling up his plate with kippers, scrambled eggs, kedgeree, mushrooms, tomatoes, fried bread, and deviled kidneys. I sat down and poured coffee.
“Zachary Palmer,” I said.
Nightingale nodded. “The late James Gallagher’s lodger. Lesley filled me in with the case history last night during the rugby.”
“He has a secret, or so he says,” I said.
“Let me guess,” said Nightingale. “Demifae?”
“If that means half fairy—then yeah,” I said. “How did you know?”
Nightingale paused for a bite of toast. “I think I knew his father. Or possibly his grandfather—it’s never easy to tell with fae.”
“You haven’t taught me about fae yet,” I said. “What are they exactly?”
“They’re not anything ‘exactly,’ ” said Nightingale. “ ‘Fae’ is just a term like ‘foreigner’ or ‘barbarian,’ it basically means people that are not entirely human.”
I glanced over at where Zach had given up trying to pile everything on one plate and resorted to using two. Toby had sidled up to sit within easy sausage-catching range, just in case.
“Less powerful,” said Nightingale, “but more independent. Father Thames could probably flood Oxford if he wanted to, but it would never occur to him to interfere with the natural order to that extent. Fae are capricious, mischievous, but no more dangerous than a common cutpurse.” That last sounded suspiciously like a quote. “They’re more frequent in the country than the city.”
Zach brought his two plates to the table and after a brief introduction to Nightingale began to plow through the heaps of food. To eat as much as he did and stay skinny he must burn calories like a racehorse. Was it a fairy thing or within the normal range of human metabolism? I wondered if I could persuade him to spend a day being tested by Dr. Walid. I was willing to bet he’d never had a demifae to experiment on. It would be nice to know whether there was a demonstrable genetic difference, but Dr. Walid said that normal human variations were wide enough that you’d need samples from hundreds of subjects to establish that. Thousands if you wanted a statistically significant answer.
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 goblin 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. He turned to Zach. “Do you know where it is?”
“Not me, guv,” said Zach. “I’m strictly persona non grata among 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 five hundred quid.
Nightingale pulled a silver money clip from his jacket pocket, peeled off five fifties, and handed them to Zach, who made them disappear 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 Zach.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, already eyeing 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 favor,” 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 is?” I asked.
“A Taoist 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, Taoist magic is based on writing characters on paper much in the way that we speak formae aloud. Beyond that I don’t think we ever discovered how it works. Contact was limited, since 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 I was hoping we could leave that case to the Murder Team 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 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, that is weird, unusual, or uncanny, had come up. Hopefully by the time we’d finished, Zach would have found the goblin market, which Lesley and I would go and check out.
“I’m going to visit the Barbican and reinterview 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 STOPPED snowing during the night, and although the sun wasn’t out the clouds had thinned and the extra warmth 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 smelled 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 rugby because he leaves the place tidier than normal. I put the kettle on, powered up my laptop and the secondhand 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 straightaway. In the end I informed them that I’d put Zachary Palmer up for the night and that, informally, he’d indicated 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 forensic reports on Holmes.
The techs failed to recover anything from James Gallagher’s phone because of the “unusually degraded” state of its chips, although they had hopes of doing a dump from the relatively undamaged flash memory. I knew from painful experience what had “degraded” the phone, and wondered if the forensic 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, 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 it was not made from china, was instead a type of stoneware—identifiable because of its opacity and semivitreous nature—whatever that meant. Chemical analysis indicated it was seventy percent clay mixed in with quartz, soda-lime glass, crushed flint, and grog. I Googled “grog” and decided 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—ceramic stoneware—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 that 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 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 have been amenable to Low Copy Number DNA testing, with the downside 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 person’s mouth.
Assuming the DNA turned out to be human.
The mud on James Gallagher’s boots was an appetizing mixture of human feces, 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 that 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 behavior 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 walk 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 taken Ryan Carroll’s statement while I had him 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,” he 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 out, and hurried away before she reloaded. She was getting much better.
I sent off the copy of the form, duplicated everything four times, put the duplicates in a series of A4 envelopes, to keep them from 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—pronounced “air”—which strictly speaking is Latinized Greek 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 led to generations of students writing variations of WTF in the margins of their primers.
“Isn’t a shield useful?” I’d asked.
“There’s a much more effective fourth-order spell that creates a shield,” said Nightingale. “But you’re at least two years from learning that. I’m teaching you this against the chance that you may encounter the Faceless Man again. This should give you some protection from a fireball while you stage a tactical withdrawal.”
By which he meant run like fuck.
“Will it stop a bullet?” I had to ask.
Nightingale didn’t know the answer. So we bought an automatic paintball gun, attached it to a hopper feed and a compressor, and mounted it on a tripod at the shooting end of the firing range. To start my training session I donned my stab vest, my old school jockstrap, and my standard-issue riot helmet with face mask. Then I set the mechanical timer on the gun and walked up the range to stand at the target end. I always felt uncomfortable standing at the wrong end, which Nightingale said was just as it should be.
The timer was a relic of the fifties, a Bakelite mushroom with a dial like those on a safe, except painted pink. It was old and flaky enough to add an exciting element of uncertainty to when it would ring. When it did, I’d cast the spell and the paintball gun would fire. Originally me and Nightingale thought we’d have to jury-rig a mechanism to randomly vary the aim. But the gun jiggled so violently on its tripod that it produced a spread wide and random enough to satisfy the most exacting standards of the Imperial Marksmanship School.
Just as well, because the first time out the only paintballs that didn’t hit my body were the ones that went wide to either side. I like to think I’ve made significant improvements since then, albeit from a low base, and could stop nine out of ten shots. But as Nightingale says, the tenth is the only one that counts. He also pointed out that the muzzle velocity of the paintball gun is about three hundred feet per second and that of a modern pistol over a thousand, and it doesn’t sound any better when you translate it into S.I. units.
So just about every day I go down to the basement, take a deep breath, and listen for the whir of the timer to wind down to that terminal click and see if I can’t get rid of that troublesome outlier.
Whir, click, splat, splat, spat.
Thank God for my riot helmet—that’s all I’m going to say.
AFTER LUNCH Zach came back with an address and an outstretched hand.
“Get it off Nightingale,” I said.
“He said you had the rest,” he said.
I pulled up my clip and gave him two fifty in twenties and tens. It was most of my clip. In return I got a piece of paper with a Brixton address and a phrase written on it.
“ ‘I’m here to cut the grass,’ ” I read.
“That’s the password,” said Zach, counting his money.
“Now I need an ATM,” I said.
“I’d buy you a drink,” said Zach, waving the cash at me. “But all this is spoken for.” He ran upstairs and grabbed his bag. But despite being keen to leave the Folly, on his way back out he paused to shake my hand.
“It was nice meeting you,” he said. “But don’t take any offense if I sincerely hope that we don’t meet again. And give my regards to Lesley.” He let go of my hand and darted out of the main entrance. I counted my fingers and then patted myself down—just to be on the safe side.
Then I went to tell Lesley that it was time for us to go.