CHAPTER 13
Sloane Square
QUITE 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 among 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 realized 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 because it wasn’t fronting the main road. It wasn’t totally overrun by police but 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 the lower ranks from the D&C and Burtons suits, while senior officers were splashed out on bespoke—it wasn’t just that they could afford it, but 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 D.I., 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 favorite. Still, he sent that first and only pint down the bar to me, so the evening at least got off to the right start.
A dark-haired DC with pale skin whose name I couldn’t remember sidled over with DC Carey in tow. She wanted to know whether it was true I worked for the Folly, and when I said yes, she wanted to know whether magic was real or not.
I told her that while there was a lot of really strange shit around, magic, doing spells and the like, didn’t really exist. I’d taken to giving this explanation to random inquiries ever since Abigail Kamara, junior ghost hunter extraordinaire, had taken my flippant confirmation and run with it.
“Pity,” the dark-haired DC said. “I always thought that reality was overrated.” Shortly after that she drifted off, with Carey bobbing behind like a sadly neglected balloon.
She’ll miss him if she lets go and he drifts off, I thought.
I looked over to where Seawoll was making Lesley laugh. She was holding a straight glass full of multicolored alcohol from which two lemon slices, a paper parasol, and a bendy straw protruded. Since she was occupied, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to get an update on the case.
There are three basic ways to get yourself up to speed on an ongoing case. One is to log into Holmes and work your way down the action list, reading statements, evaluating forensic reports, and following the investigation tree to see where each branch leads. The primary advantage of this technique is, if you have a terminal at home, you can do it while eating pizza and drinking beer.
The second way involves gathering your team around a table somewhere and getting each of them to outline their progress so far. Often a whiteboard is involved or—if you’re really unlucky—PowerPoint. The principal advantage of the meeting is that if you happen to be the Senior Investigating Officer, you can look your subordinates in the eye and tell if they’re talking bollocks or not. The disadvantage is that beyond about half an hour, everyone around the table below the rank of Chief Superintendent will begin to slip into a coma.
The third way is to catch up with the investigation team when they’re in the pub. And the big advantage of the pub ambush, beyond the easy availability of alcohol and salted peanuts, is that nobody wants to talk about the case and in their haste to get rid of you they will boil down their role in the investigation to a sentence. Thus, “We did a joint evaluation of video evidence encompassing all possible access points in conjunction with BTP and CLP, and despite widening the parameters of our assessment to include registered and nonregistered cameras in the high probability zones, we have as yet to achieve a positive identification of James Gallagher prior to his appearance at Baker Street” becomes: “We’ve checked every CCTV camera in the system and it’s as if the fucker beamed down from the Starship Enterprise.”
Accurate, concise—unhelpful. James Gallagher’s fellow students thought he was boring, his lecturers thought he was talented but boring, and those locals he interacted with thought he was pleasant, respectful, and boring. The only interesting thing about him was periodic gaps in his timeline starting in late September, when his movements couldn’t be accounted for.
“But that could be him going clubbing,” commented the DC who told me. “You always get gaps, and mine’s a pint if you’re buying.”
I bought them all night, but what I got out of it was pretty much nothing except to find there was an upper limit to the amount of orange juice I could drink. I was just wondering whether I could risk another pint when Seawoll beckoned me over and suddenly I was very glad I was sober.
Lesley was as pissed as I’ve ever seen her.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said. “I have to powder what’s left of my nose.”
Seawoll winced as he watched her stagger off in the direction of the WC then turned his attention to me.
“She was the best of your generation,” he said. “And you broke her.”
Between growing up with my mum, for whom tact is the blue stuff you use to put posters up, and my dad, who prided himself on being your plain-speaking cockney geezer, particularly when his “medicine” was late, I’m pretty immune to the hard stare. Still, it wasn’t easy to meet Seawoll’s gaze—and I’ve stared down Molly.
“But that is as it may be,” he said. “We’re fucking nowhere with this case and it’s got that nasty smell that I’ve come to associate with you and that well-dressed piece of shit you work for.”
I bit my lip and waited. He was pushing. I wondered why.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Strangely, this made him smile. “I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment,” he said. “But what I want mostly is a way of getting through this case with a minimum of paperwork, property damage, and an actual suspect I can arrest and send up the fucking stairs.”
“I’ll do my best, sir,” I said.
“You know the Covent Garden beheading has never been officially cleared,” he said. “That’s a dent in my clear-up rate, Peter, not yours, because you don’t have a fucking clear-up rate, do you?” He leaned forward. I leaned back. “I’ve got a very good clear-up rate, Peter, I’m very proud of it and so at the end of this case I expect there to be a collar—preferably one attached to a human being.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You do know when to keep your mouth shut,” said Seawoll. “I’ll give you that much. What are your actions for tomorrow?”
“I’m going to follow Kevin Nolan and see if I can’t establish what his connection with James Gallagher was,” I said.
“You’re sure there’s a connection?”
They were both dealing in magic pottery, but I didn’t say that.
“You don’t want to know, sir,” I said. “But with luck we can connect them in a more tangible way.”
“I want you to write up the action plan properly and file it first thing with the case manager,” said Seawoll. “If you get a connection we can use, you call Stephanopoulos immediately and we ramp up the surveillance. No going off on your own—understand?”
There was a crash as a door slammed open, followed by a high-pitched laugh.
Lesley lurched out of the WC, pulled herself up into a semblance of dignity, and looked around in vague puzzlement before fixing on me and Seawoll.
“Oh dear,” said Seawoll. “Will you look at the state of that. About time you took her home, son.” He waved at me imperiously and I scuttled off to do his bidding.
LESLEY WASN’T so drunk that she didn’t think to check my fitness to drive.
“I’m definitely below the limit,” I said as I poured her into the passenger seat and closed the door.
“Why aren’t you drunk?” she asked. It had grown cold out while we were in the pub, and the inside of the Asbo was freezing—my breath steamed as I leaned over to buckle Lesley in.
“Because I’m driving,” I said.
“You’re so boring,” she said. “You’d think a copper who was a wizard would be more interesting. Harry Potter wasn’t this boring. I bet Gandalf could drink you under the table.”
Probably true, but I don’t remember the bit where Hermione gets so wicked drunk that Harry has to pull the broomstick over on Buckingham Palace Road just so she can be sick in the gutter. Once Lesley wiped her mouth with the napkins I’d so boringly kept in the glove compartment against such an eventuality, she resumed by pointing out that Merlin probably had something to teach me about the raising of the wrist.
I would have been subjected to a longer list except Lesley had grown up reading Sophie Kinsella and Helen Fielding and so ran out of fictional wizards at Severus Snape, after which our journey home continued in relative quiet.
By the time I’d parked in the Folly garage Lesley had gone from belligerent to my best mate. She flopped against me and I felt her breasts squashing against my chest as her arm snaked around my waist. “Let’s go to bed,” she mumbled. I was hard enough to make me glad I wasn’t wearing jeans. It certainly didn’t make maneuvering her through the snow to the back door any easier.
I tried to prop her against the wall while fumbling for my keys but she kept flopping against me. “I could leave the mask on,” she said. “Or wear a paper bag.”
Her hand found my erection and gave it a delighted squeeze. I yelped and dropped the keys. “Look what you made me do,” I said.
“Never mind that,” she said, and tried to get her hand inside my fly.
I jumped back and she started to sag slowly into the snow. I had to throw both my arms around her to try to hoist her back up, but all I managed to do was half pull both her sweater and blouse off.
“That’s more like it,” she said. “I’m up for it if you are.”
The back door opened to reveal Molly, who looked at me then at Lesley and then back at me.
“It’s not what you think it is,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” asked Lesley as she staggered upright. “Shit.”
“Let us in, Molly, I want to get her into bed,” I said.
Molly gave me a poisonous look as I half dragged Lesley inside.
“Well, you put her to bed, then,” I said.
So she did. Molly just reached out, plucked Lesley from my arms, and slung her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, only with much less effort than I’d have had to use on a sack of potatoes. Then she slowly turned on the spot and went gliding off into the long shadows of the atrium.
Toby, who’d obviously been waiting until the coast was clear, bounced out of the door to see if I’d brought him a present.
I headed back to the coach house to do some police work—which is, trust me, better than a cold shower.
First thing, I took the image of the Elvish script from the demon trap and ran it through Photoshop, using contrast and edge finding to clarify the letters and, more important, disguise where they came from. Then I put it out onto the great and varied social media sea with a request for a translation. While I waited I wrote the formal action plan for Seawoll, no doubt snoring boozily in his bed by now, and emailed it to the Inside Inquiry Team.
The Tolkien scholars were obviously slow off the mark that night so I did a preliminary search on Empire Ware and Empire Pottery and got a lot of links to the Empire Porcelain Company of the North Staffordshire potteries. It was nice enough stuff, but not only was it from the wrong end of the country, it had ceased trading in the late 1960s—yet was nonetheless considered eminently collectible. It wasn’t until I got past page 36 that I caught a glimpse of what I was looking for: the Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company, established 1865. I changed my search but all I got was a paragraph from an expired eBay auction. Further research was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way—by sending an email to the SO11 and requesting an Integrated Intelligence Platform check. I referenced Operation Matchbox and gave my warrant number, making it all slick and official. By the time I finished, there were three translations of the Elvish in my in-box.
Bomb disposal experts talk about the bomb maker’s signature, the telltale flourishes that distinguish one mass murderer from another. But identification is so much easier when they just write their name in crayon. I recognized the Faceless Man’s particular sense of humor. The transcription read in English: If you can read these words then you are not only a nerd but probably dead.