Lies Sleeping, Page 3

  There was a shriek from the back garden, where Abigail and Nicky were doing something youthful and thankfully unspecified down on the riverbank. Beverley had taken both of them down to Runnymede earlier to hunt insects as part of our ongoing project to keep Abigail out of trouble during the summer holidays.

  Once the mince was steaming gently Beverley broke it up with a wooden spatula and dropped it into the saucepan, where I stirred it as it browned.

  ‘I wish we knew what the Pale Nanny was,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t call her the Pale Nanny,’ said Beverley, who was hunting through her cupboard for anything vaguely tomato-ish. ‘The Pale Lady is a very specific person upstream and using her name casually like that is a mistake.’

  Mistake has a specific meaning when Beverley says it like that. It means likely to provoke outrage and adverse consequences, and I don’t mean on social media either.

  ‘Ash called the one in Soho a “Pale Lady”,’ I said. Mind you, the woman in question had just thrust a metre of iron railing through his abdomen so he wasn’t what you’d call a reliable witness.

  Beverley found a tin of peeled plum tomatoes hidden behind a couple of jumbo tins of boiled chickpeas that I doubted anyone in this house was ever going to be hungry enough to cook.

  ‘Wasn’t she some kind of chimera?’ she asked, as she rattled through a drawer for the clean tin opener. ‘Isn’t that what Abdul called her?’

  Dr Abdul Haqq Walid was the Folly’s very own part time cryptopathologist and weird specimen collector. We’d recently ponied up to get him a qualified assistant and she, one Dr Jennifer Vaughan, had spent the last year reclassifying everything.

  ‘Jennifer says “chimera” is not necessarily a helpful term,’ I said. ‘I think she’s right. I think the Soho Lady and the Pale Nanny were High Fae.’

  Beverley snorted. It didn’t help that her and everybody else in the demi-monde couldn’t agree on terminology, either.

  The mince was browning nicely so I turned down the heat to stop it from burning and Bev tipped in the tomatoes and went looking for some peppers.

  The good gentlemen of the Society of the Wise had plenty of theories and systems of classification for the people of the demi-monde, most of them involving a mixture of Latin, Greek and misinterpreted Darwinism. To them, fae basically meant anyone who was vaguely magical who hadn’t gone to the right school, with the High Fae being the creatures referenced in medieval literature who dwelt in their own castles with a proper feudal set-up and an inexplicable need to marry virtuous Christian knights.

  I’d been pretty certain it was all folklore, until one hot summer when I nearly got myself whisked off to fairyland – which looked suspiciously like a parallel dimension, or whatever the cosmologists are calling them these days. Bev rescued me, by the way, which is why I never argue about emptying the dishwasher.

  The best general description I ever heard came from Zachary Palmer, self-styled half-fairy, who once told me that there were three basic types of people. Those who were born magical, which included most of the fae; those who acquired magic through their own agency – like me, Nightingale, all the other practitioners, and presumably aspiring legendary swordswomen like Guleed . . .

  And the final group were those who had been changed by magic, often against their will. I had documented cases of children who’d brushed up against fairyland and come back with different coloured eyes and magical abilities. Then there were those who had been altered by evil practitioners into monstrous chimera, real cat-girls and tiger-boys. Like I said, I wasn’t joking about the crimes against humanity.

  And there was at least one person whose mind and body had been possessed by a revenant spirit, or possibly the ghost of a god, and that had left her ‘changed’. But I’ve got to believe that biology isn’t destiny, and we’re more than just the puppets of our endocrine system – or else what’s the fucking point?

  Beverley smelt the sauce and wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t have any tomato puree at all?’ I asked.

  But there wasn’t any, so we fell back on the time-honoured approach of throwing in peppers until it tasted like something my mum would cook.

  We laid the kitchen table and called in the girls.

  ‘Wash your hands before you come in,’ yelled Beverley as Nicky and Abigail ran up.

  Abigail was fifteen, short and skinny, and making a spirited attempt to make the puffball Afro if not fashionable again, then at least unavoidable. She was also, in a semi-official official way, my fellow apprentice – having taken a hastily rewritten oath in the presence of, and with the written consent of, her parents. Both of who were holding me personally responsible for her safety, which was totally fair and completely uncomfortable.

  I watched as she stopped just short of the back door and held out her hands to Nicky.

  Who being goddess of the River Neckinger, albeit nine years old, conjured a wobbly globe of water as big as my head in which both girls washed their hands. Then, with a flick of her fingers, the globe evaporated leaving their hands clean and dry.

  Abigail caught me watching and winked.

  The science teachers at school had noticed Abigail’s interest in Latin and history and, fearing the loss of a star pupil to the arts, had started tempting her with the prospect of after-school classes. The consensus was that, when the time came, she was going to have her pick of unis from Oxford to Edinburgh, and Manchester to Imperial.

  Personally, I thought she should stay in London where I could keep an eye on her.

  ‘You’re worried about her going to Edinburgh?’ Beverley had said. ‘You’d better start worrying about her going to Massachusetts.’

  But did Massachusetts have as many ghosts as London, I wondered as, over dinner, Abigail asked about the latest spate of ghost sightings. She was convinced there’d been an increase in activity despite a lack of empirical evidence.

  ‘What about Brent’s horses?’ asked Bev.

  ‘I couldn’t find a trace of anything,’ I said.

  Brent was another of Bev’s sisters – her river ran through West London – although since she was only nine years old she mostly lived with her mum or her sister Fleet. I’ve tried asking Beverley how this growing up almost like a normal person thing works but she doesn’t appear to understand the question.

  Anyway Brent had complained that there were horses in her river in the spring and, finding nothing myself, I stuck Abigail on the problem. She found nothing, apart from discovering that a minor battle from the English Civil War had taken place along the A315 from where it crossed the Brent to about where the Premier Inn is – at the end of which the Parliamentarians ran for it and the Royalists looted the then small town of Brentford. Thus revealing their general intentions as to London proper which, in the words of one historian, significantly contributed to Londoners’ determination to defend the Capital.

  The Royalist cavalry had been heavily engaged and we did dig up some ghostly horsemen reports from the eighteenth century, but whatever had spooked Brent hadn’t stayed for me or Abigail.

  After supper it was my job to drive Abigail back home to Kentish Town. I considered driving all the way back again to spend the night with Bev, but I needed to make an early start the next morning.

  Still, there was a bit of sly snogging on Beverley’s doorstep as I left, with Nicky giggling and Abigail harrumphing in the background.

  ‘You’ve got a big stupid smile on your face,’ said Abigail when we got in the car.

  ‘That’s because I’m in love,’ I said – which had the double virtue of being both true and shutting her up for the whole drive home.

  4

  The Society of the Wise

  At the end of the eighteenth century London was well into the mad, technology-driven expansion that would only stop with the establishment of the Metropolitan Green Belt in the 1
940s. Since then, developers have gnashed their teeth and looked enviously back on a time when a man armed only with his own wits and a massive inherited estate could shape the very fabric of the capital. Times like when the fifth Duke of Bedford found his country house surrounded on three sides by Regency London, and decided there was nothing for it but to dig up the old back garden and rake in a ton of cash. He enlisted the legendary architect and developer James Burton, who had a thing for elegant squares, the newfangled long windows in the French style, and vestigial balconies with wrought iron decorative railings.

  The only carbuncle on the road to progress was the weird group of gentlemen who’d taken to meeting in the faux medieval tower that an earlier duke caused to be built to add some drama to his garden. These gentlemen were in the nature of a secret society, although they seemed well favoured by certain members of court – particularly Queen Charlotte.

  In return for being allowed to demolish the tower, James Burton agreed to incorporate a magnificent mansion into the terrace along the southern side of the square. It would be built after the style of White’s – the famous gentlemen’s club – and include a demonstration room, library, dining hall, reading room, and accommodation for visiting members. The central atrium was so impressive it’s thought to have inspired Sir Charles Barry in his design of the more famous Reform Club forty years later.

  And so the Folly was born.

  And all of this at below market cost.

  So it’s not for nothing that Sir Victor Casterbrook, the first properly respectable president of the Society of the Wise, was sometimes known as the pigeon plucker – although probably never to his face.

  It also explains why he’s the only other person with their bust on proud display in the Folly’s atrium – the other being Sir Isaac Newton.

  I’ve got a room on the second floor with a nice view of the street, bookshelves and a gas fire retrofitted into the original fireplace. In the winter you can hear the wind whistling among the chimney tops and, if you leave all four burners on overnight, you can raise the ambient temperature to just above the triple point of water. When I started my apprenticeship I lived there full time, but these days Nightingale trusts me to tie my own shoelaces so I spend half my nights at Bev’s. Especially during the winter.

  Bev calls the Folly my London club, using her posh voice when she does. But officially it’s leased to the Metropolitan Police and treated as a genuine nick – it’s got a call sign, Zulu Foxtrot, and everything. Unfortunately we don’t have a PACE compliant custody suite, otherwise we’d be able to bang suspects up and subject them to Molly’s cooking until they confessed or exploded – whichever came first.

  Since Operation Jennifer got underway I’ve fallen into the routine of waking early and doing an hour in the Folly’s very own gym. True, it hasn’t been refurbished since the 1940s so it’s a bit short on cross-trainers, steps and the sort of hand weights that haven’t been carved out of lumps of pig iron. But it does have a punchbag which smells of canvas, leather and linseed oil, and I like to pound that for a bit and pretend I’m Captain America, or at least his smarter, younger half-brother.

  Next door is the only real working shower in the whole building and if I give Molly twelve hours’ notice I can get ten minutes of hot water. I did suggest getting some serious Romanian redecoration done, but apparently we’re not supposed to mess with the plumbing.

  ‘Quite apart from anything else, Peter,’ Nightingale had said, ‘once you started who knows when you’d stop?’

  After my shower I had to squeeze past the Portakabin taking up half the courtyard and up the wrought iron spiral stairs to the Tech Cave – where I keep all my technology and the last of the Star Beer. There I checked my Airwave charger and made sure that I had three burner phones on warm-up – we tended to run through them at a rate. I transferred the notes I’d made onto my stand-alone computer and printed a copy for physical collation. It was just coming up to quarter past seven as I squeezed back out past the Portakabin and in through the back door of the Folly.

  For complicated and needlessly mystical reasons you can’t run modern telecommunication cables into the Folly proper. That’s why my Tech Cave resides on the top floor of the coach house and why, when we needed to establish a proper on-site Inside Inquiry Office, we ended up with that Portakabin in the courtyard.

  I mean, we couldn’t put it downstairs in the coach house – that’s where we keep the Jag, and the Ferrari, and the most haunted car in Britain.

  I found Nightingale in the central atrium, watching as the Operation Jennifer personnel filtered in through the front and headed for the dining room where Molly was serving breakfast. We hadn’t planned on feeding the multitude, but having this many people in the Folly had done something to Molly’s brain and by the third morning she’d reopened the dining room and was presiding over breakfast and lunch plus tea and cakes in the afternoon. Somewhere there was a budget spreadsheet piling up red numbers, but that wasn’t my problem – at least not yet.

  ‘They’re all so ridiculously young,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘They’ were mostly Police Staff, what we’re not supposed to call civilian workers any more – analysts and data entry specialists – who’d got the boot when the government decided that in the light of an increased security threat what London really needed was a smaller police force. Others were experienced officers seconded from Belgravia MIT and other specialist units, all out of uniform and all carefully selected by DI Stephanopoulos as reliable, competent and discreet.

  And all signatories of the Official Secrets Act and security vetted twice – once by the Met and once by me.

  Guleed wandered out of the dining room with a coffee cup in her hand, saw us and walked over.

  ‘You know, if every nick had a canteen like this,’ she said, ‘morale would be ever so much higher.’

  ‘Well, we could turn Molly’s kitchens into a stand-alone business unit and go for some contracts,’ I said. ‘Molly gets to cook to her heart’s content and we replenish some of our reserves.’

  Nightingale nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I was just kidding.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  And headed off to the morning briefing.

  Guleed flicked me on the arm.

  ‘You’ve really got to learn to keep your mouth shut,’ she said.

  I wisely kept my counsel and went off in search of some coffee.

  The visitors’ lounge was a long room built just off the Folly’s entrance lobby to provide an agreeable space for wives, daughters and other suitably genteel visitors to be entertained by members while making it quite clear that they weren’t welcome in the Folly proper. Still, it had been nicely furnished with oak panelling, portraits of Sir Isaac Newton, Queen Charlotte, the fifth Duke of Bedford, and some quite splendid second-best upholstery.

  Upon setting up Operation Jennifer we’d whipped off the dust sheets, put most of the furniture in storage and installed the sort of institutional desks and workspaces that no modern copper feels he can work without. Or at the very least avoid. The line of tall sash windows would have provided plenty of natural sunlight if we hadn’t installed modern metal blinds to stop people looking in. So we fastened LED strips along the walls and plugged them into the single wall plug in the whole room. Fortunately it was a computer-free room so we didn’t risk overloading the Folly’s circuitry, although people constantly complained about having nowhere to charge their phones.

  The far wall had been covered in a whiteboard which was slowly filling up with a tangle of photographs, lines, personal names, company names and question marks. DCI Seawoll was looking at it when we entered.

  ‘Fuck me, this is getting complicated,’ he said.

  Alexander Seawoll was as modern a copper as had ever authorised a community outreach action going fo
rward, but you would never know it from casual acquaintance. A big man who wore a camel hair coat and handmade shoes, he was, reputedly, from Glossop – a small town just outside Manchester famous for its beautiful setting, its role in the cotton industry, and being twinned with Royston Vasey.

  Minus DI Stephanopoulos and DC Carey, who were both back at Belgravia Nick, Nightingale, Guleed, Seawoll and I constituted the inner decision-making core of Operation Jennifer.

  ‘Well, the plan was to poke people until we got a reaction,’ said Guleed. ‘I’d say that in that sense it was a success.’

  Seawoll glared at me – not at Guleed, you notice, who was the apple of his professional eye – but at me.

  ‘Yes, it did,’ he said ‘But not what you’d call fucking quietly. But I haven’t seen a bunch of police analysts this happy since they brought back Doctor Who.’

  Exposing the Pale Nanny had not only confirmed Richard Williams as an associate of Martin Chorley, but as one important enough to kill in extremis. Now the analysts could go back over their data, but give him a higher weighting. In the normally shifting world of information theory, poor Richard Williams had taken on a new solidity – which was not bad for a man who was still unconscious.

  ‘We can’t overlook the possibility that his wife is the connection,’ said Seawoll, and looked at Guleed. ‘Speaking of which, how did the ABE interview go?’