Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (16 page)

Father Thames, as casual as a gentleman in a pub urinal, glanced left and right down the line to ensure he had our full attention before cutting himself off in midstream and calmly buttoning himself up.

‘Well, what did you expect, boys?’ he said into the silence. ‘I am the master of the source, after all.’

I woke up in the back seat of the Asbo and, despite that, I felt surprisingly good. Fucking wonderful in fact. I got out of the car and stepped into warm early morning sunlight. Immediately suspicious, I powered up my mobile and used to it to check the date – it showed what I expected – I hadn’t spent fifty years in enchanted faerie revelry. But in my line of work you can’t be too careful.

Still, the faerie fair had vanished with the morning sun, leaving behind drifts of rubbish and muddy rectangular footprints pressed into the lawns. Just like a big dirty river that had burst its banks and left its mark on the dry land. It was in a state, but fortunately I’m a man who has a mum who knows a woman who runs a company that specialises in cleaning up after rock festivals. The woman who ran it said that if you’ve ever done clean-up at Glastonbury then nothing short of highgrade nuclear waste will ever scare you again.

Her people arrived and parked in the areas recently vacated by the TSG. Most of them were young Somalis, Central Africans, Albanians and Romanians with a smattering of Poles, Turks and Kurds. They were dressed in boiler suits, steel toecapped boots and carried shovels and rakes and implements of destruction.

Lesley looked cheerfully oblivious, curled up in the front seat, so I left her to it and went in search of coffee and bacon sandwiches. When I got back she was up and waving at me from the eastern edge of the park where we’d held the pissing contest.

‘What the fuck happened here?’ she asked.

In front of where the Old Man of the River had stood flowers had bloomed. Nightingale named them when he rolled up to join us, Wild Angelica, Red Clover, Yellow Melilot, Wild Mignonette, Garlic Mustard, Scabious, blue spherical Devil’s-bit and tall stands of Red Valerian. He seemed delighted and said he would return to pick a bouquet for Molly.

‘But first we need to deal with those railings,’ he said.

Despite the sunshine the wind coming up the river from the east was brisk. Uncle Bailiff had at least left the cut sections of the handrails in a neat stack and secured them with plastic ties. Me and Nightingale each took an end of the first section and lifted it into the gap. Nightingale put his hand around the join and spoke quite a long spell, fifth or sixth order I guessed. I felt a vibration like a tubular bell being struck neatly with a hammer and a tingle in my hands where I held my end of the rail and then a warmth.

‘I haven’t done this in a long time,’ he said.

‘Is this part of the weird way of the Weylands?’ I asked. It wasn’t exactly fashioning a wizard’s staff, but it was the same line of work. The metal was getting warmer and I was just wishing that I had a pair of proper workman’s gloves when Nightingale released his end. I slid my grip over so that he could take hold of my end and watched closely as he repeated the spell.
Lux
was in there but also
formae
and modifiers that I didn’t recognise.

‘Which reminds me,’ said Nightingale. ‘We must continue with our own blacksmithing.’ He released his grip, leaving an orange glow in the rough shape of his fingers on the metal which faded to leave no sign of a join.

‘Do we have time?’ I asked as we moved on to the next railing. ‘What with the Mulkern case and the Faceless Man?’

‘I’ve spent too long in the land of the lotus-eaters,’ he said. ‘It won’t profit me to find that faceless bastard.’ The railing shone white under his hands then faded. ‘Not if you and Lesley aren’t ready to take up your duties.’

A gust of wind chilled me as I realised that Nightingale was planning against the possibility that he wouldn’t survive that encounter.

‘And the exercise will do me good,’ he said.

When we were finished we walked up to join Lesley, who was packing up our stall. The last, I noted, to be taken down.

‘Notice anything odd?’ she said.

I looked around. The cleaners had nearly finished and clear plastic bin bags stuffed with rubbish awaited collection along the paths. A man was walking his dog and a couple of curious teenagers in hoodies were watching us in the hope that we did something interesting enough to post on YouTube.

‘Not really,’ I said.

Lesley tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up at our official Metropolitan Police crest with the reassuring slogan in script. Only someone had altered it while we slept. Someone with some proper skills, because if I hadn’t known it had changed I would have assumed it had always read –
Metropolitan Police:
Working Together For A Stranger London.

O
nly London didn’t get any stranger. It stayed resolutely normal for the next week or so – at least on the surface.

Operation Tinker, the investigation into the murder of Patrick Mulkern, was headed by Bromley Murder Investigation Team under DCI Duffy, although Nightingale made a point of attending every morning briefing in case something magical came up. My presence, or Lesley’s, was apparently not required.

‘You have a relationship with the Belgravia team,’ Nightingale had said as explanation. ‘And Westminster has a tradition of dealing with unusual cases that Bromley does not share. Inspector Duffy wants someone senior enough to shoulder the blame should things go seriously awry.’

Still, there’s never any shortage of work for idle police hands, especially ones that double up as apprentices, so me and Lesley got on with our paperwork, chasing the paper trail made by our suspected Little Crocodiles and doing the preliminary reading for the detective exams we hoped we’d be taking by the end of the year. At least, I was hoping to take them by the end of the year. Lesley’s current status of being on semi-permanent medical leave was causing her grief.

Professor Postmartin wrote me a letter in which he thanked me for the list of books at Stromberg’s Highgate villa and said that he was appending a list of texts in English, German and Latin that were associated with the 1920s. I dutifully passed this on to Bromley MIT to add to their inquiry database with flags to contact me if anything turned up.

Despite the best efforts of the Spring Court it snowed that weekend, although it didn’t settle inside London’s urban heat island. It certainly didn’t deter Abigail, who arrived on Sunday morning for what Lesley insisted on calling
Junior Apprentice
. Then, as I did each week, I attempted to find new ways to keep Abigail occupied and out of trouble. Often this involved us following up things she’d put down in her notebook, working our way through the ghost-spotting books, playing what Nightingale called the Game of Jewels or, if we were really desperate, teaching her some Latin. The high point was usually tea downstairs in the atrium, especially since Molly had reached the cake section in the Jamie Oliver book.

‘What is Oberon?’ she asked that Sunday.

‘I don’t know,’ I said and looked at Nightingale.

‘Some variety of fae I presume,’ he said stirring his tea.

‘Yeah,’ said Abigail. ‘But fae just means different, don’t it?’

Nightingale nodded.

‘Is he king of the fairies?’ she asked.

‘Royalty amongst the fae is a strictly protean concept,’ said Nightingale. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘There was this Asian kid that got lost and Oberon got into an argument with Effra about who got to keep him,’ she said and showed me his picture on the phone.

He was a very handsome brown-skinned child with black ringlets and mahogany eyes. The kind of boy who was going to be mistaken for a girl until his teens and would leave a trail of broken hearts behind him thereafter.

‘What do you mean Effra wanted to keep him?’ asked Lesley suspiciously.

She never had so sweet a changeling
, I thought. We’d done A
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
at school when I was twelve – I was third magic tree on the left. I’d wanted to play Bottom, but then so did everyone else.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Abigail. ‘I got his name out of him and then got Reynard to sniff out his parents.’

‘Who’s Raymond?’ I asked.

‘Reynard,’ said Abigail. ‘Just this guy. You know . . .’

‘No we don’t know,’ I said.

‘You met him,’ she said. ‘You know – earlier.’

‘You mean the fox?’ said Lesley. ‘The one that was trying to chat you up?’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Is that the same fox that talked to you at Christmas?’

‘Not unless he’s shed a lot of fur,’ said Abigail, ‘started walking upright, oh and let’s see, put on about fifty kilograms . . . Unless you think that’s possible.’

I wasn’t sure what to say. There were reports of were-creatures and shape changers in the Folly’s library, but nothing after the nineteenth century. Nightingale had taught me to be cautious of the early sources. ‘A great deal of it is accurate,’ he’d said. ‘And great deal is less so. Unfortunately it can be difficult to determine which is which.’

‘Unlikely,’ Nightingale told Abigail. ‘But I have to say that recently I have lost my faith in the word impossible.’

But ‘impossible’ still seemed to apply to catching a break in any of our cases. Nightingale returned from the Monday morning briefing and reported that the mood was not optimistic.

‘At this rate,’ said Lesley, ‘no one’s going to want to work with us. We’re clear-up rate poison.’

Nightingale – who came from an era when clear-up rates were something applied to char ladies – decided, as he had threatened in the aftermath of the Spring Court, to teach us some magical blacksmithing. So we trooped into the classroom with a forge – Nightingale insisted that we call it the smithy – and donned our heavy leather aprons and protective goggles.

The forge itself looked bolted together out of random sheets of blackened steel. There was an extractor hood surmounted by what appeared to be a lawnmower engine and a shelf filled with coke at groin level which was fed by what looked to me to be a suspiciously jury-rigged gas line.

‘The Sons of Weyland maintain,’ said Nightingale as he turned the gas on, ‘that the smiths were the first true practitioners of magic.’ He lit the forge with a practised flick of his finger and a
lux
spell.

For the hardy men of the North, the alchemists and the astrologers that preceded the Newtonian revolution were a bunch of conmen and grifters. ‘As above, so below,’ was so much bollocks. Not that Nightingale used the word bollocks. Craft, dedication, hard work and hitting bits of metal very hard with a hammer – that was the true path to wisdom.

‘And it is true,’ said Nightingale. ‘That you can always tell where a smithy stood by the
vestigium
it leaves behind.’

‘What about hospitals?’ asked Lesley. ‘You get tons of
vestigia
off old hospitals.’

‘But not the new ones,’ said Nightingale. ‘Have you noticed that?’

I hadn’t, until he pointed it out.

‘Sudden death seems to imbue a locality with a degree of power,’ he said. ‘People don’t die in hospitals in the quantity they once did.’ He paused and frowned. ‘Or perhaps the technology mutes the effect. In either case, it is of a quite different quality from the
sensus illic
of a smithy.’

‘You don’t get much around graveyards,’ I said.

‘The magic is released upon the point of death,’ said Nightingale. ‘Despite the attachment spirits have for their bodies, I was taught that little magic stays with those earthly remains.’

‘What about massacre sites?’ I asked. ‘You know like when they get the victims to dig a pit and then—’

‘Extremely magical and extremely unpleasant,’ said Nightingale. ‘I suggest you try to avoid such sites if you wish to sleep soundly again. Although I imagine becoming inured would be worse.’

He pulled out a steel rod, ten centimetres long, from a box on a nearby work surface.

‘This will be our raw material,’ he said. ‘One rod of sprung steel, six of mild.’

But first they needed cleaning with wire wool, which can be a surprisingly painful experience if you’re not careful. By the time we’d finished, the forge was good and hot – two thousand degrees Fahrenheit according to Nightingale, which was just over a grand in real temperature.

‘You need to learn to read the colour of the flame,’ he said.

He bundled the seven rods together with wire and pushed one end into the glowing centre of the forge.

‘Now, this is where you need to watch carefully,’ he said, and stretched his hand over the forge. He said the spell quietly and I caught that weird echo you get when someone does some serious magic in your presence. Heat bloomed off the forge, real heat not
vestigia
, that crisped the hairs on my forearm and made me and Lesley step smartly backwards. Nightingale pulled back his hand equally sharply and, using a pair of tongs, rotated the bundle of rods a couple of times before withdrawing them from the forge.

For a moment the heated end shone like a magnesium flare and I added an arc welding mask to my list of things to acquire before the next lesson. The light faded to merely bright as Nightingale swung around and placed the bundle on the anvil.

‘What now?’ asked Lesley.

‘Now?’ said Nightingale. ‘Now, we hit it with a hammer.’

At breakfast the next morning Lesley pitched her plan for using the weird way of the Sons of Weyland and the staffs they made to lure out the Faceless Man.

‘Because he’s bound to want to know how it’s done,’ she said.

Nightingale finished a mouthful of scrambled egg before speaking.

‘I understand the principle,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure of the practicalities.’

‘Such as?’ asked Lesley.

‘Where do we cast our lure?’

‘I thought we’d start at the Goblin Fair,’ she said.

Nightingale nodded.

‘We should be looking to maintain a presence at the fairs anyway,’ I said. ‘We need to get that whole community used to seeing us out and about.’

‘The community?’ asked Nightingale.