Lies Sleeping

I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.

Lulu gave me a crooked smile.

“High Fae?” She asked.

“You know,” I said. “The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.”

“You mean them what step between worlds?”

“Could be.”

“Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?”

“Them sort of people,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Not in here, squire,” she said. “I run a respectable pub.”

“Anything else to report?” he asked.

“A creeping sense of existential dread,” I said. “Apart from that I’m good.”

Nightingale ignored that thread because when the suspect - I mean interviewee - wants to talk about something it's a good idea to frustrate them a little bit. That way you can get more later than they intended. Seawoll calls it the 'fuck all the cows' interview approach.

I asked Oxley to ask Beverley to bring Abigail home. Then I showered, changed and drove back to London.

And if you're the woman who, driving along the A4155 that afternoon, found herself inexplicably picking up a pair of hitchhikers and driving them all the way into London, I'm really, really sorry - I assumed Beverley would organise a lift from one of her relatives.

“A romantic,” said Nightingale. “The most dangerous people on earth.”

Upstairs, MOLA’s offices had the same open-plan cubicle based workspace that has been the delight of code monkeys and low-level paper pushers since one time and motion consultant said to another, “Hey, you know, I don’t think we’ve really dehumanized these white collar drones enough.”

I pointed out that, according to Bev, half the ecological disasters in the world occurred when people removed “pests” or predators without thinking through the consequences.

My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn’t exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms. I’m particularly proud of “initial incident” although “subjective perception threshold” runs a close second.

I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave—a chance to be exclusive.

Despite being the oldest part of London, the Square Mile has a faster architectural churn than anywhere else in the city. Occasionally it throws up something exciting, innovative and modern…but mostly it doesn’t. Architects like a bit of volume, and financiers like floor space. The easiest way to maximize both is to build a cube—which is why ninety-nine per cent of all office buildings are boxes with lobbies.

We headed off to do some community outreach. This involves meeting people, listening to their stories and memorizing their names and faces in case you have to come back and arrest them at a later date.

Foxholes might breed belief, but trench systems are full of fatalistic cynics.

Few buildings evoke the sinister horror of 1950s municipal architecture more strikingly than the flat roofed pub. Thrown up in their thousands wherever the working class were being rehoused, it’s hard to imagine that the architects were not secret teetotallers looking to make the whole pub experience as grim as possible.

None of this was real.

But I’ve learned that just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it’s not important.

The bell sang with the first hammer and screamed with the second. And within the scream I heard a familiar laugh and the jingle of merry bells.

Nothing attracts the powerful quite like more power.

Lots of angled struts, planes of glass and random spikes. It was, as architectural theorists like to say, a bold statement and the statement was: “Fuck truth and beauty. We’ve got money and loads of it.”

Common sense said I should scarper. But is anyone will tell you, me and common sense have always had an open relationship.

This guy [Security Guard] was in a navy suit with an unfortunate orange tie, and was nearing us with the caution of a man on a minimum wage zero hours contract who planned to give his employers exactly what they paid for.

Anyone who’s taken statements from multiple witnesses to the same event will know how malleable memory is.

"That at least we can leave to Abdul and the irrepressible Dr Vaughan," said Nightingale. "Who no doubt will be delighted to extend the boundaries of their empire of information."

"Their knowledge base," I said.

"I believe that's what I said."

I found that if you voluntarily take on a chore somebody else doesn’t want to do, they don’t check the results too closely—in case they have to do it again themselves.

I’m all for courageous action, in moderation, Peter. But you have an alarming tendency toward heroics.

“These people are not to be trusted,” I said.

“These people?”

“People with…” I looked over at the poshest person I’ve ever met and tried to think of the right word. “Entitlement,” I said. “They’re not good at keeping promises.

This sort of thing is pretty common—people often draw more attention to themselves trying to hide their activities than whatever it was they were up to would. Plus sometimes the cover-up is more illegal than the thing they were covering up. Still, if people were brighter routine police work would be much harder.

Dedication: This book is dedicated to all the people whose job it is to rush into danger when everybody else is running in the other direction.

Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology—projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It’s not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing—but take snacks, because you’re going to be there for a while.

I checked in the next morning to see if we knew the whereabouts of Zachary Palmer, the demi-monde's very own go-to guy for ducking and diving, bar work, fixing and general dishonesty. Due to a lucrative consultation contract with Crossrail, currently worth three hundred large a year, he didn't actually have to do any ducking and diving. That he still fiddled his change and sold dodgy goods on the Portobello Road while the money piled up in a low interest building society account seemed to wind up Seawoll no end.

Guleed went home because she has, she says, a deep and mystical understanding of the work-life balance. A concept I once tried explaining to Nightingale with the aid of the big whiteboard in the visitors' lounge. I think he grasped it in the end, and said he was all in favour as long as I understood that this in no way applied to apprentices.

“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 needed was a smaller police force.