Lies Sleeping

9 Two Plus Two

Unlike most of the Folly’s cases, Operation Jennifer was a full-on major investigation with a full-on inside inquiry room stuffed with analysts and data entry specialists and lorded over by a case manager. The case manager keeps track of what goes into HOLMES and what comes out. It is their job to keep an investigation on the rails even when the senior officers have all been sidetracked by an unfortunate fatal shooting.

Stephanopoulos used to do this job for Seawoll and our case manager, Sergeant Franklin Wainscrow, had been picked on her say-so. So it’s not surprising that when we came in on Friday morning fresh lines of inquiry were waiting on our desks in the visitors’ lounge.

David Carey had been busy at the bell foundry, and while we were failing to save Richard Williams he’d been conducting a properly thorough interview with Dr Conyard. One of the questions he’d asked was – had Richard Williams supplied any special instructions or materials for the construction of the bell? Turns out that Richard had provided several sacks of aggregate for use in making the mould. One of the analysts had spotted this, linked it to the brick thefts and pushed it back to Wainscrow, who generated an action for Carey, which he fobbed off on to me over breakfast by pretending to need my advice. The cheeky sod.

‘You’d be amazed to know what they use to make the moulds,’ said Carey. ‘Not just the clay and the loam, which I get by the way, but manure?’

‘What kind of manure?’ asked Guleed, who was having an omelette with toasted crumpets.

‘What?’

‘What kind of manure – horse, cow . . . human?’

‘I didn’t think to ask,’ said Carey. ‘I’m not sure it’s relevant to this particular line of inquiry.’ He poked at his kippers a bit and sighed. ‘Anyway – one of the analysts wanted to know whether it was possible the aggregate had come from the bricks stolen from those archaeological sites.’

I paused with a forkful of kedgeree halfway to my mouth and kicked myself for not thinking of that myself.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That would be interesting.’

‘Lucky for you,’ said Carey, ‘there was enough of the mould left to get samples.’

‘And?’

Carey frowned down at his plate, shook his head and reached for his tea.

‘We’ll know when we get the results. Two weeks to a month, depending.’

‘Depending on what?’ I asked.

‘Just depending,’ he said, and pushed his plate away.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Guleed.

Carey shook his head.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘No offence, Peter, but when this case is done I’m going back to my nice horrible murders.’ He shook his head. ‘I used to think that a six-week floater was horrible, but the shit you deal with . . . Fuck.’

Toby, who had an instinct for abandoned breakfasts, materialised beside Carey’s chair and gave him the big eye special. Carey did a quick scan to make sure Molly wasn’t watching and put his plate on the floor under the table.

‘She hates it when you put the plates on the floor,’ I said.

‘Gets them clean though, don’t it?’ said Carey, retrieving his suddenly gleaming plate. He looked at me. ‘I reckoned that since you were already in with the archaeologists you’d want to take that over that line of inquiry.’

See what I mean? The sly sod.

I had another round of IPCC interviews where I got the distinct impression that they wanted rid of this case as fast as possible. Contrary to what you might think the IPCC, being understaffed and poorly resourced, try to avoid being assigned cases. Which is probably why the Police Federation tries to dump as many on them as they can – the better to educate them about the nature of most complaints. Still, even with my Federation rep glaring at them, the interviews took up most of the day.

After which I headed back to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to spell Nightingale, who was practically camping in their foundry room and no doubt swapping manly stories about hitting pieces of metal together.

While he went back to the Folly I sat guard in the corner of the furnace room, partly because of its good lines of sight but mostly because it was the only place I could get a decent Wi-Fi signal.

Given that all three named authors had died suspicious deaths, I had another look at the PDF of the script fragment I’d found in Richard Williams’s home office.

Judging by the surviving fifteen pages, Against the Dark was a historical horror or supernatural mystery. It started with a simple Saxon herder being stalked through the ruins of Londinium by an unseen horror before being horribly killed. We then cut to our hero, a chiselled, devil-may-care adventurer who tells the first person he meets that he’s from Ireland, presumably so they could cast an American, before neatly talking himself into a fight. He’s only saved at the last minute by the arrival of his companion, a blackamoor, whose dark skin confuses the Saxons long enough for a messenger from the king to rescue them. Although I ran out of script one page into their audience with the king, you didn’t have to be a master of TV tropes to see where the story was going.

I didn’t think it was very good. But it wasn’t so bad that you’d kill the writers.

I like the Dark Ages, Martin Chorley had said when he was monologuing in the basement of One Hyde Park. When a man could make himself a myth.

Or, more precisely, the Post-Roman period. Or, if you like your history fast and loose, the Age of Arthur.

You get a lot of stuff like this in an investigation – things that look suggestive but could just be coincidences. Which happen more often than people think they do.

Yet . . . three people were dead – all of them suspiciously close together.

Bev, who’d been doing lab work down the road at Queen Mary’s, turned up with takeaway, which passed the time until Nightingale returned and I drove her back to SW20 and spent the night at her place.

I woke up at six in the morning to find that Nicky had arrived and had wormed herself into the covers between me and Bev. She smelt faintly of diesel oil and left mud stains on the duvet cover.

‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

‘Uncle Max let me in,’ she said, meaning Maksim, the former Russian mobster who’d forgone crime in favour of being Beverley’s one and only acolyte/handyman.

Bev had reacted to Nicky’s intrusion by muttering, rolling over and going back to sleep.

‘I thought you were staying with Effra?’

‘Was,’ said Nicky. ‘But she won’t be awake for ages.’

‘Does she know you’re here?’ I asked, and Nicky gave a little uncaring shrug.

‘Want to play water balloons in the garden?’ she asked.

‘Is there any chance of you letting me go back to sleep?’

Nicky solemnly shook her head.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just as soon as I’ve left a message for Effra.’ Flinging magical water balloons around was as good a practice session as Nightingale could ask for. ‘And I’ve had some coffee.’

‘Can I have pancakes?’ asked Nicky.

Saturday I had off but I had to head back to the Folly Sunday morning. Now that I was properly PIP2 qualified, Nightingale felt I would have time to concentrate a bit upon my magical studies. Since he was still guarding the drinking bell, that meant Latin and Greek and two hours on the firing range alternating between perforating cardboard cut-outs and fending off paintballs.

Since the police staff mostly work office hours, the Folly had started to feel a bit empty on the weekends. Sometimes the only sound was Toby barking or Molly humming a happy little tune as she tenderised a steak or beat a carpet to death. The place, at least, has thick walls to keep the heat out, and the magical library on the second floor gets a good cross breeze if you open the right windows. Abigail might be outpacing me, but my Latin’s got to the point where I just need a dictionary for the vocab. Cicero wouldn’t approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.

Unlike the clergy of the Middle Ages, who were halfway to speaking Italian by the end of the fourteenth century. As soon as I went looking for the Post-Roman period I found some eighteenth-century references to Roger Bacon, old Doctor Marvellous himself. His Latin was remarkably good, so it’s just a pity that he wrote what I was looking for in Greek. For extra confusion it was called the Opus Arcanum, which is Latin. I’ve never really got the hang of Greek, but with the aid of a dictionary, a 1922 edition of Smyth and Messing’s Greek Grammar, and Google, I think I got the gist. I also scanned the relevant passage and sent it off to Professor Postmartin in Oxford.

According to Bacon, the Prophetiae Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth had originally contained a section relating to the original foundation of St Paul’s in circa ad 604 and, even more interestingly, the use of bells to either signal or usher in – the translation wasn’t clear – a change, or the fulfilment of a prophecy.

A bell for ringing in the changes, Martin Chorley had called the bell in the Whitechapel foundry. Or maybe the fulfilment of a prophecy? A bell made with the help of ancient stones taken from pagan and Christian religious sites. Imbued with vestigia, perhaps.

People had died to protect the secrets of that bell. I doubted that Chorley had it made to indulge a hitherto unreported interest in campanology.

The trouble was that I was beginning to suspect that Bacon’s Greek was as bad as mine and, deciding that I had reached the limit of my Greek, I dumped it all on Professor Postmartin – who loves this sort of thing anyway.

But, to keep Nightingale happy, I read a big chunk of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae – the bits about Uther Pendragon and his son Arthur.