Lies Sleeping

22 What You Were Supposed to Do

You don’t have to tell a police officer that life can go sideways with no warning. But knowing this is one thing, and getting a phone call from Lesley while I was halfway through a smoked kipper is another.

‘Shut up, Peter, and listen,’ she said – which was harsh, given I hadn’t said anything yet.

‘Go,’ I said.

‘Martin’s going to do something stupid. He’s going to run an experimental sacrifice.’

‘Jesus Christ, Lesley, you’ve—’ I began, but Lesley talked right over me.

‘I don’t know who the subject’s going to be,’ she said. ‘But he said that the city had enough rivers already and nobody was going to miss one.’

I went cold at that.

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘Just that,’ said Lesley.

‘Was he playing you?’

‘Do me a favour,’ she said, and cut the call.

It’s just as well that Nightingale insists that we all dress for breakfast, because we were down the stairs and out the back into the Portakabin in under sixty seconds.

Nightingale called Oxley and I called Beverley first and Lady Ty second.

‘How credible is this?’ she asked.

‘Credible,’ I said. ‘Can you alert everyone else?’

She said she would, and then get back to me with the dispositions.

After I put the phone down I called Stephanopoulos and alerted her, then Jaget Kumar at BTP and finally, because it had been a contact with Lesley, DI William Pollock at the DPS.

Once we were sure everyone had been warned, we went back upstairs to finish our breakfast.

‘There’s no point rushing around on an empty stomach,’ said Nightingale.

Well, he finished his breakfast . . . I wasn’t hungry any more.

‘This could be another trap,’ he said, tucking his napkin back into his collar.

I said I didn’t think so – if only because the clues to a trap would have to be clearer.

‘Another distraction, then?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, and sat down.

There was still some toast so I buttered a bit and had that, because it was either toast or my fingernails.

The last time Martin Chorley had gone after one of the Rivers, his assassin had got a metre of metaphysical steel through his chest and Chorley himself had been swept away by a bijou urban tsunami.

And that was when Lady Ty hadn’t known he was coming.

I almost wanted him to have another go, because it would save us a lot of time and effort if someone – say, Fleet – were to vigorously defend herself to the point of saving the criminal justice system a ton of paperwork.

But then I remembered the Yellowstone and the weaponised vampirism and the dead John Chapman’s sudden interest in the Walbrook. I called Beverley on my mobile.

‘Hi, babes,’ she said. ‘Suddenly we’re all at Mum’s.’

‘Is anybody covering Walbrook?’ I asked.

I heard her asking about – in the background the football, ‘Prisoner’ by the Weeknd, and an all-comers junior Rivers shouting contest were attempting to drown each other out. While she was doing that I walked back up to my room and dug out my undercover Metvest. This is just an ordinary Metvest, only with a beige pocketless nylon cover instead of the blue one that goes with the uniform. Wearing it makes you about as inconspicuous as a silver Astra parked outside a youth centre, but I’ve come to find the sensation of wearing a rigid plastic tank top strangely comforting.

Down the phone I could hear Brent threatening to flood the living room unless she got the next go on the games console, and I was quite curious to see if she’d follow through, but Beverley came back on line to tell me that no one had thought to check on Walbrook.

‘She never has anything to do with us,’ she said.

It was Guleed’s day off so I scooped up Carey from the breakfast room, and while he was digging up his Metvest I went to confer with Nightingale in the incident room.

‘At the very least you can warn her,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sahra’s on her way in. Once she’s here we’ll head over to St Paul’s and use that as a staging post.’

‘You think the cathedral is important?’ I asked.

Nightingale tapped the point on the whiteboard where arrows from John Chapman and the Paternoster Society converged on a crude picture of the dome of St Paul’s.

‘It keeps coming up in the investigation,’ he said. ‘However, more germane to today’s operation is that it’s a good central location. From there I’ll be in a position to support you and David or deploy somewhere else should the need arise.’

‘What’s to stop him going up the river, or somewhere else entirely?’ I asked.

‘Word, as they say, is out,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lady Ty and Oxley have been using their national contacts and even small fry like your friend Chester are now covered. And all his behaviour in the last year has centred around the City in one way or another.’ He tapped the whiteboard again and frowned.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Walbrook – I’ll feel better when you’re there.’

I made sure we had a couple of screamers in the nondescript Rover before we pulled out. Then I interpreted Nightingale’s impatience as assigning an A Grade to the shout, stuck on the blues and twos as we cleared the gates and were doing a brisk, but totally within guidelines, forty mph before I hit Theobalds Road.

‘Is there something I should know?’ asked Carey, as he braced himself against the dash.

I explained as best as I could while swerving around deaf commuters and suicidal white van drivers, although I left out the metaphysics and concentrated on the policing.

‘We think Chorley might try and off one of Lady Ty’s sisters,’ I said.

‘Is that the one with the pub in Shoreditch?’ asked Carey, showing that he did actually stay awake in the briefings – he must have been the only one below the rank of inspector who did.

‘That’s the one,’ I said.

‘If that’s the case, why are we going and not Nightingale?’

Definitely staying awake during the briefings.

‘Because . . .’ I started, and then paused to say a little prayer as we crossed the course of the Fleet at Farringdon. ‘Because we don’t know for sure.’

I didn’t need to tell anyone as well briefed as Carey that Chorley loved a bit of bait and switch.

‘Oh, I get it,’ he said with surprising cheerfulness. ‘We’re the canaries.’

There’s no avoiding the Old Street Roundabout, so I powered up Clerkenwell Road and hoped for the best. Which turned out to be quite good, except for an ancient Ford Fiesta who couldn’t seem to get the hang of how roundabouts worked, and swerved right across our path. Carey swore and wrote down the vehicle index.

Then we accelerated up the eastern half of Old Street, then down Rivington Street, which, in case you don’t know, turns into a one-way street going the other way. But I felt my cause was just, so down the wrong way we went. And luckily only one poor sod was driving the right way. He panicked, swerved and, we discovered later, managed to hit one of the bollards placed on Rivington Street for just that purpose. We squeaked past and went right on Curtain Road.

By now India 99 was overhead and was reporting anything untoward and Nightingale was mobile. I switched off the lights and siren and gently turned into New Inn Yard. Ahead we could see the railway bridge and the faded pub sign.

As we got closer I couldn’t spot any suspicious activity.

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Carey, and reported that to Nightingale, who said in which case he was going to proceed to St Paul’s as we’d planned.

As we pulled up, Carey said that after my driving he was owed a drink. I was just about to say he wanted to be cautious about any pint he drank in that particular pub . . . except that suddenly everything got rather confusing.

As we reconstructed events later, Martin Chorley had obviously got hold of the Virginia Gentlemen’s playbook of total bastardness and started on page one. His packaged evil in a can arrived at the Goat and Crocodile with the regular weekly beer delivery. This was a surprise, not least because I was amazed to find that the Goat and Crocodile had enough customers to justify a regular weekly delivery in the first place.

All Martin had to do was wait outside until he was sure Walbrook had been incapacitated before moving in. He’d obviously learnt his lesson from his abortive attack on Lady Ty, because he came mob-handed just in case things didn’t go strictly to plan. Which of course they didn’t, because me and Carey turned up at just that point.

The first we knew of it was when the front façade of the Goat and Crocodile came screaming across the street and into the side of our car. All I’m going to say is that it was a good thing it wasn’t the Jag.

For a moment I thought it was just us getting closer to the pub, but then my brain registered that the angles were all wrong – and in any case we’d practically stopped. I knew right then that the only suspect who could throw a wall like that was Chorley, and that he must be in the pub. I also knew, in a strange coldly amused way, that that information was totally useless. I think I gave the mental command to my body to duck – but before any useful muscle groups moved, the front of the pub hit the side of my car.

As I said, after that things got confusing.

Suddenly the airbag was as big as an elephant but I’m swinging sideways against my seatbelt as the car flips over. I hear Carey swearing and I’m thinking that thank God the pub was made out of piece-of-shit cement sections and not bricks. I’m also thinking that if he’s smart Martin Chorley’s not going to wait for the car to stop moving before hitting us with his follow-up.

I had thought we were going to roll over, but the roof slammed into the good solid Victorian brick of the railway arch and my head whiplashed in the other direction as the car bounced back onto its wheels. Despite the ringing in my ears, I had my belt off and the door open before the suspension had settled, and I rolled out. I staggered to my feet with a screamer in my left hand and my right extended and my shield up.

Ahead of me the Goat was missing its front façade and the interior was blown to matchwood. Bizarrely, only the solid antique bar remained standing – but it was on fire. I couldn’t see any hostile movement and, more importantly, no casualties. Careful to keep my shield up and angled towards the pub, I threw the screamer down the street and turned and ducked down to see if Carey was all right. The passenger door was open and the seat was empty.

‘David?’ I called.

‘Get under cover, you pillock,’ he shouted back from behind the car.

It seemed a sensible idea, so I dashed around the back and into the gap between it and the archway. Carey was tucked in there with his back against the car, his face grey and his feet against the wall.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked as I joined him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking not.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m fed up.’

I grinned with relief.

‘It’s not fucking funny,’ he said.

I said I’d go and assess the situation if he checked for casualties in the pub.

Carey gave a pained grunt and then said, ‘After you.’

I checked my Airwave and found, amazingly, that it was still working. I told Stephanopoulos, who was currently running the op from Belgravia, about my plan. She told me to be careful and that Nightingale was less than five minutes out. I seriously considered just staying where I was but then I heard a van start up. I shuffled to the end of the car and had a look around the back, just in time to see a genuine antique Mark 1 Transit van resprayed in Prussian blue pull out from behind the ruins of the Goat and Crocodile and make a ponderous turn to the east on New Inn Yard.

I knew from my last visit that fifty metres further east New Inn Yard hit Anning Street. The south turn was a cul-de-sac and beyond the crossing New Inn Yard became bicycle only and was blocked off by a trio of cast-iron bollards. The only way the transit van could go was north up Anning Sreet, and Stephanopoulos had just told me the Incident Response Vehicle had blocked that route off.

Leaving Carey to check the pub, I took off up the street after the van, which was gunning its short-arse two-litre V4. An old-fashioned engine in a carefully chosen old-fashioned van with no chip-controlled fuel injection that a slightly desperate young Detective Constable could disable with magic. Chorley, the bastard, had probably chosen it for just that reason.

I was wondering if I could fireball the rear tyres, but tyres are difficult – small, hard to hit, and if you do burst them you’ve turned the vehicle into a couple of tons of random destruction.

I gained ground as the van slowed and I expected it to go left and be blocked by the approaching IRV, but instead it ploughed forward onto the cycle track. Something black and solid and about a metre long flew up and over the van – tumbling lazily to crash into the road behind it. I recognised it as the sort of solid metal bollard councils use to block traffic from cycle lanes and pedestrianised streets. The van practically stopped while Chorley dealt with the two remaining bollards. As the second thudded into the tarmac I got close enough to fling a handful of fireballs at the left rear tyre – all of which bloody missed. Although I think I got someone’s attention, because the third bollard came scything right at me at head height. I dropped and heard it bounce on the roadway behind me with a strange hollow boing sound.

The van lurched forward even as I was getting to my feet and I thought it was going to get away when it suddenly ground to a halt again. Later we determined that the back axle had caught on a spur of concrete created when one of the bollards was ripped up.

The van’s left rear door opened and I caught sight of Martin Chorley crouched in the back, and behind him a young woman slumped against the van wall, arms extended forward as if chained at the wrist, a look of agony on her face. It was Walbrook.

Chorley leant to out to see what his van was caught on. I was tempted to throw everything I had at him while he wasn’t looking, but I couldn’t risk it with a hostage just behind him.

Still, I was gaining enough to be wondering what the hell I was going to do when I got there. I’m getting better at magic, but Chorley was in the Nightingale-weight class. And although he’d promised Lesley he wouldn’t kill me, there were many unpleasant things he might do short of that.

Setting my clothes on fire for a starter.

Chorley gave me a disgusted look and waved his hand. I flinched but I wasn’t the target. Instead, the back of the van lifted half a metre off the ground and the whole thing lurched forward half a length before the rear dropped back onto its wheels.

Chorley gave a mocking salute, the rear doors closed and the van accelerated away. There was supposed to be another bollard where the cycle path met Shoreditch High Street but it seemed to have vanished in the excitement. Bizarrely, the van driver signalled before turning left. As it disappeared I saw half a dozen pedestrians hugging the wall, including a cycle courier.

The courier, a young black guy in blue and red lycra, stared at me in incomprehension as I bore down on him frantically waving my warrant card and yelling, ‘Police, police, I need your bike!’

He shifted his grip on the handlebars and for a moment I thought he was going to fight me for it, but then he stepped back to hold it at arm’s length and give me unimpeded access.

Thank God the bike was a hybrid, not a racer, and didn’t have toecaps, because I didn’t have time for adjustments as I grabbed it and launched myself after the van. I think I might have said thank you but I can’t remember.

Ahead, the van had done a classic dash and stop, getting a hundred metres up the road before being blocked by a 149 bus going north and a lorry coming south. I saw it give an uncertain wiggle as the driver looked for a way around. I could hear India 99 overhead, which meant that Seawoll, Stephanopoulos and probably half the Met were watching the van in real time.

I wondered what they thought of yours truly, pedalling madly up behind it.

And where did Chorley think he was going? He must have known that once we had air support and assets with eyeballs on him there wasn’t any getting away. I started to worry about India 99. Chorley had form trying to shoot down helicopters, and I know for a fact that Nightingale downed a couple of planes during World War Two.

I leant forward and stepped hard on the pedals, hoping to catch up when the van hit the inevitable traffic jam further up the road. As I did so, there was a ripping sound and I felt both shoulders of my jacket go loose and start to slip down my arms – I’d managed to tear the back of my jacket. As I struggled to flap the sleeve off my left arm, an IRV screamed past me with sirens and lights on. I learnt later that they were responding to a different shout and that CCC hadn’t alerted them in time to reroute. Chorley obviously didn’t know that, because I glanced up just in time to see the IRV’s bonnet go fluttering into the air and a dirty yellow ball of fire erupt from its engine.

They don’t let you drive an IRV until you know how to crash it safely and the vehicle went into a textbook emergency stop. I swerved around it and held my breath as I passed through the curtain of oily smoke coming off the engine. I felt the heat on my face and smelt smoke as I risked a quick look back to make sure the response officers had managed to bale. They had, and one of them even had a fire extinguisher on the go.

Collateral damage, I realised suddenly. That was how Chorley was going to ditch us. Create enough mayhem to make us draw back, and then shift to a second vehicle. He might even have minions already cruising in for a pickup.

His next logical step would be to pick off a bus or something equally high value.

My Airwave was totally dusted, but I had to assume that Nightingale was on his way.

Which meant all I had to do was distract Chorley for long enough for that to happen.

I think it’s important to state that what happened next was totally an accident and I really do not recommend it to anyone in a similar situation. I’d got within three metres of the van, and the angle was wrong to hit the tyres so I used an impello variant to pull the bloody doors off.

Not an easy thing to do when you’re pedalling your guts out, I might add.

I reckoned this would distract Chorley from any notions about creating general mayhem and focus his attention on me, although admittedly I didn’t have a plan of what to do when he did. I can’t be expected to think of everything, can I?

As the doors clanged onto the tarmac on either side of me I tried to accelerate, anticipating that the van would speed up – only for the driver to slam the brakes on. I just might have been able to swerve to the left or right, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Instead I have a very clear memory of the interior of the van growing suddenly closer as my front wheel hit the rear bumper and I went over the handlebars and into the back.

The side door was half open and Martin Chorley was crouched beside it. He’d obviously been in the process of opening it when I’d ripped the back doors off, and had half turned to see what the hell was going on. He was dressed for an afternoon’s gardening at his place in the country, jeans, open neck shirt, tweed sports jacket with elbow patches. I shall treasure the look of dismayed surprise on his face as he found me flying towards him until my dying day. Which almost turned out to be thirty seconds later.

Walbrook was still flattened against the side wall, but now I could see that she was wrapped in chains that were fastened to a cargo rack mounted behind her. Her wrists were chained together and attached by a short length to a purple and white octagonal Quality Street sweet tin, sealed with gaffer tape and wrapped like a Christmas present with a thin bicycle chain. The whole assemblage was attached by a thicker chain to an eyelet welded to the roof.

Her clothes were torn and her eyes were closed, and she was breathing hard, as if in pain.

There was no partition, so I could see through to the driver – although all I got was the sense that he was white and had grey hair in a number two trim – before I smacked face down on the cold metal floor of the van. Chorley came for me and I grabbed the chain attaching the tin to the ceiling to pull myself up.

It was like grabbing a steam pipe. Pain, followed by a shocking numbness.

I screamed and yanked my hand away, which ironically meant that the vicious kick Chorley had aimed at my head went whooshing past my ear. I tried to grab his leg while he was off balance, but he scuttled back out of reach.

‘Vampires?’ I shouted as I got to my feet. ‘Really?’

‘Just a little bit of one,’ said Chorley.

He balled his fist – I felt his spell assemble like the flat of a blade running up the skin of my face. But he never got a chance to release it, because the driver threw the van into a sharp left turn that threw me and Chorley into the right side of the van. Chorley hadn’t seen it coming, but I’d spotted the pair of TSG Sprinter vans skidding into a makeshift roadblock on the road ahead. So while Chorley was flailing around I did my best to kick him out of the half-open side door.

My foot definitely connected with something soft and dangly, because I heard Chorley grunt. But he managed to hold onto the door frame and, before I could follow up, the van straightened and we both went flying the other way. We ended up against the storage rack with Walbrook between us. My arm brushed the family-sized tin of vampire and that was enough to numb it from elbow to wrist.

We’d spent quite a lot of time discussing what I was going to do if I found myself face to face with Chorley. Nightingale said it was like fighting a man with a knife. Get inside his reach and trap the weapon.

‘Don’t bother with magic,’ he’d said. ‘Get in close and strike at his head. You want him dazed and confused.’

He didn’t say what to do if there was a civilian hostage between us.

I dropped back and kicked the tin of vampire at him. I was pleased to discover that the patented acid-resistant soles of my Doc Martens were also vampire resistant. The tin, just as I’d planned, swung like a church censer and smacked Chorley in the face. He shrieked and fell back.

I hit the chain that bound Walbrook to the vampire tin with the hottest thing I had. There was a spark, but I could feel the power being sucked away. I heard a thump, and the tin jiggled as if whatever was inside had moved of its own accord.

There was a moment’s pause during which me and Chorley both looked first at the tin and then at each other. Then I threw a left at his face. He instinctively raised his arm to block, which was what I was waiting for – I grabbed his wrist with my right hand and threw myself out the back of the lorry.

Stephanopoulos wouldn’t have forced the van down a side road if they weren’t planning to contain it. Since I couldn’t separate Walbrook from the vampire tin, I needed to get Chorley away from both so somebody else could get in there with the bolt cutters. It was a brilliant plan with only one drawback – it involved jumping out the back of a moving van.

This is going to hurt, I thought, and probably break things.

Only it didn’t, because something I can only describe as a cushion of air got between me and the cobbles. Not enough to stop it hurting and ripping my trousers to shit – although at least the Metvest kept the worst of the road rash off my back.

Unfortunately, the same was true of Chorley. Although I did try and belt him one as he rolled away from me. I’d thought he’d done the air cushion himself, but I’d been close enough to sense any formae, and there hadn’t been none.

I looked back at the van just in time to see all four wheels fly off at the same time. They went straight to the side with just a tiny bit of upward angle to stop them scraping the tarmac. Momentum carried them bouncing down the street, but the van fell onto its axles and ground to a halt in a bright shower of sparks.

Both me and Chorley knew only one person who could work with that kind of precision, and while Chorley was looking around desperately for Nightingale, I hammered him with an impello-palma combination that should have sent him screaming across the road.

Without even looking at me, Chorley threw up a hand and my own spell bounced back to smack me in the face. I got a taste of my own signare even as I was knocked off my knees and rolled into the gutter. I tried to get to my feet and slammed my head hard against an anti-parking bollard.

My ears were ringing and my sight was blurred, but not enough so I couldn’t see Chorley turning to give me his full attention. But suddenly he was sucked backwards off his feet and through an arched window in the office building opposite.

Then I heard footsteps coming up the road and Nightingale barked:

‘On your feet, Grant.’

And I was up before the command had consciously registered. Nightingale had put himself between me and the broken window.

‘Secure the van,’ Nightingale ordered, and suddenly he was surrounded by a globe of rippling air. I didn’t see what happened next, because I had my orders.

I ran towards the van, sitting on its axles at a crossroad. I could see Walbrook was still in the back, chained to the big fun tin of quality badness, but the driver had climbed out and was lurching towards me.

He was a big white man, dressed in the traditional garb of the working villain – black cargo trousers, navy blue sweatshirt and donkey jacket, all of it bought from jumble sales and charity shops the better to be discarded when the job’s done. He had a big square face, no neck, and arms about the same size as my thighs.

He frowned at me and shook his head.

My extendable baton was back with the flipped car, as was my pepper spray and my speedcuffs. Some backup would have been nice about then, but we’d all agreed the tactics in advance.

It’s the calculus of magical combat. Masters fight masters while the apprentices secure the objective.

I flicked a water bomb into his face – a nice cold one, thanks to a trick Varvara taught me – and followed up by kicking him in the bollocks. He gave me a puzzled look and then fell flat on his face. It turned out later that he’d been suffering from a concussion, probably picked up when the wheels came off the van, so it’s probably just as well I hadn’t smacked him on the bonce with a baton.

I would have paused to put him in the recovery position, but his boss chose that moment to emerge from the courtyard beside the office and fling a quarter of a ton of metal bars – the remnants of the courtyard gate – at Nightingale. The bars twisted as they flew until they formed a whirling mass like the blades of a turbine two metres across.

Despite being within charging distance of Chorley, I didn’t dare engage. He might be concentrating on Nightingale, but I thought it was better to hop back in the van on the basis that what the eye can’t see the mad supernatural psychopath can’t hit.

Walbrook’s eyes were open by then, and she pointedly stared at me and then at the purple tin of doom. Chorley had a knack for being insanely over-prepared, and it didn’t surprise me to find that he’d stashed a bolt cutter in a toolbox behind the front seats. Moving carefully to avoid the tin, I cut the chain around Walbrook’s wrist and it had barely hit the floor when she dived over the front seat.

‘Stay down,’ I said, and cut the chain holding the tin to the ceiling.

It dropped with an ominous clonk, as if it was much heavier than it had any right to be. I checked out the back and found Martin Chorley staring at me with an expression that was perversely similar to one my mum used to use.

‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said.

The tin did a little jump for emphasis, as if something were bouncing up and down inside.

I swung the bolt cutters like a golf club and whacked the vampire tin in his general direction. Typically he did an elegant pivot out of the way, but before he could complete his turn his clothes turned white with frost and I saw the hair on his head actually freeze. I assumed this was Nightingale proving that I wasn’t the only one who’d been getting tips off Varvara. I’d have loved to have stood around and watched but, still having my orders, I followed Walbrook over the back of the front seat and out the passenger door.

I found Walbrook furiously pulling the last of her chains off.

‘Where is he?’ she said when she saw me. ‘I’m going to have him.’

Behind me there was a sudden furnace blast of heat and I saw orange flames reflected in the shop windows behind Walbrook. I ran forward and bore her down to the ground as the van behind me exploded. If that was Chorley getting rid of his frostbite, then it was certainly overkill.

A bit of van – I learnt later it was a panel torn off the side – wiffled overhead and smashed the windows of the YCN gallery. Walbrook rolled me off – not angrily, but firmly, and we both cautiously got to our feet.

The van was missing from the chassis up and coils of dark smoke were rising from its blackened engine block. Through the smoke I could see Nightingale dragging the – hopefully unconscious – body of Chorley’s goon away from the fire. He was using his left arm while keeping his right free for action. I did a scan for damage and while there was smouldering debris over a wide area and plentiful broken windows, none of the buildings were on fire.

I spotted the tin of quality vampire five metres up the road.

There was no sign of Martin Chorley.

I asked Walbrook if she could put the fire out.

She grimaced at me, then sighed and gave a little contemptuous wave with her left hand. I felt a weird sucking sensation from the remains of the van and a wind briefly rushed past my head. A small cloud formed over the van like a time-lapse weather sequence and it proceeded to bucket down for five minutes.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Haven’t done that in a long time,’ said Walbrook. ‘Where’s the Nightingale going?’

He was sprinting up Rivington Place. Which, I decided, showed a touching faith in my ability to control the scene.

It doesn’t stop there, of course, with the villain getting away and you looking stupid. I was already talking to Stephanopoulos on my back-up back-up burner phone before Nightingale was out of sight. Chorley went through the back wall of the old Shoreditch Town Hall, but Nightingale had to break off pursuit when he spotted some civilian casualties and had to stop and look after them. No doubt this was what Chorley was counting on.

Later, as we reconstructed it from CCTV and eyewitness accounts, he calmly stepped out the front of the town hall and flagged down a random Nissan Micra and was driven away. When we traced the driver via his vehicle’s index he had no memory of picking up a strange man at all, and grew quite distressed when we showed him the footage. Thus Chorley was out of the area before we even had a perimeter established.

The rest of the emergency service circus arrived at our smouldering van less than a minute later. Seawoll, who never passes up a good shouting opportunity, turned up in the first wave, leaving me with only two immediate problems:

What to do with our bumper fun tin of vampire; and how to stop Walbrook walking off before I had a chance to interview her.

Fortunately Frank Caffrey turned up with the bomb squad, whereupon they performed what Caffrey was careful to explain was not a controlled explosion.

‘You use a controlled explosion to disrupt a device’s detonator,’ he said. ‘This is more like a contained incineration.’

This involved a big box made of composite armour and surrounded by sandbags into which I, since I stupidly volunteered, used a big pair of tongs to drop the tin. Even with the gloves provided, I felt the horrible not-real cold of the tactus disvitae creeping up through my hands. Needless to say, I was pretty fucking swift. The tin rattled as I swung it over the box, getting frantic just before I dropped it.

Was there some sentience there? I wondered. It certainly seemed to sense its fate.

The phosphorus charge had already been laid. It was just a question of plonking on a lid, adding more sandbags, and retiring to a safe distance. Caffrey gave the nod, the bomb squad pressed the button and there was a slightly disappointing wumph sound. A couple of seconds later, wisps of smoke rose from the edges of the box.

Caffrey said we had to wait at least half an hour to make sure it was cooked, so I went back to see if Walbrook would talk to me. There was a slight delay as I was set upon by militant paramedics, who insisted on dressing the various scrapes I’d forgotten about until they reminded me.

So, stinging with antiseptic, I found Walbrook up the road with Guleed in the back of Franco’s Takeaway, which had, by strange good fortune, been allowed to stay open despite being just inside our public exclusion zone.

‘Funny how that worked out,’ said Guleed around a mouthful of pasta salad.

‘You OK?’ I asked Walbrook, whose brush with vampirism hadn’t seemed to dent her appetite none. She nodded and continued to fork spaghetti into her mouth.

‘How’s David?’ asked Guleed, and I realised I had no idea where Carey was.

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll check in a minute.’

I wanted to get a statement from Walbrook, but I realised that my notebook was in my jacket pocket left, probably, somewhere down Shoreditch High Street. I asked if I could borrow Guleed’s, but she gave me a funny look.

So funny that I started laughing uncontrollably. When I couldn’t stop myself I clamped my hand over my mouth and went outside. The thing about having a stress reaction is that, even when you know you’re having a stress reaction, that knowledge doesn’t seem to do you any good. I found a doorway across the road where a parked police Sprinter van blocked the view from the rest of the street.

I leant against the door and let myself slip down until I was sitting with my back to it. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing until the giggles stopped. The edge of my Metvest was digging into my armpit, so I unfastened it and pulled it off. Underneath, my nice blue pinstripe shirt was soaked with sweat and ripped at the elbow. Probably beyond even Molly’s skills.

I closed my eyes again and focused on my breathing. One thing learning magic does teach you is finding your centre, or at least making an educated stab at its location. There was a smell like burnt hair and ground nutmeg and a sensation like wind blowing through the trees. And the coppery taste of blood in my mouth which, on later examination, turned out to be actual blood from where I’d split my lip. There was nothing coherent, nothing I recognised as a vestigium – it was all just random neurons firing in my brain.

I felt that if I wanted to, I could probably get up and walk around and make a good impression.

‘Peter?’

I looked up to find Guleed looking down at me.

‘I’ve called Dr Walid,’ she said. ‘He’s coming down to collect you.’

‘Not UCH again,’ I said.

Guleed was unsympathetic – she pointed out that it was policy that any officer involved in a serious Falcon incident where they may have been exposed to hazardous materials or practices was required to undergo an evaluation by an appropriately trained medical professional.

I groaned and said I didn’t want to go.

‘You probably shouldn’t have written that policy, then,’ she said. ‘Should you?’

‘What about Nightingale and Carey?’ I asked, because misery loves company.

‘Carey already went in an ambulance. Nightingale is waiting around on the off-chance Chorley pops up again. Plus he’s an inspector and gets to do what he likes.’

‘And we need to get a statement from Walbrook,’ I said.

‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m the one with a notebook.’

Bits of my back, arm and leg had woken up to the fact that my hysterical moment had passed and that rational attendance to their needs might be forthcoming if only they could get my attention.

‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘And make sure you ask whether King Arthur and Merlin were real people.’

‘King Arthur?’

‘Just make sure you ask.’

Guleed shrugged.

‘If you think it’s important,’ she said, and reached down to help me up.