Lies Sleeping

30 Skulking for Cheese Puffs

There was no sign of Molly, or breakfast, the next morning. So me and Guleed picked up something on the drive down to Coldharbour Lane. Nightingale had stayed overnight to supervise the POLSA team and to step in, in the event of demon traps or vengeful spirits – and to deal with the curious foxes.

‘Abigail’s big talking ones,’ said Guleed.

The ‘factory’ as we were now calling it was, like most of London’s vestigial industrial capacity, built beside railway tracks. It had been put up in the 1930s complete with its own goods sidings to supply raw materials. Once freight had shifted firmly to motor vehicles in the 1950s the sidings went derelict before being redeveloped as an industrial park in the 1980s.

Since London’s railway tracks have long served as conduits for its urban wildlife, it didn’t surprise me the foxes were taking an interest. I asked if Nightingale had taken a statement.

‘They might have spotted something,’ I said.

‘Abigail’s doing that this afternoon,’ said Guleed. ‘I think you’ll find it’s on your action list.’

The place was smaller than I remembered it, consisting of two workshops, a loading bay, a row of rooms that included the one I’d been in when they de-hooded me, two obvious storerooms, one with the sort of sad kitchen seen in every small office, shop and workshop in the country. Once I’d had a look in the fridge I was glad they’d been feeding me takeaway.

‘Yeah,’ said Guleed when I slammed the fridge door shut. ‘Nightingale thought there might be something alive in there.’

I thought of the Quality Street tin of vampire and really hoped their biocontainment had been somewhere else.

Someone had put a ladder down into the oubliette so that forensics could have a good rummage. I didn’t go down, but the mildew and damp smell was strong – had Foxglove’s bubble of faerie somehow inhibited decay? Or had it just masked it, like perfume over sweat?

One of the forensic techs asked if I wanted anything brought up.

‘Just any clothes and art you find down there,’ I said.

Foxglove would get her drawings back, although I did hear a rumour that a particularly fine but unfinished sketch of me imitating the centrepiece statue of Piccadilly Circus found its way into the Charing Cross canteen.

I made a point of bagging any art materials I found and labelling them as evidence to be shipped to the Folly.

What we didn’t find was a bell or any vehicles in the loading bay.

All the businesses in the industrial estate had CCTV, but by an amazing coincidence none of them covered the access road. The camera positioned at the street entrance to the estate had perfect coverage of both the access road and Coldharbour Lane. It had already been digitally copied and farmed out to teams at Charing Cross and the Folly. Meanwhile house-to-house teams were confirming what traffic movements belonged to the other businesses on the estate, even as our forensic accountants investigated to see if they were connected to Martin Chorley in some way. Guleed estimated that at least eighty people were now working directly off this one scene.

‘I can’t help worrying that this might be the entire purpose,’ said Nightingale.

‘He’s tricky, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Worse,’ said Nightingale. ‘He builds his plans with multiple redundancy. Had you not escaped then we would be deprived of a major asset. But since you did, we’re forced to expend matériel chasing leads.’

‘That’s to our advantage though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘We have personnel and an overtime budget.’

‘Not an unlimited budget. Not for this level of operational tempo.’

I pointed out that Chorley must have a deadline too.

‘Why else grab me?’ I said. ‘And Lesley practically said as much.’

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m not sure that’s much comfort.’

What was comforting was that one of the CCTV teams had managed to identify the Sprinter van that been used to deliver me to the factory. It was clearly visible turning off the lane at one in the morning and then departing two hours later, sporting different plates. Between then and my escape a total of twenty-eight separate vehicles had come and gone the same way. All but a couple had been traced, their owners interviewed and their current whereabouts ascertained.

The lack of bell disturbed me.

‘The bell was in there,’ I said.

‘Well, it didn’t go out the front,’ said Guleed. ‘And we haven’t found a back door yet.’

‘Let’s see what the Fox Whisperer finds out,’ I said.

One of the police staff dropped off Abigail before lunch and we pushed our way through some scrub down to where a fence marked the border of the railway tracks. We stopped there and Abigail extracted a Tupperware box from her shoulder bag and opened it. Inside were genuine Molly-baked cheese puffs.

I asked whether Molly was cooking again, but Abigail said no.

‘I keep a stash of these in the fridge just in case,’ she said.

‘So what now?’ I asked, making a sly grab which got my hand slapped.

‘On past form, anything from thirty seconds to five minutes,’ she said, ‘With an average arrival time of around two minutes.’

It was less than sixty seconds later that a large dog fox strolled up with the ‘Yeah, what?’ of a creature who’s figured out that they don’t allow hunting dog packs in built-up areas.

‘Wotcha, Abi.’ Its voice was breathy but surprisingly deep and cockney.

‘All right,’ said Abigail.

‘Is that a cheese puff?’ said the fox, sidling closer.

‘What do you think?’ asked Abigail.

‘Is there any chance of that becoming my cheese puff?’ he said.

‘Don’t know,’ said Abigail. ‘It depends on whether you’re going to be helpful or not, don’t it?’

The fox bobbed his head.

‘How can I be of service?’ he said.

‘Who’s been watching this place?’ she asked, and I thought – what the fuck?

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the fox. ‘Honest.’

Abigail folded her arms and tapped her feet.

‘All right,’ said the fox. ‘Here’s my problem, right. If I bring you the one who might have been keeping an eye on this place, then they’re going to be rewarded with a cheese puff – yes?’

‘Possibly,’ said Abigail.

‘But what of I, the one which facilitated this engagement without whom no information would be exchanged,’ said the fox. ‘What reward for myself?’

‘I might give you a cheese puff,’ said Abigail.

Reaching into the box, she produced a cheese puff and handed it to me. The fox watched me intently as I took a bite – it was delicious.

‘Cheddar with a hint of thyme,’ I said. ‘Also, crumbled bacon.’

The fox gave a low whine.

‘Might give me one?’ he said. ‘How might “might” become “will”?’

Abigail took out another cheese puff, took a bite and waved the remainder around for emphasis.

‘That depends upon how long me and this one have to spend waiting for you,’ she said.

‘I see,’ said the fox, turning and vanishing back into the undergrowth.

I eyed up the remaining cheese puffs.

‘Do you think he’s going to be long?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ said Abigail. ‘The watcher will be his mate – he knew what we were after, but by talking to us first they get two bites of the cherry, don’t they?’

‘That’s sly,’ I said.

‘That’s foxes, isn’t it?’

The fox came back with his mate, a vixen with a particularly long face. They sat on their haunches side by side.

‘Hello,’ said the vixen. ‘Let’s have it then.’ Her voice had a higher register but seemed just as cockney.

‘Have what?’ asked Abigail.

‘The cheese puff,’ said the vixen.

‘Let’s get your report first,’ said Abigail. ‘Then we’ll talk baked goods.’

‘This is a bit of an impasse, isn’t it? Because I’m not about to cough up what I’ve got without something upfront,’ said the vixen.

Abigail removed another cheese puff, broke it in half and threw one bit to each fox. They caught them neatly out of the air and ate them in a single bite. Long tongues emerged to lick the crumbs off their muzzles.

‘Now,’ said Abigail. ‘Your report.’

The report was oddly full of jargon. The foxes spoke of being covert and not wanting to risk being blown by being too obvious while they maintained eyes on the opposition assets. Some of it was incomprehensible: mouse-time, first and second dark all related to times of day, and Abigail had to translate. Still, since the vixen had watched with great interest as me and Foxglove had run down the access road in our rush for freedom and a local convenience, we had a fixed point to work our timings around.

Two big smelly metal boxes had left the factory the previous mouse-time, which Abigail translated as early evening. Two vans which had not registered on the CCTV camera that covered the entrance from Coldharbour Lane.

I backtracked a bit and asked questions in various different ways, but the vixen was better than most people, better than most trained professionals in fact. I let them have the rest of the cheese puffs. Abigail disapproved.

‘You shouldn’t spoil them,’ she said after we’d watched them disappear into the undergrowth.

‘Watchers?’ I asked as we walked back to the factory. ‘Assets, reports, covert? Is there something you want to tell me?’

‘It’s not me,’ said Abigail. ‘They think they’re spies.’

‘Working for who?’

‘They won’t say. I’m not sure there is anyone. I think it’s part of the process that made them big and smart.’

We didn’t see Molly for two whole days and everybody had to make do with takeaway until she resurfaced. Well, except for the second day when I cooked jollof rice, groundnut chicken, stock fish, palava sauce – with way too much palm oil – and fried plantain. Admittedly, I did have my mum to help. And I did have to physically restrain her from putting a year’s supply of pepper in the soup. We compromised and had a pot of what she called properly seasoned Tola sauce, which proved surprisingly popular with some of the analysts. One white guy kept coming back despite the fact that he’d turned bright pink and was damp with sweat.

‘I know it’s killing me,’ he said. ‘But it just tastes that good.’

Stephanopoulos filled her plate with a blithe disregard for thermodynamics and later asked my mum for the recipe for groundnut chicken.

Even while turning pink, the CCTV teams managed to establish that the footage from the entrance camera had been doctored – presumably to hide the departure of the two vans the vixen had seen. One of them, probably, carrying the new bell.

But even Chorley couldn’t get to every camera on Coldharbour Lane. And by suppertime the day after we’d fed the foxes, we had the colour, make and index of both vans. Not that we expected the indexes to remain the same – in fact we were working on the assumption they’d be changed. The City of London Police and CTC had spent a great deal of the last thirty years waiting for the next big truck bomb – be it IRA, IRA classic, various varieties of cryptofascists or jihadists – and they had systems for finding vans with dodgy numbers.

Nightingale insisted that me and Guleed got as much rest as we could.

‘Whatever happens next,’ he said, ‘is likely to be the final operation of the campaign. I need you two to be fully combat-fit, as it were.’

I always worry when Nightingale goes all Band of Brothers on us, which is one of the reasons I took up feeding the multitudes as a distraction. Still, at least after a worrying silence from Molly we got reassurance that Foxglove was settling in.

On some nights the full moon rises above the skylight and floods the atrium with cold light. On those nights Molly turns all the electric lights off, including the Emergency Exit signs, even though I’ve told her she’s not supposed to, and glides around the atrium and the balconies in weird random patterns. I’d got so used to it that I could walk down from my room to the kitchen, looking for a snack, without paying any attention to the silent shadow that darts here and there – always in the periphery of my sight.

The first such moonlit night after Foxglove joined us I was out in search of a nightcap when I realised that Nightingale was standing on the upper balcony. Silently he beckoned me over and pointed down to the atrium floor.

Below I saw Molly flit across the tiles, her hair streaming out behind her like a shadow. Behind her came a second figure, Foxglove, dressed in a loose silk shift that looked blood red in the moonlight. In her right hand she trailed a long ribbon of white fabric. Then Molly turned, grabbed Foxglove around the waist, and swept her around in a circle – the white fabric looping around them as they spun in place. I don’t how long we watched them dance, silent but for the swoosh of their clothes and Foxglove’s streamer, but when they finally vanished into shadows I heard Nightingale sigh.

‘Here’s a comforting thought for you, Peter,’ he said. ‘However long you may live, the world will never lose its ability to surprise you with its beauty.’

And the next morning there was kippers and jam and coffee and toast and everything was all right in the world.

For about six hours at least.