Lies Sleeping

32 What Remains

Burnt beyond recognition.

No one was buying that, not even when the dental records confirmed his identity.

‘We’re sending a team to check they haven’t been tampered with,’ said Seawoll at the morning briefing.

DNA tests were ongoing in three separate labs using several different reference samples, including that of his late daughter. Two to three days for confirmation one way or the other.

And Lesley was still out there.

‘Assuming this is a fake-out,’ I said, ‘he must know we’ll confirm it’s not him pretty quickly. He must be planning to do something soon.’

‘But what?’ said Seawoll. ‘We have his second bloody bell.’

Which was already on its way to the Whitechapel foundry to face the hammer.

‘What if there’s a third bell?’ asked Guleed.

Seawoll fixed her with a stern disciplinary look that wasn’t fooling me for a second.

‘Then you’d probably better find out where he made it,’ he said.

I said that I wished she hadn’t said that, and got a proper stern look for my pains.

‘There was no sign of the sword,’ said Seawoll. ‘Now I’m not a scholar of the Arthurian legendarium but I’m pretty fucking certain that Excalibur comes into it bleeding somewhere. So Guleed finds the bell.’ He glared at me again for good measure. ‘You see if you can narrow down the target.’

He looked at Nightingale, who nodded his approval.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’

Strangely enough, they don’t cover metaphysics at Hendon. But fortunately they do at Oxford, and Postmartin had spent a lifetime reading about the point where the meta meets the physical. He was also, conveniently, currently staying at the Folly. He said this was to keep abreast of developments in Operation Jennifer, but I suspected it was so he could scope out our latest house guest. I’d certainly caught Foxglove showing him her portfolio after he bribed her with two hundred quid’s worth of Polychromos artists’ pencils – whatever they were.

Luckily I managed to drag him away before Foxglove convinced him to strip off and pose for her. We convened in the upstairs reading room, where a frighteningly cheerful Molly brought us tea and cakes.

‘So, where do we think Martin Chorley plans to make his sacrifice?’ said Nightingale.

‘St Paul’s Cathedral remains the obvious choice,’ said Postmartin. ‘Given what we know of the history of Mr Punch, the next highest probability, I would say, is the true location of the Temple of Mithras. Why else would he have John Chapman encourage his banker friends to conduct their bacchanalia there?’

‘That’s assuming Punch is the determining factor,’ said Nightingale.

‘Our problem,’ I said, ‘is that Martin Chorley isn’t concerned with evidence – it’s the truth of the heart, isn’t it? Now that I’ve had a chance to chat to him, I think he really believes in it.’

‘Believes in what?’ asked Postmartin.

‘All of it,’ I said. ‘Arthur, Camelot, a British golden age, or at least the modern equivalent.’

‘A romantic,’ said Nightingale. ‘The most dangerous people on earth.’

‘For all we know he could be looking for Arthur back up at Alderley Edge,’ I said.

‘In Cheshire?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Whatever for?’

‘There’s a rather fine children’s book set there,’ said Postmartin. ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and a sequel too – The Moon of Gomrath.’

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘We should not confuse a mistaken belief with a general incredulity. He may be no true scholar but it seems to me he has always followed the forms. The places that interest him will be those that present him with the most respectable “evidence”.’

‘If we’re talking Arthur, then it’s quite a long list,’ said Postmartin. ‘The hill fort at Cadbury. Camlann, which is in the Welsh sources. Badon Hill likewise. Tintagel and Glastonbury, if we stretch the scholarship somewhat.’

‘All out of London, I notice,’ said Nightingale. ‘We can at least ask the local constabulary to keep an eye on the places we can identify.’ He looked at Postmartin. ‘If you had to pick your most likely target, which would it be?’

‘Oh, Glastonbury,’ said Postmartin. ‘Without a doubt. If you’re a romantic then the Isle of Avalon is always going to appeal.’

‘I don’t like splitting our forces,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I can reach Glastonbury in just over two hours, give the area the once-over and be back by nightfall.’ He looked at me. ‘I’d like you to kit up and be on immediate standby. If Chorley makes his move in London, God forbid, I want you to get in and disrupt him. I think we’ve eliminated most of his mundane assets, so just do what you do best and frustrate the hell out of him.’

I understood the logic. We already had St Paul’s covered, ditto the Bloomberg building. Seawoll had booked up a couple more vans’ worth of TSG and I’d noticed a couple of Frank Caffrey’s ‘associates’ in the breakfast room that morning. It would be just like Chorley to wait until we were fixed on London and then make his move out in the country. Postmartin would already be working on a potential target list and no doubt having enormous fun in the process. Meanwhile Nightingale was the only one of us with a chance of going up against Chorley without backup, so it had to be him that went.

I still didn’t like it. But what are you going to do?

To my surprise, I found Seawoll downstairs, sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs in the atrium, the remains of an elaborate morning tea spread out on an occasional table beside him. He beckoned me over and I asked why he wasn’t at Belgravia nick.

‘I’m keeping a bloody eye on you lot,’ he said. ‘Plus this is closer to the City and that’s where the action is. Which reminds me . . .’

He pulled out an envelope and shook it under my nose – coins jingled inside. Not that there were many coins. It seemed to be mostly full of tenners.

‘Whip-round for Miriam,’ he said.

I handed over a tenner and asked how she was.

‘Serious, but not life-threatening. No bones were broken and the bullet went straight through so she should make a full recovery.’ He tucked the envelope back in his jacket pocket. ‘I can’t remember the last time a detective inspector got themselves shot. Do you think our Lesley went for non-lethal on purpose?’

I said I thought she had, and Seawoll nodded grimly.

‘You’ve been right all along. Whatever our Lesley’s reasons for going to the dark side she still thinks she’s straight. That’s why she’s protecting you and went for the leg shot with Miriam. There’s still a little bit of the old Lesley in there.’ Seawoll jabbed a finger at me. ‘You must not hesitate to use that against her. I want this business finished, Peter. I want you to promise me that if you have to go hard to get the job done, that’s what you’ll do.’

I nodded, which seemed to satisfy him.

Go hard, I thought as I headed for my room. What did that even mean in this context?

Kitting up consisted of me climbing into a pair of jeans, my public order boots, utility belt and keeping my Metvest with me at all times. I considered borrowing a taser. But you know, despite Stephanopoulos’ good example, I’d never had that much luck with them.

I ended up in the atrium trying to finish the copy of The Silmarillion I’d downloaded onto my phone. Fuck all else happened, except that Foxglove turned up and did some preliminary sketches for the now famous Hither Came Peter, the Librarian which is currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.

Around five o’clock I took Toby out for a walk and then I did paperwork until seven.

Go hard – but I felt soft, mushy, as if I was walking around on a thick carpet of pink polyurethane foam. I wanted to cross the river and climb into what I realised I now thought of as our bed – mine and Bev’s. Instead I let Seawoll know where I was and lay down fully dressed in my room upstairs.

It was dark when I was woken up by Nightingale’s call from Glastonbury.

‘He’s definitely been here sometime in the past,’ he said. ‘He bought a farmhouse nearby and he’s practised magic in St Michael’s Tower at the top of the hill – I recognised his signare.’

‘Recently?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say,’ said Nightingale.

It always was with vestigia, which faded or were retained according to a complex set of interactions with material, environment and source, and whether something supernatural had been subsisting off them. Nightingale had sensed no trace of Lesley’s signare, so the magic could have happened any time in the last twenty years.

‘He might have regarded it as his country retreat,’ I said.

‘Quite. I’ve checked for booby traps and handed it over to the local boys. Alexander is sending a search team tomorrow.’

He asked after Stephanopoulos and I passed on the assurances that Dr Walid had given me. I asked if he was heading back tonight and he said he was.

‘Anything else to report?’ he asked.

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

‘Chin up, Peter. He’s on his last legs – I can feel it.’

Once Nightingale had rung off I called Guleed, who’d been arriving as a nasty surprise to bell foundries and metal casting companies from Dudley to Wolverhampton all that day.

She said she’d been just about to phone.

‘I was right,’ she said. ‘There’s another bell.’

My mum’s done a lot of shit jobs – literally, in the case of that gig she had cleaning the toilets of that gym in Bloomsbury – but I’ve never seen her hesitate. During the period of my life I like to refer to as ‘that year when I fucked around doing sod all useful’ I used to supplement the dole by tagging along on cleaning gigs. She’d been taking me to work since I was seven, whenever she couldn’t get a babysitter and my dad was too stoned to be reliable. This particular time I was getting the going rate, such as it was, and I was expected to work for it.

You should have seen those men’s loos – I don’t know what they were eating but I remember walking in one time to find that some poor unfortunate had pebble-dashed the walls of a stall to thigh height. I kid you not. The gym staff had taken one look, sealed the stall off with yellow and black hazard tape and left it for the overnight cleaners. I really didn’t want to go in there.

‘Why are you wasting time?’ my mum had said. ‘You are here to do a job and it’s not going to go away on its own.’

So in I went clutching my Domestos and my spray bottle of generic own-brand surface cleaner and got on with it. Pausing a couple of times to throw up while I did.

Sometimes you’ve got to go hard to get the job done.

Although not always in the way that people are expecting.

Parking in the City of London is always a nightmare even with a warrant card, so I got Caffrey to drive me to London Bridge in his van and drop me off in the middle.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry. It’s just magic stuff,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a cab back.’

The sun was long gone by the time I got there and sky was overcast. Beyond Tower Bridge the sawn-off blocks of Canada Water were ochre silhouettes against a murky orange sky. The Thames was in flood and HMS Belfast rode high. I could smell salt water and petrol fumes and the onset of rain. When I put my hands on the railings I got a shock of static electricity.

And I heard a thin, high-pitched giggle.

‘You want to watch it, bruv,’ I said. ‘There’s some people who want you dead.’

The giggle grew into a howl of laughter that I was amazed they weren’t hearing as far away as Canary Wharf.

‘Or deader than you are already.’

The merriment got a bit grimmer, but no less manic then before.

‘They already had a go at your little girl,’ I said, and the laughter stopped.

So the Lord of Misrule is a hypocrite just like everyone else – quelle surprise.

Then Punch spoke, but not with the rasp I was used to. This time softly and sadly.

‘Of all the girls that are so smart,

There’s none like pretty Polly:

She is the darling of my heart,

She is so plump and jolly.’

Plump and jolly, I thought, like a child.

I hauled myself up and sat on the railing with my legs dangling over the parapet – trying to make it look as casual as possible.

‘It looks likes you and me have got a beef with the same people,’ I said.

Punch laughed – this time it sounded rueful and ironic.

‘Why don’t we see if we can sort this out?’ I said.

And that’s when we came to our agreement. Although at the time I couldn’t be sure I’d done what I thought I’d done. Practical metaphysics being a pretty uncertain process, especially when you’re dealing with a hysterical psychotic like our Mr Punch.

I was brought back to reality when my phone rang – it was Beverley.

‘What are you doing up there?’ she asked.

I looked down and saw Beverley three storeys below me, standing hip deep in the water in that impossible way she and her sisters do. She held a phone in one hand and waved with the other.

‘I’m communing with the numinous,’ I said.

‘You can do that when you get home,’ she said. ‘Which is going to be when, exactly?’

‘If I jumped, would you catch me?’

‘No. But I might fish you out afterwards. Get off the railing, babes. You’re making me nervous.’

The rain started in earnest, big summer drops coming straight down and slapping my hands where they rested on the cool metal of the railing.

I sighed and climbed down and onto the pavement.

Even from a distance I could see Beverley’s shoulders relaxing and I realised that she’d been genuinely worried I’d jump. I considered explaining what I’d been up to, but I was worried that might make me sound even crazier. Even to Bev, who once rescued me from fairyland.

‘And when you do come home, bring some of your mum’s chicken,’ said Beverley. ‘I know you’ve got some stashed in the fridge.’

‘No probs,’ I said.

She told me that she loved me and to call her when I got off duty – whenever that might be.

There’s always a bit in a TV series where the detective or whatever has a final revelation that solves the case. You get the close-up on House or Poirot as the light of comprehension dawns in their eyes – usually accompanied by a soft but insistent musical cue.

I didn’t get a musical cue or a close-up, so I didn’t know I’d just solved the case until it was much too late. I just remembered that Lesley had been shopping around the Covent Garden area, so I decided to catch a cab there and have a look round before returning to the Folly.

That’s how I found myself standing out of the rain in the fake portico on the west side of the Covent Garden Piazza, wondering if the ghosts were ever going to come back. Which was why I put my hand against one of the pillars and felt for their vestigia and got, very faintly, the ringing tone of the bell.

All right, I’ll admit – that was a musical cue.

I called Seawoll on his personal number and that’s something I’ve never done before.

He must have clocked my ID on his phone because he said ‘Oh fuck,’ without preamble and then, ‘This can’t be fucking good.’

‘It’s the bloody Actors’ Church,’ I said. ‘It’s been the Actors’ Church all along.’

All that shit about the Temple of Mithras and St Paul’s had been a distraction. I told him where I was, and what I’d learnt.

‘Nightingale is at least an hour away,’ he said. ‘And Guleed is unavailable. So what we’ll do is this: I’ll put in a perimeter, nice and quiet like, while you, very carefully, ascertain the full extent of the shit we’ve landed in.’

‘It’s a plan,’ I said.

‘It’s a bloody cock-up, is what it is,’ said Seawoll. ‘And can I make it clear that when I say very carefully I mean very fucking carefully. I’m all for courageous action, in moderation, Peter. But you have an alarming tendency towards heroics. I do not want to be getting the justified hairy eyeball from your mum at any memorial service other than my own. Is that clear?’

‘Crystal, guv,’ I said.

‘However, should you spot a window of opportunity to deploy your undoubted talents at bolloxing things up for Chorley et al, feel free to proceed. But carefully.’

‘Yes, guv.’

‘Off you go.’

When the fourth Earl of Bedford hired Inigo Jones to build him an Italianate piazza on land that Henry VIII had ‘appropriated’ from the local convent, for some reason the 7th Earl decreed that a church be built, on the cheap, on the west side of the square. Since the business end of an Anglican church is supposed to be at the east end of the nave, the portico that sticks out into the square is a fake, as is the door in its centre. The main entrance is at the west end, opening into the old cemetery, now a pleasant urban garden enclosed by the tall former houses that are now all shops and offices. The main entrance is on the far side of the park, on Bedford Lane. But you can climb over the spiky fence on the piazza providing you are both careful and very stupid.

Or slightly desperate. Like me.

I made my way past the sunken steps and pressed myself to the wall so I could peer around the corner. The west end of the church is plainer than the east, being all brick and square doors and lacking those fake classical flourishes that no Renaissance landowner could live without. It still has a pediment, though, this one with a ridiculously wide lower cornice that jutted out like a particularly unsafe balcony.

Parked on the flagstones was a vintage white Ford Transit van, back doors open to show emptiness. I texted Seawoll what I was seeing and, as I pressed Send, I felt a magic detonation from the opposite side of the church. Sand, gravel and a couple of half bricks bounced off the pediment and onto the roof of the van.

‘Try it now,’ said Chorley – I judged he was standing on the left side of the cornice.

‘That did it,’ said Lesley, more muffled – so probably inside.

I texted Seawoll that the crime was ongoing and I was moving to disrupt – TOO LATE, GOING IN.

The main doors were unlocked and I slipped into the narthex, which is the fancy term for that bit of a church with the collection box and the pamphlets and souvenir stand. This being the Actors’ Church, there was a lot of stuff you could buy. There were also two staircases going up – one to the belfry on the left and one to the belfry on the right.

I didn’t have to pause long before I heard a thump and someone swearing up on the left. I went up the stairs as quietly as I could, pushed through the door at the top and nearly got the drop on both of them.

If only the bloody bell hadn’t started humming.

The Punch-summoning bell was larger than the church bell it was replacing, so Chorley had had to knock a big hole in the wall to get it into position. It hung from the original headstock while the original bell perched precariously on the landing.

Lesley was holding the sword occasionally known as Excalibur, while Chorley stood out in the rain on the cornice.

He saw me first.

‘Ah, Peter,’ he said. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘So much for Plan B,’ said Lesley.

They were both dressed in boiler suits and blue nylon cagoules, all the better to pass as council workers or contractors.

I was going to say something clever, but Lesley put the point of Excalibur against my chest and pushed gently so that I was forced out onto the cornice with Chorley. The rain had eased off a bit, but the cement was slick. There was no safety rail and the courtyard was a good twelve metres straight down. There was a clock with a blue face in the middle of the pediment and in the distance I heard a roll of thunder – all we were missing was a DeLorean.

‘Do you believe in fate, Peter?’ asked Chorley.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘And yet despite all our efforts to the contrary – here we are.’

Lesley climbed out to join us. I caught her eye. She’d transferred the sword to her left hand and in her right was the compact semi-automatic she’d used to shoot Stephanopoulos. She held it pointed down by her side with her finger safely outside the trigger guard as Caffrey had taught us both.

‘There’s no—’ I said, but Chorley cut me off with a bark of laughter.

‘No Arthur, no Merlin, no one sword,’ he said. ‘It’s all dull old socio-economic forces acting on an undifferentiated mass of semi-evolved primates.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Is he right?’ asked Lesley.

‘Why don’t you ring the bell, and we’ll find out?’ said Chorley.

‘Am I right, Marty?’ I said. ‘I think I am.’

‘You’re a bright boy, Peter,’ said Chorley. ‘I’ve always thought so. But you’ve never understood the limitations of your own viewpoint. It doesn’t matter whether there was an actual Round Table, a king, a sword, a mighty magician. Because we can make it so.’

‘And how do we do that?’ I asked, because Chorley liked the sound of his own voice and so did I – especially when I was playing for time.

‘Magic is about man reshaping reality itself,’ he said. ‘That’s what the formae do, that’s what a spell is. A tool to reshape the universe.’

‘And you think you can just wish Merlin into existence?’ I asked.

‘No.’ Chorley gave me a disturbingly confident grin. ‘I think we can change existence so that Merlin is real. Given enough magic – enough juice, so to speak.’

‘Wow. I didn’t realise we were going to have to section you – I was hoping for a trial.’

But I was wondering whether he was right. There were definitely moments when I suspected that Beverley somehow warped the world into a more congenial shape around her. But she was a goddess, and did things beyond mortal ken. And anyway, if it were that easy Lady Ty’s husband would be ageless and her daughter slightly less gullible.

‘Martin,’ said Lesley, pocketing her pistol, ‘he’s stalling.’

‘Of course he is,’ said Chorley. ‘Are you ready?’

Lesley transferred the sword to her right hand.

‘Lesley, this is insane,’ I said. ‘He’s talking bollocks.’

Lesley ignored me and caught Chorley’s eye.

‘I do this and, whatever else, Punch dies?’

‘Dead as a doornail,’ said Chorley.

‘Good enough for me,’ said Lesley and swung the sword.

As I told the subsequent inquiry, I wasn’t sure what I thought I was doing, but I wanted to try and disrupt Chorley’s insane bit of ritual. Given that Lesley was armed with a sword, and Chorley wasn’t, my choice was obvious. While Lesley was swinging I tensed. And as she hit the bell I threw myself at Chorley.

There was a flash that had nothing to do with reflected photons, and a beautiful sound.

The sword is a singing sword, I thought, as the chime struck me like a wave of freezing water. My shoulder struck Chorley just below the armpit and he staggered. I was counting on him being more centred, but he must have been distracted by the beauty of the chime. Because he went over backwards, off the side of the cornice.

And me with him.

I’ve got to stop doing this, I thought, as I fell into the rainy black.

A much shorter distance than I was expecting. And onto mud, not flagstones.

I’d lost my grip on Chorley, so I rolled away on general principle. But not fast enough to avoid getting a kick in the head. I rolled some more but managed to hit a tree – and that’s when I knew where I was.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ said Chorley. Of course he didn’t. Because we were still falling and sooner or later real gravity was going to forcefully introduce us to the real flagstones of real London. ‘Deal with him,’ he said.

Not liking the sound of that, I used the tree trunk to pull myself up.

I was standing in light woodland, in dim grey light, morning or evening – I couldn’t tell – with a light drizzle and mist. Three metres in front of me was a short white man in a yellow buff coat, matching trousers and big floppy cavalry boots. He wore a breastplate over his coat and I just had time to register the pistol he was pointing at me when there was a click, a hiss, a loud bang and a cloud of smoke. Nothing else happened.

Matchlock pistol – effective range five metres in ideal conditions. Which these weren’t.

My cavalier didn’t seem at all surprised at the miss. He calmly stuffed the pistol in his belt, and pulled out a rather fine cavalry sabre with a basket hilt and an effective range of whatever it got close to.

Weirdly, my Metvest would have served quite well if only I could have persuaded him not to stick me in the face, or the arms or the groin – particularly not the groin.

I considered surrendering, but settled for ducking behind the tree.

The man gave me an annoyed grimace, like a builder who’s just been asked to do a bit of extra finishing up, and stepped forward. I could see in my head what was going to happen next. He’d feint one way and then stab me with the point when I moved the other way. The trunk of the tree suddenly seemed very small.

I was about to leg it in the other direction, on the basis I wasn’t the one wearing the metal armour, when a high-pitched ululation from nearby interrupted us both. My poor cavalier had just enough time to grumpily turn to face in the right direction when a javelin whistled out of nowhere and pierced his throat. He staggered a step backwards and then fell with a look of profound irritation on his face.

I was expecting Tyburn, but instead got a much younger white guy, tall and lithe, with blond hair spiked up with grease and blue swirls on his face and naked chest. A golden torc gleamed at his neck and a cape made of dozens of beaver pelts stitched together hung rakishly off his shoulders.

Before I had a chance to speak he closed the distance between us, grabbed me and kissed me on the lips. Proper snog too, with tongue and everything. Not only was it not terrible as kisses go, it was also strangely familiar.

‘Beverley,’ I said when we broke for air. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

‘War has come to London,’ he said and then, after a pause, added, ‘Again.’

‘Chorley is heading for the bridge,’ I said – looking around to get my bearings. ‘And I have to stop him.’

I was standing on high ground three hundred metres north of the ancient Thames, about where St Paul’s Church was standing in the real world. The landscape had a strange unreal quality and was shrouded in a weird mist, as if I were playing a video game with a short draw distance.

I was still falling.

None of this was real.

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

I could look east at the wide and winding course of the river and see Londinium as a vague smudge. No walls, though – too early for them. The bridge was still there – laid low over pontoons to the first of the islands that made up Southwark. I thought something glittered on the central span.

To my south was the road, curving east before dropping down into the Fleet valley to that bridge and up again into Londinium.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘The road.’

‘Whatever you say, babes,’ he said and, grabbing my hand, starting running.

Fuck me, but these ancient rivers were fit. It was all I could do to keep up and I didn’t have any imaginary breath left to speak. This close to the city, the road was the proper full Roman – three metres of cambered gravel with big drainage ditches either side. The Fleet was about a kilometre ahead and I could actually see Chorley on the road, halfway there. But he was walking – limping, in fact – and I reckoned I could take him.

But Beverley wouldn’t let go of my hand.

‘Hold up, babes,’ he said.

There was a bestial howl from across the river and something black and doglike bounded down to the bank. Behind it thundered a couple of hundred men on horses, all in variations of the cuirass and long coat worn by my dead friend with the matchlock pistol.

That would be the Black Dog of Newgate, I thought, and the cavaliers might be riding the missing horses from Brentford.

To the right of the river crossing appeared, as if spawning into a video game, a couple of thousand burly men in mail and armour made of small plates of metal. They carried round shields, spears and axes and swords. On their heads were helmets that most definitely didn’t have horns on them.

‘So that’s where the Holland Park Vikings went,’ I said. ‘Mr Chorley has been a busy, busy man.’

Had he known there’d be a confrontation? Or was it just his usual planning in depth? I decided that would be one of the many things we would have a conversation about by and by.

And, if the unreconstructed Lego merchants weren’t enough, another mass came boiling out of the indistinct wattle and daub rectangles of Roman London. This was a rabble dressed from every period in London’s history – stout men in doublet and hose, crooked bravos in puffy shorts and jackets with slashed sleeves to show the silk shirts below. There were top hats and bowlers, swords and muskets and clubs and pikes. From this levy en masse came an ugly, hate-filled muttering.

I’ve faced groups like this at closing time. Drunk, angry people spoiling for a fight. You can talk down most Saturday night wastemen but there’s always a hard core who don’t think it’s a proper night out if someone doesn’t get hurt.

Among them rode men on horses, singly or in groups of three or four. They were straight-backed and arrogant and stank of money. I’d faced these too, but not as often – the likes of me didn’t get to feel their collars very often.

‘Who the fuck are they?’ I asked.

‘That’s the gentry and their servants,’ said blond Beverley. ‘All the liars, hypocrites, exploiters, dog-bastards, wankers, janissaries, Monday men, cat-ranchers and people who fly-tip in protected waterways.’

‘There’s a lot of them,’ I said.

‘What can I say?’ said Beverley. ‘It’s London, isn’t it?’

I couldn’t do the calculation in my head, but I was pretty sure that falling twelve metres at 9.8 m/s2 meant I was going to hit the flagstones in just over a second. And whatever the real time/weirdo memory of London ratio was, I didn’t think I had time to hang about.

I didn’t need to fight them all. I just had to reach Chorley before he got to the bridge.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, but Beverley put his hand on my arm to stop me.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Got reinforcements coming.’

I heard them before they arrived. It was like a thousand pots and pans being rhythmically rattled against each other. And through the soles of my feet the stamp-stamp-stamp of thousands of hobnailed sandals hitting the ground in unison.

But trotting out of the arbitrary draw distance came a pair of shaggy ponies, manes plaited and beribboned in yellow and green, drawing a wickerwork chariot with big wheels. Standing in the forward driving position was the first Tyburn, this time smartly dressed in a metal lorica, segmented skirt and deep red cloak. The only thing he was missing was a helmet with a horsehair plume.

He did a flash little stop and swerve so that the open back of the chariot was towards me.

‘Up you get,’ he said, and pulled me into the chariot. ‘Here they come.’

I looked to the west just in time for an entire bloody Roman legion to come jogging into view. Rank after rank, by the cohort and the numbers, but with no standard raised – no eagle.

The smell of blood rolled off them and, weirdly, olive oil.

They came to a halt in a clatter of iron.

‘Fuck me,’ I said. ‘I’m in an episode of Game of Thrones.’