Lies Sleeping

6 Centre Mass

Nightingale spent a long time with both palms pressed against the side of the bell. Long enough for the inside of my riot helmet to become slick with sweat and for the faceplate to start to fog up from my breath. I was in my full personal protection kit, including petrol bomb resistant overall, boots and helmet. I was also crouched behind a nice thick piece of steel reinforced with the greenest bit of wood I could find on short notice – a brand new garden table from the Argos across the road. The wood was to help protect me if the bell went bang in a magical way, and the metal in case it exploded physically.

Nightingale had made it clear that some demon traps could do both.

‘The trapped spirit ignites the metal in some way,’ he had said during an informal training session with me, Guleed and a handful of London Fire Brigade volunteers. ‘I’m not sure why.’

It had something to do with the ignition point of vaporised metal, but it could be ‘rather inconvenient’ if you were expecting the demon trap to do something else.

Ten metres behind me was Guleed, and behind her was a fire engine, with a full crew in search and rescue gear.

According to the literature, demon traps were invented by the Norwegians back around the seventh century to while away those long winter nights while you waited for the fjord to unfreeze so you could pop out and murder some monks. Creating them involved torturing a person to death over an extended period and trapping their ghost in a piece of metal. That energy stayed dormant until triggered and could be tuned to create a number of effects.

The Germans had refined the technique as a weapon during the Second World War. Nightingale swears blind that no British wizard ever stooped to such practice, and I admit I’ve never found any record to show they did. But still – you have to wonder.

Martin Chorley had either developed or discovered that you could use dogs instead of people, and that you could use demon traps like batteries to store magic. Which was a neat trick, because neither he nor any practitioner that I know actually knows what magic is. You can stick a label on it, call it potentia or mana or an interstitial boundary effect, but all that does is make you sound like you’re auditioning for Star Trek – TNG, not the movies.

I checked my watch. Nightingale had been standing in front of the bell for more than two minutes. I’d warned him that there was definitely a seducere style effect built in, but he seemed confident he could deal with it.

At three minutes I made a considered risk assessment and decided to go grab him and pull him off. But, as I came out of hiding, Nightingale took his left hand off the bell and held it up – palm towards me.

I stopped.

And considered crawling back behind cover – which would have been the sensible thing. But before I could do that Nightingale took his right hand off the bell and beckoned me over.

‘It’s not a trap,’ he said.

‘What is it, then?’

‘I have no idea whatsoever.’

Fortunately we got word that a man who might know something had woken up back at UCH. So me and Guleed bundled into the character-free Hyundai and headed over while Nightingale stayed with the bell, just in case it suddenly started ticking or something.

Lucy was back on shift when we arrived outside Richard Williams’s room. He’d been put in one of the max isolation wards. Designed for ebola outbreaks and the like, it had its own atrium with a big white sink and a couple of jumbo waste bins with big biohazard symbols painted on their lids.

Lucy was positioned in the corner of the room with a clear field of fire on anyone coming in through the heavy fire door to the corridor – the square window in the door had been blacked out with a sheet of cardboard. Someone opening the door would be in Lucy’s sights before they even knew she was there.

‘Warrant cards,’ she said as me and Guleed walked in.

We’re trained not to argue with stressed people with guns – especially our own people – so we dutifully pulled the cards out of our jackets and showed her.

‘Your governor’s a bit scary, isn’t he?’ said Lucy as she checked them.

She’d obviously been given the Nightingale lecture – that explained the increase in caution.

‘He’s a big softy, really,’ said Guleed with a straight face.

‘Of course he is,’ said Lucy, and settled back into her guard stance as we pushed open the inner door and went in.

Richard didn’t find Lucy’s presence half as reassuring as we did.

‘He’s going to kill me,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing you can do to stop it.’

We gave the usual reassurances, but everybody’s watched way too many films to trust our word. He was your classic amateur – your proper professional criminal would have been screaming for a brief and demanding to know by what right we were holding him against his will, but Richard had cracked before we’d stepped into the room.

We’d done the caution plus two – which is when we caution you and then rush to assure you that you aren’t under arrest while we make it clear, through subtle non-verbal communication, that arrest was totally an option.

Richard seemed happy to talk, eager even, as if none of it was important any more. Looking back, perhaps that should have raised more alarm bells than it did.

We started with the basics, like did he know the current location of Martin Chorley.

Richard swore he didn’t. It’s not like they’d been mates. But a friend of a friend had introduced them after he’d graduated from Oxford. He just did Chorley the occasional ‘favour’ in return for some lucrative contracts and a bit of cash under the table.

What kind of favours? we asked.

Providing video equipment, arranging to move packages around.

‘It didn’t occur to you that any of this might be dodgy?’ I asked.

‘It didn’t seem that dodgy,’ said Richard. ‘Not illegal as such.’

I wanted to press on, but we had to pause there to get names, dates and as many details of the people involved in the ‘favours’ as Richard would admit to. It’s tedious stuff but it all goes into the great mill that is HOLMES 2, the better to grind the flour of truth and produce the wholesome bread of justice.

And then, while they’re busy thinking about something else, you go down a different track.

‘Who was the friend who introduced you to Martin Chorley?’

‘Gabriel,’ said Richard. ‘Gabriel Tate. We were at Oxford together.’

The other name on the film script I’d found.

‘Was he a Little Crocodile?’ I asked – keeping it casual.

‘No way,’ said Richard. ‘He was mad into Oxford Revue and OUDS.’

‘OUDS?’ asked Guleed.

‘Oxford University Dramatic Society,’ said Richard. ‘He always wanted to write.’

‘But you were a member of the Little Crocodiles?’ I asked.

Richard sighed. I think he’d already planned to tell us everything, but old habits die hard and we suspected that all the Little Crocodiles had been sworn to secrecy. Even perhaps with a little supernatural something to seal the deal.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t take the magic seriously.’

Nobody does, I thought, until it smacks them in the face.

Guleed asked if the Little Crocodiles had stayed in touch after graduation.

‘God, no,’ said Richard. ‘We just did it for fun – well, most of us. Some people took it more seriously than others.’

We asked if he could remember the names of the ones who took it more seriously and then, because that was just as valuable, the names of the ones who didn’t. The analysts in the Annexe were going to be up all night cross-referencing and some poor sod was going to find their colourful university days knocking on their door and asking for help with its inquiries.

‘What’s the bell for?’ asked Guleed.

‘The bell?’ asked Richard.

Ah, I thought, not that keen on telling us everything.

‘The bell,’ said Guleed firmly.

‘The bell.’ Richard shifted uncomfortably in his bed. ‘The bell is complicated. You saw the quotation written on the side?’

‘Something in Greek,’ said Guleed, who’d pioneered the use of intersectionality theory as an interview technique. Richard took the bait – no matter what the evidence, the posh ones always think they’re smarter than you.

‘It’s from Euripides,’ he said. ‘He’s a Greek playwright, an ancient Greek playwright, and he wrote a play called The Bacchae and it’s a quote from it. That’s why we nicknamed it “the drinking bell”.’ He gave us reassuring nods. ‘It’s about Dionysus, the god of winemaking.’

We knew this, of course. Because I’d texted Dr Postmartin, our archivist and a noted classicist, who had not only recognised the quote but also criticised the translation. He’d then given me a ten-minute lecture on Euripides, The Bacchae and Dionysus that was really quite soothing considering I was less than twenty metres from an unexploded magical device.

And Dionysus was the god of winemaking, fertility and the theatre.

I didn’t miss that last little wrinkle, although looking back I possibly should have followed up a bit harder.

Dionysus had your standard Greek mythological bio – son of Zeus, mortal mother who burst into flames while pregnant, sewn into his father’s thigh as a foetus, torn apart by Titans and then resurrected. Famously, his worshippers met in forests where they got pissed, laid, and tore unsuspecting small woodland animals apart. Unfortunately, anything that much fun is bound to be frowned upon by the ruling class. And so they got a stern lecture from Livy and were seriously suppressed by the Roman state.

‘What’s the bell for?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Richard.

‘You weren’t curious?’ asked Guleed.

Richard gave a startled bark of a laugh that turned into a cough. I offered him some water but he waved me off.

‘Of course I was curious,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t ask questions – at least not more than once. Not if you knew what was good for you.’

‘Did Chorley say anything about the bell at all?’ I asked. ‘Anything that might indicate what it’s for?’

‘All he said was that it was a bell for ringing in the changes,’ said Richard. ‘To wake the nation.’

‘Which nation?’ asked Guleed.

‘I don’t think he was thinking about the French,’ said Richard.

I’m sure I had a snappy comeback, but I can’t remember what it was, because just then we heard Lucy challenge someone outside. Then, before I could react, there were three gunshots, astonishingly loud, a pause, and before we could react to that, two more.

I was out the door first, with shield spell half prepared, but it was too late.

Lucy stood in the far corner of the atrium, gunstock against her shoulder, barrel angled down to cover a figure on the floor. It was the Pale Nanny, dressed as a nurse, lying on her back gasping for breath while a dark stain welled up on the chest of her blue uniform tunic.

I dropped to my knees beside her and grabbed her hand and squeezed. Her skin felt hot, feverish, and she turned her head a fraction to stare at me. Her eyes were wide and uncomprehending.

I was vaguely aware of Guleed going for help and of Lucy keeping a clear line of fire – just in case.

You’re supposed to say the casualty’s name. They teach you that, to keep them focused on you, but they never say whether it actually helps. And we still didn’t know her name.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hey, what’s your name? You’ve got to have a name.’

I saw her eyes focus on my face and she looked puzzled, as if surprised to see me there.

‘Is it Claire?’ I said – babbling. ‘Barbara? Aya? Maureen?’

People were moving around me. There was a whisper of cotton against my shoulder, voices calling back and forth, all the jargon you don’t want to be hearing while in a prone position.

‘Tell me your name,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing happened that we can’t sort out.’

Her lips parted and I thought she might be about to speak, but suddenly there was a blur of green and blue arms between us and, when they’d moved out of the way, she’d been intubated and masked. Her eyes still held mine for a moment and her hand squeezed one last time. Then her eyes unfocused and her grip went slack and she was gone.

Just like that.

I stayed where I was – mostly because I couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do – but Guleed shook my shoulder to get my attention.

‘Peter,’ she said. ‘Richard Williams is dead.’