Rivers of London

Chapter 14 The Job

The young man in the hospital bed was named St John Giles, and he was a rugby eight, or rowing six or whatever at Oxford University who’d come into London for a night out. He had floppy blond hair that was stuck to his forehead with sweat.

‘I’ve already told the police what happened, but they didn’t believe me. Why should you?’ he said.

‘Because we’re the people that believe people that other people don’t believe,’ I said.

‘How can I know that?’ he asked.

‘You’re just going to have to believe me,’ I said.

Because the bed sheets covered him up to his chest there was nothing to see of his injuries, but I found my eyes drifting down towards his groin — it was like a road accident or horrific facial wart. He saw me trying not to look.

‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to see.’

I helped myself to one of his grapes. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened,’ I said.

He’d been having a night out with some mates, and had gone to a nightclub round the back of Leicester Square. There he’d met a nice young woman who he’d plied with alcohol before persuading her into a dark corner for a snog. Looking back, St John was willing to admit that perhaps he might have pressed his case a little too fervently, but he could have sworn she was a willing partner, or at least not objecting too strenuously. It was a depressingly familiar story that the officers on Operation Sapphire, the Met’s Rape Investigation Unit, must get to hear all the time. At least, right up to the point where she bit his dick off.

‘With her vagina?’ I asked, just to be clear.

‘Yep,’ said St John.

‘You’re sure?’

‘It’s not the sort of thing you make a mistake about,’ he said. ‘And you’re sure it was teeth?’

‘It felt like teeth,’ he said. ‘But to be honest, after it happened I really stopped paying attention.’

‘She didn’t cut you with something, a knife or a broken bottle, perhaps?’

‘I was holding both her hands,’ he said and made a grasping gesture with his hand. It was vague but I got the gist — he’d pinned her wrists to the wall.

What a prince among men, I thought, and checked the description he’d given at an earlier interview. ‘You say she had long black hair, black eyes, pale skin and very red lips?’

St John nodded enthusiastically. ‘Sort of Japanese-looking without being Japanese,’ he said. ‘Beautiful, but she didn’t have slanty eyes.’

‘Did you see her teeth?’

‘No, I already told you …’

‘Not those teeth,’ I said. ‘The ones in her mouth.’

‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘Is it important?’

‘It might be,’ I said. ‘Did she say anything?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, anything at all.’

He looked nonplussed, thought about it and admitted that he didn’t think she’d spoken the whole time he’d been with her. After that I asked a few closing questions, but St John had been too busy bleeding to notice where his assailant had gone and he never got her name, let alone her phone number.

I told him I thought he was bearing up well, considering.

‘Right now,’ he said, ‘I’m on some really serious medication. I don’t like to think about what’s going to happen when I come off it.’

I checked with the doctors on my way out — the missing penis had never been found. Once I’d finished up my notes — this was still an official Metropolitan Police investigation — I checked in on Lesley, who was one floor up. She was still asleep, her face hidden by a swathe of bandages. I stood by her bed for a while. Dr Walid had said that I’d definitely saved her life, and possibly increased the chances of successful reconstructive surgery. I couldn’t help thinking that hanging out with me had almost killed her. It had been less than six months since she’d gone for those coffees and I’d met a ghost, and it was terrifying that that might have been all the difference there was between me being the one wearing the bandages.

Less terrifying, but much more depressing, was figuring out why it had all kicked off back on that cold January night or, more precisely, that sunny winter’s day on Hampstead Heath when Toby the dog bit Brandon Coopertown on the nose. That was the same week the Linbury Studio, the Royal Opera House’s second, smaller auditorium had staged a revival of a little-known play entitled The Married Libertine, first shown in the main theatre in 1761 and never shown again, as far as I could tell, anywhere else in the world, its author — Charles Macklin. The Royal Opera House fell over themselves to give me access to their booking records, presumably in the hope I’d then go away for ever, and I found William Skirmish and Brendan Coopertown had attended a performance on the same night. A random set of circumstances are what did for William Skirmish, and all those who were maimed or died after him — like I said — depressing.

If you want to help, Nightingale had told me, study harder, learn faster. Do the job.

I’d have stayed longer, but I was on the clock.

Nightingale, in an adjacent room, was awake and sitting up and doing the Telegraph crossword. We discussed the case of the missing penis.

‘Vagina dentata,’ said Nightingale. I wasn’t sure that I was reassured by the thought that it was common enough for there to be a technical term for it. ‘Could be oriental, something out of Chinatown,’ he said.

‘Not Japanese,’ I said. ‘The victim was quite clear about that.’

Nightingale gave me some titles to look up in the library when I had a moment. ‘But not today,’ he said. ‘Are you nervous?’

‘A lot of things can go wrong,’ I said.

‘Just don’t drink anything,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be fine.’

As I walked back home to the Folly, I generated my own suspicions as to the identity of the phantom dick snatcher. As soon as I got in I went looking for Molly, who I found in the kitchen — chopping up cucumbers.

‘Have you been out clubbing recently?’ I asked.

She stopped slicing and turned to regard me with solemn black eyes.

‘You sure?’

She shrugged and started chopping again. I decided that I was going to let Nightingale sort that one out — a clear chain of command is a wonderful thing.

‘Is that what we’re having for the trip?’ I asked. ‘Cucumber sandwiches?’

Molly indicated the rest of her ingredients — salami and liver sausage.

‘You’re just taking the piss now, aren’t you?’

She gave me a pitying look, and handed me a recycled Sainsbury’s bag with a packed lunch in it.

In the garage there were no fewer than six suitcases piled beside the Jag. In addition, Beverley had brought a large shoulder bag that was, I learned later, stuffed with the entire top shelf of a Peckham hair salon. Beverley had heard all about the countryside, and wasn’t taking any chances.

‘Why me?’ she asked as she watched me loading up the Jag.

I opened the door for her and she climbed in, buckled up and held her shoulder bag protectively in her lap.

‘Because that’s the agreement,’ I said.

‘Nobody asked me,’ said Beverley.

I got in and checked to make sure that I had a couple of Mars Bars and a bottle of sparkling in the glove compartment. Satisfied that emergency supplies were laid on, I started up the Jag and pulled out of the garage.

Beverley stayed silent until we passed Junction 3 on the M4.

‘That was the Crane,’ she said.

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘The River Crane,’ she said. ‘We just crossed it.’

‘One of your sisters?’

‘Last one on this side of the river,’ she said.

I merged us onto the M25 at junction 15 and headed south. Traffic was light, which was a mercy. An Airbus A380 on its final approach to Heathrow crossed our path, so low I swear I could see faces peering out of the double row of windows.

‘How come she wasn’t at the meeting?’ I asked.

‘She’s never in the country,’ said Beverley. ‘She’s always flying off somewhere, sending us text messages from Bali and postcards from Rio. She went swimming in the Ganges, you know,’ Beverley said, the last in a tone of awed disapproval.

Thanks to the national curriculum, even I knew that the Ganges is one of the most sacred rivers in India, although to be honest I couldn’t remember why. Something to do with funeral pyres and chanting. I put it on the list of things that I needed to look into — it was getting to be a long list.

In the end I’d come up with one of those messy compromises. As Brock had written, you couldn’t get the genii locorum to do something as simple as negotiate a contract; symbolism had to be involved. An oath of fealty was out of the question, and a cross-dynastic marriage was too cruel a fate for either Mother or Father Thames. So I suggested an exchange of hostages, a confidence-building measure to cement ties between the two halves of the river; a suitably mediaeval solution designed to appeal to two people who definitely still believed in divine rights. It was a typically English compromise held together by string, sealing wax and the old god network. I’d like to say that I remembered the practice of exchanging hostages from school history classes or from stories of pre-colonial life in Sierra Leone, but the truth was that it came up while playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was 13.

‘Why does it have to be me?’ Beverley had said after she’d found out.

‘It can’t be Tyburn,’ I’d said. You don’t inflict Tyburn on anyone as a gesture of peace and goodwill. And Brent is too young.’ There were other daughters, some the spirits of rivers I’d never heard of and one, a plump, smiley young woman, whose formal name was the Black Ditch. Not that anyone called her that. I figured that Mama Thames thought Beverley was the least likely to cause her embarrassment among the yokels. The hostage from the other side was called Ash, whose river’s principal claim to fame was that it ran past Shepperton Film Studios.

The exchange was scheduled to take place on the evening of 21 June, Midsummer, at Runnymede. Our host was Colne Brook, son Colne who was also the father of Ash — the tributaries of the Thames can get pretty tangled, especially after two thousand years of ‘improvements’. I suspected that the real organisational brains would be Oxley — he wouldn’t want to leave anything to chance. This was confirmed when a series of hand-printed signs appeared beside the road as I negotiated the tricky bit through Hythe End, which guided us neatly down a cul-de-sac lined with semis which terminated in a gate and an impromptu car park.

Isis met us at the gate with a bevy of teenage boys all dressed in their Sunday best who scampered eagerly over to the Jag and demanded to be allowed to carry the luggage. One straw-headed scamp asked for a fiver to guard the Jag itself — I promised him a tenner just to be on the safe side, payable on my return, of course.

Isis hugged Beverley, who was finally persuaded to relinquish her death grip on her cosmetics bag, and led her through the gate into the fields beyond. Father Thames had his ‘throne’ near the priory in the shade of an ancient yew tree. Around him were arrayed his sons, their wives and grandchildren in all their donkey-jacketed and sideburned glory. All of them silently watched our approach as if Beverley were a reluctant widow in a Bollywood melodrama. The throne itself was constructed of old-fashioned rectangular hay bales, of the type I happen to know are no longer common in British farming practice, draped with elaborately embroidered horse blankets. For this occasion the Old Man of the River had been stuffed into his best suit, and his beard and hair combed until it was just scruffy-looking.

I followed Beverley and Isis as they stepped before the throne. I’d coached her the day before, all day, but Isis still had to show her the way — a deep curtsey with head bowed — before Beverley followed suit. The Old Man of the River caught my eye and then, very deliberately, touched his hand to his chest and then extended his arm, palm facing down — the Roman salute. Then he climbed off his throne, took Beverley’s hands in his own and raised her up.

He welcomed her in a language I didn’t understand, and kissed her on both cheeks.

The air was suddenly full of the scent of apple blossom and horse sweat, Tizer and old hose pipes, dusty roads and the sound of children laughing, all of it strong enough to make me take a step backwards in surprise. A wiry arm snaked round my shoulders to steady me, and Oxley slapped his hand on my chest in friendly rib-bending fashion.

‘Oh, did you feel that, Peter?’ he asked. ‘That’s the start of something, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Start of what?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ said Oxley. ‘But summer is definitely in the air.’

I couldn’t even see Beverley amid the throng of Old Man’s people. Oxley drew me away from the crowd to introduce me to the other half of the hostage swap. Ash turned out to be a young man half a head taller than me, broad of shoulder, clear of eye, noble of brow and empty of thought.

‘Have you got all your things?’ I asked.

Ash nodded, and tapped the satchel that hung at his hip.

Isis emerged from the crowd long enough to give me a sisterly kiss on the cheek and to extract a promise that I would come to the theatre with her, such things now being possible in this new and glorious summer. I’d have left there and then, but it took Ash’s relatives a good part of an hour to say goodbye to him and it was almost dusk when we got away. As Ash and I walked back to the Jag, I turned and saw that Father Thames’s people had hung hurricane lamps from the branches of the ancient yew. At least two fiddles were playing, and I heard a clackety sound that I can only assume came from a washboard. There were figures loping and dancing in the yellow light, and the seductive, melancholy music that gets played at any party you haven’t been invited to. I wasn’t sure, but with a pang I thought I saw Beverley Brook among the dancers.

‘Will there be dancing in London?’ asked Ash. He sounded as nervous as Beverley had been.

‘Definitely,’ I said.

We got into the Jag and headed down the A308 for the M25 and home.

‘Will there be drinking?’ asked Ash, displaying a fine sense of priorities.

‘Have you ever been to London?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Ash. ‘I’ve never even been in a town before. Our dad doesn’t hold with that sort of thing.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s basically just like the country,’ I said. ‘Only with more people.’

THE END