Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

We drove in, waved our warrant cards at the guy in the glass booth and parked in the bay allocated to us. He gave us directions but we still managed to wander around in circles for five minutes until Lesley noticed a discreet sign lost amongst the pipes and concrete abutments. We were then buzzed in by the concierge and guided up to the reception area.

‘We’re here to interview Albert Woodville-Gentle,’ I said.

‘And we’d much rather you didn’t tell him we were on our way,’ said Lesley as we stepped into the lift.

‘It’s just an interview,’ I said to her as the door closed.

‘We’re the police, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s always good to arrive as a nasty surprise, makes it harder to keep secrets.’

‘Makes sense,’ I said.

Lesley sighed.

The lobby of each floor was an identical truncated triangle shape with undressed concrete walls, grey carpeting and emergency fire exits the size and shape of U-boat pressure doors. Albert Woodville-Gentle lived two-thirds up the tower on the 30th floor. It was very clean. This much institutional concrete makes me nervous when it’s clean.

I rang the doorbell.

Practically the whole point of being police is that you don’t gather information covertly. You’re supposed to turn up on people’s doorsteps, terrify them with the sheer majesty of your authority, and keep asking questions until they tell you what you want to know. Unfortunately, we at the Folly were under instructions to keep the existence of the supernatural if not exactly secret then certainly low-key – all part of the agreement apparently. This meant starting any interview with the question; Oi did you learn magic at university? was right out, and so we had developed a cunning plan instead. Or rather Lesley came up with a cunning plan instead.

The door opened immediately, which told us that the concierge had phoned up to warn the inhabitants. A middle-aged woman with a worn face, blue eyes and hair the colour of dirty straw stood in the doorway. She caught sight of Lesley’s masked face and took an involuntary step backwards – works every time.

I introduced myself and showed my warrant card. She peered at the card, then at me – her eyes were narrow and suspicious. Despite a plain brown skirt, matching blouse and cardigan I noticed she wore an analogue watch hanging upside down from her breast pocket. A live-in nurse perhaps?

‘We’ve come to see Mr Woodville-Gentle,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’

‘He’s supposed to be resting at this time,’ said the woman. She had a Slavic accent. Russian or Ukrainian, I thought.

‘We can wait,’ said Lesley. The woman stared at her and frowned.

‘May I ask who you are?’ I asked.

‘I am Varenka,’ she said. ‘I am Mr Woodville-Gentle’s nurse.’

‘May we come in?’ asked Lesley.

‘I don’t know,’ said Varenka.

I had my notebook out. ‘Can I have your surname please?’

‘This is an official investigation,’ said Lesley.

Varenka hesitated and then, reluctantly I thought, stepped back from the doorway.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Come in. I shall see if Mr Woodville-Gentle is awake yet.’

Curious, I thought, she’d rather let us in than tell us her second name.

The flat was basically a long box with living room and kitchenette to the left, bedrooms and, I assumed, bathrooms to the right. Bookshelves lined every wall and with the curtains closed the air was stuffy and carried a whiff of disinfectant and mildew. I scoped out the books as Varenka the nurse led us into the living room and asked us to wait. Most of the books looked like they’d come from charity shops, the hardbacks had damaged dustcovers and the paperbacks showed creased spines and covers faded by sunlight. Wherever they’d been bought, they’d been meticulously shelved by subject, as far as I could tell, and then by author. There were two shelves of what looked like every single Patrick O’Brian up until Yellow Admiral and one whole stack of nothing but Penguin paperbacks from the 1950s.

My dad swears by those Penguins, he said that they were so classy that all you had to do was sit in the right café in Soho, pretend to read one and you’d be hip deep in impressionable young women before you ordered your second espresso.

Lesley surreptitiously jabbed me in the arm to remind me to look stern and official as Varenka led us into the living room before heading off to disturb Albert Woodville-Gentle.

‘He’s in a wheelchair,’ murmured Lesley.

Judging by the spacing between the furniture and positioning of the dining table the flat had been laid out for wheelchair use. Lesley scuffed the carpet with her shoe to show where thin wheels had worn tracks in the burgundy weave.

We heard muffled voices from the other end of the flat, Varenka raised her voice a couple of times but she obviously lost the argument because a few minutes later she emerged wheeling her patient down the hall and into the living room to greet us.

You always expect people in wheelchairs to look wasted so it was a shock when Woodville-Gentle arrived plump, pink and smiling. Or at least most of his face was smiling. There was a noticeable droop to the right-hand side. It looked like the aftermath of a stroke but I saw that he seemed to retain full movement in both his arms – although with a noticeable shake. His legs were concealed by a tartan blanket that fell all the way to his feet. He was clean-shaven, well scrubbed and he seemed genuinely pleased to see us which, in case you’re wondering, is another square of the suspicious behaviour bingo card.

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘It’s the fuzz.’ He noticed Lesley’s mask and did an exaggerated double take. ‘Young lady, don’t you think you’re taking the concept of undercover work just a tad too seriously? Can I offer you tea? Varenka is very reliable with tea, providing you like it with lemon.’

‘As it happens, I’d love a cuppa,’ I said. If he was going to play louche upper crust I wasn’t beyond doing cockney copper.

‘Sit, sit,’ he said and gestured us to the pair of chairs arranged by the dining table. He wheeled himself into position opposite and clasped his hands together to keep them still. ‘Now you must tell me what brings you bursting through my door?’

‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but David Faber recently went missing and we’re part of the investigation into his whereabouts,’ I said.

‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a David Faber,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘Is he famous?’

I made a show of opening my notebook and flicking back through the pages. ‘You were both at Magdalene College, Oxford at the same time, from 1956 to 1959.’

‘Not quite correct,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘I was there from 1957 and while my memory is not what it was I’m fairly certain I would have remembered a name like Faber. Do you have a photograph?’

Lesley pulled a picture from her inside pocket, an obviously modern colour print of a monochrome photograph. It showed a young man in a tweed jacket and authentically wavy period haircut standing against a nondescript brick wall with ivy. ‘Does it ring any bells?’ she asked.

Woodville-Gentle squinted at the picture.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.

I’d have been amazed if he had, given that me and Lesley had downloaded it off a Swedish Facebook page. David Faber was entirely fictitious and we’d chosen a Swede because it made it extremely unlikely that any of the Little Crocodiles would actually recognise him. It was just an excuse to poke our noses into their lives without alerting any practitioners, if there were any others, that we were after them.

‘It was our information that he was in the same social club at Cambridge,’ I flicked through my notebook again. ‘The Little Crocodiles.’