Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

Lesley had her mask off and I didn’t know where to look. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and the skin on her cheeks and what was left of her nose looked pink and inflamed.

‘I can’t chew properly on the left side,’ she said. ‘It’s going to look weird.’

Venison, I thought, a lovely meat but notoriously chewy – well done Peter.

‘Is it like the way you eat spaghetti?’ I asked.

‘I eat it the way Italians eat it,’ she said.

‘Yeah, face down in the bowl,’ I said. ‘Very stylish.’

The venison was not chewy, it cut like butter. But Lesley was right, it did look funny the way she bulged it all the way over in one cheek – like a chipmunk with a toothache.

She gave me a sour look which made me laugh.

‘What?’ she asked after swallowing. I noticed that the scars from the latest operation on her jaw were still red and inflamed.

‘It’s nice to be able to see your expression,’ I said.

She froze.

‘How am I supposed to know whether you’re taking the piss or not?’ I asked.

Her hand came up towards her face and stopped. She looked at it, as if surprised to find it hovering in front of her mouth, and then used it to pick up her water instead.

‘Couldn’t you just assume that I was always taking the piss?’ she asked.

I shrugged and changed the subject.

‘What did you think of our high-rise recluse?’

She frowned. I was surprised – I didn’t know she could still do that.

‘Interesting, I thought,’ she said. ‘The nurse was scary though – don’t you think?’

‘We should have taken one of the Rivers,’ I said. ‘They can tell you’re a practitioner just by smelling you.’

‘Really? What do we smell like?’

‘I didn’t want to ask,’ I said.

‘I’m sure Beverley thought you smelt lovely,’ said Lesley. She was right, mask or no mask, I still couldn’t tell when she was taking the piss.

‘I wonder if it’s innate to the Rivers or if all-’ I stopped myself before I said magical folk. A man’s got to have some standards.

‘Creatures?’ suggested Lesley. ‘Monsters?’

‘Magically endowed,’ I said.

‘Well Beverley was certainly magically endowed,’ said Lesley. Definitely taking the piss, I thought. ‘Do you think it’s something we could learn to do?’ she asked. ‘It would make the job a lot easier if we could sniff them out.’

You can tell when somebody is shaping a forma in their mind. It’s like vestigium , anyone can sense it, the trick as always is to recognise the sense impression for what it was. Nightingale said that you could learn to recognise an individual practitioner by their signare , the distinctive signature of their magic. Once Lesley had joined us I did a blind taste test and found that I couldn’t tell the difference at all – although Nightingale could, ten times out of ten.

‘It’s something you learn to do with practice,’ he’d said. He also claimed that he could not only tell who cast a spell, but who had trained the caster and sometimes who had developed the spell. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

‘I’ve got a tentative experimental protocol,’ I said. ‘But it involves getting one of the Rivers to sit still while we take it in turns to listen to her head. And we’d need Nightingale to act as a control.’

‘That’s not going to happen any time soon,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe it’s in the library – how’s your Latin?’

‘Better than yours – Aut viam inveniam aut faciam ,’ I said which means, ‘I’ll either find a way or make one’ which was a favourite of Nightingale’s and attributed to Hannibal.

‘ Vincit qui se vincit ,’ said Lesley, who loved learning Latin almost as much as I did. She conquers who conquer themselves, another Nightingale favourite and the motto from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast , which was something we hadn’t had the heart to tell him yet.

‘It’s pronounced win-kit not vincent,’ I said.

‘Bite me,’ said Lesley.

I grinned at her and she smiled back – sort of.

The Murder Team’s outside inquiry team lives in a big room on the first floor sandwiched between the Inside Inquiry Team and the Intelligence Unit (motto: we do the thinking so that other coppers don’t have to). It was a large room with pale blue walls and dark blue carpet crammed with a dozen desks and a variety of swivel chairs, some of which were held together with duct tape. In the old days it would have smelt of second-hand cigarettes but nowadays it had the familiar tang of police under pressure – I’m not sure it’s an improvement.

I’d been told to attend the seven o’clock morning briefing so I rolled up at a quarter to, to find that I was sharing a desk with Guleed and DC Carey. A full Murder Team is about twenty-five people and most of those arrived in time for the briefing to start at seven fifteen. There was much slurping of coffee and moaning about the snow. I said hello to the officers I knew from the Jason Dunlop case and we all found seats or perched on desks at one end of the room where Seawoll stood in front of a whiteboard – just like they do on the TV.

Sometimes your dreams really can come true.

He ran through where, when, how and who. Stephanopoulos gave a quick victimology of James Gallagher and tapped a photocopy of a picture of Zachary Palmer’s face that had been stuck on the whiteboard.

‘No longer a suspect,’ she said and I realised with a start that nobody had told me he was a suspect. Obviously when you play with the big boys you’re expected to keep up. ‘We have CCTV coverage of the front and back access to the house in Kensington Gardens and there’s no sign of him leaving until we turn up the next morning.’

She started running the various alternative lines of inquiry and one of the DCs near me murmured, ‘It’s going to be a grinder.’

Second day, no prime suspect. He was right, it was going to be a matter of grinding the leads down until something popped. Unless of course there was a supernatural short cut, in which case this was my chance to make an impression. Maybe pick up some favours, get a bit of respect?

I should have smacked myself in the face for having that thought.

Seawoll introduced a thin, brown-haired white woman in a smart but travel-creased skirt suit with a gold badge hung from her belt.

‘This is Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds from the FBI,’ he said and we all went ‘ooh’ – the whole room – we just couldn’t help ourselves. That didn’t bode well for international co-operation because we were all bound to be extra surly to cover up the embarrassment.

‘Since James Gallagher’s father is a US senator, the American embassy has requested that Agent Reynolds be allowed to observe the investigation on their behalf,’ said Seawoll. He nodded at a male DS seated on a desk on the other side from me. ‘Bob there will be handling the security aspects of the case in case they relate back to the senator.’

Bob held up his hand in greeting and Agent Reynolds nodded back, a tad nervously I thought.

‘I’ve asked Agent Reynolds to give us some further background on the victim,’ said Seawoll.

There was nothing nervous about her delivery, though. Her accent sounded like a mixture of Southern and Midwestern but grown clipped through her FBI training and experience. She certainly rattled through James Gallagher’s early life, youngest of three children, born in Albany while his father was a state senator – which was emphatically not the same as being the state’s senator. He was privately educated, showed an aptitude for art, attended college in New York University. One speeding ticket when he was seventeen and his name came up during an inquiry into a fellow student’s overdose a year before he graduated. A canvass of his college friends indicated a young man who was personable and well liked, if rather reserved.