Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

Seawoll was one of the best, so first we were taken out separately to a tent that the forensic people had erected near the front gate. There, we stripped to our underwear and traded our street clothes for a stylish one-piece bunny suit. As I watched my favourite suit jacket being stuffed into an evidence bag I realised I’d never bothered to find out whether you ever got things like that back. And if they did give it back to me, would they dry-clean it first? They took swabs of the blood on our faces and hands and then were nice enough to hand us some wipes so we could get the rest off.

We ended up back in the transit van for lunch, which was a couple of shop sandwiches, but this being Hampstead they were pretty high-quality. I found myself surprisingly hungry, and I was thinking of asking for a second round when DCI Seawoll climbed into the van with us. His weight caused the van to sink down on one side, and his presence caused Lesley and me to push ourselves unconsciously into our seat backs.

‘How are you two bearing up?’ he asked.

We told him that we were fine and ready, in fact dead keen, to get back up on that horse and go to work.

‘That’s a load of wank,’ he said, ‘but at least it’s convincing wank. In a couple of minutes we’re going to take you down Hampstead nick, where a very nice lady from Scotland Yard is going to take your statements — separately. And while I’m a believer in veracity in all things, I want to make it clear that there isn’t going to be any fucking mumbo-jumbo voodoo X-Files shit in any fucking statement. Is that understood?’

We indicated that he had indeed adequately communicated his position.

‘As far as anyone else is concerned, normal fucking policing got us into this mess, and normal fucking policing will get us out of it.’ And with a creaking of the van’s suspension, he left.

‘Did he just ask us to lie to a senior officer?’ I asked.

‘Yep,’ said Lesley.

‘Just checking,’ I said.

So we spent the rest of the afternoon bearing false witness in separate interview rooms. We were careful to make sure that while our accounts broadly agreed, there were lots of authentic-looking discrepancies. No one can fake a statement the way a policeman can.

After lying, we borrowed some section-house castoffs to wear and headed back to Downshire Hill. A serious crime in an area like Hampstead was always going to be big news, and the media was out in force not least because half the presenters could have walked to work that afternoon.

We let a suspiciously quiet Toby out of the Honda Accord, spent an hour or so cleaning up the back seat and then drove all the way back to Charing Cross with the windows down. We couldn’t really blame Toby, since we’d been the ones who’d left him in the car all day. We bought him a McDonald’s Happy Meal, so I think he forgave us.

We went back to my room and drank the last of the Grolsch. Then Lesley peeled off her clothes and climbed into my bed. I climbed in behind her and put my arms around her. She sighed and spooned against me. I got an erection, but she was much too polite to mention it. Toby made himself comfortable on the end of the bed, using our feet as a pillow, and we all went to sleep like that.

When I woke up the next morning Lesley was gone and my phone was ringing. When I answered, it was Nightingale.

‘Are you ready to go back to work?’ he asked.

I told him I was.

Back to work. Back to the Iain West Forensic Bar and Grill, where Inspector Nightingale and I were booked in for a guided tour of Brandon Coopertown’s horrible injuries. I was introduced to Abdul Haqq Walid, a spry, gingery man in his fifties who spoke with a soft Highland accent.

‘Dr Walid handles all our special cases,’ said Nightingale.

‘I specialise in cryptopathology,’ said Dr Walid.

‘Salem,’ I said.

‘ Al salam alaikum ,’ said Dr Walid, shaking my hand.

I’d been hoping that this time we’d used the remote monitoring suite, but Nightingale didn’t want a visual record of this stage of the autopsy. Once again in aprons, masks and eye protectors, we entered the lab. Brandon Coopertown, or at least the man we thought was Brandon Coopertown, lay naked on his back on the table. Dr Walid had already opened up his torso with the standard Y-shaped incision and, after rummaging around for whatever pathologists look for in there, closed him back up again. We had confirmed his identity via the biometrics on his passport.

‘Below the neck,’ said Dr Walid, ‘he’s a physically fit man in his late forties. It’s his face that’s holds our interest here.’

Or rather what was left of his face. Dr Walid had used clamps to splay open the torn flaps of skin so that Brandon Coopertown’s face looked horribly like a pink and red daisy.

‘Starting with the skull,’ said Dr Walid, and leaned in with a pointer. Nightingale followed suit but I contented myself with peering over his shoulder. ‘As you can see, there’s extensive damage to the bones of the face — the mandible, maxilla and zygomatic bones have been effectively pulverised and the teeth, those normally reliable survivors, have been shattered.’

‘A heavy blow to the face?’ asked Nightingale.

‘That would have been my first guess,’ said Dr Walid, ‘if not for this.’ He used a clamp to seize one flap of skin — I guessed what had once covered the cheek — and draw it over the face. It reached right across the breadth of the skull and flopped down to cover the ear on the other side. ‘The skin has been stretched beyond its natural capacity to retain its shape, and while there’s not much left of the muscle tissue, that too shows lateral degradation. Judging from the lines of stress I’d say something pushed out his face around the chin and nose, stretching the skin and muscle, pulverising the bone and then holding it in position. Then, whatever it is holding it in that shape vanishes, the bone and soft tissues have lost all their integrity and basically his face falls off.’

‘Are you thinking dissimulo ?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Or a technique very like it,’ said Dr Walid.

Nightingale explained, for my benefit, that dissimulo was a magic spell that could change your appearance. Actually he didn’t use the words ‘magic spell’, but that’s what it amounted to.

‘Unfortunately,’ said Dr Walid, ‘it essentially moves the muscles and skin into new positions, and this can cause permanent damage.’

‘Never was a popular technique,’ said Nightingale.

‘You can see why,’ said Dr Walid, indicating the remains of Brandon Coopertown’s face.

‘Any signs that he was a practitioner?’ asked Nightingale.

Dr Walid produced a covered stainless-steel tray. ‘I knew you’d ask that,’ he said, ‘so here’s something I whipped out earlier.’ He lifted the cover to reveal a human brain. I’m no expert, but it didn’t look like a healthy brain to me; it looked shrunken and pitted, as if it had been left out in the sun to shrivel.

‘As you can see,’ said Dr Walid, ‘there’s extensive degradation of the cerebral cortex and evidence of intracranial bleeding that we might associate with some form of degenerative condition, if Inspector Nightingale and I were not already familiar with the true cause.’

He sliced it in half to show us the interior. It looked like a diseased cauliflower.

‘And this,’ said Dr Walid, ‘is your brain on magic.’

‘Magic does that to your brain?’ I asked. ‘No wonder nobody does it any more.’

‘This is what happens if you overstep your limitations,’ said Nightingale. He turned to Dr Walid. ‘There wasn’t any evidence of practice at his house. No books, no paraphernalia, no vestigium .’