Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

‘There’s an important shrine nearby,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think the boys might have been after that.’

When he said shrine, I guessed he wasn’t talking about the rugby stadium.

‘And the girls are defending the shrine?’

‘Something like that,’ said Nightingale. He was a superb driver, with a level of concentration that I always find a comfort at high speed but even Nightingale had to slow down when the streets narrowed. Like a lot of London, Richmond town centre had been laid out back when town planning was something that happened to other people.

‘ Tango Whiskey one from Tango Whiskey four; I’m on Church Lane by the river and I’ve got five or six IC1 males climbing into a boat — in pursuit.’

TW-4 would be Richmond’s second Incident Response Vehicle, meaning that just about every available body was now dealing.

TW-3 reported that there was no sign of the IC3 females, naked or otherwise, but that they could see the boat and it was heading for the opposite bank.

‘Call them and tell them we’re on our way,’ said Nightingale.

‘What’s our call sign? I asked.

‘Zulu One,’ he said.

I keyed the microphone. ‘Tango Whiskey One from Zulu One; show us dealing.’

There was a bit of a pause while TW-1 digested this. I wondered if the duty inspector knew who we were.

‘ Zulu One from Tango Whiskey One; copy that .’ The Inspector had sounded flat, neutral. She knew who we were, all right. ‘ Be advised that the suspects seem to have crossed the river and may now be on the south bank .’

I tried to acknowledge but it came out strangulated when Nightingale put us the wrong way down the one-way system on George Street, which you’re not supposed to do even with your lights and siren on. Not least because of the risk of coming face to face with something heavy and designed to clean streets in the middle of the night. I braced my legs in the footwell as our headlights lit up a two-metre, cherry-red Valentine’s heart in the window of Boots.

TW-3 called in: ‘ Be advised that the suspect boat is now on fire, I can see people jumping off .’

Nightingale put his foot down, but mercifully we turned a corner and were back going the right way down the street. On the right was Richmond Bridge, but Nightingale went straight across the mini-roundabout and down the road that ran beside the Thames. We heard TW-1 calling in the London Fire Brigade fire boat — twenty minutes away at least.

Nightingale threw the Jag into a right-hand turn that I hadn’t even noticed and suddenly we were racing through pitch darkness, jolting along a track with gravel pinging off the bottom of the chassis. A sudden turn to the left and we were running right along the water’s edge, following the river as it curved north again. A line of cabin cruisers was moored close to the opposite bank, and beyond them I could see yellow flames — our burning boat. This was no modern pleasure cruiser, it looked more like a half-length narrowboat, the kind owned by homeopathic entrepreneurs that was supposed to have hand-painted gunwales and a cat asleep on the roof. If this boat had a cat, though, I hoped it could swim because it was on fire from stem to stern.

‘There,’ said Nightingale.

I looked ahead and saw figures caught on the fringes of our headlights. I called it into TW-1: ‘Confirm suspects on the south bank near … where the hell are we?’

‘Hammerton’s Ferry,’ said Nightingale and I passed it on.

Nightingale braked the Jag and we pulled up opposite the burning boat. There were torches in the glove compartment, vulcanised monstrosities with old-fashioned filament bulbs. Mine proved reassuringly heavy in the hand when Nightingale and I stepped out into the darkness.

I swept my light along the path but the suspects — assuming that’s what they were — had scarpered. Nightingale seemed more interested in the river than the path. I used my torch to check the water around the narrowboat which, I saw, was drifting slowly downstream, but there was nobody in the water.

‘Shouldn’t we check there’s no one left on board?’ I asked.

‘There had better be no one on that boat,’ said Nightingale loudly, as if speaking to the river rather than to me. ‘And I want that fire put out right now,’ he said.

I heard a giggle out in the darkness. I pointed my torch in the direction it came from but there was nothing to see except the boats moored on the far bank. I turned back to see the burning boat being sucked down into the river as if someone had grabbed hold of the bottom and yanked it under the surface. The last of the flames guttered out and then, like an escaping rubber duck, it bobbed up to the surface, the fire entirely doused.

‘What did that?’ I asked.

‘River spirits,’ said Nightingale. ‘Stay here while I check further up the bank.’

I heard another laugh from across the water. Then, very clearly and not three metres from where I was standing, someone, definitely a woman and a Londoner, said, ‘Oh, shit!’ Then came the sound of metal being torn.

I ran over. At that point the bank was a muddy slope held together with tree roots and bits of stone reinforcement. As I got close I heard a splash, and got my torch on it just in time to see a sleek curved shape vanish beneath the surface. I might have thought it was an otter, if I was stupid enough to think otters were hairless and grew as big as a man. Just below my feet was a square cage made out of chickenwire, part of an anti-erosion project I learned later, one side of which had been torn open.

Nightingale returned empty-handed and said that we might as well wait for the fire boat to come and take the remains of the narrowboat under tow. I asked him if there was such a thing as mermaids.

‘That wasn’t a mermaid,’ he said.

‘So there are such things as mermaids,’ I said.

‘Focus, Peter,’ he said. ‘One thing at a time.’

‘Was that a river spirit?’ I asked.

‘ Genii locorum ,’ he said. ‘The spirit of a place, a goddess of the river, if you like.’ Although not the Goddess of Thames herself, Nightingale explained, because her taking a direct part in any aggro would be a violation of the agreement. I asked whether this was the same agreement as ‘the agreement’, or a different agreement entirely.

‘There are a number of agreements,’ said Nightingale. ‘A great deal of what we do is making sure everyone keeps to them.’

‘There’s a goddess of the river,’ I said.

‘Yes — Mother Thames,’ he said patiently. ‘And there’s a god of the river — Father Thames.’

‘Are they related?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘And that’s part of the problem.’

‘Are they really gods?’

‘I never worry about the theological questions,’ said Nightingale. ‘They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace — that makes them a police matter.’

A searchlight stabbed out of the darkness and swept over the river once, twice, before swinging back to fix on the remains of the narrowboat — the London Fire Brigade had arrived. I smelled diesel exhaust as the fire boat gingerly manoeuvred alongside, figures in yellow helmets waiting with hoses and boathooks. The searchlight revealed that the superstructure had been completely gutted by the fire, but I could see that the hull had been painted red with black trim. I could hear the firemen chatting to each other as they boarded and made the narrowboat safe. It was all reassuringly mundane. Which brought me to another thought. Nightingale and I had scrambled out of bed, into the Jag and headed west before there was any indication that this was nothing more than the tail end of an average Friday night.