Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

‘Maintain the Queen’s peace,’ I said. ‘Bring order out of chaos.’

She shook her head sadly. ‘What makes you think there’s any order?’ she said. ‘And you’ve been out on patrol on a Saturday night. Does that look like the Queen’s peace?’

I went to lean nonchalantly against a lamp post but it went wrong and I staggered around a bit. Lesley found this much funnier than I thought it really deserved. She sat down on the step of Waterstone’s bookshop to catch her breath.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why are you in the job?’

‘Because I’m really good at it,’ said Lesley.

‘You’re not that good a copper,’ I said.

‘Yes I am,’ she said. ‘Let’s be honest, I’m bloody amazing as a copper.’

‘And what am I?’

‘Too easily distracted.’

‘I am not.’

‘New Year’s Eve, Trafalgar Square, big crowd, bunch of total wankers pissing in the fountain — remember that?’ asked Lesley. ‘Wheels come off, wankers get stroppy and what were you doing?’

‘I was only gone for a couple of seconds,’ I said.

‘You were checking what was written on the lion’s bum,’ said Lesley. ‘I was wrestling a couple of drunken chavs and you were doing historical research.’

‘Do you want to know what was on the lion’s bum?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Lesley, ‘I don’t want to know what was written on the lion’s bum, or how siphoning works or why one side of Floral Street is a hundred years older than the other side.’

‘You don’t think any of that’s interesting?’

‘Not when I’m wrestling chavs, catching car thieves or attending a fatal accident,’ said Lesley. ‘I like you, I think you’re a good man, but it’s like you don’t see the world the way a copper needs to see the world — it’s like you’re seeing stuff that isn’t there.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lesley. ‘I can’t see stuff that isn’t there.’

‘Seeing stuff that isn’t there can be a useful skill for a copper,’ I said.

Lesley snorted.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Last night while you were distracted by your caffeine dependency I met an eyewitness who wasn’t there.’

‘Wasn’t there,’ said Lesley.

‘How can you have an eyewitness who wasn’t there, I hear you ask?’

‘I’m asking,’ said Lesley.

‘When your eyewitness is a ghost,’ I said.

Lesley stared at me for a moment. ‘I would have gone with the CCTV camera controller myself,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Guy watching the murder on CCTV,’ said Lesley. ‘He’d be a witness who wasn’t there. But I like the ghost thing.’

‘I interviewed a ghost,’ I said.

‘Bollocks,’ said Lesley.

So I told her about Nicholas Wallpenny and the murdering gent who turned back, changed his clothes and then knocked poor– ‘What was the victim’s name again?’ I asked.

‘William Skirmish,’ said Lesley. ‘It was on the news.’

‘Knocked poor William Skirmish’s head clean off his shoulders.’

‘That wasn’t on the news,’ said Lesley.

‘The murder team will want to keep that back,’ I said. ‘For witness verification.’

‘The witness in question being a ghost?’ asked Lesley.

‘Yes.’

Lesley got to her feet, swayed a bit and then got her eyes focused again. ‘Do you think he’s still there?’ she asked.

The cold air was beginning to sober me up at last. ‘Who?’

‘Your ghost,’ she said, ‘Nicholas Nickleby. Do you think he might still be at the crime scene?’

‘How should I know?’ I said. ‘I don’t even believe in ghosts.’

‘Let’s go and see if he’s there,’ she said. ‘If I see him too then it will be like corob … like crob … proof.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

We wandered arm in arm up King Street towards Covent Garden.

There was a great absence of Nicholas the ghost that night. We started at the church portico where I’d seen him and, because Lesley was a thoroughgoing copper even when pissed, did a methodical search around the perimeter.

‘Chips,’ said Lesley after our second circuit. ‘Or a kebab.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t come out when I’m with someone else,’ I said.

‘Maybe he does shift work,’ said Lesley.

‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a kebab.’

‘You’ll be good at the Case Progression Unit,’ said Lesley. ‘And you’ll be …’

‘If you say “… making a valuable contribution” I will not be held responsible for my actions.’

‘I was going to say “making a difference”,’ she said. ‘You could always go to the states, I bet the FBI would have you.’

‘Why would the FBI have me?’ I asked.

‘They could use you as an Obama decoy,’ she said.

‘For that,’ I said, ‘you can pay for the kebabs.’

In the end we were too knackered to get kebabs, so we headed straight back to the section house where Lesley utterly failed to invite me to her room. I was at that stage of drunk where you lie on your bed in the dark and the room goes whirling around you, and you’re wondering about the nature of the universe and whether you can get to the sink before you throw up.

Tomorrow was my last day off, and unless I could prove that seeing things that weren’t there was a vital skill for the modern police officer, it was hello Case Progression Unit for me.

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ said Lesley.

Neither of us could face the horrors of the kitchenette that morning, so we found shelter in the station canteen. Despite the fact that the catering staff were a mixture of compact Polish women and skinny Somali men, a strange kind of institutional inertia meant that the food was classic English greasy spoon, the coffee was bad and the tea was hot, sweet and came in mugs. Lesley was having a full English breakfast; I was having a tea.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Your loss, not mine.’

‘Not that ,’ said Lesley, and smacked me on the hand with the flat of her knife. ‘What I said about you being a copper.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken your feedback on board, and having extensively workshopped it this morning I now feel that I can pursue my core career-development goals in a diligent, proactive but, above all, creative manner.’

‘What are you planning to do?’

‘I’m going to hack HOLMES to see if my ghost was right,’ I said.

Every police station in the country has at least one HOLMES suite. This is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, which allows computer-illiterate coppers to join the late twentieth century. Getting them to join the twenty-first century would be too much to ask for.

Everything related to a major investigation is kept on the system, allowing detectives to cross-reference data and avoid the kind of cock-up that made the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper such an exemplary operation. The replacement to the old system was due to be called SHERLOCK, but nobody could find the words to make the acronym work so they called it HOLMES 2.

Theoretically you can access HOLMES 2 from a laptop, but the Metropolitan Police likes to keep its personnel tied to fixed terminals — which can’t be left in trains or sold to pawn shops. When a major investigation occurs, the terminals can be transferred from the suite to incident rooms elsewhere in the station. Lesley and I could have sneaked into the HOLMES suite and risked being caught, but I preferred to plug my laptop into a LAN socket in one of the empty incident rooms and work in safety and comfort.

I’d been sent on a HOLMES 2 familiarisation course three months earlier. At the time I’d been excited because I thought they might be preparing me for a role in major investigations, but now I realise they were grooming me for data entry work. It took me less than half an hour to find the Covent Garden investigation. People are often negligent about passwords, and Inspector Neblett had used his youngest daughter’s name and year of birth, which is just criminal. It also got me read-only access to the files we wanted.