Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

‘I’d love to get acquainted, Peter, but now is not the time,’ said Fleet. She turned to Beverley. ‘Get in the car.’

Beverley gave me a sad little smile and did what she was told.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

‘You went to the same school as my kids,’ she said, and climbed back into her Range Rover. The door had barely closed before Fleet started yelling at Beverley. It was muffled but the phrase ‘irresponsible child’ was clearly audible. Beverley saw me watching and rolled her eyes. I wondered what it was like to grow up with that many sisters. I thought it might be nice to have someone pick me up in their Range Rover, even if they were going to shout at me all the way home.

It’s a funny thing about a London riot, but once you’re outside the perimeter, nothing seems to be different. On the minus side, Covent Garden had nearly burned down, but on the positive side there weren’t any major bus routes or tube lines affected. It was dark, I was soaked, the Folly was still out of bounds and I didn’t fancy spending another night in that chair in Nightingale’s hospital room. I did what everyone does when they’ve run out of options — I went back to the one place where, when you turn up, they have to let you in.

I made the mistake of catching the tube. It was crowded with people heading back from an evening out. Even that late in the evening it was warm and close inside the coach but wet, dishevelled and slightly ethnic as I was, I got more elbow room than anyone else.

My back and leg hurt, I was tired and I was missing something. I’ve never trusted the idea of policeman’s gut instinct. I’d watched Lesley at work, and every time she guessed right it was because she’d spotted something I’d missed, dug a bit further or thought a little bit harder about a case. If I was going to save her life, I was going to have to do the same.

More people got on at Goodge Street. It got hotter, but at least I was beginning to dry out. A guy in tan slacks and an off-the-peg blue blazer took the space by the connecting door on my right, close enough for me to catch the tinny backbeat from his iPod earpieces. I began to feel reassuringly anonymous again.

None of the references to revenants I’d read had provided a clear idea of how or why an ordinary ghost gained the ability to suck the magic out of other ghosts. My working theory about ghosts was that they were copies of personalities that had somehow imprinted into the magic residue that accumulated on physical objects — the vestigia . I suspected ghosts degraded over time in the same way that stuff recorded on magnetic tape degrades, unless their signal was boosted with more magic, hence the need to suck it out of other ghosts.

We must have picked up a ranting drunk at Warren Street, because after a brief wind-up he was in full flow by the time we reached Euston. There I was, distracted by a young woman in a pink halter with more cleavage than I thought physically possible who got on and leaned against the glass partition opposite me. I looked away before she caught my eye, and shifted my focus to the nearest advert. I felt the guy in the blue blazer shift position, and guessed he was doing the same thing.

A white boy with dreads lurched into my little corner of the train and I caught a whiff of patchouli, tobacco and marijuana. The woman in the halter top hesitated and then moved closer to me — apparently I was the lesser of two evils.

‘The dogs, the dogs,’ shouted the ranting drunk from somewhere down the other end of the carriage. ‘This country is going to the dogs.’ The happy train lurched into movement again.

Revenants had to be rare or there’d be no ghosts left for them to feed on, which brought me back to my question: what made a revenant? Psychological state at the moment of death, maybe? Henry Pyke had died a pointless and unjust death even by the lax standards of the eighteenth century but even so, his resentment at Charles Macklin and burning disappointment at the sad state of his acting career didn’t seem enough motivation to make him want to force poor Bernard Coopertown to beat his wife to death.

‘Used to be a fucking paradise,’ shouted the ranting drunk. He couldn’t be talking about Camden Town which, despite the markets, had never really aspired to much more than shabby respectability.

Camden tube station is where the Northern Line splits into the Edgware and High Barnet branches, and here loads of people got off and even more people got on. We all crushed up a bit more and I found myself staring at the top of the woman in the halter top’s head — she had blonde roots and dandruff. The man in the blue blazer got shoved in from the right, and between them they had me boxed against the door. We all shuffled about trying to keep our armpits out of each other’s faces — just because it’s uncomfortable, there’s really no excuse for not maintaining standards or making eye contact.

The ranting drunk welcomed everyone aboard. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said. ‘Let’s have the whole fucking world in here — why not?’

The smell of the white boy with dreads intensified, adding urine and excrement — I wondered when he’d last changed his fake combat trousers.

Less than a minute out of Camden Town, the train lurched to a stop. An almost subliminal groan rose from the passengers, especially when the lights dimmed as well. I heard someone chuckling at the other end of the carriage.

There had to be something else behind Henry Pyke, I thought, something much worse than a bitter failed actor.

‘Of course there is,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘That would be me.’

I craned my neck to spot the drunk, but my view was blocked by the white boy with dreads whose face now had an expression of dumb satisfaction. The smell of shit got worse, and I realised the boy had just relieved himself in his pants. He caught my eye and gave me a big smile of contentment.

‘Who are you?’ I shouted. I tried to get out of my corner but the woman in the halter top thrust herself backwards and pinned me to the wall. The lights dimmed further, and this time the groan from the passengers was anything but subliminal.

‘I’m the demon drink,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘I’m gin lane and your local crack house. I’m a follower of Captain Swing, Watt Tyler and Oswald Mosley. I’m the grinning face in the window of the hansom cab; I made Dickens long for the countryside and I’m what your Masters are afraid of.’

I pushed at the woman in the halter top but my arms felt heavy, useless as if in a nightmare. She started to rub herself against me. The carriage was getting hotter and I began to sweat. A hand suddenly grabbed hold of my backside and squeezed tight — it was the man in the blue blazer. I was so shocked that I froze up. I looked at his face but he was staring straight forward with the typically bored, abstracted expression of a seasoned traveller. The bleed from his iPod was louder and more irritating than it had been.

I gagged on the smell of shit and shoved the woman in the halter top enough to get a view down the carriage. I saw my ranting drunk — he had the face of Mr Punch.

The man in the blazer let go of my arse and tried to stick his hand down the back of my jeans. The woman in the halter top ground her hips into my crotch.

‘Is this,’ shouted Mr Punch, ‘any way for a young man to live?’

The white boy with dreads leaned towards me and with great deliberation poked me in the face with his index finger. ‘Poke,’ he said, and giggled. Then he did it again.

There’s a point where a human being will lose it, just lash out at everything around them. Some people spend their lives on the edge of that — most of them end up doing time in prison. Some, a lot of them women, get ground down to that point over years, until one day it’s hello, burning bed and a legal defence of extreme provocation.