Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

He looked well, my father, which meant that he’d had his ‘medicine’ some time this morning. He’d had a reputation for good grooming in the heyday of his career, and my mum liked to keep him respectable: khaki slacks and linen jacket over a pale green shirt. I always thought of it as Empire chic, and it certainly did something for my mum. He looked suitably colonial in the sunlight, sitting on a wicker chair that was almost as wide as the balcony. There was just enough room left for a stool and white plastic end table. I put the coffees down on the table by the pub-sized Foster’s Lager ashtray and my dad’s tin of Golden Virginia.

From our balcony, on a clear day, you could see all the way across the courtyard to the net curtains of our neighbours.

‘How’s the Filth?’ he asked. He always called the police the Filth, although he turned up for my graduation from Hendon and seemed proud enough of me then.

‘It’s not easy keeping the masses down,’ I said. ‘They keep fighting and nicking stuff.’

‘That’s the sad condition of the working man,’ said Dad. He sipped his coffee, put the mug down and picked up his tobacco tin. He didn’t open it, just placed it on his lap and rested his fingers on it.

I asked whether Mum was okay, and where they’d been the night before. She was fine and they’d gone to a wedding. He was hazy as to whose; one of my many cousins, a definition that could range from the child of my aunt to a guy who wandered into my mother’s house and didn’t leave for two years. Traditionally a good Sierra Leonean wedding should last several days, as should a funeral, but in deference to the hectic pace of modern British life the expats liked to keep the celebrations down to just a day, or thirty-six hours, tops. Not counting preparation time.

As he described the music — he was hazy on the food, the clothes and the religion — my dad opened his tobacco tin, took out a packet of Rizlas and with great care and deliberation made himself a roll-up. Once it was finished to his satisfaction, he put the tobacco, Rizlas and the roll-up itself back in the tin, sealed it up and replaced it on the table. When he picked up his coffee I saw his hand was trembling. My dad would leave the tin on the table for as long as he could stand it before picking it up and putting it on his lap, then he might remake his roll-up or, if he couldn’t stand it any longer, smoke the damn thing. My dad had the early stages of emphysema. The same doctor who supplied him with his heroin had warned him that if he couldn’t stop smoking he should at least keep it down to less than five fags a day.

‘Do you believe in magic?’ I asked.

‘I once heard Dizzy Gillespie play,’ said Dad. ‘Does that count?’

‘It might do,’ I said. ‘Where do you reckon playing like that comes from?’

‘In Dizzy? That was all talent and hard work, but I did know a sax player said he got his chops from the Devil, made a deal at the crossroads, that sort of thing.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘He was from Mississippi?’

‘No, Catford,’ said Dad. ‘Said he made his deal on Archer Street.’

‘Was he any good?’

‘He wasn’t bad,’ said Dad. ‘But the poor bastard went blind two weeks later.’

‘Was that part of the deal?’ I asked.

‘Apparently so,’ said Dad. ‘Your mum thought it was when I told her. She said that only a fool expects to get something for nothing.’

That sounded like Mum, whose principal saying was, ‘If it doesn’t cost something, it isn’t worth anything’. Actually her real principal saying was, at least to me, ‘Don’t think you’ve got so big that I can’t still beat you’. Not that she ever beat me, a deficiency that she later blamed for my failure to pass my A levels. Numerous university-bound cousins were held up as shining examples of discipline through physical violence.

My dad picked up his tobacco tin and put it in his lap. I picked up the mugs and washed them in the kitchen sink. I remembered the groundnut chicken and rice in the microwave. I took that out to the balcony, ate the chicken but left most of the rice. I also drank about a litre of cold water, which is a common side effect of eating my mum’s food. I seriously considered going back to bed. What else was there for me to do?

I stuck my head out onto the balcony to ask my dad if there was anything he needed. He said he was fine. As I watched, he opened his tin, took out the roll-up and put it in his mouth. He took out his silver-coloured paraffin lighter and lit the fag with the same deliberate ceremony with which he had rolled it. As he inhaled for the first time there was a look of bliss on his face. Then he started coughing, nasty wet coughs that sounded like he was bringing up the lining of his lungs. With a practised twist he snuffed out the roll-up and waited for the coughing to subside. When it had, he put the roll-up back between his lips and lit up again. I didn’t hang about — I knew how it went on from there.

I love my dad. He’s a walking caution.

My mum has three landlines. I picked one up and called my voice-mail service. The first message was from Dr Walid.

‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Just to let you know that Thomas is conscious and asking for you.’

The broadsheets called it May Madness , which made it sound like a tea dance. The tabloids called it May Rage , presumably because it had one less syllable to fit across the front page. The TV had some good footage of middle-aged women in long dresses tossing bricks at the police. Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force explaining how the riot was caused by whatever socio-political factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society — if only we knew what.

There was a big police presence in UCH’s A&E department, most of them loitering in search of overtime or trying to get statements from victims of the riot. I didn’t want to give a statement, so I slipped in the back way by grabbing a mop bucket and passing myself off as a cleaner. I got lost in the upper levels looking for Dr Walid before stumbling onto a corridor that looked vaguely familiar. I opened doors at random until I found Nightingale’s. He didn’t really look any better than last time.

‘Inspector,’ I said. ‘You wanted to see me.’

His eyes opened and flicked towards me. I sat on the edge of the bed so he could see me without moving his head.

‘Got shot,’ he whispered.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was there.’

‘Shot before,’ he said.

‘Really, when?

‘War.’

‘Which war was that?’ I asked.

Nightingale grimaced and shifted in his bed. ‘Second,’ he said.

‘The Second World War,’ I said. ‘What were you in — the baby brigade?’ To have enlisted even in 1945 Nightingale would have had to have been born in 1929, and that’s if he’d lied about his age. ‘How old are you?’

‘Old,’ he whispered. ‘Turn century.’

‘Turn of the century?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You were born at the turn of the century — the twentieth century?’ He looked as if he was in his bluff mid-forties, which is a neat trick when you’re lying half-dead in a hospital bed with a machine that goes ‘ping’ at regular intervals. ‘You’re over a hundred years old?’

Nightingale made a wheezing sound that alarmed me for a moment, until I realised that it was laughter.

‘Is this natural?’

He shook his head.

‘Do you know why it’s happening?’

‘Gift horse,’ he whispered. ‘Mouth.’

I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t want to tire him too much, so I told him about Lesley, the riot and being locked out of the Folly. When I asked him whether Molly could help me track Henry Pyke, he shook his head.