Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

If you want to help, Nightingale had told me, study harder, learn faster. Do the job.

I’d have stayed longer, but I was on the clock.

Nightingale, in an adjacent room, was awake and sitting up and doing the Telegraph crossword. We discussed the case of the missing penis.

‘ Vagina dentata ,’ said Nightingale. I wasn’t sure that I was reassured by the thought that it was common enough for there to be a technical term for it. ‘Could be oriental, something out of Chinatown,’ he said.

‘Not Japanese,’ I said. ‘The victim was quite clear about that.’

Nightingale gave me some titles to look up in the library when I had a moment. ‘But not today,’ he said. ‘Are you nervous?’

‘A lot of things can go wrong,’ I said.

‘Just don’t drink anything,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be fine.’

As I walked back home to the Folly, I generated my own suspicions as to the identity of the phantom dick snatcher. As soon as I got in I went looking for Molly, who I found in the kitchen — chopping up cucumbers.

‘Have you been out clubbing recently?’ I asked.

She stopped slicing and turned to regard me with solemn black eyes.

‘You sure?’

She shrugged and started chopping again. I decided that I was going to let Nightingale sort that one out — a clear chain of command is a wonderful thing.

‘Is that what we’re having for the trip?’ I asked. ‘Cucumber sandwiches?’

Molly indicated the rest of her ingredients — salami and liver sausage.

‘You’re just taking the piss now, aren’t you?’

She gave me a pitying look, and handed me a recycled Sainsbury’s bag with a packed lunch in it.

In the garage there were no fewer than six suitcases piled beside the Jag. In addition, Beverley had brought a large shoulder bag that was, I learned later, stuffed with the entire top shelf of a Peckham hair salon. Beverley had heard all about the countryside, and wasn’t taking any chances.

‘Why me?’ she asked as she watched me loading up the Jag.

I opened the door for her and she climbed in, buckled up and held her shoulder bag protectively in her lap.

‘Because that’s the agreement,’ I said.

‘Nobody asked me,’ said Beverley.

I got in and checked to make sure that I had a couple of Mars Bars and a bottle of sparkling in the glove compartment. Satisfied that emergency supplies were laid on, I started up the Jag and pulled out of the garage.

Beverley stayed silent until we passed Junction 3 on the M4.

‘That was the Crane,’ she said.

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘The River Crane,’ she said. ‘We just crossed it.’

‘One of your sisters?’

‘Last one on this side of the river,’ she said.

I merged us onto the M25 at junction 15 and headed south. Traffic was light, which was a mercy. An Airbus A380 on its final approach to Heathrow crossed our path, so low I swear I could see faces peering out of the double row of windows.

‘How come she wasn’t at the meeting?’ I asked.

‘She’s never in the country,’ said Beverley. ‘She’s always flying off somewhere, sending us text messages from Bali and postcards from Rio. She went swimming in the Ganges, you know,’ Beverley said, the last in a tone of awed disapproval.

Thanks to the national curriculum, even I knew that the Ganges is one of the most sacred rivers in India, although to be honest I couldn’t remember why. Something to do with funeral pyres and chanting. I put it on the list of things that I needed to look into — it was getting to be a long list.

In the end I’d come up with one of those messy compromises. As Brock had written, you couldn’t get the genii locorum to do something as simple as negotiate a contract; symbolism had to be involved. An oath of fealty was out of the question, and a cross-dynastic marriage was too cruel a fate for either Mother or Father Thames. So I suggested an exchange of hostages, a confidence-building measure to cement ties between the two halves of the river; a suitably mediaeval solution designed to appeal to two people who definitely still believed in divine rights. It was a typically English compromise held together by string, sealing wax and the old god network. I’d like to say that I remembered the practice of exchanging hostages from school history classes or from stories of pre-colonial life in Sierra Leone, but the truth was that it came up while playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was 13.

‘Why does it have to be me?’ Beverley had said after she’d found out.

‘It can’t be Tyburn,’ I’d said. You don’t inflict Tyburn on anyone as a gesture of peace and goodwill. And Brent is too young.’ There were other daughters, some the spirits of rivers I’d never heard of and one, a plump, smiley young woman, whose formal name was the Black Ditch. Not that anyone called her that. I figured that Mama Thames thought Beverley was the least likely to cause her embarrassment among the yokels. The hostage from the other side was called Ash, whose river’s principal claim to fame was that it ran past Shepperton Film Studios.

The exchange was scheduled to take place on the evening of 21 June, Midsummer, at Runnymede. Our host was Colne Brook, son Colne who was also the father of Ash — the tributaries of the Thames can get pretty tangled, especially after two thousand years of ‘improvements’. I suspected that the real organisational brains would be Oxley — he wouldn’t want to leave anything to chance. This was confirmed when a series of hand-printed signs appeared beside the road as I negotiated the tricky bit through Hythe End, which guided us neatly down a cul-de-sac lined with semis which terminated in a gate and an impromptu car park.

Isis met us at the gate with a bevy of teenage boys all dressed in their Sunday best who scampered eagerly over to the Jag and demanded to be allowed to carry the luggage. One straw-headed scamp asked for a fiver to guard the Jag itself — I promised him a tenner just to be on the safe side, payable on my return, of course.

Isis hugged Beverley, who was finally persuaded to relinquish her death grip on her cosmetics bag, and led her through the gate into the fields beyond. Father Thames had his ‘throne’ near the priory in the shade of an ancient yew tree. Around him were arrayed his sons, their wives and grandchildren in all their donkey-jacketed and sideburned glory. All of them silently watched our approach as if Beverley were a reluctant widow in a Bollywood melodrama. The throne itself was constructed of old-fashioned rectangular hay bales, of the type I happen to know are no longer common in British farming practice, draped with elaborately embroidered horse blankets. For this occasion the Old Man of the River had been stuffed into his best suit, and his beard and hair combed until it was just scruffy-looking.

I followed Beverley and Isis as they stepped before the throne. I’d coached her the day before, all day, but Isis still had to show her the way — a deep curtsey with head bowed — before Beverley followed suit. The Old Man of the River caught my eye and then, very deliberately, touched his hand to his chest and then extended his arm, palm facing down — the Roman salute. Then he climbed off his throne, took Beverley’s hands in his own and raised her up.

He welcomed her in a language I didn’t understand, and kissed her on both cheeks.

The air was suddenly full of the scent of apple blossom and horse sweat, Tizer and old hose pipes, dusty roads and the sound of children laughing, all of it strong enough to make me take a step backwards in surprise. A wiry arm snaked round my shoulders to steady me, and Oxley slapped his hand on my chest in friendly rib-bending fashion.

‘Oh, did you feel that , Peter?’ he asked. ‘That’s the start of something, if I’m not mistaken.’