Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

Counting a stop for refs at Gaby’s, salt beef and pickle, it took me a good three hours and I didn’t get back to the Folly until late afternoon. I wanted to head straight for the tech cave to check the footage but Nightingale insisted that both me and Lesley practise knocking a tennis ball back and forth across the atrium using only impello . Nightingale claimed it had been a popular rainy day sport back when he was at school and called it Indoor Tennis. Me and Lesley, much to his annoyance, called it Pocket Quidditch.

The rules were simple and about what you’d expect from a bunch of adolescents in an aggressively allmale environment. The players stood at either end of the atrium and had to stay within a two-metre-wide chalk circle drawn on the floor. The referee, in this case Nightingale, introduced a tennis ball at the mid-point of the pitch and the players attempted to use impello and any other related spells to propel the ball at their opponent. Points were scored for strikes to the body between neck and waist and lost for losing control of the ball in your half of the court. As soon as he got wind of the sport, Dr Walid had insisted that we wear cricket helmets and face guards when we played.

Nightingale grumbled that in his day they would never have dreamt of wearing protection — not even in the sixth form when they’d played with cricket balls — and besides it reduced the player’s incentive to maintain good form and not be struck in the first place. Lesley, who never liked wearing a helmet, objected right up to the point where she found she could get an amusing boing sound by bouncing the ball off mine. I’d have been more irritated except, 1) helmet, 2) Lesley would pass up easy body shots to go for my head, which made it easier to win.

Back in the days at Casterbrook the boys had placed bets on the game. They had wagered fag-days, fagging being when a younger boy acted as a servant for an older one, which tells you just about everything you need to know about posh schools. Me and Lesley, both being aspirational working class, staked rounds at the pub instead. The fact that I had a seven month head start as an apprentice on Lesley probably being the only reason she ever had to pay for her own drinks.

In the end it was a draw with one body strike to me, one boing to Lesley and a disqualified point caused by Toby jumping up and catching the ball in mid-air. We broke for what me and Lesley called dinner, Nightingale called supper and Molly, we’d begun to suspect, thought of as field trials for her culinary experimentation.

‘This potato tastes a bit different,’ said Lesley poking at the neat conical pile of mash that balanced one side of the plate against what Nightingale had identified as seared tuna steak.

‘That’s because it’s yam,’ said Nightingale — surprising me. It’s not like yam is big on the traditional English menu. Although if it had been, they probably would have mashed it and then covered it in onion gravy. My mum boils it like cassava, slices it up with butter and a soup spicy enough to cauterise the end of your tongue.

I looked over at Molly, who watched over us as we ate, and she lifted her chin and met my gaze.

‘It’s very nice,’ I said.

We heard a distant ringing noise that confused everyone until we recognised the Folly’s front door bell. We all exchanged looks until it was established that since I wasn’t intrinsically supernatural, a chief inspector or required to put on a mask before meeting the public I was nominated door opener in chief.

It turned out to be a cycle courier who handed over a package in exchange for my signature. It was an A4 envelope stiffened with cardboard and addressed to Thomas Nightingale Esq.

Nightingale used a serrated steak knife to open the envelope at the wrong end, the better, he explained, to avoid unpleasant surprises and extracted a sheet of expensive paper. He showed it to me and Lesley — it was handwritten and in Latin. Nightingale translated.

‘“The Lord and Lady of the River do give you notice that they will be holding their Spring Court together at the Garden of Bernadette of Spain”,’ he paused and reread the last bit. ‘“Bernie Spain’s Garden and that you are hereby charged as if by ancient custom to secure and police the fair against all enemies.” And it’s sealed with the Hanged Man of Tyburn and the Waterwheel of Oxley plus signatures.’

He showed us the seals.

‘Somebody’s been watching way too much Game of Thrones ,’ said Lesley. ‘And what is the Spring Court?’ Nightingale explained that it had once been traditional for the Old Man of the Thames to hold a Spring Court upriver, usually near Lechlade, where his subjects could come and pay their respects. It generally occurred at or around the spring equinox but there hadn’t been a formal court since the Old Man abandoned the tideway in the 1850s.

‘Nor, if I remember history correctly, did the Folly play a role,’ said Nightingale. ‘Except to send an envoy and our respects.’

‘I notice it says “as if by ancient custom”,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I imagine both Tyburn and Oxley enjoyed the ambiguity of that statement.’

‘Perhaps they’re not taking it very seriously,’ I said.

‘If only that were true,’ said Nightingale.

After supper I headed for the tech cave for a beer and to see what I could find on cable. I thought Lesley might join me, but she said she was knackered and going to bed. I pulled a Red Stripe from the fridge and futilely flicked through the channels for five minutes before deciding I might as well process that afternoon’s CCTV footage.

I started with the stuff from the shop. Judging from the angle, the camera was mounted above the counter looking down the long narrow shop to the front door. I cued up and ran it from the moment our man stepped inside, clutching his black bag of swag, and briskly approached the counter.

He was white, pale faced, thin nosed, in his midforties I guessed, dark hair going grey, bags under dark blue eyes. He was dressed in a tan zip-up jacket over a light-coloured shirt and khaki chinos.

I watched the transaction going the way Headley had described, and the moment when the thief realised he’d made a mistake was well obvious. He glanced involuntarily up at the CCTV camera, realised what he’d done and was out the door less than a minute later.

Thirty-six seconds precisely in fact — by the time-code in the corner of the screen.

The CCTV from the shop was the latest kit. I rolled it back and got a capture of his face when he looked at the camera. It blew up nicely just using Paint Shop Pro — I printed a couple of copies for use later. Despite the poor angle I was pretty sure that the book thief turned right when he exited the shop — going towards St Martin’s Lane — but just to be on the safe side I checked the footage I had from the Barclays’ branch on Charing Cross Road. Banks in central London have top of the line CCTV and one of the branch’s fifteen cameras just clipped the entrance to Cecil Court. I scanned twenty minutes either side of the time of his departure and confirmed that he definitely hadn’t come out on to Charing Cross Road.

There had been a couple of good camera positions in Cecil Court itself, but the footage hadn’t been kept. So the best I had for the St Martin’s Lane side was from the Angel and Crown who hadn’t figured how to delete yet — thank god. Still, it was a low-spec system that recorded ten frames a second, and had more ghosting than a camera operating in daylight should have. Despite that, he was easy to spot, tan zip-up jumper and khaki slacks, emerging onto St Martin’s Lane, turning left and climbing into an off-white Mondeo estate — Mark 2 from what I could see.