Бен Ааронович - Lies Sleeping

After which I headed back to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to spell Nightingale, who was practically camping in their foundry room and no doubt swapping manly stories about hitting pieces of metal together.

While he went back to the Folly I sat guard in the corner of the furnace room, partly because of its good lines of sight but mostly because it was the only place I could get a decent Wi-Fi signal.

Given that all three named authors had died suspicious deaths, I had another look at the PDF of the script fragment I’d found in Richard Williams’s home office.

Judging by the surviving fifteen pages, Against the Dark was a historical horror or supernatural mystery. It started with a simple Saxon herder being stalked through the ruins of Londinium by an unseen horror before being horribly killed. We then cut to our hero, a chiselled, devil-may-care adventurer who tells the first person he meets that he’s from Ireland, presumably so they could cast an American, before neatly talking himself into a fight. He’s only saved at the last minute by the arrival of his companion, a blackamoor, whose dark skin confuses the Saxons long enough for a messenger from the king to rescue them. Although I ran out of script one page into their audience with the king, you didn’t have to be a master of TV tropes to see where the story was going.

I didn’t think it was very good. But it wasn’t so bad that you’d kill the writers.

I like the Dark Ages , Martin Chorley had said when he was monologuing in the basement of One Hyde Park. When a man could make himself a myth.

Or, more precisely, the Post-Roman period. Or, if you like your history fast and loose, the Age of Arthur.

You get a lot of stuff like this in an investigation – things that look suggestive but could just be coincidences. Which happen more often than people think they do.

Yet . . . three people were dead – all of them suspiciously close together.

Bev, who’d been doing lab work down the road at Queen Mary’s, turned up with takeaway, which passed the time until Nightingale returned and I drove her back to SW20 and spent the night at her place.

I woke up at six in the morning to find that Nicky had arrived and had wormed herself into the covers between me and Bev. She smelt faintly of diesel oil and left mud stains on the duvet cover.

‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

‘Uncle Max let me in,’ she said, meaning Maksim, the former Russian mobster who’d forgone crime in favour of being Beverley’s one and only acolyte/handyman.

Bev had reacted to Nicky’s intrusion by muttering, rolling over and going back to sleep.

‘I thought you were staying with Effra?’

‘Was,’ said Nicky. ‘But she won’t be awake for ages.’

‘Does she know you’re here?’ I asked, and Nicky gave a little uncaring shrug.

‘Want to play water balloons in the garden?’ she asked.

‘Is there any chance of you letting me go back to sleep?’

Nicky solemnly shook her head.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just as soon as I’ve left a message for Effra.’ Flinging magical water balloons around was as good a practice session as Nightingale could ask for. ‘And I’ve had some coffee.’

‘Can I have pancakes?’ asked Nicky.

Saturday I had off but I had to head back to the Folly Sunday morning. Now that I was properly PIP2 qualified, Nightingale felt I would have time to concentrate a bit upon my magical studies. Since he was still guarding the drinking bell, that meant Latin and Greek and two hours on the firing range alternating between perforating cardboard cut-outs and fending off paintballs.

Since the police staff mostly work office hours, the Folly had started to feel a bit empty on the weekends. Sometimes the only sound was Toby barking or Molly humming a happy little tune as she tenderised a steak or beat a carpet to death. The place, at least, has thick walls to keep the heat out, and the magical library on the second floor gets a good cross breeze if you open the right windows. Abigail might be outpacing me, but my Latin’s got to the point where I just need a dictionary for the vocab. Cicero wouldn’t approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C .

Unlike the clergy of the Middle Ages, who were halfway to speaking Italian by the end of the fourteenth century. As soon as I went looking for the Post-Roman period I found some eighteenth-century references to Roger Bacon, old Doctor Marvellous himself. His Latin was remarkably good, so it’s just a pity that he wrote what I was looking for in Greek. For extra confusion it was called the Opus Arcanum, which is Latin. I’ve never really got the hang of Greek, but with the aid of a dictionary, a 1922 edition of Smyth and Messing’s Greek Grammar , and Google, I think I got the gist. I also scanned the relevant passage and sent it off to Professor Postmartin in Oxford.

According to Bacon, the Prophetiae Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth had originally contained a section relating to the original foundation of St Paul’s in circa ad 604 and, even more interestingly, the use of bells to either signal or usher in – the translation wasn’t clear – a change, or the fulfilment of a prophecy.

A bell for ringing in the changes , Martin Chorley had called the bell in the Whitechapel foundry. Or maybe the fulfilment of a prophecy? A bell made with the help of ancient stones taken from pagan and Christian religious sites. Imbued with vestigia , perhaps.

People had died to protect the secrets of that bell. I doubted that Chorley had it made to indulge a hitherto unreported interest in campanology.

The trouble was that I was beginning to suspect that Bacon’s Greek was as bad as mine and, deciding that I had reached the limit of my Greek, I dumped it all on Professor Postmartin – who loves this sort of thing anyway.

But, to keep Nightingale happy, I read a big chunk of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae – the bits about Uther Pendragon and his son Arthur.

The following Tuesday was taken up with the American first lady’s visit to a school in Whitechapel. The American Secret Service were already unhappy about having their second biggest target at a largely Muslim school in London’s most Muslim area. Even more so since the Home Office wouldn’t let them park a couple of Abrams main battle tanks on Commercial Road. We all had to work extra hard to convince them security was tight.

The Commissioner requested on the spot Falcon coverage – just in case.

‘I didn’t want to ask him what contingencies he had in mind,’ said Nightingale. ‘I felt he might be a tad preoccupied.’

And it might have been a fun day out for all, if it hadn’t been necessary to guard the bell at the foundry. Striking while everyone is distracted is Martin Chorley’s signature move, so I didn’t argue when Nightingale selected me for the job.

‘After myself you are the most powerful practitioner we have,’ he said. ‘If I am to cover the first lady then it follows that you should guard the bell.’

As we did the preliminary operational planning I had a clever idea about how we might turn the event to our advantage. Nightingale didn’t like it, but he couldn’t argue with my logic. Which is why Guleed has a selfie with Michelle Obama and I don’t.

Martin Chorley being the dangerous criminal he was, Nightingale insisted on some additional contingency planning. Which was just as well, because just as Michelle was going peak-first lady down the road, the bell began to sing.

I’d camped out beside the bell where a work table and several tons of heavy brass wrangling tools formed an improvised barricade between me and the main gates. There I’d made myself comfortable with a coffee and a takeaway from the Café Casablanca and waited for something to happen.