Бен Ааронович - Lies Sleeping

I handed over a tenner and asked how she was.

‘Serious, but not life-threatening. No bones were broken and the bullet went straight through so she should make a full recovery.’ He tucked the envelope back in his jacket pocket. ‘I can’t remember the last time a detective inspector got themselves shot. Do you think our Lesley went for non-lethal on purpose?’

I said I thought she had, and Seawoll nodded grimly.

‘You’ve been right all along. Whatever our Lesley’s reasons for going to the dark side she still thinks she’s straight. That’s why she’s protecting you and went for the leg shot with Miriam. There’s still a little bit of the old Lesley in there.’ Seawoll jabbed a finger at me. ‘You must not hesitate to use that against her. I want this business finished, Peter. I want you to promise me that if you have to go hard to get the job done, that’s what you’ll do.’

I nodded, which seemed to satisfy him.

Go hard, I thought as I headed for my room. What did that even mean in this context?

Kitting up consisted of me climbing into a pair of jeans, my public order boots, utility belt and keeping my Metvest with me at all times. I considered borrowing a taser. But you know, despite Stephanopoulos’ good example, I’d never had that much luck with them.

I ended up in the atrium trying to finish the copy of The Silmarillion I’d downloaded onto my phone. Fuck all else happened, except that Foxglove turned up and did some preliminary sketches for the now famous Hither Came Peter, the Librarian which is currently hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.

Around five o’clock I took Toby out for a walk and then I did paperwork until seven.

Go hard – but I felt soft, mushy, as if I was walking around on a thick carpet of pink polyurethane foam. I wanted to cross the river and climb into what I realised I now thought of as our bed – mine and Bev’s. Instead I let Seawoll know where I was and lay down fully dressed in my room upstairs.

It was dark when I was woken up by Nightingale’s call from Glastonbury.

‘He’s definitely been here sometime in the past,’ he said. ‘He bought a farmhouse nearby and he’s practised magic in St Michael’s Tower at the top of the hill – I recognised his signare .’

‘Recently?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say,’ said Nightingale.

It always was with vestigia , which faded or were retained according to a complex set of interactions with material, environment and source, and whether something supernatural had been subsisting off them. Nightingale had sensed no trace of Lesley’s signare , so the magic could have happened any time in the last twenty years.

‘He might have regarded it as his country retreat,’ I said.

‘Quite. I’ve checked for booby traps and handed it over to the local boys. Alexander is sending a search team tomorrow.’

He asked after Stephanopoulos and I passed on the assurances that Dr Walid had given me. I asked if he was heading back tonight and he said he was.

‘Anything else to report?’ he asked.

‘A creeping sense of existential dread,’ I said. ‘Apart from that I’m good.’

‘Chin up, Peter. He’s on his last legs – I can feel it.’

Once Nightingale had rung off I called Guleed, who’d been arriving as a nasty surprise to bell foundries and metal casting companies from Dudley to Wolverhampton all that day.

She said she’d been just about to phone.

‘I was right,’ she said. ‘There’s another bell.’

My mum’s done a lot of shit jobs – literally, in the case of that gig she had cleaning the toilets of that gym in Bloomsbury – but I’ve never seen her hesitate. During the period of my life I like to refer to as ‘that year when I fucked around doing sod all useful’ I used to supplement the dole by tagging along on cleaning gigs. She’d been taking me to work since I was seven, whenever she couldn’t get a babysitter and my dad was too stoned to be reliable. This particular time I was getting the going rate, such as it was, and I was expected to work for it.

You should have seen those men’s loos – I don’t know what they were eating but I remember walking in one time to find that some poor unfortunate had pebble-dashed the walls of a stall to thigh height. I kid you not. The gym staff had taken one look, sealed the stall off with yellow and black hazard tape and left it for the overnight cleaners. I really didn’t want to go in there.

‘Why are you wasting time?’ my mum had said. ‘You are here to do a job and it’s not going to go away on its own.’

So in I went clutching my Domestos and my spray bottle of generic own-brand surface cleaner and got on with it. Pausing a couple of times to throw up while I did.

Sometimes you’ve got to go hard to get the job done.

Although not always in the way that people are expecting.

Parking in the City of London is always a nightmare even with a warrant card, so I got Caffrey to drive me to London Bridge in his van and drop me off in the middle.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry. It’s just magic stuff,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a cab back.’

The sun was long gone by the time I got there and sky was overcast. Beyond Tower Bridge the sawn-off blocks of Canada Water were ochre silhouettes against a murky orange sky. The Thames was in flood and HMS Belfast rode high. I could smell salt water and petrol fumes and the onset of rain. When I put my hands on the railings I got a shock of static electricity.

And I heard a thin, high-pitched giggle.

‘You want to watch it, bruv,’ I said. ‘There’s some people who want you dead.’

The giggle grew into a howl of laughter that I was amazed they weren’t hearing as far away as Canary Wharf.

‘Or deader than you are already.’

The merriment got a bit grimmer, but no less manic then before.

‘They already had a go at your little girl,’ I said, and the laughter stopped.

So the Lord of Misrule is a hypocrite just like everyone else – quelle surprise .

Then Punch spoke, but not with the rasp I was used to. This time softly and sadly.

‘Of all the girls that are so smart,

There’s none like pretty Polly:

She is the darling of my heart,

She is so plump and jolly.’

Plump and jolly, I thought, like a child.

I hauled myself up and sat on the railing with my legs dangling over the parapet – trying to make it look as casual as possible.

‘It looks likes you and me have got a beef with the same people,’ I said.

Punch laughed – this time it sounded rueful and ironic.

‘Why don’t we see if we can sort this out?’ I said.

And that’s when we came to our agreement. Although at the time I couldn’t be sure I’d done what I thought I’d done. Practical metaphysics being a pretty uncertain process, especially when you’re dealing with a hysterical psychotic like our Mr Punch.

I was brought back to reality when my phone rang – it was Beverley.

‘What are you doing up there?’ she asked.

I looked down and saw Beverley three storeys below me, standing hip deep in the water in that impossible way she and her sisters do. She held a phone in one hand and waved with the other.

‘I’m communing with the numinous,’ I said.

‘You can do that when you get home,’ she said. ‘Which is going to be when, exactly?’

‘If I jumped, would you catch me?’

‘No. But I might fish you out afterwards. Get off the railing, babes. You’re making me nervous.’

The rain started in earnest, big summer drops coming straight down and slapping my hands where they rested on the cool metal of the railing.