Бен Ааронович - Lies Sleeping

But I wasn’t so sure about the matter that I didn’t hit Leather Jacket very hard in the face with my shield and then stamp on his knife wrist, just to be on the safe side. Ditto for the posh guy on a horse, who obviously hadn’t done any cavalry training or he wouldn’t have pulled up beside me and tried to use a riding crop. I like to think the horse was quite relieved to be rid of him. He went into the Walbrook – the muddy creek, that is, not the conspicuously absent goddess.

I had a good view of the bridge by then. A classic bit of Roman military engineering, a wooden roadbed laid over a series of pontoons. It would rise and fall with the tides.

There was nobody on it apart from Martin Chorley.

When I saw this I stopped running and walked the rest of the way. Obviously today was my day.

Chorley glowered at me as he watched me approach.

‘Where is Punch?’ Chorley asked me when I reached him.

‘He’s behind you,’ I said, and when he turned to look I punched him in the face.

His head snapped to the side and he staggered and gave me a look of hurt outrage. A look I’ve seen so many times on the street, or in an interview room or the magistrates’ court. The one on the face of every bully that ever got what was coming to them and counted it unfair, an outrage – You can’t do this to me. I know my rights.

‘You let him go?’ he said.

I said that I had.

‘Why?’ Chorley seemed sincerely perplexed.

‘He thought I was the lesser of two evils,’ said Punch suddenly beside us.

Not the moon-faced Italian puppet but the youngest son of an Atrebates sub-chief – black haired, square faced, dressed in the blood-stained remains of his fashionable Roman tunic, ripped across the front to show the horrid gaping wound in his belly. He was a sad sight, but his eyes were full of a screaming and dangerous mirth.

‘More fool him,’ he shrieked, and seized Chorley by the throat and lifted him off his feet.

I jumped forward but Punch casually backhanded me so hard I landed on my back more than a metre away.

‘We had a deal,’ I shouted.

‘I don’t bargain,’ screamed Punch as I got to my feet.

‘Father,’ said a woman.

Still holding Chorley aloft, Punch turned to look at his daughter as she walked across the bridge towards us. She seemed taller, thinner and darker, and wore a sheath of white linen from armpit to ankle. From her shoulders trailed a shawl of implausibly gauzy material that streamed a couple of metres behind her in a non-existent wind.

Light blazed from the circlet around her head.

Isis of the Walbrook, I thought, you kept that quiet, girl, didn’t you?

Punch turned to his daughter, his face stricken, mouth drawn down in pain.

‘Never like that,’ he said. ‘You promised.’

The light faded, the gauzy shawl slipped from Walbrook’s shoulders and went fluttering over the dark gleaming river. She became shorter, stockier and lighter until she was the women I’d met in the pub a month ago, complete with orange capri pants and purple scorpion T-shirt.

‘Come on, Dad,’ she said. ‘Put the little man down.’

‘Don’t want to,’ said Punch petulantly. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because my boy there is going to deal with him,’ she said, glancing at me. ‘And I owe him. And I pays my debts.’

‘Shan’t,’ said Punch.

‘Drop him!’ said Walbrook sharply, and Punch let go and Chorley fell to the floor.

Punch dropped to his knees, grasped his daughter around her waist and pulled her tightly to him. His face was buried in her hair, tears streamed from his eyes, and he mumbled continuously something that sounded like Italian but was probably Latin.

Ack, I thought. Melodrama.

Walbrook turned to me and said, ‘You still here?’

And then I was falling through the rain again.

Then we hit. But not the flagstones.

We hit something white and cold that buckled under the impact. Softer than cement, but still hard enough to rattle my brain. And I didn’t have a chance to do anything useful before we rolled off the roof of the Transit van and fell the last metre and a half. This time we hit stone and it was even more painful than I was expecting.

The whole of my left side from shoulder to knee went numb, in that worrying numb-now pain-later way of a major injury, and the air was literally knocked out of my body. I was trying to breathe in but it felt as if my lungs were paralysed. Then I coughed. It hurt, then I breathed in – it was wonderful.

I rolled onto my back and looked up through the gently falling rain to see Lesley frowning down at me from the cornice. Then she vanished and I realised I had about twenty seconds while she ran down the steps. And she’d still have that pistol, wouldn’t she?

The flagstones were slick, so getting up was hard work. And I didn’t like the way my knee hurt. My only consolation was that Martin Chorley was moaning and wasn’t moving any faster than I was. I got to my feet while Chorley was still on his hands and knees. Grabbing him struck me as being too complicated an action and I did consider falling on him, but decided to caution him instead.

I got as far as ‘Anything you say might be’ when he flung out his hand and tried to impello me into the far wall of the cemetery. Fortunately he was in pain and I was ready with a shield – even so, I skidded back on my heels from the force of it. At which point Lesley came out of the main doors and, without hesitating, ran up to Chorley and kicked him in the stomach.

‘He’s not dead!’ she screamed. ‘You fucking fucker! You didn’t kill him!’

This time the impello hit home, but on Lesley not me, and she went sprawling onto her back. Chorley took the opportunity to climb to his feet.

‘That’s hardly my fault!’ he shouted. ‘You can blame your fucking boyfriend.’

The rain was getting heavier and was dribbling into my eyes, but Nightingale has made me train in worse weather. I wondered if Chorley had ever practised in the rain – somehow I didn’t think so.

Lesley got to her feet and that’s how we found ourselves recreating the stand-off scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , only wetter, closer together, and in central London.

I caught Lesley’s eye for a fraction of a fraction of a second and tilted my head at Chorley. He didn’t catch the gesture, but was hesitating because he didn’t know which one of us to attack first.

We jumped, as we had jumped belligerent drunks every bloody weekend for two whole years. I went high, she went low, and we had the fucking Faceless Man face down on the ground and wearing my speedcuffs before you could say ‘properly authorised restraint technique’.

Then we both hauled him to his feet and looked at each other, and sniggered.

Chorley started to react but I jerked the speedcuffs up in the approved manner and broke his chain of concentration.

‘What now?’ asked Lesley.

‘You turn supergrass, don’t you?’ I said.

‘You’re not serious?’ she said.

‘I asked the CPS to draw up the paperwork ages ago.’

Chorley moved again and this time I stuck my finger in his ear and wriggled it to disrupt any spell formation. This I knew from conducting experiments with Nicky’s enthusiastic help. The trick is to keep changing the method of disruption – it didn’t hurt that Chorley was dazed and in pain after the fall.

Still, backup couldn’t arrive fast enough – I was listening for sirens.

‘I’m not talking about me,’ she said, and pulled Chorley’s nose. ‘You can’t be serious about arresting him.’

‘That’s the job,’ I said.

‘He’ll escape,’ she said, which reminded me to tweak the cuffs again.