‘They slit her pretty little neck,’ he said. ‘And threw her in the Walbrook.’
He pushed me away and I fell into darkness.
And blinked and opened my eyes in an ambulance.
Allison Conte was riding with me and the paramedic – she didn’t look happy.
‘I don’t care who you think you are. None of you lot are going down alone,’ she said. ‘Ever again.’
She’d found me in the side access alcove, sitting up against the ladder and totally out of it. She’d had to get some help and a rope to drag me out.
The paramedic wanted to know if I’d smelt or ingested anything prior to losing consciousness.
‘Woodsmoke,’ I said.
‘Could have been carbon monoxide,’ said the paramedic, because medical professionals are willing to spout total bollocks in order to maintain their air of authority. Nothing like us police, who always tell it how it is.
Generally speaking, if you’ve fallen unconscious for any length of time it’s best to go to a hospital for blood tests and shit. So I asked them to take me to UCH. Then I called Guleed and arranged to have her pick up the Hyundai, and then go ahead to the hospital so Dr Walid could meet me in casualty. They were used to our ways there by then, and the casualty registrar didn’t blink when Dr Walid ordered up a ton of phlebotomy. He’s hoping to get an understanding of the biochemical consequences of my ‘encounters’, as he calls them. He’d have popped me in the MRI, but it was solidly booked with emergency cases that day.
Bev called me and asked if I wanted her to pick me up. But my mind felt heavy and slow, as if it was waterlogged, and I wanted time to myself. I fell asleep in one of the treatment cubicles and didn’t wake up until after midnight, when the first wave of closing time casualties arrived and the unit needed their cubicle back.
I let them check my pupil reaction and blood pressure and then I walked back to the Folly.
I was walking past the quiet darkness of the park in Russell Square when the full implications of what I’d learnt sank in.
Mr Punch was a god.
And Martin Chorley wanted to sacrifice him.
18
The Tea Committee
We held a meeting of the ‘Tea Committee’ in the upstairs reading room. The Tea Committee consisted of me, Nightingale and other interested parties – in this case Postmartin and Dr Walid – where we thrashed out any policy involving magic. This was part of our agreement with Seawoll to avoid ‘distracting’ his ‘normal’ officers from doing their jobs properly.
‘I have come to the conclusion,’ Seawoll had said during one of the initial planning meetings that set up Operation Jennifer, ‘that if we can’t ignore it we can at least paint it pink and make it somebody else’s problem.’
Dr Vaughan was off on a training course, but Abigail was allowed to be present as long as she kept her mouth shut and took notes.
We quickly reached the consensus that despite Lesley’s opinion – that it would make the world a better place – we didn’t think anything good was going to come of offing Mr Punch. Especially now we knew he was a god.
‘Although wouldn’t dealing with Punch in and of itself be a bonus?’ asked Dr Walid, who’d spent a gruesome six months working with what was left of his victims the last time the little hook-nosed bastard had made his presence known.
I pointed out that, according to Bev, half the ecological disasters in the world occurred when people removed ‘pests’ or predators without thinking through the consequences.
Nightingale asked for an example, but all I could think of offhand were snakes – which if eliminated lead to a massive increase in rats. Even as I said it, I had a horrible feeling that I’d read it in a fantasy book once – possibly a comical one.
I looked over at Abigail, who tilted her head to one side in a disturbingly Molly-like way and made a note.
‘You believe removing Punch might disrupt the . . .’ Dr Walid paused to dredge up his medical Greek. ‘Eidolonisphere.’
Nightingale smiled.
‘From Eidolon,’ explained Postmartin. ‘Greek for phantom or ghost – indeed quite apropos because it commonly refers to a phantasm or ghost that possessed the living.’
‘Eidolosphere scans better,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know what effect it will have, but in any complex system if you change one variable it can cause unpredictable effects throughout that system.’
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘But this doesn’t get us any closer to learning what Martin Chorley wants to happen.’
‘We need to find a way to turn Lesley,’ I said.
Nightingale sighed.
‘Our last attempt in that direction hardly went well,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘If anyone knows what Martin Chorley is up to, then it’s going to be her.’
Nobody round the table liked the idea, but nobody could argue with the logic.
‘How?’ asked Dr Walid.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But perhaps when she next gets in touch with me I’ll just ask for a meeting.’
‘You seem very sure she’ll be in touch,’ said Postmartin.
‘Oh, she’ll be in touch,’ I said. ‘If only to complain about us arresting Zach.’
Nightingale gave me a long cool look, but didn’t insult me by saying that I shouldn’t do anything without checking with him first. After a moment he nodded gravely.
‘Yes, ee should make another attempt.’ He raised a finger. ‘If the opportunity arises.’
Dr Walid wanted to know if there was any literature relating to the death or killing of powerful genii locorum. We knew of a couple of incidents for sure – the River Lugg in Herefordshire – ‘Done in by Methodists’, apparently. And less powerful entities who vanished after their locus – pond, house, or in one well-documented case, ship-of-the-line – was destroyed or disrupted.
Postmartin admitted that there was plenty of material as yet uncatalogued, both in the Folly proper and back at the ‘special’ stacks in Oxford.
‘I believe there may be some relevant American material in the Library,’ said Nightingale.
‘I don’t suppose you remember where?’ I asked.
Nightingale frowned.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.
‘That’s going to be a slog.’
We all looked at Abigail, who was smiling a self-satisfied smile at her notebook.
So Postmartin returned to Oxford to rummage through his stacks while Abigail disappeared into the Magical Library, armed only with a notebook, a second-hand laptop and a look of cheerful determination.
I went back to the Outside Inquiry Office and found my in-tray full of actions that had been piling up while I’d been mucking around with metaphysics. The most urgent regarded one Camilla Turner, an archaeologist at MOLA, who had deleted her entire email archive the morning of the raid. One of the analysts in the Inside Inquiry Office had spotted this and flagged it as suspicious. Since wrangling the lost emails out of the ISP would probably involve further permission from the Home Office, it was suggested that I go and restatement Ms Turner in the hope she’d just give us permission to recover them ourselves. I wondered why I was being singled out for this job until I saw the photograph attached to her nominal file and realised that Ms Turner was the skeleton lady I’d met in the MOLA offices.
I gave MOLA a call and found that Camilla Turner hadn’t turned up for work that morning, so I got her address off the Inside Inquiry Office and found myself heading for Dalston, where she had the top half of a terrace on Parkholme Road. She’d bought the place in the mid-eighties when it was half derelict and respectable people didn’t live in Hackney. As an early pioneer of gentrification she was sitting on a couple of million in housing equity, which she could liberate if only she was willing to move somewhere dire – like Bromley or somewhere outside the M25. Sensibly, she’d decided to stay put.