‘Well, I dress to please myself,’ said Isis, and clinked glasses with Beverley.
‘And I dress to please my love,’ said Oxley.
They all looked at me.
‘I dress to project an aura of confident authority,’ I said.
‘Not to please your goddess?’ said Oxley.
‘We much prefer the pair of you as nature intended,’ said Isis.
‘In which case,’ said Oxley, putting down his drink, ‘your wish is my command.’
He started stripping off his jacket and was only stopped when Isis grabbed his hand.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said.
‘Are they not as fickle as the wind?’ said Oxley. ‘And as changeable as the sea.’
‘I’m not going anywhere near that, mate,’ I said, and Isis asked Beverley what she planned to do with her degree.
‘I’ve still got another year,’ said Beverley.
Down in the Piazza the street magician had given way to a small white man in a shabby suit and a top hat. I felt a moment of unease until he pulled out a yellow balloon and started comically failing to make an animal out of it. He did his patter in a broad West Country accent that had nothing to do with the skeleton army or the cruel streets of nineteenth-century London.
‘I was thinking of going into flood management,’ said Beverley.
‘Isn’t that cheating?’ asked Isis.
‘I like to think of it more as offering a unique insight.’
‘The insight being that they pay you money and you don’t flood their back gardens?’ said Isis.
Beverley denied the extortion aspect, although she admitted that she might end up having to extract some promises from her sisters if she did work in the lower Thames.
‘Which reminds me,’ said Isis. ‘When are Nicky and Brent coming up to visit?’
‘Are you sure you want them back?’ I asked. ‘After what happened last time?’
Oxley waved away any problems.
‘After all,’ he said. ‘Who hasn’t capsized a boat when they were young?’
‘And I was asked to ask if Abigail might come up before school starts again,’ said Isis. ‘We’d love to have her for a week or two.’
I thought of all that chatting late at night and the sound of the tent zipping up.
‘Asked by who?’ I asked.
‘See how he bristles?’ said Oxley. ‘Ever vigilant of his sister’s honour.’
‘Not my sister,’ I said, which the others seemed to find hilarious.
I said I’d check with her parents, but I already knew they’d say yes. They were horribly trusting, and worse, held me responsible. My dad said that this would be a good preview of life with my own children, but what he thought he might know about it I don’t know.
Oxley asked if we were eating and Beverley did the honours – summoning up a startled looking white guy in a blue pinstripe shirt, who I sincerely hoped was bar staff and not some random member of the public. We’ve talked about the ethics of this, but she does like to show off in front of her country cousins.
Anyway, whoever the guy was, fish and chips and steak and ale pie arrived pretty damn quick. Oxley turned out to be a surprisingly dainty eater and at one point Beverley nudged me and told me to stop embarrassing her in public. But, I mean, if you can’t eat battered cod with your fingers, how should you eat it?
‘Patience,’ said Isis. ‘It only took me a couple of hundred years to stop my darling from farting at the table.’
I pointed out that Beverley had her own bad habits, such as leaving her wetsuits lying around the living room.
‘While still wet,’ I said. ‘Not to mention that time you climbed into bed in the middle of the night still wearing it.’
‘I was going out again in a minute,’ said Beverley. ‘I didn’t want all the hassle of putting it back on.’ Not even after she’d kissed me awake.
Isis and Oxley, who both made a point of swimming unabashedly naked, gave me an interested look, which I ignored. My dad says that a gentleman never tells and my mum says nor tel me business to other person despite being quite happy to tell my business to a non-trivial proportion of London’s Sierra Leonean population. I decided it was time to change the subject, so I asked Isis if she’d had a chance to ask Father Thames about King Arthur.
‘Ha,’ said Isis. ‘Yes, I did. Although I think I should have listened to my husband.’
‘I warned you it would be a pretty riddle,’ said Oxley.
‘I couldn’t speak to its beauty, but it was in Latin.’ Isis asked me if I was sure I wanted to hear it. ‘Often times the answer is not worth the question.’
‘Nice,’ said Beverley. ‘I’ll remember that one.’
‘I’ll take the risk,’ I said.
‘Dicito praeconi lucis,’ said Isis.
‘lucis’ I recognised but ‘praeconi’ I didn’t know.
‘Something of the morning?’ I asked.
‘Herald,’ said Oxley. ‘Herald of the morning – that’s you, by the way.’
‘I thought I was a starling,’ I said.
‘And the herald of the morning,’ said Isis.
‘I thought the herald of the dawn was the rooster.’
‘Do you want to hear the rest or not?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Dicito praeconi lucis,’ she said. ‘Si pontem ad urbem servandam dissolvet, praemium suum exilium erit.’
‘Should I dissolvo the bridge?’
Even as I said it, I remembered the feel of the ghost spear in my hand, the feel of the impact as I drove it through the chest of Punch and pinned him to the decking of the first London Bridge.
A ghost spear, a dream Punch, a memory of London’s past.
Praemium suum exilium erit.
His reward will be exile.
‘Peter?’ said Beverley – they were all staring at me.
‘I don’t fancy exile,’ I said.
‘That’s your actual prophecy, that is,’ said Oxley. ‘You’d better watch out.’
Because when you find the hand of destiny on your shoulder, the proper London response is to deny you’re the one she’s looking for.
‘What, me, guv?’ I said.
22
What You Were Supposed to Do
You don’t have to tell a police officer that life can go sideways with no warning. But knowing this is one thing, and getting a phone call from Lesley while I was halfway through a smoked kipper is another.
‘Shut up, Peter, and listen,’ she said – which was harsh, given I hadn’t said anything yet.
‘Go,’ I said.
‘Martin’s going to do something stupid. He’s going to run an experimental sacrifice.’
‘Jesus Christ, Lesley, you’ve—’ I began, but Lesley talked right over me.
‘I don’t know who the subject’s going to be,’ she said. ‘But he said that the city had enough rivers already and nobody was going to miss one.’
I went cold at that.
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Just that,’ said Lesley.
‘Was he playing you?’
‘Do me a favour,’ she said, and cut the call.
It’s just as well that Nightingale insists that we all dress for breakfast, because we were down the stairs and out the back into the Portakabin in under sixty seconds.
Nightingale called Oxley and I called Beverley first and Lady Ty second.
‘How credible is this?’ she asked.
‘Credible,’ I said. ‘Can you alert everyone else?’
She said she would, and then get back to me with the dispositions.