After I put the phone down I called Stephanopoulos and alerted her, then Jaget Kumar at BTP and finally, because it had been a contact with Lesley, DI William Pollock at the DPS.
Once we were sure everyone had been warned, we went back upstairs to finish our breakfast.
‘There’s no point rushing around on an empty stomach,’ said Nightingale.
Well, he finished his breakfast . . . I wasn’t hungry any more.
‘This could be another trap,’ he said, tucking his napkin back into his collar.
I said I didn’t think so – if only because the clues to a trap would have to be clearer.
‘Another distraction, then?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, and sat down.
There was still some toast so I buttered a bit and had that, because it was either toast or my fingernails.
The last time Martin Chorley had gone after one of the Rivers, his assassin had got a metre of metaphysical steel through his chest and Chorley himself had been swept away by a bijou urban tsunami.
And that was when Lady Ty hadn’t known he was coming.
I almost wanted him to have another go, because it would save us a lot of time and effort if someone – say, Fleet – were to vigorously defend herself to the point of saving the criminal justice system a ton of paperwork.
But then I remembered the Yellowstone and the weaponised vampirism and the dead John Chapman’s sudden interest in the Walbrook. I called Beverley on my mobile.
‘Hi, babes,’ she said. ‘Suddenly we’re all at Mum’s.’
‘Is anybody covering Walbrook?’ I asked.
I heard her asking about – in the background the football, ‘Prisoner’ by the Weeknd, and an all-comers junior Rivers shouting contest were attempting to drown each other out. While she was doing that I walked back up to my room and dug out my undercover Metvest. This is just an ordinary Metvest, only with a beige pocketless nylon cover instead of the blue one that goes with the uniform. Wearing it makes you about as inconspicuous as a silver Astra parked outside a youth centre, but I’ve come to find the sensation of wearing a rigid plastic tank top strangely comforting.
Down the phone I could hear Brent threatening to flood the living room unless she got the next go on the games console, and I was quite curious to see if she’d follow through, but Beverley came back on line to tell me that no one had thought to check on Walbrook.
‘She never has anything to do with us,’ she said.
It was Guleed’s day off so I scooped up Carey from the breakfast room, and while he was digging up his Metvest I went to confer with Nightingale in the incident room.
‘At the very least you can warn her,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sahra’s on her way in. Once she’s here we’ll head over to St Paul’s and use that as a staging post.’
‘You think the cathedral is important?’ I asked.
Nightingale tapped the point on the whiteboard where arrows from John Chapman and the Paternoster Society converged on a crude picture of the dome of St Paul’s.
‘It keeps coming up in the investigation,’ he said. ‘However, more germane to today’s operation is that it’s a good central location. From there I’ll be in a position to support you and David or deploy somewhere else should the need arise.’
‘What’s to stop him going up the river, or somewhere else entirely?’ I asked.
‘Word, as they say, is out,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lady Ty and Oxley have been using their national contacts and even small fry like your friend Chester are now covered. And all his behaviour in the last year has centred around the City in one way or another.’ He tapped the whiteboard again and frowned.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Walbrook – I’ll feel better when you’re there.’
I made sure we had a couple of screamers in the nondescript Rover before we pulled out. Then I interpreted Nightingale’s impatience as assigning an A Grade to the shout, stuck on the blues and twos as we cleared the gates and were doing a brisk, but totally within guidelines, forty mph before I hit Theobalds Road.
‘Is there something I should know?’ asked Carey, as he braced himself against the dash.
I explained as best as I could while swerving around deaf commuters and suicidal white van drivers, although I left out the metaphysics and concentrated on the policing.
‘We think Chorley might try and off one of Lady Ty’s sisters,’ I said.
‘Is that the one with the pub in Shoreditch?’ asked Carey, showing that he did actually stay awake in the briefings – he must have been the only one below the rank of inspector who did.
‘That’s the one,’ I said.
‘If that’s the case, why are we going and not Nightingale?’
Definitely staying awake during the briefings.
‘Because . . .’ I started, and then paused to say a little prayer as we crossed the course of the Fleet at Farringdon. ‘Because we don’t know for sure.’
I didn’t need to tell anyone as well briefed as Carey that Chorley loved a bit of bait and switch.
‘Oh, I get it,’ he said with surprising cheerfulness. ‘We’re the canaries.’
There’s no avoiding the Old Street Roundabout, so I powered up Clerkenwell Road and hoped for the best. Which turned out to be quite good, except for an ancient Ford Fiesta who couldn’t seem to get the hang of how roundabouts worked, and swerved right across our path. Carey swore and wrote down the vehicle index.
Then we accelerated up the eastern half of Old Street, then down Rivington Street, which, in case you don’t know, turns into a one-way street going the other way. But I felt my cause was just, so down the wrong way we went. And luckily only one poor sod was driving the right way. He panicked, swerved and, we discovered later, managed to hit one of the bollards placed on Rivington Street for just that purpose. We squeaked past and went right on Curtain Road.
By now India 99 was overhead and was reporting anything untoward and Nightingale was mobile. I switched off the lights and siren and gently turned into New Inn Yard. Ahead we could see the railway bridge and the faded pub sign.
As we got closer I couldn’t spot any suspicious activity.
‘I don’t see anything,’ said Carey, and reported that to Nightingale, who said in which case he was going to proceed to St Paul’s as we’d planned.
As we pulled up, Carey said that after my driving he was owed a drink. I was just about to say he wanted to be cautious about any pint he drank in that particular pub . . . except that suddenly everything got rather confusing.
As we reconstructed events later, Martin Chorley had obviously got hold of the Virginia Gentlemen’s playbook of total bastardness and started on page one. His packaged evil in a can arrived at the Goat and Crocodile with the regular weekly beer delivery. This was a surprise, not least because I was amazed to find that the Goat and Crocodile had enough customers to justify a regular weekly delivery in the first place.
All Martin had to do was wait outside until he was sure Walbrook had been incapacitated before moving in. He’d obviously learnt his lesson from his abortive attack on Lady Ty, because he came mob-handed just in case things didn’t go strictly to plan. Which of course they didn’t, because me and Carey turned up at just that point.
The first we knew of it was when the front façade of the Goat and Crocodile came screaming across the street and into the side of our car. All I’m going to say is that it was a good thing it wasn’t the Jag.
For a moment I thought it was just us getting closer to the pub, but then my brain registered that the angles were all wrong – and in any case we’d practically stopped. I knew right then that the only suspect who could throw a wall like that was Chorley, and that he must be in the pub. I also knew, in a strange coldly amused way, that that information was totally useless. I think I gave the mental command to my body to duck – but before any useful muscle groups moved, the front of the pub hit the side of my car.