Then I heard footsteps coming up the road and Nightingale barked:
‘On your feet, Grant.’
And I was up before the command had consciously registered. Nightingale had put himself between me and the broken window.
‘Secure the van,’ Nightingale ordered, and suddenly he was surrounded by a globe of rippling air. I didn’t see what happened next, because I had my orders.
I ran towards the van, sitting on its axles at a crossroad. I could see Walbrook was still in the back, chained to the big fun tin of quality badness, but the driver had climbed out and was lurching towards me.
He was a big white man, dressed in the traditional garb of the working villain – black cargo trousers, navy blue sweatshirt and donkey jacket, all of it bought from jumble sales and charity shops the better to be discarded when the job’s done. He had a big square face, no neck, and arms about the same size as my thighs.
He frowned at me and shook his head.
My extendable baton was back with the flipped car, as was my pepper spray and my speedcuffs. Some backup would have been nice about then, but we’d all agreed the tactics in advance.
It’s the calculus of magical combat. Masters fight masters while the apprentices secure the objective.
I flicked a water bomb into his face – a nice cold one, thanks to a trick Varvara taught me – and followed up by kicking him in the bollocks. He gave me a puzzled look and then fell flat on his face. It turned out later that he’d been suffering from a concussion, probably picked up when the wheels came off the van, so it’s probably just as well I hadn’t smacked him on the bonce with a baton.
I would have paused to put him in the recovery position, but his boss chose that moment to emerge from the courtyard beside the office and fling a quarter of a ton of metal bars – the remnants of the courtyard gate – at Nightingale. The bars twisted as they flew until they formed a whirling mass like the blades of a turbine two metres across.
Despite being within charging distance of Chorley, I didn’t dare engage. He might be concentrating on Nightingale, but I thought it was better to hop back in the van on the basis that what the eye can’t see the mad supernatural psychopath can’t hit.
Walbrook’s eyes were open by then, and she pointedly stared at me and then at the purple tin of doom. Chorley had a knack for being insanely over-prepared, and it didn’t surprise me to find that he’d stashed a bolt cutter in a toolbox behind the front seats. Moving carefully to avoid the tin, I cut the chain around Walbrook’s wrist and it had barely hit the floor when she dived over the front seat.
‘Stay down,’ I said, and cut the chain holding the tin to the ceiling.
It dropped with an ominous clonk, as if it was much heavier than it had any right to be. I checked out the back and found Martin Chorley staring at me with an expression that was perversely similar to one my mum used to use.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said.
The tin did a little jump for emphasis, as if something were bouncing up and down inside.
I swung the bolt cutters like a golf club and whacked the vampire tin in his general direction. Typically he did an elegant pivot out of the way, but before he could complete his turn his clothes turned white with frost and I saw the hair on his head actually freeze. I assumed this was Nightingale proving that I wasn’t the only one who’d been getting tips off Varvara. I’d have loved to have stood around and watched but, still having my orders, I followed Walbrook over the back of the front seat and out the passenger door.
I found Walbrook furiously pulling the last of her chains off.
‘Where is he?’ she said when she saw me. ‘I’m going to have him.’
Behind me there was a sudden furnace blast of heat and I saw orange flames reflected in the shop windows behind Walbrook. I ran forward and bore her down to the ground as the van behind me exploded. If that was Chorley getting rid of his frostbite, then it was certainly overkill.
A bit of van – I learnt later it was a panel torn off the side – wiffled overhead and smashed the windows of the YCN gallery. Walbrook rolled me off – not angrily, but firmly, and we both cautiously got to our feet.
The van was missing from the chassis up and coils of dark smoke were rising from its blackened engine block. Through the smoke I could see Nightingale dragging the – hopefully unconscious – body of Chorley’s goon away from the fire. He was using his left arm while keeping his right free for action. I did a scan for damage and while there was smouldering debris over a wide area and plentiful broken windows, none of the buildings were on fire.
I spotted the tin of quality vampire five metres up the road.
There was no sign of Martin Chorley.
I asked Walbrook if she could put the fire out.
She grimaced at me, then sighed and gave a little contemptuous wave with her left hand. I felt a weird sucking sensation from the remains of the van and a wind briefly rushed past my head. A small cloud formed over the van like a time-lapse weather sequence and it proceeded to bucket down for five minutes.
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘Haven’t done that in a long time,’ said Walbrook. ‘Where’s the Nightingale going?’
He was sprinting up Rivington Place. Which, I decided, showed a touching faith in my ability to control the scene.
It doesn’t stop there, of course, with the villain getting away and you looking stupid. I was already talking to Stephanopoulos on my back-up back-up burner phone before Nightingale was out of sight. Chorley went through the back wall of the old Shoreditch Town Hall, but Nightingale had to break off pursuit when he spotted some civilian casualties and had to stop and look after them. No doubt this was what Chorley was counting on.
Later, as we reconstructed it from CCTV and eyewitness accounts, he calmly stepped out the front of the town hall and flagged down a random Nissan Micra and was driven away. When we traced the driver via his vehicle’s index he had no memory of picking up a strange man at all, and grew quite distressed when we showed him the footage. Thus Chorley was out of the area before we even had a perimeter established.
The rest of the emergency service circus arrived at our smouldering van less than a minute later. Seawoll, who never passes up a good shouting opportunity, turned up in the first wave, leaving me with only two immediate problems:
What to do with our bumper fun tin of vampire; and how to stop Walbrook walking off before I had a chance to interview her.
Fortunately Frank Caffrey turned up with the bomb squad, whereupon they performed what Caffrey was careful to explain was not a controlled explosion.
‘You use a controlled explosion to disrupt a device’s detonator,’ he said. ‘This is more like a contained incineration.’
This involved a big box made of composite armour and surrounded by sandbags into which I, since I stupidly volunteered, used a big pair of tongs to drop the tin. Even with the gloves provided, I felt the horrible not-real cold of the tactus disvitae creeping up through my hands. Needless to say, I was pretty fucking swift. The tin rattled as I swung it over the box, getting frantic just before I dropped it.
Was there some sentience there? I wondered. It certainly seemed to sense its fate.
The phosphorus charge had already been laid. It was just a question of plonking on a lid, adding more sandbags, and retiring to a safe distance. Caffrey gave the nod, the bomb squad pressed the button and there was a slightly disappointing wumph sound. A couple of seconds later, wisps of smoke rose from the edges of the box.
Caffrey said we had to wait at least half an hour to make sure it was cooked, so I went back to see if Walbrook would talk to me. There was a slight delay as I was set upon by militant paramedics, who insisted on dressing the various scrapes I’d forgotten about until they reminded me.