With that reality check, I realised that some of the glamour was wearing off. I think Mama Thames must have sensed it too, because she gave me a shrewd look and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see how it is now. How clever of your Master to choose you, and they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’
Two weeks of similarly impenetrable remarks from Nightingale meant that I had developed a sophisticated counter-measure to gnomic utterances – I changed the subject.
‘How did you come to be Goddess of the Thames?’ I asked.
‘Are you sure you want to know?’ she asked, but I could tell that she was flattered by my interest. It’s a truism that everybody loves to talk about themselves. Nine out of ten confessions arise entirely out of a human being’s natural instinct to tell their life story to an attentive listener, even if it involves how they came to bludgeon their golf partner to death. Mama Thames was no different; in fact, I realised, gods had an ever greater need to explain themselves.
‘I came to London in 1957,’ said Mama Thames. ‘But I wasn’t a goddess then. I was just some stupid country girl with a name that I have forgotten, come to train as a nurse, but if I am honest I have to say I was not a very good nurse. I never liked to get too close to the sick people, and there were too many Igbo in my class. Because of those stupid patients I failed all my exams and they threw me out.’ Mama Thames kissed her teeth at the barefaced cheek of them. ‘Into the street, just like that. And then my beautiful Robert, who had been courting me for three years, says to me, “I can no longer wait for you to make up your mind, and I am going to marry a white bitch Irish woman.”’
She kissed her teeth again, and it was echoed around the room by all the other women.
‘I was so heartbroken,’ said Mama Thames, ‘that I went to kill myself. Oh, yes, that is how bad the man broke my heart. So I went to Hungerford Bridge to throw myself in the river. But that is a railway bridge, and the old footbridge that ran along the side – very dirty in those days. All sorts of things used to live on that bridge, tramps and trolls and goblins. It is not the sort of place a decent Nigerian girl wants to throw herself off. Who knows what might be watching? So I went to Waterloo Bridge, but by the time I got there it was sunset and everywhere I looked it was so beautiful that I thought I just cannot bring myself to jump. Then it was dark, so I went home for my dinner. The next morning I got up nice and early and caught a bus to Blackfriars Bridge. But there is that damn statue of Queen Victoria at the north end, and even if she is looking the other way, think how embarrassed you would be if she were to turn round and see you standing on the parapet.’
The rest of the room shook their heads in agreement.
‘There was no way on earth that I was going to throw myself off Southwark Bridge,’ said Mama Thames. ‘So after another long, long walk, where did I find myself?’
‘London Bridge?’
Mama Thames reached out and patted me on the knee. ‘This was the old bridge, the one that was sold soon afterwards to that nice American gentleman. Now there was a man who knows how to show a river a good time. Two barrels of Guinness and a crate of Rhum Barbancourt, that’s what I call an offering.’
There was a pause while Mama Thames sipped her tea. Beverley entered with a plate of custard creams and placed them within easy reach. I had a biscuit in my hand before I realised what I was doing, and put it back. Beverley snorted.
‘In the middle of the old London Bridge was a chapel, a shrine to St Birinus and I thought, good Sunday Christian that I was, that this would be the right place to jump off. I stood there looking west just as the tide began to turn. London was still a port back then, dying but like an old man with a long, exciting life, full of stories and memories. And terrified that he was going to be old and frail with no one to look after him because there was no life left in the river, no Orisa, no spirit, nothing to care for the old man. I heard the river call me by the name I have forgotten and it said, “We see you are in pain, we see you are weeping like a child because of one man.”
‘And I said, “Oh, River, I have come such a long way, but I have failed as a nurse and I have failed as a woman and this is why my man does not love me.”
‘And then the river said to me, “We can take the pain away, we can make you happy and give you many children and grandchildren. All the world will come to you and lay its gifts at your feet.”
‘Well,’ said Mama Thames, ‘this was a tempting offer so I asked, “What must I do? What do you want from me?” And the river answered, “We want nothing that you were not already willing to give.”
‘So I jumped into the water – splash! And I sank all the way to the bottom, and let me tell you, there are things down there that wouldn’t believe. Let’s just say that it needs to be dredged and let it go at that.’
She waved her arm languidly towards the river. ‘I walked out of the river over there on the Wapping Stair where they used to drown pirates. I have been here ever since,’ she said. ‘This is the cleanest industrial river in Europe. Do you think that happened by accident? Swinging London, Cool Britannia, the Thames Barrier; do you think that all happened by accident?’
‘The Dome?’ I asked.
‘Now the most popular music venue in Europe,’ she said. ‘The Rhine Maidens come to visit me to see how it’s done.’ She gave me a significant look, and I wondered who the hell the Rhine Maidens were.
‘Perhaps Father Thames sees things differently,’ I said.
‘Baba Thames,’ spat Mama. ‘When he was a young man he stood where I stood, on the bridge, and made the same promise I did. But he hasn’t been below Teddington Lock since the Great Stink of 1858. He never came back, not even after Bazalgette put the sewers in. Not even for the Blitz, not even when the city was burning. And now he says this is his river.’
Mama Thames pulled herself upright in her chair as if posing for a formal portrait.
‘I am not greedy,’ she said. ‘Let him have Henley, Oxford and Staines. I shall have London, and the gifts of all the world at my feet.’
‘We can’t have your people fighting each other,’ I said. The ‘royal we’ is very important in police work; it reminds the person you’re talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you’re using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are.
‘It’s Baba Thames who is trespassing below the lock,’ said Mama Thames. ‘I am not the one that needs to back off.’
‘We’ll be the ones that talk to Father Thames,’ I said. ‘We expect you to keep your people under control.’
Mama Thames tilted her head to one side and gave me a long, slow look. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you until the Chelsea Flower Show to bring Baba to his senses; after that, we shall take matters into our own hands.’ Her use of the ‘royal we’ was a great deal less tentative than mine.
The interview was over, we exchanged pleasantries and then Beverley Brook showed me to the door. As we got to the atrium she deliberately let her hip graze mine, and I felt a sudden hot flush that had nothing to do with the central heating.
She gave me an arch little look as she opened the door for me.
‘Bye-bye, Peter,’ she said. ‘See you around.’
When I got back to the Folly I found Nightingale in the reading room on the first floor. This was a scattering of upholstered green leather armchairs, footstools and side tables. Glass-fronted mahogany bookcases lined two walls, but Nightingale had admitted to me that in the old days people had generally come here for a nap after lunch. He was doing the Telegraph crossword.
He looked up as I sat down opposite. ‘What did you think?’
‘She certainly thinks she’s the Goddess of the Thames,’ I said. ‘Is she?’
‘That’s not a terribly useful question,’ said Nightingale.
Molly silently
arrived with coffee and a plate of custard creams. I looked at the biscuits and gave her a suspicious glance, but she was as unreadable as ever.
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘where does their power come from?’
‘That’s a much better question,’ said Nightingale. ‘There are several conflicting theories about that; that the power comes from the belief of their followers, from the locality itself or from a divine source beyond the mortal realm.’
‘What did Isaac think?’
‘Sir Isaac,’ said Nightingale, ‘had a bit of a blind spot when it came to divinity – he even questioned whether Jesus Christ was truly divine. Didn’t like the idea of the Trinity.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He had a very tidy mind,’ said Nightingale.
‘Does the power come from the same place as magic?’ I asked.
‘All of this will be much easier to explain once you’ve mastered your first spell,’ he said. ‘I believe you could get a good two hours of practice in before afternoon tea.’
I slunk off in the direction of the lab.
I dreamed that I was sharing my bed with Lesley May and Beverley Brook, both lithe and naked on either side of me, but it wasn’t nearly as erotic as it should have been because I didn’t dare embrace one for fear that I’d mortally offend the other. I had just devised a strategy to get my arms around both at the same time when Beverley sank her teeth into my wrist and I woke with a terrible cramp in my right arm.
It was bad enough to make me fall out of bed and thrash around being uselessly stoic for a good two minutes. There’s nothing like excruciating pain for waking you up, so once it was clear I wasn’t going back to sleep I left my room and went looking for a snack. The basement of the Folly was a warren of rooms left over from when it boasted dozens of staff but I knew that the back stairs bottomed out next to the kitchen. Not wanting to disturb Molly, I padded down the steps as quietly as I could but as I reached the basement, I saw that the kitchen lights were on. As I got closer I heard Toby growl, then bark and then there was a strange rhythmic hissing sound. A good copper knows when not to announce his presence, so I crept to the kitchen door and peered in.
Molly, still dressed in her maid’s outfit, was perched on the edge of the scarred oak table that dominated one side of the kitchen. Beside her on the table was a beige ceramic mixing bowl and sitting, some three metres in front of her, was Toby. Since the door was behind her shoulder Molly didn’t see me watching as she dipped her hand into the mixing bowl and lifted out a cube of chopped meat – raw enough to be dripping.
Toby barked with excitement as Molly teased him with the meat for a moment before sending it flying towards him with an expert flick of her wrist. Toby did an impressive jump from a sitting position and caught the meat in mid-air. At the sight of Toby chewing industriously while turning tight little circles, Molly began to laugh – the rhythmic hissing sound I’d heard earlier.
Molly picked up another cube of meat and waved it at Toby, who did a little dance of doggy anticipation. This time Molly faked him out, hissing at his confused twirling and then, when she was sure he was watching, popping the bloody piece of meat in her own mouth. Toby barked crossly but Molly stuck out an unnaturally long and prehensile tongue at him.
I must have gasped or shifted my weight because Molly leaped off the table and spun to face me. Eyes wide, mouth open to reveal sharp pointed teeth and blood, bright red against her pale skin, dribbling down her chin. Then she clamped her hand over her mouth and with a look of startled shame ran silently from the kitchen. Toby gave me an irritated growl.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I told him. ‘I just wanted a snack.’
I don’t know what he was complaining about; he got the rest of the bowl of meat – I got a glass of water.
Action at a Distance
A part from the cramp and a definite improvement in the strength of my grip, my efforts to create my own werelight were frustrating. Every other morning Nightingale would demonstrate the spell, and I’d spend up to four hours a day opening my hand in a meaningful manner. Fortunately I got a break three weeks into February, when Lesley May and I were due to give evidence against Celia Munroe, the perpetrator of the Leicester Square cinema assault.
That morning we both dutifully turned up in our uniforms – magistrates like their constables to be in uniform – at the requisite time of ten o’clock, in the firm and certain knowledge that the case would be delayed at least until two. As forward-thinking and ambitious constables, we’d brought our own reading material; Lesley had the latest Blackstone’s Police Investigator’s Manual and I had Horace Pitman’s Legends of the Thames Valley, published in 1897.
City of Westminster Magistrates Court is around the back of Victoria Station on the Horseferry Road. It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning. Inside, the waiting areas maintained the unique combination of cramped busyness and barren inhumanity that was the glory of British architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.
There were two benches outside the court. We sat on one while the accused, Celia Munroe, her lawyer and a friend she’d brought along for moral support shared the other with Mr Ranatunga and Mr Ranatunga’s brother. None of them wanted to be there, and all of them blamed us.
‘Any word from Los Angeles?’ I asked.
‘Brandon Coopertown was a man on the edge,’ said Lesley. ‘Apparently all of his American deals had fallen through and his production company was about to fold.’
‘And that house?’ I asked.
‘About to go the way of all flesh,’ said Lesley. I looked blank. ‘Mortgage was six months in arrears,’ she said. ‘And his income this year barely scraped thirty-five thousand.’
That was a good ten grand more than I was getting as a full constable – my sympathy was limited.
‘It’s starting to look like a classic family annihilation,’ said Lesley, who’d been reading up on her forensic psychology. ‘Father faces a catastrophic loss of status, he can’t live with the shame and decides that without him his wife’s and kid’s lives are meaningless. He snaps, tops a fellow media professional, tops his family and tops himself.’
‘By making his face fall off?’ I asked.
‘No theory is ever perfect,’ said Lesley. ‘Particularly since we can’t even find a reason for William Skirmish being in the West End that night.’
‘Maybe he was on the pull,’ I said.
‘He wasn’t on the pull,’ said Lesley. ‘And I should know.’
Because William Skirmish’s ‘victim timeline’ had become barely relevant to the case, the job of completing it had been handed to the Murder Team’s most junior member, i.e. Lesley. Since she’d spent such a lot of time and effort reconstructing William Skirmish’s last hours she was perfectly willing, in fact overjoyed, to share it with me in excruciating detail. She’d checked out William Skirmish’s romantic leanings and found no history of trawling the West End for sex – serially monogamous, that was our William – all of them guys he’d met through work or mutual friends. She’d also traced every single CCTV that he’d passed that night, and as far as Lesley could tell he’d walked from his house to Tufnell Park Station and caught the tube to Tottenham Court Road – from there, he’d walked straight to Covent garden, via Mercer Street, and his fatal encounter with Coopertown. No deviation or hesitation – as if he had an appointment.
‘Almost as if something was messing with his head,’ she said. ‘Right?’
So I told her about the dissimulo spell and the theory that something had invaded Coopertown’s mind, forced him to change his face, kill William Skirmish and then his family. This led, naturally, to a description of my visit to Mama Thames, the magic lessons and Molly the ‘God knows what she is’ Maid.
‘Should you be telling me this?’ asked Lesley.
‘I don’t see w
hy not,’ I said. ‘Nightingale’s never told me not to. Your boss believes this stuff is real, too; he just doesn’t like it very much.’
‘So something was messing with Coopertown’s mind – right?’ asked Lesley.
‘Right,’ I said.
‘And whatever that was,’ continued Lesley, ‘could have been interfering with William Skirmish’s mind as well. It could have made him come down West just so he could have his head knocked off. I mean, if it can mess with one person’s mind, why not another, why not yours or mine?’
I remembered the horror of Coopertown’s face as he lurched towards me across the balcony, and the smell of blood. ‘Thank you for that thought, Lesley,’ I said. ‘I shall certainly treasure it for ever – probably late at night when I’m trying to sleep.’
Lesley glanced at where Celia Monroe sat demurely. ‘She had the same kind of sudden mad rage,’ she said. ‘What if her mind had been messed with too?’
‘Her face didn’t fall off,’ I said.
Celia Monroe caught us looking at her and flinched. ‘What if Coopertown was the big splash,’ said Lesley, ‘and she was just an echo? There could have been other incidents going on all over the place, but we just happened to be there when this one blew.’
‘We could check the crime reports and see if anything fits,’ I said. ‘See if there’s a cluster.’
‘That would be Westminster and Camden,’ said Lesley. ‘That’s a lot of crime.’
‘Limit it to physical assaults and first offences,’ I said. ‘The computer should do most of the work.’
‘What are you going to be doing?’ she asked.
‘I shall be learning to make light,’ I said loftily.