Whispers Under Ground

fireplace. I went back out onto the balcony and spotted Lesley heading for the stairs up to her room.

‘Lesley,’ I called. ‘Wait up.’

She stopped and looked at me, her face a mask of dirty pink.

‘Come and have dinner,’ I said. ‘You might as well, otherwise it will just go to waste.’

She glanced up the stairs and then back at me. I know the mask itches and that she was probably dying to get up to her room and get it off.

‘I’ve seen your face,’ I said. ‘So has Molly. And Toby doesn’t give a shit as long as he gets a sausage.’ Toby barked on cue. ‘Just take the fucking thing off – I hate eating on my own.’

She nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said and started up the stairs.

‘Hey!’ I called after her.

‘I’ve got to moisturise, you pillock,’ she called back.

I looked down at Toby who scratched his ear.

‘Guess who’s coming to dinner,’ I said.

Molly, stung perhaps by the amount of takeaway we ate in the coach house, had started to experiment. But tonight, probably for comfort, she’d reached back into the classics. All the way back to ye olde Englande in fact.

‘It’s venison in cider,’ I said. ‘She had it soaking overnight. I know because I went down looking for a snack last night and the fumes nearly knocked me out.’

Molly had served it up garnished with mushrooms in a casserole dish, with roast potatoes, water cress and green beans. The important thing from my point of view was that it was steaks – Molly could be very old-fashioned about things like sweetbreads which I might add are not what a lot of you think they are. After you’ve attended a couple of fatal car accidents, offal loses its appeal. In fact I’m amazed I’ll still eat kebabs.

Lesley had her mask off and I didn’t know where to look. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and the skin on her cheeks and what was left of her nose looked pink and inflamed.

‘I can’t chew properly on the left side,’ she said. ‘It’s going to look weird.’

Venison, I thought, a lovely meat but notoriously chewy – well done Peter.

‘Is it like the way you eat spaghetti?’ I asked.

‘I eat it the way Italians eat it,’ she said.

‘Yeah, face down in the bowl,’ I said. ‘Very stylish.’

The venison was not chewy, it cut like butter. But Lesley was right, it did look funny the way she bulged it all the way over in one cheek – like a chipmunk with a toothache.

She gave me a sour look which made me laugh.

‘What?’ she asked after swallowing. I noticed that the scars from the latest operation on her jaw were still red and inflamed.

‘It’s nice to be able to see your expression,’ I said.

She froze.

‘How am I supposed to know whether you’re taking the piss or not?’ I asked.

Her hand came up towards her face and stopped. She looked at it, as if surprised to find it hovering in front of her mouth, and then used it to pick up her water instead.

‘Couldn’t you just assume that I was always taking the piss?’ she asked.

I shrugged and changed the subject.

‘What did you think of our high-rise recluse?’

She frowned. I was surprised – I didn’t know she could still do that.

‘Interesting, I thought,’ she said. ‘The nurse was scary though – don’t you think?’

‘We should have taken one of the Rivers,’ I said. ‘They can tell you’re a practitioner just by smelling you.’

‘Really? What do we smell like?’

‘I didn’t want to ask,’ I said.

‘I’m sure Beverley thought you smelt lovely,’ said Lesley. She was right, mask or no mask, I still couldn’t tell when she was taking the piss.

‘I wonder if it’s innate to the Rivers or if all—’ I stopped myself before I said magical folk. A man’s got to have some standards.

‘Creatures?’ suggested Lesley. ‘Monsters?’

‘Magically endowed,’ I said.

‘Well Beverley was certainly magically endowed,’ said Lesley. Definitely taking the piss, I thought. ‘Do you think it’s something we could learn to do?’ she asked. ‘It would make the job a lot easier if we could sniff them out.’

You can tell when somebody is shaping a forma in their mind. It’s like vestigium, anyone can sense it, the trick as always is to recognise the sense impression for what it was. Nightingale said that you could learn to recognise an individual practitioner by their signare, the distinctive signature of their magic. Once Lesley had joined us I did a blind taste test and found that I couldn’t tell the difference at all – although Nightingale could, ten times out of ten.

‘It’s something you learn to do with practice,’ he’d said. He also claimed that he could not only tell who cast a spell, but who had trained the caster and sometimes who had developed the spell. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

‘I’ve got a tentative experimental protocol,’ I said. ‘But it involves getting one of the Rivers to sit still while we take it in turns to listen to her head. And we’d need Nightingale to act as a control.’

‘That’s not going to happen any time soon,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe it’s in the library – how’s your Latin?’

‘Better than yours – Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,’ I said which means, ‘I’ll either find a way or make one’ which was a favourite of Nightingale’s and attributed to Hannibal.

‘Vincit qui se vincit,’ said Lesley, who loved learning Latin almost as much as I did. She conquers who conquer themselves, another Nightingale favourite and the motto from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which was something we hadn’t had the heart to tell him yet.

‘It’s pronounced win-kit not vincent,’ I said.

‘Bite me,’ said Lesley.

I grinned at her and she smiled back – sort of.

Tuesday

6 Sloane Square

The Murder Team’s outside inquiry team lives in a big room on the first floor sandwiched between the Inside Inquiry Team and the Intelligence Unit (motto: we do the thinking so that other coppers don’t have to). It was a large room with pale blue walls and dark blue carpet crammed with a dozen desks and a variety of swivel chairs, some of which were held together with duct tape. In the old days it would have smelt of second-hand cigarettes but nowadays it had the familiar tang of police under pressure – I’m not sure it’s an improvement.

I’d been told to attend the seven o’clock morning briefing so I rolled up at a quarter to, to find that I was sharing a desk with Guleed and DC Carey. A full Murder Team is about twenty-five people and most of those arrived in time for the briefing to start at seven fifteen. There was much slurping of coffee and moaning about the snow. I said hello to the officers I knew from the Jason Dunlop case and we all found seats or perched on desks at one end of the room where Seawoll stood in front of a whiteboard – just like they do on the TV.

Sometimes your dreams really can come true.

He ran through where, when, how and who. Stephanopoulos gave a quick victimology of James Gallagher