Whispers Under Ground

harm to another.

I heard a grunt, a smack, a whimper and before I thought about it I had my extendable baton out and was across the road and heading for the shadows around the alley opposite the market. There were two of them, bulky shapes in cold weather jackets, laying into a third person who was hunched up in the snow.

‘Oi,’ I shouted. ‘Police! What do you think you’re doing?’ It’s traditional.

They turned and stared as I ran at them – there was one big one and one skinny, as is also traditional. I recognised the skinny one. It was Kevin bloody Nolan. He would have bolted, except that his big friend was made of sterner stuff.

The thing about being the police is that to do the job properly part of you has to enjoy getting stuck in. And the thing about members of the public, like the big idiot with Kevin Nolan who started squaring up to me, is that they expect there to be at least some kind of ritual exchange of insults before you get down to it. Something I had no intention of indulging in.

The big one had just enough time to register that I wasn’t going to stop when I drove my shoulder into his chest. He staggered backwards and tripped over the cowering man behind him. As he went down, bellowing, I swiped Kevin bloody Nolan’s thigh with my baton hard enough to give him a dead leg. Then I just reached out and shoved him off his feet.

‘You bastard,’ said the big man as he tried to get up.

‘Stay down or I’ll break your fucking arms,’ I said and then thought. Shit, I only have one set of handcuffs. Luckily the big man lay down again.

‘Are you really the police?’ he asked almost plaintively.

‘Ask your mate Kevin,’ I said.

The big man sighed. ‘You stupid cunt,’ he said, but he was talking to Kevin. ‘You utter, utter moron.’

‘I didn’t know he was going to be here,’ said Kevin.

‘Just keep your gob shut,’ said the big man.

I pushed his legs off the figure in the snow who rolled over and grinned up at me – it was Zach. What a surprise.

‘You know I was really hoping for a St Bernard,’ he said as he sat up.

‘But what you’re asking for is a smacking,’ I said.

I reached for my phone and was about to switch it on and call for backup when Zach tapped me on the leg and pointed up the alley. ‘Look out,’ he said.

A figure came running towards us and I headed to block them.

‘Get back,’ I yelled and the figure reached for a gun.

There’s something unmistakable about the way someone reaches for a concealed weapon. The smooth way he pulled back his jacket with one hand while the other hand dipped under his armpit for the butt of the firearm. I didn’t give him a chance to finish the movement – I made the formae in my head, flung out my left hand, still holding my phone, and shouted, much louder than I’m supposed to, ‘Impello palma.’

Nightingale can put a fireball through ten centimetres of steel armour and I can singe my way through a paper target nine times out of ten but really, in the interests of community policing, it’s better to have something a bit less lethal in your armoury. I’d used impello in anger twice and managed to seriously injure one suspect and kill the second. More importantly, from Nightingale’s point of view, I was twisting the forma out of shape by making a sort of second off-the-cuff forma and ramming it into the back of the first. Turpis vox, he called it, the unseen word, and it was a classic apprentice’s error.

‘You think you’re being innovative,’ Nightingale had said. ‘But what you’re doing is distorting the forma. If you get into the habit of doing that then those formae won’t integrate properly when you start combining them with other formae to create proper spells.’

I made the mistake of saying that the couple of spells I could do seemed to work well enough, which made him sigh and say, ‘Peter you’re still learning first- and second-order spells. Spells that are designed to be easy and forgiving and that’s why you learn them first. Once you start getting to the higher-order spells there’s no margin for error – if you haven’t mastered the formae they’ll go wrong or backfire in unpredictable ways.’

‘You’ve never shown me a high-order spell,’ I said.

‘Really?’ said Nightingale. ‘We must rectify that.’ He took a deep breath and then, with a curiously theatrical wave of his hand, he spoke a long spell that was at least eight formae long.

I pointed out that nothing had happened, which prompted Nightingale to give me one of his rare smiles.

‘Look up,’ he said.

I did and found that above my head a small cloud, about as wide as a tea tray, was gathering. It looked like a compact mass of thick steam and once it finished growing, raindrops began to fall on my upturned face.

I ducked out from under it and it followed me. It wasn’t very fast – you could stay ahead of it with a brisk walking pace, but as soon as you stopped it would drift to a halt overhead and bring a little bit of the English summer to a personal space near you.

I asked Nightingale what on Earth the spell was for. He said it was a favourite of one of his masters at school. ‘At the time I thought he seemed inordinately fond of it, though,’ said Nightingale, as he watched me dodge around the atrium. ‘Although I must say I’m beginning to appreciate its appeal now.’

According to my stopwatch, the spell lasted thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds.

Nightingale did relent and teach me an additional forma, palma, which allowed me to give people a nice evenly spread, hopefully non-lethal smack. I had Nightingale test it on me on the firing range – it feels exactly like running into a glass door.

With a high-pitched grunt the figure went down on his back in the snow. I reached him just as he reached again into his jacket, so I smacked him hard on the wrist. ‘He’ yelped in pain and I realised it was a woman and then I saw her face and recognised her. It was Agent Reynolds.

She looked up at me with bewilderment.

I heard a scuffling sound behind me and Zach yelled, ‘They’re getting away.’

Good, I thought, one less thing to worry about, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t find Kevin Nolan whenever I needed to. ‘Let them go,’ I said.

I couldn’t leave Reynolds lying on her back in the snow, with a possible concussion and/or a broken wrist. I told Zach to stay close and walked back to find that she was sitting up and cradling her wrist.

‘You hit me,’ she said.

‘Wasn’t me,’ I said and crouched down in front of her and tried to see if her eyes were unfocused. ‘You must have slipped on some ice and gone down on your back.’

‘You hit me on the wrist,’ she said.

‘You were reaching for a weapon,’ I said.

‘I’m not carrying a weapon,’ she opened her jacket to prove it.

‘Then what were you reaching for?’ I asked.

She looked away. I understood it had been an automatic reaction just like mine.

‘Hold on,’ she said and felt her nose. ‘If I fell on my back, why does my face hurt?’

‘Have you got a headache?’ I asked. ‘Are you feeling dizzy?’

‘I’m just fine, coach,’ she said and pushed herself to her feet. ‘You can put me back in the game.’ She spotted Zach and took a step towards him. ‘You,’ she said with an excellent command voice. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Oi,’ I said. ‘None of that. Why were you following me?’

‘What makes you think I was following you?’ she asked.

I pushed the jury-rigged power switch on my phone to the on position, gave thanks it had been off when I’d done the spell, and waited impatiently while it jingled at me cheerily and wasted my time with a hello graphic.

‘Who are you calling?’ she asked.

‘I’m calling Kittredge,’ I said. ‘Your liaison.’

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘If I explain, will you leave him out of it?’

‘No promises,’ I said. ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down.’