Whispers Under Ground

‘You sure about that?’ I asked and Kumar made a rude noise.

‘I did find some interesting CCTV footage from last Sunday,’ he said. ‘Very irresponsible behaviour by a man and a woman and what looked suspiciously like a child in an enormous hat. On tracks near Tufnell Park – ringing any bells?’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Were they easy to identify?’

There was a pause while a nervous female voice asked for directions to the Underground and Kumar responded. The train companies had finally put their snow countermeasures into effect and people were belatedly flooding into London to do their last-minute shopping. One of my morning emails had been a general alert to this effect, warning of the inevitable increase in theft, road traffic accidents and disgruntled northerners.

‘Only if some complete wanker makes an incident out of it,’ said Kumar.

‘How can one avoid such total wankery?’ I asked.

‘Easy,’ said Kumar. ‘By following basic safety procedures with regard to the transport infrastructure and making sure that next time you get the urge to go walkabouts on the tracks you call me first.’

‘Deal,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

‘A big one,’ said Kumar.

The Murder Team was bound to ask why I hadn’t statemented Ryan Carroll while I had him there in front of me at the Tate Modern, so I generated a memo indicating that I’d been called away to handle an aspect of a case exclusive to the Folly. Then I popped over to the training lab to get Nightingale to initial it.

When I got there Lesley had three, count them three, apples doing slow circuits in the air of the lab. Nightingale beckoned me over and, after barely glancing at the clipboard, signed the memo.

‘Excellent,’ Nightingale told Lesley, before turning to me and adding, ‘That’s what happens when you don’t allow yourself to become sidetracked and focus on the task at hand.’ Her hair was damp with sweat.

‘I see,’ I said and retreated to the open doorway before saying, ‘But can she make them explode?’ And ducked out of sight. Two of the apples slammed into the wall behind me at head height and the third actually made the right turn to whoosh past my ear and down the length of the corridor.

‘Missed,’ I called and hurried away before she reloaded. She was getting much better.

I sent off the copy of the form, duplicated everything four times and put the duplicates in a series of A4 envelopes, to stop them getting mixed up, and dumped them next to the fruit bowl ready to go back to AB. Then I went downstairs to the shooting range for my own workout.

For me, one of the weirdest things about magic was the way some formae went out of fashion. And a good example of this is aer, which strictly speaking is Latinised Greek and is pronounced ‘air’ and means – well – air. Once you’ve mastered it, and that took me six weeks, it gives you ‘purchase’ on the air in front of your body. But since there’s no actual physical way of measuring the effect, and believe me I tried, your master has to be present to tell you when you’ve got it right. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ve got a forma that’s tricky to do and has, apparently, no effect. It’s not hard to see why it went out of fashion, especially since it was clear by the eighteenth century that it was based on a completely erroneous theory of matter. Nightingale took the trouble to teach me aer because, combined with the equally tricky and out-of-fashion congolare, it creates a shield in front of my body. Both formae were developed by the Great Man, Isaac Newton, himself and have the trademark fiddliness that has led to generations of students writing variations of WTF in the margins of their primers.

‘Isn’t a shield useful?’ I’d asked.

‘There’s a much more effective fourth-order spell that creates a shield. But you’re at least two years from learning that,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m teaching you this against the chance that you may encounter the Faceless Man again. This should give you some protection from a fireball while you stage a tactical withdrawal.’

By which he meant run like fuck.

‘Will it stop a bullet?’ I had to ask.

Nightingale didn’t know the answer. So we bought an automatic paintball gun, attached it to a hopper feed and a compressor and mounted it on a tripod at the shooting end of the firing range. To start my training sessions I don my Met-Vest, my old school jockstrap and my standard issue riot helmet with face mask. Then I set the mechanical timer on the gun and walk up the range to stand at the target end. I always feel uncomfortable standing at the wrong end, which Nightingale said was just as it should be.

The timer was a relic of the fifties, a Bakelite mushroom with a dial like those on a safe except painted pink. It was old and flaky enough to add an exciting element of uncertainty to when it would ring. When it did, I cast the spell and the paintball gun would fire. Originally me and Nightingale had thought we’d have to jury-rig a mechanism to randomly vary the aim. But the gun jiggled so violently on its tripod that it produced a spread wide and random enough to satisfy the most exacting standards of the Imperial Marksmanship School.

Just as well, because the first time out the only paint-balls that didn’t hit my body were the ones that went wide to either side. I like to think I’ve made significant improvements since then, albeit from a low base, and could stop nine out of ten shots. But as Nightingale says, the tenth is the only one that counts. He also pointed out that the muzzle velocity of the paintball gun is about 300 feet per second and that of a modern pistol over a thousand, and it doesn’t sound any better when you translate it into SI units.

So just about every day I go down to the basement, take a deep breath and listen for the whir of the timer wind down to that terminal click and see if I can’t get rid of that troublesome outlier.

Whir, click, splat, splat, spat.

Thank god for my riot helmet – that’s all I’m going to say.

After lunch Zach came back with an address and an outstretched hand.

‘Get it off Nightingale,’ I said.

‘He said you had the rest,’ he said.

I pulled up my clip and gave him two fifty in twenties and tens. It was most of my clip. In return I got a piece of paper with a Brixton address and a phrase written on it.

‘I’m here to cut the grass,’ I read.

‘That’s the password,’ said Zach, counting his money.

‘Now I need a cashpoint,’ I said.

‘I’d buy you a drink,’ said Zach, waving the cash at me, ‘but all this is spoken for.’ He ran upstairs and grabbed his bag. But despite being that keen to leave the Folly, on his way back out he paused to shake my hand.

‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘But don’t take any offence if I sincerely hope that we don’t meet again. And give my regards to Lesley.’ He let go of my hand and darted out of the main entrance. I counted my fingers and then I patted myself down – just to be on the safe side.

Then I went to tell Lesley that we was up.

11 Brixton

The media response to unusual weather is as ritualised and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: ‘I can’t believe there’s so much snow.’ Then anger: ‘Why can’t I drive my car, why are the trains not running?’ Then blame: Why haven’t the local authorities gritted the roads, where are the snow ploughs, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can’t? This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling background moan, enlivened by occasional ‘Asylum Seekers Ate My Snow Plough’ headlines from the Daily Mail, that continues until the weather clears up. Luckily we were spared some of the repetition as the authorities narrowed down the source of the E. coli outbreak to a stall in Walthamstow market.

Slightly elevated temperatures and no fresh snow had turned the main roads into rivers of brown slush. I was getting the hang of winter driving, which mostly consisted of not going too fast and putting as much room between you and the average driver as humanly possible. Traffic was light enough for me to brave Vauxhall Bridge, but I went on via Oval and the Brixton Road just to be sure. We stopped short of Brixton proper and turned into Villa