Whispers Under Ground

‘You do know the search team would have found it,’ said Lesley.

‘It’s not good to become reliant on specialists,’ I said.

‘Hear hear,’ said Nightingale.

‘And we’re not specialists?’ asked Lesley.

‘We’re indispensable,’ I said. ‘That’s what we are.’

We had to wait while a couple more techs finished up in the living-room area before we could go in. Nightingale, despite being vacuum-packed in an earlier era, had taken to advances in forensic science like a man who knew a magic bullet when he saw one. He might be hazy about what DNA actually was, but he understood the concept of trace evidence and took everything else on trust.

Actually I tried to explain DNA fingerprinting to him once, but found I had to look most of it up myself. The biology I could understand. It was the various probability calculations that stuffed me – they always do. I’d have been a bad scientist.

Once the techs were out, Nightingale led us inside, making us aware of the circle of blue police tape surrounding a burnt patch on the carpet and the numbered tags scattered around the room.

‘I brought you two here,’ said Nightingale, ‘because I wanted you to have experience of this while the vestigium was strong enough to be identified.’

He had us close our eyes and think about nothing, which is, of course, impossible. But it was from that jumble of random thoughts that you picked out the uncanny. In this case the vestigium was quite startling, like a shrieking voice, almost but not quite human. Like when cats fight outside your window and for a moment you can swear it’s a person screaming. Not once you’ve been police for any length of time, though – you soon learn to tell the difference.

‘Screaming,’ I said.

‘Is that a ghost?’ asked Lesley.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Nightingale.

‘A demon?’ I asked.

‘In the biblical sense of a fallen angel no,’ said Nightingale. ‘But it can be thought of as a spirit that has been driven into a state of malevolence.’

‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

‘Torture some poor soul to death,’ said Nightingale. ‘And then trap the spirit at the point of death.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Weaponised ghosts?’

‘The Germans invented this,’ said Lesley. ‘Didn’t they?’

‘Not invented,’ said Nightingale. ‘Refined perhaps. We believed that the technique is actually very old and originated in Scandinavia during the first millennia.’

‘Vikings,’ said Lesley.

‘Precisely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Bloodthirsty, but surprisingly erudite in a limited fashion.’

Well that made sense, what with those long winter nights, I thought. Once you’d exhausted the possibilities of drinking, feasting and wenching, torturing someone slowly to death probably helped break the monotony.

Nightingale handed me a stick.

‘I want you to bang gently on the carpet and find the edges of the device,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley can mark the outside with this.’ He handed her a piece of chalk.

The stick was thirty centimetres long, knobbly and still covered in bark. It looked like something you might pick up while walking in the woods with a small annoying dog.

‘Very high-tech,’ I said.

Nightingale frowned at me. ‘Wood is best,’ he said. ‘The greener and younger the better. Pull a branch off a sapling if you can. Much less likely to set it off.’

My mouth went dry. ‘But this one isn’t live,’ I said. ‘Is it? You disarmed it?’

‘Not disarmed,’ said Nightingale. ‘Discharged and dissipated – think of it as a controlled explosion.’

One that we’d ‘heard’ all the way across the river in Brixton.

‘But it’s inert now?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But it was common for these devices to have two separate components, one to cause the initial damage and a second to catch any rescuers or medical teams.’

‘So be careful,’ said Lesley.

I thumped the carpet a safe distance from the burn mark just to get a feel for what the normal floor surface felt like – concrete decking with a layer of hard insulator on top if I was any judge. I worked the stick back towards the centre until I felt it come down on something unmistakably metallic.

I froze.

‘Find the edge,’ said Nightingale.

I forced myself to backtrack until I was tapping concrete again. Lesley marked the spot with the chalk. I worked my way around the edge – it seemed to match the circular burn on the carpet but Nightingale said that you could never take that for granted. Once we’d established that there were no trigger pads outside the burnt area Nightingale handed Lesley a Stanley knife and we watched as she cut out a square of carpet and peeled it away.

The demon trap was a disc of metal the size of a riot shield, the kind you use for snatch arrests. The metal was a dull silver and looked like stainless steel. At the centre two circles had been incised side by side. One circle was filled with a glittering sand that reminded me of what happened to microprocessors when they were exposed to magic.

‘I’m guessing that the empty one is the first component,’ I said.

‘Top marks, Peter,’ said Nightingale.

‘So the intact circle is the second component,’ I said.

‘What we call a double-boss device,’ said Nightingale.

‘What’s this scratched into the edge?’ asked Lesley.

I looked where she was pointing and saw that there were marks etched neatly around the rim of the disc. Nightingale explained that they’d often found runic inscriptions on demon traps and the theory was that in the original Viking designs the runes had been part of the enchantment.

‘Like the Daoists?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ said Nightingale. ‘Comparative thaumatology is a discipline still in its infancy.’

This was a familiar Nightingale joke – meaning that I was the only one currently interested in it.

‘We spent a great deal of effort having the runes translated only to find it was mostly insults – “die English scum,” that sort of thing,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sometimes the messages were more ambiguous – “this is not a moral argument” was one of my favourites and of course there was the unknown craftsman who wrote “Greetings from Ettersberg”.’

‘What did that mean?’

‘Come and put me out of my misery,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or so we interpreted it. They’d conscripted a lot of practitioners from all over Europe, many couldn’t face what they were being made to do, some suicided, some suffered from a strange illness where they just stopped eating and wasted away. Others were tougher, undertook acts of sabotage or tried to contact the outside world. It must been a desperate hope that someone would hear them.’

‘And somebody did,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘We did.’

I recognised the markings and they weren’t Nordic runes.

‘This is Elvish script,’ I said.

‘I doubt that,’ said Nightingale.

‘Not real elves,’ I said, wondering if there were such a thing. ‘Elves as in Lord of the Rings elves, Tolkien. He developed his own language and alphabet for his books.’

‘This is all very interesting, boys,’ said Lesley. ‘And much as I like hanging around lethal devices, I haven’t had my dinner yet – so can we get on with the IED.’

‘IDD,’ I said. ‘Improvised Demonic Device.’

‘It doesn’t look improvised, anyway,’ said Lesley. ‘It looks custom-built.’

‘When you two are quite finished,’ said Nightingale.