A quarter tone flat as it happens, but beautiful all the same.
I didn’t recognise the song at first. The tune and the structure of the couplets seemed familiar but it was only when she sang the fourth couplet—
Oranges and Lemons
Ring the bells at St Clements
—that I recognised it as the nursery rhyme. An older version, I discovered later, after a bit of Googling.
As she sang her happy little song of legally enforced debt and credit avoidance she turned to dust, dissolving in front of me and drifting away on a non-existent breeze across the rows of Topsy and Tim books and the serried ranks of coloured pens.
I personally would have liked to believe that a friendly skeleton on a white horse was waiting to carry her off. Preferably to somewhere a good voice coach could teach her to sing on key. But I’ve always believed that my dad is right about one thing—your life is your solo and whatever song you choose to sing you only get to do it once.
Although if you’re lucky you get to change the tune a couple of times.
Nightingale was waiting for me outside the shop. He frowned when he saw me.
“Is something wrong, Peter?”
“I think someone’s been kidnapped,” I said.
2Note for Reynolds: Diego Maradona was a short-arse Argentinian soccer player who, despite not being averse to a bit of handball, was awe-inspiring in his ability to race up the length of the pitch, bypassing opposing players as if they weren't there, and then slamming the ball into the back of the net.[back]
3Note for Reynolds: what you'd call a Social Security Number[back]
Chapter 5:
THE WATER BABY
When in doubt, do police work. You start with the facts you’ve got and work your way methodically out from there. Even if some of the facts come from an unorthodox source and your Day Book reads like an extract from a Bram Stoker novel.
There was a princess trapped in a dungeon…
“And you believe that represents a kidnapping?” said Nightingale.
Despite everything, we kept the Hangover Stone going until rush hour was well over because it’s not good police work to assume there was only one ghost per morning.
“There’s a sentence you don’t hear every day,” said Jaget.
“Speak for yourself,” I said.
After which we packed up and retired to a nearby pub for refs and regrouping.
“We can’t be sure it’s a kidnapping,” I said. “But if it is a kidnapping we can’t afford to delay for confirmation.”
Nightingale and Jaget nodded over their pints. Kidnappings were time-sensitive, so you couldn’t afford to mess about.
So, assuming it was one…what we needed to know was who the victim was and where they were being kept.
“Alice Bowman said that the Master was sending her and her friends down the line, which I think means the ‘dungeon’ has to be close to one of the stations further up.”
Jaget said in that case we could rule out Amersham because Alice had got off the direct Chesham train. “Can we check Abigail’s notes to see if all the sightings were on Chesham trains?” he asked.
“As soon as we get back to the Folly,” I said.
“Likewise we want to check with NCA’s misper unit,” said Jaget. “Start looking for missing women from further up the line.”
“What does a dungeon sound like to you?” I asked.
“A basement maybe?” said Jaget. “And the description of our Princess’s day sounds like someone commuting into work.”
“This could explain why the ghosts are so assiduously taking the morning train,” said Nightingale. “They may be following a trail worn smooth by the victim.”
“Ghosts do that?” asked Jaget.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to have to check the literature. I’m also interested in this fairy castle that Alice spoke of. I believe a rummage in the magical library is called for.”
I pointed out that Abigail would be waiting for us when we got back to the Folly, no doubt leading Molly astray even as we spoke.
“Abigail can join me in my search,” said Nightingale.
“Abigail?”
“Of course,” said Nightingale. “Not only will it be good practice for her Latin but it would be useful for her to gain some perspective on the craft.”
Nightingale has always been reluctant to let me loose on the library and I must have frowned or something because he went on—“My worry with you, Peter, is not what you would learn but, should you go into the library, you might never emerge again. Abigail can, at least, be lured out with the promise of the pictures Jaget took.”
“She did describe it as a fairy palace,” I said. “We might be looking at an incursion by the Fair Folk.” That being what the old literature called the type of fae that hung about looking cool and riding unicorns and, to my certain knowledge, stealing children. I explained a bit of this to Jaget who gave me the “if you say so” look that had become very familiar to me since I joined the Folly.
“I can check the CP logbooks for the same geographical areas as we check for mispers,” I said. “See if anything pops.”
“Leaving me to the mispers search,” said Jaget.
“Would you?” I said. “That would be brilliant.”
So, our actions suitably assigned, we finished our drinks and got down to what passes for real policing at the Special Assessment Unit. We dropped Jaget off at BTP HQ so he could use his own secure terminal and, importantly, give the impression to his senior officers he was hard at it. When we returned to the Folly we found Abigail in the kitchen teaching Molly how to take pictures of her food using the antiquated Samsung I suspected she’d liberated from my supply of expendable technology.
I suspected Molly wanted the pictures to send to her friends on Twitter and Facebook, the ones that I was not supposed to know about. I didn’t dare ask because we have an unspoken agreement—I don’t question what she does on my computer when I’m out and, in return, she doesn’t murder me in my sleep.
Back in the old days, before the Folly became a de facto branch of the Metropolitan Police—a time that the rest of the Met don’t like to talk about—it was a much wider, grander organisation. A combination Gentleman’s Club, Royal Society and the unofficial magical arm of the British establishment. Back then, every county had an official County Practitioner who were there to keep the peace and deal with any problems that went beyond the purview of the local magistrates. The County Practitioners were utterly respectable and so integrated into the provincial gentry that I’m amazed that one never turned up in a Miss Marple mystery. Maybe some characters are too twisty—even for Agatha.
The CPs, as they were known, kept a working diary not unlike my own Day Book for keeping track of supernatural incidents. At the end of every calendar year they were supposed to be sent back to the Folly where, as far as I could tell, they were shelved at the back of the mundane library and never, ever, picked up again. Sometime after the First World War some bright spark decided that their contents should be neatly typed out, with carbon duplicates, categorised in various different ways and the results filed in a bank of green metal filing cabinets that lined an access corridor, also never to be picked up again. Nightingale said that at one time the Folly had had its own typing pool in the basement with the cooks and maids and Molly.
These are the only CP logs that are filed under subject as well as date, so I always start with them. Usefully, the area I was interested in had been part of Middlesex in those days, which narrowed it down further. The carbon copies are filed in cardboard folders tied up with ribbons and they felt dry and fragile under my fingertips. From 1921 the Middlesex County Practitioner had been one Wallace Blair Esq. from Arbroath of all places and who, by the standards of the Folly, had a nice succinct style. In the files marked “F” for “Fae” I found six promising reports of which one from May 1924 stood out.
Called out to Waterside, a village in the parish of Che
sham, today. The local reverend, who I know to be a sound man, said there had been reports of figures dancing upon the moor. Spoke to witnesses who claimed to have seen six or so girls dancing in what he described as “nightwear and bloomers.” This area has long been reputed to be the abode of “fairies.” Checked the logs of my predecessors and found many references including a verified abduction in 1852, in this case foiled by Walter Buckland who is rusticated at the old parsonage. Alas he left no notes back at Russell Square.
And, also alas, Blair didn’t say which previous CP’s notes he’d consulted. So, short of ploughing through two hundred years of paperwork, I was stuffed. Blair found no direct sign of fairy involvement but did report a strong vestigia of the country type which I took to mean possibly fairy. He did discover bare footprints and some empty gin bottles—freshly emptied by the smell—and concluded that the dancers were probably women from the local mill out for a drunken lark. There followed a paragraph or three lamenting the decline of modern female morality which he blamed on allowing women to do factory work during the Great War. I bet that went down well with the typing pool.
It wasn’t much, but then all I’d had in Herefordshire were imaginary friends and UFO sightings. So I did a quick Google and found the area around Waterside had had its share of sightings—lights in the sky in 2009 and a purported YouTube video of a spacecraft a couple of years later.
More importantly, Waterside was within a brisk cycle ride or short car journey from two stations on the Metropolitan Line—Chesham, and Chalfont and Latimer. So I hopped in the Blue Asbo and set forth to brave the wilds of Buckinghamshire.
Once you’re past the M25 and driving up the Latimer Road there’s no disguising that you’re in a river valley and that Jaget’s fabled good Tamil restaurants are a long way behind you. It didn’t help that the woods and hedgerows were giving me flashbacks to Herefordshire, although thankfully it wasn’t so hot and, hopefully, was lacking in psychopathic unicorns.
After a long stretch of mixed woods and farming, the valley narrows, you pass a sewage treatment plant, some heavy farming and some light engineering and you’ve arrived in Waterside. Beyond the recreation centre and swimming pool was the Moor—note capital letters.
Which, if you were looking for a wild and romantic place, was a bit of a disappointment in that it wasn’t really a moor. It was in fact a marshy artificial island created in the tenth century by Lady Elgiva. Whoever she was, she presumably liked marshy islands for the waterfowl hunting and peasant drowning opportunities. It was used as a recreation area and had a car park, which was handy. So I parked up and had a sniff around. It was a triangular piece of land, hemmed in by the River Chess on one side and the Metropolitan Line on the other. The high fae, aka the fair folk aka elves or whatever you want to call them, do not live amongst us in the same way other fae do, but appear to exist parallel to our world. I’d use the phrase other dimension but I’m not ready to think about the implications of that just yet—thank you very much.
The vestigia they leave behind during an incursion is subtle but powerful and if they’d been abducting princesses in the vicinity I was pretty certain I’d spot it. I checked around to make sure nobody was watching me and lay down in the long grass and pressed my ear to the ground.
For a long time there was nothing but the sweetish smell of grass, the swish of passing cars and the vague worry that I hadn’t remembered to back up my current set of case notes. I’ve learnt to allow myself to let go of these things and exist in the now—which is exactly as easy as it sounds.
Very faintly I caught the distant regular thumping of old machinery, the crackle of paper and an acrid, caustic stink. There’d been mills all along this stretch of the river. The girls the prim and proper Wallace Blair had suspected of drunkenly dancing through the night had worked in those mills and lived in the mean terraces on the opposite bank.
But there was none of the deep vibrato sense of change that you got from an incursion. I suspected it had been gin-drinking working girls back in 1924 and nothing magical before or after. I raised my head to look over at the river.
At least nothing fae.
There was a well-maintained and tree-shaded path running alongside the water. I cast an experienced eye over the suspiciously new-looking reed beds and anti-erosion fixtures. They call this sort of scheme “rewilding.” I can’t prove that a sudden rush to improve your local river indicates the emergence of young and active genius loci. But when Mama Thames went into the river at London Bridge it was so toxic that drowning was the least of your worries. And now—cleanest industrial river in Europe. Just saying.
Right on cue a sturdy little white boy came running down the path towards me waving his arms and yelling. He didn’t look more than four or five, with amazingly pink cheeks, fair hair and blue eyes. He was dressed in red shorts, a stripy blue and green T-shirt and blue trainers. As soon as I saw him I automatically starting scanning for nearby traffic in case he ran into the road, potential child abductors and/or responsible adults.
I soon spotted an elderly white couple, a man and a woman, twenty metres behind him and trying to muster the speed to catch up. The man, grey haired, tweed jacketed and carrying a walking stick, looked dangerously out of breath and I resolved to gently corral the boy to a stop and return him to—what? Grandparents, at a guess.
I bent down and opened my arms to block the pavement, which the boy took as a cue to throw himself at me and wrap his arms around my neck. It was like plunging my face into an icy stream, shocking and exciting and with that the grinding of metal teeth and the fluttering sound of paper wings. I stood up and hoisted him onto my hip.
“What’s your name?” he cried.
“Peter,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Chess,” he said. “Which is supposed to be short for Chester.”
The grandfather had been forced to stop for a bit of a breather, but the gran was made of sterner stuff.
“Chester,” she said as she approached. “Put that poor man down.” And then to me, “I’m so sorry. He seems to have got away from us.” She glanced back at the man who stopped coughing long enough to raise a reassuring hand.
I assured her that it was fine and that I was skilled in the ways of wrangling children, having a ton of nieces, nephews and assorted cousins.
“You smell funny,” said Chester.
A look of total mortification crossed the woman’s face.
“Chester!” she said, and looked at me with a pleading expression. “I’m so very very sorry.”
I told her not to worry, even as Chester asked me if I ate funny food.
“Here, let me take him,” said the woman. She sagged as I handed him back. He was a heavy little boy and slid down her front until he was standing on the pavement holding her hand.
“I’m so very sorry,” said the woman.
The old man arrived in time to catch the fag end of the conversation. He eyed me belligerently and said, “He’s just a boy.”
“And a handsome one too,” I said, because no parent or grandparent, however loco, can resist flattery aimed at their offspring. I asked how old he was and the old man and woman exchanged strangely nervous looks before saying that he was four.
I said that he was a big lad for four, but again the couple’s reaction was all wrong. Alluding to a big healthy child is normally taken as a compliment, but they started to back off in a defensive fashion that is totally familiar to anyone who’s spent five minutes in law enforcement. I couldn’t let them walk away, given who or what I thought the child might be, so I adopted my most positive customer-facing voice.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m with the Metropolitan Police. I wonder—” But I never got to finish, because the woman’s hands flew to her face and the man started shouting, “No, no, no. You can’t have him.”
“Why would I want him?” I asked.
The man and woman stared at each other and I saw the awful realisation that if I hadn’t been suspicious enough to i
ntervene before, I was well and truly over that line now.
The old man seized the boy’s hand and started dragging him back up the path.
“Come on, Chester,” he said. “It’s time for us to go home.”
“But I want to stay with the policeman,” said Chester, showing his age.
“No, no, no,” said the old man. “It’s time for tea.”
The boy was resisting, not yanking his arm back or digging his heels in, but definitely resisting the old man’s pull.
“Allen,” called the old woman. “What are you doing? It’s too late. Allen!” She turned to me and I saw that she was crying, proper old-fashioned stiff upper lip tears. “I suppose we knew this day would happen. I just hoped we would have more time.”
When faced with complex and inexplicable circumstances, a modern police officer will fall back onto one of two basic policing approaches. Option one; call for backup, arrest everyone in the vicinity and sort it out down the nick. Or option two; locate the nearest source of tea, sit everyone down and hope nobody’s carrying a concealed weapon.
I opted for option two, although I did keep an eye on the old man’s walking stick all the way back to their house—just in case. Their names were Allen and Lillian Heywood and they lived in a two-bedroom Edwardian terrace further down the street opposite the community swimming pool and recreation centre. The house was neat and well cared for, but to my eye the Heywoods were losing the battle against the four-year-old agent of entropy who was living with them. There was grime building up in the seams and corners of the hallway and the walls bore a line of gunge at hip level.
The Heywoods might have been aware of this, because they quickly led me through the kitchen, worn but clean, and out into the modest garden at the back. This was well-maintained but strewn with the array of discarded action figures, deflated balls and other forsaken toys that I expected. At the far end was a low fence and, also as I expected, beyond that a metre and a half of grass bank before the course of the River Chess.