Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)
Ben Aaronovitch
It is the unanimous belief of the senior officers involved in the above operations that Martin Chorley represents a serious and immediate danger to the Queen’s Peace on a scale that could, conceivably, match that of the 7/7 bomb attacks. To this end it is their conviction that we should effect the capture, arrest and prosecution of Martin Chorley as soon as possible. To do this will require an aggressively proactive intelligence led investigation. The DPS have advised that internal communications within MPS have been subverted requiring any operation to be run on a ‘need to know’ basis and with compartmentalised IT support.
As the MPS’, and the UK’s, lead agency on Falcon matters I can see no alternative but to let the Special Assessment Unit run the operation in line with their rather, frankly, risky and unorthodox methods. It will, at least, create a degree of plausible deniability should matters become messily public and remains the best chance for a positive outcome with the minimum exposure to the media.
1
Chiswick Poke
His name was Richard Williams and he worked in public relations. Despite living in a nice Edwardian semi in Chiswick, his family were originally from Fulwood, Sheffield and had enough readies to send him to Birkdale School as a day boy. Thus allowing him to get both an expensive education and a home cooked meal. He’d moved to London after graduating with a creditable first from Magdalen College, Oxford. There he had met his first wife while working for a major advertising agency. Now with a second, younger, wife and a pair of daughters on the cusp of primary school he was, if I was any judge, getting ready to move out to the Thames Valley or even further west to ensure that they went to schools that were a little less ‘colourful’ than the ones in Chiswick. I could guess this because I knew just about everything there was to know about Richard Williams, from his school records to the last thing he bought online with his credit card. No doubt he would be horrified to hear that he’d fallen victim to the ubiquitous surveillance state, and even more horrified to learn that two police officers, me and DS ‘count the stripes’ Guleed, were sitting across from his house in an unmarked, but mercifully not silver, Hyundai and keeping his house under observation.
Me and Guleed were less horrified, and more bored out of our tiny little minds.
We were there because while at Oxford Richard Williams had joined a dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Nothing unusual about that; plenty of posh students and their aspirational middle-class groupies joined dining clubs, if only for the chance to get pissed and boisterous without the fear of turning up on a cheap Channel 5 documentary about the moral decline of the English working class.
Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.
What made the Little Crocodiles different was their founder Professor Geoffrey Wheatcroft, DD, DPhil, FSW, and fully qualified wizard. The FSW is the giveaway. It stands for Fellow of the Society of the Wise, otherwise known as The Folly – the official home of British wizardry since 1775. And if this is coming as a shock you might want to consider doing some background reading before you continue.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft thought it would be a laugh to teach some of the Little Crocodiles how to do magic – we don’t know how many. A small percentage of them got really good at it, but we don’t know how many of these there are, either.
What we do know is that at least two of them decided to use their magical skills to do some serious crimes. Including a couple that might just qualify as crimes against humanity – and I’m not joking about that.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft died before all this came to light, and so managed to avoid the consequences for his actions, although I know my governor occasionally fantasises about digging up his corpse and setting fire to it. Also conveniently dead was Albert Woodville-Gentle, who we used to call Faceless Man number I. But, before he went, he helped train up Martin Chorley, who we called Faceless Man II. Trust me – it made sense at the time.
We know who Martin Chorley is, and we know what he’s done. But we don’t know where he is. Or what he’s planning. And that’s what’s keeping us all awake at night.
The man was clever, I’ll say that. He didn’t count on getting busted, but he definitely had contingency plans and resources squirrelled away just in case.
We really only had two viable lines of inquiry to find Martin Chorley. One was the fact that we know he recruited former Little Crocodiles to work for him, and the other was that there were more of those that we hadn’t identified. So some bright spark came up with the idea of the ‘poke’ strategy.
We got our analysts to locate likely candidates amongst the Little Crocodiles, then we put them under close surveillance and then we went and practised some light intimidation – the ‘poke’ – to spook them. That done, we sat back and waited to see if they reacted. Hopefully they might call a number or send an email or a text to an unusual contact. Even more hopefully, they might run out of their house, jump in their car and lead us somewhere tasty.
That’s why me and Guleed were in the Hyundai – so we could follow Williams if he ran for it.
‘This is all your fault,’ said Guleed.
‘It’s bound to work sooner or later,’ I said.
Richard Williams was our third ‘poke’ and the consensus was that we’d only get another two or three attempts before Martin Chorley twigged what we were doing, or someone tried to sue us for harassment.