Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(17)

‘So she was born the way she is?’ I said. ‘How can you tell?’

‘Why don’t we have a look?’

She tweaked the sheet back to expose poor Charlotte Green down to her navel. The horribly familiar Y incision had been sewn up, although I noticed the cut had wiggled slightly to avoid bisecting any bullet wounds.

‘We won’t have the genetic results back for a week or so, but I’m willing to bet good money that we won’t find any evidence of chimerism,’ she said.

So no genetic manipulation at the cellular level.

I asked her how she could be so sure, which got me an approving nod from Dr Walid.

‘From this,’ said Dr Vaughan.

I watched, wincing, as she reached into Charlotte’s mouth and pulled her tongue out to its full extent. It was at least twenty centimetres long.

‘Now, as you can imagine,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘You can’t just a fit a tongue like that into someone’s face – there’s no room for it. If you detach her lower jawbone and have a good look down her throat you’ll see it’s substantially different from the human norm.’

Which didn’t necessarily mean anything, since the human norm was a spectrum that went from smaller than you’d expect to larger than you can imagine.

‘Vastly different,’ said Dr Walid, who’s had this argument with me before. ‘But very similar to Molly’s. As is the dentition.’

‘Molly let you look in her throat?’

‘Not me,’ said Dr Walid, who had never got close to Molly with so much as a tongue depressor.

‘She’s perfectly reasonable if you explain yourself properly,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘She let me have a quick look with a bronchoscope. Admittedly, it took a little while for her to get used to it, and I did have to get a second bronchoscope after she bit through the first one.’

‘Did you get a tissue sample as well?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Dr Walid. ‘That’s what we’ll use as a comparison for genome sequencing. But at an anatomical level, the positioning of the hyoid bone and the larynx are identical between Molly and Charlotte.’

‘Longer tongue, more control, and extra room to keep it in,’ said Dr Vaughan.

And if Charlotte the killer nanny was the same as Molly, then the chances were that she was the same as the so-called High Fae I’d encountered in Herefordshire. We couldn’t call them gammas. It made them sound like bad guys in a cheap first-person shooter – and what if they found out?

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘can we change the surname to Greenwood?’

‘Whatever for?’ asked Dr Vaughan.

‘Because one day we might want to share this data with them,’ I said. ‘And it will be slightly less embarrassing.’





8

Flat Roof Pub

So I spent the next couple of days seeing if I couldn’t find where Charlotte Greenwood had come from.

Some say there is an invisible line in the world that separates the demi-monde, the world of magic, from the mundane world of everyday existence. They say that if you step over that line, however unknowingly, your world will be changed for ever. They say that once you have taken that fateful step you can never go back, never unsee what you have seen, never unknow what you have discovered.

This is of course total bollocks.

Of course you can cross back; you can move to Burnley and become a hairdresser, or to Sutton and work in IT. You can go caravanning in Wales and never see a single dragon, and go swimming in the Severn and never meet the goddess Sabrina.

Even the very strange can leave the demi-monde if they put their mind to it. There’s definitely at least one bridge troll that I know of teaching PE at a comprehensive in Reading.

Those that don’t choose a quiet life teaching basketball to twelve-year-olds form what we call the demi-monde, because calling it the half-world in English would lead to too many questions. It’s made up of fae of all kinds, and also people who want to be fae or have been touched by the supernatural in some way, or just found this great pub with this really spooky atmosphere.

So pub crawling I went – from the Chestnut Tree at Hyde Park Corner to the Spaniards Inn in Highgate, to the shebeen that’s run off the roof of a tower block in Hillingdon. Everywhere I went I was greeted with the glad cries and open-hearted welcome that a police officer comes to expect when trawling his suspect pool.

I did get some co-operation if only, as it was made clear, to speed me on my way.

While I was out fruitlessly outreaching the community, the Queensland Police emailed back to say that Gabriel Tate had died the previous November after being bitten by an eastern brown snake at his home in Middle Park, Brisbane. That he didn’t recognise the bite for what it was, until he was too far gone, was attributed to his inexperience with Australian wildlife and it was considered an accidental death. Just to be on the safe side I requested the full file.

An email from the US regarding John Chapman just said Call me.



By the time I got back from Hillingdon it was past 8 p.m. in Washington DC, and so late enough to catch my US contact at home.

Leaving aside dumb luck, criminals are mainly caught by systems, not individuals. Most of these systems are officially sanctioned and come with virtual folders full of regulations and best practice, but some are complex webs of interpersonal relationships and traded favours. Where everyday policing butts up against boundaries – jurisdictional, national, ideological – the official linkages can clog up or break down or just plain fail to exist at all. Here the informal networks take over at every level, from ordinary hard-working but newly qualified DCs to the chief constables of major forces – they are tolerated as the quickest way to get the job done.