Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(19)
‘He could at least move to a Home Office priority crime,’ he said. ‘Something worth nicking him for. Or maybe he could buy something worth sequestrating.’
I explained that people like Zach were wired differently from most of us. Driven by a different set of priorities – even if they were as blind to their obsessions as we were to ours.
‘Is that what it is?’ Seawoll had said, giving me a long look. ‘Well, that explains a lot.’
Zach was also costing us a fortune, because a full-time surveillance is three shifts of five running 24/7 plus overtime – a cool two and a half grand a day. And every week or so he managed to shake them anyway. As he had that morning.
We still had to pay the bloody team, by the way – police work is by the hour, not by results.
‘Is he using magic to do that?’ asked Guleed.
‘He’s just really sneaky,’ I said. ‘But I reckon he only makes an effort when he wants to slope off and meet Lesley – which is a good thing.’
‘Because?’
‘For one thing, it means if we ever find Martin Chorley we can time his arrest to when she isn’t there,’ I said. ‘One less thing to worry about.’
There was no Goblin Market that week but Marcia, who grows underwater blow on the Regent’s Canal just outside Camden Lock, mentioned that she’d heard of unusual sightings of the High Fae around Southend and Canvey Island.
‘Only on moonless nights,’ said Marcia, a muscular white woman in her seventies who favoured sleeveless tops that showed off her impressive tattoo collection. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said. ‘But can we make sure it’s just tea this time?’
‘I’ve already said that was a mistake,’ said Marcia. ‘I got the labels mixed up.’
She ducked into the cabin to put the kettle on. Marcia’s boat is one of the few remaining narrowboats still rigged for cargo, with a small cabin at the stern and a long tarpaulin-covered A-frame over the holds forward. The tarpaulin was blue, which clashed horribly with the lurid red and orange gingerbread trim of the boat itself. Marcia had bought it in 1974 when she’d mustered out of the Merchant Marine. Previous to that she’d been first mate on a tramp freighter registered out of Panama. At the bow of the boat, just behind the prow, a half metre high carved wooden statue of an orangutan sat cross-legged, palms upwards in the style of the Buddha. This mark of allegiance being why Marcia didn’t pay tying up fees anywhere along the length of the canal.
That and the blow, of course. Which, while not containing any Falcon-actionable ingredients, and you can be sure we tested extensively, was potent enough for me to be missing one whole weekend. Guleed swears blind I didn’t do anything too embarrassing and so far nothing has surfaced on YouTube. Occasionally she or Bev, or once even Molly, will look at me and laugh . . . but that could just be my paranoia.
I glanced inside Marcia’s cabin long enough to make sure it was Sainsbury’s own label tea bags going into the mugs. Once the tea was done we did the whole ‘no obligation’ exchange – nobody knows whether this is really necessary, and nobody wants to be the first to find out the hard way that it is.
We sat opposite each other on the padded gunwales and chatted shit for a bit. It’s good when you’re running an investigation not to get tunnel vision. Sometimes spending a bit of time with the local faces can often yield better results than charging around yelling ‘Just the facts, ma’am’. So it proved that afternoon, although I didn’t spot the connections until much later.
‘You guys haven’t been stirring up the City, have you?’ she asked.
We were moored off Muriel Street in Islington, just short of the west end of the Islington Tunnel, which gaped like the entrance to a dark dimension, but really just led to more Islington. Marcia had gestured down it when she spoke – so I knew when she said ‘the City’ she meant the City of London proper.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Things have been unsettled recently.’
She refused to provide details – although she did suggest I might want to check out the Goat and Crocodile. Which turned out to be a pub in Shoreditch. When I checked the map I keep on my phone I saw that it lay squarely on the theoretical course of the Walbrook. The river that originally bisected the Roman city from north to south.
Worth a look, I thought.
Few buildings evoke the sinister horror of 1950s municipal architecture more strikingly than the flat roof pub. Thrown up in their thousands wherever the working class were being rehoused, it’s hard to imagine that the architects were not secret teetotallers looking to make the whole pub experience as grim as possible. How else do you explain the cheap portal frame construction, the equally cheap uninsulated concrete slabs, and the flat roof with just enough parapet to ensure that damaging puddles formed with the lightest drizzle.
The Goat and Crocodile was a classic flat roof pub, and the fact that it sat squarely under the brand new concrete viaduct that linked the London Overground to the station at Shoreditch High Street marked it out from the start.
The sign looked even older than the pub, and in patches had been bleached blank by the weather. There was enough left to make out the image of a goat standing on its hind legs, head tilted upwards, jaws open as if screaming. The bleaching made it hard to see, but there was a suggestion that the goat had its forelimbs around the shoulders of figures to either side – as if it were dancing in a chorus line. There was no sign of the crocodile. The more I stared, the more I was convinced of the mad gleam in the animal’s eye. The paintwork was very fine and if ever a pub sign was ripe to be restored and hung in a museum, this was it.