Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(20)

The interior décor of the pub, on the other hand, couldn’t have been dumped in a skip fast enough. In fact, quite a lot of it looked like it had been salvaged from skips in the first place. The floor was a patchwork of different coloured lino, faded blue in one corner, scuffed brown in front of the bar. A mismatched collection of fabric-covered benches, stools and repurposed wooden kitchen chairs were clustered around chipboard tables with genuine wood-finish laminated tops. The light coming in the dirty windows was a dusty brilliance on one side of the pub and cast the other side into shadow. In those shadows I saw two figures hunched over a table playing dominoes. The pieces clacking down in a demure English style. The players seemed to be the only patrons.

The place couldn’t have been more demi-monde if it had changed its name to Biers and had a sign saying Do not ask for normality, as postmodernism often offends.

The bar was the only solid bit of furnishing, an old-fashioned wooden pub bar with a brass foot rail that looked like it had been looted during the Blitz and cemented awkwardly into place by someone on work experience.

As I walked towards the bar I felt a strange wave of vestigia – the smells of burnt earth and incense, and behind them a wash of sound like an outdoor market, with shouting and calls to buy and haggling, and the sound of anvils ringing like bells.

I blinked and realised that there was a young woman waiting behind the counter. She was tiny and dressed in orange capri pants and a purple T-shirt with a scorpion printed on the front. I couldn’t tell if she was mixed race or Portuguese or something like that, but she had a straight nose and hair and light brown skin.

And black eyes, and a disturbingly unwavering gaze.

‘What’ll it be?’ she said in an old-fashioned cockney accent.

I introduced myself as Detective Constable Peter Grant – because I’m allowed to do that now.

‘Yeah, you’re the Starling, ain’t you?’ she said, and managed to work an improbable glottal stop into the word ‘starling’.

I figured, if we were going to play it that way . . .

‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘So who are you, then, when you’re at home?’

‘Where do you think you’re standing?’ she said. ‘From a topographical point of view?’

The answer was, well, in the shallow valley carved by the second most important river in London.

‘So, you’re the Walbrook?’

‘You can call me Lulu,’ she said.

‘I know your mum. And a couple of your sisters.’

A hush fell all around me and there was a sound like wind chimes – the bottles along the back of the bar tinkling into each other.

‘If you want to stay on my good side,’ said Lulu, ‘you might not want to be name-dropping in this pub – especially not those names.’

My mum maintains a couple of rotating feuds with the vast cloud of family and semi-family that now stretches across four generations and eleven time zones. I know for a fact that one Aunty Kadi hasn’t spoken to another Aunty Kadi for six years, although, just to confuse people, she gets on fine with a third Aunty Kadi. Which is why most introductions in my family start, ‘This is your Aunty Kadi who lives in Peckham and married my half-brother from Lunghi, but is not the Aunty Kadi who said that thing about me which was totally not true’. Not all my aunties are called Kadi – some of them are called Ayesha, and one of them, on my dad’s side, is called Bob. The upshot of this is I’m well skilled at keeping my head down in the face of intra-familial wrangling.

‘Fair enough,’ I said and, because I thought it might be a spectacularly bad idea to ask for a drink, I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.

Lulu gave me a crooked smile.

‘High Fae?’ she asked.

‘You know,’ I said. ‘The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.’

‘You mean them what step between worlds?’

‘Could be.’

‘Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?’

‘Them sort of people,’ I said. ‘Yeah.’

‘Not in here, squire,’ she said. ‘I run a respectable pub.’



Later that evening, when I got Beverley alone in the big bath at her house, I asked about Walbrook.

‘She doesn’t mix with us,’ she said, leaning forward while I soaped her back.

‘Why not?

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘If she doesn’t want to mix with us we can’t exactly ask her why, can we?’

‘You don’t seem very curious about what she’s like.’

‘I am curious, but . . .’ She shifted and a wave of cool water from the other end of the bath sloshed over me. ‘It’s like the back of your head. Apart from after your yearly haircut, do you ever look at the back of your head?’

‘That makes no sense at all,’ I said, and used my toes to open the hot tap.

‘I suppose not,’ said Beverley, and leant back against my chest. She had her locks all tied up on the crown of her head and they brushed my face, smelling of lemons and clean damp hair. ‘Some things we do are never going to make sense to you. They barely make sense to us half the time.’

‘What does your mum say?’

‘She says, “When you are older these things will be clearer. Now go away and stop bothering me with all these questions”.’