Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(25)

I suggested the British Museum, not least because it’s possible to lose just about anything in their storage area. They’re still looking for a mummy that went missing in 1933 – staff believe it was stolen but Nightingale said he’d always had a sneaking suspicion that it got bored one day and walked away.

‘I don’t think we want to expose the museum to the risk,’ he said.

There were any number of army bases and security installations we might have called, but they had even less experience with the uncanny than the British Museum. We’d also considered leaving it in place and using it as bait, but decided the risk to members of the public was too great.

So, smashed it was. And the scrap pieces transported to the Folly to be distributed widely to randomly selected scrap metal recycling companies across the Midlands. We weren’t going to take any chances with it being reassembled on the sly.

The bell sang with the first hammer and screamed with the second. And within the scream I heard a familiar laugh and the jingle of merry bells.

What do you want, you hook—nosed bastard? I asked in my head, but the third blow cracked the bell and Mister Punch fell silent. I turned away to find Nightingale watching me.

‘What did you hear?’ he asked.

‘Mr Punch,’ I said, and asked Nightingale if he hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head.

Oh, me and Punch go way back, I thought. We have a special relationship.



Kimberley Reynolds skyped me from the States to save money and to make the NSA work for their intercept. Behind her I could see a wood veneer headboard and horrible magnolia painted walls – so I guessed she was sitting on a hotel bed. Eating doughnuts, as it turned out.

‘Cleveland PD gifted them,’ she said, taking a bite.

The local police being caught up in a Department of Justice investigation into their tendency to shoot people first and make up answers second. All Kimberley had to do, she said, was roll her eyes and make it clear that if it were up to her they could shoot as many people as they liked.

‘I used to be a straight arrow,’ she said. ‘This is your bad influence.’

‘What was that whole unauthorised operation in our sewers, then?’

‘That,’ said Kimberley, waving half a chocolate frosted doughnut at the camera, ‘was me being patriotic and can-do under difficult foreign circumstances.’

‘So, did you find out about our John Chapman, then?’

‘Oh, you really don’t want him to be your John Chapman,’ said Reynolds. ‘I had a professor like him in college.’

Kimberley’s low opinion of Chapman was shared by his colleagues and most of his students. Sexually harassing his female students and failing to turn up for lectures was bad enough. But worse, according to his faculty colleagues, he was a snob and put on airs.

‘Acted like he was better than them,’ said Kimberley. ‘Refused to socialise.’

Never invited people round to his home, not even the gullible coeds. They had all been shocked by his violent death, of course, but had managed to get on with their lives regardless.

Kimberley had interviewed a lot of the students. A few had ended up in one of several economically priced motels – never more than twice. The general consensus among those so blessed was that John Chapman had given the impression that he was enjoying the experience even less than they were.

Six months following his death, Chapman’s rented apartment had been re-let and redecorated and nobody was sure where his personal effects had disappeared to. Luckily, Cleveland PD had recovered the contents of his car. Including his laptop.

‘Want to guess why that was a waste of their time?’ asked Kimberley.

I said I was all agog, but I wasn’t surprised when it turned out that the microprocessors had inexplicably been turned to sand. As had those in the gas station pumps, the cash register, the CCTV camera and the phone recovered off Chapman’s body.

‘And you remember the thing I told you about when I was last over?’ asked Kimberley. ‘The thing with the bear.’

That had been Kimberley’s first probable encounter with vestigia. And I knew from experience that once you knew what you were looking for, separating vestigia from the brain’s own random background noise got easier with practice.

‘You sensed something?’ I asked.

She had – although she wasn’t sure what it was.

‘Just something,’ she said.

I’d liked to have asked whether Kimberley could make it over the Pond for a bit of training. But we were still waiting for a determination from the Commissioner as to whether we could offer our newly minted vestigia awareness course to non-UK nationals.

Still, I trusted she had enough experience to at least know it when she felt it.

‘Would there really be a trace after six months?’ she asked.

I explained that concrete retained vestigia almost as well as stone or brick.

‘But the initial incident must have been significant,’ I said. ‘For you to sense it over such a wide area.’

My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn’t exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms. I’m particularly proud of ‘initial incident’ although ‘subjective perception threshold’ runs a close second.

‘Still, there were a couple of flash drives among his effects,’ said Kimberley.