Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(31)

Later, as we lay there with the cabin door open to catch the breeze, we heard Abigail talking to someone, although whoever it was pitched their voice too low for us to identify. I reckoned they were outside her tent. Occasionally there was a laugh and, horrifically, the ting sound of beer cans.

After a while the conversation died down and we heard the distinctive sound of a tent door being zipped closed. What we didn’t hear were any footsteps moving away.

I went to get up and check but Bev put her arm across my chest to stop me.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she said quietly.

‘Just a quick look,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘But—’

‘What do you think the Summer Court is for?’

‘But I’m responsible,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Beverley. ‘And so is she.’

‘People say that, you know,’ I said. ‘But if something goes tits up suddenly everybody wants to know why the police weren’t intervening at an earlier stage.’

‘Relax,’ said Beverley, ‘She’s Nightingale’s apprentice and my friend. People round here would gnaw their own foot off before doing anything with Abigail that Abigail didn’t want them to.’

It still took me a while to drift off.



One other thing the Summer Court was definitely for was creating a tremendous mess. But fortunately Father Thames, or more precisely Oxley, had organised a clean-up crew almost entirely composed of pale young men with hangovers. Soon the drifts of bottles, pink and blue plastic wrappers, and happily unidentifiable organic leftovers were scooped up into bin bags and dumped in an open-topped river barge that had arrived first thing that morning.

‘The Old Man took the Keep Britain Tidy campaign very seriously,’ said Oxley, as we supervised the hard work from deckchairs and drank coffee.

‘Where’s Isis?’

‘Upstream with the rest of the women,’ he said. ‘It’s customary.’

The women and girls got the morning off during the clean-up and traditionally bathed in the symbolically clean waters upstream.

‘And have a picnic and gossip and all the other important mysteries of the better half. It’s all to do with the female principle and that style of thing.’ He caught my expression. ‘This is what Isis tells me. I just keep my eye on the boys and mind my own business.’

Which was obviously the theme for the weekend.

Oxley’s current mental state, caught in that transition between alcohol and caffeine, would have made it a good time to get some social history questions answered – including what the hell they did before coffee was invented – but my phone started ringing. It was Stephanopoulos.

‘City of London need you to do a Falcon Assessment at a crime scene,’ she said.

I asked whether it was urgent.

‘As soon as pos,’ said Stephanopoulos.

Nightingale was obviously busy and neither Guleed or Carey were qualified.

‘I’m on my way,’ I said.

I called both Bev and Abigail, but their phones went straight to voicemail

I asked Oxley to ask Beverley to bring Abigail home. Then I showered, changed and drove back to London.

And if you’re the woman who, driving along the A4155 that afternoon, found herself inexplicably picking up a pair of hitchhikers and driving them all the way into London, I’m really, really sorry – I assumed Beverley would organise a lift from one of her relatives.





13

Probably Goat

Despite being the oldest part of London, the Square Mile has a faster architectural churn than anywhere else in the city. Occasionally it throws up something exciting, innovative and modern . . . but mostly it doesn’t. Architects like a bit of volume, and financiers like floor space. The easiest way to maximise both is to build a cube – which is why ninety-nine per cent of all office buildings are boxes with lobbies.

The New Bloomberg building on Queen Victoria Street was going to be yet another steel-framed Metsec affair but was still half built, with plastic sheeting protecting the gaping open sides. Once the cladding and windows were in, I suspected it wasn’t going to be much of an aesthetic improvement on the 1950s modernist boxes it was replacing. The site hoarding had ‘Improving the Image of Construction’ signs at regular intervals along its length.

Great, I thought, now can we do something about the construction itself?

It was obviously my month for wearing hard hats because the site safety officer insisted I put one on before pointing me at the temporary staircase that was bolted onto the front of the building. I nodded at the City of London PC on guard at the bottom and made my way up.

Waiting for us at the top was a small Vietnamese woman in a City of London Police uniform with SC tags denoting that she was a special constable. This was Geneviève Nguy?n who had attended the Sorbonne and worked in Paris before being headhunted by Citigroup and moving to London. There she had discovered that any citizen of the European Economic Area could swear an oath, don a uniform and enforce the law with the same authority as their full-time colleagues.

Most of the time she stays in her expensively tailored suit and helps with fiendishly complicated fraud cases, but the City Police allow her out on the streets once in a while. She also triples up as their liaison with the Folly, and was one of the first officers to do my patented vestigia awareness training seminar. She didn’t seem at all fazed by my wild talk of ghosts and magic – which made me really suspicious. But all she would admit to was having heard a lot of stories from her grandmother.