Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(33)
‘Do you think this is one of yours?’ asked Nguy?n.
‘I don’t know yet. Are you going to pursue the vandalism side?’
‘I’m just a special. But the head of Bloomberg’s London office is finishing his vacation in the Seychelles early and flying back this afternoon. So I believe some investigation is likely.’
‘In that case I’ll email you some names to look out for,’ I said.
Back in the ‘good old days’ when a quarter of the map was pink and the Folly was at its height you couldn’t practise magic in the UK without their permission. Sometimes the permission was implicit – if you weren’t scaring the horses or curdling the milk they ignored or patronised you, especially if you were female.
But if you were a full-on Newtonian practitioner, a master of the forms and wisdoms, you had better be recognising the authority of the Society of the Wise or there were going to be consequences.
All that ended with the decimation of British and European wizardry during the Second World War, although personally I think their control might already have been slipping in the 1920s and ’30s. After the war all you had to do to practise magic with impunity was not come to the attention of Britain’s last official wizard.
At least until recently.
When dealing with a problem, the first thing to do is admit you have a problem. The second thing is to try and determine the scale of the problem. Now, for the last couple of years we’ve mainly been hunting Little Crocodiles. But in the process we’ve been identifying other potential practitioners and adding them to our growing database. A database that I was happy to assure the Data Protection Agency was impervious to unauthorised access on account of it being confined to old-fashioned index cards in a rather nice polished walnut filing cabinet in the upstairs magical library.
They still made me fill in my own body weight in forms.
And on one of those cards in the walnut cabinet was the name Patrick Gale – confirmed practitioner. He’d come to my attention following the death by hyperthaumaturgical necrosis of one Tony Harden – a junior colleague of his. Because neither had studied at Oxford or were on our Little Crocodiles list, or appeared as nominals in Operation Jennifer or any other Martin Chorley-related investigations, we’d kept a watching brief.
Also, Patrick Gale was a senior partner at Bock, Loupe and Stag, one of the top ten legal firms in London known collectively as ‘the magic circle’. Firms like BL&S routinely swindled developing countries for fun and profit, bullied government departments and had the personal mobile numbers of media proprietors on speed dial – you don’t mess with them unless you have to. Not if you want to wake up in the same career you went to bed in.
But the case that had drawn Patrick Gale to my attention had also involved the ritual sacrifice of a goat. So it had to be followed up. In policing you don’t want to be explaining to the case review board why you missed that vital piece of evidence because it seemed a bit obscure and you couldn’t be bothered to get off your arse. Even if in our work a case review board is pretty bloody unlikely.
So when I got back to the Folly I pulled the relevant index cards and sent the details to Nguy?n. Then I called Postmartin, who has a morbid interest in animal sacrifice.
‘My interest is entirely academic and historical,’ said Postmartin on the phone.
Behind him I could hear town traffic and student voices. Given it was a warm Sunday afternoon I guessed he was sitting outside the Eagle and Child enjoying a gin and tonic and pretending he was C. S. Lewis’s younger, atheist, brother.
‘Neither Thomas nor Abdul have ever shown any interest, beyond the practical, in ritual magic,’ he said. ‘Particularly if they predate the Newtonian synthesis.’
Postmartin always called it ‘the Newtonian synthesis’ to emphasise the fact that Newton did not so much invent magic as find the principles that underlie its practice.
‘A practice that dates back millennia,’ he said. ‘All the way back to the dawn of Man. If not older than that.’
Postmartin favoured the ‘tribal religion theory’ propagated by P. J. Wickshaven, country parson, occasional wizard and amateur anthropologist. Around 1905 he wrote a treatise in which he postulated that religious rituals gained currency with early Man because they produced actually identifiable results. Furthermore, as Postmartin explained it to me, the ancient pre-Abrahamic religions maintained their effectiveness because of their essentially local nature.
‘It’s always Isis or Hermes of such and such a place,’ he said. ‘It seems entirely reasonable to me that Isis, for example, could have been a local genius loci who either took on the guise of the goddess or even perhaps came to embody the deity in that locality.’
Prior to Newton, Wickshaven contended, the practice of magic and that of religion were essentially indistinguishable. He’d travelled to Papua New Guinea in 1907 to find some poor lost tribe to prove his theory for him and had last been seen setting out from Port Moresby, never to return. You’ve got a lot of work like this in the Folly libraries – enthusiastic theories defended to the death without much in the way of corroboration. Or, as Abigail said, ‘So, this is what people used to do before the internet.’
According to Wickshaven, the central figure – he called him a shaman – generates a forma and leads a congregation in a ritual. Even if only a couple of the attendees successfully replicate the forma then, presumably, that would increase the strength of the spell. And throw in an animal sacrifice?