Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(38)
‘Entitlement?’ he said.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘We can always have them swear an oath,’ said Nightingale. ‘Something suitably restrictive and modern – like the attestation you fellows took to become constables.’
Historically, the constable’s attestation mainly concerned his loyalty to the monarch. But the modern version includes a promise to be diligent, honest, respect human rights and apply the law without fear and favour. The new wording has been known to provoke hilarity amongst old lags and defence lawyers.
‘Think of it as one of your community outreach programmes,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the resources to enforce our will upon them, but perhaps we can bribe them into submission with Molly’s cooking.’
‘You think that’ll work?’
‘It has with everyone so far.’
I frowned.
‘You don’t approve?’
‘I was thinking of the paperwork,’ I said. ‘Assuming that Patrick Gale is not the last stray we’re going to round up, at the very least we need to develop a safety programme to ensure they don’t melt their brains by accident.’
‘That at least we can leave to Abdul and the irrepressible Dr Vaughan,’ said Nightingale. ‘Who no doubt will be delighted to extend the boundaries of their empire of information.’
‘Their knowledge base,’ I said.
‘I believe that’s what I said.’
‘We can’t keep this up,’ I said. ‘It’s unsustainable.’
‘Which of the many unstable aspects of our professional life are you referring to now?’
‘The secrecy surrounding magic,’ I said. ‘Leaving aside our lack of statutory authority, and the fact that the public have no say whatsoever in our conduct of operations.’
‘They do in a general sense,’ said Nightingale, ‘through the office of the Commissioner and, beyond him, the Home Office.’
‘That is not accountability,’ I said.
‘Do you think the general public would make good decisions?’
‘That’s not the point. Sooner or later this stuff always comes back to bite you in the arse.’
‘You think we should make ourselves public?’ said Nightingale. ‘Step out of the cupboard and into the limelight?’
‘I think we need to be ready for when it happens,’ I said.
‘No other nation has officially acknowledged the existence of magic, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘It might be prudent to ask yourself why.’
14
Human Intelligence Assets
On the following Friday we had a meeting in the incident room of the interested principals to discuss the progress of Operation Jennifer. Seawoll wasn’t happy with the progress we were making. Or, more precisely, he was even less happy than he usually was.
‘We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster,’ he said, which went into the official log as – DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive.
He wanted to go after Lesley.
‘We know Chorley needs her for whatever evil bollocks he has planned,’ he said. ‘If we grab her he’s got to be fucked – right?’ He went on to argue for a proactive intelligence—led approach going forward.
‘And we know how to find her because she’s knocking off that nasty little scrote from Notting Hill,’ he said.
Utilising known human intelligence assets.
Easier said than done.
We had a ‘bloody expensive’ surveillance team on Zachary Palmer, which he evaded every so often to slope off for what we assumed was a sly leg-over with Lesley May.
‘We’re going to look well stupid if he’s doing something else,’ said Guleed.
‘A negative result is almost as good as a positive one,’ said Seawoll. ‘Isn’t that so, Peter?’
I hate it when people listen to what I say in an inappropriate fashion.
We hadn’t pushed the issue before in the hope that Zach, who was skittish – literally supernaturally skittish – would get complacent about losing his followers. The idea was that we would use a second, presumably even sneakier team, to track him after that.
‘That would be me and Sahra,’ said Nightingale. ‘With Peter and David as perimeter and backup.’
It had to be Nightingale in case we did run into Lesley.
‘I have the best chance of a clean capture,’ he said. ‘But I need Peter to deal with any external interference.’
‘Do you think that’s likely?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
‘It’s always best to be prepared,’ said Nightingale.
Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones adopting a proactive posture going forward and, before we could get the operation out of the planning stage, Martin Chorley raided the MOLA finds warehouse at their HQ in Islington.
Given the previous thefts from archaeological sites we’d guessed that MOLA was a likely target. I’d left half a dozen magic detectors around the building and warned their security, so they’d double-checked their alarms and cameras. We’d also done a discreet review of everyone who worked there, but none had a connection with Martin Chorley or the Little Crocodiles. Then we organised an alert so that CCC would call us to any incident within 400 metres of the address.