Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(53)

Nobody round the table liked the idea, but nobody could argue with the logic.

‘How?’ asked Dr Walid.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But perhaps when she next gets in touch with me I’ll just ask for a meeting.’

‘You seem very sure she’ll be in touch,’ said Postmartin.

‘Oh, she’ll be in touch,’ I said. ‘If only to complain about us arresting Zach.’

Nightingale gave me a long cool look, but didn’t insult me by saying that I shouldn’t do anything without checking with him first. After a moment he nodded gravely.

‘Yes, ee should make another attempt.’ He raised a finger. ‘If the opportunity arises.’

Dr Walid wanted to know if there was any literature relating to the death or killing of powerful genii locorum. We knew of a couple of incidents for sure – the River Lugg in Herefordshire – ‘Done in by Methodists’, apparently. And less powerful entities who vanished after their locus – pond, house, or in one well-documented case, ship-of-the-line – was destroyed or disrupted.

Postmartin admitted that there was plenty of material as yet uncatalogued, both in the Folly proper and back at the ‘special’ stacks in Oxford.

‘I believe there may be some relevant American material in the Library,’ said Nightingale.

‘I don’t suppose you remember where?’ I asked.

Nightingale frowned.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.

‘That’s going to be a slog.’

We all looked at Abigail, who was smiling a self-satisfied smile at her notebook.



So Postmartin returned to Oxford to rummage through his stacks while Abigail disappeared into the Magical Library, armed only with a notebook, a second-hand laptop and a look of cheerful determination.

I went back to the Outside Inquiry Office and found my in-tray full of actions that had been piling up while I’d been mucking around with metaphysics. The most urgent regarded one Camilla Turner, an archaeologist at MOLA, who had deleted her entire email archive the morning of the raid. One of the analysts in the Inside Inquiry Office had spotted this and flagged it as suspicious. Since wrangling the lost emails out of the ISP would probably involve further permission from the Home Office, it was suggested that I go and restatement Ms Turner in the hope she’d just give us permission to recover them ourselves. I wondered why I was being singled out for this job until I saw the photograph attached to her nominal file and realised that Ms Turner was the skeleton lady I’d met in the MOLA offices.

I gave MOLA a call and found that Camilla Turner hadn’t turned up for work that morning, so I got her address off the Inside Inquiry Office and found myself heading for Dalston, where she had the top half of a terrace on Parkholme Road. She’d bought the place in the mid-eighties when it was half derelict and respectable people didn’t live in Hackney. As an early pioneer of gentrification she was sitting on a couple of million in housing equity, which she could liberate if only she was willing to move somewhere dire – like Bromley or somewhere outside the M25. Sensibly, she’d decided to stay put.

There was a silver intercom bolted onto the wall beside the front door with, as is usual, no actual names written on the tags by the buzzers. I guessed top button, waited, pressed again, waited, and repeated a couple of times before trying the bottom.

An elderly male voice with a distinctive Caribbean accent asked me what I wanted.

I told him I was the police and that I was concerned about the welfare of his neighbour and if he could just buzz me in I wouldn’t bother him any further.

The intercom cut off, then, half a minute later, I heard the front door being manually unlocked from the inside before opening about a quarter of the way to reveal an old black guy.

He was a touch shorter than me, with a cropped Afro that was mostly grey and a matching neatly trimmed beard. He was the light colour some old black guys go, with freckles across his cheeks, a strong jaw and dark suspicious eyes.

He was also strangely familiar.

‘What kind of concern exactly?’ he asked.

‘We think she might be in danger,’ I said.

‘From whom?’

‘Some quite serious criminals.’

‘Show me your identification.’

So I got out my warrant card and held it up while he peered at it.

‘How come a nice boy like you join the police?’

‘I didn’t join the police,’ I said. ‘They joined me.’

He gave this some consideration before nodding and opening the door to let me in.

Crudely carved out of the original Victorian hallway, the atrium was gloomy and overheated. The door to the ground floor flat was ajar while the second, presumably for upstairs, was firmly shut.

I asked the man if he knew whether Camilla Turner was in.

‘She came in last night,’ he said and then, without another word, retreated behind his own door.

I banged on Camilla’s door and yelled her name – no answer.

‘Ms Turner,’ I called again. ‘Camilla – this is Peter Grant from the police – I’m concerned for your safety. Are you in there?’

There was no answer, but I was sure I’d heard something moving on the other side.

I knocked and shouted a couple more times, just so I could write that I had at least tried that before breaking and entering.