Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(56)

John didn’t get back to her until the summer of 2012 – that’s when they first met at the Rising Sun and he offered her money for some ‘inside information’. That had been just after Covent Garden caught fire and then flooded during an unprecedentedly posh riot. It was also about the same time Patrick Gale was persuaded to take up the mantle of the High Priest of Bacchus/Dionysus/. . . Mr Punch?

I asked why she’d never connected the site thefts with the information she was handing over and she shrugged.

‘I don’t even remember those thefts being reported.’ she said.

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but that detail could wait.

I asked when she’d last met Chapman and she said the spring of the previous year, which accorded with our records of his departure the following June. After that they’d communicated by email.

‘He said he’d got a new job that involved a lot of travelling,’ she said.

I wondered if John had continued the correspondence from Cleveland prior to his death or whether somebody else had taken over immediately.

Before I called Belgravia to send someone over to pick her up, I asked about the sword.

‘You said you felt something when you held the sword?’

‘Felt something?’

‘You said it felt old,’ I said. ‘Was that a powerful sensation? Did you feel anything else?

She frowned and gave it some thought.

‘Yes, there was a musical tone,’ she said. ‘Like the sword was singing.’





19

Taming the Wild Frontier

It was while I was helping Camilla into the local IRV for transport back to Belgravia that I realised who her neighbour was. Harry Acworth – who’d played bass guitar with the Clarke-Boland Big Band and had briefly formed a trio with my dad in the late nineties. I’d have to tell my dad when I got a moment, because I was pretty sure he thought Harry was dead.

I told Camilla Turner that everything was going to be fine as long as she co-operated, and sent her off to have Stephanopoulos turn her life inside out. My main worry was that Martin Chorley might take his usual ‘direct’ approach to operational security, but I had some hope that he might regard Camilla as too unimportant to take the risk. Especially if we kept her stashed at Belgravia.

I got back to the Folly that evening to find that Abigail had gone to sleep on the couch in the reading room – it wasn’t the first time.

She’d left her laptop open and around it a sprawl of papers. And, because I’m a nosy bastard, I sat down and had a good shufti. Judging from its position, the last thing she’d been working on was her notebook – open at a page with clusters of words written in Cyrillic.

Varvara and Nightingale had agreed, when teaching Abigail, to stick to classical Newtonian spell notation, in Latin. But this looked suspiciously like a spell notation to me – the giveaway being фоз in Cyrillic, which I recognised as φ?? or phos in Greek. I thought I recognised ?λα?νω followed by the abbreviation ел in Cyrillic – the notation for Impello. This was the notation that Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina had been taught during the Second World War, but following it was another notation which I didn’t recognise. It looked like a doodle of ф linked by an upward curving line ел – the line representing the upwards spin you put on lux when combining it with impello to make a fireball.

Nightingale had been taught to write out in spells in full, using parentheses to indicate which formae were affected by which subordinate modifiers. He’d passed that system on to me.

‘This way encourages clarity and precision,’ he’d said, when I asked if there was a shorthand notation. ‘Aim for perfection of form – speed comes later.’

He wasn’t going to like this at all.

‘My principal concern,’ Nightingale had told me, ‘is that she will run ahead of herself and put herself in danger.’

We were going to have to have the safety talk again.

I looked up to find Molly staring at me from the other side of the table. I glanced over at Abigail and saw that somebody had covered her with a red and green tartan blanket without me noticing. I looked back at Molly, who tilted her head to the left.

‘Her dad’s doing nights and her mum is at the hospital with her brother,’ I said. ‘She’s going to text me when they’re finished and I’ll take her home.’

Molly’s eyes narrowed.

‘She can’t live here,’ I said. ‘Even if it was allowed, it wouldn’t be right.’

Molly gave me a reproachful look, as if that was my fault, then turned and went gliding out the door.

In among Abigail’s notes I spotted the initials VGC and the sentence Montana Territory Campaign 1877. I had a rummage through the pile of books and found a thin, yellowing pamphlet titled Devil River by Robert Sharp. Along the top somebody had paper-clipped a handwritten note on good quality paper that read: I thought you gentlemen should know how things go in the former colonies. Signed with the initials RS.

This was probably the American material Nightingale was thinking of. I opened it up and had a look.

Robert Sharp claimed that an – unnamed – participant of the expedition had related the story to him a year after the events portrayed. I personally couldn’t tell whether it was totally made up, or a heavily fictionalised account of a true story. Abigail had attached yellow Post-it Notes to strategic passages with references to proper Newtonian practice – although this was referred to in the text as ‘proper knowledge’, ‘true magic’ and on one occasion as ‘white sorcery’.