Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(6)
Nightingale likes to be precise in his language so when he uses a word like wriggle he means wriggle.
‘There was magic involved,’ he said, when I asked for a clarification. ‘I’m afraid I overreacted and used more force than I should have.’
It was a slightly less impressive throw than it looked at first. The loft conversion had a strong whiff of the Wild West about it; the plasterboard was flimsy and the rafters were widely spaced and the battens were substandard. I reckoned the force of the spell had done most of the material damage while our Pale Nanny had sort of ridden the force of it out onto the roof.
Quite impressive, really, and not lost on Nightingale.
He’d have followed her out, but he had to run downstairs and make sure Richard Williams didn’t bleed to death.
‘This one seems far more capable than the individual you encountered in Soho,’ he’d said.
But who was ‘this one’?
When we’d done the initial Integrated Intelligence Platform check on the Williams household her name had been listed as Alice McGovern of Leith, Scotland. When the Belgravia follow-up team finally tracked down the real Alice, she turned out to be a heroin addict currently living in Glasgow who’d sold her identity to a group of entrepreneurial information brokers. They liked using addicts because they generally tried to stay off the grid and, contrary to what people think, can live a long time without coming to the attention of the authorities.
The loft conversion had two bedrooms and a bathroom. The rear bedroom had been turned into a playroom for the children. A half-demolished canvas and bamboo Wendy house sat in the centre where light from the window pooled. There were more shelves stuffed with toys and puzzles and picture books. And a cushion nest in the corner for naps, and a pair of pink fairy costumes hanging from a hook on the back of the door.
There was a smell in the front bedroom. It reminded me of the period when I was sharing a house with half a dozen young PCs, and from student digs I’ve visited since. A bit of old sweat and leftovers and overstuffed swing-top bins. The Pale Nanny’s queen-sized bed was unmade and, when I had a sniff, the sheets hadn’t been changed for a couple of weeks. Whoever cleaned the rest of the house hadn’t come into this room.
It too had been painted the same white-with-a-hint-of-bland as downstairs and furnished during a sale at Ikea. About half the Pale Nanny’s clothes were draped over a straight-backed chair and matching writing desk. The rest were tumbled into drawers with no apparent organisation. The Pale Nanny had favoured tracksuit bottoms, T-shirts and hoodies in pink, sky blue and navy, and her underwear was sensible and cheap.
After the initial engagement with Nightingale she could have gone out the back door but instead she ran up the stairs. Why? Was there something in her room she wanted, something important? Something sentimental?
I checked the drawers again, but there was a stunning absence of cryptic photographs hidden inside.
I sat down on the bed and looked around the room from there.
Nothing sprang out at me, but given the way my day had gone that was probably a good thing.
3
More Pepper
‘Maybe she went back for her phone,’ said Bev. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t think of that.’
‘We didn’t find a phone,’ I said, although it was true I hadn’t thought of that.
We were in Bev’s outsized kitchen cooking pasta and random things we’d found in the fridge. I was frying onions and garlic in the bottom of a saucepan while Bev defrosted the mince by dragging it out of the freezer and glaring at it until it melted. She’s done this before and it takes under a minute. My current working hypothesis is that she’s scaring the water molecules into a state of excitation. I’m dying to wire up the mince and get some precise measurements, but Bev won’t let me. She says it’s because a goddess should retain a few mysteries, but I think she’s saving it for a future PhD project. I did try to further the cause of science once by grabbing her around the waist and kissing her neck in the hope it would cause the mince to burst into flames. Sadly, this did not happen – although she did smell nice and, anyway, in science a negative result is almost as good as a positive. And however arduous kissing Beverley becomes, I am willing to persevere in the name of progress.
There was a shriek from the back garden, where Abigail and Nicky were doing something youthful and thankfully unspecified down on the riverbank. Beverley had taken both of them down to Runnymede earlier to hunt insects as part of our ongoing project to keep Abigail out of trouble during the summer holidays.
Once the mince was steaming gently Beverley broke it up with a wooden spatula and dropped it into the saucepan, where I stirred it as it browned.
‘I wish we knew what the Pale Nanny was,’ I said.
‘You can’t call her the Pale Nanny,’ said Beverley, who was hunting through her cupboard for anything vaguely tomato-ish. ‘The Pale Lady is a very specific person upstream and using her name casually like that is a mistake.’
Mistake has a specific meaning when Beverley says it like that. It means likely to provoke outrage and adverse consequences, and I don’t mean on social media either.
‘Ash called the one in Soho a “Pale Lady”,’ I said. Mind you, the woman in question had just thrust a metre of iron railing through his abdomen so he wasn’t what you’d call a reliable witness.