Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(67)

A bit of van – I learnt later it was a panel torn off the side – wiffled overhead and smashed the windows of the YCN gallery. Walbrook rolled me off – not angrily, but firmly, and we both cautiously got to our feet.

The van was missing from the chassis up and coils of dark smoke were rising from its blackened engine block. Through the smoke I could see Nightingale dragging the – hopefully unconscious – body of Chorley’s goon away from the fire. He was using his left arm while keeping his right free for action. I did a scan for damage and while there was smouldering debris over a wide area and plentiful broken windows, none of the buildings were on fire.

I spotted the tin of quality vampire five metres up the road.

There was no sign of Martin Chorley.

I asked Walbrook if she could put the fire out.

She grimaced at me, then sighed and gave a little contemptuous wave with her left hand. I felt a weird sucking sensation from the remains of the van and a wind briefly rushed past my head. A small cloud formed over the van like a time-lapse weather sequence and it proceeded to bucket down for five minutes.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Haven’t done that in a long time,’ said Walbrook. ‘Where’s the Nightingale going?’

He was sprinting up Rivington Place. Which, I decided, showed a touching faith in my ability to control the scene.

It doesn’t stop there, of course, with the villain getting away and you looking stupid. I was already talking to Stephanopoulos on my back-up back-up burner phone before Nightingale was out of sight. Chorley went through the back wall of the old Shoreditch Town Hall, but Nightingale had to break off pursuit when he spotted some civilian casualties and had to stop and look after them. No doubt this was what Chorley was counting on.

Later, as we reconstructed it from CCTV and eyewitness accounts, he calmly stepped out the front of the town hall and flagged down a random Nissan Micra and was driven away. When we traced the driver via his vehicle’s index he had no memory of picking up a strange man at all, and grew quite distressed when we showed him the footage. Thus Chorley was out of the area before we even had a perimeter established.

The rest of the emergency service circus arrived at our smouldering van less than a minute later. Seawoll, who never passes up a good shouting opportunity, turned up in the first wave, leaving me with only two immediate problems:

What to do with our bumper fun tin of vampire; and how to stop Walbrook walking off before I had a chance to interview her.

Fortunately Frank Caffrey turned up with the bomb squad, whereupon they performed what Caffrey was careful to explain was not a controlled explosion.

‘You use a controlled explosion to disrupt a device’s detonator,’ he said. ‘This is more like a contained incineration.’

This involved a big box made of composite armour and surrounded by sandbags into which I, since I stupidly volunteered, used a big pair of tongs to drop the tin. Even with the gloves provided, I felt the horrible not-real cold of the tactus disvitae creeping up through my hands. Needless to say, I was pretty fucking swift. The tin rattled as I swung it over the box, getting frantic just before I dropped it.

Was there some sentience there? I wondered. It certainly seemed to sense its fate.

The phosphorus charge had already been laid. It was just a question of plonking on a lid, adding more sandbags, and retiring to a safe distance. Caffrey gave the nod, the bomb squad pressed the button and there was a slightly disappointing wumph sound. A couple of seconds later, wisps of smoke rose from the edges of the box.

Caffrey said we had to wait at least half an hour to make sure it was cooked, so I went back to see if Walbrook would talk to me. There was a slight delay as I was set upon by militant paramedics, who insisted on dressing the various scrapes I’d forgotten about until they reminded me.

So, stinging with antiseptic, I found Walbrook up the road with Guleed in the back of Franco’s Takeaway, which had, by strange good fortune, been allowed to stay open despite being just inside our public exclusion zone.

‘Funny how that worked out,’ said Guleed around a mouthful of pasta salad.

‘You OK?’ I asked Walbrook, whose brush with vampirism hadn’t seemed to dent her appetite none. She nodded and continued to fork spaghetti into her mouth.

‘How’s David?’ asked Guleed, and I realised I had no idea where Carey was.

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll check in a minute.’

I wanted to get a statement from Walbrook, but I realised that my notebook was in my jacket pocket left, probably, somewhere down Shoreditch High Street. I asked if I could borrow Guleed’s, but she gave me a funny look.

So funny that I started laughing uncontrollably. When I couldn’t stop myself I clamped my hand over my mouth and went outside. The thing about having a stress reaction is that, even when you know you’re having a stress reaction, that knowledge doesn’t seem to do you any good. I found a doorway across the road where a parked police Sprinter van blocked the view from the rest of the street.

I leant against the door and let myself slip down until I was sitting with my back to it. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing until the giggles stopped. The edge of my Metvest was digging into my armpit, so I unfastened it and pulled it off. Underneath, my nice blue pinstripe shirt was soaked with sweat and ripped at the elbow. Probably beyond even Molly’s skills.

I closed my eyes again and focused on my breathing. One thing learning magic does teach you is finding your centre, or at least making an educated stab at its location. There was a smell like burnt hair and ground nutmeg and a sensation like wind blowing through the trees. And the coppery taste of blood in my mouth which, on later examination, turned out to be actual blood from where I’d split my lip. There was nothing coherent, nothing I recognised as a vestigium – it was all just random neurons firing in my brain.