Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(69)

Nine beats, three kilometres, a loud crash somewhere to the north.

The council had replaced the windows since I’d left home. In the old days heavy rain used to seep in around the edges and mess up Mum’s DIY. Now it just bounced off the double glazing. There was nothing they could do about the thickness of the interior walls, though, so we could clearly hear Stan Getz’s ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ coming from my parents’ room.

‘That’s nice,’ said Beverley. ‘Does your dad always play music before sleeping?’

‘That’s the arrangement with the Claus Ogerman strings,’ I said. ‘That’s not what my parents sleep to.’

It took a couple of seconds to sink in, and then Beverley wriggled around in my arms so that she could stare me in the face.

‘No,’ she said.

‘According to my mum that’s what my dad was playing when she walked into the old 606 Club in 1983,’ I said. ‘So that’s been their tune ever since.’

Beverley sniggered and wriggled around again to lay her head against my shoulder.

‘That’s so sweet,’ she said.

There was another blue-white flash, a longer interval – maybe ten seconds. The thunder was further away. We listened as the strings fell away and Getz played a final phrase, wrapping it all up with a neat little ribbon.

‘You were probably conceived to this,’ said Beverley.

‘You had to go there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Beverley kissed the back of my hand. ‘Yes, I did.’

And as the thunderstorm grumbled off to the north we both, amazingly, fell asleep.



We woke up the next morning in my old room – which was a bit of a surprise, since I have no memory of waking up and shifting all the boxes and spare suitcases full of clothes from where my mum stacked them on my bed and onto the floor. Thank God the sheets and duvet covers were clean, if a bit musty with non-use.

I watched as Beverley, in just her knickers and a yellow T-shirt liberated from one of the boxes, peered cautiously through a crack in the door before risking a dash to the toilet. Then I checked the messages on my phone, of which the most pertinent was from Dr Walid and read: You are officially on a sick day: do not come in to work.

It sounded like good advice to me, so when Beverley climbed back into bed I asked what she wanted to do.

‘Pretty much this,’ she said. ‘But in a bigger bed.’

So after breakfast we drove across the river to her house where, Sod’s Law being what it is, we ended up on Wimbledon Common helping Maksim plant reed beds along Beverley’s course. Well, I helped Maksim while Beverley spent time poking at the riverbank and muttering about flow rates. Then we had a cheeky Nando’s on Hill Rise near the bridge along with most of Richmond, who then followed us to the local Odeon to watch Allison Carter play against type as a single mother trying to balance her responsibilities to her children and her career as a highly paid assassin. We both agreed that her inability to control her fourteen year old goth daughter was hilariously white and neither of us would have got away with talking back to our mothers that way. Then we met up for drinks with some of Bev’s old school friends on the riverside terrace at the White Cross, and finally an Uber home and bed.

And then we stayed mainly in bed for the whole next day.

I left my phone on in case Lesley tried to get in touch. But nothing. I wondered if Chorley knew he’d been grassed up and whether I should find a way to let him know. Would that be enough of a wedge to break up the team? I decided I wanted to discuss it with Nightingale first – at the very least.

Early Monday morning Seawoll texted me and said he wanted to see me and Guleed in his office at Belgravia first thing.

‘I’m afraid I have bad news,’ he said once we were seated. ‘David Carey is taking indefinite medical leave.’

‘I didn’t think he was that hurt,’ I said.

Seawoll held up a hand to stop me.

‘The problem is not his physical injuries. David has been diagnosed as suffering from acute stress and is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. I wanted you both to know before the official announcement.’

‘Where is he?’ I asked. ‘Can we see him?’

‘No,’ said Seawoll. ‘He has specifically requested that neither of you visit him.’

He squinted at us and took a deep breath before asking how we were.

We both said we were fine, of course. Now, coppering is famously stressful and equally famous for its macho working-class disregard for the realities of mental health. So naturally Seawoll didn’t believe a word of it.

‘I’ve seen this happen before,’ he said. ‘In cases involving the Special Assessment Unit back before we called it that.’

‘What did you call it, sir?’ I asked.

‘We didn’t fucking call it anything, Peter. We tried very hard not to talk about it at all. But the thing is that this job is hard enough,’ he caught my eye and then Guleed’s. ‘As you both know full well. But at least all the shit you get in the day-to-day is familiar. You get used to it – you learn how to cope. It’s part of the job. But this . . . supernatural shit is different. Ordinary coppers don’t get any training for it. They don’t know what to do with cursed safes, possessed cars or magic bells. And that causes them stress.’