Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(48)
What worried me was where the power was coming from. I never was very good at electricity, so I didn’t know how much power it took to make a werelight. But levitating one small apple against the earth’s gravity – that was essentially the standard definition of one newton of force, and it should be using one theoretical joule of energy every second. The laws of thermodynamics are pretty strict about this sort of thing, and they say that you never get something for nothing. Which meant that that joule was coming from somewhere – but from where? From my brain?
‘So it’s like ESP,’ said Lesley during one of herperiodic visits to the coach house. Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension. Besides, apart from a couple of unconfirmed cases around the same time as the Neal Street attack, nothing had come to our attention.
‘Like that guy on that show who could move things around,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t feel like I’m moving things around with my mind,’ I said. ‘It’s like I’m making shapes with my mind, which affects something else, which makes stuff happen at the other end. Do you know what a theremin is?’
‘It’s that weirdo sci-fi musical instrument with the loops,’ she said. ‘Right?’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘The point is, it’s the only musical instrument you don’t physically touch. You make shapes with your hands and you get a sound. The shapes are completely abstract, so you have to learn to associate a particular shape with a note and tone before you can get the thing to make a tune.’
‘What does Nightingale say?’
‘He says that if I stopped letting myself get distracted I might spend less time covered in bits of apple.’
At the end of March, the clocks go forward one hour to mark the start of British Summer Time. I woke up late to find the Folly feeling weirdly empty, the chairs in the breakfast room still tucked beneath the tables and the buffet counter unlaid. I found Nightingale reading the previous day’s Telegraph in one of the overstuffed armchairs that lined the first-floor balcony.
‘It’s the change in the clocks,’ he said. ‘Twice a year she takes the day off.’
‘Where does she go?’
Nightingale pointed up towards the attic. ‘I believe she stays in her room.’
‘Are we going on a road trip?’ I asked. Nightingale was wearing his sports jacket over a cream-coloured Arran sweater. His driving gloves and the keys to the Jag were lying on a nearby occasional table.
‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Do you think you know where the Old Man of the Thames is today?’
‘Trewsbury Mead,’ I said. ‘He’ll have arrived there round about the Spring Equinox, which was last week, and he’ll stay until All Fool’s Day.’
‘Your reasoning?’ asked Nightingale.
‘It’s the source of his river,’ I said. ‘Where else is he going to go in the spring?’
Nightingale smiled. ‘I know a nice little transport café off the M4 – we can have breakfast there.’
Trewsbury Mead, early afternoon under a powder blue sky. According to the Ordnance Survey, this is where the Thames first rises 130 straight-line kilometres west of London. Just to the north is the site either of an Iron Age hill fort or a Roman encampment, the exact nature of which is awaiting an episode of Time Team. Apparently there is a soggy field, a stone to mark the spot and a chance, after a particularly wet winter, that you might see some water. You approach down a minor road that turns to gravel once you’re past the private houses it was built to serve. The line of the river is marked by a dense stand of trees, and the source of the Thames is beyond that.
In the field beyond was the Court of the Old Man of the River. We could hear it before we saw it, the rumble of diesel generators, steelwork clanking, the bass beat of music thumping, tannoys barking, girls screaming, glimpses of neon over the treeline and the whole round-the-corner thrill of a travelling funfair. I had a sudden Bank Holiday memory of holding my father’s hand in one fist and clutching a precious handful of pound coins in the other. Never enough, and quickly gone.
We left the Jag by the side of the road and walked the rest of the way. Beyond the line of trees I could see the tops of the big wheel and that ride where they fling you into the air on the end of a rope which I really don’t see the point of. The track crossed a stream bed on a modern concrete culvert which had recently been scored by the passage of heavy trucks, and for a moment we were in the shade of the trees.
The first line of parked caravans began as soon as we were back in the sunlight. Most of them were old-fashioned with humpbacked roofs and mean little doors and windows. A few were modern with sloped fronts and go-faster stripes. I even caught sight, through the thickets of Calor gas bottles, deckchairs, guy ropes and sleeping Rottweilers, of the horseshoe roof of a wooden gypsy caravan – something I thought was only for tourists. Although the caravans seemed to be parked randomly I was struck by the notion that there was a pattern, a deep structure that nagged at the edge of perception. There was definitely a perimeter, and nothing illusive about the heavyset man who guarded it from the doorway of his caravan.
The man had thick black hair greased into a quiff and a set of long sideburns that had last been fashionable when my dad was doing regular sessions with Ted Heath in the late 1950s. He also had a totally illegal twelve-bore shotgun propped up against the side of his caravan.