Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(52)

‘They both have genuine power,’ I said. ‘But it feels different. Hers is definitely from the sea, from the port and all that. His is all from the earth and the weather and leprechauns and crystals, for all I know.’

‘That would explain why the border’s at Teddington Lock,’ he said. Teddington is the highest point the tide reaches. The river below that point is called the tideway. It’s also the part of the Thames administered directly by the Port of London – I doubted that was a coincidence.

‘Am I right?’ I asked.

‘I believe you are,’ he said. ‘I think there may always have been a split between the tideway and the freshwater river. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for Father Thames to abandon the city.’

‘Oxley was hinting that the Old Man doesn’t really want anything to do with the city,’ I said. ‘That he just wanted some respect.’

‘Perhaps he would be content with a ceremony,’ said Nightingale. ‘An oath of fealty, perhaps.’

‘Which is what?’

‘A feudal oath,’ said Nightingale. ‘A vassal pledges his loyalty and service to his liege lord, and the lord pledges his protection. It’s how mediaeval societies were organised.’

‘Mediaeval is what it would get if you tried to make Mama Thames swear loyalty and service to anyone,’ I said. ‘Let alone Father Thames.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Nightingale. ‘It would be purely symbolic.’

‘Symbolic just makes it worse,’ I said. ‘She’d see it as a loss of face. She sees herself as the mistress of the greatest city on earth, and she’s not going to kowtow to anyone. Particularly not some yokel in a caravan.’

‘It’s a pity we can’t marry them off,’ said Nightingale.

We both laughed out loud at that, and bypassed Swindon.

Once we were on the M4, I asked Nightingale what he and the Old Man had talked about.

‘My contribution to the conversation was cursory at best,’ said Nightingale. ‘A great deal of it was technical, groundwater overdrafts, aquifer delay cycles and aggregate catchment-area coefficients. Apparently all these will affect how much water goes down the river this summer.’

‘If I was to go back two hundred years and have that same conversation,’ I said, ‘what would the Old Man have talked about then?’

‘What flowers were blooming,’ said Nightingale. ‘What kind of winter we’d had – the flight of birds on a spring morning.’

‘Would it have been the same Old Man?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was the same Old Man in 1914, I can tell you that for certain.’

‘How do you know?’

Nightingale hesitated, then he said, ‘I’m not quite as young as I look.’

Myphonerang. I really wanted to ignore it but the tune was ‘That’s Not My Name’, which meant it was Lesley. When I answered she wanted to know where the hell we were. I told her we were just going through Reading.

‘There’s been another one,’ she said.

‘How bad?’

‘Really bad,’ she said.

I put the spinner on the roof as Nightingale put his foot down and we topped 120mph back into London with the setting sun behind us.


There were three appliances parked up in Charing Cross Road, and the traffic was backing up as far as Parliament Square and the Euston Road. We arrived at St Martin’s Court to the smell of smoke and the chatter and squawk of emergency radios. Lesley met us at the tape line and handed us bunny suits. I could see while we were changing that half of J. Sheekey’s frontage had been burned out, and that there were three forensic evidence tents set up in the alley. Three bodies, at least.

‘How many inside?’ asked Nightingale.

‘None,’ said Lesley. ‘They all went out the back emergency doors – minor injuries only.’

‘Something to be thankful for,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’re sure this is our case?’

Lesley nodded and led us over to the first tent. Inside we found that Dr Walid had got there before us and was crouched beside the body of a man dressed in the distinctive saffron robes of a Hare Krishna devotee. The body lay on its back where he’d fallen, legs straight, arms stretched out to either side as if he’d participated in one of those trust-building exercises where you let yourself fall backwards – only no one had been there to catch him. His face was the same bloody ruin as Coopertown’s and the cycle courier’s had been.

That answered that question.

‘That’s not the worst of it,’ she said, and beckoned us over to the second tent. This one had two bodies. The first was a dark-skinned man in a black frock coat, his hair stuck up in clumps and stiff with blood. He’d been hit hard enough to crack open the skull and expose a section of his brain. The second body was another devotee of Krishna. A random good samaritan had tried to help by putting him in the recovery position, but with his face split open the gesture had been futile.

I was aware of a thudding in my ears and a shortness of breath. Blood, presumably from the blow struck to the other man, had splattered the devotee’s robes and made a bloody tie-dye pattern on the orange cloth. The interior of the forensic tent was stifling, and I started sweating inside my bunny suit. Nightingale asked a question but I didn’t really hear Lesley’s answer. I stepped outside the tent, gagged once, swallowed it and stumbled to the tape line where, to my own amazement, I managed to keep my Battenberg cake down.