Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(57)
As laid down in the Tragical Comedy, after killing his wife and kid Mr Punch sings a happy little song about the benefits of wife-murdering and, that done, he presses his suit with Pretty Polly. She’s a character who says nothing but ‘seems nothing loath’ when our cheerful little serial killer starts kissing her.
‘We don’t know he’s following that particular script,’ I said.
‘True,’ said Nightingale. ‘Piccini was relating an oral tradition, and those are almost never reliable.’
According to the possibly unreliable Piccini, the next victim was due to be a blind beggar who coughs in Mr Punch’s face and is thrown off the stage for his presumption. The script didn’t specify if he survived the experience or not. ‘If our revenant Pulcinella is following form,’ I said, ‘then the most likely target is going to be a tinny for the RNIB.’
‘What’s a tinny?’
‘A person with a collecting tin,’ I said, miming a shake. ‘People put their spare change in it.’
‘A blind man begging for money,’ he said. ‘It would be more useful to know who the revenant was and where he’s buried.’
‘Presumably if we know who he is then we can deal with his issues and lay him to rest peacefully,’ I said.
‘Or,’ said Nightingale, ‘we dig up his bones and grind them into dust, mix them with rock salt and then scatter them out at sea.’
‘Would that work?’
‘Victor Bartholomew says that’s the way to do it,’ Nightingale shrugged. ‘He wrote the book on dealing with ghosts and revenants – literally.’
‘I think we may be overlooking a blindingly obvious source of information,’ I said.
‘Really?’
‘Nicholas Wallpenny,’ I said. ‘All the attacks have originated near the Actors’ Church, which I’m guessing means that our revenant is located nearby. Nicholas might know him – for all we know, they hang out.’
‘I’m not sure ghosts “hang” quite the way you imagine,’ said Nightingale, and with a quick glance to be sure that Molly wasn’t watching, he slipped his half-full plate under the table. Toby’s tail banged against my legs as he snaffled it down.
‘We need a bigger dog,’ I said. ‘Or smaller portions.’
‘See if he won’t talk to you tonight,’ said Nightingale. ‘But remember that our Nicholas wasn’t a reliable witness when he was alive – I doubt his veracity has improved since his demise.’
‘How did he die?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘Died of drink,’ Nightingale said. ‘Very enjoyable.’
*
Since Toby was our official ghost-hunting dog, and because he had begun to waddle alarmingly when he walked, I took him with me. It’s a half-hour stroll from Russell Square and the Folly to Covent Garden. Once you’re past Forbidden Planet and across Shaftesbury Avenue, the direct route takes you down Neal Street, where the cycle courier had died. But I figured if I started avoiding certain streets just because somebody’d died on them, I’d have to move to Aberystwyth.
It was late evening and not all that warm, but there was still a crowd of drinkers outside the gastropub. London had come late to the idea of outdoor café society, and it wasn’t going to allow a bit of a chill to get in the way now – especially since it had become illegal to smoke indoors.
Toby did pause close to the point where Dr Framline had attacked the courier, but only long enough to pee on a bollard.
Even at closing time Covent Garden was packed. The post-performance crowd were emerging from the Royal Opera House and looking for somewhere to have a bite to eat and a pose, while clusters of young people on school-sponsored holidays from all over Europe exercised their time-honoured right to block the pavement from one side to the other.
Once the cafés, restaurants and pubs in the covered market shut down, the piazza emptied quickly and soon there were few enough people about for me to risk a bit of ghost-chasing.
There was disagreement among the authorities as to what the true nature of a ghost was. Polidori insisted that ghosts were the detached souls of the deceased who clung to a locality. He theorised that they fed off their own spirit and would, unless this spirit was replenished through magic, eventually fade away to nothing. Richard Spruce’s The Persistence of Phantasmagoria in Yorkshire, published in 1860, broadly agreed with Polidori but added that ghosts might draw on the magic in their environment in a similar manner to a moss leaching sustenance from its rocky home. Peter Brock, writing in the 1930s, theorised that ghosts were nothing more than recordings etched into the magical fabric of their surroundings in much the same way music is recorded on a vinyl disk. Personally I figured that they were like crude copies of the dead person’s personality that were running in a degraded fashion in a kind of magical matrix where packets of ‘information’ were passed from one magic node to the next.
Since both my encounters with Nicholas had started in the portico of the Actors’ Church, that was where I began. Coppers don’t look at the world the same way other people do. You can tell a policeman by the way he looks around a room. It’s a chilly, suspicious gaze that makes him immediately recognisable to others who know what to look for. The strange thing is how fast you pick it up. I was a still a Police Community Support Officer, had only been doing it a month, when I visited my parents’ flat and realised that even if I didn’t know already that my father was an addict, I would have spotted the fact the moment I was in the door. You have to understand that my mum is a cleaning fanatic – you could eat dinner off her living-room carpet – but still all the signs were there if you knew what to look for.