Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(6)

‘Let’s go and see if he’s there,’ she said. ‘If I see him too then it will be like corob … like crob … proof.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

We wandered arm in arm up King Street towards Covent Garden.

There was a great absence of Nicholas the ghost that night. We started at the church portico where I’d seen him and, because Lesley was a thoroughgoing copper even when pissed, did a methodical search around the perimeter.

‘Chips,’ said Lesley after our second circuit. ‘Or a kebab.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t come out when I’m with someone else,’ I said.

‘Maybe he does shift work,’ said Lesley.

‘Fuck it,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a kebab.’

‘You’ll be good at the Case Progression Unit,’ said Lesley. ‘And you’ll be …’

‘If you say “… making a valuable contribution” I will not be held responsible for my actions.’

‘I was going to say “making a difference”,’ she said. ‘You could always go to the states, I bet the FBI would have you.’

‘Why would the FBI have me?’ I asked.

‘They could use you as an Obama decoy,’ she said.

‘For that,’ I said, ‘you can pay for the kebabs.’


In the end we were too knackered to get kebabs, so we headed straight back to the section house where Lesley utterly failed to invite me to her room. I was at that stage of drunk where you lie on your bed in the dark and the room goes whirling around you, and you’re wondering about the nature of the universe and whether you can get to the sink before you throw up.

Tomorrow was my last day off, and unless I could prove that seeing things that weren’t there was a vital skill for the modern police officer, it was hello Case Progression Unit for me.


‘I’m sorry about last night,’ said Lesley.

Neither of us could face the horrors of the kitchenette that morning, so we found shelter in the station canteen. Despite the fact that the catering staff were a mixture of compact Polish women and skinny Somali men, a strange kind of institutional inertia meant that the food was classic English greasy spoon, the coffee was bad and the tea was hot, sweet and came in mugs. Lesley was having a full English breakfast; I was having a tea.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Your loss, not mine.’

‘Not that,’ said Lesley, and smacked me on the hand with the flat of her knife. ‘What I said about you being a copper.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken your feedback on board, and having extensively workshopped it this morning I now feel that I can pursue my core career-development goals in a diligent, proactive but, above all, creative manner.’

‘What are you planning to do?’

‘I’m going to hack HOLMES to see if my ghost was right,’ I said.

*

Every police station in the country has at least one HOLMES suite. This is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, which allows computer-illiterate coppers to join the late twentieth century. Getting them to join the twenty-first century would be too much to ask for.

Everything related to a major investigation is kept on the system, allowing detectives to cross-reference data and avoid the kind of cock-up that made the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper such an exemplary operation. The replacement to the old system was due to be called SHERLOCK, but nobody could find the words to make the acronym work so they called it HOLMES 2.

Theoretically you can access HOLMES 2 from a laptop, but the Metropolitan Police likes to keep its personnel tied to fixed terminals – which can’t be left in trains or sold to pawn shops. When a major investigation occurs, the terminals can be transferred from the suite to incident rooms elsewhere in the station. Lesley and I could have sneaked into the HOLMES suite and risked being caught, but I preferred to plug my laptop into a LAN socket in one of the empty incident rooms and work in safety and comfort.

I’d been sent on a HOLMES 2 familiarisation course three months earlier. At the time I’d been excited because I thought they might be preparing me for a role in major investigations, but now I realise they were grooming me for data entry work. It took me less than half an hour to find the Covent Garden investigation. People are often negligent about passwords, and Inspector Neblett had used his youngest daughter’s name and year of birth, which is just criminal. It also got me read-only access to the files we wanted.

The old system couldn’t handle big data files, but because HOLMES 2 was only ten years behind the state of the art, detectives could now attach evidence photographs, document scans and even CCTV footage directly to what’s called a ‘nominal record’ file. It’s like YouTube for cops.

The Murder Team assigned to the William Skirmish murder had wasted no time grabbing the CCTV footage and seeing if they could get a look at the murderer. It was a big fat file and I went straight for it.

According to the report, the camera was mounted on the corner of James Street, looking west. It was low-quality, low-light footage updated at one frame per second. But despite the poor light it clearly showed William Skirmish walking from under the camera towards Henrietta Street.

‘There’s our suspect,’ said Lesley, pointing.

The screen showed another figure – the best you could say was probably male, probably in jeans and a leather jacket – walk past William Skirmish and vanish below the screen. According to the notes, this figure was being designated WITNESS A.