Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(65)

‘I thought it was time you and I had a little chat,’ said Tyburn.

I offered her the flowers, which she took with a delighted laugh. She pulled my head down and kissed me on the cheek. She smelled of cigars and new car seats, horses and furniture polish, Stilton, Belgian chocolate and, behind it all, the hemp and the crowd and the last drop into oblivion.

I’d traced the sources, as well as I could anyway, of all the lost rivers of London. Some, like the Beverley Brook, the Lea or the Fleet were easy to find, but the location of the Tyburn, the legendary Shepherd’s Well, had got lost in the mad Victorian steam-powered expansion of London in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This fountain was obviously at the source, but the fountain itself, I suspected, had been looted by an enterprising official in the last days of the Empire.

I was thirsty – I would have liked a drink.

‘What would you like to talk about?’ I asked.

‘For a start,’ said Tyburn, ‘I’d like to know what your intentions are with regards to my sister.’

‘My intentions?’ I asked. My mouth was very dry. ‘My intentions are purely honourable.’

‘Really?’ she said, and crouched down to retrieve a vase from behind the fountain. ‘Is that why you took her to see the pikeys?’

Pikey is not a word a well brought-up young policeman is supposed to use. ‘That was just a preliminary, exploratory investigation,’ I said. ‘And Oxley and Isis are not pikeys.’

Tyburn drew the back of her hand down the back of the marble water carrier, and the trickle from the gourd thickened into a strong stream from which she filled the vase. ‘Still,’ she said as she unwrapped the roses, ‘not the sort of people one wants one’s sister associating with.’

‘We don’t get to choose our family,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Thank God we can choose our friends.’

Tyburn gave me a sharp look and started arranging the roses. The vase was unremarkable, fat-bottomed like a volumetric flask and made from green lacquered fibreglass, the sort of thing you can pick up for fifty pence at a car boot sale. ‘I’ve got nothing against the Old Man or his people, but this is the twenty-first century and this is my town, and I haven’t busted a gut for thirty years so that some “gentleman of the road” can move back in and take what’s mine.’

‘What do you think is yours?’ I asked.

She ignored me and, having arranged the last of the roses, placed the vase on the patio wall close by. When I’d bought them the roses had been the last of the stock and were beginning to wilt on the stand. Once Tyburn placed them in the vase they perked up, becoming full, rich and even darker.

‘Peter,’ she said, ‘you’ve seen the way the Folly is organised, or rather not organised. You know that it has no official standing in Government, and its relationship with the Metropolitan Police is entirely a matter of custom and practice and, God help me, tradition. It’s all held together with spit and sealing wax and the old boy network. It’s a typical British mash-up, and the one time it was asked to step up it failed horribly. I have access to files you don’t even know exist, Peter, about a place in Germany called Ettersburg – you might want to ask your mentor about that.’

‘Technically he’s my Master,’ I said. ‘I swore a guild oath as his apprentice.’ My tongue felt thick and dry, as if I’d just spent the night sleeping with my mouth open.

‘I rest my case,’ she said. ‘I know it’s against the national character but don’t you just wish we were a little bit more organised about these things, just a tad more grown-up? Would it kill us to have an official branch of government that handled the supernatural?’

‘A Ministry of Magic?’ I asked.

‘Ha-bloody-ha,’ said Tyburn.

I wanted to know why she hadn’t offered me a cup of tea. I’d brought her flowers, and figured the least I could expect in return would be a nice cup of tea or a beer, or even a drink of water. I cleared my throat and it came out a bit wheezy. I glanced at the fountain and the water streaming into the basin.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked. ‘The basin is a rather crude seventeenth-century knock-off of an Italian design, but the central figure was excavated when they were building Swiss Cottage station.’ She rested her hand on the statue’s face. ‘The marble’s from Belgium, but the archaeologists assure me that it was carved locally.’

I was having trouble working out why I didn’t want to drink the water. I’ve drunk water before, when beer, or coffee or Diet Coke weren’t available. I’ve drunk it from bottles, occasionally from a tap. When I was a kid I used to drink from the tap all the time. I’d run back into the flat all hot and sweaty from playing and didn’t even bother putting it in a glass, just turned the tap on and stuck my mouth underneath it. If my mum caught me doing it she used to scold me, but my dad just said that I had to be careful. ‘What if a fish jumped out?’ he used to say. ‘You’d swallow it before you knew it was there.’ Dad was always saying stuff like that and it wasn’t until I was seventeen that I realised it was because he was stoned all the time.

‘Stop that,’ I mumbled.

She gave me a pretty smile. ‘Stop what?’

I don’t mind getting drunk, but there always comes a moment in the evening when I find myself watching myself bumping into things and thinking, I’m bored of this, can I have full control of my brain back, please? I was getting equally irritated by my sudden need to deliver flowers to Hampstead and drink water from strange fountains. I tried to take a step backwards but the best I could manage was a minor shuffle.