Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(67)
All the time most of us were devising friction-free strategies to promote peace in our time, our carriage and please God at least until I get home. It’s called, by people over sixty, common courtesy, and its purpose is to stop us from killing each other. It was like vestigia: you weren’t always aware of them but you instinctively shaped your behaviour in response to the accumulation of magic around you. This is what kept ghosts going, I realised; they lived off the vestigia like LEDs off a long-life battery, powering down to ration it out. I remembered the dead space that was the vampire house in Purley. According to Nightingale, vampires were ordinary people who became ‘infected’, no one was sure how or why, and started feeding off the magic potential, including the vestigia, of their surroundings.
‘But it’s not enough to sustain a living being,’ Nightingale had said. ‘So they go hunting for more magic.’ The best source of that, according to Isaac Newton, was human beings, but you can’t steal magic from a person, or any life more complex than slime moulds, except at the point of death and even then it isn’t easy. I’d asked the obvious question – why the blood-drinking? He said that nobody knew. I asked him why hadn’t anyone done any experiments, and he gave me a strange look.
‘There were some experiments done,’ he’d said after a long pause. ‘During the war. But the results were considered unethical and the files were sealed.’
‘We were going to use vampires during the war?’ I’d asked, and been surprised by the look of genuine hurt and anger on Nightingale’s face. ‘No,’ he’d said sharply, and then, with more moderation, ‘Not us – the Germans.’
Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere it’s better not to go there.
The genii locorum, like Beverley, Oxley and the rest of the dysfunctional Thames family, were also living beings on one level, and also got their power from their surroundings. Bartholomew and Polidori both suggested that they drew sustenance from all the diverse and myriad life and magic within their domains. I was sceptical, but I was willing to accept that they lived in symbiosis with their ‘domains’, whereas vampires were clearly parasitical. What if that was mirrored by ghosts? If Thomas Wallpenny was in some way part of the vestigia he inhabited and drew power from, a symbiont, then the revenant could be a parasite, a ghost vampire. That would explain the shrunken cauliflower brains of the victims – they’d had the magic sucked out of them.
Which meant that the summoning I’d done with the calculators had achieved nothing more than to feed Henry Pyke’s appetite for magic. But I also wondered if you couldn’t attract a revenant by spilling magic around like laying a chum line for shark. By the time the train pulled into Baker Street, I was already beginning to formulate a plan.
The tube is a good place for this sort of conceptual breakthrough because, unless you’ve got something to read, there’s bugger all else to do.
This time when I arrived at Westminster Mortuary I didn’t even have to show my warrant card. The guards on the gate just waved me through. Nightingale was waiting for me in the locker room. While I was kitting out, I gave him a brief explanation of my meeting with Tyburn.
‘It’s always the children,’ said Nightingale. ‘They’re never satisfied with the status quo.’
‘How did you save the blind man?’ I asked.
‘Apparently they’re not blind,’ said Nightingale. ‘They are in fact visually impaired. A very forceful young lady pointed this out to me at some length while we were waiting at the hospital.’
‘How did you save the visually impaired man then?’
‘I wish I could take the credit,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was his guide dog. As soon the sequestration began …’
‘Sequestration?’ I asked.
Apparently this was the term Dr Walid had invented to describe what happened when a normal human being was taken over by our revenant. It’s a legal term that refers to the process by which a person’s property is seized in order to pay off debts, or because it’s considered to be the proceeds of crime. In this case the property sequestrated was the person’s body.
‘As soon as sequestration commenced,’ said Nightingale, ‘the guide dog, who I believe is called Malcolm, went berserk and dragged the potential victim away. Inspector Seawoll already had his people covering charity collections in the area, and one of them intervened before our poor sequestrated Punch could follow the blind man.’
‘Another triumph for intelligence-led policing,’ I said.
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was your friend Constable May who was on the scene first.’
‘Lesley? I bet she wasn’t happy about that,’ I said.
‘In her words: “Why does this shit always fucking happen to me?”’ said Nightingale.
‘So who was our sequestration victim when he was alive?’ I asked.
‘Who says he’s dead?’ said Nightingale.
He led me down the corridor, where they had a room kitted out as a mobile intensive care unit which is, when you think about it, a disturbing thing to find in a mortuary. Lesley was slumped in a chair in the corner of the room. She raised her hand in a hello when we entered. The bed was surrounded on both sides by machines huffing, going beep or just silently blinking. In the bed was Terrence Pottsley, aged twenty-seven, of Sedgefield, County Durham, a stock control manager for Tesco’s, next of kin most definitely not informed as yet. A thicket of stainless steel was growing out of his face – a medical scaffold they call it. Dr Walid hoped that would allow successful reconstructive surgery once the issue of Pottsley’s sequestration was resolved.