Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(72)

It was coming up to midnight, and the last of that evening’s opera devotees had trickled out of the House and headed for the tube station and taxi stands. Bow Street was as quiet and empty as any street in central London ever gets.

‘You’re sure you can track him?’ I asked.

‘You do your bit,’ he said, ‘and I’ll do mine.’

I tightened the strap on my helmet and checked in with the Airwave. This time I got Seawoll, who told me to stop faffing around and get on with it. I turned to ask whether I looked the part, which is how I came to be looking straight at the man in the good suit when he stepped out of the shadows by the stage door and shot Nightingale in the back.





The Blind Spot


He was a middle-aged white man in a good-quality but otherwise nondescript bespoke suit. He held what looked like a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand and a Kobbé’s opera guide in his left. He wore a white carnation in his buttonhole.

Nightingale fell down quickly. He just slipped to his knees and flopped forward onto his face. He let go of his cane and it rattled on the paving stones.

The man in the good suit looked at me, his eyes pale and colourless in the sodium light of the streetlamps, and winked. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ he said.

You can run away from a man with a handgun, especially in poor lighting conditions, provided you remember to zigzag and can open the range fast enough. I’m not saying that option wasn’t tempting, but if I ran then there was nothing to stop the gunman from stepping forward and shooting Nightingale in the head. I was trained to placate the gunman while edging backwards; talking establishes a rapport and keeps the suspect’s focus on the officer so that the civilians can get clear. Ever see The Blue Lamp with Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde? During our training at Hendon, they made us watch the scene where PC Dixon, Warner’s character, is shot dead. The film was written by an ex-copper who knew what he was talking about. Dixon dies because he’s a dinosaur who stupidly advances on an armed suspect. Our instructors were clear: don’t crowd, don’t threaten, keep talking and backing away, a suspect has to be particularly stupid, political or, in one memorable case, protected by diplomatic immunity to think that killing a police officer will in any way make their situation any better. At the very least you’re buying enough time for an armed response team to arrive and blow the silly bugger’s head off.

I didn’t think that backing off was an option. This was one of Henry Pyke’s sequestrated puppets, and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me or Nightingale no matter how calmly I was talking.

To be honest, I didn’t think at all. My brain went: Nightingale down – gun – spell!

‘Impello!’ I said as calmly as I could, and levitated the man’s left foot one metre in the air. He screamed as his body was catapulted upwards and to the right. I must have lost concentration because I heard the distinct crack of a bone breaking in his ankle. The gun fell out of his hand and his arms flailed as he tumbled to the ground. I stepped forward and kicked the gun down the street, then kicked him once in the head, hard, just to make sure.

I should have cuffed him, but Nightingale was lying in the road behind me making wet breathing sounds. It was what they call a ‘sucking chest wound’, and they’re not being metaphorical in their description. There was an entry wound ten centimetres below Nightingale’s right shoulder, but at least when I gently rolled him on his side I couldn’t find an exit wound. My first-aid training was unequivocal about sucking chest wounds – every second you spend faffing around is another second that the London Ambulance Service hasn’t arrived.

I knew that the back-up teams couldn’t have heard the gunshot because they’d have been there already, and I’d blown my Airwave when I levitated the gunman off his feet. Then I remembered the silver whistle in the top pocket of my uniform jacket. I fumbled it out, put it in my mouth and blew as hard as I could.

A police whistle on Bow Street. For a moment I felt a connection, like a vestigium, with the night, the streets, the whistle and the smell of blood and my own fear, with all the other uniforms of London down the ages who wondered what the hell they were doing out so late. Or it could just have been me panicking; it’s an easy mistake to make.

Nightingale’s breath started to falter.

‘Keep breathing,’ I said. ‘It’s a habit you don’t want to break.’

I heard sirens coming closer – it was a beautiful sound.


The trouble with the old boy network is you can never really be sure whether it’s switched on or not, and whether it’s operating in your interest or some other old boy’s. I began to suspect that it wasn’t operating in my interest when they brought a cup of coffee and a biscuit to the interview room. Fellow police officers being interviewed in a friendly manner get to go to the canteen and fetch their own coffee. You only get room service when you’re a suspect. I was back in Charing Cross nick, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the way to the canteen.

Inspector Nightingale was still alive, they told me that much before they sat me down on the wrong side of the interview table, and had been taken to the brand new trauma centre at UCH listed as ‘stable’, a term which covered a multitude of sins.

I checked the time. It was three thirty in the morning, less than four hours after Nightingale had been shot. If you work for any time in a large institution you start to get an instinctive feel for its bureaucratic ebb and flow. I could feel the hammer coming down, and since I’d only been a copper for two years, the fact that I could feel it coming meant that it was a very big hammer indeed. I had a shrewd idea about who’d put the hammer in motion, but there was nothing I could do but stay sitting on the wrong side of the interview table with my cup of bad coffee and two chocolate biscuits.