Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(74)

‘What do you want to believe?’ I asked.

‘That magic is real,’ Seawoll said, and gave me a knowing smile. ‘Can you give us a demonstration?’

‘That’s not a good idea,’ I said. ‘There could be side effects.’

‘Sounds a bit too convenient to me,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘What kind of side effects?’

‘Probably destroy your mobile phones, palm pilot, laptop or any other electronic equipment in the room,’ I said.

‘What about the tape recorder?’ asked Seawoll.

‘That too,’ I said.

‘And the CCTV?’

‘Same as the tape recorder,’ I said. ‘You can protect the phones by disconnecting them from their batteries.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Stephanopoulos, and leaned forward aggressively, neatly masking from the camera behind her the fact that she was popping the battery from her very ladylike Nokia slimline.

‘I think we’re going to want a demonstration,’ said Seawoll.

‘How much of a demonstration?’ I asked.

‘Show us what you’re made of, son,’ said Seawoll.

It had been a really long day and I was knackered, so I went for the one forma I can reliably do in a crisis – I made a werelight. It was pale and insubstantial under the fluorescent strip lighting and Seawoll wasn’t impressed, but Stephanopoulos’s heavy face broke into such a wide smile of unalloyed delight that for a moment I saw her as a young girl in a pink room full of stuffed unicorns. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

One of the tapes unspooled messily inside the tape machine while the other just stopped dead. I knew from my experiments that I needed to up the strength of the werelight to take out the camera. I was going for a brighter light when the ‘shape’ in my mind went wrong and suddenly I had a column of light hitting the ceiling. It was a bright blue colour, and focused. When I moved my hand the beam played across the walls – it was like having my own personal searchlight.

‘I was hoping for something a bit more subtle,’ said Seawoll.

I shut the light down and tried to remember the ‘shape’, but it was like trying to remember a dream, slipping away even as I grabbed for it. I knew I was going to have to spend a long time in the lab trying to recapture that form, but as Nightingale had said right at the beginning, knowing the forma is there is half the battle.

‘Did that do for the camera?’ asked Seawoll. I nodded and he gave a sigh of relief. ‘We’ve got less than a fucking minute,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen this much shit rolling downhill since de Menezes got shot, so my advice to you, son, is to find the deepest hole you can crawl into and stay there until this shitfall is over and the crap lies deep and crisp and even.’

‘What about Lesley?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t worry about Lesley,’ said Seawoll. ‘She’s my responsibility.’

Which meant that Seawoll had stepped in as Lesley’s patron and made it clear that anyone trying to get to her would have to go through him first. Since my patron was currently lying on a bed at UCH and breathing through a tube, Nightingale was unlikely to do the same for me. I like to think that Seawoll would have extended his protection to me if he could have, but I’ll never know for sure. He didn’t tell me that I should look out for myself – that was a given.

‘What the fuck do we do next?’ asked Seawoll.

‘You’re asking me?’

‘No, I’m fucking asking the table,’ said Seawoll.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Sir. There’s loads of stuff I don’t know.’

‘Then you’d better start educating yourself, Constable,’ said Seawoll. ‘Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Mr Henry Pyke is going to stop now – do you?’

I shook my head.

Stephanopoulos grunted and tapped her watch.

‘I’m going to spring you,’ he said. ‘Because we need to put an end to this fucking spiritual shit before some ACPO wallah panics and decides to bring in the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

Seawoll gave me a look that implied my best had better be fucking good enough. ‘When we start again,’ he said, ‘I need you to make sure your brain is engaged before you put your mouth into gear. Just like after the thing in Hampstead – clear?’

‘Crystal,’ I said.

The door to the interview room slammed open and a man stuck his head inside. He was middle-aged with greying hair, broad-shouldered and with extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. Even if I hadn’t recognised him from his web profile, I would have known Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Folsom was one of the big beasts of the jungle. He crooked his finger at Seawoll and said, ‘Alex, a word please.’

Seawoll looked at the ruined tape machine. ‘Interview suspended,’ he said and gave the time. Then he rose and meekly followed Folsom out of the room. Stephanopoulos gave me a half-hearted attempt at her famous evil glare, but I was wondering whether she still had her My Little Pony collection.

Seawoll returned and told us that we would be continuing the interview in an adjacent room, one where the monitoring equipment was still working. There, we continued the time-honoured tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth. I told them that Nightingale and I had reason to believe, through an entirely conventional informer, that the group – because it had to be more than one person – who had perpetrated a series of senseless attacks in and around the West End would be based on Bow Street, and that we had been investigating there when we were ambushed by unknown assailants.