Rivers of London (Rivers of London #1)(78)

I dismissed precognition out of hand. Not only am I a big fan of causality, but Henry Pyke had never done anything else that suggested knowledge of the future. According to my research in the mundane library at the Folly, there was no such thing as mind-reading, at least, not in the sense of hearing someone’s thoughts as if they were narrating a voice-over on television. No: somebody had told Henry Pyke, or told somebody who was sequestrated by Henry Pyke, what the plan was. Nightingale didn’t. I didn’t. Which left the Murder Team. Given that Stephanopoulos and Seawoll were reluctant to talk about magic with its official practitioners, I couldn’t see them discussing it with their people, and Lesley would have followed their lead.

I stepped out of the shower feeling pleasantly raw, and dried myself off with a towel that had been repeatedly washed to the texture of sandpaper. The clothes I’d retrieved from the coach house weren’t exactly fresh, but at least they were cleaner than what I’d been wearing. After a few missed turnings in the featureless corridors I relocated Dr Walid’s office.

‘How’re you feeling?’ he asked.

‘Human,’ I said.

‘Close enough,’ he said. After that he pointed out the location of the coffee machine and left me to get on with it.

Ever since humankind stopped wandering around aimlessly and started cultivating its own food, society has been growing more complex. As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don’t need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on. The more diverse the functions performed by an organisation, the more complex the interlocking systems and subsystems become. If you are responsible, as the Metropolitan Police are, for preventing terrorist attacks, sorting out domestic rows and keeping motorists from killing random strangers, then your systems are very complex indeed.

One part of the system is the requirement that every OCU, that’s Operational Command Unit, has access to the HOLMES2 and CRIMINT databases either through a dedicated HOLMES suite or via specialised software installed on an authorised laptop. This is handled by the Directorate of Information who, because their responsibility is only to their bit of the system, don’t make a distinction between the Serious and Organised Crime Group (OCU) and the Folly, which was made an OCU only because nobody knew how else to drop it into the Met’s organisational chart. Now, this meant nothing to Inspector Nightingale, but to yours truly it meant that not only could I install a legal copy of the HOLMES2 interface into my laptop, but I was also provided with the same access privileges as the head of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command.

Which was just as well, because one of my suspects was Chief Inspector Seawoll, and that’s a target you don’t take aim at unless you’re certain it’s going to go down on the first hit. DS Stephanopoulos, who’d also known about the operation in advance, was an equally hard target, unless I wanted to be joke number two – Do you know what happened to the DC who accused Stephanopoulos of being the unwitting tool of a malicious revenant spirit? Dr Walid was suspect number four, which was why I didn’t tell him what I was up to; Lesley was suspect number five and suspect number six, the one that frightened me the most, was of course myself. There was no way of proving it, but I was reasonably certain that between killing William Skirmish and throwing his child out of the window, Brendan Coopertown had had no inkling that he was anything other than the same man he’d always been.

I hadn’t sensed anything from Lesley. Was it possible to mask a sequestration? Or, more likely, maybe I just wasn’t as sensitive as I thought I was. Nightingale was always telling me that learning to distinguishing vestigia from the vagaries of your own senses was a lifetime’s endeavour. I’d made an assumption about who was to be trusted – I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

After my shower I’d spent some time staring at my face in the mirror, working up the courage to open my mouth and look inside. In the end I closed my eyes and dug my fingers into my cheeks – I’ve never been so happy to fondle a bicuspid in my life. All that meant for certain is that Henry Pyke hadn’t stretched my face out yet.

I booted up HOLMES and typed in my access code and password. Technically both belonged to Inspector Nightingale and, technically, both should have been revoked as soon as he became inactive, but obviously nobody had got round to doing it yet – inertia being another key characteristic of civilisation and bureaucracy. I started at the beginning with the murder of William Skirmish, Covent Garden, 26 January.

I found what I was looking for three hours and two coffees later, when I was reviewing the Framline case. That attack had started with the cycle courier being knocked off his bike on the Strand and being taken to UCH for treatment, where he attacked Dr Framline. A uniformed PC had actually taken a statement from him at the scene of the accident while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He’d claimed that a driver had overtaken him and deliberately forced him off the road. Lesley had told me that the accident had taken place in a rare CCTV blind spot on the Strand, but according to the initial report, the courier had been forced off the road outside Charing Cross Station. There hasn’t been a camera blind spot outside a London rail terminus since the IRA declared them legitimate targets in the 1990s. I went rummaging in the bowels of the HOLMES archive, where some demented soul on the Murder Team had uploaded the relevant footage from every single operable camera from Trafalgar Square to the Old Bailey. None of it was labelled properly, and it took me a good hour and a half to find the video I was looking for. The cycle courier hadn’t specified what make of car had crowded him, but there was no mistaking the battered Honda Accord that deliberately ran him off the road. The video resolution wasn’t good enough to show the driver or the licence plate, but even before I tracked its progress to the high-resolution traffic camera that guarded the lights at Trafalgar Square, I knew who it belonged to.