For John, Stevie, Anne, Genn and Liz without whom nothing would get done.

Wednesday

Surprise …

1

Airsoft

As a rule, we don’t get to see the bodies when they’re fresh. It’s drilled into every modern copper that our first duty, after protecting life and limb, is to preserve the crime scene from contamination. That means the first plod on the spot doesn’t want to let anyone in but the murder team. And the murder team, when they get there, don’t want anybody else except the forensics people getting close.

They certainly don’t want to call in yet another specialist team until they’re absolutely certain they need to. Especially not us – on account of us being the Special Assessment Unit, famed throughout the Met as purveyors of weird bollocks, sudden violent upsets and, worse, poor detection rates. Especially if they’ve worked with us before.

DI Stephanopoulos being a notable exception to that rule.

She was waiting for us outside the entrance to the London Silver Vaults on Chancery Lane on a cold wet Wednesday morning in April, a hefty-looking white woman with sharp blue eyes and resting scowl face. At least I assume that was her habitual expression – certainly it was the one I saw the most. And she was definitely scowling when I tooled up with the Folly’s latest trainee in tow.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

‘This is Danni Wickford,’ I said. ‘She’s on the course.’

That being the Basic Falcon Management Course, an intensive one-on-one jaunt around the world of magical policing with yours truly, so that me and DCI Thomas Nightingale, my governor, could get time off for bad behaviour.

We refer to magical gubbins as Falcon in the police – all the better to draw a veil of comforting euphemism across the disturbing face of supernatural policing.

Danni Wickford was a DC from Kingston CID whose Performance Development Reviews contained phrases like ‘utterly reliable’ and ‘completely dependable’. Dependable and reliable being the qualities that the Falcon Recruitment Committee – that is, me and Nightingale – had decided were what we wanted in a Falcon-capable officer. Physically she was a no-nonsense white woman, skinny, shorter than me with dark brown hair tied up in a French braid, blue eyes and a pointy chin. Born and raised in Dagenham, she had a proper East London accent but, like me, could cycle through various degrees of middle-class, cockney and Multicultural London English as the situation required.

Stephanopoulos favoured Danni with a nod.

‘Try not to pick up any bad habits,’ she said.

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Danni.

The London Silver Vaults were originally built as just that – as vaults for valuable items. Shopkeepers used to store stuff there at night, safe inside metre-thick, iron-reinforced walls, and then bring them up to stock their shops during the day. At some point some lazy git asked why they had to schlep all this expensive – but, above all, heavy – metal up and down the stairs each day. Why not just invite the punters downstairs? Safer all round.

So the vaults were converted into shops and, voilà, London gets its first ever underground shopping mall. Amazingly, I’d never heard of it and Danni had had to look it up on her phone while we drove over.

‘The original surface building was bombed during the Blitz,’ she’d said.

Which explained the neoclassical pile that was sitting on the site, now complete with faux-Georgian windows and rusticated masonry façade of the ground floor.

At least it was an easy crime scene to secure, with a marble reception desk guarding the main staircase down and the lifts. The cordon officer had simply strung a line of blue and white tape across the doorway leading from the atrium and turfed the vault’s security guard out from behind his desk. The cordon officer now sat behind it in his noddy suit, looking like a doorman from a dystopian future. Once he’d signed us in the log, we proceeded down half a dozen flights of stairs to a lobby with a coffee machine and a stack of crates with police labels.

DS Sahra Guleed was waiting for us at the inner cordon in a low-ceilinged waiting room with a black and cream coloured floor and a couple of blue sofas that looked like rejects from the 1990s. At one end, a pair of grey metal and glass cases displayed artfully arranged collections of silver.

In the opposite corner was a huge old-fashioned safe with a maker’s plaque proudly welded onto its front: JOHN TANN – RELIANCE.

‘Is this the new trainee?’ asked Guleed when she saw us.

I introduced Danni.

‘Try not to pick up any bad habits,’ said Guleed.

‘Yeah,’ said Danni giving me a questioning look. ‘’Course.’

Guleed waved us over to a storage box half-filled with packets of paper noddy suits. She was already kitted out with her hood up, drawn tight so that she could keep her expensive hijab tucked away in her jacket. We shed our coats and struggled into our suits and gloves, and I had to rifle through the cellophane-wrapped packets to find one in XXL size. You nearly always have to go one size up to fit them over your street clothes, and if you’re late to a scene you can end up squeaking round in something too small.

As we wrestled our way into our suits, Guleed filled us in.

‘Just after nine o’clock this morning an unidentified white male entered the vault, made his way down here, then proceeded to one of the shops and threatened the proprietor. The proprietor hit the silent alarm, but before anyone could respond something happened – we don’t know what – and the male was killed.’

‘Something happened?’ I said.

‘Want to guess how much CCTV there is in this place?’ asked Guleed. ‘Want to guess how much of it is still working?’

Strong magic damages microprocessors – one of the telltale signs of a Falcon event tends to be the local CCTV getting knocked out. Us police like our CCTV. It makes our job easier, and our only complaint about the surveillance state is that it’s not nearly as seamless as everyone seems to think it is. Just ask anyone who’s had to sit through five hundred hours of grainy video on the off chance someone in a hoody looked the wrong way at the right moment.

Once we were kitted out and as anonymous as stormtroopers, we waddled off to see just what ‘something’ had happened to our victim.

The vault proper was guarded by a door forty centimetres thick, with the John Tann maker’s mark embedded into the header. The weight of the door and the building above me gave me a queasy moment as I followed Guleed through.

Beyond the Tron door we turned right into a brightly lit and blindingly white corridor which infinitied off into the distance. It was lined with vault doors and display cases filled with silver. At the far end I could see blue and white tape and forensic types swishing around with cameras and collection kits. As we walked down the corridor I saw that John Tann’s name was on every header, but the name of each shop was displayed on the inside of the door so you could see them when the shop was open.

And inside each shop was the most silver. It was crammed onto shelves and free-standing display cabinets. Ranks of cutlery, salvers and gravy boats. Lines of dogs and cats and bears and eagles and intricate galleons under full sail. All of it glittering in the bright white tungsten light.

And in each shop, standing or sitting amongst the splendour, was the proprietor or salesperson watching us slither past in our noddy suits.

‘We offered them a chance to wait outside the perimeter,’ said Guleed. ‘But they refused to go.’

Most of the shops had been owned by the same families for over fifty years, and so it was with Samuel Arnold & Co, two thirds of the way down the main corridor.

Samuel Arnold & Co was a double-width shop, which meant it had two John Tann doors, which was just as well because one of them was blocked by the body which lay sprawled across the threshold, legs sticking out into the corridor. The SOCOs backed off as we approached, I like to think out of deference to my expertise but more likely because they didn’t want to be associated with the kind of weird bollocks that doesn’t look good when making a court appearance. Me and Danni went in through the second door and picked our way down the narrow aisle between packed display cases until we could get a good look.

I’d noticed as I passed them that some of the shops seemed very specialised. One was all silver cutlery, salvers and plates; another specialised in silver figurines or candelabras. Samuel Arnold & Co was mostly jewellery, the display cases showing lines of rings, chains and pendants, while delicate spun silver necklaces hung around the necks of headless busts.

By the standard of murders most gruesome, this was not particularly bad. I’ve seen headless, faceless and dismembered bodies. Not to mention the one that was cooked from the inside out. And it’s not that you get used to it, but you do feel a little wash of relief if the injury is small and neat and the corpse hasn’t yet started to smell.

He was a white man, looked to be in his fifties, with thinning brown hair cut short, regular features, pale grey eyes staring at the ceiling, thin-lipped mouth now slack with death. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a plain purple sweatshirt under an olive Patagonia jacket. A hole, about a hand’s width across, had been burnt in the sweatshirt just below and to the right of the label; it was perfectly circular and the edges of the fabric were charred black. Through the hole a huge wound was visible but its exact nature was obscured by congealed blood and unidentifiable bits. I’d have said it was a shotgun wound, except I couldn’t see any pellet holes surrounding the main injury and it seemed too deep.

‘Does that look strange to you?’ I asked Danni, pointing at the wound.

‘Yes,’ said Danni in a slightly squeaky voice. And then, in a normal register, ‘Yes, yes, it does.’

I called out to the hovering forensic techs and asked whether I could pull back the sweatshirt and have a look.

‘No!’ came the unanimous reply. ‘And get a move on.’

‘We’re going to do an Initial Vestigium Assessment,’ I told Danni.

Magic, including the everyday magic that permeates the world, leaves behind it a trace – an echo, if you like. You’ve probably felt it all your life – that sense of familiarity when you walk into a strange room, that shiver you felt for no reason on a particular stretch of pavement, the sense that someone just whispered your name. These can all be vestigia, or they can be random misfiring of neurons, a memory or even a daydream. Separating the two takes training and practice, and is the first step in becoming a Falcon-capable officer.

‘Don’t worry if you don’t feel anything,’ I said. ‘If you’re unsure don’t hesitate to ask me. Remember, that’s part of the training process.’

We were already squatting down by the body, so that seemed a sensible place to start. I leant over and got my face as close to the corpse as I could. I smelt sweat, fabric softener and, underneath, the first sweet, creeping hints of decay.

But nothing else but the random tick-tock of my brain.

I pushed myself back onto my heels and looked over at Danni.

‘What can you sense?’ I asked.

Danni closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. It was hard to tell behind the glasses, mask and hood, but I think she frowned before looking at me.

‘There’s nothing there,’ she said. ‘Is there?’

I was impressed.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No vestigia down here at all.’

‘You said there’s nearly always something,’ said Danni.

‘There’s some things that can suck magic out of the environment,’ I said, and heard Guleed groan from her position in the doorway.

‘Not that again,’ she said as we stood up.

‘Not what again?’ said Danni.

‘I’ll brief you when we’ve finished evidence collection,’ I said. ‘You need to get hold of a crime scene map, locate all the CCTV cameras, electronic cash registers, phones and laptops, and mark where they were when the incident happened. If we track the level of damage they’ve sustained, we might be able to triangulate the epicentre of the effect.’

Danni nodded and swished off to get the job done. Another phrase used in her reviews was efficient.

‘Look at you,’ said Guleed. ‘Ordering people about.’

‘Better than the alternative,’ I said, and we went and found the SOCO to make sure all the CCTV cameras and the rest were bagged and tagged.

‘That’s going to cost money,’ said Guleed.

‘We’ll let Nightingale argue the toss with Stephanopoulos,’ I said – that being, in my opinion, what senior officers were for.

‘I love that you still call them by their last names,’ said Guleed.

‘When I’m a skipper like you I’ll call them Thomas and Miriam,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure I ever would – at least not Nightingale. ‘I think I need to have a word with the witness.’

Phillip Arnold was a third-generation silver trader. He was proud to inform us that his family had owned a shop in the London Silver Vaults for fifty years.

‘Although I’ve got to say I worry about the future,’ he said.

Phillip was a young-looking forty-year-old white man with black hair and light brown eyes. He was dressed in a well-cut but, deliberately to my eye, old-fashioned pinstripe suit complete with embroidered waistcoat and matching yarmulke. His movements were nervous and he kept making repetitive little gestures with his hands. In normal policing it’s usually better to wait a bit before you conduct a second interview, but with Falcon cases you wanted to get in quickly. Faced with the supernatural, witnesses tend to rationalise away things they didn’t understand. So it’s better to get a statement before they can convince themselves they didn’t see what they actually saw.

And Phillip wasn’t at all sure about what he’d seen.

‘A light, he said. ‘Only not like a real light but … Have you ever been hit in the head?’

‘Occupational hazard,’ I said.

‘Did you ever get that flash of light?’ he said, making exploding gestures in front of his eyes. ‘It’s not really a flash of light but that’s what it looks like?’

‘Definitely.’

‘It was like that,’ he said and clutched at the bottle of water we’d provided.

I was conducting the interview on the blue sofas in the lobby by the safe and the display cases. I was still in my noddy suit, which was not ideal, but I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t going to have to go back into the crime scene.

‘Like that, really,’ said Phillip, and he took a swig from the bottle. ‘Really. Like being smacked on the back of the head.’

Which hadn’t happened – at least according to the paramedic who’d had a look. He had worried about concussion all the same, and had wanted Phillip to take a quick ride to A & E. But Phillip had refused to leave until his dad or one of his brothers arrived to keep an eye on the shop.

I led him through his initial statement. How the victim had entered his shop shortly after opening time and asked about rings.

‘He seemed totally normal,’ said Phillip. ‘A little intense, maybe, but normal. I showed him some rings, but he was after a particular style.’

‘What was he after?’

‘That’s difficult to say,’ said Phillip. ‘I’m not sure he knew exactly himself. A puzzle ring, or possibly a gimmal ring.’

A gimmal ring being two rings joined together to form one – very popular with romantics and suspicious husbands from the Middle Ages onwards.

‘He said it “opened up” and had “symbols” on the outer and inner surfaces.’

In the old days I would have made a Lord of the Rings joke about the Black Speech of Mordor, but now that I’m almost a father I’m trying to adopt a more professional attitude and set a good example for trainees like Danni.

‘Did he say what kind of symbols?’ I asked.

‘Well, I did ask him if he meant Elvish,’ said Phillip. ‘I’ve heard that was popular fifteen years ago – on gold rings, anyway.’ He obviously misinterpreted my expression because he continued, ‘Because of the hobbit films.’

Not Elvish, replied the man, but mystical symbols, alchemical symbols.

‘I said we didn’t have anything like that in stock,’ said Phillip. ‘And he said I was lying. He said that his ex-wife had sold it to us and, when I asked when, he said years ago. I said I’d look it up in our inventory, but there was nothing like that in the shop and he could look around if he didn’t believe me.’

The man was getting agitated and Phillip wondered whether he should activate the silent alarm, only you weren’t supposed to do that unless it was a real emergency and Phillip wasn’t sure it was – right up until the moment the man pulled out a gun.

‘At first I couldn’t believe it,’ said Phillip. ‘It didn’t seem real.’

And you’d have to be meshuga to try and rob the vault. Shop policy was to give them whatever they wanted and let them run out into the arms of the police.

Only Phillip couldn’t give the meshuggenah what he wanted, because Phillip had never heard of this particular ring, or the man’s ex-wife, and definitely didn’t have it in stock.

‘Wait,’ I said, because some of this was missing from his earlier statement. ‘Did he give the ex-wife a name?’

Phillip paused.

‘Anthea?’ he said, ‘No it wasn’t that – older, old-fashioned … Althea. Like the woman in the poem.’ I must have looked blank. ‘“To Althea, from Prison”? “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”?’ He sighed. ‘It’s a poem by Richard Lovelace. Fairport Convention did a famous version. You lot are making me feel old,’ he said, and chuckled. He flexed his shoulders and neck and became noticeably more relaxed.

Contrary to what people think about police interviews, we like relaxed. People are more likely to blurt out the truth when they’re relaxed – even incriminating truth – so I smiled and said that we get that a lot.

And then I asked whether the man had given his ex-wife a surname.

‘Moore,’ said Phillip. ‘Moore with an e – he was very definite about that. Wanted me to check our records.’

‘And did you?’ I asked.

‘Of course I did,’ said Phillip, tensing up again. ‘He was pointing a gun at me. Or at least I looked it up in the book.’

This was an old-fashioned account book which Phillip’s family still used, mainly because it added an air of mystery and style to the shop. Their true stock control system ran off a laptop.

I was willing to bet money that the laptop had been sanded along with everyone’s phones and the CCTV cameras. Still …

‘Do you have off-site backup?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Phillip, and I added searching that database as an action to pass on to Guleed.

‘Was Althea Moore with an e in the book?’ I asked.

‘I never got a chance to find out,’ said Phillip. ‘I was looking it up when … it happened.’

The flash of light that was like being brained with a plank of wood.

‘And then he was just lying there,’ said Phillip. ‘Brown bread.’

‘The pistol was a fake,’ said Stephanopoulos once we’d reconvened in the upstairs lobby for post-crime-scene coffee. ‘The firearms guy knew it as soon as he looked at it. It’s an Airsoft replica – shoots pellets.’

‘When are they going to move the body?’ I asked.

‘This afternoon,’ said Guleed, and I made a note to let Nightingale know so he could wangle the PM for Dr Vaughan and Dr Walid.

‘Do you think this is a Falcon case?’ asked Stephanopoulos with the merry tone of a senior officer hoping to make a tricky-looking case somebody else’s problem.

I was pretty certain it was indeed Falcon, but it’s the policy of the Special Assessment Unit to discourage other units from foisting their cases on us. Even if it’s Stephanopoulos.

We call this encouraging operational self-sufficiency.

‘I don’t think we’ll know until we have a cause of death,’ I said.

So, after I’d briefed Nightingale over the phone I commandeered the vault’s meeting room, conveniently located just off the lobby, and used it to finish up our Initial Vestigium Assessment. With the aid of Danni’s crime scene map we collected a representative sample of phones, cameras and laptops from the SOCOs. Or, more precisely, we prised them out of their reluctant fingers by promising that everything that needed logging or signing would be logged and signed, and that the chain of custody would be maintained yea, even unto the end of days, or the first court appearance – whichever came first.

We started with Phillip Arnold’s iPhone 6, since that was most likely the closest affected item. You need a special screwdriver for the pentalobe screws, but apart from that, the 6 is less hassle to open than previous models. I’d known just by shaking it by my ear what to expect, so I made sure to put down a white sheet of paper to catch the sand that dribbled out when I lifted out the motherboard. Unfortunately the protection plates were soldered on, so I had to pry them loose to show Danni the chips.

‘This is what happens when someone or something does serious magic around modern microprocessors,’ I said. ‘It’s basically just silicon sand with trace impurities from metals and quartz.’

‘Is this why I’m wearing a crap wind-up watch, then?’ said Danni. ‘And why my lovely phone, which has my entire life on it I may add, is locked in the safe back at Russell Square?’

‘We got tired of replacing people’s phones,’ I said.

‘And you get the Airwave handsets cheap,’ said Danni.

‘Not that cheap,’ I said. ‘I prefer to use the burners.’

I’d issued one to Danni when she’d started the course. Experience had taught me that it’s much easier to get a copper to do something if you throw in some free kit.

‘Do I get to keep it?’ she asked. ‘After the course is over?’

‘If it’s still working,’ I said, ‘be my guest.’

The shop’s laptop was easier to open and, like Phillip Arnold’s phone, just as buggered. The whole chipset had basically disintegrated, leaving nothing but the connector pins, the cables and the motherboards behind. It had a physical hard drive, which at least meant that the Arnold family might be able to recover any crucial data off it. Although I had no doubt Sahra would be trying to winkle any mention of Althea Moore out of their off-site storage.

We checked a CCTV camera that had been two metres from the body, then a cash register that had been four metres away, another camera at six, and so on at two-metre intervals until we found one, another iPhone, at twelve metres that showed no visible damage.

‘Still “inoperative”,’ said Danni, reading off the evidence label.

‘It doesn’t take much to knock out a chip,’ I said, and used my jeweller’s glass to spot the tiny pinprick-sized craters in the surface of the silicon.

Once we’d established the probable radius of visible effect, we went back and checked the items we’d picked up within that circle. It was a laborious process because we had to take pictures of the damaged components, then relabel them and package them up neatly for the forensic guys. Once we had everything plotted, it was clear that whatever magical happening had happened to our victim had happened just outside the door to Samuel Arnold & Co.

‘There’s a shock,’ said Danni as we started packing up. ‘What I don’t get is if there was enough magic to knock out all cameras and stuff, why didn’t it leave a vestigium?’

Points, I thought, for correct use of the singular.

‘I’ve got a theory,’ I said. ‘Do you want to hear it?’

‘Is this like the one about the sentient tree?’ she asked.

‘This one has a bit more data behind it,’ I said.

‘Data?’

‘Verifiable data,’ I said. ‘All carefully noted down and ting.’ As my cousin Abigail would say.

Danni sighed and finished the label she was working on.

‘You know, when I volunteered for this course not one person warned me that a science background would be an advantage,’ she said.

‘What were you expecting? Ouija boards and tarot cards?’

‘Yeah, actually,’ she said. ‘Something like that.’

‘I think I saw a crystal ball in one of the labs,’ I said. ‘But we are modern go-ahead police officers. We stick to the facts and operate in a rigorously empirical environment.’

‘It’s been a long time since your last foot patrol, hasn’t it?’

‘Do you want this theory or not?’

She made me wait, carefully folding over an evidence envelope and putting it in the plastic travel box with the others.

‘What’s the theory?’ she said.

‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said, and explained while we carried the boxes back to the forensic staging post and signed them back over to the SOCOs.

‘We think when you cast a spell you’re doing two things,’ I said. ‘One, you’re sucking in magic. And then, two, using that magic to create an effect. Like the werelight I showed you on day one.’

‘That was a bit of a shock, I can tell you.’ she said.

‘When you cast a spell, as well as the magical effect, you are also putting out excess magic,’ I said. ‘The same way that when you turn on a light bulb you get heat as well as light.’

‘So the heat bit is what leaves the vestigium,’ said Danni.

‘Correct. So the magic is drawn from yourself and, for some reason, microprocessors,’ I said.

I didn’t add that possibly it was a boundary effect caused by our universe rubbing up against parallel universes. Because, A, that’s an even more unproven theory than the first one. And, B, it makes me sound like an episode of Doctor Who.

Danni frowned.

‘So that’s what does the damage,’ she said. ‘The same way it damages brains?’

‘You did the brain tour with Dr Walid?’

The Folly’s chief cryptopathologist liked to emphasise the dangers of practising magic by displaying the results of hyperthaumaturgical necrosis – or cauliflower brain syndrome, as those of us without medical degrees call it. We’ve got quite a collection sitting in jars back at the Folly.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Right after breakfast, too.’

‘So we also know that there’s some things that can draw magic from the wider environment,’ I said. ‘They suck up everything magical around them, including vestigia – so no trace is left behind.’

‘Some things?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not people, then?’

‘Depends on your definition of people.’

‘Only I’ve heard stories …’

‘Like what?’

‘Like there was a thing, like a ghost, that got inside people’s head and made them do stuff,’ she said. ‘And that’s what caused the Covent Garden riots. And when it was finished with you, it would rip your face right off the front of your head. And that happened to some poor sod in the Belgravia MIT.’

And her name was Lesley May, and we came up from Hendon together and her face was broken and destroyed by just the thing that Danni was talking about. Her face wasn’t ripped off, but the bones, cartilage and muscles that held it together fell apart.

Happened right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.

‘You said you’d brief me once we’d finished evidence collection,’ she said. ‘So brief me.’

‘The thing you’re describing is called a revenant,’ I said. ‘You can think of it as a super-ghost.’

‘You said ghosts were harmless,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s what makes them super,’ I said. ‘They can’t get in your head unless you let them. They try and play on your weaknesses.’

‘That’s not reassuring,’ said Danni. ‘I have a lot of weaknesses.’

‘As far as we know, there’s only one confirmed revenant,’ I said. ‘And he’s been dealt with.’

Sort of.

I actually had written provisional guidelines for encounters with that particular revenant. Admittedly they amounted to Run back to the Folly as fast as you can and hide under Foxglove’s bed.

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘If Mr Punch had been here we’d know about it,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t like to do his work anonymously.’

‘Mr Punch?’ said Danni.

‘It’s in the briefing material I gave you,’ I said, and Danni gave me the bright, interested look of a trainee who has skipped a vital bit of reading but doesn’t want to admit it.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I remember.’

We were stripping off our noddy suits when the undertakers wheeled the body bag out of the vault.

‘What next?’ asked Danni once it had clattered past.

‘Now we find out what happened to that poor sod,’ I said.