Annotation 8 страница

It was strangely hard to leave the fair. My legs felt heavy, as if I was wading out of a swimming pool. It wasn’t until we were back at the Jag and the funfair sounds had started to fade that I felt I had escaped. ‘What is that?’ I asked Nightingale as we climbed into the car. ‘ Seducere,’ he said. ‘The Compulsion, or, as the Scots say, “the Glamour”. According to Bartholomew, many supernatural creatures do it as a form of self-defence.’ ‘When do I learn how to do it?’ I asked. ‘In about ten years,’ he said. ‘If you pick up the pace a bit.’ As we headed back through Cirencester for the M4, I told Nightingale about my meeting with Oxley. ‘He’s the Old Man’s consigliere, isn’t he?’ I asked. ‘If you mean his consiliarius, his advisor,’ said Nightingale, ‘then yes. Probably the second most important man at the camp.’ ‘You knew he’d talk to me, didn’t you?’ Nightingale paused to check for traffic before pulling out onto the main road. ‘It’s his job to press for an advantage,’ he said. ‘You had the Battenberg cake, didn’t you?’ ‘Should I have refused?’ ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘He wouldn’t try to trap you while you’re under my protection, but you can’t always take common sense for granted when dealing with these people. It makes no sense for the Old Man suddenly to be pushing downstream. Now that you’ve met them both — what do you think?’ ‘They both have genuine power,’ I said. ‘But it feels different. Hers is definitely from the sea, from the port and all that. His is all from the earth and the weather and leprechauns and crystals, for all I know.’ ‘That would explain why the border’s at Teddington Lock,’ he said. Teddington is the highest point the tide reaches. The river below that point is called the tideway. It’s also the part of the Thames administered directly by the Port of London — I doubted that was a coincidence. ‘Am I right?’ I asked. ‘I believe you are,’ he said. ‘I think there may always have been a split between the tideway and the freshwater river. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for Father Thames to abandon the city.’ ‘Oxley was hinting that the Old Man doesn’t really want anything to do with the city,’ I said. ‘That he just wanted some respect.’ ‘Perhaps he would be content with a ceremony,’ said Nightingale. ‘An oath of fealty, perhaps.’ ‘Which is what?’ ‘A feudal oath,’ said Nightingale. ‘A vassal pledges his loyalty and service to his liege lord, and the lord pledges his protection. It’s how mediaeval societies were organised.’ ‘Mediaeval is what it would get if you tried to make Mama Thames swear loyalty and service to anyone,’ I said. ‘Let alone Father Thames.’ ‘Are you sure?’ asked Nightingale. ‘It would be purely symbolic.’ ‘Symbolic just makes it worse,’ I said. ‘She’d see it as a loss of face. She sees herself as the mistress of the greatest city on earth, and she’s not going to kowtow to anyone. Particularly not some yokel in a caravan.’ ‘It’s a pity we can’t marry them off,’ said Nightingale. We both laughed out loud at that, and bypassed Swindon. Once we were on the M4, I asked Nightingale what he and the Old Man had talked about. ‘My contribution to the conversation was cursory at best,’ said Nightingale. ‘A great deal of it was technical, groundwater overdrafts, aquifer delay cycles and aggregate catchment-area coefficients. Apparently all these will affect how much water goes down the river this summer.’ ‘If I was to go back two hundred years and have that same conversation,’ I said, ‘what would the Old Man have talked about then?’ ‘What flowers were blooming,’ said Nightingale. ‘What kind of winter we’d had — the flight of birds on a spring morning.’ ‘Would it have been the same Old Man?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was the same Old Man in 1914, I can tell you that for certain.’ ‘How do you know?’ Nightingale hesitated, then he said, ‘I’m not quite as young as I look.’ Myphonerang. I really wanted to ignore it but the tune was ‘That’s Not My Name’, which meant it was Lesley. When I answered she wanted to know where the hell we were. I told her we were just going through Reading. ‘There’s been another one,’ she said. ‘How bad?’ ‘Really bad,’ she said. I put the spinner on the roof as Nightingale put his foot down and we topped 120mph back into London with the setting sun behind us.

There were three appliances parked up in Charing Cross Road, and the traffic was backing up as far as Parliament Square and the Euston Road. We arrived at St Martin’s Court to the smell of smoke and the chatter and squawk of emergency radios. Lesley met us at the tape line and handed us bunny suits. I could see while we were changing that half of J. Sheekey’s frontage had been burned out, and that there were three forensic evidence tents set up in the alley. Three bodies, at least. ‘How many inside?’ asked Nightingale. ‘None,’ said Lesley. ‘They all went out the back emergency doors — minor injuries only.’ ‘Something to be thankful for,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’re sure this is our case?’ Lesley nodded and led us over to the first tent. Inside we found that Dr Walid had got there before us and was crouched beside the body of a man dressed in the distinctive saffron robes of a Hare Krishna devotee. The body lay on its back where he’d fallen, legs straight, arms stretched out to either side as if he’d participated in one of those trust-building exercises where you let yourself fall backwards — only no one had been there to catch him. His face was the same bloody ruin as Coopertown’s and the cycle courier’s had been. That answered that question. ‘That’s not the worst of it,’ she said, and beckoned us over to the second tent. This one had two bodies. The first was a dark-skinned man in a black frock coat, his hair stuck up in clumps and stiff with blood. He’d been hit hard enough to crack open the skull and expose a section of his brain. The second body was another devotee of Krishna. A random good samaritan had tried to help by putting him in the recovery position, but with his face split open the gesture had been futile. I was aware of a thudding in my ears and a shortness of breath. Blood, presumably from the blow struck to the other man, had splattered the devotee’s robes and made a bloody tie-dye pattern on the orange cloth. The interior of the forensic tent was stifling, and I started sweating inside my bunny suit. Nightingale asked a question but I didn’t really hear Lesley’s answer. I stepped outside the tent, gagged once, swallowed it and stumbled to the tape line where, to my own amazement, I managed to keep my Battenberg cake down. I wiped my mouth on the cold plastic sleeve of the bunny suit and leaned against the wall. Opposite me was a poster for the Noël Coward Theatre where they were showing a farce called Down With Kickers!. Two victims with their faces half off meant that the ‘possession’ had affected two individuals at the same time. There was one more tent left. I asked myself, how much worse could that be? Stupid question. The third body was seated with its legs crossed but like a child, not a yogi for all that his hands were resting on his knees palm upwards. His robes were drenched in blood and ribbons of red ropey stuff covered his shoulders and upper arms. His head was completely gone, leaving a ragged stump of a neck. There was a flash of white buried amid the torn muscle — I assumed it was his spine. Seawoll had been waiting for us in the tent. He grunted when Lesley led us in. ‘Somebody’s just taking the piss now.’ ‘It’s escalating,’ I said. Nightingale gave me a sharp look but said nothing. ‘But what’s escalating?’ asked Lesley. ‘And why can’t you stop it?’ ‘Because, Constable,’ said Nightingale coldly. ‘We don’t know what it is.’

There were plenty of witnesses and suspects, and people who were helping the police with their inquiries. We paired off to conduct the interviews as fast as possible. I worked with Seawoll while Nightingale paired with Lesley. That way there’d be someone in the room who could spot a vestigium when it slapped him in the face. Sergeant Stephanopoulos handled the collecting of physical evidence and collating the CCTV coverage. It was a bit of a privilege to watch Seawoll work. He wasn’t nearly so intimidating with the suspects as he was with other policemen. His interrogation technique was gentle — never chummy, always formal but he never raised his voice. I took notes. The sequence of events, as we reconstructed them, was depressingly familiar but on a larger scale than we’d seen before. It had been a mild spring Sunday afternoon, and St Martin’s Court had been moderately crowded. The Close itself is a pedestrianised alleyway that has access to three separate stage doors, the back entrance to Brown’s and the famous J. Sheekey’s Oyster Bar. It’s where the theatre staff go for a coffee and a crafty fag between performances. J. Sheekey’s is a thespian landmark, which isn’t surprising if you sell food late at night within walking distance of the most famous theatres in the West End. Sheekey’s also employs uniformed doormen in top hats and black frock coats, and that’s where the trouble started that afternoon. At two forty-five, about the same time as I was sitting down for tea with Oxley and Isis, six members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness entered the Close from the Charing Cross Road end. This was a common route for the bhaktas, the aspirant devotees to the god, as they traversed from Leicester Square to Covent Garden. They were being led by Michael Smith, his identity later confirmed through fingerprint evidence, a reformed crack addict, alcoholic, car thief and suspected rapist, who had lived an unblemished life since joining the movement nine months previously. ISKCON, as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness likes to be known, is aware that there is a fine line between drawing attention to yourself and provoking active hostility from passers-by. The intention is that through dancing and chanting in public, potential converts may be attracted to the movement, and not to provoke an angry confrontation. Thus, ‘dwell time’ in a particular locality had to be judged carefully to avoid trouble. Michael Smith had proved particularly good at judging what the devotees could get away with, and that was why he was leading the saffron crocodile that afternoon. Which was why, according to Willard Jones, former Llandudno lifeguard and lucky survivor, everyone had been surprised when they came to a halt outside J. Sheekey’s, and Michael Smith said he wanted to hear some noise. Still, making a noise and attracting attention was what they were on the street for, so they started making a noise. ‘A harmonious noise,’ said Willard Jones. ‘In this age of materialism and hypocrisy, no other form of spiritual realisation is as effective as the chanting of the maha-mantra. It is like the genuine cry of the child for his mother …’ He went on like this for some time. What was not harmonious was the cowbell, which Willard Jones knew was a genuine cowbell because his father and brothers were genuine failing Welsh hill farmers. ‘If you’ve ever heard a cowbell,’ said Jones, ‘you’d realise that they are not designed to be harmonious.’ At approximately two fifty, Michael Smith produced a huge cowbell from somewhere about his person and started ringing it with great sweeping movements of his arm. On duty as uniformed doorman that day was Gurcan Temiz of Tottenham via Ankara. As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit and the name of that limit is ‘taking the piss’. Ringing a huge cowbell outside the restaurant and disturbing the patrons certainly constituted taking the piss, so Gurcan stepped up to remonstrate with Michael Smith, who clubbed him repeatedly with the bell around the head and shoulders. According to Dr Walid, the fourth blow was the one that killed him. Once Gurcan Temiz was on the ground two more devotees, Henry MacIlvoy of Wellington, New Zealand and William Cattrington of Hemel Hempstead rushed over and proceeded to kick the victim. This didn’t cause the damage it might have, because both devotees were wearing soft plastic sandals. At that point an incendiary device exploded behind the bar inside J. Sheekey’s. The clientele, despite being a mix of thespians and tourists, evacuated the premises in an orderly but rapid fashion. Those that went out the back fire exits dispersed via Cecil Court; those that went out the front streamed past the bodies of Gurcan Temiz, Henry MacIlvoy and William Cattrington, who were already dead. Most registered that there were bodies and that there was blood, but they were all vague about the details. Only Willard Jones had a clear view of what happened to Michael Smith. ‘He just sat down,’ said Jones. ‘And then his head exploded.’ There are a couple of mundane things that can make your head explode, high-velocity rifle shot for one, so the Murder Team spent some time eliminating them from our inquiries. Meanwhile, I’d figured out what had caused the explosion inside J. Sheekey’s, which was just as well because by that time the Anti-Terrorist Squad and MI5 were starting to sniff around the case, which nobody wanted.

The answer came from the experiments I’d been conducting, semi-covertly, into why my phone broke. I had no intention of using my laptop or even another phone as a guinea pig, so a quick trip to Computers For Africa, who refurbish abandoned computers and donate them abroad, netted me a bag full of chips and a motherboard that I suspected came from an Atari ST. I used masking tape to set marks at twenty-centimetre intervals along the length of a bench and once I had a chip placed at every mark, I carefully positioned my hand and cast a werelight. The trick in science is to try and change only one variable at a time, but I felt I’d gained enough fine control to produce the same intensity of werelight consistently each time. I spent an entire day conjuring up lights and then checking each chip for damage under the microscope. All to no avail, except for pissing off Nightingale who said that if I had that much time to waste I should be able to tell him the difference between propositions of the accusative and the ablative kind. Then he distracted me by teaching me my first Adjectivum, which is a forma which changes some aspect of another forma. This Adjectivum was called Iactus, which combined with Impello should, theoretically, have allowed me to float an apple around the room. After two weeks of exploding apples I’d got to the point where I could reliably whoosh an apple down the length of the lab with a fair degree of accuracy. Nightingale said that the next stage was catching things that were thrown towards me, which took us back to exploding apples, and that’s where we were the day the clocks went forward and we paid our respects to Father Thames. It was while I was in the interview room watching Seawoll gently pluck the facts from Willard Jones’s testimony that I had my breakthrough. Magic, it turned out, was just like science in that sometimes it was a question of spotting the bleeding obvious. Just as Galileo spotted that objects accelerate under gravity at the same rate regardless of their weight, I spotted that the big difference between my mobile phone and the various microchips I’d been experimenting on was that my mobile phone was connected up to its battery when it got fried. Just connecting up my collection of second-hand microchips to a battery seemed far too random and time-consuming, but luckily you can a get ten generic calculators for less than a fiver — if you know where to go. Then it was just a matter of laying them out, casting the werelight for precisely five seconds and sticking them under the microscope. The one placed directly under my hand was toast and there were decreasing levels of damage out to the two-metre mark. Was I emitting power as a waste product, which was damaging the electronics — or was I sucking power out of the calculators, and was it that that was doing the damage? And why was the damage principally to the chips, and not the other components? Crucially, despite the unresolved questions, it implied that I could now carry my mobile phone and do magic — providing I took the battery out first. ‘But what does all that mean?’ asked Lesley. I took a pull on my Becks and waved the bottle at the TV. ‘It means that I’ve just figured out how the fire was started.’ The next morning Lesley emailed me the fire report, and after I’d checked that I tracked down a retail equipment store that could deliver a till just like the one used in J. Sheekey’s Oyster Bar. Because of Nightingale’s No Visitors in the Folly, Not Counting the Coach House rule, I had to carry the bloody thing from the tradesman’s entrance down into my lab all by myself. Molly watched me staggering past and covered her smile with her hand. I figured Lesley didn’t count as a visitor in this instance, but when I called and invited her over for the demonstration she said she was busy running errands for Seawoll. Once I had everything in position I asked Molly to ask Nightingale to meet me in the lab. I cleared an area in the corner, away from any gas pipes, mounted the till on a metal trolley and plugged it in. When Nightingale arrived I handed him a lab coat and eye protectors and asked him to stand on a mark six metres from the till. Then, before I did anything else, I removed the battery from my mobile phone. ‘And the purpose of this is what, exactly?’ asked Nightingale. ‘If you’ll just bear with me sir,’ I said, ‘It’ll all become clear.’ ‘If you say so Peter,’ he said, and folded his arms. ‘Should I be wearing a helmet as well?’ ‘That’s probably not necessary, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m going to count down from three, and on zero I’d like you to do the strongest magic consistent with safety.’ ‘The strongest?’ asked Nightingale. ‘You’re sure about this?’ ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Ready?’ ‘Ready when you are.’ I counted down, and on zero Nightingale blew up the lab — at least, that’s what it felt like. A ball of burning fire, like a werelight spell gone horribly wrong, formed over Nightingale’s outstretched palm. A wave of heat washed over me and I smelled crisping hair. I almost threw myself behind a bench before I realised that the heat wasn’t physical. It couldn’t have been, or Nightingale would have caught fire. Somehow the heat was all contained within the sphere above his hand — what I’d felt was vestigia on a grand scale. Nightingale looked at me and calmly raised an eyebrow. ‘How long do you want me to keep this up?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How long can you keep it up?’ Nightingale laughed. I caught a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision and I turned to find Molly standing in the doorway, eyes shining with reflected fire and fixed on Nightingale. I turned back just in time for the till to explode. The top blew right off and a spray of burning plastic fountained out, black smoke billowed upwards and raced across the ceiling. Molly gave a delighted shriek and I ran forward with the fire extinguisher and sprayed the CO2 over the till until it went out. Nightingale shut down his sphere of flaming death and switched on a set of extractor fans I didn’t even know the lab was equipped with. ‘Why did it explode?’ he asked. ‘The rapid breakdown of the components releases a volatile gas, hydrogen or something,’ I said. ‘I only got a C in chemistry, remember. The gas mixes with air inside the casing, there’s an electrical spark, and boom. The question I need you to answer is, does doing a spell suck magic out of an object or put magic into an object?’ The answer was, of course, both. ‘You don’t normally cover this until you’ve mastered the primary forma,’ said Nightingale. Magic, as Nightingale understood it, was generated by life. A wizard could draw on his own magic, or on magic that he’d stored by enchantment, which sounded interesting but not relevant to exploding cash tills. However, life protected itself, and the more complex it was the more magic it produced, but the harder it was to draw off. ‘It’s impossible to draw on magic from another human being,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or even a dog, for that matter.’ ‘The vampires,’ I said. ‘They sucked the life out of everything in the house, didn’t they?’ ‘The vampires are obviously parasitical in that way but we don’t know how they do it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nor do we know how people like your friend Beverley Brook draw power from their environment, either.’ ‘The vampire house is where I first noticed the effect on the microchips,’ I said. ‘As machines become more like men,’ said Nightingale, ‘I suppose it follows that they might start producing magic of their own. I’m not sure I see how this helps us.’ I tried not to wince at the pseudoscience, and decided now was not the time to get into that. ‘In the first instance,’ I said, ‘it means we know that whatever is doing this is sucking down enormous amounts of power, and second, it gives us another thing to look for.’

Not that we were actually finding anything. In the meantime, Seawoll’s Murder Team were assigned a particularly pointless stabbing in a pub off Piccadilly Circus. I had a sniff around but there were no vestigia, and a stupid but comprehensible motive. ‘Cheating boyfriend,’ Lesley explained one night when she came round to watch a DVD. First, boy meets girl, girl sleeps with second boy, first boy stabs second boy and runs away. ‘We think he’s hiding in Walthamstow,’ she said. Many would say that was punishment enough. The murders outside J. Sheekey’s were blamed on Michael Smith, who had supposedly shot three people in the head with an illegal firearm before killing himself with the same gun. The media might have taken more of an interest had not a soap star been caught cottaging with an equally famous footballer in the loos of a club in Mayfair. The resulting media white-out blotted out any real news for two weeks and was, according to Lesley, far too convenient to be a coincidence. I spent April practising my forma, my Latin and experimenting with new ways to blow up microchips. Every afternoon I’d take Toby out for a walk in the area around Covent Garden and Cambridge Circus to see if either of us picked up a sniff, but there was nothing. I called Beverley Brook a couple of times, but she said that her mother had told her not to have anything to do with me until I’d done something about Father Thames. May started in typical Bank Holiday fashion, with two days of rain and three of drizzle, until the next Sunday dawned bright and fair. It’s on a day like this that a young man’s mind turns to romance, ice cream and Punch and Judy shows. It was the day of the Covent Garden May Fayre, which celebrates the first ever recorded performance of Punch and Judy with a brass-band parade, a special puppet mass at the Actors’ Church and as many Punch and Judy shows as can be crammed into the church grounds. While I’d been a probationary constable at Charing Cross, I’d always been on crowd control that day, so I called up Lesley and asked if she wanted to try the fayre from the civilian point of view. We got ice cream and Cokes from the Tesco Metro and dodged around the tourists until we reached the front portico of the church. A single ‘professor’s’ booth had been set up not half a metre from where poor old William Skirmish had had his head knocked off. ‘Four months ago,’ I said out loud. ‘It hasn’t been boring,’ said Lesley. ‘You’re not the one who’s had to learn Latin,’ I said. Mats had been put down for the kids to sit on while we adults stood at the back. A man in jester’s motley stepped forward and warmed up the audience. He explained that over the centuries there had been many versions of the Punch and Judy show but today, for our education and our entertainment, the renowned Professor Phillip Pointer would perform The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy as told to John Payne Collier by Giovanni Piccini in 1827. The story started with Punch being bitten on the nose by Toby the dog.

Chapter 8
The Jackanory Version

Toby the dog bites Punch, who beats Mr Scaramouch, Toby’s owner, to death. He then goes home and throws his baby out of the window and beats his wife Judy to death. He falls off his horse and kicks the doctor in the eye. The doctor attacks him with a stick, but he grabs that and beats the doctor to death. He rings a sheep bell outside a rich man’s house, and when the rich man’s servant remonstrates with him Punch beats him to death. At that point, my ice cream melted and slopped all over my shoes. The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Punch and Judy as told to John Payne Collier by Giovanni Piccini in 1827. Not very hard to get hold of, once you know what you’re looking for. After the show, Lesley and I showed the Professor our warrant cards and he was happy to hand over the hard copy of the script. We took it over to the Roundhouse on the corner of New Row and Garrick Street, and settled in to read it with two double vodkas.. ‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ I said. ‘You think?’ asked Lesley. ‘Something is using real people to act out this stupid puppet show.’ ‘Your governor’s not going to like this,’ I said. ‘Well I’m not going to tell him,’ said Lesley. ‘Let your governor tell my governor that the fucking ghost of Mr Punch is knocking people off on his patch.’ ‘You think it’s a ghost?’ I asked. ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘That’s what you magic cops are for.’

The Folly has three libraries: one, I didn’t know about back then, number two was a magical library where the direct treatise on spells, forma and alchemy were kept, all of them written in Latin and so all Greek to me, and number three was the general library on the first floor next to the reading room. The division of labour was clear from the start: Nightingale checked the magic library, and I hit the books in the Queen’s English. The general library was lined with enough mahogany to reforest the Amazon basin. On one wall the stacks went all the way to the ceiling, and you reached the top shelves by using a ladder that slid along on shining brass rails. A row of beautiful walnut cabinets held the index cards, which were the closest thing the library had to a search engine. I caught a whiff of old cardboard and mildew when I opened the drawers, and it comforted me to think that Molly didn’t go so far as to open them up regularly and clean inside. The cards were arranged by subject, with a master index arranged by title. I started by looking for references to Punch and Judy, but found none. Nightingale had given me another term to search for: revenant. A couple of false passes with the index cards led me to Dr John Polidari’s Meditations on the Matter of Life and Death which, according to the frontispiece, had been published in 1819. The same page had a notation in Latin written in an elegant looping hand: Vincit qui se vincit, August 1821. I wondered what it meant. According to Polidari, a revenant is an unquiet spirit who returns from the dead to wreak havoc on the living, usually in reprisal for some slight or injustice, real or perceived, that the person suffered during their life. ‘It certainly fits our profile,’ I told Nightingale over lunch — Beef Wellington, boiled potatoes and sautéed parsnips. ‘These little grievances going all postal — it fits Lesley’s idea that the big events have little echoes. ’ ‘You think it’s infecting them?’ ‘I think it’s a field effect, like radiation or light from a bulb,’ I said. ‘I think the echoes are inside the field, their brains get charged up with negative emotions and off they go.’ ‘Wouldn’t more people be affected, in that case?’ asked Nightingale. ‘There were at least ten other people in the cinema foyer, including you and Constable May, and yet only the mother was affected.’ ‘Could be that it reinforces anger that’s already there?’ I asked. ‘Or acts as a catalyst? It wouldn’t be an easy thing to prove scientifically.’ Nightingale smiled. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘You remind me of a wizard I used to know called David Mellenby,’ said Nightingale. ‘He had the same obsession.’ ‘What happened to him?’ I asked. ‘And did he leave any notes?’ ‘I’m afraid he died in the war,’ said Nightingale. ‘He never did get a chance to do half the experiments he wanted to. He had this theory about how the genii locorum works that would have appealed to you.’ ‘What was his theory?’ I asked. ‘I believe I will make telling you that contingent on you mastering your next forma,’ he said. ‘I did notice that there were discrepancies between the script and Mr Punch’s actions. I’m thinking of Pretty Polly.’ As laid down in the Tragical Comedy, after killing his wife and kid Mr Punch sings a happy little song about the benefits of wife-murdering and, that done, he presses his suit with Pretty Polly. She’s a character who says nothing but ‘seems nothing loath’ when our cheerful little serial killer starts kissing her. ‘We don’t know he’s following that particular script,’ I said. ‘True,’ said Nightingale. ‘Piccini was relating an oral tradition, and those are almost never reliable.’ According to the possibly unreliable Piccini, the next victim was due to be a blind beggar who coughs in Mr Punch’s face and is thrown off the stage for his presumption. The script didn’t specify if he survived the experience or not. ‘If our revenant Pulcinella is following form,’ I said, ‘then the most likely target is going to be a tinny for the RNIB.’ ‘What’s a tinny?’ ‘A person with a collecting tin,’ I said, miming a shake. ‘People put their spare change in it.’ ‘A blind man begging for money,’ he said. ‘It would be more useful to know who the revenant was and where he’s buried.’ ‘Presumably if we know who he is then we can deal with his issues and lay him to rest peacefully,’ I said. ‘Or,’ said Nightingale, ‘we dig up his bones and grind them into dust, mix them with rock salt and then scatter them out at sea.’ ‘Would that work?’ ‘Victor Bartholomew says that’s the way to do it,’ Nightingale shrugged. ‘He wrote the book on dealing with ghosts and revenants — literally.’ ‘I think we may be overlooking a blindingly obvious source of information,’ I said. ‘Really?’ ‘Nicholas Wallpenny,’ I said. ‘All the attacks have originated near the Actors’ Church, which I’m guessing means that our revenant is located nearby. Nicholas might know him — for all we know, they hang out.’ ‘I’m not sure ghosts “hang” quite the way you imagine,’ said Nightingale, and with a quick glance to be sure that Molly wasn’t watching, he slipped his half-full plate under the table. Toby’s tail banged against my legs as he snaffled it down. ‘We need a bigger dog,’ I said. ‘Or smaller portions.’ ‘See if he won’t talk to you tonight,’ said Nightingale. ‘But remember that our Nicholas wasn’t a reliable witness when he was alive — I doubt his veracity has improved since his demise.’ ‘How did he die?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’ ‘Died of drink,’ Nightingale said. ‘Very enjoyable.’