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Beverley’s euphoria lasted long enough for us to get our German family to the nearest ambulance. As far as I could tell from looking around while we walked out, Beverley’s wave of water had started somewhere near the centre of the covered market and rolled outwards to flood the Piazza to a depth of ten centimetres. I reckoned that at a stroke Beverley had quadrupled the amount of property damage done that night, but I kept that thought to myself. She hadn’t managed to extinguish the fire on the roof, but even as we sidled away, the London Fire Brigade were moving in to finish it off. Beverley got strangely agitated when she saw the firemen, and practically dragged me up James Street and away from the market. The riot seemed to be all over bar the media witch hunt, and TSG officers in full riot gear stood around in groups discussing baton technique and reattaching their ID numbers. We sat down on the plinth of the sundial column at Seven Dials and watched the emergency vehicles roaring past, Beverley flinching every time a fire engine went by. Still soaking wet, we were beginning to chill despite the warm evening. Beverley took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m in so much trouble,’ she said. I put my arm around her and she took the opportunity to slip one of her cold hands under my shirt and warm it against my ribs. ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said. ‘Just shut up and think warm thoughts,’ she said, as if that were hard with her breasts brushing up against my side. ‘So you burst a few pipes,’ I said. ‘How much trouble can you be in?’ ‘Those were fire hydrants I messed with, which means the cult of Neptune’s going to be pissed,’ she said. ‘Cult of Neptune?’ ‘London Fire Brigade,’ she said. ‘The London Fire Brigade are worshippers of the god Neptune?’ ‘Not officially, no,’ she said. ‘But you know — sailors, Neptune, it’s a natural fit.’ ‘The Fire Brigade are sailors?’ ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But in the old days when they were looking for disciplined guys who knew about water, ropes, ladders and didn’t freak out at altitude. On the other hand, you had a lot of sailors looking for a nice steady career on dry land — marriage made in heaven.’ ‘Still, Neptune,’ I said. ‘Roman god of the sea?’ Beverley laid her head on my shoulder. Her hair was wet, but I wasn’t complaining. ‘Sailors are superstitious,’ she said. ‘Even the religious ones know you got to have a little respect for the King of the Deeps.’ ‘Have you met Neptune?’ ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘There’s no such person. Anyway, I feel bad about the hydrants, but it’s Thames Water I’m worried about.’ ‘Don’t tell me,’I said. ‘Worshippers of dread Cthulhu.’ ‘I don’t think they’re very religious at all, but you don’t piss off people who can release raw sewage into your headwaters,’ she said. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen your river.’ Beverley turned and made herself comfortable against my chest. ‘I’ve got a place off the Kingston bypass,’ she said. ‘It’s just a semi, but my garden goes all the way down to the water.’ She lifted her head until her lips were brushing mine. ‘We could go swimming.’ We kissed. She tasted of strawberries and cream and chewing gum. God knows where we might have gone after that, except a Range Rover screeched to a stop right by us and Beverley disengaged so fast I got lip burn. A stocky woman in jeans got out of the Range Rover and marched over. She was dark-skinned with a round expressive face that was, on this occasion, expressing a high degree of annoyance. ‘Beverley,’ she said, barely registering my presence. ‘You are in so much trouble — get in the car.’ Beverley sighed, kissed me on the cheek and got up to meet her sister. I scrambled up myself, ignoring the pain from my bruised back. ‘Peter,’ said Beverley, ‘this is my sister, Fleet.’ Fleet gave me a critical once-over. She looked to be in her early thirties, built like a sprinter — broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted with big muscular thighs. She wore a tweed jacket over a black polo neck, her hair trimmed down to a thick stubble. Looking at her gave me a weird sense of familiarity, like you get when you meet a minor celebrity whose name you can’t remember. ‘I’d love to get acquainted, Peter, but now is not the time,’ said Fleet. She turned to Beverley. ‘Get in the car.’ Beverley gave me a sad little smile and did what she was told. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I know you from somewhere.’ ‘You went to the same school as my kids,’ she said, and climbed back into her Range Rover. The door had barely closed before Fleet started yelling at Beverley. It was muffled but the phrase ‘irresponsible child’ was clearly audible. Beverley saw me watching and rolled her eyes. I wondered what it was like to grow up with that many sisters. I thought it might be nice to have someone pick me up in their Range Rover, even if they were going to shout at me all the way home. It’s a funny thing about a London riot, but once you’re outside the perimeter, nothing seems to be different. On the minus side, Covent Garden had nearly burned down, but on the positive side there weren’t any major bus routes or tube lines affected. It was dark, I was soaked, the Folly was still out of bounds and I didn’t fancy spending another night in that chair in Nightingale’s hospital room. I did what everyone does when they’ve run out of options — I went back to the one place where, when you turn up, they have to let you in.

I made the mistake of catching the tube. It was crowded with people heading back from an evening out. Even that late in the evening it was warm and close inside the coach but wet, dishevelled and slightly ethnic as I was, I got more elbow room than anyone else. My back and leg hurt, I was tired and I was missing something. I’ve never trusted the idea of policeman’s gut instinct. I’d watched Lesley at work, and every time she guessed right it was because she’d spotted something I’d missed, dug a bit further or thought a little bit harder about a case. If I was going to save her life, I was going to have to do the same. More people got on at Goodge Street. It got hotter, but at least I was beginning to dry out. A guy in tan slacks and an off-the-peg blue blazer took the space by the connecting door on my right, close enough for me to catch the tinny backbeat from his iPod earpieces. I began to feel reassuringly anonymous again. None of the references to revenants I’d read had provided a clear idea of how or why an ordinary ghost gained the ability to suck the magic out of other ghosts. My working theory about ghosts was that they were copies of personalities that had somehow imprinted into the magic residue that accumulated on physical objects — the vestigia. I suspected ghosts degraded over time in the same way that stuff recorded on magnetic tape degrades, unless their signal was boosted with more magic, hence the need to suck it out of other ghosts. We must have picked up a ranting drunk at Warren Street, because after a brief wind-up he was in full flow by the time we reached Euston. There I was, distracted by a young woman in a pink halter with more cleavage than I thought physically possible who got on and leaned against the glass partition opposite me. I looked away before she caught my eye, and shifted my focus to the nearest advert. I felt the guy in the blue blazer shift position, and guessed he was doing the same thing. A white boy with dreads lurched into my little corner of the train and I caught a whiff of patchouli, tobacco and marijuana. The woman in the halter top hesitated and then moved closer to me — apparently I was the lesser of two evils. ‘The dogs, the dogs,’ shouted the ranting drunk from somewhere down the other end of the carriage. ‘This country is going to the dogs.’ The happy train lurched into movement again. Revenants had to be rare or there’d be no ghosts left for them to feed on, which brought me back to my question: what made a revenant? Psychological state at the moment of death, maybe? Henry Pyke had died a pointless and unjust death even by the lax standards of the eighteenth century but even so, his resentment at Charles Macklin and burning disappointment at the sad state of his acting career didn’t seem enough motivation to make him want to force poor Bernard Coopertown to beat his wife to death. ‘Used to be a fucking paradise,’ shouted the ranting drunk. He couldn’t be talking about Camden Town which, despite the markets, had never really aspired to much more than shabby respectability. Camden tube station is where the Northern Line splits into the Edgware and High Barnet branches, and here loads of people got off and even more people got on. We all crushed up a bit more and I found myself staring at the top of the woman in the halter top’s head — she had blonde roots and dandruff. The man in the blue blazer got shoved in from the right, and between them they had me boxed against the door. We all shuffled about trying to keep our armpits out of each other’s faces — just because it’s uncomfortable, there’s really no excuse for not maintaining standards or making eye contact. The ranting drunk welcomed everyone aboard. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said. ‘Let’s have the whole fucking world in here — why not?’ The smell of the white boy with dreads intensified, adding urine and excrement — I wondered when he’d last changed his fake combat trousers. Less than a minute out of Camden Town, the train lurched to a stop. An almost subliminal groan rose from the passengers, especially when the lights dimmed as well. I heard someone chuckling at the other end of the carriage. There had to be something else behind Henry Pyke, I thought, something much worse than a bitter failed actor. ‘Of course there is,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘That would be me.’ I craned my neck to spot the drunk, but my view was blocked by the white boy with dreads whose face now had an expression of dumb satisfaction. The smell of shit got worse, and I realised the boy had just relieved himself in his pants. He caught my eye and gave me a big smile of contentment. ‘Who are you?’ I shouted. I tried to get out of my corner but the woman in the halter top thrust herself backwards and pinned me to the wall. The lights dimmed further, and this time the groan from the passengers was anything but subliminal. ‘I’m the demon drink,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘I’m gin lane and your local crack house. I’m a follower of Captain Swing, Watt Tyler and Oswald Mosley. I’m the grinning face in the window of the hansom cab; I made Dickens long for the countryside and I’m what your Masters are afraid of.’ I pushed at the woman in the halter top but my arms felt heavy, useless as if in a nightmare. She started to rub herself against me. The carriage was getting hotter and I began to sweat. A hand suddenly grabbed hold of my backside and squeezed tight — it was the man in the blue blazer. I was so shocked that I froze up. I looked at his face but he was staring straight forward with the typically bored, abstracted expression of a seasoned traveller. The bleed from his iPod was louder and more irritating than it had been. I gagged on the smell of shit and shoved the woman in the halter top enough to get a view down the carriage. I saw my ranting drunk — he had the face of Mr Punch. The man in the blazer let go of my arse and tried to stick his hand down the back of my jeans. The woman in the halter top ground her hips into my crotch. ‘Is this,’ shouted Mr Punch, ‘any way for a young man to live?’ The white boy with dreads leaned towards me and with great deliberation poked me in the face with his index finger. ‘Poke,’ he said, and giggled. Then he did it again. There’s a point where a human being will lose it, just lash out at everything around them. Some people spend their lives on the edge of that — most of them end up doing time in prison. Some, a lot of them women, get ground down to that point over years, until one day it’s hello, burning bed and a legal defence of extreme provocation. I was at that point, and I could feel the righteous anger. How wonderful it would be just to fuck the consequences and let rip. Because sometimes you just want the fucking universe to take some notice — is that too fucking much to ask for? Then I realised that was what it was all about. Mr Punch — the spirit of riot and rebellion — does what it says on the tin. This was him, the guy behind Henry Pyke, and he was fucking with my mind. ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Henry Pyke, Coopertown, that cycle courier, lots of frustration — but that’s everyone in the big city, ain’t it, Mr Punch? And what percentage actually let you in? I bet you’ve got a piss-poor success rate — so you can just fuck off out of it — I’m going home to bed.’ At that point I realised that the train was moving again, the lights were up and the man in the blue blazer didn’t have his hand down my trousers. The ranting drunk was silent. Everybody in the carriage was studiously not looking at me. I bailed at Kentish Town, the very next stop. Fortunately it was where I wanted to go.

From September 1944 to March 1945, that lovable Nazi scamp Wernher Von Braun aimed his V2 rockets at the stars and yet, in the words of the song, somehow hit London instead. When my dad was growing up, the city was dotted with bombsites, gaps in the neat rows of houses where homes had been obliterated. In the postwar years these sites were gradually cleared and rebuilt in a series of ghastly architectural mistakes. My dad liked to claim that the mistake where I grew up was built on a V2 impact site, but I suspect it was probably just an ordinary cluster of German high explosives dropped by a conventional bomber. Still, whatever caused the two-hundred-metre gap in the Victorian terraces lining Leighton Road, the postwar planners weren’t going to pass up an opportunity to make mistakes on this scale. Built in the 1950s, the blocks of the Peckwater Estate are six storeys high, rectangular and constructed, as a final aesthetic touch, of a dirty grey brick that weathered badly. As a result, when the clean air act put an end to the famous London pea-soupers and they started sand-blasting the old buildings clean, the Peckwater Estate came out looking worse than it had before. The flats were solidly built, so at least I didn’t grow up listening to next door’s live docusoap, but they were built on the dubious assumption, so beloved of post-war planners, that the London working class was composed entirely of hobbits. My parents had a third-floor flat with a front door that opened onto an open-air walkway. When I’d been growing up, in the early 1990s, the walls had been covered in graffiti and the stairwell with dogshit. These days the graffiti was mostly gone and the dogshit got regularly hosed into the gutter which, by the standards of the Peckwater Estate, counted as gentrification. I still had my front-door key, which was just as well because when I got there I found my parents were out. This was unusual enough to give me pause. My dad’s in his early seventies and doesn’t move about much. I figured it had to be a major occasion, a wedding or a christening, for my mum to dress him up and drag him out of the house. I figured I’d hear all about it when they got home. I made myself a cup of tea with condensed milk and sugar and ate a couple of supermarket own-brand biscuits. Thus fortified, I went to my old bedroom to see if there was room for me to sleep in it. As soon as I’d moved out — and by this I mean about ten minutes after the door had closed behind me — my mum started using my bedroom for storage. It was full of cardboard moving boxes, each one stuffed to capacity and sealed shut with packing tape. I had to move several off the bed just to lie down. They were heavy and smelled of dust. On roughly a two-year cycle my mum collected clothes, shoes, cooking utensils and non-perishable beauty products, stuffed them into cardboard boxes and shipped them back to her family in Freetown. The fact that a great deal of her immediate family had already immigrated to the UK, the US and, strangely enough, Denmark never seemed to cause a reduction in the flow. African families are notoriously extended but from what I could gather, my mum was related to about half the population of Sierra Leone. I’d learned from an early age that anything I owned that I didn’t defend was subject to arbitrary seizure and deportation. My Lego, in particular, was the subject of a running battle from my eleventh birthday on, when Mum decided that I was too old for such things. In my fourteenth year it mysteriously vanished while I was on a school trip. I prised off my shoes, climbed under the covers and was asleep before I could wonder where all my posters had gone. I woke briefly some hours later to the sound of the bedroom door being stealthily closed and the muffled sound of my dad’s voice. My mother said something which made my father laugh and, comforted that everything was all right, I went back to sleep. I woke again, much later, with the morning sunlight slanting through my bedroom window. I lay on my back feeling refreshed, with a solid erection and the vague memory of an erotic dream about Beverley. What was I going to do about Beverley Brook? That I fancied her was a given, that she fancied me was pretty obvious, that she wasn’t entirely human was a worrying possibility. Beverley wanted me to go swimming in her river, and I had no idea what that meant except Isis had warned me against doing it. I had a strong feeling that you didn’t shag a daughter of the River Thames without getting out of your depth — literally. ‘It’s not that I’m scared of commitment,’ I said to the ceiling. ‘It’s just that I want to know what I’m committing to first.’ ‘Are you awake then, Peter?’ said a soft voice outside my door — my father. ‘Yeah, Dad, I’m awake.’ ‘Your mum’s left you some lunch,’ he said. Lunch, I thought. The day was half-done and nothing achieved so far. I rolled out of bed, squeezed past a stack of cardboard boxes and headed for the shower. The bathroom was as hobbit-sized as everything else in the flat, and it had only been by dint of some serious Polish retro-engineering that a power shower was shoehorned into the gap between the sink and the window. It was me that coughed up the cash for it, so I guaranteed I didn’t have to duck my head to get it wet. There was a new soap dispenser mounted beside the shower, the kind you find in the toilets of executive office suites, bought or liberated from a cleaning wholesaler. I’d noticed that the toilet paper and bath towels were much better brands than the ones we used when I was living at home — Mum was cleaning a much better class of office these days. I got out and dried myself off with an enormous fluffy towel with ‘Your Institution Here’ embroidered into the corner. My dad was of the ‘real men don’t moisturise’ school of dry skin diseases, and all my mum had was a wholesale tub of cocoa butter. I’ve got nothing against using cocoa butter, it’s just that you end up smelling like a giant Mars Bar for the rest of the day. My skin taken care of, I nipped back into my old room where I cracked open some of the boxes at random until I had a change of clothes. One of my distant cousins was just going to have to go without. The kitchen was a narrow slot that could have been used to train a mess crew for a Trident submarine. It was just big enough for a sink, cooker and a work surface. A door at the far end opened out onto an equally vestigial balcony which at least caught enough sun to dry clothes most of the year round. Curls of blue tobacco smoke drifted in from the balcony, which meant that my father was out there having one of his four precious daily roll-ups. My mum had left groundnut chicken and about half a kilo of basmati on the cooker. I threw both in the microwave and asked my father if he wanted a coffee. He did, so I made two cups using instant from a catering-sized tin of Nescafé. I topped them up with a centimetre of condensed milk to mask the taste. He looked well, my father, which meant that he’d had his ‘medicine’ some time this morning. He’d had a reputation for good grooming in the heyday of his career, and my mum liked to keep him respectable: khaki slacks and linen jacket over a pale green shirt. I always thought of it as Empire chic, and it certainly did something for my mum. He looked suitably colonial in the sunlight, sitting on a wicker chair that was almost as wide as the balcony. There was just enough room left for a stool and white plastic end table. I put the coffees down on the table by the pub-sized Foster’s Lager ashtray and my dad’s tin of Golden Virginia. From our balcony, on a clear day, you could see all the way across the courtyard to the net curtains of our neighbours. ‘How’s the Filth?’ he asked. He always called the police the Filth, although he turned up for my graduation from Hendon and seemed proud enough of me then. ‘It’s not easy keeping the masses down,’ I said. ‘They keep fighting and nicking stuff.’ ‘That’s the sad condition of the working man,’ said Dad. He sipped his coffee, put the mug down and picked up his tobacco tin. He didn’t open it, just placed it on his lap and rested his fingers on it. I asked whether Mum was okay, and where they’d been the night before. She was fine and they’d gone to a wedding. He was hazy as to whose; one of my many cousins, a definition that could range from the child of my aunt to a guy who wandered into my mother’s house and didn’t leave for two years. Traditionally a good Sierra Leonean wedding should last several days, as should a funeral, but in deference to the hectic pace of modern British life the expats liked to keep the celebrations down to just a day, or thirty-six hours, tops. Not counting preparation time. As he described the music — he was hazy on the food, the clothes and the religion — my dad opened his tobacco tin, took out a packet of Rizlas and with great care and deliberation made himself a roll-up. Once it was finished to his satisfaction, he put the tobacco, Rizlas and the roll-up itself back in the tin, sealed it up and replaced it on the table. When he picked up his coffee I saw his hand was trembling. My dad would leave the tin on the table for as long as he could stand it before picking it up and putting it on his lap, then he might remake his roll-up or, if he couldn’t stand it any longer, smoke the damn thing. My dad had the early stages of emphysema. The same doctor who supplied him with his heroin had warned him that if he couldn’t stop smoking he should at least keep it down to less than five fags a day. ‘Do you believe in magic?’ I asked. ‘I once heard Dizzy Gillespie play,’ said Dad. ‘Does that count?’ ‘It might do,’ I said. ‘Where do you reckon playing like that comes from?’ ‘In Dizzy? That was all talent and hard work, but I did know a sax player said he got his chops from the Devil, made a deal at the crossroads, that sort of thing.’ ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘He was from Mississippi?’ ‘No, Catford,’ said Dad. ‘Said he made his deal on Archer Street.’ ‘Was he any good?’ ‘He wasn’t bad,’ said Dad. ‘But the poor bastard went blind two weeks later.’ ‘Was that part of the deal?’ I asked. ‘Apparently so,’ said Dad. ‘Your mum thought it was when I told her. She said that only a fool expects to get something for nothing.’ That sounded like Mum, whose principal saying was, ‘If it doesn’t cost something, it isn’t worth anything’. Actually her real principal saying was, at least to me, ‘Don’t think you’ve got so big that I can’t still beat you’. Not that she ever beat me, a deficiency that she later blamed for my failure to pass my A levels. Numerous university-bound cousins were held up as shining examples of discipline through physical violence. My dad picked up his tobacco tin and put it in his lap. I picked up the mugs and washed them in the kitchen sink. I remembered the groundnut chicken and rice in the microwave. I took that out to the balcony, ate the chicken but left most of the rice. I also drank about a litre of cold water, which is a common side effect of eating my mum’s food. I seriously considered going back to bed. What else was there for me to do? I stuck my head out onto the balcony to ask my dad if there was anything he needed. He said he was fine. As I watched, he opened his tin, took out the roll-up and put it in his mouth. He took out his silver-coloured paraffin lighter and lit the fag with the same deliberate ceremony with which he had rolled it. As he inhaled for the first time there was a look of bliss on his face. Then he started coughing, nasty wet coughs that sounded like he was bringing up the lining of his lungs. With a practised twist he snuffed out the roll-up and waited for the coughing to subside. When it had, he put the roll-up back between his lips and lit up again. I didn’t hang about — I knew how it went on from there. I love my dad. He’s a walking caution. My mum has three landlines. I picked one up and called my voice-mail service. The first message was from Dr Walid. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Just to let you know that Thomas is conscious and asking for you.’

The broadsheets called it May Madness, which made it sound like a tea dance. The tabloids called it May Rage, presumably because it had one less syllable to fit across the front page. The TV had some good footage of middle-aged women in long dresses tossing bricks at the police. Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force explaining how the riot was caused by whatever socio-political factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society — if only we knew what. There was a big police presence in UCH’s A&E department, most of them loitering in search of overtime or trying to get statements from victims of the riot. I didn’t want to give a statement, so I slipped in the back way by grabbing a mop bucket and passing myself off as a cleaner. I got lost in the upper levels looking for Dr Walid before stumbling onto a corridor that looked vaguely familiar. I opened doors at random until I found Nightingale’s. He didn’t really look any better than last time. ‘Inspector,’ I said. ‘You wanted to see me.’ His eyes opened and flicked towards me. I sat on the edge of the bed so he could see me without moving his head. ‘Got shot,’ he whispered. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was there.’ ‘Shot before,’ he said. ‘Really, when? ‘War.’ ‘Which war was that?’ I asked. Nightingale grimaced and shifted in his bed. ‘Second,’ he said. ‘The Second World War,’ I said. ‘What were you in — the baby brigade?’ To have enlisted even in 1945 Nightingale would have had to have been born in 1929, and that’s if he’d lied about his age. ‘How old are you?’ ‘Old,’ he whispered. ‘Turn century.’ ‘Turn of the century?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘You were born at the turn of the century — the twentieth century?’ He looked as if he was in his bluff mid-forties, which is a neat trick when you’re lying half-dead in a hospital bed with a machine that goes ‘ping’ at regular intervals. ‘You’re over a hundred years old?’ Nightingale made a wheezing sound that alarmed me for a moment, until I realised that it was laughter. ‘Is this natural?’ He shook his head. ‘Do you know why it’s happening?’ ‘Gift horse,’ he whispered. ‘Mouth.’ I couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t want to tire him too much, so I told him about Lesley, the riot and being locked out of the Folly. When I asked him whether Molly could help me track Henry Pyke, he shook his head. ‘Dangerous,’ he said. ‘Has to be done,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to stop until he’s stopped.’ Slowly, one word at a time, Nightingale told me exactly how it would work — I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. It was a terrible plan, and it still left the question of how to get back into the Folly. ‘Tyburn’s mother,’ said Nightingale. ‘You want her to overrule her daughter?’ I asked. ‘What makes you think she’ll do that?’ ‘Pride,’ said Nightingale. ‘You want me to beg?’ ‘Not her pride,’ said Nightingale. ‘Yours.’

Chapter 13
London Bridge

It’s not easy manoeuvring an articulated lorry up the Wapping Wall, so I hired a middle-aged man called Brian to do it. Brian was balding, pot-bellied and foulmouthed. The only thing missing from the stereotype was a Yorkie Bar and a rolled-up copy of the Sun. Still, I hadn’t hired him for his erudition, and he did get us all the way to Mama Thames’s house without any extraneous insurance claims. We parked up half outside Mama Thames’s block and half outside the Prospect of Whitby. The staff must have thought it was an unexpected delivery because they came tumbling out — I had to tell them it was for a private party, and weirdly they didn’t seem that surprised. I asked Brian to wait, and picking up my crate of samples from the cab, I staggered over to the communal entrance. I put it down and rang the doorbell. This time I was met at the door by the same white lady I’d seen before among Mama Thames’s cronies. She was dressed in a different, but equally nice, twinset and pearls, and carried a small black child on her hip. ‘Why Constable Grant,’ she said. ‘How lovely to see you again.’ ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You must be Lea.’ ‘Very good,’ said Lea. ‘I do like a young man who has his wits about him.’ The River Lea rises in the Chilterns north-west of London, and skirts the top of the city before making a sharp right-hand turn down the Lea Valley to the Thames. It’s the least urbanised of London’s rivers and the largest, so of course it survived the great stink. Lea must have been one of Oxley’s generation of genii locorum, if not older. I pulled a face at the child, who looked to be a girl of nursery age, and she pulled a face back. ‘Who’s this?’ I asked. ‘This is Brent,’ said Lea. ‘She’s the youngest.’ ‘Hello Brent,’ I said. She was lighter-skinned than her sisters, with brown eyes that might have been called hazel by a good-natured liar, but the belligerent set of her face was unmistakable. She was wearing a miniature red England away strip, predictably the number 11 shirt. ‘You smell funny,’ said Brent. ‘That’s because he’s a wizard,’ Lea told her. Brent squirmed out of Lea’s grip and grabbed my hand. ‘Come with me,’ she said and tried to drag me through the door. She was surprisingly strong, and I had to brace a little to stay still. ‘I have to bring my crate,’ I told her. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of that,’ said Lea. I let Brent pull me down the long cool corridor to Mama Thames’s flat. Behind me I heard Lea calling for Uncle Bailiff, and if he would be a dear, could he take the crate to Mama’s flat. According to Dr Polidari, genii locorum ‘ behave as if the imperatives of ceremony are to them as necessary as meat and drink is to man ’, and furthermore claimed that they ‘ anticipate such events with miraculous facility so that they are always appropriately attired, and if surprised or somehow prevented, show signs of great distress ’. Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him some slack. They were waiting for me in the throne room, and this time I could see it was a throne room, the potted mangrove sheltering the sacred World of Leather executive armchair. There sat Mama Thames, resplendent in her Austrian lace and a headdress of blue and white Portuguese beads. Behind her were arrayed her attendants in batik lappas and headscarves and on her left and right hands, forming an aisle down which I had to walk, stood her daughters. I recognised Tyburn and Fleet on my left standing with a pair of teenage girls wearing thin braids and cashmere jumpers. Beverley was on my right, looking underdressed in Lycra shorts and a purple sweatshirt. When she was sure I was looking she rolled her eyes. Beside her stood an amazingly tall and slender woman with a fox face, electric-blue and blonde extensions and elongated nails painted in green, gold and black. That, I guessed, was Effra, another underground river, who was clearly moonlighting as the goddess of Brixton market. I noticed that it was north London rivers on the left and south London rivers on the right. Brent let go of my hand, essayed a curtsey in the direction of Mama Thames and then spoiled the effect by skipping over and hurling herself into her mother’s lap. There was a brief pause in the ceremony as the little girl squirmed her way into a comfortable position. Mama Thames turned her full gaze on me, and the undertow of her regard drew me closer to her throne. I had to fight a strong urge to throw myself on my knees and bang my forehead on the carpet. ‘Constable Peter,’ said Mama Thames. ‘How nice to see you.’ ‘It’s nice to be here. As a token of my respect I’ve brought you a gift,’ I said, hoping that it was going to arrive before I ran out of pleasantries. I heard clinking behind me, and Uncle Bailiff arrived with my crate. He was a heavyset white man with a number two skinhead and a faded tattoo of SS lightning bolts on his neck. He set the crate down before Mama Thames, gave her a respectful nod and, with a pitying look at me, left without a word. One of the cronies stepped forward to pluck a bottle from the crate and show it to Mama Thames. ‘Star Beer,’ she said. The core product of the Nigerian Breweries PLC, available in the UK from any good stockist, and in bulk if your mum knows someone who knows someone who owes someone a favour. ‘How much has he got out there?’ asked Fleet. ‘A lorryload,’ said Lea. ‘How big a lorry?’ asked Mama Thames without taking her eyes off me. ‘Big lorry,’ said Brent. ‘Is it all Star?’ asked Mama Thames. ‘I put in some Gulder,’ I said. ‘Some Red Stripe for variety, a couple of cases of Bacardi, some Appleton, Cointreau and a few bottles of Bailey’s.’ I’d liquidated my savings doing it, but as my mum says, nothing worth having is free. ‘That’s a handsome gift,’ said Mama Thames. ‘You can’t be serious?’ said Tyburn. ‘Don’t worry, Ty,’ I said. ‘I threw in a couple of bottles of Perrier for you.’ Someone sniggered — probably Beverley. ‘And what can I do for you?’ asked Mama Thames. ‘It’s a small matter,’ I said. ‘One of your daughters feels that she has a right to interfere in the business of the Folly. All I ask is that she steps back and lets the proper authorities get on with their jobs.’ ‘Proper authorities,’ spat Tyburn. Mama Thames turned her eyes on Tyburn, who stepped before the throne. ‘You think you have a right to meddle in this?’ she asked. ‘Mum,’ said Tyburn. ‘The Folly is a relic, a Victorian afterthought from the same people who gave us Black Rod and the Lord Mayor’s show. Heritage is all very well and good for the tourist industry, but it’s no way to run a modern city.’ ‘That is not your decision to make,’ I said. ‘And you think it’s yours?’ ‘I know it’s mine,’ I said. ‘My duty, my obligation — my decision.’ ‘And you’re asking—’ ‘I am not asking,’ I said, pleasantries over. ‘You want to fuck with me, Tyburn, you had better know who you’re messing with.’ Tyburn took a step back and recovered. ‘We know who you are,’ she said. ‘Your father is a failed musician and your mother cleans offices for a living. You grew up in a council flat, and you went to your local comprehensive and you failed your A levels …’ ‘I am a sworn constable,’ I said, ‘and that makes me an officer of the law. I am also an apprentice, which makes me a keeper of the sacred flame, but most of all I am a free man of London and that makes me a Prince of the City.’ I jabbed a finger at Tyburn. ‘No double first from Oxford trumps that.’ ‘You think so?’ she said. ‘Enough,’ said Mama Thames. ‘Let him into his house.’ ‘It’s not his house,’ said Tyburn. ‘Do as I say,’ said Mama Thames. ‘But Mum …’ ‘Tyburn!’ Tyburn looked stricken, and for a moment I felt genuinely sorry for her because none of us is ever grown-up enough that our mothers don’t think they can’t beat us. She slipped a slimline Nokia from her pocket and dialled a number without taking her eyes off mine. ‘Sylvia,’ she said. ‘Is the Commissioner available? Good. Could I have a quick word?’ Then, having made her point to her own satisfaction, she turned and walked from the room. I resisted the urge to gloat but I did glance over at Beverley to see if she was impressed with me. She gave me a studiously indifferent look that was as good as a blown kiss. ‘Peter,’ said Mama Thames, and beckoned me over to her chair. She indicated that she wanted to tell me something private. I tried to bend down with as much dignity as I could but I found myself, much to Brent’s amusement, on my knees before her. She leaned forward and brushed her lips against my forehead. For a moment it was as if I stood high up on the middle cowling of the Thames Barrier looking east over the mouth of the river. I could feel the towers of Canary Wharf rising triumphantly at my back and beyond them the docks, the White Tower and all the bridges, bells and houses of London town. But ahead of me over the horizon I could feel the storm surge, the fatal combination of high tides, global warming and poor planning, waiting. Ready to drive a wall of water ten metres high up the river and bring down the bridges, towers and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. ‘Just so you understand,’ said Mama Thames, ‘where the real power lies.’ ‘Yes, Mama,’ I said. ‘I expect you to sort out my dispute with the Old Man,’ she said. ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘And because of your good manners, I have a last gift.’ She bent her head and whispered a name in my ear: ‘Tiberius Claudius Verica.’