For John, Stevie, Anne, Genn and Liz without whom nothing would get done.
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Wednesday: Surprise …
1: Airsoft
2: Scalpel
Thursday: Fear …
3: Harsh Language
4: Misdirection
Friday: Ruthless efficiency …
5: Knowledge
6: Spear
7: Intelligence
Saturday: Nice red uniforms …
8: Manoeuvre
9: Air Support
Sunday: Hampstead wasn’t good enough for you …
10: Logistics
11: Communication
12: Faith
Monday: An almost fanatical devotion …
13: Improvisation
14: Love
15: Earthworks
Tuesday: Amongst our weapons …
16: Commitment
17: Teamwork
18: Command and Control
Wednesday: I’ll come back in again …
19: Hearts and Minds
20: Reconstruction
Technical Notes
Acknowledgements
Credits
By Ben Aaronovitch
Copyright
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.