‘Hooray,’ said the fox.
It slunk out of the machine and watched, stretching and yawning, while I loaded my laundry and carefully selected the correct cycle. I’m no expert, but I’ve been around these foxes long enough to recognise one or two. This was Indigo, who was my cousin Abigail’s right-hand vixen.
And if she was hanging around the house …
‘Where’s Abigail?’ I asked.
‘She’s off with Maksim acquiring a diggy thing,’ said Indigo.
‘What’s a diggy thing?’ I asked.
‘You know – a big thing,’ said Indigo. ‘For digging.’
Maksim already had shovels and spades racked neatly in the garden shed. A horrible thought occurred to me.
‘How big is this big diggy thing?’ I asked.
‘Big!’
‘As big as me?’
‘Bigger.’
‘As big as a car?’
Indigo gave this some thought.
‘As big as a big car,’ she said.
‘And what are they planning to dig with this big digger?’
‘That is beyond the scope of my need to know, fam,’ said Indigo. ‘But it would be nice to have a permanent den here – with cushions.’
‘What’s Beverley doing now?’ I asked.
Indigo raised her head, her ears twitching back and forth like radar dishes.
‘She’s in the TV and snack room watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ she said, and jumped up on top of the washing machine as it started its churn cycle. ‘This is nice,’ she said, and lay down flat on top of the machine.
‘Which do you think it was?’ asked Beverley when I returned to the living room. ‘An angel or an alien?’
She muted the TV and looked at me expectantly.
‘Are there angels?’ I asked.
‘I’ve never met one,’ said Beverley.
‘Before I met you, I didn’t know there were river goddesses,’ I said.
‘But you did believe in rivers,’ she said. ‘The existence of angels – the traditional messengers of God – implies a god. Which is a significant claim.’
‘What’s the digger for?’ I asked.
‘Maksim’s going to do some work on the garden,’ said Beverley. ‘But leaving aside the existence or otherwise of a monotheistic god, is it possible that our conceptions of angels are based on something else?’
‘What kind of work do you need a big diggy thing for?’
‘Focus, Peter – this is important,’ said Beverley. ‘I don’t like the idea of you having a beef with someone who might be connected.’
‘Connected to who?’
‘Or what?’ said Beverley. ‘What worries me more than who.’
‘Well, what will have trouble finding me, then,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Manchester tomorrow.’
Saturday Nice red uniforms …
8 Manoeuvre
We caught the morning train to Manchester Piccadilly. Seawoll upgraded us to first class.
‘I’m too fucking large for economy,’ he’d said, and paid for me and Danni out of his own pocket. Even with the upgrade, he barely fitted into the gap between the table and the seat, and had to raise the armrest to sit comfortably. The seat next to him had been marked reserved, but when the designated passenger arrived – a flustered-looking white man in a business suit – he took one look at Seawoll and hesitated.
‘Plenty of room,’ said Seawoll with a friendly smile, but the man said he’d see if there was a free seat further up.
Going first class meant we got free beverages and a choice of microwaved mini-meals. But, despite this bounty, Seawoll plonked an M&S bag on the table and started pulling out two weeks’ worth of snacks – some of them, like the grapes, even vaguely healthy.
As we divided up the goodies I briefed them on the Sons of Wayland.
‘They were the engineering branch of the Folly,’ I said. ‘They claimed to be part of a smithing tradition that goes all the way back to prehistory. They made all the battle staffs and other enchanted stuff.’
‘Like what?’ asked Seawoll.
‘Like the statue in the Smithfield Garden – that was one of theirs,’ I said.
And the battleship steel doors that guarded the Black Library in the Folly basement, which I didn’t mention.
‘And you think they made the rings?’ said Seawoll.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But Mr Goodfellow said that if anyone in Britain made enchanted rings, it would be them. And if they didn’t make them, then they would know who did.’
Seawoll turned to Danni.
‘That’s good policing, that is,’ he said. ‘Don’t make any assumptions, check everything. Even if it is weird bollocks.’ He waved half a large-sized sausage roll at me. ‘Especially if it’s weird bollocks.’
Danni looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged back.
‘Why doesn’t your boss know about them?’ asked Seawoll.
‘He knows about them,’ I said. ‘He even trained with them before the war.’
I saw Danni react. The fact that Nightingale was born in 1900, had fought in World War Two and then started getting younger again in the early 1970s had, strangely, been omitted from Danni’s briefing material.
‘Once your trainees are up to their neck in magic,’ Guleed had said, when I’d canvassed her for advice on writing the briefing, ‘Nightingale won’t come as such a shock – it’ll just be one more thing in the mad, mad world of magical policing.’
‘After the war—’ I said, but Danni interrupted me.
‘This is like the Second World War, right?’ she said.
‘I’ll explain later,’ I said. ‘The Folly never recovered from the losses during the war and the Sons of Wayland disbanded.’
Many of the smiths, who were also practitioners in their own right, had taken part in the abortive attack on Ettersberg, and subsequently been killed in action or grievously wounded. The Sons of Wayland’s main headquarters on the outskirts of Manchester had been destroyed by German bombing shortly before the operation took place. There had been an archive and a repository of valuable artefacts, but that, like the contents of the Tate and the British Museum, had been moved to a safe location at the start of the war.
When I asked Nightingale where it was now, he said he didn’t know.
‘I wasn’t told,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nobody who went out into the field was given that sort of information. What we didn’t know we couldn’t reveal under interrogation.’
‘And after the war?’ I asked.
‘Things were confused,’ said Nightingale. ‘I spent a great deal of time in hospital and by the time I was back on duty nobody could tell me where it had gone. The official position of the new government was that magic belonged to a bygone age, and good riddance.’
The reports from the camp at Ettersberg – what the raiders had found, what they had fought on the ground that night – had only reinforced the conviction that the world was better off without modern magic.
But Mr Goodfellow had been adamant that the smiths’ evacuated archive still existed, and that somebody had access to it.
‘I hear things from time to time,’ he’d said. ‘I have factors at the horse fairs and conclaves in Cumbria and both borderlands, and they pass on information. Rumours, mostly, of enchanted items that have nothing to do with the fae or the spirits. Things of cold iron.’
Seawoll sighed and split open a packet of corn chips.
‘To be honest,’ he said, and unscrewed a jar of salsa dip, ‘I don’t like the fact that all we have so far is that somebody did something to somebody at some time which may or may not have some fucking connection to some other people who we’re not sure still exist.’