I introduced myself as Detective Constable Peter Grant – because I’m allowed to do that now.
‘Yeah, you’re the Starling, ain’t you?’ she said, and managed to work an improbable glottal stop into the word ‘starling’.
I figured, if we were going to play it that way . . .
‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘So who are you, then, when you’re at home?’
‘Where do you think you’re standing?’ she said. ‘From a topographical point of view?’
The answer was, well, in the shallow valley carved by the second most important river in London.
‘So, you’re the Walbrook?’
‘You can call me Lulu,’ she said.
‘I know your mum. And a couple of your sisters.’
A hush fell all around me and there was a sound like wind chimes – the bottles along the back of the bar tinkling into each other.
‘If you want to stay on my good side,’ said Lulu, ‘you might not want to be name-dropping in this pub – especially not those names.’
My mum maintains a couple of rotating feuds with the vast cloud of family and semi-family that now stretches across four generations and eleven time zones. I know for a fact that one Aunty Kadi hasn’t spoken to another Aunty Kadi for six years, although, just to confuse people, she gets on fine with a third Aunty Kadi. Which is why most introductions in my family start, ‘This is your Aunty Kadi who lives in Peckham and married my half-brother from Lunghi, but is not the Aunty Kadi who said that thing about me which was totally not true’. Not all my aunties are called Kadi – some of them are called Ayesha, and one of them, on my dad’s side, is called Bob. The upshot of this is I’m well skilled at keeping my head down in the face of intra-familial wrangling.
‘Fair enough,’ I said and, because I thought it might be a spectacularly bad idea to ask for a drink, I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.
Lulu gave me a crooked smile.
‘High Fae?’ she asked.
‘You know,’ I said. ‘The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.’
‘You mean them what step between worlds?’
‘Could be.’
‘Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?’
‘Them sort of people,’ I said. ‘Yeah.’
‘Not in here, squire,’ she said. ‘I run a respectable pub.’
Later that evening, when I got Beverley alone in the big bath at her house, I asked about Walbrook.
‘She doesn’t mix with us,’ she said, leaning forward while I soaped her back.
‘Why not?
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘If she doesn’t want to mix with us we can’t exactly ask her why, can we?’
‘You don’t seem very curious about what she’s like.’
‘I am curious, but . . .’ She shifted and a wave of cool water from the other end of the bath sloshed over me. ‘It’s like the back of your head. Apart from after your yearly haircut, do you ever look at the back of your head?’
‘That makes no sense at all,’ I said, and used my toes to open the hot tap.
‘I suppose not,’ said Beverley, and leant back against my chest. She had her locks all tied up on the crown of her head and they brushed my face, smelling of lemons and clean damp hair. ‘Some things we do are never going to make sense to you. They barely make sense to us half the time.’
‘What does your mum say?’
‘She says, “When you are older these things will be clearer. Now go away and stop bothering me with all these questions”.’
‘Helpful,’ I said, and managed to get the hot tap off before the bath overflowed.
There was a pause.
‘If I tell you something can you keep it a secret?’
‘Sure.’
‘Nah, nah, nah, you said that too quickly,’ she said. ‘I mean really secret. You don’t tell nobody, not your boss, not your mum, not Toby, not nobody.’
‘Yeah, OK.’
‘Swear on your mum’s life.’
‘Not my mum’s life.’
‘Yes, on your mum’s life.’
‘I swear on Mum’s life I won’t tell nobody,’ I said.
‘I don’t think Walbrook comes from my mum at all,’ said Beverley. ‘I think she’s way older than that.’
‘Older than Father Thames?’
‘Nobody’s that old.’
9
Two Plus Two
Unlike most of the Folly’s cases, Operation Jennifer was a full-on major investigation with a full-on inside inquiry room stuffed with analysts and data entry specialists and lorded over by a case manager. The case manager keeps track of what goes into HOLMES and what comes out. It is their job to keep an investigation on the rails even when the senior officers have all been sidetracked by an unfortunate fatal shooting.
Stephanopoulos used to do this job for Seawoll and our case manager, Sergeant Franklin Wainscrow, had been picked on her say-so. So it’s not surprising that when we came in on Friday morning fresh lines of inquiry were waiting on our desks in the visitors’ lounge.
David Carey had been busy at the bell foundry, and while we were failing to save Richard Williams he’d been conducting a properly thorough interview with Dr Conyard. One of the questions he’d asked was – had Richard Williams supplied any special instructions or materials for the construction of the bell? Turns out that Richard had provided several sacks of aggregate for use in making the mould. One of the analysts had spotted this, linked it to the brick thefts and pushed it back to Wainscrow, who generated an action for Carey, which he fobbed off on to me over breakfast by pretending to need my advice. The cheeky sod.
‘You’d be amazed to know what they use to make the moulds,’ said Carey. ‘Not just the clay and the loam, which I get by the way, but manure?’
‘What kind of manure?’ asked Guleed, who was having an omelette with toasted crumpets.
‘What?’
‘What kind of manure – horse, cow . . . human?’
‘I didn’t think to ask,’ said Carey. ‘I’m not sure it’s relevant to this particular line of inquiry.’ He poked at his kippers a bit and sighed. ‘Anyway – one of the analysts wanted to know whether it was possible the aggregate had come from the bricks stolen from those archaeological sites.’
I paused with a forkful of kedgeree halfway to my mouth and kicked myself for not thinking of that myself.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That would be interesting.’
‘Lucky for you,’ said Carey, ‘there was enough of the mould left to get samples.’
‘And?’
Carey frowned down at his plate, shook his head and reached for his tea.
‘We’ll know when we get the results. Two weeks to a month, depending.’
‘Depending on what?’ I asked.
‘Just depending,’ he said, and pushed his plate away.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Guleed.
Carey shook his head.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘No offence, Peter, but when this case is done I’m going back to my nice horrible murders.’ He shook his head. ‘I used to think that a six-week floater was horrible, but the shit you deal with . . . Fuck.’
Toby, who had an instinct for abandoned breakfasts, materialised beside Carey’s chair and gave him the big eye special. Carey did a quick scan to make sure Molly wasn’t watching and put his plate on the floor under the table.
‘She hates it when you put the plates on the floor,’ I said.
‘Gets them clean though, don’t it?’ said Carey, retrieving his suddenly gleaming plate. He looked at me. ‘I reckoned that since you were already in with the archaeologists you’d want to take that over that line of inquiry.’
See what I mean? The sly sod.
I had another round of IPCC interviews where I got the distinct impression that they wanted rid of this case as fast as possible. Contrary to what you might think the IPCC, being understaffed and poorly resourced, try to avoid being assigned cases. Which is probably why the Police Federation tries to dump as many on them as they can – the better to educate them about the nature of most complaints. Still, even with my Federation rep glaring at them, the interviews took up most of the day.