Great, I thought, now can we do something about the construction itself?
It was obviously my month for wearing hard hats because the site safety officer insisted I put one on before pointing me at the temporary staircase that was bolted onto the front of the building. I nodded at the City of London PC on guard at the bottom and made my way up.
Waiting for us at the top was a small Vietnamese woman in a City of London Police uniform with SC tags denoting that she was a special constable. This was Geneviève Nguyễn who had attended the Sorbonne and worked in Paris before being headhunted by Citigroup and moving to London. There she had discovered that any citizen of the European Economic Area could swear an oath, don a uniform and enforce the law with the same authority as their full-time colleagues.
Most of the time she stays in her expensively tailored suit and helps with fiendishly complicated fraud cases, but the City Police allow her out on the streets once in a while. She also triples up as their liaison with the Folly, and was one of the first officers to do my patented vestigia awareness training seminar. She didn’t seem at all fazed by my wild talk of ghosts and magic – which made me really suspicious. But all she would admit to was having heard a lot of stories from her grandmother.
‘Definitely a spy,’ said Carey, who never knowingly left a stereotype unturned.
‘What gives her away?’ asked Guleed.
‘It’s the accent,’ said Carey.
Police tape marked out the entry point for the single designated approach to the crime scene, although fortunately it was booties and gloves only – not the full noddy suit.
‘What’s your opinion of animal sacrifice?’ asked Nguyễn as she led me further into the building.
‘Well, I’ve got this annoying dog,’ I said.
‘I meant from a Falcon point of view,’ said Nguyễn, who had once patiently explained to me that while she understood that the British liked a laugh, she didn’t understand why we felt it necessary to inject it into every single aspect of life, no matter how inappropriate.
‘Ritual sacrifices can have power,’ I said. ‘But usually it’s something for the RSPCA.’
We went down an unfinished corridor smelling of cement dust and cut plasterboard and out into a large internal room whose newly fitted walls were a pristine white. Except for the blood spatter on every vertical surface. With some on the ceiling as well. It was definitely blood – the reek gave it away – and some of it had been sprayed with force.
It was hard to sense anything over the smell, but I got flickers of shouting and feet stamping and a rhythmic pulse like a mad rave heard from far away.
‘Tell me this is animal blood,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Nguyễn. ‘We confirmed that this morning. That is why you’re talking to me and not Major Crime.’
‘We’re not that far from Smithfield,’ I said – the market being a good source of offal, blood, and the sort of high-spirited young people who might think flinging it about was a bit of a laugh.
I noticed that the floor was devoid of any spatter, and Nguyễn noticed me noticing.
‘They put down plastic sheeting,’ she said.
But hadn’t covered the walls – had things got out of hand? I took a longer look at the spatter on the walls. I’m not an expert, but some of it looked like arterial spray – and there were voids. Or rather there were what looked like spaces outlined by an initial spray – that of blood projected out by a beating heart – which had then been partially filled in by blood spattered later. If you squinted you could see that the voids formed the outlines of people standing against the walls when they were hit by the spray.
‘Did you find anything else?’ I asked.
‘Not much.’
Nguyễn took me over to where the portable finds were spread out in separate bags on a sheet of white paper.
‘Not much’ summed it up. A couple of condom packets, a pill that had lodged in a crack at floor level and looked suspiciously like MDMA, and samples from some non-blood stains on the walls – mainly alcohol.
‘Red wine,’ said Nguyễn.
‘Do we know what kind of animal?’
‘Tentatively goat,’ said Nguyễn. ‘The lab will confirm it in a couple of days.’
The ravers had turned up for a party and had taken forensic countermeasures in the form of plastic sheeting on the floor and policing up condoms, bottles, cups and anything else that might contain useful DNA. Even vomit, pointed out Nguyễn, although uniforms were out searching the surrounding streets in case someone had thrown up on their way out or was careless enough to dump their rubbish nearby.
So they’d . . . What? Gathered together with booze and condoms and slaughtered a goat. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like they’d sprayed the poor thing’s blood around like champagne from a winner’s podium.
And then, covered with blood, they’d danced and shagged the merry night away.
Actually, it might have just been shagging since nobody had reported any loud music.
But you get vestigia at the site of any major live music festival, and even a little bit at your average gig. The Notting Hill Carnival generates enough potential magic that I know of at least one Russian witch who takes part in the parade just to bask in it. Football matches, Christmas shelters, village fêtes and light engineering works all generate magic – or at least enough to make Toby bark. Which is my current benchmark.
It was the forward planning and the forensic countermeasures that were dragging at my attention.
That and the goat.
‘This was definitely a ritual,’ I said. ‘Why here?’
‘It’s probably the temple,’ said Nguyễn. And then, off my blank look, ‘The Temple of Mithras.’
‘I thought it was over on Victoria Street?’
Contrary to what people think, I haven’t actually memorised the location of every historically significant building in London. I did know that the temple had been discovered nearby during construction work in the mid-1950s and moved to another location for preservation. There’d been talk of moving it back, but I thought that had been kiboshed by the great financial collapse five years back.
‘Bloomberg took over the project,’ said Nguyễn. ‘Reinstated the complete return.’
Back to its original location on the banks of the Walbrook.
‘I wonder if they’ll put in a labyrinth,’ I said out loud, by accident.
Ritually sacrificed goats, Roman temples, bells infused with the power of ancient stones, and dead wannabe scriptwriters.
‘Do you think this is one of yours?’ asked Nguyễn.
‘I don’t know yet. Are you going to pursue the vandalism side?’
‘I’m just a special. But the head of Bloomberg’s London office is finishing his vacation in the Seychelles early and flying back this afternoon. So I believe some investigation is likely.’
‘In that case I’ll email you some names to look out for,’ I said.
Back in the ‘good old days’ when a quarter of the map was pink and the Folly was at its height you couldn’t practise magic in the UK without their permission. Sometimes the permission was implicit – if you weren’t scaring the horses or curdling the milk they ignored or patronised you, especially if you were female.
But if you were a full-on Newtonian practitioner, a master of the forms and wisdoms, you had better be recognising the authority of the Society of the Wise or there were going to be consequences.
All that ended with the decimation of British and European wizardry during the Second World War, although personally I think their control might already have been slipping in the 1920s and ’30s. After the war all you had to do to practise magic with impunity was not come to the attention of Britain’s last official wizard.