Two big smelly metal boxes had left the factory the previous mouse-time, which Abigail translated as early evening. Two vans which had not registered on the CCTV camera that covered the entrance from Coldharbour Lane.
I backtracked a bit and asked questions in various different ways, but the vixen was better than most people, better than most trained professionals in fact. I let them have the rest of the cheese puffs. Abigail disapproved.
‘You shouldn’t spoil them,’ she said after we’d watched them disappear into the undergrowth.
‘Watchers?’ I asked as we walked back to the factory. ‘Assets, reports, covert? Is there something you want to tell me?’
‘It’s not me,’ said Abigail. ‘They think they’re spies.’
‘Working for who?’
‘They won’t say. I’m not sure there is anyone. I think it’s part of the process that made them big and smart.’
We didn’t see Molly for two whole days and everybody had to make do with takeaway until she resurfaced. Well, except for the second day when I cooked jollof rice, groundnut chicken, stock fish, palava sauce – with way too much palm oil – and fried plantain. Admittedly, I did have my mum to help. And I did have to physically restrain her from putting a year’s supply of pepper in the soup. We compromised and had a pot of what she called properly seasoned Tola sauce, which proved surprisingly popular with some of the analysts. One white guy kept coming back despite the fact that he’d turned bright pink and was damp with sweat.
‘I know it’s killing me,’ he said. ‘But it just tastes that good.’
Stephanopoulos filled her plate with a blithe disregard for thermodynamics and later asked my mum for the recipe for groundnut chicken.
Even while turning pink, the CCTV teams managed to establish that the footage from the entrance camera had been doctored – presumably to hide the departure of the two vans the vixen had seen. One of them, probably, carrying the new bell.
But even Chorley couldn’t get to every camera on Coldharbour Lane. And by suppertime the day after we’d fed the foxes, we had the colour, make and index of both vans. Not that we expected the indexes to remain the same – in fact we were working on the assumption they’d be changed. The City of London Police and CTC had spent a great deal of the last thirty years waiting for the next big truck bomb – be it IRA, IRA classic, various varieties of cryptofascists or jihadists – and they had systems for finding vans with dodgy numbers.
Nightingale insisted that me and Guleed got as much rest as we could.
‘Whatever happens next,’ he said, ‘is likely to be the final operation of the campaign. I need you two to be fully combat-fit, as it were.’
I always worry when Nightingale goes all Band of Brothers on us, which is one of the reasons I took up feeding the multitudes as a distraction. Still, at least after a worrying silence from Molly we got reassurance that Foxglove was settling in.
On some nights the full moon rises above the skylight and floods the atrium with cold light. On those nights Molly turns all the electric lights off, including the Emergency Exit signs, even though I’ve told her she’s not supposed to, and glides around the atrium and the balconies in weird random patterns. I’d got so used to it that I could walk down from my room to the kitchen, looking for a snack, without paying any attention to the silent shadow that darts here and there – always in the periphery of my sight.
The first such moonlit night after Foxglove joined us I was out in search of a nightcap when I realised that Nightingale was standing on the upper balcony. Silently he beckoned me over and pointed down to the atrium floor.
Below I saw Molly flit across the tiles, her hair streaming out behind her like a shadow. Behind her came a second figure, Foxglove, dressed in a loose silk shift that looked blood red in the moonlight. In her right hand she trailed a long ribbon of white fabric. Then Molly turned, grabbed Foxglove around the waist, and swept her around in a circle – the white fabric looping around them as they spun in place. I don’t how long we watched them dance, silent but for the swoosh of their clothes and Foxglove’s streamer, but when they finally vanished into shadows I heard Nightingale sigh.
‘Here’s a comforting thought for you, Peter,’ he said. ‘However long you may live, the world will never lose its ability to surprise you with its beauty.’
And the next morning there was kippers and jam and coffee and toast and everything was all right in the world.
For about six hours at least.
31
The Winkle Garden
There once were railway sidings that ran right under Smithfield Market, allowing tons of animal carcasses to be shipped into the cold stores prior to dismemberment, distribution and, ultimately, dinner. In the 1960s they were closed by the same people who gave us streets in the sky, the urban motorway and myriad buildings that architects have spent the last forty years trying to blame on somebody else.
The sidings became an underground car park, but in an ironic twist their entrance is an elegant spiral ramp that winds its way around a small circular park. The park itself was built by the Victorians on a site made famous as an execution ground for such celebrities as William Wallace, Wat Tyler and a couple of hundred Protestants who got on the wrong side of Queen Mary. According to the Folly’s records, the area had been pacificatus as part of the process of building the original railway, the ramp and the park. The dispersal of all that negative energy was capped off with a bronze statue of ‘Peace’ by John Birnie Philip, which the Sons of Weyland had, apparently, had a hand in.
‘Does it say in what way?’ I asked.
‘Nope,’ said Abigail, who was back in the library at the Folly digging up references in real time.
I was sitting on a bench in the courtyard in the Church of St Bartholomew-the-Less, peering through the railings out at West Smithfield in the hope of catching sight of Martin Chorley and/or associates. I was there because parked halfway down the spiral ramp was one of the vans last seen leaving Martin Chorley’s factory. Spotted by one of the car park attendants, who called it in because the number plate ‘looked iffy’, which set off a flag at CCC, which filtered quickly over to Operation Jennifer, which didn’t so much spring into action as lurch sideways like a startled crab.
This is totally normal police behaviour, by the way, and nothing to be alarmed about.
Ranks and chain of command are all very well for administration, but when the wheels come off and the world is going fruit-metaphor-of-your choice, then the plod on the spot needs to know who’s in charge of what. That’s why we have the Gold, Silver and Bronze Incident Management Procedure (page 560, Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook, Second Edition). Seawoll was Gold, which meant he was stuck in the Portakabin back at the Folly. Because this was a Falcon incident Nightingale was Silver and, theoretically, should have also been in a control room somewhere – like that was going to happen – while Stephanopoulos was Bronze (public safety) and I was Bronze (Falcon containment).
‘The Victorians did a lot of this pacificatus stuff,’ said Abigail. ‘And not just in London either.’
And was it just the unquiet dead? I wondered, thinking of the god of the Yellowstone River. Or had the wizards of the Folly gone forth like the loyal sons of the British Empire they were and done a bit of pacificatus in the dominions?
I thought you gentlemen should know how things go in the former colonies, the letter from America had said.