She said she’d been just about to phone.
‘I was right,’ she said. ‘There’s another bell.’
My mum’s done a lot of shit jobs – literally, in the case of that gig she had cleaning the toilets of that gym in Bloomsbury – but I’ve never seen her hesitate. During the period of my life I like to refer to as ‘that year when I fucked around doing sod all useful’ I used to supplement the dole by tagging along on cleaning gigs. She’d been taking me to work since I was seven, whenever she couldn’t get a babysitter and my dad was too stoned to be reliable. This particular time I was getting the going rate, such as it was, and I was expected to work for it.
You should have seen those men’s loos – I don’t know what they were eating but I remember walking in one time to find that some poor unfortunate had pebble-dashed the walls of a stall to thigh height. I kid you not. The gym staff had taken one look, sealed the stall off with yellow and black hazard tape and left it for the overnight cleaners. I really didn’t want to go in there.
‘Why are you wasting time?’ my mum had said. ‘You are here to do a job and it’s not going to go away on its own.’
So in I went clutching my Domestos and my spray bottle of generic own-brand surface cleaner and got on with it. Pausing a couple of times to throw up while I did.
Sometimes you’ve got to go hard to get the job done.
Although not always in the way that people are expecting.
Parking in the City of London is always a nightmare even with a warrant card, so I got Caffrey to drive me to London Bridge in his van and drop me off in the middle.
‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry. It’s just magic stuff,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a cab back.’
The sun was long gone by the time I got there and sky was overcast. Beyond Tower Bridge the sawn-off blocks of Canada Water were ochre silhouettes against a murky orange sky. The Thames was in flood and HMS Belfast rode high. I could smell salt water and petrol fumes and the onset of rain. When I put my hands on the railings I got a shock of static electricity.
And I heard a thin, high-pitched giggle.
‘You want to watch it, bruv,’ I said. ‘There’s some people who want you dead.’
The giggle grew into a howl of laughter that I was amazed they weren’t hearing as far away as Canary Wharf.
‘Or deader than you are already.’
The merriment got a bit grimmer, but no less manic then before.
‘They already had a go at your little girl,’ I said, and the laughter stopped.
So the Lord of Misrule is a hypocrite just like everyone else – quelle surprise.
Then Punch spoke, but not with the rasp I was used to. This time softly and sadly.
‘Of all the girls that are so smart,
There’s none like pretty Polly:
She is the darling of my heart,
She is so plump and jolly.’
Plump and jolly, I thought, like a child.
I hauled myself up and sat on the railing with my legs dangling over the parapet – trying to make it look as casual as possible.
‘It looks likes you and me have got a beef with the same people,’ I said.
Punch laughed – this time it sounded rueful and ironic.
‘Why don’t we see if we can sort this out?’ I said.
And that’s when we came to our agreement. Although at the time I couldn’t be sure I’d done what I thought I’d done. Practical metaphysics being a pretty uncertain process, especially when you’re dealing with a hysterical psychotic like our Mr Punch.
I was brought back to reality when my phone rang – it was Beverley.
‘What are you doing up there?’ she asked.
I looked down and saw Beverley three storeys below me, standing hip deep in the water in that impossible way she and her sisters do. She held a phone in one hand and waved with the other.
‘I’m communing with the numinous,’ I said.
‘You can do that when you get home,’ she said. ‘Which is going to be when, exactly?’
‘If I jumped, would you catch me?’
‘No. But I might fish you out afterwards. Get off the railing, babes. You’re making me nervous.’
The rain started in earnest, big summer drops coming straight down and slapping my hands where they rested on the cool metal of the railing.
I sighed and climbed down and onto the pavement.
Even from a distance I could see Beverley’s shoulders relaxing and I realised that she’d been genuinely worried I’d jump. I considered explaining what I’d been up to, but I was worried that might make me sound even crazier. Even to Bev, who once rescued me from fairyland.
‘And when you do come home, bring some of your mum’s chicken,’ said Beverley. ‘I know you’ve got some stashed in the fridge.’
‘No probs,’ I said.
She told me that she loved me and to call her when I got off duty – whenever that might be.
There’s always a bit in a TV series where the detective or whatever has a final revelation that solves the case. You get the close-up on House or Poirot as the light of comprehension dawns in their eyes – usually accompanied by a soft but insistent musical cue.
I didn’t get a musical cue or a close-up, so I didn’t know I’d just solved the case until it was much too late. I just remembered that Lesley had been shopping around the Covent Garden area, so I decided to catch a cab there and have a look round before returning to the Folly.
That’s how I found myself standing out of the rain in the fake portico on the west side of the Covent Garden Piazza, wondering if the ghosts were ever going to come back. Which was why I put my hand against one of the pillars and felt for their vestigia and got, very faintly, the ringing tone of the bell.
All right, I’ll admit – that was a musical cue.
I called Seawoll on his personal number and that’s something I’ve never done before.
He must have clocked my ID on his phone because he said ‘Oh fuck,’ without preamble and then, ‘This can’t be fucking good.’
‘It’s the bloody Actors’ Church,’ I said. ‘It’s been the Actors’ Church all along.’
All that shit about the Temple of Mithras and St Paul’s had been a distraction. I told him where I was, and what I’d learnt.
‘Nightingale is at least an hour away,’ he said. ‘And Guleed is unavailable. So what we’ll do is this: I’ll put in a perimeter, nice and quiet like, while you, very carefully, ascertain the full extent of the shit we’ve landed in.’
‘It’s a plan,’ I said.
‘It’s a bloody cock-up, is what it is,’ said Seawoll. ‘And can I make it clear that when I say very carefully I mean very fucking carefully. I’m all for courageous action, in moderation, Peter. But you have an alarming tendency towards heroics. I do not want to be getting the justified hairy eyeball from your mum at any memorial service other than my own. Is that clear?’
‘Crystal, guv,’ I said.
‘However, should you spot a window of opportunity to deploy your undoubted talents at bolloxing things up for Chorley et al, feel free to proceed. But carefully.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Off you go.’
When the fourth Earl of Bedford hired Inigo Jones to build him an Italianate piazza on land that Henry VIII had ‘appropriated’ from the local convent, for some reason the 7th Earl decreed that a church be built, on the cheap, on the west side of the square. Since the business end of an Anglican church is supposed to be at the east end of the nave, the portico that sticks out into the square is a fake, as is the door in its centre. The main entrance is at the west end, opening into the old cemetery, now a pleasant urban garden enclosed by the tall former houses that are now all shops and offices. The main entrance is on the far side of the park, on Bedford Lane. But you can climb over the spiky fence on the piazza providing you are both careful and very stupid.