Apart from us, of course.
The big gates round the back on Plumber’s Row were open for a delivery, so we walked in bold as brass until someone shouted at us. We showed them our warrant cards, but they weren’t impressed – they weren’t going to talk to us until we were wearing hard hats and had signed in.
We did as we were told, both me and Guleed being big fans of health and safety, particularly when it’s our health and safety. Plus you could feel the heat of the main furnace from five metres away. Molten copper, I learnt later, for a relatively small one ton church bell. It filled the workshop with a smell like fresh blood.
London used to be full of workshops, craftsmen and manufactories. But the industrial revolution sucked all the jobs north, where the water and the coal flowed freely and a man could wear a flat cap and fancy his whippet free from fear. Much of what made Dickensian London Dickensian was driven by that shift. What people forget is that, in the short term, the Luddites were right.
Still – policing is a service industry, so no worries there.
We were introduced to a white guy in a blue boiler suit, with burn and grease marks I noticed, who was in charge that morning. His hair was a tight mop of grey curls and his face was dark and deeply lined. I thought he might be the same age as my father, but he radiated physical strength as if decades of hard work had made a furnace of him. When he shook my hand the skin was as rough as sandpaper and his grip as deliberate as a machine tool.
Another one for Dr Walid’s DNA database, I thought, if we can persuade him.
He introduced himself as Gavin Conyard.
‘But you can call me Dr Conyard,’ he said, and smiled.
I showed him a picture of Richard Williams and asked if he remembered him visiting the foundry.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Dr Conyard. ‘The drinking bell.’
It turned out that Richard Williams, under his own name, had commissioned and paid for a bell – and not a small one either.
‘Not the largest we’ve ever made,’ said Dr Conyard, ‘but pretty vast all the same.’
Also not the sort of thing our POLSA team would have overlooked back at the family home.
‘Did he pick it up himself?’ I asked. ‘Or did you deliver?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, and pointed to the other side of the foundry. ‘It’s still here.’
It was sodding enormous – as tall as me and a deep rich brass colour that seemed almost red in the light from the foundry. It was, I learnt later, your classic church bell tuned to five partials to give it that full-bodied main note.
‘Not that the buyer seemed particularly interested in the tone,’ said Dr Conyard.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Guleed.
It was very plain, with no decoration around the dome. Just the crest and name of the foundry and below that an inscription in what I recognised as Greek.
δέχεσθε κῶμον εὐίου θεοῦ
‘We had to get the lettering made specially,’ said Dr Conyard.
‘Do you know what it means?’ asked Guleed.
‘We asked that ourselves,’ said Dr Conyard. ‘It means “Prepare yourself for the roaring voice of the god of joy”.’
I asked Dr Conyard whether he’d worked on it personally, and he gave me a sly grin.
‘I thought you were one of them,’ he said and winked.
‘One of them what?’ I asked, but he shook his head.
‘Put your hand on it,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think.’
I gingerly reached out and touched the side of the bell with my fingertips.
Nothing.
I nodded at Guleed to step back – just in case – then I put my palm flat against the bell and closed my eyes.
And there it was. A cool tone like the moments that follow the ringing of a bell, like the sound a finger running around a wine glass makes – if the glass was as wide as a cannon mouth and made of brass.
It was definitely a vestigium, but faint and subtle and deep. I thought that if I could push my way through the gaps between the tones and semitones I might find another sound on the other side. If only I could listen a little harder . . .
I snatched my hand away.
Great, I thought. It’s not enough that every supernatural creature feels free to try and put the ’fluence on me, but now I’ve got to put up with inanimate objects trying it on as well?
But before I let go I got a whisper of the straight razor strop and a smell of blood that was all slaughterhouse and fear.
‘Dr Conyard,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to temporarily close this premises and evacuate all the staff.’
‘What for?’
‘I believe you may have inadvertently helped construct an explosive device.’
6
Centre Mass
Nightingale spent a long time with both palms pressed against the side of the bell. Long enough for the inside of my riot helmet to become slick with sweat and for the faceplate to start to fog up from my breath. I was in my full personal protection kit, including petrol bomb resistant overall, boots and helmet. I was also crouched behind a nice thick piece of steel reinforced with the greenest bit of wood I could find on short notice – a brand new garden table from the Argos across the road. The wood was to help protect me if the bell went bang in a magical way, and the metal in case it exploded physically.
Nightingale had made it clear that some demon traps could do both.
‘The trapped spirit ignites the metal in some way,’ he had said during an informal training session with me, Guleed and a handful of London Fire Brigade volunteers. ‘I’m not sure why.’
It had something to do with the ignition point of vaporised metal, but it could be ‘rather inconvenient’ if you were expecting the demon trap to do something else.
Ten metres behind me was Guleed, and behind her was a fire engine, with a full crew in search and rescue gear.
According to the literature, demon traps were invented by the Norwegians back around the seventh century to while away those long winter nights while you waited for the fjord to unfreeze so you could pop out and murder some monks. Creating them involved torturing a person to death over an extended period and trapping their ghost in a piece of metal. That energy stayed dormant until triggered and could be tuned to create a number of effects.
The Germans had refined the technique as a weapon during the Second World War. Nightingale swears blind that no British wizard ever stooped to such practice, and I admit I’ve never found any record to show they did. But still – you have to wonder.
Martin Chorley had either developed or discovered that you could use dogs instead of people, and that you could use demon traps like batteries to store magic. Which was a neat trick, because neither he nor any practitioner that I know actually knows what magic is. You can stick a label on it, call it potentia or mana or an interstitial boundary effect, but all that does is make you sound like you’re auditioning for Star Trek – TNG, not the movies.
I checked my watch. Nightingale had been standing in front of the bell for more than two minutes. I’d warned him that there was definitely a seducere style effect built in, but he seemed confident he could deal with it.
At three minutes I made a considered risk assessment and decided to go grab him and pull him off. But, as I came out of hiding, Nightingale took his left hand off the bell and held it up – palm towards me.
I stopped.
And considered crawling back behind cover – which would have been the sensible thing. But before I could do that Nightingale took his right hand off the bell and beckoned me over.
‘It’s not a trap,’ he said.
‘What is it, then?’