Assume for the moment that the dead sniper had something to do with laughing Sir Tyburn – thought dead by his father and brothers these last hundred and fifty years.
But we know that apparent remnants of normal human beings can be left behind, and under particular circumstances can physically interact with the mundane world.
Do gods have ghosts? I wondered.
If they did, wouldn’t they be much more powerful than those left behind by people? Or was that a typical first order assumption? Probably, I thought. And yet, if we stayed with that idea then surely the world would be full of these powerful ghosts of former gods. Now, I hadn’t come across anything like that in my literature and while my predecessors in the craft were often thicker than a bag full of custard I think even they would have noticed something like that.
Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA – hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and – hey presto – suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a metre of cold steel through the chest.
Perhaps that explained why the rivers of London had burst forth with new goddesses so quickly after Mama Thames took up her throne. Perhaps there was more than historical continuity between the dead sons of old Father Thames and the daughters that had taken their place.
And a certain river on the Welsh Borders where me and Beverley had been ‘catalysts’ in the creation of a new spirit, a new genius loci, a new god.
Shit, I thought, I’ve just invented epideism.
‘Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You still with us?’
‘Oh, god,’ I said. ‘I think I preferred being a frog,’ And then, before Stephanopoulos had a chance to clip me round the ear for being obscure, I told her I’d have to do some digging on the subject.
‘But we still need to see if they find any metal fragments in the wound track,’ I said and reminded myself to ask Dr Vaughan to do the most sensitive test she could, because if she couldn’t find any then it was possible that the sniper had been stabbed with a sword that didn’t physically exist.
What had definitely existed was the water that had erupted out of the street in front of Lady Ty’s house. A burst water main, according to Thames Water, who said they’d get back to us as to why it had chosen to burst at just the moment Mr Sniper was getting an invisible sword stuck through his chest.
Tyburn’s street had a noticeable slope north to south and you could see from the water damage where the flood had risen outside her front door and rolled down hill, across Curzon Street, down the passage under Curzonfield House before emptying out into Shepherd Market. Much to the surprise of the shop workers who’d been sitting on the benches having a quiet fag at the time.
‘It was two feet deep,’ said Stephanopoulos.
This was confirmed by some of the eyewitnesses, especially those on the dry end of the street. Statements from witnesses downstream were, as Seawoll put it, ‘less than fucking useful’.
One woman who’d been carried away and deposited outside the RBS branch on Curzon Street said that the water had been much cleaner than she expected and that she thought she smelt meadowgrass.
‘Meadow grass?’
‘Meadowgrass,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘One word – she was very insistent, and that’s not the strangest statement.’ Amina Asad, who’d been one of the shop workers having a fag, said she’d sort of ‘had a weird vision, you know like a really vivid daydream’ that she’d been stood waist-deep in a river washing clothes by hand. ‘By hand,’ she’d said again and laughed. ‘Like that’s going to fucking happen.’
Some reported seeing fish in the water, others a young fit-looking white boy in a loin cloth.
‘He was laughing,’ said David Hantsworth of Charnwood Drive, Walthamstow, who quite fancied getting the guy’s number, you know, should we ever catch up with him. ‘He had the coolest accent,’ according to Mr Hantsworth, who was convinced he’d been part of an elaborate bit of street theatre. ‘Like an actor doing Shakespeare.’
‘Did he say whether the guy was carrying a sword?’ I asked.
‘You know,’ said Stephanopoulos, ‘we never thought to ask.’
I added asking that question and following up the stranger eyewitness accounts to my personal action list.
Martin Chorley must have waited for his chance. At a guess, he’d been downstairs in the foyer of the same building. The sniper would have been instructed to take the shot as soon as he had a clear bead on Lady Ty – the sound of the shot would have served as a signal. Then Chorley steps out onto the street and starts his attack only to, probably, get washed away in the flood.
Thankfully the media were largely ignoring the flood, mainly because of the massive explosion that had blown out the first two floors of Tyburn’s house. British Gas, who are a bit sensitive on the subject, were desperate to rule out a gas explosion, but the only alternative the Fire Brigade would commit to involved Semtex and a truly ridiculous amount of fertiliser.
To my trained eye it looked like somebody had tried to unzip the front façade and spray it left and right. They were still pulling bits of brick and rusticated stucco out of basement areas of houses fifty metres to each side. I reckoned I’d actually seen something like it once, in an old barn in Essex, from the other side. It had been terrifyingly impressive sight back then, for all that it meant rescue from certain death.
Once Stephanopoulos had finished with her tour I found Nightingale giving the damage a cool appraisal. He shook his head and looked disapproving.
‘See that,’ he pointed at a section of first floor window frame hanging suspended from what looked like a curtain rail. ‘Very shoddy. I’d say our man was not himself when he cast his opening spell.’
He’d been enough of himself to rip out the base of Tyburn’s expensive period staircase, leaving the polished balusters hanging like broken teeth from the handrail. The back wall of the parlour had been smashed into the room behind – the wall mounted TV ripped neatly in half with one part embedded in the ceiling and the other lodged at head height in a kitchen cabinet.
Olivia and Phoebe had been watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on that TV when the attack started and had only avoided serious injury because they’d both happened to be lying prone on the sofa.
‘Saved by snogging,’ had been Seawoll’s verdict. ‘Let that be a lesson to you.’
Nightingale’s lesson was slightly different.
‘He just went straight in with no thought as to where his targets might be,’ he said. ‘And if you look at the line of his effort there . . .’ Nightingale swept his hand to indicate where a wide crack had shattered the delicate Regency moulding in the corner of the room, ‘you’ll see that it lacks precision. A surefire sign of . . . what, exactly, Mr Grant?’
‘One of the underlying forma was not properly developed,’ I said.
Nightingale’s lips twitched.
‘Can you tell which one?’ he asked.
I studied the crack. I had no idea what the spell would have been, but probably fourth or fifth order given it was doing quite a number of different things at the same time. Since it was shoving masonry around, the spell had to be impello-based but not even I mess impello up. So it probably had to be one of the modifiers.
‘Temperāre,’ I said – totally guessing.