Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London) - Softcover

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Ben Aaronovitch was born in London in 1964 and had the kind of dull routine childhood that drives a man either to drink or to science fiction. He is a screenwriter, with early notable success on BBC's legendary Doctor Who, for which he wrote some episodes now widely regarded as classics, and which even he is quite fond of. After a decade of such work, he decided it was time to show the world what he could really do, and embarked on his first serious original novel. The result is Midnight Riot, the debut adventure of Peter Grant.

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1

Chiswick Poke

His name was Richard Williams and he worked in public relations. Despite living in a nice Edwardian semi in Chiswick, his family were originally from Fulwood, Sheffield and had enough readies to send him to Birkdale School as a day boy. Thus allowing him to get both an expensive education and a home cooked meal. He'd moved to London after graduating with a creditable first from Magdalen College Oxford. There he had met his first wife while working for a major advertising agency. Now with a second, younger, wife and a pair of daughters on the cusp of primary school he was, if I was any judge, getting ready to move out to the Thames Valley or even further west to ensure that they went to schools that were a little less "colorful" than the ones in Chiswick. I could guess this because I knew just about everything there was to know about Richard Williams, from his school records to the last thing he bought online with his credit card. No doubt he would be horrified to hear that he'd fallen victim to the ubiquitous surveillance state, and even more horrified to learn that two police officers, me and DS "count the stripes" Guleed, were sitting across from his house in an unmarked, but mercifully not silver, Hyundai and keeping his house under observation.

Me and Guleed were less horrified, and more bored out of our tiny little minds.

We were there because while at Oxford Richard Williams had joined a dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Nothing unusual about that; plenty of posh students and their aspirational middle-class groupies joined dining clubs, if only for the chance to get pissed and boisterous without the fear of turning up on a cheap Channel 5 documentary about the moral decline of the English working class.

Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.

What made the Little Crocodiles different was their founder Professor Geoffrey Wheatcroft, DD, DPhil, FSW, and fully qualified wizard. The FSW is the giveaway. It stands for Fellow of the Society of the Wise, otherwise known as The Folly-the official home of British wizardry since 1775. And if this is coming as a shock you might want to consider doing some background reading before you continue.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft thought it would be a laugh to teach some of the Little Crocodiles how to do magic-we don't know how many. A small percentage of them got really good at it, but we don't know how many of these there are, either.

What we do know is that at least two of them decided to use their magical skills to do some serious crimes. Including a couple that might just qualify as crimes against humanity-and I'm not joking about that.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft died before all this came to light, and so managed to avoid the consequences for his actions, although I know my governor occasionally fantasizes about digging up his corpse and setting fire to it. Also conveniently dead was Albert Woodville-Gentle, who we used to call Faceless Man number I. But, before he went, he helped train up Martin Chorley, who we called Faceless Man II. Trust me-it made sense at the time.

We know who Martin Chorley is, and we know what he's done. But we don't know where he is. Or what he's planning. And that's what's keeping us all awake at night.

The man was clever, I'll say that. He didn't count on getting busted, but he definitely had contingency plans and resources squirreled away just in case.

We really only had two viable lines of inquiry to find Martin Chorley. One was the fact that we know he recruited former Little Crocodiles to work for him, and the other was that there were more of those that we hadn't identified. So some bright spark came up with the idea of the "poke" strategy.

We got our analysts to locate likely candidates among the Little Crocodiles, then we put them under close surveillance and then we went and practiced some light intimidation-the "poke"-to spook them. That done, we sat back and waited to see if they reacted. Hopefully they might call a number or send an e-mail or a text to an unusual contact. Even more hopefully, they might run out of their house, jump in their car and lead us somewhere tasty.

That's why me and Guleed were in the Hyundai-so we could follow Williams if he ran for it.

"This is all your fault," said Guleed.

"It's bound to work sooner or later," I said.

Richard Williams was our third "poke" and the consensus was that we'd only get another two or three attempts before Martin Chorley twigged what we were doing, or someone tried to sue us for harassment.

"There they go," said Guleed.

I looked over and saw a battered green Vauxhall Corsa pull up outside the target house.

The house had probably cost a couple of million quid, with its two stories plus loft conversion, red brick, and detailing on the porch roof that hinted at Arts and Crafts without actually making it over the finishing line. It was at least mercifully free of pebble-dash and fake half-timbering. They'd retained the original sash windows but installed the venetian blinds that have replaced net curtains as the genteel response to sharing your neighborhood with other human beings. The blinds were currently open. But to avoid being bleeding obvious we were parked ten meters up the street, so the angle was too poor for us to see inside.

The burner phone I was holding pinged and a sideways smiley face appeared.

"Stand by," I said.

We were avoiding using our police issue Airwaves as much as possible, and not just because of the danger of them being wrecked if something magical happened. The smiley face had gone out to the team covering the next road over in case somebody made a break out of the back.

Nightingale and DC David Carey got out of the Corsa and started up the path to the front door.

"Here we go," said Guleed, and stifled a yawn.

We'd been swapping roles since we started the operation. Nightingale and Carey had been in the observation car for the last poke-in Chipping Norton. We were calling that one "the Aga saga" because our target hadn't shut up about his kitchen, which, as far as I could tell, had been designed by the same people who'd decorated Bag-End.

"Door's open," said Guleed, and I made a note of the time in the log.

Normally the police like to turn up nice and early, preferably around 6 a.m., because not only are people liable to be actually at home but that early in the morning they're rarely playing with a full deck. Today we were going in Sunday lunchtime because we weren't looking for shock and awe but aiming for sinister and creepy instead. Nightingale is remarkably good at that-I think it's the accent.

Richard Williams had once had a job with a company called Slick Pictures, who'd done a lot of work for a land development company that was, via a series of shell companies, wholly owned by a firm called County Gard. Which just happened to be the remote instrument by which Martin Chorley ran some of his criminal enterprises.

It was thin, but we were desperate and, at the very least, it might keep the pressure on.

Guleed fussed with her hijab, an unusually plain one for her, police issue and designed to tear away if somebody grabbed it. We were both wearing the plain clothes version of the Metvest under our jackets-just in case.

I watched a cat leap out of the next door garden and streak away down the road. Something about its frantic pace made me uneasy and I was just about to mention it to Guleed when the burner pinged again and flashed up "aa." We'd worked out a series of codes as part of our operational planning. The character was irrelevant-the code lay in the number of them you sent. Three characters meant stand by, one meant charge in screaming, and two meant we were to take up our prearranged "intervention"...