Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (14 page)

‘
If e bin day play the trumpet e bin for sell more records
,’ said my mum in a wheedling tone of voice that suggested something expensive was about to happen to me.

‘How much are you looking for?’ I asked, because my mum will circle around a request like this for half an hour if you let her.

‘
I don see one dentist way go fix you papa een teeth den
,’ she said. ‘Four thousand pond.’

‘I haven’t got that,’ I said.

‘Ah
feel say you bin day save you money
,’ said Mum.

I had been but I’d blown it all on an artic full of booze to propitiate a certain Goddess of the River Thames – one who even at that moment was holding court less than ten metres from where we were standing. Mum frowned at me.

‘
Watin you spend you money par
?’ she asked.

‘You know, Mum,’ I said. ‘Wine, women and song.’

She looked like she wanted to ask me exactly which women and what songs, but while I was never going to be too big to beat, I was no longer living at home so I couldn’t be worn down.

‘Well
we go raise some of de money by selling de records but you go get for fend some of de money too
,’ she said.

I almost asked whether she’d tried Kickstarter but knowing mum she probably would have. Instead, I made the usual squirmy excuses and promises of the fully grown man faced with his mum’s uncanny ability to knock ten years off his age at will.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said and we returned to the tent to find that Lesley had indeed acquired a pint of beer, in a straight glass no less, and was cheerfully drinking it with the straw she carries for just such emergencies.

‘Where’d you get that?’ I asked.

Lesley gave me a sly look. ‘I seem to remember you lecturing me about the scientific method,’ she said. ‘And for this experiment to be valid one of us has to stay off the booze – as a control. Right?’

I nodded sagely. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We need a control.’

‘Seriously?’ she asked.

‘Otherwise, how do you know the variable you’ve changed is the one having the effect?’ I said.

Lesley retrieved another pint from the top of one of the amps behind her. ‘So you don’t get this?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘In fact you should drink both of them because we’re going to need your blood alcohol levels to be sufficiently elevated if we’re going to get a measurable result.’

Lesley stared at me. Her mask is a horrible shade of off-pink that can be barely called skin toned even by white people’s standards and it pretty much conceals Lesley’s expressions. But I’d learnt to read the shape of her eyes and the way her jaw moves under the hypoallergenic plastic. For just a moment she’d totally bought it. Then she relaxed and passed me the pint.

‘Funny,’ she said.

‘I thought so,’ I said.

‘Drink your bloody pint.’

So I did, and had a chat with my dad although this close to a gig he never takes in anything you say. But he seemed pretty pleased to see me, and asked if I was going to watch the set.

‘As much as I can,’ I said.

Beer finished, we left the tent. It was beginning to get crowded as what I took to be more tourists and curious locals wandered in. A couple of years patrolling the West End and Soho and you get used to crowds, but the mist muted the voices and made it seem unnaturally quiet. A quiet crowd is a bit of a worry to a copper, since a noisy crowd is one that’s telegraphing what it’s going to do next. A quiet crowd means that people are watching and thinking. And that’s always dangerous, on the off chance that what they’re thinking is,
I wonder what would happen if I lobbed this half brick at that particularly handsome young police officer over there.

‘We might want to break that up,’ said Lesley nodding at the police booth.

There Abigail had been cornered by a slim white guy dressed in a red hunting jacket, camouflage trousers and Dr Marten boots. He was looming over her in the classic school disco manner and while she had her arms folded and her face turned away from his, Abigail’s expression was tolerant and craftily self-contained. She saw me coming before he did, and her smile became ever so smug.

‘Oi you,’ I said. ‘Sling your hook.’

The man spun around fast enough to make me take an automatic step back and check my stance. He was small, barely ten centimetres taller than Abigail but definitely at least ten years older. His face was triangular underneath a brush of rust-coloured hair, his eyes hazel flecked with gold, and when he smiled his teeth were white and sharp.

‘Oh, you startled me, Officer,’ he said in the kind of posh voice posh people use when they’re doing an impression of someone with a posh voice. ‘Is there something wrong?’

Underneath the open jacket he was wearing a white T-shirt with what looked like a medieval woodcut of a man being torn apart by hounds. Printed above the picture, in a modern font, were the words
But they hardly suffer at all
. I seriously doubted his name was going to be something like Mr Badger.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s called the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Which in this case would mean life imprisonment for you, but only if her father didn’t catch up with you first.’

‘I assure you, Officer,’ said the man. ‘My intentions were entirely honourable.’

‘Parked around the corner I’ve got a van full of very bored officers,’ I said. ‘Who, having spent most of their career in the morally ambiguous world of modern policing, would probably just love to be introduced to something as clear cut and despicable as an old-fashioned nonce.’

‘You wound me, Officer,’ said the man, but I noticed he was unconsciously backing away from Abigail and the booth.

‘Nothing that wouldn’t see me exonerated by the Department of Professional Standards,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said the man uncertainly. ‘Nice meeting you, Abigail, Officers.’ He turned and scampered off.

‘What’s so funny?’ I asked Lesley, who was trying not to giggle.

‘Peter,’ she said. ‘When you threaten people it’s usually more effective if they don’t have to spend five minutes working out what you just said first.’

Abigail folded her arms and gave me a bad look.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I was having a conversation there.’

‘Is that what it was?’ said Lesley.

‘You can talk to that one in five years,’ I said.

‘If you still want to,’ said Lesley.

Abigail was about to answer back when a voice called Lesley’s name. She had just enough time to turn in the right direction when a young woman with a mane of dreads came barrelling out of the mist and threw her arms around Lesley. I recognised her – it was Beverley Brook.

She pushed Lesley to arm’s length and stared at her – mask and all.

‘They said you were walking about,’ she said. ‘But they didn’t say you were fit. I was worried about you, but I was stuck upriver with the shire folk and the students.’ Lesley was too stunned to speak, which was something to see.

Beverley glanced over at me. Her eyes were as black as I remembered and shaped like those of a cat. Her nose was sleek and flat, her mouth wide, her lips full and her skin, despite the winter, smooth, flawless and dark.

‘Hi, Peter,’ she said and turned back to Lesley.

Peter Grant at the South Bank
, I thought.
His eyes wide, his testicles on fire.

Beverley leaned in and, much to Lesley’s discomfort, sniffed Lesley’s neck.

‘It’s true,’ said Beverley. ‘You’ve fallen into bad ways like Mister Never Texts over there.’ She glared at me. ‘Not one in nine months, no phone calls, not even an email.’ I knew better than to make excuses. ‘There are some people living by the river who are still waiting on their insurance because of you, and I ain’t joking about that.’ She turned back to Lesley. ‘You two had better make sure you pop in and pay your respects to Mum and the Old Man before they start to think you’re taking them for granted.’

A small figure in an Imperial Yellow silk jacket bounced into our midst like a little sun grenade.

‘Bev Bev Bev,’ shouted the girl. ‘You’ve got to come with me – you promised.’

‘Wait, Nicky,’ said Beverley. ‘I’m talking here.’

Nicky shortened from Neckinger, I guessed, another lost river which ran across the top part of Southwark. The girl, temporarily thwarted, turned to me and gave me a big radiant smile.

‘Wizards.’ She pointed and laughed as if this was hilarious.

A deep voice that I recognised called Nicky’s name.

‘Uh oh,’ she said and pulled a face at me.

Oberon strode out of the mist towards us. A tall man with a square handsome face, he wore an archaic military coat that had once been dyed red but had now faded to a muddy brown, black combat trousers and boots. At his waist he wore what looked to me like a genuine antique British Army sword, and not the ceremonial type either, one hand resting easily on the pommel to keep it from tangling with his coat. He nodded politely to me and Lesley.

‘Constables,’ he said. ‘I trust all is as it should be.’

‘Insofar as it can be,’ I said, but despite the temptation I didn’t add forsooth.

He held out his hand to Nicky, who sighed theatrically before skipping over to seize it.

‘You’re going to come see me,’ she said to me, even as Oberon towed her away. ‘Make sure you bring presents.’

‘Is that her dad?’ asked Lesley.

Beverley shook her head. ‘Oberon is Effra’s man, but they’ve both been roped into babysitting Nicky. Speaking of which, I have to go. But we need a girls’ night out. So text me, right?’

I coughed and asked Beverley if I could have a word later.

She gave me a sly smile. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Later.’

Lesley punched me in the upper arm.

‘Let’s go see her mum,’ she said. ‘While your brain is still engaged.’

It comes as a surprise to many that the rivers of London have their goddesses. Even people who have been officially raised to believe in such things as river spirits, and that’s about a third of the world’s population by the way, have trouble with the idea that the Thames might have a deity. The Niger, definitely. The Amazon, of course. The Mississippi, certainly. But the Thames?

Actually there are two of them. The Old Man of the River is the eldest by a couple of millennia, possibly a Romano-Brit called Tiberius Claudius Verica who ruled the Thames from source to estuary until 1858, when the mere fact that the city had reduced the river to an open sewer caused him to move upstream in a huff. So London did without his help until the late fifties when a heartbroken trainee nurse from Nigeria threw herself off London Bridge and found the position of goddess open. Well, that’s the way she tells it anyway.

The Old Man feels that as the original his dominion, however titular, should be recognised. And she in turn says that since he couldn’t be bothered to step up for the Festival of Britain, let alone the Blitz, he can’t just arrive and demand to sit at the head of the table. It’s the sort of exciting intergenerational and ethnic conflict that makes life in the big city worth living. The fact that we’re the police and it’s our job to interpose our precious bodily selves between such potential conflicts explains why me and Lesley made a point of being polite and respectful when dealing with them.

So we marched up to where they sat, resplendent in their Sunday best. Father Thames in a black pinstripe double-breasted suit, a paisley waistcoat and a matching porkpie hat that did its best to keep his tangle of white hair under control. In honour of the occasion he was clean shaven, which served to emphasise his thin lips, beaky nose and bleak grey eyes.

Next to his dull self, Mama Thames blazed in a blouse and lapa of gold, silver and black. Her face was as smooth and dark as her daughter Beverley’s but rounder, although the eyes had the same upward tilt. Her hair had been braided into an elaborate birdcage shot through with gold thread in a style that must have kept her cronies busy for hours, if not days.

Following Nightingale’s instructions we made sure that we slipped in and out as unobtrusively as possible, receiving the equivalent of,
And how long have you been a police officer? Jolly good
. Lady Ty standing at her mother’s right shoulder gave me a dangerously cheerful little smile which left the spot between my shoulder blades itching as I walked away.

Then it was back to the jazz tent for Dad’s set where we found Nightingale discussing the evolution of Ted Heath’s big band from the Geraldo orchestra with a guy who said he’d driven down from Nottingham especially for the gig. I stayed long enough to make sure my dad registered my presence and then headed back out. After all, we couldn’t have the entire forces of law and order stuck in one place – who knew what someone might get up to while we were all grooving on a spring evening? As I reached Abigail standing disconsolately beneath the
Working Together for a Safer London
banner, I heard Lord Grant’s Irregulars start into my dad’s eccentric arrangement of ‘Misty’. I said she could have a look around the fair as long as she didn’t talk to any strange people.

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘Or strange things,’ I said.

‘Whatever,’ she said and skipped off.

‘Or strange things that are also people,’ I called after her.

Neither category seemed interested in stopping at the police stall for a chat, although a couple of Brazilian students wanted to know what the fair was in aid of.

‘It’s a celebration of the spring equinox,’ I said.

They looked around at the bare mist-shrouded trees and shuddered before they were sucked towards the jazz tent by the music. They passed Lesley coming the other way and stared curiously at her mask, only realising what they were doing when Lesley stopped and asked them if they needed something. They shook their heads and scuttled off.

Lesley was carrying another pint of beer which she presented to me when she reached the stall.

‘Compliments of Oberon,’ she said. ‘He says you’re going to need it before the day is done.’

‘Did he say why?’ I asked.

Lesley said no, but I drank the beer anyway. It was proper beer, I noticed, not your fizzy lager from a cask – probably off one of the stalls I thought.