Lies Sleeping

33 The Sacrifice of Gaius C. Pulcinella Considered as a Deleted Scene from The Lord of the Rings

‘Useless fucks of the Ninth!’ shouted Tyburn, and the legion muttered – a rolling sound like distant thunder. ‘You failed this city once.’ Jeers, catcalls, and I didn’t need any Latin to recognise that tone. ‘But the gods have given you a second chance.’

The legion fell silent – which was scarier than when they were making a noise.

‘And this time you’re going to get the job done!’ shouted Tyburn.

There were mutters and sporadic cheers.

‘Right?’

A cheer started in the cohort directly in front of us. It was taken up by those on either side and proceeded to roll outward and then back, finally to peter out as Tyburn held up his fist.

‘Right!’

Five thousand men cheered and stamped their feet in unison; the ponies shied and pulled away. Tyburn didn’t try and stop them. I looked back at Beverley, who blew me a kiss before running out to the flank with a javelin ready in his hand.

The Romans liked to outsource their cavalry, but every legion had a small contingent of its own. Small wiry men in mail on horses the size of Shetland ponies – their saddles looked ridiculous, with absurdly high cantles and no stirrups. But the points of their spears glittered in the sunlight.

As the chariot picked up speed down the road they formed up around us as an escort.

Up ahead Chorley had limped onto the bridge across the Fleet and looked back to find us bearing down in all our righteous fury. I saw him shout something and gesture and a brace of Norsemen barred the way.

‘Take this,’ said Fleet, and handed me a spear. I handed it back.

‘I’m not using that,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got something a bit less lethal?’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.

The Norsemen formed a line and braced their shields.

‘Time to earn your triple pay, boys!’ yelled Tyburn as the chariot went down the slope towards the bridge, picking up speed as it went.

The Roman cavalry surged ahead. There was a flurry of movement and then they wheeled away to the left and right. Straight ahead men at the centre of the shield wall were staggering backwards, or sitting down coughing up blood, with spears through important parts of their anatomy.

I could hear the screaming even over the mad thundering of our horses, but the line looked unbroken and we were going to hit it any second.

‘Hold on!’ yelled Tyburn.

Whooping, he vaulted over the edge of the chariot and ran along the pole until he was standing upright on the yoke between the heads of his horses, one javelin poised to throw, another in his left hand ready to go.

With another high-pitched yell he threw both spears, one after another. Two Norsemen directly ahead fell away and the rest looked at Tyburn’s face and scattered. The shield wall broke and the chariot ploughed through.

As we did, Tyburn dropped down on the yoke and scooped something off the ground as the chariot passed over it. Then he popped back up and ran lightly along the pole to join me in the chariot. He passed me a round Norse shield.

‘That better?’ he asked.

I took the shield – it was heavier than the riot shield I’d trained with, made with wood bound with a metal rim and a centre grip within the boss. It was well balanced, nicely made, but probably not supposed to be wielded as a primary weapon.

We thundered across the bridge and the horses only slowed a little as they climbed out of the valley of the Fleet into Ludgate Hill, or at least what would be Ludgate Hill when there was a gate for it to be named after.

A shanty town with a bridge attached Tyburn had called early Londinium. But, even worse, it was spread out so thin that it was practically the countryside. Only the fort to the north had any stonework. Everything wattle and daub and thatch – half of them being the traditional British roundhouse.

The roads, though, were wide and well maintained, and fanned out from the point where the bridge met the high ground like a net cast to catch an island. And ahead on Watling Street I saw Chorley halfway to the bridge already.

‘We’ll have him in no time,’ said Tyburn, just as something huge and dog-shaped leapt out of nowhere and killed the chariot’s left-hand horse.

The chariot pitched forward like an unexpected pole-vaulter and I think Tyburn threw me clear, because I have a definite memory of tumbling along the muddy verge, stopping and looking back in time to see a wheel scything into the thatch of a nearby roundhouse. The remaining horse was screaming and Tyburn was yelling as he wrestled with the Black Dog of Newgate Prison. I grabbed my shield that was, miraculously, nearby and legged it after Chorley.

If this turns out to be cyclical, I thought, I’m going to have serious words with whoever’s in charge.

It was less than a kilometre from Ludgate Hill to the north end of London Bridge.

I was younger and fitter than Chorley, but he had a head start and the occasional friend who tried to kill me. I wasn’t sure what death in the realm of memory would entail – probably nothing permanent. It wasn’t going to be this very short gentleman with a leather jacket and a switchblade that killed me. It was going to be the sudden transfer of energy from potential into kinetic.

But I wasn’t so sure about the matter that I didn’t hit Leather Jacket very hard in the face with my shield and then stamp on his knife wrist, just to be on the safe side. Ditto for the posh guy on a horse, who obviously hadn’t done any cavalry training or he wouldn’t have pulled up beside me and tried to use a riding crop. I like to think the horse was quite relieved to be rid of him. He went into the Walbrook – the muddy creek, that is, not the conspicuously absent goddess.

I had a good view of the bridge by then. A classic bit of Roman military engineering, a wooden roadbed laid over a series of pontoons. It would rise and fall with the tides.

There was nobody on it apart from Martin Chorley.

When I saw this I stopped running and walked the rest of the way. Obviously today was my day.

Chorley glowered at me as he watched me approach.

‘Where is Punch?’ Chorley asked me when I reached him.

‘He’s behind you,’ I said, and when he turned to look I punched him in the face.

His head snapped to the side and he staggered and gave me a look of hurt outrage. A look I’ve seen so many times on the street, or in an interview room or the magistrates’ court. The one on the face of every bully that ever got what was coming to them and counted it unfair, an outrage – You can’t do this to me. I know my rights.

‘You let him go?’ he said.

I said that I had.

‘Why?’ Chorley seemed sincerely perplexed.

‘He thought I was the lesser of two evils,’ said Punch suddenly beside us.

Not the moon-faced Italian puppet but the youngest son of an Atrebates sub-chief – black haired, square faced, dressed in the blood-stained remains of his fashionable Roman tunic, ripped across the front to show the horrid gaping wound in his belly. He was a sad sight, but his eyes were full of a screaming and dangerous mirth.

‘More fool him,’ he shrieked, and seized Chorley by the throat and lifted him off his feet.

I jumped forward but Punch casually backhanded me so hard I landed on my back more than a metre away.

‘We had a deal,’ I shouted.

‘I don’t bargain,’ screamed Punch as I got to my feet.

‘Father,’ said a woman.

Still holding Chorley aloft, Punch turned to look at his daughter as she walked across the bridge towards us. She seemed taller, thinner and darker, and wore a sheath of white linen from armpit to ankle. From her shoulders trailed a shawl of implausibly gauzy material that streamed a couple of metres behind her in a non-existent wind.

Light blazed from the circlet around her head.

Isis of the Walbrook, I thought, you kept that quiet, girl, didn’t you?

Punch turned to his daughter, his face stricken, mouth drawn down in pain.

‘Never like that,’ he said. ‘You promised.’

The light faded, the gauzy shawl slipped from Walbrook’s shoulders and went fluttering over the dark gleaming river. She became shorter, stockier and lighter until she was the women I’d met in the pub a month ago, complete with orange capri pants and purple scorpion T-shirt.

‘Come on, Dad,’ she said. ‘Put the little man down.’

‘Don’t want to,’ said Punch petulantly. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because my boy there is going to deal with him,’ she said, glancing at me. ‘And I owe him. And I pays my debts.’

‘Shan’t,’ said Punch.

‘Drop him!’ said Walbrook sharply, and Punch let go and Chorley fell to the floor.

Punch dropped to his knees, grasped his daughter around her waist and pulled her tightly to him. His face was buried in her hair, tears streamed from his eyes, and he mumbled continuously something that sounded like Italian but was probably Latin.

Ack, I thought. Melodrama.

Walbrook turned to me and said, ‘You still here?’

And then I was falling through the rain again.

Then we hit. But not the flagstones.

We hit something white and cold that buckled under the impact. Softer than cement, but still hard enough to rattle my brain. And I didn’t have a chance to do anything useful before we rolled off the roof of the Transit van and fell the last metre and a half. This time we hit stone and it was even more painful than I was expecting.

The whole of my left side from shoulder to knee went numb, in that worrying numb-now pain-later way of a major injury, and the air was literally knocked out of my body. I was trying to breathe in but it felt as if my lungs were paralysed. Then I coughed. It hurt, then I breathed in – it was wonderful.

I rolled onto my back and looked up through the gently falling rain to see Lesley frowning down at me from the cornice. Then she vanished and I realised I had about twenty seconds while she ran down the steps. And she’d still have that pistol, wouldn’t she?

The flagstones were slick, so getting up was hard work. And I didn’t like the way my knee hurt. My only consolation was that Martin Chorley was moaning and wasn’t moving any faster than I was. I got to my feet while Chorley was still on his hands and knees. Grabbing him struck me as being too complicated an action and I did consider falling on him, but decided to caution him instead.

I got as far as ‘Anything you say might be’ when he flung out his hand and tried to impello me into the far wall of the cemetery. Fortunately he was in pain and I was ready with a shield – even so, I skidded back on my heels from the force of it. At which point Lesley came out of the main doors and, without hesitating, ran up to Chorley and kicked him in the stomach.

‘He’s not dead!’ she screamed. ‘You fucking fucker! You didn’t kill him!’

This time the impello hit home, but on Lesley not me, and she went sprawling onto her back. Chorley took the opportunity to climb to his feet.

‘That’s hardly my fault!’ he shouted. ‘You can blame your fucking boyfriend.’

The rain was getting heavier and was dribbling into my eyes, but Nightingale has made me train in worse weather. I wondered if Chorley had ever practised in the rain – somehow I didn’t think so.

Lesley got to her feet and that’s how we found ourselves recreating the stand-off scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, only wetter, closer together, and in central London.

I caught Lesley’s eye for a fraction of a fraction of a second and tilted my head at Chorley. He didn’t catch the gesture, but was hesitating because he didn’t know which one of us to attack first.

We jumped, as we had jumped belligerent drunks every bloody weekend for two whole years. I went high, she went low, and we had the fucking Faceless Man face down on the ground and wearing my speedcuffs before you could say ‘properly authorised restraint technique’.

Then we both hauled him to his feet and looked at each other, and sniggered.

Chorley started to react but I jerked the speedcuffs up in the approved manner and broke his chain of concentration.

‘What now?’ asked Lesley.

‘You turn supergrass, don’t you?’ I said.

‘You’re not serious?’ she said.

‘I asked the CPS to draw up the paperwork ages ago.’

Chorley moved again and this time I stuck my finger in his ear and wriggled it to disrupt any spell formation. This I knew from conducting experiments with Nicky’s enthusiastic help. The trick is to keep changing the method of disruption – it didn’t hurt that Chorley was dazed and in pain after the fall.

Still, backup couldn’t arrive fast enough – I was listening for sirens.

‘I’m not talking about me,’ she said, and pulled Chorley’s nose. ‘You can’t be serious about arresting him.’

‘That’s the job,’ I said.

‘He’ll escape,’ she said, which reminded me to tweak the cuffs again.

‘We’ve got plans,’ I said. ‘And brand new holding cells.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Lesley.

‘And thanks to you I may even have a—’

Lesley pulled out her pistol and shot Martin Chorley in the head.

I flinched as something that was not rain splashed my face and as, with no more than a rustle of his clothing, Chorley flopped bonelessly to the ground. I looked back at Lesley, who had taken a step backwards so she could point the gun at my face without it being within arm’s reach.

‘Check his pulse,’ she said.

Slowly I squatted down and fumbled in the wet collar of Martin Chorley’s coat. I felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing. Not really surprising, given there was an entry wound where his right eye should have been.

‘Is he dead?’ asked Lesley. The rain was running down her face, but her aim was steady.

I stood and the barrel of the gun followed me up.

‘What now?’ I asked. ‘Am I next?’

Lesley laughed. It surprised me – I think it surprised her too.

‘You pillock,’ she said. ‘I did this for you. If you’d helped we could have done it nice and clean and nobody would have been the wiser. Do you think anyone wanted a trial? Do you really think you could have kept him banged up in Belmarsh without him escaping?’

‘That’s not the point—’

‘That is the point,’ she said firmly, and because she still had a gun on me I didn’t push the matter. ‘And now an avalanche of shit is going to land on your head. If you’re still in the job in a year I will be totally gobsmacked.’ She paused and shrugged. ‘Although if you want I could shoot you in your leg – make your statement look a bit better.’

‘I think I’ll forgo the maiming,’ I said. ‘If it’s all the same to you.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ said Lesley. ‘Besides, Bev would be well vexed if I sent you back with a hole.’

Instead, she made me unlock the cuffs on Martin Chorley and cuff myself to him – using my right wrist. Then she took the key.

‘So what about you?’ I asked, because every minute talking to me raised the likelihood Nightingale would catch up with us.

‘Oh, I’m getting the fuck out of here,’ she said. ‘And you really don’t want to come after me.’

She made me lie down next to the corpse with my hands clasped behind my head. Because of the cuffs Martin Chorley’s cold hand kept on brushing up against my wrist.

The rain fell heavily enough on the cobbles to mask Lesley’s footsteps, but I’m pretty certain she was gone thirty seconds later.

I probably could have sprung up, snapped the speedcuffs and given chase, but I had nothing left. So I lay on the cobbles and waited for someone else to clean up the mess.