Lies Sleeping

4 The Society of the Wise

At the end of the eighteenth century London was well into the mad, technology-driven expansion that would only stop with the establishment of the Metropolitan Green Belt in the 1940s. Since then, developers have gnashed their teeth and looked enviously back on a time when a man armed only with his own wits and a massive inherited estate could shape the very fabric of the capital. Times like when the fifth Duke of Bedford found his country house surrounded on three sides by Regency London, and decided there was nothing for it but to dig up the old back garden and rake in a ton of cash. He enlisted the legendary architect and developer James Burton, who had a thing for elegant squares, the newfangled long windows in the French style, and vestigial balconies with wrought iron decorative railings.

The only carbuncle on the road to progress was the weird group of gentlemen who’d taken to meeting in the faux medieval tower that an earlier duke caused to be built to add some drama to his garden. These gentlemen were in the nature of a secret society, although they seemed well favoured by certain members of court – particularly Queen Charlotte.

In return for being allowed to demolish the tower, James Burton agreed to incorporate a magnificent mansion into the terrace along the southern side of the square. It would be built after the style of White’s – the famous gentlemen’s club – and include a demonstration room, library, dining hall, reading room, and accommodation for visiting members. The central atrium was so impressive it’s thought to have inspired Sir Charles Barry in his design of the more famous Reform Club forty years later.

And so the Folly was born.

And all of this at below market cost.

So it’s not for nothing that Sir Victor Casterbrook, the first properly respectable president of the Society of the Wise, was sometimes known as the pigeon plucker – although probably never to his face.

It also explains why he’s the only other person with their bust on proud display in the Folly’s atrium – the other being Sir Isaac Newton.

I’ve got a room on the second floor with a nice view of the street, bookshelves and a gas fire retrofitted into the original fireplace. In the winter you can hear the wind whistling among the chimney tops and, if you leave all four burners on overnight, you can raise the ambient temperature to just above the triple point of water. When I started my apprenticeship I lived there full time, but these days Nightingale trusts me to tie my own shoelaces so I spend half my nights at Bev’s. Especially during the winter.

Bev calls the Folly my London club, using her posh voice when she does. But officially it’s leased to the Metropolitan Police and treated as a genuine nick – it’s got a call sign, Zulu Foxtrot, and everything. Unfortunately we don’t have a PACE compliant custody suite, otherwise we’d be able to bang suspects up and subject them to Molly’s cooking until they confessed or exploded – whichever came first.

Since Operation Jennifer got underway I’ve fallen into the routine of waking early and doing an hour in the Folly’s very own gym. True, it hasn’t been refurbished since the 1940s so it’s a bit short on cross-trainers, steps and the sort of hand weights that haven’t been carved out of lumps of pig iron. But it does have a punchbag which smells of canvas, leather and linseed oil, and I like to pound that for a bit and pretend I’m Captain America, or at least his smarter, younger half-brother.

Next door is the only real working shower in the whole building and if I give Molly twelve hours’ notice I can get ten minutes of hot water. I did suggest getting some serious Romanian redecoration done, but apparently we’re not supposed to mess with the plumbing.

‘Quite apart from anything else, Peter,’ Nightingale had said, ‘once you started who knows when you’d stop?’

After my shower I had to squeeze past the Portakabin taking up half the courtyard and up the wrought iron spiral stairs to the Tech Cave – where I keep all my technology and the last of the Star Beer. There I checked my Airwave charger and made sure that I had three burner phones on warm-up – we tended to run through them at a rate. I transferred the notes I’d made onto my stand-alone computer and printed a copy for physical collation. It was just coming up to quarter past seven as I squeezed back out past the Portakabin and in through the back door of the Folly.

For complicated and needlessly mystical reasons you can’t run modern telecommunication cables into the Folly proper. That’s why my Tech Cave resides on the top floor of the coach house and why, when we needed to establish a proper on-site Inside Inquiry Office, we ended up with that Portakabin in the courtyard.

I mean, we couldn’t put it downstairs in the coach house – that’s where we keep the Jag, and the Ferrari, and the most haunted car in Britain.

I found Nightingale in the central atrium, watching as the Operation Jennifer personnel filtered in through the front and headed for the dining room where Molly was serving breakfast. We hadn’t planned on feeding the multitude, but having this many people in the Folly had done something to Molly’s brain and by the third morning she’d reopened the dining room and was presiding over breakfast and lunch plus tea and cakes in the afternoon. Somewhere there was a budget spreadsheet piling up red numbers, but that wasn’t my problem – at least not yet.

‘They’re all so ridiculously young,’ said Nightingale.

‘They’ were mostly Police Staff, what we’re not supposed to call civilian workers any more – analysts and data entry specialists – who’d got the boot when the government decided that in the light of an increased security threat what London really needed was a smaller police force. Others were experienced officers seconded from Belgravia MIT and other specialist units, all out of uniform and all carefully selected by DI Stephanopoulos as reliable, competent and discreet.

And all signatories of the Official Secrets Act and security vetted twice – once by the Met and once by me.

Guleed wandered out of the dining room with a coffee cup in her hand, saw us and walked over.

‘You know, if every nick had a canteen like this,’ she said, ‘morale would be ever so much higher.’

‘Well, we could turn Molly’s kitchens into a stand-alone business unit and go for some contracts,’ I said. ‘Molly gets to cook to her heart’s content and we replenish some of our reserves.’

Nightingale nodded thoughtfully.

‘Interesting,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I was just kidding.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see.’

And headed off to the morning briefing.

Guleed flicked me on the arm.

‘You’ve really got to learn to keep your mouth shut,’ she said.

I wisely kept my counsel and went off in search of some coffee.

The visitors’ lounge was a long room built just off the Folly’s entrance lobby to provide an agreeable space for wives, daughters and other suitably genteel visitors to be entertained by members while making it quite clear that they weren’t welcome in the Folly proper. Still, it had been nicely furnished with oak panelling, portraits of Sir Isaac Newton, Queen Charlotte, the fifth Duke of Bedford, and some quite splendid second-best upholstery.

Upon setting up Operation Jennifer we’d whipped off the dust sheets, put most of the furniture in storage and installed the sort of institutional desks and workspaces that no modern copper feels he can work without. Or at the very least avoid. The line of tall sash windows would have provided plenty of natural sunlight if we hadn’t installed modern metal blinds to stop people looking in. So we fastened LED strips along the walls and plugged them into the single wall plug in the whole room. Fortunately it was a computer-free room so we didn’t risk overloading the Folly’s circuitry, although people constantly complained about having nowhere to charge their phones.

The far wall had been covered in a whiteboard which was slowly filling up with a tangle of photographs, lines, personal names, company names and question marks. DCI Seawoll was looking at it when we entered.

‘Fuck me, this is getting complicated,’ he said.

Alexander Seawoll was as modern a copper as had ever authorised a community outreach action going forward, but you would never know it from casual acquaintance. A big man who wore a camel hair coat and handmade shoes, he was, reputedly, from Glossop – a small town just outside Manchester famous for its beautiful setting, its role in the cotton industry, and being twinned with Royston Vasey.

Minus DI Stephanopoulos and DC Carey, who were both back at Belgravia Nick, Nightingale, Guleed, Seawoll and I constituted the inner decision-making core of Operation Jennifer.

‘Well, the plan was to poke people until we got a reaction,’ said Guleed. ‘I’d say that in that sense it was a success.’

Seawoll glared at me – not at Guleed, you notice, who was the apple of his professional eye – but at me.

‘Yes, it did,’ he said ‘But not what you’d call fucking quietly. But I haven’t seen a bunch of police analysts this happy since they brought back Doctor Who.’

Exposing the Pale Nanny had not only confirmed Richard Williams as an associate of Martin Chorley, but as one important enough to kill in extremis. Now the analysts could go back over their data, but give him a higher weighting. In the normally shifting world of information theory, poor Richard Williams had taken on a new solidity – which was not bad for a man who was still unconscious.

‘We can’t overlook the possibility that his wife is the connection,’ said Seawoll, and looked at Guleed. ‘Speaking of which, how did the ABE interview go?’

Guleed took out her notebook and ran through the outcome. Fiona Williams didn’t know anything about her husband’s contacts from his Oxford days apart from Gabriel Tate, who he had occasional drinks with.

‘And co-wrote the script I found,’ I said.

Guleed had already actioned an IIP report and checked our lists and found he wasn’t a suspected Little Crocodile.

‘He is now,’ said Seawoll.

Because Fiona had been in the living room with Nightingale and Carey and hadn’t witnessed the attack, we hadn’t revealed anything to her beyond the fact that it had been a serious assault.

‘She seemed suspiciously uninterested to me in how her husband was injured,’ said Guleed. ‘I mean I’d want to know – wouldn’t you?’

But Fiona Williams had accepted Guleed’s explanation with what psychologists call a ‘flat’ response.

‘She might still be in shock,’ said Seawoll. ‘We’ll give her a day or two to recover and then you can have another pop.’

Fiona Williams had hired the nanny from an agency But when Guleed had followed up they’d denied knowing anything about Alice McGovern, aka the Pale Nanny, but whether the substitution had been made with or without the collusion of Richard Williams we wouldn’t know until he woke up.

‘If he wakes up,’ I said.

‘Abdul seemed confident he would,’ said Nightingale.

So we were going to have to find a way to secure him against future attack. We’d discussed housing high-risk witnesses and/or suspects inside the Folly, but that had its own problems – running from PACE compliance to operational security. Ultimately, safety for the likes of Richard Williams and his family lay in us nailing Martin Chorley’s feet to the floor.

‘We’re stuffed until he does wake up,’ said Seawoll.

Neither Nightingale not Seawoll were looking particularly happy at the lack of results so far, but I kept my mouth shut because I’d noticed that Guleed had skipped over a couple of pages in her notebook and guessed that she’d saved the best for last. You don’t make your way up the Met’s particularly convoluted greasy pole without knowing when to use a bit of showmanship.

‘There was one more thing,’ she said and gave me the barest flicker of a wink. ‘Richard Williams had an unusual interest in bells.’ She paused for applause – not a sausage – and went on. ‘He made several trips to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.’

‘Good lord,’ said Nightingale. ‘I didn’t realise it was still open.’

‘Could it have been for his work?’ asked Seawoll.

‘We’re checking that now, but he went to some lengths to keep it secret from the missus,’ said Guleed.

The missus, perhaps because she was missus number two, had twigged that Richard was keeping secrets. And, having way less faith in his fidelity than his first wife – go figure – followed him down to Whitechapel to see what he was up to. This sort of thing is pretty common – people often draw more attention to themselves trying to hide their activities than whatever it was they were up to would. Plus sometimes the cover-up is more illegal than the thing they were covering up.

Still, if people were brighter routine police work would be much harder.

Guleed had held off contacting the bell foundry directly.

‘I didn’t want to risk tipping anyone off,’ she said, and both Nightingale and Seawoll nodded approvingly.

‘I think you two should go and have a poke around the place,’ said Seawoll. ‘While we finish up with Chiswick.’

He looked over at Nightingale, who gestured at me and Guleed.

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he said.