Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

Author:Ben Aaronovitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

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So Postmartin returned to Oxford to rummage through his stacks while Abigail disappeared into the Magical Library, armed only with a notebook, a second-hand laptop and a look of cheerful determination.

I went back to the Outside Inquiry Office and found my in-tray full of actions that had been piling up while I’d been mucking around with metaphysics. The most urgent regarded one Camilla Turner, an archeologist at MOLA, who had deleted her entire e-mail archive the morning of the raid. One of the analysts in the Inside Inquiry Office had spotted this and flagged it as suspicious. Since wrangling the lost emails out of the ISP would probably involve further permission from the Home Office, it was suggested that I go and restatement Ms. Turner in the hope she’d just give us permission to recover them ourselves. I wondered why I was being singled out for this job until I saw the photograph attached to her nominal file and realized that Ms. Turner was the skeleton lady I’d met in the MOLA offices.

I gave MOLA a call and found that Camilla Turner hadn’t turned up for work that morning, so I got her address off the Inside Inquiry Office and found myself heading for Dalston, where she had the top half of a terrace on Parkholme Road. She’d bought the place in the mid-eighties when it was half derelict and respectable people didn’t live in Hackney. As an early pioneer of gentrification she was sitting on a couple of million in housing equity, which she could liberate if only she was willing to move somewhere dire—like Bromley or somewhere outside the M25. Sensibly, she’d decided to stay put.

There was a silver intercom bolted onto the wall beside the front door with, as is usual, no actual names written on the tags by the buzzers. I guessed top button, waited, pressed again, waited, and repeated a couple of times before trying the bottom.

An elderly male voice with a distinctive Caribbean accent asked me what I wanted.

I told him I was the police and that I was concerned about the welfare of his neighbor and if he could just buzz me in I wouldn’t bother him any further.

The intercom cut off, then, half a minute later, I heard the front door being manually unlocked from the inside before opening about a quarter of the way to reveal an old black guy.

He was a touch shorter than me, with a cropped Afro that was mostly gray and a matching neatly trimmed beard. He was the light color some old black guys go, with freckles across his cheeks, a strong jaw and dark suspicious eyes.

He was also strangely familiar.

“What kind of concern exactly?” he asked.

“We think she might be in danger,” I said.

“From whom?”

“Some quite serious criminals.”

“Show me your identification.”

So I got out my warrant card and held it up while he peered at it.

“How come a nice boy like you join the police?”

“I didn’t join the police,” I said. “They joined me.

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