Lies Sleeping: The Seventh Rivers of London novel (A Rivers of London novel Book 7) by Ben Aaronovitch

Author:Ben Aaronovitch
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2018-11-14T18:30:00+00:00

19

Taming the Wild Frontier

It was while I was helping Camilla into the local IRV for transport back to Belgravia that I realised who her neighbour was. Harry Acworth – who’d played bass guitar with the Clarke-Boland Big Band and had briefly formed a trio with my dad in the late nineties. I’d have to tell my dad when I got a moment, because I was pretty sure he thought Harry was dead.

I told Camilla Turner that everything was going to be fine as long as she co-operated, and sent her off to have Stephanopoulos turn her life inside out. My main worry was that Martin Chorley might take his usual ‘direct’ approach to operational security, but I had some hope that he might regard Camilla as too unimportant to take the risk. Especially if we kept her stashed at Belgravia.

I got back to the Folly that evening to find that Abigail had gone to sleep on the couch in the reading room – it wasn’t the first time.

She’d left her laptop open and around it a sprawl of papers. And, because I’m a nosy bastard, I sat down and had a good shufti. Judging from its position, the last thing she’d been working on was her notebook – open at a page with clusters of words written in Cyrillic.

Varvara and Nightingale had agreed, when teaching Abigail, to stick to classical Newtonian spell notation, in Latin. But this looked suspiciously like a spell notation to me – the giveaway being фоз in Cyrillic, which I recognised as φῶς or phos in Greek. I thought I recognised ἐλαύνω followed by the abbreviation ел in Cyrillic – the notation for Impello. This was the notation that Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina had been taught during the Second World War, but following it was another notation which I didn’t recognise. It looked like a doodle of ф linked by an upward curving line ел – the line representing the upwards spin you put on lux when combining it with impello to make a fireball.

Nightingale had been taught to write out in spells in full, using parentheses to indicate which formae were affected by which subordinate modifiers. He’d passed that system on to me.

‘This way encourages clarity and precision,’ he’d said, when I asked if there was a shorthand notation. ‘Aim for perfection of form – speed comes later.’

He wasn’t going to like this at all.

‘My principal concern,’ Nightingale had told me, ‘is that she will run ahead of herself and put herself in danger.’

We were going to have to have the safety talk again.

I looked up to find Molly staring at me from the other side of the table. I glanced over at Abigail and saw that somebody had covered her with a red and green tartan blanket without me noticing. I looked back at Molly, who tilted her head to the left.

‘Her dad’s doing nights and her mum is at the hospital with her brother,’ I said. ‘She’s going to text me when they’re finished and I’ll take her home.

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