Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [34]
TW-3 called in: ‘Be advised that the suspect boat is now on fire, I can see people jumping off.’
Nightingale put his foot down, but mercifully we turned a corner and were back going the right way down the street. On the right was Richmond Bridge, but Nightingale went straight across the mini-roundabout and down the road that ran beside the Thames. We heard TW-1 calling in the London Fire Brigade fire boat – twenty minutes away at least.
Nightingale threw the Jag into a right-hand turn that I hadn’t even noticed and suddenly we were racing through pitch darkness, jolting along a track with gravel pinging off the bottom of the chassis. A sudden turn to the left and we were running right along the water’s edge, following the river as it curved north again. A line of cabin cruisers was moored close to the opposite bank, and beyond them I could see yellow flames – our burning boat. This was no modern pleasure cruiser, it looked more like a half-length narrowboat, the kind owned by homeopathic entrepreneurs that was supposed to have hand-painted gunwales and a cat asleep on the roof. If this boat had a cat, though, I hoped it could swim because it was on fire from stem to stern.
‘There,’ said Nightingale.
I looked ahead and saw figures caught on the fringes of our headlights. I called it into TW-1: ‘Confirm suspects on the south bank near … where the hell are we?’
‘Hammerton’s Ferry,’ said Nightingale and I passed it on.
Nightingale braked the Jag and we pulled up opposite the burning boat. There were torches in the glove compartment, vulcanised monstrosities with old-fashioned filament bulbs. Mine proved reassuringly heavy in the hand when Nightingale and I stepped out into the darkness.
I swept my light along the path but the suspects – assuming that’s what they were – had scarpered. Nightingale seemed more interested in the river than the path. I used my torch to check the water around the narrowboat which, I saw, was drifting slowly downstream, but there was nobody in the water.
‘Shouldn’t we check there’s no one left on board?’ I asked.
‘There had better be no one on that boat,’ said Nightingale loudly, as if speaking to the river rather than to me. ‘And I want that fire put out right now,’ he said.
I heard a giggle out in the darkness. I pointed my torch in the direction it came from but there was nothing to see except the boats moored on the far bank. I turned back to see the burning boat being sucked down into the river as if someone had grabbed hold of the bottom and yanked it under the surface. The last of the flames guttered out and then, like an escaping rubber duck, it bobbed up to the surface, the fire entirely doused.
‘What did that?’ I asked.
‘River spirits,’ said Nightingale. ‘Stay here while I check further up the bank.’
I heard another laugh from across the water. Then, very clearly and not three metres from where I was standing, someone, definitely a woman and a Londoner, said, ‘Oh, shit!’ Then came the sound of metal being torn.
I ran over. At that point the bank was a muddy slope held together with tree roots and bits of stone reinforcement. As I got close I heard a splash, and got my torch on it just in time to see a sleek curved shape vanish beneath the surface. I might have thought it was an otter, if I was stupid enough to think otters were hairless and grew as big as a man. Just below my feet was a square cage made out of chickenwire, part of an anti-erosion project I learned later, one side of which had been torn open.
Nightingale returned empty-handed and said that we might as well wait for the fire boat to come and take the remains of the narrowboat under tow. I asked him if there was such a thing as mermaids.
‘That wasn’t a mermaid,’ he said.
‘So there are such things as mermaids,’ I said.
‘Focus, Peter,’ he said. ‘One thing at a time.’
‘Was that a river spirit?’ I asked.
‘Genii locorum,’ he said. ‘The spirit of a place,