BOXING DAY AND BEYOND
CHAPTER 27
Tottenham Court Road
WE WENT in mob-handed, Nightingale in front, backed by me and Lesley in our riot gear. Behind us was a stream of backup including some reliable TSG guys, Guleed, Kumar, and right at the back, Stephanopoulos—so if something went wrong we’d have someone responsible to clear up any mess. Nightingale didn’t say, but I suspected that even farther back was a nondescript Transit van filled with former members of the Parachute Regiment. I didn’t worry about them, though, because in the event that they had to be involved I was likely to be past caring.
I’d been right about the Faceless Man relocating his base under cover of the Crossrail works. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you’re buried under a ton of concrete, although I don’t recommend it as an aid to memory. Kumar and Nightingale cruelly interrupted Christmas dinner for Graham Beale and several other engineering contractors and compared their plans until they found an anomaly: an excavation at the end of Dean Street that only appeared on one set of plans.
They made that discovery at about the same time my mum squared off for the traditional Christmas row with her sister. My dad’s usually nodded off by this point, and me and all the other nieces, nephews, and cousins pile into the kitchen to eat the leftovers and pretend to do the washing up. One thing you never get with my relatives is leftover turkey, but that year there was some serious smoked ham that I had with French mustard. I was thankful they held off for twelve hours before organizing the raid, because I doubt after that much Christmas dinner I would have moved too fast.
Access was via the basement of an International Money Transfer shop on Dean Street. We didn’t wait and use a ram. Instead Nightingale employed a nifty spell that caused all the hinges and attachment points on a reinforced fire door to simultaneously pop out of the frame so that the door itself toppled slowly backward into the corridor. He signaled me to wait before darting through—there was a long moment and then he told us to move in.
It was a cylindrical shaft six meters across and twenty meters deep. The door gave in at the top, from where a modern metal staircase with sensible handrails spiraled around the circumference down to the base. It had been hiding in plain sight, marked on the construction blueprints as an emergency access shaft for the far end of the Crossrail passenger platforms. What it looked like to me was an inverted wizard’s tower, but I kept that to myself. There was an open frame lift, like the ones used on building sites, that nobody wanted to be the first to use—just in case of booby traps.
The shaft was adjacent to the smaller shaft located at the end of Dean Street that Graham Beale’s brother had been found at the bottom of.
“No floors,” said Lesley.
“They haven’t been installed yet,” I said. “You can see the points where the load bearing beams were going to slot in.”
“What’s with him?” asked Guleed.
“He once arrested an architect,” said Kumar.
At the bottom, placed in the exact center of the bare cement floor, was a double-sized inflatable mattress of the type people take camping. It had been neatly made up with blue-and-white striped sheets and pillowcases, a duvet in a matching cover, clean, crisp—meticulously turned over. Next to it was parked an empty wheelchair, and under the covers was Albert Woodville-Gentle, my personal number one suspect for the first Ethically Challenged Magician—the Faceless Man’s mentor. He was lying on his back, eyes closed, hands folded across his chest—dead for about three days, Stephanopoulos reckoned, a timeline confirmed by Dr. Walid, who rushed down from Aberdeen the next day.
“Natural causes,” he reported after the tests came in. “Exacerbated by severe hyperthaumaturgical necrosis.” Which was the next step up from hyperthaumaturgical degradation. So magic had put him in that wheelchair. He made a point of having Nightingale, Lesley, and me in the lab when he did his brain transects—presumably as an awful warning. Nightingale said that Dr. Walid always got excited when he had a new brain to play with.
But all that came days later. While we were still waiting for the forensic people, Lesley asked the question that had been bugging me. “Why no demon traps? If it had been me, I’d have left a nasty surprise in hope of taking us all out.”
Nightingale looked around. “Our ethically challenged magician is far too careful to return here,” he said. “Whatever plans he may have had regarding this place, I suspect he changed them shortly after your derring-do on the rooftop in Soho.”
“He didn’t seem that worried,” I said. Contemptuous, yes. Worried, no.
“As I said,” said Nightingale, “careful. I suspect he instructed the nurse to bring Old Albert here and then abandon him—a message to us, I suppose.”
“Do you think we can find the nurse?” I asked.
“She’s dead,” said Lesley. “Or worse. He’s not going to leave any loose ends.”
That wasn’t going to stop us from looking.