Stone and sky, p.1
Stone and Sky, page 1
This book is dedicated to Stuart MacBride and his creations DI Roberta Steel and DS Logan McRae, who nobly stand as shining exemplars to fictional detectives across the multiverse.
STONE & SKY
BEN AARONOVITCH
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1 Monster House
2 Beach Boulevard
3 The Lemon Tree
4 What Abigail Got Up To in the Woods
5 What Abigail Did About the Panther This Time
6 The Cream of the Well
7 Cheerz
8 What Abigail Did at the Horse Fair
9 Westhill
10 What Abigail and Ione Did at the Museum
11 Rubislaw Hill
12 Acronym City
13 Bayview Court
14 What Abigail Learnt About the Queen
15 How Abigail Came to Fall So Hard
16 Dyce
17 Elgar Bravo
18 What Abigail Did When She Woke Up the Next Morning
19 What Abigail Did To the School
20 The Diving Skid
21 The High Road
22 What Abigail Did At The End
Technical Notes
Acknowledgements
Credits
By Ben Aaronovitch
Copyright
Who does not dream of stone and sea
The depths below and the wild skies above?
William Pageant (1920)
1
Monster House
It all started when Dr Brian Robertson, retired GP, enthusiastic amateur ecologist and self-confessed cryptid aficionado, stumbled over a dead sheep a few kilometres west of the town of Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire. Normally, because they are famously geniuses at finding inventive ways of getting themselves killed, a dead sheep does not cause much concern beyond irritation in the farmer and speculation as to whether it can be disposed of off the books to avoid costs.
This, however, was a weird death even by sheep standards. It was difficult to tell the precise cause, what with the sheep’s organs being spread over quite a wide area, but it looked to Brian as if something had taken a bite out of its belly. Something with a mouth the size and cutting power of a bear trap. So he took a series of photographs, bagged as much of the remains as he could stand, and sent an email to an old friend of his who worked in London. When Brian had known him at Edinburgh Medical School he was plain old Ian Meikle, but then he’d got religion and a medical degree and taken to styling himself Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, FRCP, AFSW.
Dr Walid had thanked him for the pictures and said if Brian could stand to send him some samples, he’d be very grateful. Spring rolled around into summer, and while Brian had kept an eye out for any further attacks, he heard nothing more from his old friend and assumed that there had been nothing unusual about the dead sheep at all.
So he was a little surprised when, late one evening in July, he looked out of his window to find a vintage Jag, a bright orange Ford Focus ST and a heavily customised VW California camper van unsuccessfully attempting to cram into his driveway. He flung open his front door to find Abdul standing on the step. Beside him was a young coloured girl wearing a fox stole.
‘Good evening, Brian,’ said Abdul. ‘I’m sorry about dropping in so unexpectedly, but the decision to come up was made last minute.’
‘It’s lovely to see you all the same,’ said Brian, and was about to ask the girl’s name when he realised that the ‘stole’ she was wearing was in fact a live fox – and a large one at that.
‘This is Abigail,’ said Abdul.
‘Delighted to meet you, Abigail,’ said Brian. ‘Would you like some tea?’
At that, the fox lifted its head and gave Brian an enthusiastic stare.
‘Will there be cheese puffs?’ it asked.
Before we continue, I’d like to point out that a) none of this was my fault and b) ultimately the impact on overall North Sea oil production was pretty minimal. I’m a dad now, so I don’t go looking for trouble the way I used to. What had happened was that Abdul decided to spend his annual leave in Aberdeenshire to check out continuing reports of ‘big cat’ attacks on livestock. My boss, Nightingale, who said he hadn’t done any proper hunting since the 1930s, volunteered to join him, and could his youngest apprentice, Abigail, accompany them?
‘It will be useful for her to see how magic operates outside an urban environment,’ he said.
And where Abigail goes these days, a fox is not far behind.
And it might have stayed bizarre but manageable if my better half and the love of my life hadn’t decided that a Scottish holiday was just the thing for her, our twin two-year-old daughters, and me.
Which meant my mum demanded that she be included for babysitting purposes and, because my dad cannot be left unsupervised, he rode up in the back of the modified VW California, serenading the twins from custom sliding back seats with location-specific solos on his trumpet. Since he was coming up anyway, my mum figured that my dad might as well make a splash on Aberdeen’s small but perfectly formed jazz scene.
So somewhere, probably just south of Perth, was an ancient Transit van containing his band, Lord Grant’s Irregulars, and their brand-new manager Zachary Palmer, making its way inexorably towards us.
I was hoping for serious delays.
Dr Brian Robertson was a tall, gangly white man with sharp features, small blue eyes and a thatch of hair that had obviously grown bored of being grey and was busily turning white. He lived west of Mintlaw in what was less of a barn conversion than an old agricultural building that was slowly evolving into a combination retirement bungalow and ecological laboratory. I noted at least three types of building materials, including what looked like granite blocks in the walls, but the roof appeared to have been replaced with modern slate, like so many of the local bungalows I’d seen driving up.
There was a caravan site across the road, which we offered to stop at, but Brian assured us that we were welcome to make camp in his garden. This proved to be the last vestiges of the farmland attached to the barn. Immediately behind the house was a terrace and formal garden, while the rest of the area formed a meadow that ran thirty metres to the woods that bounded the property. The grass had been mowed recently and a tarpaulin-shrouded roll of hay awaited pickup by the drive.
Brian said he had a farmer friend who mowed it for him in return for the hay. He offered the spare room to Mum and Dad, but they elected to stay in the camper van.
‘It reminds me of when we were on the road,’ my mum said, and my dad had laughed.
‘Not that our van then was half as nice as this,’ said my dad. ‘And we had to share with the drummer.’
‘You papa ein me not bein’ say natin. We set we mot,’’ said my mum, which I considered to be too much information.
Me, Bev and the twins glammed it up in a huge family tent complete with inflatable poles, double air mattress, folding table and a blow-up playpen. Despite not having any pesky poles, setting up was delayed as my beloved ‘surveyed’ the back garden to locate the optimal location.
‘We don’t want to get waterlogged if it rains,’ she said.
Nightingale pitched his surprisingly modern pop-up tent between us and the house, while Abigail pitched hers at the bottom of the garden with the door facing the woods. Presumably so that Indigo the fox could sneak about to her heart’s content. Once our tent was up, the twins ran around in circles for five minutes before dropping like sacks of sugar onto the air mattress and going to sleep.
After nearly twenty hours on the road, I was ready to join them, but Brian invited us in for supper, so we left Indigo to watch over the kids, with the promise we’d return with snacks, and went inside. Two things were immediately obvious: Brian mostly lived in his kitchen, and he’d used the grace period while we were setting up the tents to hurriedly tidy the place. He’d cleared enough of his scarred oak table for us to sit around it and eat, once we’d brought in some camp chairs.
I half expected an Aga, but Brian had installed an ecologically sound modern electric cooker which was wedged into a granite work surface that morphed abruptly at one end into what looked suspiciously to me like the wooden benches you find in school chemistry labs.
‘It’s probably best if you think of that side of the kitchen as being more akin to a laboratory,’ said Brian, who was still heaving piles of books and paper off the table and onto the work surfaces at that end when we came in. My mum was eyeing the clutter with a dangerously professional eye, but Dad, who never sleeps while travelling, was getting unsteady in his chair, so she concentrated on him. I wondered how long that would last.
Supper was toasted cheese sandwiches supplemented by rice and cassava my mum had packed, and the snacks left over from the journey up. I managed to stay awake right up to the point where Brian cracked open a bottle of whisky and poured us all a dram.
‘Ah,’ said Abdul waving away the bottle, ‘the good stuff.’
I’m not a whisky expert, but it went down fiery while simultaneously cleaning out my sinuses – but in a nice way. My dad declined, so I split his glass between me and Beverley, and as a result we both fell onto the mattress beside the twins and went out like a light. Until three in the morning, when the twins woke up and had to be changed into their pyjama onesies and resettled.
Being a parent of two-year-olds means never having to set your alarm clock. Inspired by the ridiculously early sunrise you get up north, the twins woke their parents through the time-honour
Nightingale and Brian were already up.
Brian pointed out that it was going to be a glorious day and that, this being north-east Scotland where glorious days were in short supply even in summer, I should definitely take advantage and hit the beach. Sounded like good advice, so Beverley and me threw the twins and a picnic in the back of the Asbo and headed for the sea.
Beverley had picked out a beach at a place called Rattray Head, and I faithfully followed the GPS for twenty minutes before turning off into a narrow lane. Around us, the land was flat and covered in wide fields of short yellowing grass. Silage or hay, according to Bev, who said they mowed early up here on account of the short summer. We continued on under a wide blue sky, past a ruined church and isolated farmhouse, at which point my poor Asbo started bumping along an unmetalled farm track.
I mentioned to Beverley that it seemed a bit excessively unspoilt, and she snorted.
‘If we wanted crowds we could have gone to Southend,’ she said.
We topped a low rise and suddenly the horizon ahead was fringed with dark blue. Even the twins, who up until then had been engaged in competitive yodelling, shut up and made excited gurgling noises.
A couple more random bends and we arrived at a makeshift car park behind a two-storey blockhouse of a building which had once serviced the offshore lighthouse, but was now, Beverley said, an eco-hostel. Somebody had parked a motorhome in the corner – probably as a cheap alternative to the eco-friendly accommodation.
We could hear the sea, but our view was blocked by three-metre dunes sprouting tufts of the unimaginatively named European beach grass.
‘Ammophila arenaria,’ said Bev, who likes to remind me that I’m not the only one who can attach obscure Latin tags to things. Then she loaded me down with the half a ton of kit apparently required to take kids to the seaside, and we schlepped over the dunes. At least there was a cool breeze when we reached the crest and saw the sea, restless and turquoise, stretching out like the end of the world.
Beverley gave beach and sea a professional once-over.
‘Tide is coming in,’ she said, and pointed to a third of the way to the water. ‘We should be OK there.’
The Goddess of the River Thames, Beverley’s mother, claims to have forgotten her birth name. She says that she abandoned it when she gave herself to the river back in the fifties. Despite a bit of surreptitious digging on my part, we know little of her life beyond what she has told us – that she was a trainee nurse from Nigeria. But you don’t have to spend more than five minutes around her or her daughters to twig that she was raised a Yoruba.
And they have some particular conventions when it comes to twins.
The first out is always called Taiwo – the one who tasted the world first. The bold child. The second is always named Kehinde – the one who waited to see what was what. The cautious one. So it was a bit ironic that, of the pair, it was Kehinde who took one look at the sea and made a break for it. She had some legs on her, too, because she’d made it all the way to the surf before I caught her and hoisted her up, legs kicking, into my arms. I heard a rhythmic thumping behind me and disengaged my right arm so I could scoop up Taiwo, who was trying to sneak past while I was distracted. I hoisted a twin onto each hip and jiggled them to make them giggle. They were getting heavy – I wasn’t going to be able to lift both of them for much longer.
‘Bath,’ called Taiwo, arms wide, ‘bath, bath, bath, bath.’
‘Big bath,’ said Kehinde, who was the intellectual of the pair.
‘Sea,’ I said. ‘That’s the sea.’
‘Monster,’ said Taiwo, and pointed at the lighthouse that reared out of the waves.
‘Lighthouse,’ I said. It was a classic cylindrical white tower, albeit a stumpy one, mounted on a cone-shaped stone base.
‘Monster house,’ said Kehinde.
I carried them back towards their mother, both girls squirming to keep their eyes on the sea. Beverley had laid out a blanket, erected the wind and sunshades, and had the twins’ wetsuits waiting. She was already sealed into her own blue and red suit with the hood up to cover her hair.
‘You get them ready,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to check it’s safe.’
We watched as she ran into the sea, dived forward and vanished. Back home Beverley can submerge for hours, swim the length of minor rivers that you’d swear were only ten centimetres deep, and do other things that make me think she may not be entirely under the water. At least not in a mundane sense. But being a genius loci, the spirit of a locality, means her power fades the further she gets from her river’s catchment area.
‘And the sea,’ she says, ‘has a different set of rules.’
So I worry a little bit more when she swims in the sea.
‘Yeah,’ she says when I bring this up. ‘Remember that worry the next time you do something brave and noble in the line of duty.’
She surfaced halfway to the lighthouse, and turned and waved before diving under again. I didn’t see where she went after that because Kehinde made another break for the water, and I had to trap her with my leg as I finished dressing her sister. By the time I’d finished Beverley was doing her Bond girl impression, emerging from the surf with her hips swaying from side to side.
Although I noticed she was also breathing heavily. When she reached me, she slumped down on the blanket and fell on to her back, still panting.
‘That was way more tiring than I was expecting it to be,’ she said. ‘Much harder than off Southend.’ She sat up again and pulled the water flask from its shady spot behind the cooler. ‘I was actually getting worried on the home stretch.’ She gulped down water and then looked back out towards the lighthouse – eyes narrowed.
‘You should be more careful,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should.’
‘Anyone in the lighthouse?’
‘Nah, it’s automated,’ she said. Which was not really what I meant.
‘Anyone else, though?’
She shrugged.
‘If they wanted a chat, they would have made themselves known.’
Which, to me, implied that Bev had half expected someone to do just that.
Once she’d recovered we took the twins out for a swim. Or rather, I supervised while Kehinde played tag with the wavelets and Bev kept a close eye on Taiwo, who seemed determined to drown herself in the breakers. When they got bored with that, we put them on our shoulders and did water jousting. Once we reckoned they were sufficiently worn out, we trooped back up to where our stuff was spread on the beach and broke open lunch. Beverley stuck her hand in the cooler and refroze the ice water in the bottom.
‘That still works, then?’ I asked.
‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘But up here it’s harder and slower.’ Then she flicked me and the twins with freezing water, so that the girls shrieked and ran around in circles until I enticed them back to the blanket with tuna sandwiches, cut into squares, and carrot sticks. The moment the food came out the gulls arrived, and were only kept at bay by flicking carrot sticks down the beach for them to squabble over.
After lunch it warmed up enough to strip off the wetsuits and sunbathe while the twins napped in the shade of the umbrella. We were slapping on the sunscreen when a scruffy yellow Labrador bounded over the dunes to sniff at Bev’s BGF-Factor-30-covered hands before racing off down the beach. There it fell in with a pair of windsurfers – the first people we’d seen all day.
Unlike the twins, I found it difficult to settle. There was something desolate about the emptiness of the beach. The monotonous wash of the waves, unbroken by screaming kids and overheated parents, made me weirdly restless, so instead of lying down next to Bev I went for a stroll. From the top of the nearest dune I could see the car park, where the Asbo had been joined by half a dozen other vehicles. There were windsurfers out beyond the breakwaters and the rocks – red, blue and green triangles flitting across the waves. As I watched, one went arse over tit. I kept an eye on them until they righted their board and started up again. You could tell where other picnickers were by the way the gulls wheeled above them. Not counting the resting windsurfers, I spotted three couples and two families evenly spread along the beach.
