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For a fraction of a moment he looked so genuinely embarrassed that I was afraid he might say Peter, I can explain. Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened; in an instance he was his Nightingale self again, his face a carefully schooled mask.
“What is it, Peter?” he asked in a calm voice.
Molly, however, had no use for hiding her feelings, and from her expression I could judge that she was royally pissed off - which was, of course, to be expected. In fact, her reaction struck me as the only gleam of sanity in what was otherwise a pretty crazy situation.
“Well,” I said, intelligently. “Um.”
I may expect to see many a wondrous thing when entering Nightingale’s study, but there are limits even to my imagination. And I had never thought that one day I’d bump into Nightingale holding a drawing tablet and sporting a neat pair of horrendous-looking green headphones.
I mean, it was adorable, in a way. As was the fact that it was Molly who was carefully putting the headphones on his head when I’d come across them. But I doubted that either of them would appreciate it if I went aww.
“I was just looking for my Wheelock, sir,” I said. “I thought I might’ve forgotten it here.”
“Well, you have not,” snapped he. “Especially since you customarily leave it in the library, which is where it is most likely to be. Now do kindly leave.”
And leave I did, no questions asked. Do not misunderstand me; of course I was dying of curiosity, because it is not every day that you see things like this - not even in the Folly. Deadly magical weapons and ancient non-human creatures, possibly. Molly watching Thomas Nightingale do digital painting, no.
But I’m not one of those PCs who actually think that their DI belongs to another species. Nightingale may be a powerful magician aging backwards, but it hardly means that his leisure time must be spent brewing mysterious potions Brothers Grimm-style. We all have our silly hobbies to distract us from the drawbacks of the Job; if Nightingale’s is drawing, so be it, I thought.
I just wasn't sure I… needed the mental image, is all.
Sure enough, the textbook lay on the big oaken table in the library, the sunrays from the tall windows falling on the reproachful faces of the bunch of Roman guys on the front cover.
“I know, I know,” I told them. “But I can’t unsee it now. Too late.”
One of the more tantalizing questions was what Molly was doing there. Was that what the Molly-Nightingale bonding time was like? Nightingale drawing stuff and Molly… what? Watching him with a loving look on her face?
As it was, a possible answer to this question formed in my mind at approximately the same time an evidently irritated Nightingale turned up on the doorstep of the coach house, where I’d retreated upon finding the Wheelock.
There’s no way Nightingale would willingly do digital stuff, I was thinking, stumbling over empty beer cans on my way to the door. Traditional art, maybe, although it’s not a thing easy to imagine. On the other hand, he would do just about anything for a case, up to and including table dancing to Hava Nagila.
And Molly was tech-savvy to some degree - at least enough to operate a PC. Why not enough to do digital painting? It sounded insane, but who said that Molly couldn’t draw? I did very much doubt that that painting of her with a bowl of cherries had been done by Nightingale. What a nightmarish thought. No, definitely not.
I opened the door. He was looking straight at me, his eyes narrowed in a kind of subtle displeasure.
“I thought I may as well bring you into the investigation,” he huffed. “You don’t seem otherwise preoccupied.”
I mentally high-fived myself and gave him one of my more ironically polite smiles.
“Of course, sir,” I said. “I am at your service, sir.”
Maybe I’m mean, but I love it when people obviously want to tell you to stop but can’t, simply because they cannot quite put their finger on what it is that they want you to stop doing. Especially since Nightingale knew perfectly well that I was by no means idling around - I had planned to dedicate this day to some promising experiments involving lux, a bunch of apples in a shoebox, and a mercury thermometer (courteously lent to me by Dr Walid). My recent discovery that the use of magic always led to a minuscule decrease in the temperature of the surroundings had given me hope that the two major areas Sir Isaac Newton had specialized in weren't as unrelated as it seemed, and I was eager to test the hypothesis.
On the other hand, I also had to admit that investigating a case that had already managed to make Thomas Nightingale try to learn digital painting wasn't a half bad prospect. So maybe I wasn't all that pissed off at him for distracting me from my science-y stuff.
“Last night a Dartford patrol pulled a man out of Thames,” he explained, as we crossed the yard. “They were convinced it was a suicide attempt, especially since a witness reported seeing someone walk into the water about a mile upstream. But I chanced to be there, and it struck me as suspicious that he smacked of vestigia.”
I briefly wondered how on earth he had “chanced to be” in Dartford the previous night, but asking this question was hardly a good idea.
“All right,” I said. “But how is it all related to…?”
“Drawing?” finished Nightingale, with noticeable dryness. “He was easy enough to identify - we found his driver’s license in the breast pocket of his jacket. And of course the first thing I did was search his house. It seemed fairly obvious to me that he was a failed practitioner - amateur use of magic gone wrong, nothing unusual.
“But this was not what I found when I went through his belongings.”
We walked through the Folly’s vestibule and up the staircase. Nightingale pushed the door to his study, and, to my astonishment, I saw that Molly was still there, sitting motionlessly in Nightingale’s armchair. The drawing tablet and the headphones were nowhere to be seen, but on the desk in front of her there sat what looked like a fairly modern laptop.
I hadn't had much time to process what I saw when I had first entered the room. But now I realized that there was something unusual about the way both Molly and Nightingale looked. Molly, funnily enough, boasted a black velvet choker and a white hair bow. Nightingale’s outfit, on the other hand, was - by his standards, at any rate - outrageously casual. His shirt actually had a henna-coloured pattern on it, and I saw with some dismay a hint of flowers here and there.
There was logic in it, of course, if there was any undercover policing to be involved. Nightingale had the unfortunate knack for attracting people's attention, and going for a more casual and humane image seemed the obvious option if he wanted to blend in. Mind you, it didn’t explain Molly - she would've hardly agreed to leave the place other than in the case of a nuclear apocalypse - but does anything really explain Molly? Yeah, I don’t think so, either.
Outside it was a lovely summer evening. I eyed the window with a certain regret - that weather screamed leisure and fun with amateur physics experiments - but mentally I was already in my “work” mode.
“Well, sir,” I sighed, turning to Nightingale, “what was it that you've found?”
He silently handed me something huge and flat wrapped in brown paper. I tore the wrapping to reveal what I, with no great surprise, realized was painted canvas. The painting was about a foot wide and six inches tall; and it did very much strike me as something someone could draw if they were trying to copy Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” while being high on acid.
It wasn't bad, really - not to my amateur tastes. I would even say it was aesthetically pleasing. But it did have all sorts of wildly bright colours from the opposite ends of the colour spectrum mixed together in bizarre swirls of paint. And in general there was something… distinctly unnatural about the thing, something that made me want to cover it again and put it away.
Instead I put my face inches away from the canvas, so close that I could feel the characteristic smell. And sure enough, there it was - weak like a whisper (hardly more than 250 milliyaps), but obviously above the normal level. It felt like dipping my nose into cold water. And the coldest of all was the signature - a tiny crooked tangle of black. Despite the fact that the artist seemed to have chosen a thinner brush specifically to sign the painting, the handwriting was so bad that I could swear their name was “Oscfgb Heirtyiop”.
“It was the only magical thing in the entire flat,” said Nightingale, who’d been watching me all along. “Not a whiff of vestigia otherwise, not a hint that anyone had practiced any formae within the last decade. No subject specific books, either.”
“So you've traced the author of the painting and they turned out to be - who? An art student? And you’re going undercover in an art school?”
“I am,” said Nightingale, “but she isn't a student - she’s a teacher. Jessica Roberts is the name. It seems that some dozen students recently completed an art course under her supervision and she gave them her paintings as farewell gifts.”
“What about others, then?” I asked, mildly alarmed.
“None of them fared quite as badly as poor Jeremy Gautney, the one who was pulled out of Thames,” shrugged he. “But one Linda Rooks was arrested for running around naked, and everyone else reported seeing horrible nightmares that same night.”
Well, as murder attempts went, this one looked pretty feeble, and I remarked as much to Nightingale.
“I see no reason why she should want to put so much effort into something with so little payback, sir,” I said. “And how could she possibly hold a grudge against all her former students?”
“That’s what I've been asking myself,” agreed Nightingale. “But maybe she wanted to make it more efficient and failed. And, after all, I won’t know until I can see her studio and possibly watch her work."
Molly was still sitting some two feet away from us, quite immobile, her big cold eyes fixed on me. It was unnerving, especially when Nightingale informed us that he’d go get some coffee and left.
“I’m not laughing at him,” I attempted to explain. “We all have to do ridiculous things when going undercover. Do you know about that one time I had to pretend to be a supporter of the Westboro Baptist Church?”
I don’t think she did; she looked very unimpressed.
“Listen,” I said, “do you seriously think I'd laugh at him even if he were simply doing it for fun? Well, maybe I would, a little, but just because it's so adorable.”
I think her eyes turned to stone a little when I said “adorable”. So I pretty much gave up after that, and resorted to waiting for Nightingale to return.
It turned out that he actually made us some amazing coffee, rather than bringing the coffee machine variety (though to be fair, I wasn't sure he knew how to operate a coffee machine); I thought it must've been a part of his future undercover persona, because it was in no way customary for him to make coffee for anyone, but I must say I sort of wished he'd remain this way for a while longer.
And he brought something for Molly, too - I wasn't sure I cared to find out what, though it did look suspiciously red to me.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, after sipping the coffee from my mug. “So why digital painting? And she does teach beginners, right?”
“I’m not exactly a beginner,” he replied slowly, giving the wall behind me a glassy look. “We did have art classes, of course. I was quite good.”
I should have thought of that - he would have hardly started learning this stuff from scratch, and it would have probably made more sense to make me learn it, anyway. Of course posh kids in a place like Nightingale’s school must have had art classes.
“So far I've no intention of kicking down the door of her studio and flashing my badge in everyone’s faces,” shrugged Nightingale. “And she isn't taking new students into the group that does traditional art. I thought I might as well brush up my skills and pretend that I want to learn to paint digitally; Molly agreed to help me with the technical part.”
“Makes sense,” I nodded. “And who am I going to be, sir? The only thing I’m good at drawing is fancy geometrical figures, and only when I’m given a ruler.”
“Well,” he took out a pocket mirror, gave his reflection a critical look, and raised his hand to ruffle his sleek fringe. “Let’s say I’m reluctant to go there. And you’re my young friend trying to talk me into it, eh?”
Somehow I was getting the feeling he was enjoying himself.
It was one of the gated communities in Bromley. This borough is a curious thing to anyone accustomed to distinguishing vestigia, and over the years I’d formed some interesting theories as to why Bromley attracted people. The place might've been turned from a market town into a part of the industrial London, but too many of its buildings remember the time when there had been fairs every Sunday with tradeswomen shouting their wares and strong smells of foods mixing into one indescribable smell. Nightingale keeps saying you can still feel the scent of apples on the exact spot where an apple stall used to be; I cannot vouch for that, of course, seeing as I hadn't yet been born when that apple stall vanished forever. But certainly Bromley is the kind of borough that creates in me an irrational feeling of satisfaction.
And now, as I marched through its streets beside Nightingale while dutifully playing the part of his “young friend”, I found I was in the perfect mood for some policing. It does a copper no good to feel sullen and paranoid, especially not when they’re going undercover.
Nightingale seemed pretty relaxed, too - I had to admit he’d made peace with the fact that I’d walked in on him practicing his drawing skills suspiciously quickly, to the point where I had no clue if he still felt any embarrassment at all. Which was, of course, just as well.
The studio was located in a small neat house of brown brick. I banged the faux gold ring against the wooden door; but we had to wait quite a while for the door to open.
“You must be Thomas,” the woman said with a smile. She was small, with big green eyes and darkish skin, her whitening hair gathered into a high sleek bun. “Hello. And you?”
“I’m his friend,” I beamed. “Peter!”
Nightingale gave me a top notch glower, which was not, I suspected, entirely insincere.
“C'mon,” I said, nudging him with some playfulness. “You’ll do fine.”
“I’m sure he will,” agreed she. “Glad to meet you both; I’m Jessica.”
We followed her into the dusky front hall and then through the corridor into a lighter but smaller room. There was a slight pleasant noise of well-working PC coolers in the air; a few people sat around, scribbling something on their tablets. Hardly anyone turned to look at us. There was a generally relaxing atmosphere about the place.
So far I had noticed nothing either about her or about our surroundings that would have suggested any sort of foul play. There was little magic there; and she herself seemed pleasant enough - if a little preoccupied with something.
Granted, it was somewhat colder in the studio than I would have expected, even given the big fan in the corner and the rest of the cooling tech, but I certainly couldn't vouch it had anything to do with magic. One has to be wary of confirmation bias - especially since I hadn't even completed my own experiments and so could not form any kind of solid conclusions about the phenomenon.
It felt fucking weird to treat Nightingale like we were buddies, though. It always does. No matter how many times we go on operations in civilian clothes, I can’t stop my brain from doing double-takes at having to pretend to be his mate.
I mean, that’s what I am, in a way. But this is covered in so many layers of professional hierarchy and awkward social interactions that I can hardly call myself that even in my head. He isn't really a buddy buddy. More like Inspector Buddy.
Jessica whirled Nightingale away, and I was kicked out into the corridor and told to wait, which was exactly what I’d hoped would happen. This did deprive me of a priceless opportunity to watch Nightingale draw, but simultaneously it gave me the freedom to hang around, examine the art supplies, and annoy everyone by sticking my head into doors of various classes.
Everything smelt with paint, of course. But not too unpleasantly. It didn't have the kind of sharp alcohol-y smell that gives you headaches. I walked forward, my footsteps soft on the polished floorboards; on my left was another door, which I assumed led to the room allocated to the other group.
I pushed it open and looked inside; it was a big light space, a bit like a ballroom, but with easels stacked along one of the walls and a compact bookshelf stretching along another wall. In one of the corners there sat two twenty-something blokes, daubing their canvases with concentration. Clearly it wasn't a regular session - perhaps they were finishing the work they’d started during the previous class.
It was something of a let-down that the room wasn't empty, especially considering the bookshelf - an object that naturally excited my keenest interest. But the painters seemed to be so decidedly uninterested in me that I wandered inside anyway, taking full advantage of my nosy over-eager fake persona.
Sadly, there was hardly anything on that bookshelf but books on human anatomy. It’s not like I expected anyone with the littlest bit of common sense to keep their copy of Newton’s Principia Artes Magicis in a place with public access, but I hoped there might be something less highbrow; other traces of Jessica’s hypothetical interest in the occult, something along the lines of Carlos Castaneda with his magical mushroom obsession. And I was about to turn away in disappointment and walk back to where I’d left Jessica and Nightingale, when the door opened and Jessica herself entered the room.
I don’t think she even noticed me. Perhaps it was because I stood really still, or, more likely, because something was still troubling her. She looked markedly more anxious than when Nightingale and I had seen her for the first time, and my first thought was that she picked up on our tactics. I confess to having felt slightly alarmed by that - mostly because everything about her screamed cluelessness so loudly that I started finding it unnatural. A part of me was expecting some sort of grand reveal with her turning out to be the Faceless Man, or possibly Satan, because there was no way a person who intentionally did actual malicious magic could be so all over the place in the aftermath. And then of course Hollywood movies taught me that the most harmless small old lady always turns out to be the villain.
Suppressing the stupid urge to go and check on Nightingale, I observed her hover around her students. She was explaining something to them, apparently pointing out the mistakes in their work; at one point she even grabbed a brush and quickly drew a couple of lines on one of the canvases, twisting her wrist forcefully.
That was when I sensed it. A light but distinct touch of cold on my cheek; a feeling of excitement and revulsion that made me want to step away. I looked at the students and saw that at least one of them flinched and stepped back, stumbling over something that produced a flat metallic sound.
And she seemed upset by that. In a “man, I keep screwing up” way, not in an “I’m an evil overlord” one.
Oh, I thought. Not a terribly eloquent thought, but I found it did adequately reflect the fact that I felt pretty bloody lost.
I waited until she left and made my way back. Nightingale was there, standing in the corridor in that weird patterned shirt of his, his hair outright dishevelled. He looked alright to me, and while it was a relief, it did confirm everything I now suspected about Jessica and her unorthodox painting techniques.
“Sir,” I said quietly, as we hurried outside, “could it be an accident? It isn't actually possible to accidentally do magic, is it?”
“It’s been a long time since I saw anything like this,” he answered, and was silent for a while. “She broke one of the drawing tablets, you know. Tried to show something to a student and the next moment I knew, there was the same sort of vestigia I remembered from her painting and the thing just died in her hands.”
It was dusky outside, and the air was pleasantly cool. We walked down the alley and sat on one of the small neat wooden benches painted dark blue.
“’It’s been a long time’?” I quoted incredulously. “So these things do happen?”
“Yes,” he sighed. “And I should've realized it sooner. But, after all, I had no proof, and it is a very rare occasion indeed. I can hardly say I've ever seen such… well-developed formae getting used by accident.”
I gave him a prompting look, which earned me an uncharacteristic but endearing eye roll.
“Ah, I forgot,” intoned he. “Science.”
I wasn't about to rise to the bait; I think it upset him just a little bit, because he adopted a slightly more lecturing tone: “If you think about it, Peter, it becomes obvious that not only is the Newtonian magic no more an invention of Newton’s than the universal law of gravitation is, but also that the same can be said of any pre-Newtonian formalizations of magic. As is the way with such things, the phenomenon predates the craft.”
“So, just as anyone can sense vestigia,” I said, “anyone can do magic without being trained to?..”
It did sound like an obvious idea, in retrospect, and I felt a tad stupid for not having thought of that earlier. But hey, even if I wasn't the First Ever Magic Scientist In the History of Mankind, I sure felt like it, what with all the lack of materials pertaining to the actual mechanics of magic. Pioneers of science tend to do stupid things: whenever I feel bad about my own dabbling in physics, I remind myself about that one guy who studied the origins of life and whose genius idea was to lock up some wheat and dirty rugs and see if that would produce mice.
“In a way,” said Nightingale. He sounded a little dreamy, much as if the conversation reminded him of something nice. “Or rather, just as everyone senses vestigia to some extent, everyone does magic to some extent. It’s not even a question of ability; it just happens. Small things, of course. Nothing significant.
A corner of his mouth hitched up.
“Potentially, there’s magic in everything. Perhaps your experiments make more sense than one might think, Peter; there isn't necessarily a clear line between what people call 'physical phenomena' and what they call 'wizardry'."
“Which, in our case, means that Jessica accidentally developed a forma powerful enough for others to sense?” asked I. Inwardly I sort of puffed up with pride at his remark about my experiments, even if it did sound a little condescending, but it wasn't like I was about to show it.
“I think it’s that hand twist she does when painting. Gestures can be used to bind magic, too; it needn't necessarily be words.”
I mulled over that.
“She suspects something,” I said finally. “Perhaps she’s starting to make the connection between this and the kind of thing that happened to Gautney and Rooks.”
“I agree. I don’t even exclude the possibility that similar things have happened in the past. Which will make it easier to explain to her just why and how she should change her painting habits.”
Nightingale smoothed his fringe, and his expression changed imperceptibly - from a sort of awkwardly nice one to the kind of coolly professional one I was used to seeing. Funny thing, that - I realized that for a moment he’d almost convinced me that his undercover persona was real. That’s what I call some goddamn amazing policing.
Five minutes later we were flashing our badges at the unfortunate Jessica Roberts.
“Metropolitan Police, ma’am,” said I, when she opened the door.
It was a few days after the incident in the Bromley art school that it occurred to me to check the Folly record of the case. I’m not sure what my idea was; perhaps I had nothing to do - both Rooks and Gautney had fully recovered from the incident, and as to my relationship with Molly, it remained remarkably unchanged in that whenever we met, she still looked absolutely done with me. Perhaps I was simply trying to kill the time in the most boring way possible (because let me tell you, the reports written by Nightingale are usually boring as hell). At any rate, I went and took a look at it.
It contained my own report - a half-assed pathetic thing on a sheet of paper torn out of a notebook. Then there was Nightingale’s, which, for the reasons mentioned above, I could not finish reading.
And then there was the unexpected bit. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure it was real.
Nightingale had dutifully submitted all his practice sketches. I imagine Molly must've helped him to print them out - most of them were digital. And what an assortment of sketches it was!
Honestly, I don’t think I’d had any idea as to what I expected Nightingale to have drawn. Things like this simply didn’t figure in the equation. But whatever it was, it certainly wasn't… this.
They stared at me from the pages of the records folder - neat, clean drawings of people’s faces. There was a lot of Molly; just the face, and the neck with the black choker, and the white hair bow. In some of the pictures she was smiling a little, and somehow it didn't look menacing or weird. It looked nice.
Dr Walid was frowning in what was clearly faux grumpiness. I could just imagine him delivering a snarky one-liner and walking away from me, the way a Hogwarts portrait would do.
There were some drawings of Lesley, all of them without the mask, and I didn't think things like this could hurt me anymore, but these ones did. I think it wasn’t so much the pictures themselves as the thought of Nightingale drawing them. He was certainly very good - there was a sort of merciless confidence about his lines, the kind of thing where you see that the artist knew exactly how every single one of them should go.
And then there was I. A disproportionate amount of me, really. I had no idea I had a smile like this - in a few drawings I looked like I was about to break my face grinning, and it kind of made me want to grin back. Sometimes there was Toby next to me, a very accurate depiction of Toby, with that distinctly mistrustful expression of his. I don’t know how you a make a dog look mistrustful, but then I’m not an artist.
Look, I know all this sounds very cheesy and Christmas carol-y, but I looked at those pictures and found myself having no clue as to how much of the Undercover Nightingale from the Bromley case had been fake and how it all worked. Of course he doesn't actually do any drawings in his leisure time. But I couldn't help remembering what he’d said about accidental magic - “small things, of course. Nothing significant”. And “there’s magic in everything”.