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beatrice-otter · 1 year

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Fic: Goodfellow (Rivers of London)

Title: Goodfellow Author: Beatrice Otter Fandom: Rivers of London Characters: Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale Additional tags: casefic, organized crime Written for: Galadriel1010 in Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2022 (fffx ) Betaed by: mysteryfail Length: 13,211 words Summary: There had been thefts at three successive Goblin Markets, and one incident of serious vandalism, before Robin Goodfellow had deigned to call in the munificent arm of the law. Authors Note: Yes, the title of the fic is a play on Goodfellas. No, this story has nothing to do with that movie, but I couldn't resist. On AO3. On Dreamwidth. On Pillowfort. There had been thefts at three successive Goblin Markets, and one incident of serious vandalism, before Robin Goodfellow had deigned to call in the munificent arm of the law—in this case, the Special Assessment Unit, colloquially known as the Folly, and disparagingly called the Isaacs by the demi-monde. Which just goes to show that after over a century of alternating condescension, neglect, and active persecution, it takes more than a few years of community-focused policing to change community perception. Even when that policing is being done by a handsome and charismatic DC such as myself.

When Goodfellow had called us in, I took Constable Danni Wickford with me. She'd been a great help to Nightingale and Sahra when I'd been out on paternity leave but was quite happy to be demoted back to Falcon Four.

"So … you don't have any CCTV at all?" she asked Robin Goodfellow in some disbelief. "Not even over the entrances and exits?"

He shrugged. "Besides the practical challenges of setting a system up and tearing it down every time we move, our clientele—both the stallholders and the shoppers—are a bit more protective of their privacy than the average punter at a Marks and Spencer. We're a tight-knit bunch; we keep an eye on things, and that's always been sufficient."

"But not this time," I said. Most of police work is asking variations on the same obvious questions over and over again until you're sure—really sure—that you've gotten every last bit of information out of whoever you're talking to.

Robin Goodfellow shook his head. "It's not any of the usual troublemakers. And believe me, we've checked."

"Can you give us the list of usual troublemakers, so we can double-check?" I asked.

Robin Goodfellow hesitated. "It's not that I don't trust you, Grant," he said. "But my clientele are not very trusting people. And they wouldn't like knowing I'd given the Isaacs a list of names—even of the sort of shits nobody likes—and told them they were trouble."

We went around on that for a bit, but he didn't budge and I didn't like to push him too hard. Not when it was still so rare for anyone in the demimonde to voluntarily ask for our help. Besides, the demimonde was used to handling things internally—Goodfellow hadn't gotten to be where he was without knowing how to handle the usual troublemakers. Chances were, he was right and this wasn't anybody on his list. "How about a list of stallholders we can talk with, to see if they spotted anything?"

"I can do that," he said. "Not all of them will talk to you, though."

"We'll be polite," I assured him.

"Do you have any special anti-theft measures in place, either on the market as a whole or on specific booths?" Danni asked.

"Couple of booths have glass cases for the special stuff," Robin Goodfellow said.

"But no magical defenses?" Danni persisted. "Nothing that might provide any evidence for our investigation?"

"I've given you all I know," he said. Which wasn't an answer, but that was all we were going to get out of him.

…

"Not much to go on, is it?" Danni said as we drove back to the Folly to start our investigations. She was studying the list of names Robin Goodfellow had given us as I drove. "A list of what was stolen, and from whom, and when. A list of stallholders, some of whom won't talk to us. A list of damage done to the stalls—no forensics for that—and to the building. Which at least got reported."

I had never enquired too deeply into whether or not the market had official permission to use the buildings it popped up in, because if the answer was 'no' there wasn't much I or the Folly could do about it. They didn't exactly let us know in advance where they were going to be, and until very recently we hadn't even known for sure the name of the person running them. But after every one I knew the location of, I'd checked with the local nick to see if any damage had been reported, and none had until the last one. At which time, they'd cleaned up all their stuff and removed it, and the contractors working on the building had called it in the next day.

Apparently, it was the custom of the market to set up the stalls and make any needed site modifications the night before, so that all that needed to be done the morning of would be to cart in the merchandise before opening. While a number of stalls had been demolished, and some random damage done to the building and the scaffolding around it, no merchandise had been stolen at that time.

Danni continued. "But forensics didn't find anything. No CCTV, no fingerprints or mysterious fibres or blood spatter, nothing."

And, since it was an active construction site and we hadn't gotten called in until almost a week later, the chances of there being any useful vestigium left was very small. I sighed. "Maybe we'll get lucky," I said. "We'll both be at the next one, and hopefully we'll catch whoever it is in the act."

"If they don't get spooked off at the sight of a couple of coppers," Danni pointed out.

"That's still a win," I said. "And maybe we'll get really lucky and the thief'll be stupid enough to try and sell some of it to the wrong person in the Hanging Tree or one of the other demi-monde hangouts."

The demi-monde wasn't that big, and the thefts were hot gossip, which was part of why Robin Goodfellow had called us in—he needed to be seen to be doing something. While some of the stolen items were valuable, that was only true if the thief could offload them onto someone who knew and cared what they were. For example, the costume jewelry imbued with vestigia would look like ordinary stuff you could get cheap in any department store. If you didn't know what vestigia was, you wouldn't attribute your sense of peace and stillness to the jewelry, and so you wouldn't be interested in paying a premium price for it. There were only so many places you could reliably find people who would know that … and everybody in those places would not only know you were trying to flog stolen goods, they'd know who those goods had been stolen from.

"You think someone'll call us to report someone selling stolen goods?" Danni asked, skeptically. "Is the demi-monde so much more law-abiding than everyone else?"

"I think there are just as many people willing to buy things that fell off the back of a lorry in the demi-monde as there are anywhere else," I said. "But it makes a difference when that lorry is filled with stuff owned by people you know, instead of some faceless international corporation. And no, I doubt they'll call us. But they might call Robin Goodfellow, and he'll pass it on to us."

"He didn't seem to want to involve the police, he might not," Danni said. "He could try to handle things himself."

I shook my head. "I doubt it. He wants to establish a permanent, larger site for the Goblin Fair of London, remember, and that would be much harder without the Folly's good will."

…

Back at the Folly's coach house/tech cave, we fed the information into HOLMES, got an operation formally started, and (pending Nightingale's approval) I actioned Danni to interview the stallholders from the market. It was lovely to have someone junior to me to fob some of the drudgery off on. Then we headed into the Folly itself to brief Nightingale over tea.

"Do you think they do have any sort of magic defenses?" I asked Nightingale. "He didn't answer that question."

"It's possible, but I doubt it," Nightingale said. "Though he might like to imply they exist, when he can."

"If they'd had something like the Folly's wards, they would have tripped when Lesley and I and Varvara were throwing around spells that one time," I said. "But what about anti-theft systems specifically?"

Nightingale took a bite out of an avocado-and-egg sandwich and chewed contemplatively. "I shouldn't think so," he said. "Or rather, anything you could do magically in that area would be easier to do technologically. I understand that putting tags on merchandise that will sound an alarm if they leave the store is quite simple, whereas achieving the same effect with a spell would be … rather complicated, if it were possible at all. Particularly given that one would wish to ensure that the merchandise, and only the merchandise, was affected, and that it was easily reversible when an item was purchased. And several of the stolen items—the jewelry, for example—might be negatively affected by the added vestigia."

"Electronic anti-theft measures work as long as nobody sands the chips," Danni pointed out. "Somebody does a big spell, and they're just so much expensive junk."

"It would tip everyone off that something was going down," I pointed out. "Even if you didn't have anything monitoring the security system set to alert you if it went down, and if the spell had a small enough physical effect to go unnoticed by the average person, most people in the demi-monde know the feel of magic being done. Goblin market's always crowded. Somebody would notice and spread the alarm. It'd be easier not to bother disabling it, just grab the stuff and run."

Nightingale nodded. "Very true, Peter. And, of course, there might be other effects achievable by the Genius Loci and any fae who might be among the stallholders, but I confess I can't think of anything plausible."

"I can't see Mama Thames or her daughters wanting to work anti-shrinkage for anybody," I said, "and I can't see Robin Goodfellow allowing it—it'd turn his fair into a River thing too quickly."

We talked the situation over a bit more, but no further insights sprang up between us. Danni went off to interview the stallholders, I added the dates for the next several markets on the Folly calendar and actioned myself to get the layouts from Robin Goodfellow so we could figure out where to station Danni and me for maximum effectiveness. (Nightingale, as someone with a reputation sufficient to merit a definite article in conversation when referred to in the third person, was a bit overkill and wouldn't be joining us).

Then I got in a couple of hours' practice on the current formae I was working on, and after that I spent a few hours slogging through the paperwork.

I once naively believed that when the briefing documents and Basic Falcon Management Course were written and comments from the various stakeholders had been addressed, that would be the end of it and I could go back to only the ordinary mountain of paperwork required of the average Detective Constable. But it had only been the beginning; and while Nightingale did as much of it as he could, his facility with Modern Metropolitan Police Bureaucratese was far worse than his Latin, and honestly it was easier for the two of us to brainstorm and plan together and me to write it up than it was for him to write it up and me to add the Bureaucratese later.

"Besides," he said with a smile when officially delegating such things to me, "it will be very good experience for you, preparation for when you are the official head of the Special Assessment Unit."

All things considered, I probably would have ended up doing less paperwork if I'd gone to the Case Progression Unit after my probation.

But it would have been far less interesting paperwork.

…

The next day, while Danni was working on the Goblin Market case, I got a call from the Right Honourable Caroline Linden-Limmer, on behalf of her girlfriend Grand Master Grace Yutani of the Sons (and, apparently, Daughters) of Wayland.

"Grace wants to talk with you," Caroline said. "Directly."

"She is welcome to come visit any time," I said, which was true both socially and professionally. Grace and Caroline had come to Bev and my place to meet the twins, and to give me a magic-proof phone case. I'd had a lot of fun testing that; it wasn't 100% fool-proof, but it could handle most spells even at close range, which was a definite improvement.

On the professional level, we were in the delicate process of re-building the organizational ties destroyed by (on the one side) the mass death and retirement of the Folly's membership after the War, and (on the other side) the resentment and suspicion caused by the destruction of the Sons of Wayland's headquarters. The Sons of Wayland were Newtonian practitioners, and some of their sons had gone to Casterbrook. After the war, they'd trained their own people their own way. If we were expanding the Folly and reopening Casterbrook as a training center, it would be much more efficient to work together.

"We're a bit busy right now," Caroline said. "Besides, for this we need you here. We had a break-in."

"Another one?" I said. "Not Lesley again, I hope?"

"No," Caroline said. "This wasn't out at the house you visited, which holds the Archives and the Grand Master's residence. The main headquarters, with the public forges and classrooms and offices and meeting space, is in the Northern Quarter. And the thief didn't get into the forges themselves, which have tighter security. But they got all the computer equipment and projectors from the office and classrooms, and some of the student projects that were lying around."

If they had computers in their classrooms, their ability to shield technology from magic must be a lot better than what was in the phone case. It probably had something to do with not needing to size it down to fit in your pocket. Not for the first time I wondered how they did it; Nightingale and I had spent a lot of time studying it, and the most we'd figured out was that it didn't have any relation to Foxglove's magic dampening field.

"So, will you come?" Caroline asked.

"It sounds like a mundane break-in, to me," I said. "Have you reported it to your local police?"

"Yes," Caroline said. "But they aren't hopeful we'll get any of it back."

"Was there any magical component to the theft?" I asked. "Did they use any spells, or target anything obviously magical?"

"No," Caroline said. There was a pause, and I guessed she was communicating with Grace. "They did try and force the door to the forges, both the outside door to the loading dock, and the inner door from the reception area. Just with a crowbar, nothing fancy."

"What's the cover story?" I asked. "I assume they don't have a fancy plaque saying 'Sons of Wayland, magical smiths, call us for all your enchanted metalwork needs.'" I'd looked them up in HOLMES, of course, as well as on Google and Facebook, but they didn't do business as the Sons of Wayland, and neither Grace Yutani nor Caroline Linden-Limmer had official ownership of or control over any metal-related businesses, at least on paper.

"You can look up Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy online," Caroline said. "They do custom blacksmithing, whitesmithing, and other metal work. In addition to teaching their own apprentices they have a partnership with the Wilkinson Welding Academy, and sometimes make specialized equipment for the University of Manchester."

I almost asked what her mum thought about her dating a woman who taught welding, but didn't. Besides, I bet I knew. Would the magic be enough to make up for the blue-collar work? My mum wouldn't think so, and she wasn't a Viscountess. Now, my mum didn't look down on working people, but she'd still rather I married up. She loved that Bev was not only a river goddess, but also a uni student (although Mum would have preferred her to study engineering, law, or medicine). Somehow I doubted Lady Helena Louise Linden-Limmer would be less snobby than my mum.

"So everyone in the neighborhood would know they have stores of metal and welding equipment and tools in the workshop area," I said, keeping myself on topic.

"Yes," Caroline said.

"And you've told all this to the Manchester police?"

"Yes."

"Was there anything sensitive on those computers beyond normal business data?"

There was another pause, while Caroline asked Grace, and I thought about how I could adjust my schedule to start learning British Sign Language. It should be easier than Latin or Greek, and also something I could have conversations in, not just read. Where I was going to get the time I didn't know.

"There's PowerPoints and other class materials for teaching the academic part of Newtonian magic," Caroline said at last. "But you still need a teacher to demonstrate the formae for you. The business data is more critical; besides things like banking information and client information, they've got the whole membership list for the Wayland Group, both active and retired."

Which meant that whoever had stolen those computers now knew more about the Sons of Wayland—or the Wayland Group, if that was what they were calling themselves now—than either Nightingale or I did. "You've contacted everyone on that list and told them what happened?"

"We have, and there haven't been any attacks on our members, or targeted thefts, that we know of," Caroline said. "Look, can you just come up here? We'd rather have your personal attention in person."

"Is there anything your local police haven't noticed or followed up on that they should?"

"No."

"Well, the first step for us will be to contact the Greater Manchester Police and get copies of their forensics reports," I said. "See if we can spot anything they missed. There almost certainly won't be; they're very good and they know their manor better than I do. But it'll stop us from duplicating their work."

"And then, when their reports tell you nothing?" Caroline said.

"I'll talk to Nightingale about coming up in person," I said, "but I doubt we'll be able to do anything more than your local police will. Less, probably, because if it was just a standard break-in by someone looking for computers or whatever, they're the ones who are going to know where to look for the goods when they get fenced."

"And if it is somehow targeted?" Caroline asked.

"If you give me the compromised information, I'll put flags out for Wayland's members and clients. If anything does happen, we'll find out when the other shoe drops," I said. "And then we'll have more to go on and a better chance at finding them. We are taking this seriously, Caroline," I assured her. "It's just that your bog-standard Breaking-and-Entering is the hardest crime to solve if the criminals are even halfway competent. If they wear gloves so they don't leave fingerprints and a hoodie to make them hard to identify on CCTV, chances are they're not going to get caught unless we catch them trying to flog their ill-gotten gains." This was something I hadn't had to explain since I was a lowly probationary PC, working the streets of London with Lesley, dealing with street crime and petty theft. Most crimes were solved because there was a connection between the victim and the perpetrator. When there wasn't a connection to find, and little physical evidence either, there was only so much to investigate.

I paused to see if Caroline had anything to say, but she didn't.

"You know your community better than I do," I said. "The Manchester police know the local fences and criminal habits better than I do. And you and Grace are top practitioners. Nightingale will probably want to go up and check things out, especially if Grace says she'll give him a tour of the forges while he's up there, either at the main offices or her personal setup. But the people on the spot are the ones most likely to notice a problem, and that's you guys."

"Let me talk to Grace," Caroline said.

While I waited for her to come back to the phone, I googled Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy and found a webpage that looked like it hadn't been redesigned in the last decade. There were examples of their work, and a page with the classes they offered (everything from basic welding to blacksmithing to jewelry making), but there wasn't an "about us" page.

But I thought I knew where they had gotten the name from anyway. Wayland was a mythological smith who popped up in stories from Finland to Germany to England; he learned his craft from dwarves and made weapons and armor for everyone from Beowulf to Charlemagne. Along the way, he wreaked bloody vengeance on everyone who tried to cheat him or control him. And Wade was his father. The perfect name to choose if you wanted to honor your heritage, but also not be noticed by people looking for your old name.

I should have been searching for groups with "Wade" in their name, not just Wayland, once we'd learned the Sons of Wayland had gone into hiding instead of disbanding after the war the way the Folly had. But I'd gone on paternity leave almost immediately, and hadn't been back from it that long. And maybe it was better that they'd come to us, and told us the name they were using these days, instead of me hunting them down.

Once Caroline had rung off, I called DC Eileen Monkfish from Manchester, who'd been the one escorting us about when we were investigating the case with Francisca the Angel of Death/Inquisition brainwashing victim.

"Hello, Peter," she said. "What can I do for you?"

"There was a break-in at Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy yesterday," I said. "It's probably just an ordinary break-in, but Wade's is a subsidiary of the IronFast Trust, who are part of our stakeholder community. They asked me to take a look at it."

"One of your lot?" Eileen said. "Any chance of magic rings or people appearing naked out of nowhere?"

"Shouldn't be," I said. "My contact said there was no sign of anything pointing to Falcon involvement, and she'd know."

"All right," Eileen said. "I can get you added to the case on HOLMES, if that's all you need. As long as you don't go around stepping on my peoples' toes, that is."

"My governor or I might pop up to Manchester to see the people at Wade's," I said, "but that'll be community engagement, not serious investigation. We'll let you know if we find anything."

"That's all right then," she said.

…

Nightingale, Danni, and I met together over tea in the lobby. We started with Danni filling us in about what she'd learned from the stallholders, which was nothing much.

"I did have a thought about the vandalism, though," Danni said when she finished her summary. "Are we sure it's connected to the market? People do sometimes vandalize construction zones and whatnot just for a lark. And once they were in, the easiest things to smash would be the stalls and things."

"I'd expect more graffiti, in that case," I said. "And theft of building materials and tools left lying around. There were some, I think."

"There were indeed," Nightingale said, proving he'd read the report. "While the thefts and the vandalism may be separate, we have very little evidence either way. Unless either of you has a suggestion, I would suggest leaving the issue to the Kingston CID."

That being settled, I shared what Caroline had told me about the theft at Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy, along with what I'd gotten from HOLMES.

"Well!" Nightingale said. "It would be rude to turn down an invitation, though I don't see that we could do anything they or their local constabulary could not."

"That's my thought, too," I said. "But if we swing it right, you'll get a tour of the forge, and maybe even a copy of their training materials along with the membership list."

"That would certainly make our trouble in traveling up there worthwhile," Nightingale allowed. "And I suppose that it would be worthwhile to show the flag and prove our attentiveness to their concerns, given … well." He stirred his tea and took a sip with great deliberation.

Nightingale had been hurt that the Sons of Wayland had mistrusted the Folly (and him, by extension) so little they'd let everyone think they were destroyed with their headquarters. He'd covered it with a Stiff Upper Lip and a few dryly put out words, but I could tell it bothered him. Between his hurt and Grace's mistrust, we hadn't actually been able to set up a formal meeting on terms that were acceptable to both parties, yet. There were too many implications to either of them hosting the other at a formal first meeting.

In the bad old days, the Grand Master had called upon the Master of the Folly at the Folly's convenience, and after he left, some corners of the Folly would occasionally ring with laughter at the Sons of Wayland's hubris in calling their leader the Grand Master. The true gentleman went to Oxford or London or became County Practitioners. The Sons of Wayland worked with their hands and the sweat of their brow, and (despite some of them having gone to Casterbrook alongside the future gentleman wizards) they were socially a cut below, and the Folly had made sure they knew it. The Grand Master had had little say in whether wizards would sit out the Second World War as they had the First, but his order had provided men and materiel regardless.

If they'd been listened to instead of condescended to, perhaps they wouldn't have been so quick to jump in a hole and pull it in after themselves when their headquarters were bombed out. And they'd certainly be less cautious about talking with us now.

Grace and Caroline had come down to visit when the babies were born, of course, but so far no amount of negotiation had resulted in an official first meeting for Grace and Nightingale that both parties found acceptable. When the Master of the Folly invited the Grand Master of the Sons of Wayland to visit the Folly, Grace hadn't exactly refused, but she had countered with an offer to come visit them on their manor, in Manchester, in such a way that it implied that Nightingale was the petitioner and she the superior. Which was just not on. Nightingale would be happy to accept her as an equal, but balked at being condescended to himself, particularly when (as he saw it) the Sons of Wayland's paranoia was what had broken the relationship to begin with.

Nightingale had thanked them for the invitation and expressed an interest in seeing the forge and possibly even Grace at work, having studied with the Sons of Wayland in his youth, but found various excuses for why he couldn't possibly accept the invitation.

I'd had thoughts about opening up Ambrose Hall at Casterbrook for a formal dinner as a compromise, but so far nothing had come of it. It wasn't quite as fraught as mediating the peace between Mama Thames and Father Thames had been, but that experience was proving useful.

This, on the other hand, was perfect. They had called us for help. Nightingale could go as part of his duties as a policeman, and the disadvantage of the formal meeting being on Wayland's turf was cancelled out by his being the expert called in to solve a problem they couldn't. And then once they'd formally met and sounded each other out, future meetings would hopefully be much less fraught.

"Do you want to go yourself?" I asked. "Or you could send me, or we could even go together."

"The two of you is a bit overkill, isn't it?" Danni asked. She was looking through her notes in between bites of a cucumber sandwich.

I shrugged. "Sending either of us is overkill, at the moment. Hell, sending you would be overkill, if the thefts were all we cared about. The relationship between us and them is still a bit delicate. It never hurts to build up good will."

"Besides," Nightingale told her, "While the Folly is, at present, almost totally ensconced inside the Metropolitan Police, that is historically an anomaly. There are many things that are Folly business that are not police business, just as there are many things that are police business but not Folly business." He turned to me. "I've nothing scheduled in the next day or so. I don't know that both of us need to go, but I've no objection to your company, if you feel it's worth leaving Beverly and the twins overnight."

"Or we could make a day trip of it," I said. "Go up in the morning, come back late afternoon." I made a face—that was a lot of time in a train for one day. But I'd rather that than be away from the girls for a night, and Bev would definitely prefer it. I was torn. I wanted to see their main facility, and see if I could get access to their training materials, or at least get it on the agenda for future meetings.

"That would be less disruptive for us," Nightingale said. "Danni's seminars would not need to be postponed."

"Fair enough," I said, though I'd just as soon postpone the training sessions; I knew the material, I just had never appreciated how much work it took to organize a class or tutoring session. At least Danni was better-behaved than I was, and didn't drag us off topic with interesting questions, the way I still tended to do with Nightingale.

"You said their business name is Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy?" Danni said. She was frowning at her notes.

"That's right," I said."

"One of the stallholders from the Goblin Market sells jewelry that he called 'Wade's Wear,'" she said. "Nice stuff, much more expensive than the costume pieces that got stolen. He had it in a case, so the thief couldn't just grab it when his back was turned. He'd have had to smash the case to get any of it, and then they could have caught him."

"Goblin markets are always packed," I said. "Nobody could make a quick exit without throwing around a few fireballs or something to clear the way."

"I had been wondering what the Sons of Wayland—or Wayland Group, if they prefer that—was doing with their wares," Nightingale said. "The Folly had been their only customer, and they didn't have the kind of property or investments to allow them to live on interest as the Folly has done. There is ordinary metalworking, of course, but where's the fun in that? If they've been selling jewelry and other trinkets to the demi-monde, that would give them a market for their particular skills."

"They can't have been selling directly to the markets and fairs for long, though," I protested. "Otherwise Robin Goodfellow would have known more about them. He knew occasional pieces were popping up, but someone with a regular supply to sell is more than that."

"It could be recent," Nightingale said. "Friendly contact with you encouraging friendly relations with others in the wider community. Or it could be that Goodfellow lied."

"Possible," I said. "And it's always possible that Wade's Wear stuff has been at previous markets, and people whisked it out of sight when the Isaacs showed up. I certainly wouldn't put it past, say, Artemis Vance, purveyor of genuine charms, cantrips, and spells, to have the good stuff but lie about it. But I wouldn't think Goodfellow would lie at the same time he was trying to negotiate an agreement he needed. If he or his family got a reputation for lying in the middle of a deal, it wouldn't be good for business."

"True," Nightingale said, "but one can't rule it out. That is something else we should inquire after: how long have they been selling their wares to people in the demimonde."

I thought about what sorts of things they'd be interested in making, and what would sell, and what items I'd seen at previous Goblin markets might have been of Wade manufacture. There wasn't much; from what I'd seen, the market tended more towards pottery and clothing and books than metal, things that were easier to make yourself without specialized equipment or a formal workshop.

Something else occurred to me. "Hold on, do you think there's a connection between the thefts in London and the break-in in Manchester? If the thief wanted Wade's wear, and couldn't steal it from the market, maybe he tried his luck from the source?"

"Awful lot of trouble," Danni said. "And the cost of the train ticket or petrol. It'd be much easier—and maybe even cheaper—to just buy it."

"Not when you take into account the other things stolen from Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy," I said. "That could offset the cost and hassle of the trip."

"Whoever it was didn't get into the forge," Nightingale pointed out, "and unless the student pieces Ms. Linden-Limmer mentioned were jewelry, he wasn't successful in his aims. If that was his aim, he didn't succeed, and may well try again."

"If the Wade's Wear jewelry was his aim, why come back to the market three times with the same strategy?" I asked. "Once he saw it wouldn't work, you'd think he'd have either tried to steal from the market a different way, or go directly to Manchester then, instead of waiting around repeating himself."

"He may not have known where the jewelry came from," Danni pointed out. "And had to come back and hang around the booth to find out, and just decided he might as well add to his haul."

"Chances are that all this is merely a coincidence," Nightingale said. "However, it should be investigated nonetheless. Danni, would you contact the jewelry merchant again and ask if they remember anyone hanging about their booth or particularly interested in the Wade's Wear?"

Danni made a note, and then shared the rest of the findings from her interviews. There wasn't much more than Goodfellow had given us to begin with, but the first rule of policing is to always double-check everything.

In the end Nightingale decided to make a day trip of it, and there really wasn't any need for both of us to come along. Which meant I had to give him a crash course in modern police procedures for handling a break-in like this. Even if Manchester had done the actual footwork, it would be good if he knew at least what not to do if he found any evidence to collect. "But you will ask about their training materials, right?" I asked, after the briefing was done.

"Yes," Nightingale said. "Actually, since they've clearly got a great deal more experience with training practitioners than I have—albeit to very different ends—I'll be sounding them out about the possibility of supplying instructors for Casterbrook, when we open up Ambrose Hall."

"That'd be good," I said. "Maximum collegiality, lots of different perspectives on magic and training … wonder if we could get the New York Library to send us someone, too?"

"I should think it quite unlikely, given their attitude towards our relations with the demi-monde," Nightingale said, "but there's no harm in asking."

"Future training plans aside," I said, dreading the amount of paperwork and administration that would be necessary to set up a new training center, "getting them to supply teaching staff is a long-term goal requiring a lot of negotiation. Getting a copy of the powerpoints they use should be fairly simple and easy."

"Why are you so interested in that?" Nightingale said. "I've heard you grumble about powerpoint use often enough."

Which was true, usually after having to sit through a particularly boring police refresher training course, or wrestle with the program myself to make up slides for Danni and whoever came after her. "They're going to be in English," I said. "I highly doubt they're making all their apprentices slog through learning Latin before they start serious training in enchanting items. If they use the Principia, it will be in translation—and who knows, they might just have written their own textbooks to replace it."

"While future students of Casterbrook would no doubt thank them for it," Nightingale said, "it would not remove the need for you to continue your Latin mastery. Still, I will make sure to ask."

…

Nightingale departed early in the morning before I'd even left Bev and the twins. This left Danni and myself to rattle around the Folly without him. No new information had come in on either the thefts or the vandalism, and so it started out as a quiet day. I gave her a lecture in the morning, then she studied the briefing material while I practiced the latest formae Nightingale had taught me. That afternoon, we got a call-out to check and see if some weird graffiti near the site of a gang fight was anything, and by this time Danni was proficient enough at sensing vestigia that she could handle it by herself.

Which mean that when the call came in from Woodwose Tavern, a drinking establishment frequented by the demi-monde where they asked even fewer questions than most, I was the only one at the Folly to take the call.

"Special Assessment Unit, this is Detective Constable Peter Grant," I said into the old bakelite phone. We kept them around because, being purely from several generations before the advent of computer chips, we didn't have to worry about them.

"Oooh, the Starling himself, what an honor," said the voice on the telephone. It was a throaty, husky voice that sounded like the speaker had been a chain smoker for fifty years, and could have belonged equally plausibly to a man or a woman. "You're looking for the scrote who stole shit from the market, yeah? He came in here bold as brass not an hour ago, trying to sell me some of it, as if I wouldn't notice it came from my mate's booth."

"Thank you for the tip," I said. "Is he still there?"

"Nah, he didn't stick around once I said I wasn't going to buy anything on the spot. But I did make out like I was interested, so he gave me his name and number if I changed my mind."

Got you, I thought, and asked for their name, address, and every detail they could remember. Pat Fernsby was a regular at Woodwose and friends with several of the stallholders who frequented the Goblin Fair. He happily told me all he knew about the boorish American calling himself Mike Santini—which wasn't much. But it did include a cell phone, which turned out to be a burner phone purchased with cash a week earlier from a store without a working CCTV.

"I understand Robin Goodfellow has a history of taking care of matters like these himself," I said, once I'd asked every question twice and was satisfied I'd gotten every bit of information possible. "Thank you for calling us."

"Yeah, well, Goodfellow is a fucking prick," Fernsby said. "Thinks the fact that he owns the fair means he should own everything else, too. Besides, he's the one called you in first. Look, do you have anything else you need? Things are going to start picking up in here, soon."

Once he'd rung off, I called Nightingale and filled him in.

"Do you want to handle the arrest yourself, or turn it over to the local constabulary?" Nightingale asked.

"Operational details are not supposed to be handled by the officer in charge of the intelligence in question," I said. "To prevent corruption on both sides. We don't usually follow that because we can't—we're not large enough—but I'd rather follow procedure when we can."

"Agreed," Nightingale said. "Besides, we'd have to turn him over to them anyway, unless we wanted to open up our own custody suites, and we have no indication he is a practitioner of any sort."

"Kingston nick will be happier with us if they're the ones to do the collar and it goes on their books as a case closed," I said.

"I do want you to sit in on the interrogation, at least," Nightingale said. "See what brought him here, and how he chose to target the market. I don't like that Americans keep popping up."

"We do seem to be getting a lot of trouble from that part of the world lately," I said. When I stopped to think about it, Brian Packard may have been given his enchanted ring in Manchester, but he hadn't decided to hire Lesley to steal the rest of them (and the lamp) until he'd lived in America for years. Terrence Skinner wasn't American originally, either, but that's where his company and the work with the Rose jars had gotten their start, and the New York Librarians hadn't exactly been a model of helpfulness. Then there was the Virginia Company, who had interfered in our investigation of Martin Chorley. "It's all these foreigners stirring up trouble," I said, ironically. "I'll be sure to ask. And also see if he has any connection to the break-in at the Wayland headquarters."

…

The Goblin Market had been in Kingston when the vandalism had occurred, so they were the ones it had gotten reported to, and they were the ones who'd opened the investigation. Danni had come to us from Kingston CID, so she knew everyone there, including DC Kernshaw, who was handling the case. Danni had filled her in, and entered the list of stolen items into HOLMES, the computer system that correlated every bit of data from every police investigation in the country. She'd also noted the possible connection to the Manchester break-in. So Kernshaw already knew there was a Folly connection when I called her up and told her I'd gotten a lead from an informant.

"And you have no reason to believe the suspect is dangerous?" Kernshaw said with what I felt was unwarranted suspicion. "No flaming spear or anything? Can't melt your face off?"

"Nothing like that," I said. "As far as we know, he has no more powers or weapons than your average thief."

"How about the stolen goods?" Kernshaw persisted. "Anything there that could bring down a building or something?"

"Course not," I said. "It's just stuff he nicked from a market."

"A market run by and for the type of people who need your particular … policing skills," Kernshaw said. "And you're sure none of it is Falcon material?"

"Well, some of the jewelry is," I said, "but it's not dangerous. If you wore it, it would give you a mild feeling of peace and goodwill, or happiness, or enthusiasm, depending on which particular piece you were wearing. But they're not strong enough for most people to notice consciously if you're not paying attention, and certainly not strong enough to cause an altered state or anything."

"Do we need to take any special precautions when handling it?"

"Nah," I said. "Just standard procedures for handling stolen goods is fine."

"All right," she said, and I was a little hurt at how dubious she sounded. The Folly's cases weren't that bad, or, at least, not many of them were; but then again, the quiet, ordinary cases didn't often result in other nicks being called in to help, and also weren't as interesting to gossip about over a pint.

"We'll pick him up," she said. "Will you want to sit in on the interview?"

"I would, yeah," I said. "We want to know how he knew where the market was going to be, and also, he's a person of interest in another theft up in Manchester."

She sighed. "Do I want to know what sort of Harry Potter shit they have going on up in Manchester?"

"I'll send you the Manchester Police reports," I said. "No Falcon-related material got stolen, just a bunch of computers and things like that from a business that is part of our community. Could be totally a coincidence that they got robbed within a couple of weeks of when the goblin market here got targeted."

"Well, we'll check it out," Kernshaw said.

…

The operation itself was simple enough, though I wasn't involved in it. Kernshaw contacted Fernsby, and had him pass her name on to Mike Santini as a possible buyer. Kernshaw met Santini, verified he had the goods, and then arrested him.

He'd been in a holding cell at Kingston CID for a few hours by the time I arrived to discuss interrogation strategies with Kernshaw. "I've checked with my contact in America, and they've got no record of Santini in connection with any magical crime," I told her. Agent Reynolds of the FBI hadn't been able to dig anything substantial up on him. "But that's not saying much; their magical community is fragmented and very isolationist, and there are major players they barely know exist. What he does have is a string of arrests—and a few convictions—for minor crimes. Petty theft, vandalism, that sort of thing. He got out of prison after a short stint for possession of stolen goods, hopped a plane, and came here."

"So, he hasn't learned anything, and is trying to start fresh here as a young criminal on the make," Kernshaw said.

"Exactly," I said. "But if he's so new here, how did he know to target the goblin market, of all places? Most Londoners don't know about it, and not all of those who do have the connections to find out where it is and how to get in."

"Well, we'll see what we get out of him," Kernshaw said.

…

"We didn't get much out of him," I told Nightingale when he got home. "Not even where he stashed the rest of it. The problem with career criminals is that they know enough to keep their mouths shut, instead of telling us what we want to know. It's very inconsiderate of them."

"It couldn't have helped that you had very little leverage," Nightingale said. "His crime was not serious enough that he would feel the need to bargain it down with any information he might have had. Still, you should be satisfied that the case is closed."

"I know," I said. "I still think there has to be more to it. It just feels … incomplete. Too many loose ends."

"It's certainly possible that there is more to uncover," Nightingale said with an elegant shrug. "But all too often, police work is not like a novel—things do not wrap up neatly into a tidy conclusion. There are always loose ends. Talk to Agent Reynolds, and see if she can find any more background information on him, perhaps a connection to the American demimonde. And when you inform Goodfellow of the arrest, see if he's still willing to have you or Danni patrol the next market. Just don't be surprised if there's truly nothing more to uncover."

…

"Well, I haven't found any evidence of contact with magical groups on this side of the pond," Agent Reynolds told me. "But I contacted a friend in the New York office, and apparently Mike Santini spent some time trying to get in bed with the Luccheses."

"And who are they when they're at home?" I asked.

"They're one of the Five Families," Reynolds said, sounding surprised. "The biggest and longest-lasting Mafia families in New York. His older brother Chris was a member of the Tanglewood Boys in the 1990s, they were a feeder group for the Luccheses, but he never made it up into the main gang. Mike apparently idolized his older brother and watched The Godfather too many times, but by the time he got old enough things were coming apart at the seams. A lot of the Lucchese leadership got arrested and convicted and thrown in jail one after the other around the turn of the millennium, with several of them turning informant for lighter sentences. They had to keep restructuring things and were barely keeping their head above water and wondering who to trust. Not exactly a good time for someone new to join up. He hung around for a while with some of their lower-level associates. Nothing ever came of it."

"If he wants to join the mafia, why come here?" I asked. "We've got crime syndicates, of course, but nothing with the glamour of the mafia. He's got no connections here."

"Except whatever connections he has that got him the location of several successive goblin markets," Reynolds said.

"Except that."

"Have you considered asking the Librarians?" Reynolds asked. "They're based in New York, after all, and they definitely know the magical community there better than I would."

"I thought about it," I said. "But Mrs. Chin and I didn't exactly part on good terms. She's not going to tell me just because I ask. And given the Librarians' views on the demimonde, I doubt she'd approve of me investigating crimes against them. This isn't an important case, and there's probably nothing to find. I'd rather not rub her nose in our working relationships with the magical community if I don't have to—it'll just make it harder to work with her down the line if something important happens where I really need information from her. At this point, it's mostly just my curiosity."

"Fair enough," Reynolds said.

…

When I called Goodfellow and asked where we could meet, he directed me to Shurgard Self Storage in Wandsworth, where the Back of the Lorry Deliveries van was parked. I wasn't sure whether that meant he didn't trust me to know where his home base was or if he truly did work from the van even when the market wasn't operating. It was outfitted comfortably enough, but surely it would get cold and damp during the winter.

To get to the storage place, I drove the ASBO south on the A3205 until I turned off onto a narrow road with the back gardens of the working-class terraces of Wandsworth on one side and industrial buildings on the other. Then I crossed a bridge over the narrow course of the River Wandle, and wound through the alleys back to where Goodfellow's van was parked.

The transit's door was closed, but the mahogany steps were out and at my knock he called for me to come in. Goodfellow was sitting at his desk with his left arm in a sling and bruises up the side of his face. "What happened?" I asked.

"Hit and run," he said. "I was walking on Middlesex Street near the Petticoat Lane Market, and next thing I know I'm in fucking agony, lying in the street with some kid in a hoodie telling me he got a picture of the car what done it."

"Did it show the number plate?" I asked, reaching for my notebook.

"Nah, that'd have been too easy," Goodfellow said. "I already reported it to the City of London Police, and they say there's no way to find whoever it is."

The City of London Police and the Met didn't always work together very well, or very quickly, and I didn't have the sort of contacts there that I had in my fellow Met nicks. But the details would still be on HOLMES for me to check. "Unfortunately, they're probably right," I said. "If it wasn't caught on CCTV, and nobody at the scene got the plate number…" I shook my head. "Well. Sometimes something will come up, but not often."

"What good are you, then?" he asked. He leaned back in his chair, and though he winced at the pain, his gaze was direct.

I shifted under the weight of it. "We did catch the guy who robbed the market," I said. "He tried to sell it on to the wrong person."

"Yeah?" Goodfellow looked off to the side. "What's his name?"

"Mike Santini," I said. "An American. He's got a long list of convictions and suspected crimes—robbery, assault, things like that. Does the name ring a bell?"

"No," Goodfellow said. He swiveled his chair and reached for a ledger from the shelves. It was a modern one, not so fancy as the ledgers on the top shelves, but still very good quality. "How long's he been in the country?"

"Not long. A few months, that's all."

Goodfellow nodded as he flipped through the ledger, stopping occasionally to run his finger down a column of names. "If I've encountered him, he was using a different name," he said. "And I think I'd remember an American. He stayed out of my way. Was he working with anyone?"

"If he is, he hasn't said." I shrugged. "He hasn't told us anything, really. I don't know how he found out what the Goblin Market even is, much less where it would be. Or where the rest of the stuff he took is."

"That is the question, isn't it," Goodfellow said. He shifted in his chair. "What's going to happen to him?"

"He'll be tried for theft," I said. "There's not much chance he'll get out of it, unless he's got a really good lawyer and an even better story for how he got ahold of stolen property. There's no evidence linking him to the vandalism, and the total monetary value of the thefts was low, so it won't be a long sentence. Then he'll get put on a plane back to the States and we never see him again."

"Never see him again," Goodfellow repeated. "That sounds lovely. I am beyond ready for this whole thing to be over."

There was something in his tone that caught my ear. He knew something he hadn't told me.

Goodfellow reached in his back pocket and pulled out a phone, unlocking it with a PIN. No protective Wayland case, no aftermarket hard off/on switch modded in, just your bog standard smartphone. Either he didn't use magic and didn't spend enough time around practitioners to care, or he had magic the way the Rivers had magic and didn't need to worry because he wouldn't blow out the chips.

"A few hours after I got out of hospital after I got run over, I got a message on my voicemail." Goodfellow hit play, and a tinny voice with an American accent filled the van.

"Mister Goodfellow, my name is Drew Johnson, and my phone number is 020 7946 0867. I called you a week ago and you didn't respond. Maybe you didn't get the message. I have an import-export business and a security contracting business. I'm sorry to hear about your recent injury and the problems you've been having at your fairs. Now that you're preparing to take the next step to a larger and more permanent establishment, I think you might be happier and safer with someone to take care of your security needs. Your business is so important to the community. It would be a shame if your problems got worse. Call me. 020 7946 0867."

"He sounds like someone from a gangster film," I said, incredulously. And what did he think was going to happen when London's underworld got word there was an American trying to run a protection racket on their turf? If Goodfellow had called the Brindles or the Walkers or the Hunt Crime Syndicate for protection against the interloper, Johnson would have been found floating face down in the Thames in short order, unless he had either a lot more magical powers or a lot more muscle than he had shown so far.

"I know," Goodfellow said. "He doesn't actually say anything overtly threatening or illegal in this one, or the first one—I deleted that one, didn't think anything about it at the time."

"No, but if you play that to a jury, all of them have seen gangster films, too," I said. "If there's even a shred of hard evidence, they hear that voicemail, and the Crown Prosecutor isn't going to have to paint them a picture of what it means."

"What happens now?" Goodfellow said.

"Now, I call in my governor, and DC Kernshaw out at Kingston," I said. "We'll want to move quickly, in case he doesn't know we've already nicked Santini. We'll track down whatever properties he has and get warrants to search them, and if there's any evidence at all, Johnson will be arrested and charged with theft at least. Possibly assault, as well, if we can track down the car; that'll be much easier with a name to start with." And I'd have to call Agent Reynolds again, and definitely the Librarians, to dig up what they could on Johnson.

"You're not going to ask me to wear a wire?" Goodfellow said.

I stopped going over my internal list of all the things to do next, and smiled at him. "No, Mister Goodfellow, if you record someone without telling them in advance, it's usually not admissible in court. You don't have to worry, we'll take care of him without needing you to do anything except testify when the time comes."

"And will it go to court? Most crimes involving the demimonde don't." He sounded neutral, and his face was carefully blank. I couldn't tell if he wanted it to be kept quiet, or not.

"At this point, none of the crimes he's committed have been caused by magic, none of the evidence requires knowledge of magic to interpret, and all of the victims can pass for an ordinary human," I said. "So there's no problem trying the case in public." I sighed. "But you're right, a lot of crimes by or against people in the demimonde can't go to court without … a lot of things being public. There's no way you could keep a jury quiet, if there was real, verifiable magic involved."

"A lot of people would get hurt, if everyone knew about people like us," Goodfellow said. "We couldn't just live our lives like we've been doing all this time. I can imagine what the Daily Mail would have to say."

I winced. "So can I," I said. It was something I'd never really thought about, before the twins were born. If magic became public, if people knew about river spirits and fae and all the rest, things would change. And the Folly had the weight of a government institution headed by a white man to protect it. The Folly's problem would be all the people who thought magic was cool and wanted in, just like I had.

But the rest. Black goddesses? People who'd lived underground for over a century? All the others? The gutter press would have a field day, and there would be everything from racist hate to hysteria about the glamour to voyeuristic interest, as if they were zoo animals. Bev was a goddess; she could handle herself. Taiwo and Kehinde were just kids. And most members of the demimonde were just ordinary people, when it came right down to it, but that wouldn't matter to the paparazzi.

"On the other hand," Goodfellow said, "the old way of handling things—where the Folly ignored the small problems and killed the big ones—that was a terrible way of doing business. Lot of good people were hurt."

"We don't do that anymore," I said.

"I know," Goodfellow said. "Would've been much easier (and safer) to kill that Angel of the Inquisition than capture her."

I wondered exactly what the demimonde knew about that case, and whether their source was Bev or Molly or someone else.

"I'm just saying," Goodfellow continued, "that we need a proper way of handling things when there's a crime where you can't hide the magic, or the nature of the people involved."

"I know, and we're working on it," I said. Slowly. Step one had been figuring out how to hold magical people and practitioners who didn't want to be held. Figuring out what to do when someone we arrested refused a plea bargain and wanted things to go to trial … nobody had any workable ideas for that, yet. "If you have any suggestions, we'll take them under advisement."

"Fair enough," he said.

…

My first call was to Nightingale, who'd arrived back at the Folly. He listened quietly. "Well, that's unexpected," he said when I had finished. "But it is gratifying to have our suspicions confirmed. I shall set Danni to tracing this Johnson fellow, and call Kingston to coordinate the investigation."

My second call was to Agent Reynolds, who assured me that she'd see what she could find about Drew Johnson and let me know.

My third call was to Mrs. Patricia Higgins of the militant magical wing of the New York Public Library. I was pretty sure that whatever she thought about "shades," she wouldn't approve of a protection racket, either. And she was a librarian: she probably liked sharing information.

I was mistaken on both counts. "What will you give me in return for the information you want?" she asked.

"I already sent you everything we found out about that magic lamp and those rings," I said. Which wasn't quite true—I hadn't told them the Wayland Group was still active—but then, that wasn't my secret to share, and it wasn't as if their survival was pertinent to the enchanted objects in question.

"It was very interesting, but hardly makes up for your treatment of us and your lies when we were trying to obtain the Mary Engine," she replied tartly.

I sighed. "What do you want?"

"Information," she said, and we set to haggling, eventually settling on a future gift of information of similar value and type.

"The only good thing the Five Families ever did was work to keep the shades in line," she said. "Angry spirits being bad for business. Quiet watering holes for people like that keeps them away from places they might harm the general public. It significantly lightens the load on the Librarians, having a large segment of the shades of New York City under the Five Families' protection—and thus control. Part of the reason we've been spread so thin in the last two decades is the decline of the Mafia thanks to FBI diligence."

"I see," I said. We didn't have time to unpack all the problems I had with that attitude, and it wouldn't help me get the information I needed, anyway. "Do the Mafia have a magical wing, too?"

"Not really," Mrs. Chin said. "Some of them have folk rituals from Sicily, that sort of thing; nothing fancy, but enough to harden them against the glamour or let them know when an intruder has been in their places. And making saints' medals into enchanted amulets for protection is quite common."

"Do they work?" I asked.

"Sometimes," she said.

Neither of the names I had rang a bell, and she didn't want to look them up for me, but the background was useful.

My fourth call was to Caroline Linden-Limmer. "Have you found anything?"

"Maybe," I said. "That is, we've found something, I'm just not sure it's connected with your thefts." I explained about Santini's arrest, and the threatening voicemail Johnson had left for Goodfellow.

"A protection racket?" she said, bewildered. "Like in a crime movie?"

"He literally used the phrase 'it would be a shame if something happened to you,'" I said. "If the break-in was him or Santini—or both—then he's going to try to set himself up as protection for the Wayland Group. And the first thing to do is make you feel like you need protection."

"And he has the Wayland and Ironfast Trust member rolls, from the computers," she said grimly.

"Exactly," I said. "Now, he may have other things besides assaulting people in mind; be on the lookout for sabotage and vandalism, too."

"Of course," Caroline said. "Thank you for the warning, I'll pass it along to Grace and her people."

…

It had been decided that investigating Drew Johnson was not important enough to justify overtime; if he got spooked by Santini's arrest and left the country, he would be out of our hair. If he went to ground, he wouldn't be a direct threat any longer, and as an American he would stand out. People would remember him, and he probably wouldn't have enough working knowledge of the UK and Europe to slip through the cracks.

So Danni and I headed for Kingston bright and early the next morning.

"Ah, Grant!" DC Kernshaw said as we entered the bullpen. "A second case practically gift-wrapped to help my clear-up rate. People tell filthy lies about you, you know. Is there any weird shit we need to know about?"

"Not that I know of," I said. It was still the middle of the night for Kim Reynolds, and she hadn't sent me anything overnight. "But there is a chance Johnson also has connections to the American Mafia." I explained what Mrs. Chin had told me last night.

"Funny," Kernshaw said. "I'd have thought a Mafia protection racket would be bloodier to start up. Either that or The Godfather lied to me. Or maybe the Italian-American mob is just less bloodthirsty than the gangs here in London."

I shrugged. "Maybe they're starting small. No point in killing someone to intimidate the rest if the rest don't know you yet."

"True," Kernshaw said. "And guns are harder to get here—that hit-and-run could've killed someone, if Goodfellow had hit his head wrong or something."

The voicemail by itself wasn't enough to make an arrest on, and given the relatively low level of injury, property damage, and theft so far, the case wasn't important enough to spend a lot of man-hours on. So Danni started tracking down any vehicles Johnson or Santini might have had access to, and Kernshaw and I looked for property records. It was the sort of low-level background work that the Murder Squad had lowly PCs to handle. But on a case this small, it was just the three of us.

If Johnson had been here long enough to establish significant aliases or contacts in the criminal underworld, any warehouses full of stolen goods would be tied up in shell companies and fake owners and people paid cash under the table to rent out space and look the other way. But he'd only arrived in the UK this year.

"He's got a whole industrial building rented in his own name off the A40 near Park Royal," Kernshaw said. "Probably for his official business."

"Maybe not," I said. "Looks like he's still in the process of getting permits and things like that. Why bother with the expense and trouble of renting space if he's not using it yet?"

"True," Kernshaw said. "Doubt the recording will be enough for a warrant to search it, though, unless we turn up something else."

"How long do you think it will take to get the warrant, once we find something?" I asked. I hadn't ever actually investigated this sort of case before. I'd done my fair share of nicking people for pickpocketing and the like when I was on probation, and then with the Folly we were either working big murder investigations with Belgravia or our own cases.

"About three weeks, or thereabouts," she said absently, taking a sip of her coffee. "Maybe four."

"Three weeks?" I said incredulously.

She looked up at me, both eyebrows raised. "Yeah?"

"Things work a little quicker on a murder case," I said.

"Wouldn't know," she said. "Haven't gotten to work on anything that big yet, have I. But surely you do stuff besides murder cases."

"Yeah," I said. "But if there's enough Falcon-related material involved, we have an agreement—it doesn't go through the main court system with the rest of the warrant requests."

"Must be nice," she said. "If we get enough evidence for a search warrant, is this case Falcon enough to go through that route?"

"Probably," I said, and we got back to the paperwork.

…

That evening, Reynolds called over Skype. "How's your investigation going?"

I shrugged. "Nothing much so far. He hasn't been here long enough to get into trouble, or make contacts. On the one hand, there's not much to sort through, which is nice. On the other, there's not as much time for him to have slipped up. And it's possible there's nothing there, and the threatening voicemail isn't actually him trying to set up a protection racket."

"I don't have a smoking gun for you, either," Reynolds said. "He was an associate of the Luccheses for a while, in the Bronx faction. Came up through the Tanglewood Boys, and according to my friend in the New York office of the FBI, there was some sort of rumor that he had some special skill, and resented the fact that he was never going to be made."

"Made?" I asked. At her surprised look, I shrugged. "Hey, I haven't watched The Godfather in years."

"The Mafia has a strict hierarchy," Reynolds said. "At the bottom level are associates, the grunts. Above that are the soldiers, the made men—the ones who are trusted to be reliable and loyal. Above that you have the bosses. Associates are the ones who get the worst jobs, and if they get caught the family really isn't going to care because they're disposable. The soldiers, though, the made men—they're still not the ones making the decisions, but they've got job security and influence within the family, and the chance of advancement, and the family takes care of them in a way they don't take care of associates. There's a lot of prestige to it. And in the Italian gangs like the Luccheses, you have to be Italian to be made."

"And Johnson isn't Italian," I said. "So it didn't matter what skills he had."

"Pretty much," she said. "Wanna bet those special skills are some sort of magic use?"

"No bet," I said. I shared what Mrs. Chin had told me, and we speculated about Johnson's history and plans for a bit, and then I signed off.

…

The next day, I drove out the A40 to the Victoria Industrial Estate instead of to Kingston. It was a row of industrial buildings, modern, with brown brick up to eye level and gray siding above, and just a bit of a peak to the roof of each section to break up the lines. None of the buildings were particularly large, and the parking lots in front of them had rows of trees to delineate the space. It was surprisingly pleasing to look at for an industrial park.

Johnson's warehouse was flanked on one side by an audio-visual supply company, and on the other by an airline catering company. The caterers didn't have a working CCTV, but the AV place had quite good coverage, and they cheerfully handed over a thumb drive with the last month's worth of recordings.

I took the thumb drive back to the tech cave at the Folly and settled in to see if I could spot Santini in them, either bringing stuff in or taking it out. The angle wasn't good enough to cover the door to Johnson's building, but it got a large chunk of his parking lot. I thought about turning the footage over to Danni, but she was still looking for the car, and thought she might have a lead. I couldn't even split the footage with Kernshaw, because she had other cases to work on.

I sighed and dove in.

There wasn't much activity in the corner of the screen that showed Johnson's parking lot, so I could fast forward through most of it. There was still a lot. Johnson showed up a couple of times, which wasn't surprising; he was the one who'd rented it. He was driving his own car, a white Volkswagon Golf, and not the black Vauxhall Corsa that had been used to assault Goodfellow with. Still, I made a note of every time he appeared.

Given how little activity there was, and the fact that only one camera was actually relevant, it didn't take that long to find what I was looking for: a basic white panel van, driven by Mark Santini, parked in front of Johnson's building the day after Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy was robbed.

"That should be enough for a warrant," Nightingale said when I showed it to him.

"Yeah," I said. "We should use the Folly's contacts to get it, though; DC Kernshaw says it'll be at least three weeks to get it if it has to go through normal channels."

"I'll see to it," Nightingale said.

Which is how, two days later, I went back to the Victoria Industrial Estate with Danni and a small forensics team out of Kingston CID.

The space was mostly empty, but there were two tables along the wall piled with items matching the description of things stolen from the Goblin Market, and in a box under them were two desktop towers, without monitors or keyboards—those would probably have been easier to sell. "We suspect Johnson and Santini were involved in a theft of computers up in Manchester," I told the forensics techs. "You'll want to see if those are from Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy."

"Right," one of them nodded.

"Definitely the things we're looking for," Danni said, holding a gloved hand over one of the ceramic masks to feel the vestigia from it.

"I'm calling Nightingale," I said, pulling out my phone in the magic-resistant case that still made me smile to look at. I hit the speed dial for Nightingale.

"Nightingale," he answered.

"Yeah, it's me," I said. "There's a pile of stuff here that matches the description of stolen goods from the Goblin Fair, and two computers that might be from the Manchester break-in."

"Excellent," Nightingale said. "The next step should be to arrest Johnson, yes?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'll call Kernshaw, have her pick him up."

…

Johnson proved to be no more talkative than Santini had been, but it didn't matter. He owned the building the stolen goods were found in, some of the stolen jewelry pieces were found in his apartment when we searched it, along with a burner phone with a number of calls and texts to Santini on them. The computers were indeed from Wade's Custom Metalworking and Smithy, so that got added to the list of charges. We never did find the car that hit Goodfellow, or any evidence tying either American to the hit and run, but the evidence on the thefts was enough for a conviction on that count.

Besides my testimony, the Folly also contributed magic-proof cuffs so that the Americans could be transported without risk of Johnson using magic to escape. If he had any; that was just a guess, because we'd still never seen him use it.

"I don't understand why they were so obvious about it," I said to Nightingale as the case wended its way slowly through the courts. "Surely they could have found some place less noticeable to stash the stuff than a building with Johnson's name on it. A storage locker takes a lot less paperwork, too."

Nightingale shrugged. "Perhaps it was taking longer to get their front business set up than they thought, and they were short of cash. And I doubt they were expecting the thefts to get reported to the police at all, much less for us to care. The demi-monde has historically taken care of such matters themselves, and given what we know of the situation in America that is even more likely to be the case there."

"Yeah, but they're both career criminals," I said. "Part of the mafia! They have experience."

"Neither were high-level enough to plan crimes in America, from what Reynolds has told us," Nightingale pointed out. "And they're used to corruption on the part of the police, and the magical law enforcement tacitly approving of them."

I shook my head. "It just seems ironic. Johnson gets fed up because he thinks his skills as a practitioner—"

"We still don't know for sure he is a practitioner of any sort," Nightingale pointed out.

"—his skills at whatever aren't getting enough power in America, so he comes here to try and build an operation here," I said. "Only, he doesn't cover his tracks at all, so he gets caught right away. He doesn't even get a chance to use his special skills."

"How embarrassing for him," Nightingale said with a wry grin. "If only all our cases were as easily solved."

"Yeah, I like the stupid criminals best," I said.

"Indeed," Nightingale said. "Have the loose ends been tied up to your satisfaction?"

I sighed and sat back in my chair. "I suppose. It still feels … unsatisfying. Most of it wasn't anything I did; I didn't crack the case or outsmart them or anything. I just got lucky. Santini tried to sell the stuff on to the wrong person, and Johnson was so thick he stored the stolen goods in a building he rented in his own name."

"I believe most policing is like that," Nightingale said. "And besides, you underestimate your contributions in the long run. Without your community policing and the trust you have built with the demimonde, we would never have known that the thefts occurred in the first place. Even if we had been notified of the theft, we certainly would not have been the first choice to handle things when the thief tried to sell his ill-gotten gains to someone who didn't approve of the thefts."

"Yeah, but Fernsby only called me instead of Goodfellow because he's got some sort of beef with Goodfellow," I pointed out.

"That still doesn't mean he would have called me about it," Nightingale said. "He could have ignored the whole thing, or spread Santini's name around the demimonde as a known thief to be wary of. He could have handled it in any number of ways that did not involve the Folly or the Metropolitan Police. I know, because that's what the demimonde has done up until now. Santini and Johnson have been arrested and will be tried, instead of being beat to a pulp and dropped in an alley. And it is your work up to this point that allowed for that."

"That's kind of you to say," I said.

"It's the truth," Nightingale said. "If it were on my account, it would have happened long since. You've done good work, Peter, on this case in particular and in all the things you have done since joining the Folly that laid the groundwork for it."

"Thank you," I said. "I hope all our cases are this easy."

"I quite agree." Nightingale smiled. "But please don't jinx us, Peter."

#fanfiction #fanfic #rivers of london #case fic

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