To the main road the warehouse showed a blind face of London brick pierced by modern windows, but on the Thames side the old loading wharves had been converted into a car park. I parked up between an orange Citro?n Picasso and a fire-brick red Jaguar XF with an Urban Dance FM sticker in the windscreen.
As I stepped out, I had the clearest sense of vestigia so far. A sudden smell of pepper and seawater as quick and shocking as the scream of a gull. Hardly surprising, since the warehouse had once been part of the Port of London, the busiest port in the world.
A bitterly cold wind was sweeping up the Thames so I hurried for the entrance lobby. Someone somewhere was playing music with the bass turned up to Health and Safety-violating levels. The melody, assuming there was one, wasn’t audible but I could hear the bass line in my chest. Suddenly, above it there was a trill of feminine laughter, wicked and gossipy. The neo-Victorian lobby was guarded by a top-of-the-line entryphone. I pressed the number Nightingale had given me and waited. I was about to try the number again when I heard the slap of flip-flops on tile approaching the door from the other side. Then it opened to reveal a young black woman with cat-shaped eyes, wearing a black t-shirt that was many sizes too big for her with the words WE RUN TINGZ printed on the front.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m Detective Constable Grant,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Mrs Thames.’
The girl looked me up and down and, having judged me against some theoretical standard, folded her arms across her breasts and glared at me. ‘So?’ she asked.
‘Nightingale sent me,’ I said.
The girl sighed and turned to yell down the communal hall way. ‘There’s some geezer here says he’s from the Wizard.’ Printed on the back of her t-shirt was TINGZ NUH RUN WE.
‘Let him in,’ called a voice from deep inside the building. It had a soft but distinctive Nigerian accent.
‘You’d better come in,’ said the girl, and stood aside.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘My name’s Beverley Brook,’ she said, and cocked her head as I walked past.
‘Pleased to meet you, Beverley,’ I said.
It was hot inside the building, tropical, almost humid, and sweat prickled on my face and back. I saw the front doors in the communal corridor were wide open and the heavy bass beat came floating down the wrought-iron staircase that linked the floors. Either this was the most neighbourly block of flats in English history, or Mother Thames controlled the whole building.
Beverley led me into a ground-floor flat, and I tried to keep my eyes off the long legs that emerged slender and brown below the hem of the t-shirt. It was even hotter inside the flat proper, and I recognised the smell of palm oil and cassava leaf. I knew exactly the style of home I was in from the walls, painted hint of peach, to the kitchen full of rice and chicken and Morrison’s own-brand custard-cream biscuits.
We stopped at the threshold to the living room. Beverley beckoned me down so she could murmur in my ear: ‘You show some respect now.’ I breathed in cooked hair and cocoa butter. It was like being sixteen again.
During the 1990s, when the architect who built this place had been commissioned, he had been told that he was designing luxury apartments for thrusting young professionals. No doubt he envisioned power suits, braces and people who would furnish their home with the bleak minimalist style of a Scandinavian detective novel. In his worst nightmare he probably never considered the idea that the owner would use the generous proportions of the living room as an excuse to cram in at least four World of Leather three-piece suites. Not to mention a plasma television, currently showing football with the mute on, and a huge plant in a pot, which I recognised with a start as being a mangrove tree. An actual mangrove tree, whose knobbly-kneed roots spilled over the edges of the pot and had gone questing through the shagpile carpet. I looked up and saw that the topmost branches had thrust up through the ceiling. I could see where the white plaster had flaked away to reveal the pine joists.
Arrayed on a leather sofa was as fine a collection of middle-aged African women as you’d find in a Pentecostal church, all of whom gave me the same once-over that Beverley had. Seated incongruously among them was a skinny white woman in a pink cashmere twinset and pearls, looking as perfectly at home as if she’d wandered in on her way into town and had never left. I noticed that the heat wasn’t bothering her. She gave me a friendly nod.
But none of this was important because also in the room was the Goddess of the River Thames.