UMA organiser turned the corner. He stood in the grey daylight, in the view of flaking Georgian facades, the prams and bicycles of passersby, and stared. After a horrified instant, he screamed, “Hey!” and ran at the attacker.
But the man continued his brutal mosh, ignoring the shout, murdering with each step. His companion stepped into the organiser’s path and punched him in the face. He sent him sailing, legs wide, blood arcing. The helmeted man grabbed him on the ground and punched him again and again. People saw, and shouted. They called the police. The two dark-dressed figures continued, one with a mad-looking murderous dance, the other to break the nose and teeth of the trade unionist, pounding him not quite to death, but so that his face would never ever look as it had done thirty seconds before.
A police car screamed in as the beating and the crushing concluded. The vehicle’s doors opened, but then there was a hesitation. The officers within did not come out. Anyone close enough could see the lead police shouting into a radio, listening to orders, shouting again, staying in the car and throwing up her hands in rage.
The two bikers backed away. In front of the aghast eyes of the locals, some demanding they stop, others ducking out of their sight, others calling the police again, the two men walked out of the garden and away. They did not get on any bikes: they walked, bowlegged and rolling like violent sailors, through the streets of north London.
When they were gone from sight the police emerged and ran to where the UMA organiser was breathing bubbles in his own spitty blood, and where the strikers were pasted into the earth. Two streets away, inklings of unease reached the avian picket. Their tightly controlled circuit became ragged, as first one then another scooted over the town hall roof to see what had happened.
They cried out. Their calls resonated in more than the conventional dimensions. So it was not very long until with a gust of presence Wati came speeding to the square. He tore into a plaster saint on the wall of a house.
“Bastards,” he said. He was guilty. His attention had not been fully on the action: he had become intrigued by the investigation into the names Dane had given him, the strangeness that underlay the city, the sheer unusualness of being unable to find what he wanted, here any sign of the missing kraken, from any statuette anywhere in the city.
He came too fast even for himself. His velocity skidded him out of the statue and into a Meissen shepherd boy on a mantelpiece on the other side of the wall. He bounced into a teddy bear, and back out into the statue again. He looked at the police and his comrade. If the officers even clocked the insect corpses, they did not think anything of them.
“Motherfuckers,” Wati whispered in the voice of architecture. “Who did this?”
The birds were still screaming, and Wati heard the siren of the ambulance as if it was joining in their cacophony. A quick fingering outreach: one of the cops wore a Saint Christopher, but the silver charm was almost flat, and Wati needed three-dimensionality to manifest. There was a beat-up Jaguar, though, just in earshot, and he leapt into the tarnished effigy at the car’s front. He stood, a motionless outstretched cat, and listened to the police.
“What the hell’s that about, ma’am?” the younger officer said.
“Search me.”
“It’s bloody criminal, ma’am. Just sitting there …”
“We’re here now, aren’t we?” the senior officer snapped. She glanced around. She lowered her voice. “I don’t like it any more than you, but orders are fucking orders.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ONE THING COLLINGSWOOD HAD ENJOYED IMMEDIATELY SHE joined the police—had been headhunted into the FSRC—was the slang. Initially it had been incomprehensible and delightful, nonsense poetry, all my ground this and his brief that, bird and the black and a bunce, monkeys and drums and nostrils, and the terrifying invocation of a snout.
The first time she had heard that last word, Collingswood had still not known how often she might meet, for example, composite guardian things put together by priests of an animal god (rarely), or invoked things that called themselves devils (slightly more often). She had thought the word a description, and she had imagined the snout Baron had been taking her to meet would be some insightful dangerous mandrill presence. The drab man who had simpered at her in the pub had been