so disappointing she had, with a little motion of her fingers, given him a headache.
Despite that letdown, that police term always cast the shadow of a spell on her. On her way to meetings with informants she would whisper “snout” to herself. She enjoyed the word in her mouth. It delighted her when, as she sometimes did, she met or invoked presences that actually deserved the name.
She was in a coppers’ pub. There were countless coppers’ pubs, all with slightly different ambiences and clientele. This one, the Gingerbread Man, known by many as the Spicy Nut Bastard, was a haunt in particular of the FSRC and other officers whose work brought them up against London’s less traditional rules of physics.
“So I been chatting to my snouts,” Collingswood repeated. “Everyone’s freaking out. No one’s sleeping right.”
She sat in a beery booth opposite Darius, a guy she knew slightly from a dirty-tricks brigade, one of the subspecialist units occasionally equipped with silver bullets or bullets embedded with splinters of the true cross, that sort of thing. She was trying to get him to tell her everything he knew about Al Adler, the man in the jar. Darius had known him slightly, had encountered him in the course of some questionable activity.
Vardy was there. Collingswood glanced at him, still astonished that when he heard where she was going, he had asked to come.
“Since when the fuck are you into shit-shooting?” she had said.
“Will your friend mind?” he had said. “I’m trying to collate. Get my head around everything that’s happened.”
Vardy had been more distracted even than usual over the last several days. In his corner of the office the slope of books had grown steeper, its elements both more and less arcane: for every ridiculous-looking underground text was some well-known classic of biblical exegesis. Increasingly often, too, there were biology textbooks and printouts from fundamentalist Christian websites.
“First round’s on you, preacher-man,” Collingswood had said. Vardy sat glumly and grimly, listening as Darius told boring anecdotes about standoffs.
“So what was the story with that guy Adler?” Collingswood interrupted. “You and him went at it once, right?”
“No story. What do you mean?”
“Well, we can’t find dick on him, really. He used to be a villain—he was a burglar, right? Never gets caught but there’s a lot of chatter about him, until a few years ago and all of it dries up. What’s all that?”
“Was he a religious man?” Vardy said. Darius made a rude noise.
“Not that I knew. I only bumped up against him the one time. It was a whole thing. Long story.” They all knew that code. Some Met black op, plausibly deniable, when the lines between allies, enemies, informants and targets were questionable. Baron called them “brackets” operations, because, they were, he said, “(il)legal.”
“What was he doing?” Collingswood said.
“Can’t remember. He was with some crew shopping some other crew. It was the Tattoo, actually.”
“He was running with the Tattoo?” Collingswood said.
“No, he was shopping them. Him and another couple of people, some posh bint—Byrne her name was, I think—and that old geezer Grisamentum. He was sick. That’s why Byrne was around. They were dobbing the Tattoo in it. Tattoo’d only been Tattoo for a little while, and they didn’t say, but they were hinting it was Gris who made him into it. All change, ain’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Vardy said.
“Oh, you know. Never the same friends, is it? All change now. Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”
“Is it?” Collingswood said, offering him a cigarette.
“Well …” Darius glanced around. “We’ve been told to go softly on his lot for a little while. Which is funny, because you know they ain’t exactly subtle.” The Tattoo’s predilection for ostentatious, damaged and reconstituted henchpersons as a method to spread fear was notorious. “They reckon he’s got Goss and fucking Subby on payroll at the moment. But we’ve been told tread a bit light unless it really spills out into Oxford Street.”
“Who’s doing who favours?” Collingswood said.
Darius shrugged. “You’d be slow if you didn’t think it had something to do with the strike. Word is the UMA are having a bit of a time of it. Look, all I know about Al is that he was a good thief and loyal to his mates. And he liked things to be proper, you know? He had those tattoos, I know, but he had proper manners too. I’d heard bugger-all about him since Grisamentum died.”