I thought about the three women and their cauldron. I looked up at the Tower of London. I looked down at Judith.
I said, “Listen to me. This is very important. I need to know about the ravens in the Tower.”
I had to see it to believe it. I bought an overpriced ticket like all the good tourists who waddled in orderly queues between the barriers guiding you this way to that tower, that way to the crown jewels. The battlemented walls shut out all the city’s traffic noise, creating within the old courtyards of the Tower an eerie stillness. The air smelt of rain to come. A few yards from the executioner’s block, left out as something macabre to please the children, was a chained-off patch of grass. A small sign announced in four different languages that there were nine ravens in the tower, named after Norse gods, and legend held that should ever the ravens leave the Tower of London, then the city would be doomed. Cursed, damned, fire, water, crumble, crash: pick one, pick them all.
Even if the legend was a lie, time and belief gives everything power.
Next to that was a sign saying, Please Do Not Feed The Birds.
The grass was empty.
I took Judith, Here To Help by the arm - customer sales assistant, Tower of London, and incidentally the only person who knew first aid and had the guts to try it on floating bodies - and said calmly, “If you do not show me the ravens, I will throw myself off Tower Bridge and this time the tide will be high and you won’t be able to save me, capisce?”
She was at heart a kind woman. She wasn’t about to say no to a guy she thought had tried to commit suicide.
Below one of the towers in the wall, in a deep whitewashed room that hummed with ventilation fans and poor plumbing, were nine neat little coffins laid out on a neat little table. Inside each coffin was a black-feathered dead bird.
Judith said, “They just died. A few days ago. All of them - just died. We thought maybe poison but they hadn’t been fed by anyone except . . . and there’ll be an autopsy but they all just . . . we’re getting replacement birds, flown in special, secret like, because we don’t want the tourists to know, but they just . . . they all just died.”
We reached out, appalled, fascinated, and touched a feather.
“You mustn’t!” she hissed. “I’ll be in enough trouble already!”
We drew back our hand, hypnotised by the unblinking black eyes staring back at us from the little coffins.
“Was there . . . a message?” I stammered. “The night they died, a message . . . something written on a wall? Left on a phone? Something you didn’t expect to see?”
She licked her lips. “You didn’t try to off yourself, did you?”
“No, I was pushed into a cauldron of tea and woke up here, and . . .” we laughed, “there’s no such thing as coincidence. Not in my line of work. Was there a message?”
Nine black eyes looking up from the sides of nine black heads on nine dead feathered bodies. Judith nodded, sucking in air. “There was something painted up on one of the walls. We washed it off. Don’t know how they got it there, not easy, you know, it is a castle! It said . . . someone wrote, ‘give me back my hat’. In big white letters up on the wall where the ravens liked to sit. Just ‘give me back my hat’ . . . Who pushed you?”
“Three ladies. With a cauldron, like I said. I’ve got to go.”
“Go where?”
“Anywhere,” we replied. “Anywhere that isn’t here. Judith, thanks for all your help, and now take a traveller’s good advice, and get out of the city. Get out now.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s true,” I answered. “All of it. The ravens in the Tower are dead. That’s a curse, that’s damnation. Someone is out to destroy the city and I have no idea who it is.” I chuckled, “Which is terrific, because I’m the one who is supposed to stop them! So run. Because I have no idea how I’m going to do it.”
I don’t know if she took my advice.
There were other things we had to know.
I nearly ran to Cannon Street station, an iron shed in a street one block up from the river’s edge. Opposite