Read Online Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch - Free Book Online Page A

who shrugged.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve never given it to a horse.’
    ‘Maybe we should notify local vets,’ I said.
    ‘It wasn’t a horse,’ said Stan. ‘I had the door wired shut.’
    She showed us the black iron loops on the door and the frame – remnants of a deadbolt, I thought. Stan said that she always pushed a double loop of heavy gauge steel wire through the loops and then twisted it to keep it shut. I asked where the wire was and she showed me where the unwound strands had been dumped. I picked them up and had a look – they hadn’t been cut or melted through or, as far as I could tell, been exposed to magic. In fact there was bugger all in the way of vestigia around the stash at all. Vestigia being the trace that gets left behind when magic happens.
    Flora, your actual growing things, retain vestigia really badly and this makes the countryside, leaving aside poetry, not a very magical place. This caused a great deal of consternation to the more Romantic practitioners of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Particularly Polidori, who spent a great deal of time trying to prove that natural things in their wild and untamed state were inherently magical. He went bonkers in the end, although that could have been a result of spending too much time with Byron and the Shelleys. His big claim to fame, beyond writing the first ever vampire novel, is his work attempting to classify where whatever it is that powers magic comes from. He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you’re making it up as you go along.
    He was amongst the first to postulate that things other than animals must generate potentia . Forests, for example, would produce potentia silvestris and rivers potentia fluvialis . And it is from these sources that the gods and goddesses and spirits of a locality gain their strength.
    I’ve stood in the presence of Father Thames and felt his influence wash over me like an incoming tide. I’ve seen a lesser river goddess send a wall of water from one end of Covent Garden market to the other. That’s sixty tonnes of water over a distance of thirty metres – that’s a lot of power, at least 70 megawatts – about what you get from a jet engine at full throttle. And I nearly kissed her just after she’d done it too – makes you think, doesn’t it?
    We know that power has to come from somewhere, and Polidori’s theories were as good as anyone else’s. But sticking a Latin tag on a theory doesn’t make it true. Not true in a way that matters.
    If there had been some kind of supernatural activity, I would at least have expected to get something off the door, or the concrete of the foundations, both of which stayed stubbornly neutral. Absence of evidence, as any good archaeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence – I made a note to ask Nightingale about how things went in the countryside.
    ‘What’re you looking for?’ asked Stan.
    ‘I was looking to see if there are any tracks,’ I said.
    ‘There aren’t any tracks,’ said Stan. ‘If there’d been any tracks I’d have seen them.’
    ‘Stan’s good with tracks,’ said Dominic.
    The sun had got high enough to shine directly onto the back of my neck.
    ‘So, no tracks?’
    ‘Nothing,’ said Stan.
    ‘So why did you think a pony did it?’
    ‘Don’t know,’ said Stan. ‘That was just the first thing that came into my head when I found it open.’
    We were all silent for a moment – something high- pitched yodelled out amongst the trees. The heat seemed to grow around us. I realised that my bottle of water was still in the Nissan.
    ‘To recap,’ I said. ‘Your stash is gone but the kids are not stuck down there. It must have been people not animals. But they didn’t leave any tracks.’
    ‘I thought it might be aliens,’ said Stan. ‘Because there’s no tracks.’ She made a motion with her arm – like a claw dangling