Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions.
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It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’.
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What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.
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Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA—hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and—hey presto—suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a meter of cold steel through the chest. Perhaps
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I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr Wilkinson's driving licence to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.
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I took the swab using the collection kit that I’d borrowed from Dominic who, I realized, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness.
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Then you throw the bloody thing as far as you can, hopefully outside the area of immediate magical effect, where two minutes later it basically phones the Met control room and screams help, help, serious magic shenanigans here – send help – preferably Nightingale.
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Norwich station has your standard late-Victorian brick, cast-iron, and glass shed retrofitted with the bright molded plastic of various fast-food franchises. I gratefully staggered in the direction of Upper Crust and considered asking if I could stick my head under their coffee spigot but settled for a couple of double espressos and a chicken tikka masala baguette instead.
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Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the Internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable cash. They don't know you, you don't know them - the only problem is where to meet.
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Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.
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One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.
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I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.”
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The world was different before the war. We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.
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I texted Nightingale to let him know our change in disposition and then I picked up my Pliny, because nothing says stuck all alone in your flat like a Roman know-it-all.
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I didn't ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or later.
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We can't have your people fighting each other," I said. The 'royal we' is very important in police work; it reminds the person you're talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you're using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are.
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My dad was a fairy," said Zach. "And by that I don't mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.
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I've already told the police what happened, they didn't believe me. Why should you.
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That’s because they don’t know. It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
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That’s how real men settle their differences, through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door, a sign, I decided, of his respect.
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From the individual infantryman’s point of view there really is no such thing as too much personal firepower.
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The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I’m
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We were suffering a standard gray London drizzle, the sort that makes it clear that it can keep it up all day if needs be.
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There’s always a secret door. That’s why you always need a thief in your party.