Rivers of London (the book) timeline
Feb. 18th, 2017 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sixthlightThe longest book, in terms of book time covered! Also the most generic in terms of dates, as there’s lots of long stretches of time when nothing much happens.
Day 1 (a Wednesday in mid-to-late January): William Skirmish is murdered in the wee hours; Peter and Lesley are sent from Charing Cross to guard the scene. Peter meets a ghost. Later that day he has his career meeting with Inspector Neblett and is told he will probably be assigned to the Case Progression Unit. He and Lesley go out drinking that evening, go to Covent Garden, and don’t see a ghost.
Day 2 (Thursday): Peter hacks HOLMES to see if his ghost was right about the method of murder, and decides to go back to Covent Garden that evening to re-interview the ghost. At Covent Garden he runs into Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is not trying to pick him up, probably, but is interested in his ghost-hunting.
Day 3 (Friday): Lesley is assigned to the Murder Team; Peter is assigned to work with DCI Nightingale. He and Peter look at Skirmish’s corpse in the mortuary, where DCI Seawoll tells Peter he should steer clear of Nightingale, then go to Skirmish’s flat. They find out about Toby and interview Augusta Coopertown. Peter suggests using Toby to detect magic. They take Toby to the crime scene and he identifies the bus stop the murderer left from. Peter meets his ghost (“Wallpenny”) again, but only when Nightingale is out of sight.
Day 5 (Saturday): Lesley and Peter return to the Coopertown house and meet Nightingale there. Brandon Coopertown murders his wife and child and his face falls off. Lesley and Peter spend the afternoon being interviewed and the evening cuddling in bed.
Day 6 (Sunday): Nightingale introduces Peter to Dr Walid, who is autopsying Coopertown, including his brain. Afterwards Peter and Nightingale get lunch at a pub and Nightingale makes Peter the offer of apprenticeship as a wizard, conditional on the Commissioner’s permission.
Day 7 (Monday): Peter is sworn in as an apprentice. He moves into the Folly. He and Nightingale meet Augusta Coopertown’s parents. That evening, Peter and Lesley try to go to the movies and end up arresting a fellow moviegoer instead.
Day 8 (Tuesday): Peter gets his first lesson in magic: how to make a werelight.
Day 18 (Saturday): Peter and Nightingale are called out in the early hours to deal with the Rivers having a fight at Eel Pie Island. It’s “the tail end of Friday night” and “February”, and there’s a Valentine’s advertisement in a pharmacy window. Peter has been learning magic for “a couple of weeks”. Later that day, he goes to visit Mama Thames and meets Beverley. Mama Thames gives him and Nightingale “until the Chelsea Flower Show” (i.e. sometime in the last two weeks of May) to sort out Father Thames.
Day 32 (a weekday, around February 21): Peter and Lesley give evidence against Cecilia Munroe (the moviegoer) and discuss the Skirmish and Coopertown cases. It’s “three weeks into February” so I’m tentatively assigning it as two weeks after Peter visits Mama Thames.
Day 34: Peter and Nightingale deal with vampires in Purley, assisted by Frank Caffrey. It’s “two days later” after the scene with Peter and Lesley.
Day 57(?): Peter successfully produces lux, and Nightingale suggests he will learn “to move it around” (i.e. impello) but “not for another week”. Two days later he kills his phone with it.
Day 60: Beverley comes over with a lead on the Punch case; she and Peter go to UCH to check it out. It is “two months” since Peter learned to sense vestigia. Peter discovers his phone is dead, probably because of magic. They go to find the doctor and cycle courier involved. Peter calls Lesley and she joins them. Beverley leaves when Peter won’t promise she’s under no obligation if she eats his sandwiches. The courier is sequestered and his face falls off, but they save the doctor. Peter is interviewed, attends the autopsy, and goes home.
Day 64: Peter asks for and gets permission to install cable in the coach house. He begins to learn impello, distracting him from his plans to figure out why magic killed his phone.
Day 65: Peter cleans up the coach house. The cable won’t be installed for another week. He spends it doing practice, paperwork, and looking for Father Thames.
Day 72: The coach house is returned to the twenty-first century. Peter invites Lesley over and gets Beverley, Molly, and Nightingale as well.
Some point in March: Lesley visits the coach house and they discuss how magic works. During this time Peter also does experiments to figure out why his phone died.
During March generally: Peter learns iactus and spends two weeks moving apples around.
Day 74-ish(Sunday, March 28th-ish): “The end of March”; the clocks change. It’s a week after the equinox. Molly takes the day off. Peter and Nightingale visit Father Thames. Peter talks to Isis and Oxley. On the way back to London they learn there’s been another murder (the Hare Krishna & associated deaths.) Peter figures out that electronics have to be powered to explode, with approximately a two-metre damage radius.
Day 75-ish(Monday, March 29th): Peter demonstrates his exploding till experiment.
April: Peter spends April practicing magic, investigating murders that are not magic-related, and not seeing Beverley (although he does actually call her - I’d forgotten that! But her mum has forbidden her to see him until he sorts out the Father Thames problem.)
Day 120 (Sunday, mid-May): Lesley and Peter go to the Covent Garden Fayre, and Peter figures out the Punch connection. It has now been “four months” since Skirmish’s murder. He and Nightingale do some research and Nightingale approves Peter going to talk to “Wallpenny”, the ghost, again. Peter goes to Covent Garden late that night, taking Toby, and encounters “Wallpenny” apparently being attacked by a mysterious force.
Day 121 (Monday): Peter learns the fireball spell, which he has persuaded Nightingale to teach him after seeing it demonstrated to blow up the till. That evening he and Nightingale try to summon Wallpenny’s spirit and Peter almost suffers a terrible fate and, incidentally, blows up the graveyard.
Day 122 (Tuesday): Peter and Nightingale do research and decide to ask Isis and Oxley about Henry Pyke, who Wallpenny named.
Day 123 (Wednesday): Peter recruits Beverley and visits Isis and Oxley. After dropping Beverley off he’s reeled in by Tyburn, blows up her fountain, and pisses her off. When he gets away he finds out there’s been another Punch-related attempted murder; this time the sequestered victim survived. Nightingale, Peter, Lesley, and Dr Walid make a plan to insert Peter and Nightingale into the Punch “script” and arrest the ghost later that night. They get a ghost warrant and go to Covent Garden, where Nightingale is shot.
Day 124 (Thursday): Peter is interviewed by Stephanopoulos and Seawoll, then released. He finds the Folly guarded by Frank and his Paras and Tyburn in the tech cave. He goes to visit Nightingale in hospital, and falls asleep in Nightingale’s room. Walid gives him internet access, and he uses HOLMES to work out that Lesley has been sequestrated by Pyke and Punch, leading to Nightingale’s shooting. Peter comes up with a cunning plan to catch her involving tranquilisers. It’s now “late May”. And apparently Friday. (It’s always Friday in Central London, according to Aaronovitch.) Peter confronts Lesley in the Opera House, starts a riot, is rescued from a fire by Beverley flooding Covent Garden, kisses Beverley, and then goes home to his parents’.
Day 125 (Friday, probably): Peter wakes up, talks to his father, and calls Walid, who tells him Nightingale is awake and asking for him. He goes to see him and is advised to use Molly’s haemomancy and get back into the Folly by going to Mama Thames. He propitiates Mama Thames with alcohol, makes a permanent enemy of Tyburn, returns to the Folly, gets Molly to bite him, chases Mr. Punch through history and vestigia and pins him to London Bridge. When he wakes up he finds Lesley in the tech cave and persuades Pyke to leave her. Then he passes out as Walid arrives. ,
June 21: Peter interviews St John Giles, who has had his penis bitten off. Lesley is still in hospital, and so is Nightingale. It is “less than six months” since Skirmish’s murder. He drops Beverley off with Father Thames and takes Ash back into London.
Notes:
A helpful anon pointed out I’d mixed up some of the timing in the middle (around the vampire/magistrates’ court scenes) and there were bigger gaps in between events - fixed in this version.
This is a tricky one because there’s lots of large time gaps and, unlike all the other books, Peter’s narration jumps around in time a lot more. The dates and days are all approximate, based on a roughly mid-January date for the start of the book (by eighteen days in it’s February, so the murder can’t take place any earlier than January 14th, and it’s still less than six months later by June 21st.) He was cutting it really close with Mama Thames’ deadline if he still hadn’t come up with a solution by the final confrontation with Punch, too - it’s already late May.
Peter learns a lot of spells in quite quick succession - lux, iactus, impello, the fireball variant - and then presumably has to stop for a while as Nightingale is in hospital for at least a month. Notably, he actually only has about two and a bit months of magic instruction when he’s not just learning lux - that’s quicker than I’d thought before working it out.
Also, it's his idea to learn the fireball spell, not Nightingale’s, although presumably Nightingale finds it worthwhile to teach him. I’d forgotten that, too!
