Chekhov's Garden Shed

[sixthlight]

For the last four or five years, the RoL fandom has had a masterpost of Chekhov’s guns/unanswered questions from the series – the last version, with links to the original, can be found here. Past contributors include deviantaccumulation, the-high-meggas, maple-clef, uncommonsockeater​, and flannelgiraffe, as well as others who I have doubtless forgotten. [If that's you or someone you know, please speak up!]

Ben Aaronovitch has indicated that he views this collection as less of a set of ‘guns on the mantelpiece’ (which must be taken down and fired before the series is finished) and more a ‘garden shed’ of things he thinks might be useful one day but could also end up rusting in the back after getting buried under other things. The fun is finding out which is which. (Thanks to ilikesallydonovan for originally sharing this tidbit and finding me the link!)

So, without further ado, here is the renamed Chekhov’s Garden Shed Of Stuff That Might Come Back Later. It’s separated into Answered Questions, Partially-Answered Questions, and Things Still Buried At The Back Of The Shed. I enthusiastically welcome comments, corrections, and missing items. Contains spoilers for all published RoL-related material including the novellas, comics, online snippets, and interviews with the author.

A mirror of this version can be found at Tumblr – I will try and keep it updated as I update this one.

ANSWERED QUESTIONS:

 

· What the fox said to Abigail in WuG
It was warning her about Chorley’s involvement with/interest in Skygarden.

· Peter’s father needs a few thousand for dental work; his mum is very keen to get the money so that he might re-launch his career. They’ve already done a gig (beaucoup money) for Ty. Will this be a vulnerability for Peter at some point?
Apparently not; his dad’s band do regular gigs for the demi-monde, his dad has his new teeth, and Ty doesn’t seem to have been involved at all. Peter just has to live with his parents being better-informed about his work and new world than he might like!

· Will we see Awa Shambir again? Her of the suspiciously expensive hijab to be cleaning the offices (of a front organisation for an evil wizard) in…
Goodbye Awa Shambir the Somali cleaning lady, hello Lady Caroline Elizabeth Louise Linden-Limmer, surreptitiously aerial scion of nobility.

· What was Molly doing in the tech cave? Is she on facebook/twitter/tumblr/a cooking forum? Looking up recipes? Has she discovered online shopping?
Molly is active on Twitter gossiping and swapping recipes; it’s not a secret from either Peter or Nightingale, they just pretend not to know.

· Is that watch Nightingale gave Peter going to have any future relevance?
Peter and Caroline had a watch-off in The Hanging Tree which Peter won, and the practitioner habit of wearing mechanical (and hideously expensive) watches enabled Peter to identify Chorley as the Faceless Man.

· Who is Mr. Nolfi’s mother? Where did she learn magic? and Have any other Newtonian wizards continued to practice in secret and/or trained apprentices in other parts of the country, without telling Nightingale? (Broader: was Nightingale mostly wrong about being the last wizard in Britain or really, totally, 100% wrong?) and What about the “female affiliates” of the Little Crocodiles? and How many wizards did Wheatcroft actually train and where are they now?
Most of an answer to all of these: there’s a long-standing tradition of women practicing and teaching each other Newtonian magic dating back to before the founding of the official Folly. Mr Nolfi’s mother and the ‘female affiliates’ of the Little Crocodiles could well have come from this tradition. And Nightingale was totally utterly wrong about being the last wizard in Britain. Practitioners exist trained by ‘hedge’ wizards and witches, trained by Little Crocodiles, immigrated and bringing other traditions with them…that cat is not only out of the bag, it was never even in it. C.f. Patrick Gale and co. in Detective Stories and Lies Sleeping. However, many Little Crocodiles never really learned magic at all, or managed to brush it off after university as unimportant – unfortunately for them, Martin Chorley targeted them as tools and bait.

PARTIALLY-ANSWERED QUESTIONS:

· What happened at Ettersberg that caused magic to disappear?
Answered in various interviews: magic didn’t disappear at Ettersberg as an objective thing, but a lot of practitioners were wiped out by the war and the Nazis, as well as a lot of genii locorum and other fae and magical people. Nightingale over-indexed on this because he was depressed and traumatised, and the magic ‘coming back’ is a combination of a new generation of gods, fae, and practitioners growing up, and Nightingale noticing the ones who were there all along.

· Where are the notes Peter was promised?
Peter has a deal with Nightingale about getting questions answered in return for magical progress; we haven’t seen him look at any old wizard’s notes specifically but he doesn’t seem to be waiting on them.

· What was Nightingale doing in the 70s that he managed to miss the original FM’s adventure in Soho?
Working with the Met, apparently - he was called in when Woodville-Gentle got his at Lady Helena’s hands, but too late to determine whether it was magic. Seems like he just wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on around him!

· What was Peter doing after he left school and while he was a PCSO? Why did he have problems during his A levels? Why did he join the police?
Peter flatted and worked retail for a while after he left school (possibly while he was at school, too). We still don’t know what happened with his A-levels or what led him to join the police.

· Outwith the Met, does the Folly answer to the Home Office (or higher)? There are hints at that (cf. Walid in RoL), but nothing more and Who is Nightingale’s boss/who does Postmartin send his files to?
No direct answer to who they answer to beyond what we already knew, but we learn in THT that they have their own source of funding and aren’t an official part of the Met. Nightingale does not appear to have any direct supervisor beyond the Commissioner (or presumably they would have been informed/called when he was kidnapped in Night Witch).

· How do “Hedge Witches” practise magic; how does it differ from formal Newtonian magic and will we get to meet any? Are “Hedge Wizards” simply rusticated Newtonian wizards, or do they also have informally-developed skillz?
Per the one we meet in Black Mould: hedge witches and wizards have informally-developed skills rather than just being rusticated Folly wizards, but how close their magic is to the style Peter is learning, it’s hard to say (because it was a comic.) Others are probably from the female tradition, ex-Newtonian wizards, etc – it’s a mixed group.

· How old is Postmartin, exactly (Peter thinks he looks older and frailer than his Dad, who’s in his 70s, but that’s just his guess)? How did he get that job, and is he ‘just’ a civilian affiliate, like Walid, or something else? Who does he answer to, and what happens if/when he needs replacing? What’s his twitter handle?!
Postmartin served during the Korean War, so must have been born between 1928 and 1936 (per @sparrow-wings) - he’s currently in his 80s, as it’s late 2015 in current book time. His Twitter handle might be “dyingforafag” (who Molly is chatting to in Body Work).

· What sort of experiments were the Nazis doing with vampires? (Do we want to know? Proooooooooooobably not.) and Can the Rivers be killed, if they’re badly injured enough far enough away from their river? What happens then?
We found out in Lies Sleeping you can use ‘tinned vampires’ to kill and hurt genii locorum and discomfit practitioners, so that’s…you know…fine. Rivers can definitely be killed in general, c.f. the former Lugg whom the Methodists got to. It’s only functional immortality.

· What’s the deal with Mr. Punch when Peter’s leaving London at the beginning of Foxglove Summer? Is he coming back? Is it only Peter who senses him? If so, why? and How are Lesley and Punch connected? And What powers does Lesley have now aside from face-changing, if any?
Martin Chorley was trying to murder Punch, who was a god of chaos and vengeance, in order to 1) gain magical power 2) ????? 3) glorious white supremacy. Lesley agreed to help Chorley to get back at Punch, but may still have some connection to him, having survived possession by him; she certainly has magical powers of her own now, being able to change her face at will. They wanted Punch powered up so he’d be a better source of magic when taken down.
Punch was still pinned to London Bridge, but was freed by Peter. He can be talked down by his daughter Walbrook, but for better or worse, he’s out and a player in London’s magical ecosystem. Let’s hope Peter’s right and he plays an important role in it.

· How and why did Isis become immortal, since just marrying a River doesn’t appear to do the trick?
Kelly tells Tobi Winter in The October Man that sometimes the partners/spouses/better halves of Rivers do just pick up immortality, although even she as an elder River doesn’t know exactly how or why that happens. Probably it’s what happened to Isis. Why it hasn’t happened to George McAlister is an open question.

· What does it mean that Michael Cheung is ‘the new guy in Chinatown’? and Is there something going on with Guleed (PLEASE NO) or is she just picking up things about the demi-monde via her friendship with Bev (…and others)?
Michael Cheung is the latest of a long line of people who have responsibility for any magical shenanigans in London’s Chinatown, so 1) the Folly/Nightingale don’t have to worry about it and 2) Chinatown doesn’t have to be offended by their attempts to worry about it. He’s dating Guleed and teaching her cool martial arts magic. Whether she has other demi-monde contacts is not yet clear.

· Who is Chorley’s mole within the Met?
Probably not Seawoll, Stephanopoulos, Richard Folsom, Guleed, or Carey, due to the security practices put in place during Operation Jennifer. But if not any of them….then who?

· How/why the fox knows about [Skygarden and Chorley], (and why it would tell Abigail)
According to Abigail, the talking foxes view themselves as secret agents, and someone like Chorley would naturally draw their attention. Why they do so and who they think they should be reporting to is still unclear (but may be elucidated in the Abigail novella).

STILL BURIED IN THE SHED SOMEWHERE:

· What about the paintings of Molly and a blue-eyed elderly man who looks like Nightingale that Peter found in the coach house?

· Are there really werewolves or just creepy magic trackers called werewolves? (I’m waiting for them to turn up.)

· Why does Fleet have a captain of dogs? What do her dogs do? (Is this related to the werewolves? Were-dogs?)

· What’s the actual connection between Wheatcroft, FM1 (Woodville-Gentle, if that’s him) and FM2? Did he train them both, or did W-G train FM2?
NB: Unlikely to be directly answered now Chorley is dead.

· What’s up with Abigail’s apparently useless protection charm?

· Is there a special reason that Nightingale is called The Nightingale? (+ is he strong/good at magic because of hard work or something else.)

· People I’d like to know more about: Nightingale’s uncle, David Mellenby, Nightingale’s family.

· How much do senior officers in the Met really know about the Folly/Nightingale/magic? Is it well-known that Nightingale has been running the Folly since the 1940s?

· How did Nightingale learn the language Father Thames speaks?

· How much does Nightingale and/or Walid know/suspect about the deaging thing? How much of this aren’t he/they telling Peter?

· How did Walid and Nightingale meet?

· Are there aliens?

· Was the 1911 decrease of odd magical activity in Herefordshire linked to Molly?

· Why does Seawoll dislike Nightingale so viscerally?

· Did Peter really drop architecture because of his draughtsmanship or was it something else? Is it related to why his chemistry teacher wrote that letter to the newspaper?

· How active is the ex-wizard grapevine, really? Is the FM connected to it at all?

· What was the Faceless Man actually planning on doing with his Crossrail lair? Why build it so close to the Folly?

· What happens if one river tries to userp, unseat or in any way properly fight another? Are the results ‘mythic’?

· Was Emma Wall really a waste of space? As a character she is a bit of a smoking gun - red herring, or something else? She was living next door to our two, and *in* one of the flats where… stuff was being put. Any happily waltzed out on d-day. Peter never really got a chance to speak to her - but Lesley did, and was the one to dismiss her from suspicion. Which is suspicious (to me)!

· Although we found out after that he’s been around for much longer, Nightingale said that Father Thames was definitely the same person in 1914. So presumably they met then… In what circumstances?

· Are fae genetically different to other humans? Are they human? What about changelings (like Zoe in FS) - and will she get in contact with Dr Walid?

· What did Lesley say to her family about what happened to her face? Do they know about magic?

· Just how much of an age gap is there between Peter’s parents?

· Why did the Virtuous Men blame the British for Ettersberg? What was the agreement between them that Nightingale was referring to?

· Postmartin made a show of wanting to get Peter alone to have a ”big” talk with him. Yet, the discussion we, the readers have witnessed was relatively small. Nightingale only arrived to The Eagle and the Child an hour later. What was said between Postmartin and Peter in the meantime?

· Peter’s narration at certain points (like Chapter 14 in Moon Over Soho) waivers between past and present tense, and he is occasionally referring to events in (presumably) later books. Just what point in the future is Peter actually narrating these books?

· When Nightingale got an infection in MoS, how did Walid know? Did Molly phone him and do her Nightingale’s being an idiot silence, or was he just visiting anyway?

· What does Molly do on her days off?

· When Nightingale doesn’t go to Peter’s parents’ for Christmas, did his not wanting to leave Molly excuse have any truth to it, or did he just say that so Peter didn’t realise that Nightingale planned to work (and so Peter didn’t feel he should be missing his own Christmas to help)/ he had a reasonable excuse to not go to Peter’s family’s Christmas celebrations?

· (tongue-in-cheek) What would have happened if Peter and Lesley had given Molly a Heston Blumenthal cookbook?

· What’s the deal with Lady Helena (and Caroline) - are they connected to Chorley and/or Lesley’s face being healed?

· What does Caroline want to escape from? What was she doing posing as a cleaning lady at the County Gard offices?

· What do the Virginian Gentlemen want, and how connected are they with the American government?

· What’s their specific definition of a ‘shade’?

· When and how did MI5 learn about magic, and do they have any practitioners of their own?

· Was Christina Chorley a practitioner, possessed, or something else?

· Who sold and bought Molly, Foxglove, 'Charlotte' (the Pale Nanny), and 'Alice' (the Pale Lady)? Where were Foxglove, Charlotte, and Alice before they were put in the oubliette and rescued by Woodville-Gentle and then Chorley? Where is the fifth girl who was with them before they were split up?

· Is it important that Walbrook is also Isis of London? Are there any other Isis-figures in the UK and Europe (aside from Isis who is married to Oxley, and is probably an Isis of Oxford?)

· Are there any other non-Mama-Thames tidal Rivers? What exactly is Lea’s relationship with Mama Thames, as they see it?

· What WAS Chorley's master plan, aside from ‘become Merlin, Profit!’?

· How is the Difference Engine linked to magic, and why?
NB: May be answered in ‘False Value’, which is about computing to some degree

· Who or what is killing talking foxes in Cheshire (as Peter discovers in The Furthest Station)? Why?