Captain Odo Mere

One of the masters of London’s river watches, remembered because the city knows the Thames cannot be policed like an inland street, and a familiar figure too in the capital’s guarded-mast culture.

Captain Odo Mere is one of the masters of the river watches, the force London keeps for the water rather than the wards. Its work is peculiar to the Thames: bridge approaches, ferry licences, corpse traffic, contraband, flood panic, and the stairs where cargo and crime overlap. The river watch has a culture distinct from ordinary ward policing, and Mere is one of the reasons the city remembers the distinction.

He is also a recurring name in the capital’s secret sky, heard in mast culture, aerial gossip and the instructional copy by which London explains height to itself. A river officer equally at ease on a guarded mast is unusual, and he is regarded in both worlds as slightly foreign and decidedly useful.

His river-watch notes, written from Southwark in 4621 A.C., set out a practical theory of policing by rumour: the safest district is not the one without rumours, but the one whose rumours still arrive in time to be tested. He is said to cultivate ferrymen, stair-keepers and mudlarks accordingly, and to prefer a warning at dusk to a report at dawn. On the water he is known at a distance by the tall hat and dark shades he wears in all weathers.

Companies meet him when their business crosses the river at the wrong hour, when something comes out of the Thames that ought not to have been in it, or when they have heard a rumour he would like to test before it grows teeth.

In person

Mere is tall, athletic and wiry, a little under forty, with copper-brown hair worn to the shoulder and usually tied back badly, a short pointed beard, broad cheekbones and a visibly broken nose. His sea-green eyes are mostly hidden behind dark shades, three small brass rings hang in one ear, and his skin is burned by river wind. He wears the dark coat of the River Watch, gloves and a tall black hat, and goes armed with a long carbine and a boarding sabre, brass optics at hand.