Whispers Under Ground

  ‘It’s terrible,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘And I like to think horrific as well.’

  ‘That too,’ I said which seemed to please him.

  I introduced myself and we shook hands. He had stained fingers and a strong grip.

  ‘Police?’ he asked. ‘Are you here on business?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘The murder of a young art student called James Gallagher.’ Carroll didn’t react.

  ‘Do I know him?’ he asked.

  ‘He was an admirer of yours,’ I said. ‘Was he ever in contact?’

  ‘What was his name again?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘James Gallagher,’ I said. Again not a flicker. I pulled up a headshot on my phone and showed him that.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  This is where, as police, you have to make a decision – do you ask for an alibi or not? Fifty years of detective dramas mean that even the densest member of the public knows what it means when you ask them where they were at a certain time or date. Nobody believes ‘just routine’, even when it’s true. With television broadcast levels of vestigia radiating from his art work I figured Ryan Carroll had to be involved in something but I had no evidence that he’d ever come in contact with James Gallagher. I decided that I would write him up tonight and let Seawoll or Stephanopoulos decide whether they wanted him interviewed. If he was statemented by someone else from the Murder Team then I could pursue the magic angle while he was distracted by that.

  I love it when a plan comes together, especially when it means someone else will do the heavy lifting. I waved my glass at the mannequin in his coat of despair.

  ‘Did you make them yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘With my own little hands,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to make a million,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the plan,’ he said smugly.

  A blonde woman in a blue dress waved at Ryan to get his attention. When she had it, she pointed at her watch.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Constable,’ said Ryan. ‘Duty calls.’ He walked over to the blonde woman who took his arm and pulled him gently back towards the waiting crowd. As they went she fussed at Ryan’s collar and jacket. Manager, I wondered, or better half, or possibly both.

  Most of the patrons gathered around them and I heard the woman launch into what was unmistakably a warm-up speech. I guessed that Ryan Carroll was about to take his bow. I looked at his work again. The question was – did he imbue it with its vestigia or did that come from a found object? And if it did, was Ryan aware of its significance?

  My phone rang – it was Zach.

  ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Why’s that?’

  ‘His old man threw me out of the house,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go.’

  ‘Try Turning Point. They’ve got a big shelter up west,’ I said. ‘You can stay there tonight.’

  ‘You owe me,’ said Zach.

  ‘No I don’t,’ I said. One of the lessons of policing is that everyone has a sad story, including the guy you’ve just arrested for shoving a chip pan in his wife’s face. Obvious chancers like Zach were often way more convincing than those that had real grievances – comes with practice, I suppose.

  ‘I think they’re after me,’ he added.

  ‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

  There was a round of applause from the crowd.

  ‘If you pick me up I’ll tell you,’ he said.

  Shit, I thought. If I ignored him and he turned up dead I’d be facing some questions from Seawoll and a ton of paperwork.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked, reluctantly.

  ‘Shepherd’s Bush – near the market.’

  ‘Get on the tube and meet me at Southwark.’

  ‘I can’t do the tube,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe. You’re going to have to meet me here.’

  I asked him which end of the market and headed for the exit. As I traversed the empty hallway I saw Ziggy the dog sitting alertly on his haunches by the door to the gift shop. He looked at me, tilted his head to one side and then tracked me all the way out.

  9

  Shepherd’s Bush Market

  My airwave was squawking about a fatac, a fatal accident, at Hyde Park Corner so once I was across the river I swung north and went via Marylebone. The Westway was eerily deserted as I climbed onto the elevated section and it seemed like I could have reached up and brushed the bottom of the clouds. The snowflakes whipped through the white beam of my headlights and over my bonnet like streamers in a wind tunnel. It’s the closest I’d ever come to driving in a blizzard and yet when I got on the slip road at the White City turnoff, I found myself gliding into a world of pale stillness.

  It was only after I rounded Holland Park roundabout and headed through Shepherd’s Bush that I started to see people again. Pedestrians were walking gingerly along the pavements, shops were open and idiots who shouldn’t be driving in adverse conditions were forcing me to drop my speed to just over twenty.

  Shepherd’s Bush Market is an elevated station and as I approached the bridge where the tracks crossed the road I started to look out for Zach. I pulled over by the locked battleship-grey gates of the market and got out. I turned to look as headlights approached, but the car, a decomposing early model Nissan Micra, surfed by on the road slush.

  If, like me, you’ve spent two years as a PCSO and another two as a PC patrolling central London in the late evenings, you become something of a connoisseur of street violence. You learn to differentiate the bantam posturing of drunks or the shrieking huddle of a girls-night-out gone south from the ugly shoving of a steaming gang and the meaty, strangely quiet, crunch that indicates an intense desire by one human being to do your actual bodily harm to another.

  I heard a grunt, a smack, a whimper and before I thought about it I had my extendable baton out and was across the road and heading for the shadows around the alley opposite the market. There were two of them, bulky shapes in cold weather jackets, laying into a third person who was hunched up in the snow.

  ‘Oi,’ I shouted. ‘Police! What do you think you’re doing?’ It’s traditional.

  They turned and stared as I ran at them – there was one big one and one skinny, as is also traditional. I recognised the skinny one. It was Kevin bloody Nolan. He would have bolted, except that his big friend was made of sterner stuff.

  The thing about being the police is that to do the job properly part of you has to enjoy getting stuck in. And the thing about members of the public, like the big idiot with Kevin Nolan who started squaring up to me, is that they expect there to be at least some kind of ritual exchange of insults before you get down to it. Something I had no intention of indulging in.

  The big one had just enough time to register that I wasn’t going to stop when I drove my shoulder into his chest. He staggered backwards and tripped over the cowering man behind him. As he went down, bellowing, I swiped Kevin bloody Nolan’s thigh with my baton hard enough to give him a dead leg. Then I just reached out and shoved him off his feet.

  ‘You bastard,’ said the big man as he tried to get up.

  ‘Stay down or I’ll break your fucking arms,’ I said and then thought. Shit, I only have one set of handcuffs. Luckily the big man lay down again.

  ‘Are you really the police?’ he asked almost plaintively.

  ‘Ask your mate Kevin,’ I said.

  The big man sighed. ‘You stupid cunt,’ he said, but he was talking to Kevin. ‘You utter, utter moron.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was going to be here,’ said Kevin.

  ‘Just keep your gob shut,’ said the big man.

  I pushed his legs off the figure in the snow who rolled over and grinned up at me – it was Zach. What a surprise.

  ‘You know I was really hoping for a St Bernard,’ he said as he sat up.

  ‘But what you’re asking for is a smacking,’ I said.

  I reached for my phone and was about to switch it on and
call for backup when Zach tapped me on the leg and pointed up the alley. ‘Look out,’ he said.

  A figure came running towards us and I headed to block them.

  ‘Get back,’ I yelled and the figure reached for a gun.

  There’s something unmistakable about the way someone reaches for a concealed weapon. The smooth way he pulled back his jacket with one hand while the other hand dipped under his armpit for the butt of the firearm. I didn’t give him a chance to finish the movement – I made the formae in my head, flung out my left hand, still holding my phone, and shouted, much louder than I’m supposed to, ‘Impello palma.’

  Nightingale can put a fireball through ten centimetres of steel armour and I can singe my way through a paper target nine times out of ten but really, in the interests of community policing, it’s better to have something a bit less lethal in your armoury. I’d used impello in anger twice and managed to seriously injure one suspect and kill the second. More importantly, from Nightingale’s point of view, I was twisting the forma out of shape by making a sort of second off-the-cuff forma and ramming it into the back of the first. Turpis vox, he called it, the unseen word, and it was a classic apprentice’s error.

  ‘You think you’re being innovative,’ Nightingale had said. ‘But what you’re doing is distorting the forma. If you get into the habit of doing that then those formae won’t integrate properly when you start combining them with other formae to create proper spells.’

  I made the mistake of saying that the couple of spells I could do seemed to work well enough, which made him sigh and say, ‘Peter you’re still learning first- and second-order spells. Spells that are designed to be easy and forgiving and that’s why you learn them first. Once you start getting to the higher-order spells there’s no margin for error – if you haven’t mastered the formae they’ll go wrong or backfire in unpredictable ways.’

  ‘You’ve never shown me a high-order spell,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ said Nightingale. ‘We must rectify that.’ He took a deep breath and then, with a curiously theatrical wave of his hand, he spoke a long spell that was at least eight formae long.

  I pointed out that nothing had happened, which prompted Nightingale to give me one of his rare smiles.

  ‘Look up,’ he said.

  I did and found that above my head a small cloud, about as wide as a tea tray, was gathering. It looked like a compact mass of thick steam and once it finished growing, raindrops began to fall on my upturned face.

  I ducked out from under it and it followed me. It wasn’t very fast – you could stay ahead of it with a brisk walking pace, but as soon as you stopped it would drift to a halt overhead and bring a little bit of the English summer to a personal space near you.

  I asked Nightingale what on Earth the spell was for. He said it was a favourite of one of his masters at school. ‘At the time I thought he seemed inordinately fond of it, though,’ said Nightingale, as he watched me dodge around the atrium. ‘Although I must say I’m beginning to appreciate its appeal now.’

  According to my stopwatch, the spell lasted thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds.

  Nightingale did relent and teach me an additional forma, palma, which allowed me to give people a nice evenly spread, hopefully non-lethal smack. I had Nightingale test it on me on the firing range – it feels exactly like running into a glass door.

  With a high-pitched grunt the figure went down on his back in the snow. I reached him just as he reached again into his jacket, so I smacked him hard on the wrist. ‘He’ yelped in pain and I realised it was a woman and then I saw her face and recognised her. It was Agent Reynolds.

  She looked up at me with bewilderment.

  I heard a scuffling sound behind me and Zach yelled, ‘They’re getting away.’

  Good, I thought, one less thing to worry about, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t find Kevin Nolan whenever I needed to. ‘Let them go,’ I said.

  I couldn’t leave Reynolds lying on her back in the snow, with a possible concussion and/or a broken wrist. I told Zach to stay close and walked back to find that she was sitting up and cradling her wrist.

  ‘You hit me,’ she said.

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ I said and crouched down in front of her and tried to see if her eyes were unfocused. ‘You must have slipped on some ice and gone down on your back.’

  ‘You hit me on the wrist,’ she said.

  ‘You were reaching for a weapon,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not carrying a weapon,’ she opened her jacket to prove it.

  ‘Then what were you reaching for?’ I asked.

  She looked away. I understood it had been an automatic reaction just like mine.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said and felt her nose. ‘If I fell on my back, why does my face hurt?’

  ‘Have you got a headache?’ I asked. ‘Are you feeling dizzy?’

  ‘I’m just fine, coach,’ she said and pushed herself to her feet. ‘You can put me back in the game.’ She spotted Zach and took a step towards him. ‘You,’ she said with an excellent command voice. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Oi,’ I said. ‘None of that. Why were you following me?’

  ‘What makes you think I was following you?’ she asked.

  I pushed the jury-rigged power switch on my phone to the on position, gave thanks it had been off when I’d done the spell, and waited impatiently while it jingled at me cheerily and wasted my time with a hello graphic.

  ‘Who are you calling?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m calling Kittredge,’ I said. ‘Your liaison.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘If I explain, will you leave him out of it?’

  ‘No promises,’ I said. ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down.’

  We ended up, as is traditional, in a kebab shop just the other side of the bridge where I could keep an eye on my car. Although first we had to scuff about in the snow looking for Zach’s repulsive sports bag, which we finally located via its smell. Once inside I forked out for a doner and chips for Zach and a mixed shish kebab for myself. Reynolds seemed appalled by the whole notion of a rotating lamb roast and stuck with a diet coke. Maybe she was worried about contracting that insidious European E. coli. I had a coffee. Usually the coffee in kebab shops is dire but I believe the guy on the counter made me for a cop, so I got something blacker and stronger than usual. Late-night kebab shops fulfil a very particular ecological niche – that of feeding stations for people spilling out of the pubs and clubs. Since the clientele tends to be pissed young men who have utterly failed to pull that night, the staff are always pleased to have the police hanging about.

  Under the harsh fluorescent light I saw that the roots of Agent Reynolds’ hair were auburn. She caught me looking and jammed her black knit hat back on her head.

  ‘How come you dye your hair?’ I asked.

  ‘It makes me less conspicuous,’ she said.

  ‘For undercover work?’

  ‘Just for everyday,’ she said. ‘I want the witnesses talking to the agent not the redhead.’

  ‘Why were you following me?’ I asked.

  ‘I wasn’t following you,’ she said. ‘I was following Mr Palmer.’

  ‘What have I done?’ asked Zach, but Agent Reynolds sensibly ignored him.

  ‘He was your best suspect,’ she said. ‘And not only did you just let him go, you let him right back into the victim’s home.’

  ‘I lived there too, you know,’ said Zach.

  ‘It was his registered address,’ I said.

  ‘Yes his polling address,’ said Agent Reynolds. ‘A status you can earn by filling in a single form once a year without providing any significant identification whatsoever. I’m amazed your voting security is so lax.’

  ‘Not as amazed as I am that Zach’s registered to vote,’ I said. ‘Who do you vote for?’

  ‘The Greens,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think this is funny?’ she asked and her voice was hoarse. Even if she’d got some sleep on the plane over she had
to be pushing twenty-four hours without by now. ‘Is it because the victim is an American citizen? Do you find the murder of American citizens funny?’

  I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they’re that strung out. I took a gulp of my coffee to cover my hesitation.

  ‘What makes you think he’s involved?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s a criminal,’ she said.

  ‘We did him for possession,’ I said. ‘Murder would be a bit of a step up.’

  ‘Not in my experience,’ she said. ‘James Gallagher was his meal ticket. Perhaps James got tired of being freeloaded on.’

  ‘I’m sitting right here, you know,’ said Zach.

  ‘I’m trying to forget it,’ said Reynolds.

  ‘He has an alibi,’ I said.

  ‘Not a direct one,’ she said. ‘There could be a way out of the back that goes through a blind spot.’

  Did she think we were amateurs? Stephanopoulos would have spent most of yesterday trying to break Zach’s alibi and that included the notion of a back way out.

  ‘Is it usual for FBI agents to exceed their authority in this way?’ I asked.

  ‘The FBI is legally responsible to investigate crimes committed against American Citizens in foreign countries,’ she said, her eyes fixed on some abstract spot to the left of my head.

  ‘But you don’t really, do you?’ I said. ‘Not that it wouldn’t have been nice to have a bit of extra manpower, especially for that one assault that we had in Soho. Young man got a crowbar in the face, he was American, no sign of the FBI then.’

  She shrugged. ‘His father probably wasn’t a senator.’

  ‘Apart from the security aspect,’ I said, ‘what are they really worried about?’

  ‘His father is in a position of moral authority,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t serve any purpose to have him compromised by something his son may have done.’

  ‘What do you think his son may have done?’

  ‘There were incidents while he was at college,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of incidents?’ asked Zach before I could.