Whispers Under Ground

  I sighed and pointed at a table at the other end of the room. ‘Go and sit over there,’ I said,

  ‘Do I have to?’ he asked.

  ‘This is grown-up stuff,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a cake,’ I said.

  He sat up like a small dog. ‘Really?’

  ‘If you go sit over there,’ I said, and he did. I turned to Reynolds. ‘I can see why you consider him a suspect. What kind of incidents?’

  ‘Narcotics,’ she said. ‘He was arrested twice for possession but the charges were dropped.’

  I bet they were, I thought.

  ‘He did some drugs at university,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that what it’s for?’

  ‘Some people hold themselves to a higher standard,’ she said primly. ‘Even while at college.’

  ‘Have you ever been outside America?’ I asked.

  ‘How is that relevant?’

  ‘I’m just curious,’ I said. ‘Is this your first time abroad?’

  ‘Do you think I’m “unsophisticated”, is that it?’ she asked.

  So, yeah, I thought. First time abroad.

  ‘I’m curious as to why they chose you for the assignment,’ I said.

  ‘I’m known to the senator and his family,’ she said. ‘My superiors felt that it would be helpful if the senator had a friendly face on the ground during the investigation – given the senator’s background and your country’s history.’

  ‘Really, which bit?’ I asked.

  ‘Ireland,’ said Reynolds. ‘In his early career he was vocal in his condemnation of the occupation and British human rights abuses. He was worried that the British police might allow their investigation to be prejudiced because of those positions.’

  I wondered whether a father, upon learning of his son’s death, would really be so self-centred as to think that. Or whether a canny politician might use any position he could to bolster the investigation. If it was politics, it wasn’t my problem – I could safely kick that up to them that are paid to deal with such matters. Sometimes a rigid command hierarchy is your friend. But Seawoll would want a heads-up about the Irish connection, just in case CTC hadn’t bothered to tell him. It never hurts to curry favour with the boss, I thought.

  ‘I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Ireland,’ I said. ‘The murder I mean.’

  ‘What about Ryan Carroll?’ she asked.

  She had been following me after all, and she wasn’t beyond lying to me when she was pretending to come clean – useful to know.

  ‘What about him?’ I wondered if Reynolds’ conversation always ricocheted around its subject like a pinball or whether this was the jet lag talking. I started feeling increasingly knackered just looking at her.

  ‘Is he a suspect?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘A person of interest?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why did you go and interview him?’

  Because some of his ‘pieces’ or whatever you call them are partially constructed with something so strongly imbued with a vestigium that members of the public backed away without knowing why, was what I didn’t say.

  ‘James Gallagher was a fan,’ I said. ‘I was just there to see if there’d been any contact. Which there wasn’t, I might add.’

  ‘Just that?’ she asked. ‘I’d say that was a strange use of your time during the early stages of an investigation.’

  ‘Agent Reynolds,’ I said. ‘I’m just a PC in plain clothes, I’m not even officially a detective yet and about as junior as it is possible to be in the Murder Team without still being at school.’

  ‘Just a lowly constable?’

  ‘That’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Sure you are,’ she said.

  She knew something. That’s the trouble with detectives – they’re suspicious bastards. But she didn’t know the whys and wherefores, and she hadn’t even hinted that she knew about the weirder shores of policing.

  ‘Go get some sleep,’ I said. ‘But if I was you I’d call Kittredge first and put him out of his misery.’

  ‘And what do think I should tell him?’

  ‘Tell him you fell asleep in your car – jet lag.’

  ‘Hardly the image the bureau likes to project,’ she said.

  ‘What do you care what Kittredge thinks?’ I said. ‘Where’re you staying?’

  ‘Holiday Inn,’ said Reynolds and pulled a card out of her pocket and squinted at it. ‘Earls Court.’

  ‘Have you got your own transport?’

  ‘A rental,’ she said. Of course she had – how else had she followed me?

  ‘Will you be all right driving in this snow?’

  She found that hilarious. ‘This isn’t snow,’ she said. ‘Where I’m from you know you have snow when you can’t find your car the next morning.’

  I was tempted to drop Zach at the Turning Point shelter or even bang him up again at Belgravia, if only I could have trusted him to keep his mouth shut. But in the end I gave up and took him back to the Folly. Despite the cold I had to leave the window open to combat the tramp smell of Zach’s bag. At one point I seriously considered stopping and making him open it so I could check whether it was full of body parts.

  ‘Where the fuck are we?’ asked Zach as I pulled into the coach house and parked beside the Jag. ‘And whose is that?’

  ‘My governor’s,’ I said. ‘Don’t even look at it.’

  ‘That’s a Mark 2,’ he said.

  ‘You’re still looking at it,’ I said. ‘I told you not to.’

  With a last lingering gaze at the Jag, Zach followed me out of the coach house and across the courtyard to the rear door of the Folly. I’d considered letting him crash in the coach house, but then I considered what was likely to happen if I left Zach alone with six grand’s worth of portable electronics – my personal six grand at that.

  I opened the back door and ushered him in – watching him closely as he crossed the threshold, I’d been told once that the protections around the Folly were ‘inimical’ to certain people but Zach didn’t react at all. The back hallway is just a short corridor lined with brass hooks for the hanging of sou’westers, oilskins, capes and other archaic forms of outdoor apparel.

  ‘You know this is the weirdest nick I’ve ever been in,’ he said.

  As we stepped into the main atrium Molly came gliding out to meet us in what would have been a much more sinister fashion had Toby not been dancing and yapping excitedly around her skirts at the same time.

  Even so, Zach took one look at her and promptly hid behind me.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he hissed in my ear.

  ‘This is Molly,’ I said. ‘Molly – this is Zach who will be staying overnight. Can he use the room next to mine?’

  Molly gave me a long stare and then inclined her head at me, exactly the way Ziggy the dog had, before gliding off towards the stairs. Possibly to put fresh linen on the guest bed or possibly to sharpen her meat cleavers – it’s hard to tell with Molly.

  Toby had stopped yapping and instead snuffled at Zach’s heels as he made his way across the atrium towards the podium where we keep The Book, well not The Book exactly but a really good late eighteenth-century imprint of The Book open to the title page.

  He read the title out loud: ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis.’ With the erroneous soft ‘c’ sound in principia and magicis – Pliny the Elder would have been pissed. I know it annoyed Nightingale when I did it.

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he said and turned to point an accusing finger. ‘You can’t be part of this, you’re … common. This is the Folly, this place is strictly toffs and monsters.’

  ‘What can I say,’ I said. ‘Standards have been falling lately.’

  ‘The bloody Isaacs,’ he said. ‘I should have taken my chances with the Nolan brothers.’

  I wondered if Nightingale knew we had a nickname. I also wondered how come someone like Zachary Palmer k
new what it was.

  ‘So what are you then?’ I asked – it had to be worth a try.

  ‘My dad was a fairy,’ said Zach. ‘And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.’

  Wednesday

  10

  Russell Square

  It was the yelling that woke me up the next morning. I rolled out of my bed, grabbed my extendable baton and was out the door before I was fully awake. All those nights being terrorised by Molly had obviously paid off. It was still early enough to be dark, so the first thing I did was hit the hallway lights.

  I stood there in my boxers chilling quickly in the winter air thinking that maybe it had been a nightmare, when the next door along slammed open and Zach ran out wearing nothing but a pair of purple Y-fronts and swearing at the top of his voice. He saw me and waved something in my face.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said.

  It was his filthy gym bag, the one that had stunk up my car, only now it was marvellously clean, the frayed seams had been stitched and reinforced with leather and the Adidas logo touched up with blue thread. Angrily he yanked it open to display the clean and neatly folded clothes inside within a waft of lemon and wildflowers. Only one person I know folds clothes to that level of precision.

  ‘Molly must have cleaned it,’ I said.

  ‘No shit,’ he said. ‘She didn’t have no right. It’s my stuff.’

  ‘Smells nice though,’ I said.

  He opened his mouth to say something but it snapped shut when Lesley came running around the corner carrying her baton in one hand and a heavy-duty torch in the other. She’d taken the time to fasten on her mask, but nothing else, and was dressed in a pair of skimpy red and white polka dot low-rise shorts and a sleeveless thermal vest under which her breasts bounced distractingly. Me and Zach both stared like a pair of teenagers, but I managed to drag my eyes back up to her mask before she could hit me with the baton.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Zach brightly.

  I introduced Zach to Lesley and gave her the potted history. ‘I couldn’t leave him in the snow,’ I said. She told us to stop making so much noise and that she was going back to bed.

  As she walked away I realised I’d forgotten just how shapely her thighs were and how beautiful the dimples that formed in her buttocks when she walked.

  Me and Zach both watched in rapt silence until she’d gone round the corner.

  ‘That was amazing,’ said Zach.

  ‘Yes she is,’ I said.

  ‘So,’ said Zach. ‘Are you two fucking?’

  I glared at him.

  ‘Does that mean you’re not?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s—’

  ‘Sex on legs,’ said Zach and took a moment to sniff his armpit. Apparently satisfied, he squared his shoulders, twanged the elasticated waist on his Y-fronts and said, ‘Good. There’s nothing like an early start.’ He made to follow Lesley but I stopped him with a hand on the chest. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, bruv,’ he said. ‘Make up your mind.’

  ‘Did you not notice …’ I hesitated, ‘the injuries?’

  ‘Some of us look beyond the superficial,’ said Zach.

  ‘Some of us look beyond someone’s tits,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Did you see that bum?’

  ‘Do you want me to smack you?’

  ‘Hey,’ said Zach taking a step back. ‘Just say you’re interested and I won’t give her another thought. Maybe a couple of other thoughts, difficult not to, given the circumstances. Come on, even you can’t be that blind.’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ I said.

  ‘I’m giving you a week on account of the inalienable laws of hospitality,’ he said. ‘Then I’m going to consider it an open field – okay?’

  It seemed a safe bet that something else would have caught Zach’s attention by then. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’

  Zach slapped his six-pack and looked around. ‘Now that we’re up,’ he said. ‘What do we do about breakfast?’

  ‘In this establishment,’ I said. ‘We dress for breakfast.’

  Nightingale certainly did, his only concession to informality being that he left the top button of his shirt undone and draped his blazer over the back of his chair. He was addressing his toast and marmalade when I showed Zach, currently sweet-smelling and freshly laundered thanks to Molly, into the breakfast room. Nightingale gave me a quizzical look as Zach fell upon the line of silver salvers with cries of glee and started piling up his plate with kippers, scrambled egg, kedgeree, mushrooms, tomatoes, fried bread and devilled kidneys. I sat down and started pouring coffee.

  ‘Zachary Palmer,’ I said.

  ‘The late James Gallagher’s lodger,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley filled me in with the case history last night during the rugby.’

  ‘He has a secret or so he says,’ I said.

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Nightingale. ‘Demi-fae?’

  ‘If that means half fairy – then yeah,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

  Nightingale paused for a bite of toast. ‘I think I knew his father,’ he said. ‘Or possibly his grandfather – it’s never easy to tell with fae.’

  ‘You haven’t taught me about fae yet,’ I said. ‘What are they exactly?’

  ‘They’re not anything exactly,’ said Nightingale. ‘Fae is just a term like foreigner or barbarian, it basically means people that are not entirely human.’

  I glanced over at where Zach had given up trying to pile everything on one plate and had resorted to using two. Toby had sidled up to sit within easy sausage-catching range, just in case.

  ‘Like the Rivers?’ I asked.

  ‘Less powerful,’ said Nightingale. ‘But more independent. Father Thames could probably flood Oxford if he wanted to, but it would never occur to him to interfere with the natural order to that extent. Fae are capricious, mischievous but no more dangerous than a common cutpurse.’ That last sounded suspiciously like a quote. ‘They’re more frequent in the country than the city.’

  Zach brought his two plates to the table and, after a brief introduction to Nightingale, began to plough through the heaps of food. To eat as much as he did and stay skinny he must burn calories like a racehorse. Was it a fairy thing or within the normal range of human metabolism? I wondered if I could persuade Zach to spend a day being tested by Dr Walid. I was willing to bet he’d never had a demi-fae to experiment on. It would be nice to know whether there was a demonstrable genetic difference, but Dr Walid said that normal human variations were wide enough that you’d need samples from hundreds of subjects to establish that. Thousands if you wanted a statistically significant answer.

  Low sample size – one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile.

  Zach kept his attention on his food while I told Nightingale about James Gallagher’s visit to Powis Square and the vestigium I’d sensed there.

  ‘Sounds like a floating market,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘A nazareth?’ I asked.

  ‘Like a nazareth only for those that live in our world, rather than your average criminal,’ said Nightingale. ‘We used to call them goblin markets.’ He turned to Zach. ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘Not me, guv,’ said Zach. ‘I’m strictly persona non grata amongst them kind of people.’

  ‘Could you find it, though?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Zach. ‘What’s it worth?’

  Nightingale leaned forward and, whip-fast, grabbed Zach’s wrist and twisted it palm up so that Zach had to half rise out of his chair to avoid breaking it.

  ‘You’re in my house, Zachary Palmer, eating at my table, and I don’t care how modern you think you are, I know you know that’s an obligation you can’t avoid.’ He smiled and released Zach’s wrist. ‘I’m not asking you to put yourself at risk, just find us the current location. We’ll do the rest.’

  ‘You only
had to ask,’ said Zach.

  ‘Can you find it by this afternoon?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Course,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to need some readies – for transport, washing some hands, that sort of thing.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Pony,’ said Zach, meaning £500.

  Nightingale pulled a silver money clip from his jacket pocket and peeled off five fifties and handed them to Zach, who disappeared them so fast I didn’t see where they went. He didn’t protest the shortfall, either.

  ‘Let’s take our coffee to the library,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Will you be all right here?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Zach who was already eyeing up the salvers for a return visit.

  ‘One does rather wonder if he will stop before he explodes,’ said Nightingale as we walked along the balcony.

  ‘It’s one of those paradox thingies,’ I said. ‘What happens when the unstoppable cook meets the unfillable stomach?’

  The General Library is where me and Lesley do most of our studying. It’s got a couple of ornate reading desks with angular brass reading lamps and an atmosphere of quiet contemplation that is totally spoiled by the fact that we both have our headphones on when we’re studying.

  Nightingale strode over to the shelves that I’d come to know as the eccentric naturalist section. He tapped his finger along a line of books before pulling one out and inspecting it. ‘Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly is probably the authority,’ he said. ‘How’s your French?’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘I’m barely keeping up with my Latin.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Nightingale and replaced the book. ‘We should get that translated one day.’ He pulled out a second, thinner, volume. ‘Charles Kingsley,’ he said and handed the book to me. It was titled On Fairies and Their Abodes.

  ‘Not as comprehensive as Barbey d’Aurevilly,’ said Nightingale. ‘But reasonably sound, or at least so my tutors assured me when I was at school.’ He sighed. ‘I did prefer things when we all knew what we were doing and why.’

  ‘Before I ran into Zach I ran into Fleet,’ I said. ‘And before I ran into Fleet I ran into a Chinese woman who I’m pretty sure was a practitioner.’