Whispers Under Ground

by Ben Aaronovitch

‘All the FBI has to do is ask Kittredge and he’d ask us,’ I said.

  ‘But we might not tell Kittredge,’ said Lesley. ‘Not to mention we know Agent Reynolds bent the rules already by following you.’

  Lesley went quiet and I paused with the coffee halfway to my lips.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said.

  ‘Why do I have to do it?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Because I went out last time,’ I said. ‘And I’m still freezing.’

  Lesley snarled but she got out of the car and while I finished my coffee she checked for bugs. She was back inside in less than two minutes with another identical GPS tracker.

  ‘Voilà,’ she said and dropped it into my palm. The casing was freezing – it must have been attached for ages.

  ‘Agent Reynolds,’ I said.

  ‘Or somebody else,’ said Lesley. ‘That we don’t know about.’

  I twirled the rectangular box in my hand. If it had been set up like ours, then it was probably programmed to send a signal if we started moving. Chances were if I deactivated it now the operator wouldn’t notice until she, or possibly a mysterious they, pinged it to check its operating status.

  ‘Should I fry it?’ I asked Lesley.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Because if we destroy it they’ll know we know but if we keep it we have the option of feeding whoever it is false information. We could put the tracker on a decoy vehicle and send them on a wild goose chase or we could use it to set up a sting—’

  Lesley snorted.

  ‘We’re the police,’ she said. ‘Remember? We’re not spies, we’re not undercover and we’re conducting a legitimate investigation that’s been authorised at ACPO level. We want them to follow us so we can identify them, call for backup and arrest them. Once we have them in the interview room we’ll be able to tell who they are by what kind of lawyer turns up.’

  ‘My way’s more fun,’ I said.

  ‘Your way’s more complicated,’ said Lesley. She dug her finger under the edge of her mask where it itched. ‘I miss being a proper copper,’ she said.

  ‘Take it off,’ I said. ‘No one’s going to see you here.’

  ‘Apart from you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m getting used to it,’ I said. ‘It’s starting to become your real face.’

  ‘I don’t want it to become my real face,’ hissed Lesley.

  I replaced the tracker under the Asbo and we sat in stony silence while the main Nolan and Sons vans were loaded up and driven away. Finally Kevin did his rounds and returned, surprisingly, not with the bin bags of leftovers but with neatly loaded pallets on a forklift. His customers were truly getting the good stuff today. I jumped out of the Asbo, snapped some pictures with the long lens and dived back in again.

  ‘Turn the tracker on,’ I said.

  Lesley opened the laptop and tilted it to show me that the device was already activated and sending a signal every five seconds. I backed the Asbo out of its parking space and headed for the exit ramp. Using a tracker means you don’t have to crowd your target, but you don’t want to be too far away in case they suddenly do something interesting.

  Dawn brought a clear sky of dirty blue and illuminated a landscape of pockmarked snow and icy slush. Lesley and I instinctively hunched down into our seats as Kevin Nolan’s Transit lurched past. We waited until we were sure we knew which way he was turning on Nine Elms, and then we followed.

  It was all very civilised, but I still would’ve liked to have a pickaxe handle in the back seat – just for tradition’s sake, you understand.

  ‘Cultural weapon,’ I said out loud.

  ‘What?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘If the police had a cultural weapon,’ I said. ‘Like a claymore or an assegai – it would be a pickaxe handle.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something more useful,’ said Lesley. ‘And keep your eyes open for a car with diplomatic plates.’

  We were coming up on Chelsea Bridge, which for all its blue and white painted carriage lamp charm is only three lanes wide – two if you don’t count the bus lane. A good choke point to spot a tail.

  All diplomatic cars have distinctive plates which indicate status and nationality, for the ease and convenience of terrorists and potential kidnappers.

  I spotted a late-model dark blue Mercedes S class with a D plate and read the code out.

  ‘Sierra Leone,’ said Lesley and I felt a little borrowed patriotic tug.

  ‘Have you memorised all of these?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Lesley. ‘There’s a list on Wikipedia.’

  ‘What’s the code for the US then?’ I asked.

  ‘270 to 274,’ said Lesley.

  ‘She’s not going to use an embassy car,’ I said. ‘Is she? I mean talk about conspicuous.’

  Lesley felt that I had failed to understand the full implications of using a tracking device, i.e.: you can hang back far enough to be inconspicuous so it doesn’t matter what plates you have. And if she did have diplo plates she wouldn’t have to pay congestion charge or parking tickets and it would make it fucking hard to arrest her.

  ‘Does she have diplomatic immunity?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We could ask Kittredge.’

  ‘Or we could phone Kittredge now and make it his problem,’ said Lesley. She checked the laptop. ‘Where the fuck is he going?’ she said and tilted the screen so I could see it again – the little dots marking Kevin Nolan’s Transit were heading into Knightsbridge.

  Suddenly a luxury car with D plates would have blended in perfectly.

  ‘Who round here is going to want a van full of dodgy greens?’ asked Lesley. The restaurants in that area generally had their own people to go down to Covent Garden for the best produce.

  ‘Things are tough all over,’ I said. But our fears for the palates of the diplomats and oligarchs proved baseless as Kevin skirted the west end of Hyde Park and turned up Bayswater Road. When he turned again into a side street I put my foot down and closed the gap. We followed him up a line of deceptively modest-looking terraces until Lesley said, ‘He’s stopping.’ In time for me to find an inconspicuous parking space from which we could keep him in view.

  London was mostly built piecemeal and if, like me, you know a little bit of architecture you can see where the initial developers built a string of grand Regency mansions along a country lane. Then as the city ground remorselessly westward a line of neat little Victorian terraced houses was built for those members of the working class that one needed to have close at hand.

  Kevin had stopped outside an odd late-Victorian terrace consisting of exactly three houses that abutted the back of a 1930s London brick shopping arcade. I forbore from mentioning this to Lesley because discussion of that sort of thing tends to get her vexed.

  ‘Here come the greens,’ said Lesley.

  Kevin Nolan slouched around to the back of his van, opened the doors and collected the first of the pallets and headed for the front door. Lesley lifted the camera and its telephoto and we watched through the cable link on the laptop while Kevin scrabbled around in his trouser pockets.

  ‘He’s got his own keys,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Make sure you get a close-up on the pallet,’ I said. ‘I want to know who the supplier was.’

  We watched as he ferried the pallets from the van to the house. Once he’d taken the last one inside, he closed the door behind him. We waited a couple of minutes and then we waited some more.

  ‘What the fuck is he doing in there?’ asked Lesley.

  I rummaged in the stake-out bag and discovered that we’d eaten all the snacks except for Molly’s sandwich surprise, packed neatly in greaseproof paper. I gave them an experimental sniff.

  ‘Not tripe this time?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Spam, I think,’ I said as I opened up the parcels and lifted the top slice of homemade bread. ‘My mistake,’ I said. ‘Spam, cheese and pickle.’

  ‘He’s coming out,’ said Lesl
ey and raised the camera again.

  Kevin emerged from the front door carrying a battered cardboard box. From the way he carried it I assumed it was heavy. This was confirmed when the van sank on its rear axle as he dumped the box in the back. He rested for a moment, panting, breath visible in the cold air, before returning to the house, where a minute or two later he reappeared with a second box and loaded that.

  It’s a funny thing, but you only need to be following someone for a very short period of time before you start identifying with them. Watching Kevin stagger out the front door with a third heavy box I had to fight down the urge to jump out of the car and give him a hand. If nothing else, it would have speeded things up. As it was, we waited and watched him bring out two more boxes while taking the occasional picture to relieve the boredom.

  Much too Lesley’s disgust I ate the spam, cheese and pickle sandwiches.

  ‘Are you planning to spend the rest of the day breathing out?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s an autonomic function,’ I said smugly.

  ‘Then open the window,’ she said.

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘It’s too cold. Tell you what, though.’ I fished out a Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener from the glove box and hung it from the rear-view mirror. ‘There you go.’

  I was probably only saved from death, or at least serious injury, by the fact that Kevin chose that moment to get back into his van and drive away. We waited a couple of minutes to make a note of the house number and call AB for a pool check and then drove after him.

  Kevin’s next stop was fifteen minutes away on the other side of the Westway in what had to be the last unconverted warehouse in the whole of West London. It still had its double-width wooden loading gates on which the original blue paint had faded to a scabby dark grey.

  We drew up and watched as Kevin left his van, stamped over to the gates, unlocked the inset pedestrian door and stepped inside.

  ‘I’m bored of this,’ said Lesley. ‘Let’s go in and search the place.’

  ‘If we let him move on,’ I said. ‘We could have the place to ourselves, have a good look around before anyone finds out.’

  ‘We’d need a search warrant,’ said Lesley. ‘On the other hand if we wait for little Kevin, who I believe you witnessed assaulting someone yesterday, to carry a couple of boxes in then we’re just investigating his suspicious behaviour. And once we’re inside—’

  She was right, so that’s what we did. When Kevin opened the gates and drove his van into the warehouse we drove in just behind him. He didn’t even notice until he came round the back his van to unload.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said.

  ‘What wasn’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘What’s in the boxes then, Kevin?’ asked Lesley.

  Kevin actually opened his mouth to say ‘nothing’ again, but realised that was just too stupid even for him.

  ‘Plates,’ he said, and it was true. Every box was full of plates all made of the same tough biscuit-coloured stoneware as the fruit bowl in James Gallagher’s flat – and the shard that had killed him. But that wasn’t all.

  The loading bay was a wide two-storey space that penetrated through the centre of the warehouse. At the far end was another set of wooden loading gates that opened directly onto the tow path of the Grand Union Canal, which ran along the rear. Opening off the bay on either side were two storage rooms, a pattern duplicated on the first floor and again, albeit with larger rooms, on the second. All but one of the rooms were fitted with rotting wooden shelving itself piled with pottery.

  Leaving Kevin to Lesley’s tender mercies I wandered through the warehouse. In places the shelving had collapsed to create drifts of dinner plates or saucers which could be treacherous underfoot. In the far rooms I found piles of tureens and soup bowls covered in a thick layer of dust and the shelves ragged with old cobwebs. I definitely heard rats scuttling out of my way as I entered each room. In one I found a long shelf on which ranks of salt cellars were lined up like an army of miniature Daleks and on the shelf below a different army of little drunk men in tricorn hats – toby jugs. I pulled a few out for a closer look and as I touched them I felt a little flash of vestigia – the pigsty smell, but also beer and laughter. I saw that the face on each jug was subtly different, as if they’d all been individually made. As I walked out I could feel them leering at my back. In another, amidst what looked like chamber pots and milk jugs I found a shelf of statuettes – my old friend goddess-surprised-by-a-sculptor.

  One room, on the ground floor at the back, had been partially cleared of shelves and pottery. In their place stood, almost as tall as Lesley and smothered in bubble wrap, a brand-new 15 kilowatt kiln. I found out later that this was just about the largest and hottest unit it was possible to buy off the shelf. Other packing cases were arrayed around it which turned out to be full of kiln furniture and bags full of mysterious coloured powders which were identified later as ingredients for making various types of ceramic glazes.

  I thought of James Gallagher and his new-found interest in ceramics. A kiln like that would have to set you back a couple of thousand quid at least and the Murder Team would have flagged an expenditure like that on day one of the investigation. Likewise if he was renting the warehouse as a studio.

  ‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ I asked Kevin.

  ‘Which stuff?’ he asked. Even inside, Kevin kept his hoodie up, as if worried that without it his brains would fly out of his ears.

  ‘The pottery,’ I said. ‘The stuff what you’ve been trying to sell to the traders on the Portobello.’

  ‘Comes from here, don’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Not from Moscow Road then?’

  Kevin gave me an accusing look. ‘You’ve been following me?’

  ‘Yes Kevin, we’ve been following you,’ said Lesley.

  ‘That’s a violation of my European human rights,’ he said.

  I looked at Lesley – surely nobody could really be that stupid? She shrugged. Lesley has a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.

  I gestured at the kiln. ‘Do you know whose this is?’ I asked.

  Kevin glanced incuriously at the kiln and then shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever noticed anything weird happening around here?’ I asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Ghosts, mysterious noises – weird shit?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘It’s time to call in Seawoll,’ said Lesley.

  We made Kevin sit on the edge of the kiln’s loading pallet and walked out of his hearing.

  ‘Is this anything he wants to know about?’ I asked.

  ‘This could be the source of the murder weapon,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s down to the SIO to decide what he wants to know about.’

  I nodded, she was right but I was thinking that this could have been where James was sloping off to during those gaps in his timeline. James was a student, but his father was rich.

  ‘I want to talk to the senator,’ I said. ‘Maybe he paid for all of this.’

  Lesley reminded me that little miss FBI agent was likely to take a close interest in any visit, so I phoned Kittredge.

  ‘Have you found your little lost sheep?’ I said.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Special Branch might have been reorganised out of existence but they were still the same cagey bastards they’d been when they were doing the legwork for MI5 during the Cold War.

  ‘Possible sighting in Ladbroke Grove,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d check with you before wasting any time on it.’

  ‘She’s back in the bunker,’ he said. ‘Has been since about nine this morning.’

  ‘That’s the hotel, right?’ I asked, knowing full well it probably wasn’t.

  ‘Grosvenor Square,’ said Kittredge wearily – meaning the American Embassy.

  I thanked him and hung up. CTC was responsible for guarding the embassy, including any secret back doo
rs it might have. If Kittredge said Reynolds was inside then that’s probably where she was.

  ‘Sitting in front of a laptop watching us drive around,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘If I leave the tracker with you, then she’ll never suspect.’

  Finding the senator was easy enough. I just called Guleed – knowing where the relatives are is part and parcel of the family liaison role. It comes in useful if they make that unfortunate, but all too common, transition from victim to suspect.

  ‘We’re at the house in Ladbroke Grove,’ said Guleed.

  I left Lesley to baby-sit Kevin and call in the cavalry, and made the short drive in under ten minutes.

  The senator was an ordinary-looking man in an expensive suit. He sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jameson’s and a plastic half-pint glass in front of him.

  ‘Senator?’ I asked. ‘May I have a quick word?’

  He looked up at me and gave me a grimace – I figured it was the closest he could get to a polite smile. There was whiskey on his breath.

  ‘Please, Detective, have a seat,’ he said.

  I sat down opposite – he offered me a drink but I declined. He had a long face with a curious lack of expression, although I could see pain in the tension around his eyes. His brown hair was neatly cut into a conservative side parting, his teeth were white and even and his nails were neatly manicured. He looked maintained – as polished, dusted and cared for as a vintage automobile.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

  I asked whether he, or anyone he knew, had purchased a kiln and associated equipment.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I can’t say yet, sir,’ I said. ‘Did your son have access to an independent source of income – a trust fund perhaps?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the senator. ‘Several, in fact. But they’ve all been checked and nothing has been taken. Jimmy was always very self-sufficient.’

  ‘Did you have a lot of contact?’ I asked.

  The senator poured a measure of whiskey into his plastic cup.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘The FBI seemed concerned that he might prove embarrassing – politically?’

  ‘Do you know what I like about the English?’ asked the senator.