Whispers Under Ground rol-3

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The Metropolitan Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations, not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers. So you can see I fit in very well.

  By five twenty that morning at least thirty of us had converged on Baker Street, so we started out for Ladbroke Grove en masse. A couple of DCs hitched a lift with me while Stephanopoulos followed on in a five-year-old Fiat Punto. I knew one of the detectives in my car. Her name was Sahra Guleed and we’d once bonded over a body in Soho. She’d also been one of the officers involved in the raid on the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau, so she was a good choice for any weird stuff.

  ‘I’m family liaison,’ she said as she climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘Rather you than me,’ I said.

  A plump sandy-haired DC in a rumpled D&C suit introduced himself after he’d got in the back.

  ‘David Carey,’ he said. ‘Also family liaison.’

  ‘In case it’s a big family,’ said Guleed.

  It’s always important to get to the victim’s relatives quickly, partly because it’s just common decency to give them the news before they see it on TV, partly because it makes us look efficient but mostly because you want to be looking them in the face when they hear the news. Genuine surprise, shock and grief being hard to fake.

  Rather Guleed and Carey than me.

  Notting Hill is three kilometres west of Baker Street, so we were there in under a quarter of an hour and would have been faster if I hadn’t got turned around near Portobello Road. In my defence, at night all those late-Victorian knock-off Regency town houses look the bleeding same, and I’ve never spent that much time in Notting Hill outside of Carnival. It didn’t help that Guleed and Carey both had their phones on GPS and took it in turns to give me contradictory directions. I finally spotted a landmark I recognised and pulled up outside the Notting Hill Community Church. It has a Pentecostal congregation and is just the sort of noisy and fervent place my mum favours on those rare occasions when she remembers she’s supposed to be a Christian.

  My dad only attended a church if he rated their band, so you can imagine how often that happened. When I was really young I liked the dressing up in the good clothes and there were usually other kids to play with, but it never lasted. After a couple of months my mum would get a Sunday cleaning gig or pick a fight with the pastor or just lose interest. Then we’d go back to Sunday being a day I got to stay in and watch cartoons and change records on my dad’s turntable.

  I got out of the car and into an eerie silence. The air was still, sounds were muffled, the shop windows were blind in the flat yellow glare of the street lamps and had the artificiality of a film set. The clouds were low and sullen with reflected light. The slam of the car doors was muffled in the moist air.

  ‘It’s going to snow,’ said Carey.

  It was certainly cold enough. I could stick my hands in my pockets but my ears were starting to freeze. Guleed pulled a big furry hat with ear flaps down over her hijab and looked at me and Carey, bare-headed and frozen-eared, with amusement.

  ‘Practical and modest,’ she said.

  Neither of us gave her the satisfaction of an answer.

  We headed for the mews.

  ‘Where did you get the hat?’ I asked.

  ‘Nicked it off my brother,’ she said.

  ‘I heard it gets cold in the desert,’ said Carey. ‘You’d need a hat like that.’

  Guleed and I exchanged looks, but what can you do?

  For decades Notting Hill has been fighting a valiant rearguard action against the rising tide of money that’s been creeping in now that Mayfair has been given over entirely to the oligarchs. I could see that whoever had done the conversion on the mews had adopted the spirit of the place because nothing says I’m part of a vibrant local community quite like sticking a bloody great security gate at the entrance to your street. Guleed, Carey and I stared through the bars like Victorian children.

  It was your typical Notting Hill mews, a cobbled cul-de-sac lined with what used to be the coach-houses of the wealthy, now converted into houses and flats. It was the sort of place that gay cabinet ministers used to stash their boyfriends back when that sort of thing would have caused a scandal. These days it was probably full of bankers and the children of bankers. All the windows were dark but there were BMWs, Range Rovers and Mercedes parked awkwardly in the narrow roadway.

  ‘Do you think we should wait for the Stephanopoulos?’ asked Carey.

  We gave it some careful thought but not for too long since the religiously non-observant amongst us were freezing our ears off. There was a grey intercom box welded to the gate, so I pressed the number of Gallagher’s house. No answer. I tried a couple more times. Nothing.

  ‘Could be broken,’ said Guleed. ‘Should we try the neighbours?’

  ‘I don’t want to have to deal with the neighbours yet,’ said Carey.

  I checked the gate. It was topped with blunt spikes, widely spaced, but there was a white bollard situated conveniently close enough to give me a stepping point. The metal was painfully cold under my hands but it took me less than five seconds to get my foot on the top bar, swing myself over and jump down. My shoes skidded on the cobbles but I managed to recover without falling over.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Carey. ‘Nine point five.’

  ‘Nine point two,’ said Guleed. ‘He lost points for the dismount.’

  There was an exit button on the wall just beyond arm’s reach of the gate. I pushed it and buzzed the others in.

  Given that all three of us were Londoners, we paused a moment to carry out the ritual of the ‘valuation of the property’. I guessed that, given the area, it was at least a million and change.

  ‘Million and a half easy,’ said Carey.

  ‘More,’ said Guleed. ‘If it’s freehold.’

  There was a ye olde carriage lamp mounted next to the front door just to show that money can’t buy you taste. I rang the doorbell and we heard it going off upstairs. I left my finger on it – that’s the beauty of being the police – you don’t have to be considerate at five o’clock in the morning.

  We heard flat-footed steps coming down a staircase and a voice yelling – ‘I’m coming, hold your fucking horses …’ And then the door opened.

  He was tall, white, early twenties, unshaven, with a mop of brown hair and naked except for a pair of underpants. He was thin though not unhealthy. His ribs stuck out but he almost had a six-pack and his shoulders, arms and legs were muscled. He had a big mouth in a thin face that opened wide when he saw us.

  ‘Oi,’ he said. ‘Who the fuck are you supposed to be?’

  We all showed him our warrant cards. He stared at them for a long second.

  ‘How about a five-minute head start to hide my stash?’ he said finally.

  We surged forward as one.

  The ground floor had obviously been converted from a garage and then notionally split in two – faux rusticated kitchen area at the back, open-plan ‘reception’ at the front, with an open-sided staircase running up the left wall. Open-plan houses are all very well, but without a traditional hallway to act as a choke point it’s laughably easy for a trio of eager police to roll right over you and take control.

  I got between him and the stairs, Guleed slipped past me and up the stairs to check there was nobody else in the house and Carey stood in front of the man deliberately placing himself just inside the guy’s personal space.

  ‘We’re family liaison officers,’ he said. ‘So in the normal course of events we’re not that bothered abou
t your recreational drug use, but this attitude depends entirely on whether you give us your wholehearted cooperation.’

  ‘And provide coffee,’ I said.

  ‘You do have coffee?’ asked Carey.

  ‘We’ve got coffee,’ said the man.

  ‘Is it good coffee?’ shouted Guleed from somewhere upstairs.

  ‘It’s proper coffee. You make it in a cafetière and everything. It’s bare wicked stuff.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Carey.

  ‘Zach,’ said the man. ‘Zachary Palmer.’

  ‘Is this your house?’

  ‘I live here but it belongs to my mate, my friend James Gallagher – he’s American. Actually it belongs to some company, but he gets the use of it and I live here with him.’

  ‘Are you in a relationship with Mr Gallagher?’ asked Carey. ‘Civil partnership, long-term committed … no?’

  ‘We’re just friends,’ said Zach.

  ‘In that case, Mr Palmer, I suggest we repair to the kitchen for coffee.’

  I got out of the way as Zachary, looking a bit wild-eyed, was herded into the kitchen area by Carey. He’d be looking to get names and addresses of James Gallagher’s friends, and if possible, family as well as establishing Zach’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. You want to do that sort of thing fast before everyone has a chance to co-ordinate their stories. Guleed would be upstairs hunting out any useful diaries, phone books, laptops and anything else that would allow her to expand James Gallagher’s acquaintance tree and fill in the gaps in the timeline of his last movements.

  I glanced around the living room. I guessed the house must have come ready furnished because it had that decorated out of a catalogue feel although, judging by the sturdiness of the furniture and the lack of laminated chipboard, it was probably a more expensive catalogue than my mother would have used. The TV was big and flat but two years old. There was a Blu-Ray player, an X-Box but no cable or satellite. I checked the simulation oak shelves beside the TV; the collection was a bit ostentatiously foreign, newly remastered Godards, Truffauts and Tarkovskys. Kurosowa’s Yojimbo was lying sacrilegiously on top of its case, ejected in favour of, judging from the case lying on the floor by the TV, one of the Saw movies.

  The original fireplace, a rarity given that the ground floor must have been a coach house, had been bricked up and plastered over but the mantelpiece remained. Perched on it was an expensive Sony mini-system with no iPod attached – something else to look for – an unpainted figurine, a deck of playing cards, a packet of Rizlas and an unwashed cup.

  Over in the kitchen area Carey had Zach settled at the table while he pottered around making proper coffee and having a rummage through all the cupboards and shelves for good measure.

  If you’re a professional cleaner, like my mum, one of the ways you make sure you get the dust out of the corners is to use a moist mop and swirl it along the skirting board. All the crud gets rolled up into little damp balls, you wait a bit for them to dry and then you hoover them up. It leaves a distinctive swirling pattern in the carpet which I found behind the TV. It meant that James and Zach were not cleaning their own home and that I was unlikely to find anything useful in the living room. I headed for the stairs.

  The bathroom was professionally sparkling but I was hoping that whoever the cleaner was she’d drawn the line at going into the bedrooms. Judging by the combination old sock and ganja smell in the smaller of the two bedrooms she had indeed. Zach’s bedroom, I guessed. The clothes scattered on the floor had British labels and there was a high-tech bong vaporiser, improvised out of a converted soldering iron and Perspex tube, stashed under the bed. I only found one bit of luggage, a large gym bag with worn straps and stains on the bottom. I gave it a cautious sniff. It had been washed recently but under the detergent there was just of whiff of something rank. What my dad would call tramp smell.

  Whatever it was it wasn’t magical, so I headed out.

  Guleed and I met on the landing.

  ‘No diary or address book – it must be on his phone,’ she said. ‘A couple of airmail letters, his mum I think, same address as the driver’s licence.’ She said she was going to call the police in America and ask them to make contact. I asked her how she was going to find the number.

  ‘That’s what internet is for,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not how the song goes,’ I said but she didn’t get it. ‘I think the governor is going to want to take a close look at Zach, especially if he hasn’t got an alibi.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s a student,’ I said. ‘He might even have been sleeping rough.’

  Guleed gave me a lopsided smile. ‘Must be a villain then.’

  ‘Have you done a PNC check yet?’

  ‘Never mind my job, Peter. You’re supposed to be checking for magic or whatever.’ She smiled to show that she was half joking, but only half. I let her get on with her job and stepped into James’ bedroom to see if I could detect any weird bollocks.

  Which appeared to be in short supply.

  I was surprised by the lack of posters on the walls, but James Gallagher had been twenty-three. Maybe he’d outgrown posters or maybe he was saving the space for more serious work. There was a stack of canvasses leaning against the wall. They were mostly city scenes, local I thought, after recognising Portobello Market. It didn’t look like tourist tat so I figured it was probably his own work – a bit retro for a modern art school student, though.

  The bed was rumpled but the sheets had been recently changed and the duvet laid out and turned back. There was a pile of books on the bedside table – art books but of the serious academic kind rather than the coffee table variety; on socialist realism, propaganda posters of the 1930s, classic London Underground posters, and a volume called Right About Now – art & theory since the 1990s. The only non-art books were an omnibus edition of Colin MacInnes’ London trilogy and a reference on mental health called 50 Signs of Mental Illness. I picked up the medical book and dangled it by its spine, but it stubbornly failed to reveal any tell-tale gaps where it had been heavily read.

  Looking for material? I wondered. Worried about himself or somebody else? The book was still crisp and relatively new. Was he worried about Zach perhaps?

  I looked around the room, but there were no books on the arcane or even the vaguely mystical and not even a vestige of vestigium beyond the normal background. This is a classic example of what I was coming to call the inverse law of magical utility – in others words the chance of finding magical phenomena is inversely proportional to how useful it would be to bloody find it.

  It was entirely possible that any magical side to the murder rested with the killer, not the victim. I probably should have stayed in the tunnels with Sergeant Kumar and the search team.

  So of course I found what I was looking for five minutes later, downstairs, while we were statementing Zach.

  Zach had put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt while I’d been upstairs. He was sitting half hunched over the table while Carey took his statement. Guleed had taken a position leaning nonchalantly against the simulation farmhouse kitchen unit just inside Zach’s peripheral vision. She was watching his face carefully and frowning. I guessed she’d spotted the mental health book too.

  There was a cup of coffee waiting on the table for me. I sat down next to Carey but kept my posture relaxed, took my coffee and leaned back slightly as I sipped it. Zach’s hands were trembling and he was unconsciously rocking back and forth as we went through his movements in the last twenty-four hours. It’s always useful to have your witnesses a little bit unnerved, but you can have too much of a good thing.

  On the table was an earthenware bowl sitting on the kitchen table with two apples, a splotchy banana and a handful of minicab cards inside it. It was the same rich biscuit colour as the shard I’d found in the Underground but too curved to be an identical piece.

  I took another gulp of coffee, which was definitely the good stu
ff, and casually brushed my fingers along the rim of the bowl. There it was, fainter than the shard, heat and charcoal and what I realised was the smell of pig shit and … I wasn’t sure what.

  I emptied the fruit and cards from the bowl and traced my fingertips across the smooth curve of its interior. It seemed beautifully shaped but I couldn’t say why. A circle is just a circle, after all. But it was as beautiful as Lesley’s smile. At least how Lesley’s smile used to be.

  I realised that the others had fallen silent.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ I asked Zach.

  He looked at me like I was bonkers, so did Guleed and Carey.

  ‘The bowl?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes the bowl,’ I said. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘It’s just a bowl,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said slowly. ‘Do you know where it came from?’

  Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique. ‘I think he got it from the market.’

  ‘From Portobello?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Portobello Market is at least a kilometre long and must have at least a thousand stalls, not to mention the hundred-plus shops that line both sides of Portobello Road and spill out into the side streets.

  ‘Any chance of you being bit more specific?’ I asked.

  ‘Top end I think,’ said Zach. ‘You know. Not the posh end, the other end where the normal stalls are. That’s all I know.’

  I picked up the bowl, cupped it in my hands and brought it level with my eyes.

  ‘I’m going to need to package this,’ I said. ‘Has anybody got any bubble wrap?’

  4

  Archway

  The answer to that question turned out to be, surprisingly, yes. Apparently, art students often have to transport fragile bits of work around and so a cupboard in the kitchen turned out to be not only full of aging spaghetti and dubious packets of cup-a-soup but bubble wrap, tissue paper and masking tape.

  It was also where Zach kept his stash, a ziploc bag of yellow-looking leaf that Carey suggested constituted a seasoning rather than a controlled substance. Nonetheless Carey unofficially confiscated it until it was decided whether we needed to use it as a pretext to arrest Zach or not.