Whispers Under Ground rol-3

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Lesley had her mask off and I didn’t know where to look. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and the skin on her cheeks and what was left of her nose looked pink and inflamed.

  ‘I can’t chew properly on the left side,’ she said. ‘It’s going to look weird.’

  Venison, I thought, a lovely meat but notoriously chewy – well done Peter.

  ‘Is it like the way you eat spaghetti?’ I asked.

  ‘I eat it the way Italians eat it,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, face down in the bowl,’ I said. ‘Very stylish.’

  The venison was not chewy, it cut like butter. But Lesley was right, it did look funny the way she bulged it all the way over in one cheek – like a chipmunk with a toothache.

  She gave me a sour look which made me laugh.

  ‘What?’ she asked after swallowing. I noticed that the scars from the latest operation on her jaw were still red and inflamed.

  ‘It’s nice to be able to see your expression,’ I said.

  She froze.

  ‘How am I supposed to know whether you’re taking the piss or not?’ I asked.

  Her hand came up towards her face and stopped. She looked at it, as if surprised to find it hovering in front of her mouth, and then used it to pick up her water instead.

  ‘Couldn’t you just assume that I was always taking the piss?’ she asked.

  I shrugged and changed the subject.

  ‘What did you think of our high-rise recluse?’

  She frowned. I was surprised – I didn’t know she could still do that.

  ‘Interesting, I thought,’ she said. ‘The nurse was scary though – don’t you think?’

  ‘We should have taken one of the Rivers,’ I said. ‘They can tell you’re a practitioner just by smelling you.’

  ‘Really? What do we smell like?’

  ‘I didn’t want to ask,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure Beverley thought you smelt lovely,’ said Lesley. She was right, mask or no mask, I still couldn’t tell when she was taking the piss.

  ‘I wonder if it’s innate to the Rivers or if all—’ I stopped myself before I said magical folk. A man’s got to have some standards.

  ‘Creatures?’ suggested Lesley. ‘Monsters?’

  ‘Magically endowed,’ I said.

  ‘Well Beverley was certainly magically endowed,’ said Lesley. Definitely taking the piss, I thought. ‘Do you think it’s something we could learn to do?’ she asked. ‘It would make the job a lot easier if we could sniff them out.’

  You can tell when somebody is shaping a forma in their mind. It’s like vestigium, anyone can sense it, the trick as always is to recognise the sense impression for what it was. Nightingale said that you could learn to recognise an individual practitioner by their signare, the distinctive signature of their magic. Once Lesley had joined us I did a blind taste test and found that I couldn’t tell the difference at all – although Nightingale could, ten times out of ten.

  ‘It’s something you learn to do with practice,’ he’d said. He also claimed that he could not only tell who cast a spell, but who had trained the caster and sometimes who had developed the spell. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  ‘I’ve got a tentative experimental protocol,’ I said. ‘But it involves getting one of the Rivers to sit still while we take it in turns to listen to her head. And we’d need Nightingale to act as a control.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen any time soon,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe it’s in the library – how’s your Latin?’

  ‘Better than yours – Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,’ I said which means, ‘I’ll either find a way or make one’ which was a favourite of Nightingale’s and attributed to Hannibal.

  ‘Vincit qui se vincit,’ said Lesley, who loved learning Latin almost as much as I did. She conquers who conquer themselves, another Nightingale favourite and the motto from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which was something we hadn’t had the heart to tell him yet.

  ‘It’s pronounced win-kit not vincent,’ I said.

  ‘Bite me,’ said Lesley.

  I grinned at her and she smiled back – sort of.

  Tuesday

  6

  Sloane Square

  The Murder Team’s outside inquiry team lives in a big room on the first floor sandwiched between the Inside Inquiry Team and the Intelligence Unit (motto: we do the thinking so that other coppers don’t have to). It was a large room with pale blue walls and dark blue carpet crammed with a dozen desks and a variety of swivel chairs, some of which were held together with duct tape. In the old days it would have smelt of second-hand cigarettes but nowadays it had the familiar tang of police under pressure – I’m not sure it’s an improvement.

  I’d been told to attend the seven o’clock morning briefing so I rolled up at a quarter to, to find that I was sharing a desk with Guleed and DC Carey. A full Murder Team is about twenty-five people and most of those arrived in time for the briefing to start at seven fifteen. There was much slurping of coffee and moaning about the snow. I said hello to the officers I knew from the Jason Dunlop case and we all found seats or perched on desks at one end of the room where Seawoll stood in front of a whiteboard – just like they do on the TV.

  Sometimes your dreams really can come true.

  He ran through where, when, how and who. Stephanopoulos gave a quick victimology of James Gallagher and tapped a photocopy of a picture of Zachary Palmer’s face that had been stuck on the whiteboard.

  ‘No longer a suspect,’ she said and I realised with a start that nobody had told me he was a suspect. Obviously when you play with the big boys you’re expected to keep up. ‘We have CCTV coverage of the front and back access to the house in Kensington Gardens and there’s no sign of him leaving until we turn up the next morning.’

  She started running the various alternative lines of inquiry and one of the DCs near me murmured, ‘It’s going to be a grinder.’

  Second day, no prime suspect. He was right, it was going to be a matter of grinding the leads down until something popped. Unless of course there was a supernatural short cut, in which case this was my chance to make an impression. Maybe pick up some favours, get a bit of respect?

  I should have smacked myself in the face for having that thought.

  Seawoll introduced a thin, brown-haired white woman in a smart but travel-creased skirt suit with a gold badge hung from her belt.

  ‘This is Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds from the FBI,’ he said and we all went ‘ooh’ – the whole room – we just couldn’t help ourselves. That didn’t bode well for international co-operation because we were all bound to be extra surly to cover up the embarrassment.

  ‘Since James Gallagher’s father is a US senator, the American embassy has requested that Agent Reynolds be allowed to observe the investigation on their behalf,’ said Seawoll. He nodded at a male DS seated on a desk on the other side from me. ‘Bob there will be handling the security aspects of the case in case they relate back to the senator.’

  Bob held up his hand in greeting and Agent Reynolds nodded back, a tad nervously I thought.

  ‘I’ve asked Agent Reynolds to give us some further background on the victim,’ said Seawoll.

  There was nothing nervous about her delivery, though. Her accent sounded like a mixture of Southern and Midwestern but grown clipped through her FBI training and experience. She certainly rattled through James Gallagher’s early life, youngest of three children, born in Albany while his father was a state senator – which was emphatically not the same as being the state’s senator. He was privately educated, showed an aptitude for art, attended college in New York University. One speeding ticket when he was seventeen and his name came up during an inquiry into a fellow student’s overdose a year before he graduated. A canvass of his college friends indicated a young man who was personable and well liked, if rather reserved.

  I raised my hand – I didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘Yes, Peter,’ said Seawoll
.

  I thought I heard someone snigger but it might have been my paranoia.

  ‘Is there any history of mental illness in the family?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that we know of,’ said Reynolds. ‘There are no psychiatric consults and no prescriptions for any medication beyond the usual cold and flu remedies. Do you have some reason to believe there was a psychiatric element to the case?’

  I didn’t need to look at Seawoll’s face to know how to answer that one.

  ‘It was just a thought,’ I said.

  For the first time she looked straight at me – she had green eyes.

  ‘Moving on,’ said Seawoll.

  I made a slow tactical fade towards the back of the room.

  A murder investigation, like other major police operations, is assigned a name by SCD Operational Support. It used to be done by an administrative assistant with a dictionary who put a line through each word as it was used but now it’s got a bit more sophisticated – if only to avoid PR disasters like SWAMP81 and GERON-IMO. The William Skirmish murder had been OPERATION TURQUOISE, the death of Jason Dunlop OPERATION CARTWHEEL and now James Gallagher’s sad demise would forever be enshrined in the annals of the Metropolitan Police as OPERATION MATCHBOX. It wasn’t much of an epitaph but, as Lesley liked to say, better than the American system where all the jobs would be called a variation on OPERATION CATCH BADGUYS.

  I went back to my desk and discovered that during the briefing elves had apparently crept in and placed a couple of purple Ryman’s folders on my bit of the desk. Each had a smaller printed memo stapled to the top corner. It was dated, marked OPERATION MATCHBOX, with my name and under that a line that read: Trace origin of earthenware fruit bowl. Priority: High. The second memo read: Canvass Art Gallery for sightings of James Gallagher, take statements as necessary. Priority: High.

  ‘Your first actions,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You must be very proud.’

  She got me logged in, which was a suspicious amount of help and attention from a Detective Inspector, and explained the priority codes to me.

  ‘Officially, low means we want it within a week,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Medium is five days and high priority is three.’

  ‘And really?’ I asked.

  ‘Today, now and “I want it bloody yesterday.”’

  I was logging out when Special Agent Reynolds approached me.

  ‘Excuse me, Constable Grant,’ she said. ‘May I ask you a question?’

  ‘Call me Peter,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I wonder, Constable, if you could tell me what makes you think there might be mental illness in the family?’ she asked.

  I told her about the shift in James’s art work at St Martin’s and how I thought it might have been an indication of incipient mental illness or drug abuse – or both. Reynolds looked sceptical but it was hard to tell, given that she didn’t seem to like making eye contact.

  ‘Is there any hard evidence?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s the art work, statement by his tutor, the self-help book on mental illness and his flatmate smoked a lot of dope,’ I said. ‘Apart from that – no.’

  ‘So you have nothing,’ she said. ‘Do you even have a background in mental health?’

  I thought of my parents but I didn’t think they counted so I said no.

  ‘Then it would be better if you didn’t speculate without evidence,’ she said sharply. Then she shook her head as if to clear it and walked away.

  ‘Somebody doesn’t know they’re not in Kansas anymore,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘That was off,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘I did think she was going to ask for your birth certificate at one point,’ she said. ‘Come down to the office before you go. Seawoll wants a word.’

  I promised not to run off.

  After Stephanopoulos had left I took a moment to stare at Agent Reynolds as she had a drink at the water cooler. She looked tired and ill at ease. I did some mental calculations – assuming half a day of bureaucratic arse-covering I guessed she’d got the overnight from Washington or New York. She’d have had to come straight from the airport – no wonder she looked like shit.

  She caught me staring, blinked, remembered who I was, scowled and looked away.

  I went downstairs to see how much trouble I was in.

  Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had their lair on the first floor in a room that had been divided into four offices, one big one for Seawoll and three small ones for the DIs working under him. This suited everyone, since all us foot soldiers could get on with our work without the oppressive presence of our senior officers and our senior officers could work in peace and quiet in the full knowledge that only something really urgent would motivate us to schlep down the stairs and interrupt them.

  Seawoll was waiting for me behind his desk. There was coffee, he was reasonable and I was suspicious.

  ‘We’ve giving you the actions relating to the pot and the art gallery because you think that’s where the funny business is,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want you haring off into the fucking distance. Because quite frankly I don’t think your career can survive much more in the way of property damage, what with the ambulances and the helicopters.’

  ‘The helicopter was nothing to do with me,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t play silly buggers with me, lad,’ said Seawoll. He idly picked a paperclip off his desk and began to methodically torture it. ‘If you get so much as a sniff of a suspect I want to know right away – and I want everything in the statements. Except of course the stuff you can’t put in the statements, in which case you inform Stephanopoulos or me as soon as possible.’

  ‘The father is a US senator,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Do I need to stress how important it is that neither he, Agent Reynolds or, more importantly, the American media get even a whiff of anything unusual?’

  The paperclip broke between Seawoll’s fingers.

  ‘The Commissioner phoned this morning,’ he said, picking up another paperclip. ‘He wants to make it clear that should the beady eye of the media fall upon you, he expects you to dig a hole, climb in and bleeding stay there until we tell you otherwise. Got it?’

  ‘Do what I’m told, tell you everything, don’t tell the Americans anything and don’t end up on TV,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a cheeky bugger,’ said Seawoll.

  ‘Yes he is,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  Seawoll dropped the mangled paperclip back into a little Perspex box where it served, presumably, as an awful warning to the rest of the stationery.

  ‘Any questions?’ he asked

  ‘Have you finished with Zachary Palmer yet?’ I asked.

  7

  Nine Elms

  Given that I was not only getting him out of the custody suite but also offering him a lift home, Zachary Palmer seemed curiously displeased to see me.

  ‘How come you locked me up?’ he asked as we drove back.

  I pointed out that he hadn’t been under arrest and could have just asked to leave whenever he wanted to. He seemed surprised to learn that, which confirmed that either he wasn’t a career criminal or he was too stupid to pass the entrance exam.

  ‘I wanted to clean the house up,’ he said. ‘You know, so it would nice for when his parents visited.’

  It had stopped snowing overnight and the sheer weight of London traffic had cleared the main roads. You still had to be careful in the side streets, not least because gangs of kids had taken to snowballing passing cars.

  ‘You’ve got a cleaning lady, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Zach as if remembering suddenly. ‘But I don’t think she comes in today and anyway she’s not my cleaning lady, she was Jim’s. Now he’s not there she probably won’t come. I don’t want them to think I’m a slacker – his parents – I want them to know he had a mate.’

  ‘How did you meet James Gallagher?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you always do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Call
him by both his names all the time,’ said Zach slouching down in his seat. ‘He liked being called Jim.’

  ‘It’s a police thing,’ I said. ‘It avoids confusion and shows some respect. How did you meet him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your friend Jimmy,’ I said.

  ‘Can we stop off for some breakfast?’

  ‘You know it’s been left entirely up to me whether we charge you or not?’ I lied.

  Zach started absently tapping the window. ‘I was a mate of one of his mate’s mates,’ he said. ‘We just got on. He liked London but he was shy, he needed a guide and I needed to a place to crash.’

  This was close enough to the statements he’d given first to Guleed and then to Stephanopoulos for me to think it might even be the truth. Stephanopoulos had asked about drugs, but Zach had sworn blind and on his mother’s life that James Gallagher hadn’t partaken. Didn’t have any objections, mind, just wasn’t interested.

  ‘Guide to what?’ I asked as I negotiated the tricky corner at Notting Hill Gate. It had begun to snow again, not as heavy as the day before but enough to make the road surface slick and unforgiving.

  ‘Pubs, clubs,’ said Zach. ‘You know places, art galleries – London. He wanted to go places in London.’

  ‘Did you show him where to buy the fruit bowl?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in that fruit bowl. It’s just a bowl.’

  Amazingly, I didn’t tell him it was because I thought it was a magic fruit bowl. It’s the sort of thing that can open one up to ridicule.

  ‘It’s a police thing,’ I said.

  ‘I know where he got it,’ he said. ‘But we might have to have breakfast first.’

  Portobello Road is a long thin road that undulates from Notting Hill to the Westway and beyond. It’s been the front line in the gentrification war since the big money started arriving in Ladbroke Grove with the pop stars and the film directors in the swinging sixties. There’s been a market there since the time you could walk into fields at the north end and catch fish in Counter’s Creek. The antique market, the bit that sucks in tourists every Saturday, only got started in the 1940s but it’s what everyone thinks of when they hear the name. As the well-heeled bohemians were replaced by the really rich in the 1980s Portobello has been like a thermometer of social change. Starting at the Notting Hill end the neat little Victorian terraces have been snaffled up by people with six-figure salaries and the big high-street chains have been looking to spawn amongst the antique shops and Jamaican cafés. Only the red-brick council estates stand like bastions against the remorseless tide, glowering down on the City folk and the media professionals and lowering the house prices by their very presence.