‘Do you know what I like about the English?’ asked the senator.
‘The sense of humour?’ I asked.
He gave me a bleak smile to make sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.
‘You’re not a constituency,’ he said. ‘There’s no community leaders or lobbying group ready to crawl up my ass because somebody somewhere takes exception to a joke or just a slip of the tongue. If I was to, hypothetically speaking, call you a limey or a nigger – which one would cause you the most offence?’
‘Was he an embarrassment?’ I asked.
‘Do you know why you evaded that question?’ asked the senator.
Because I’m a professional, I thought. Because I spent a couple of years talking to morose drunks and belligerent shoplifters and people who just wanted someone to shout at because the world was unfair. And the trick of it is simply to keep asking the questions you need the answers for, until finally the sad little sods wind down.
Occasionally, you have to wrestle them to the floor and sit on them until they’re coherent, but I thought that was an unlikely contingency given who I was talking to.
‘In what way would he have been embarrassing?’ I asked.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you what, Senator,’ I said. ‘You tell me about your son and I’ll answer.’
‘I asked first,’ he said. ‘You answer my question and I’ll tell you about my son.’
‘If you call me a nigger you just sound like a racist American,’ I said. ‘And limey is a joke insult. You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.’
The senator squinted at me for a long time and I wondered if I might have been too clever by half, but then he sighed and picked up his plastic cup.
‘He wasn’t an embarrassment – not to me,’ he said. ‘Although I think maybe he thought he was.’ He sipped his whiskey, I noticed, savouring it on his tongue before he swallowed. He put the glass down – rationing himself – I recognised the behaviour from my dad. ‘He liked being here in London, I can tell you that. He said that the city went on for ever. “All the way down” he said.’
His eyes unfocused, just for a moment, and I realised that the senator was phenomenally drunk.
‘So he was in contact with you?’
‘I’d arrange a phone call once a week,’ said the senator. ‘He’d call me every other month or so. Once your kids are out of high school that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.’
‘When did you last speak to him?’
‘Last week,’ said the senator. His hand twitched towards the whiskey but he stopped himself. ‘I wanted to know if he was coming back for the holidays.’
‘And was he?’
‘Nope,’ said the senator. ‘He said he’d found something, he was excited and the next time he saw me he was going to blow my mind.’
The older coppers always make it very clear that it’s just not good practice to get too involved with your victims. A murder inquiry can last weeks, months or even years and ultimately the victims don’t want you to be sympathetic. They want you to be competent – that’s what you owe them.
But still someone had stabbed James in the back and left his father flailing around in grief and incomprehension. I decided that I didn’t approve of that at all.
I asked some more questions relating to his son’s art work, but it was clear that the senator had been indulgent rather than interested. Guleed, who’d been watching me from the other side of the kitchen, managed to convey, by expression alone, the fact that she’d already asked all the routine questions and unless I had anything new I should shut up now and leave the poor bastard alone.
I was walking back to the car when Lesley phoned me.
‘You know that house?’ she asked.
‘Which house?’
‘The one that Kevin Nolan delivered his greenery to.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘The one where he picked up all the crockery,’ said Lesley. ‘The very crockery that we have just found several metric tons of?’
‘The house off the Moscow Road,’ I said.
‘That house doesn’t exist,’ she said.
15
Bayswater
The British have always been madly over-ambitious and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight. The London Underground was no exception and was built by a breed of entrepreneurs whose grasp was matched only by the size of their sideburns. While their equally gloriously bewhiskered counterparts across the Atlantic were busy blowing each other to pieces in a Civil War they embarked on the construction of the Metropolitan Line knowing only one thing for certain – there was no way they were going to be able to run steam trains through it.
Experience with the established long tunnels of the mainline railways had proven that, unless you liked breathing smoke, you wanted to get through the tunnel as fast as possible. You certainly didn’t want to stay in there permanently, let alone stop at an equally enclosed station to take on passengers. So they tried pneumatic tunnels but they couldn’t maintain a seal. They tried superheated bricks but they weren’t reliable. They burnt coke but the fumes from that proved even more toxic than coal smoke. What they were waiting for was electric trains, but they were twenty years too early.
So steam it was. And because of that the London Underground was a lot less underground than originally planned. Where the tracks ran under an existing roadway they put in steam grates and, wherever the tracks didn’t, they tried to leave the roof off as much as possible. One such ‘cut’ famously existed at Leinster Road where, in order to hide the unsightly railway from sensitive middle-class eyes, two brick facades were built that seamlessly replicated the grand Georgian terrace that had been demolished to dig it. These fake houses, with their convincing but blind painted windows, became an endless source of humour to the kind of people who think making minimum-wage pizza delivery guys go to a false address is the highest form of wit.
Everyone knows about Leinster Road, except perhaps minimum-wage pizza delivery guys, but I’d never heard of any fake houses west of Bayswater Station. Once you knew what you were looking for they were easy to spot on the satellite view of Google Maps, although their nature was somewhat disguised by the oblique angle of the aerial photograph. Me and Lesley talked our way into one of the flats above the shopping arcade on the Moscow Road, which had a good view over the back of the house where Kevin Nolan had delivered his greenery. From there it was obvious that, while the buildings were less than a full house, they were more than just a facade.
‘It’s like someone only built the front rooms,’ said Lesley.
Where the rear rooms and back garden should have been there was a sheer drop to the track bed six metres below.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why?’
Lesley dangled the keys she’d confiscated from Kevin Nolan in front of my face.
‘Why don’t we go find out?’ she said. She must have detached them from Kevin when we put him in a car to send him off to AB to be interviewed.
Both of the houses were part of the same facade but we chose the door that Kevin had used on the basis that he’d known what he was doing.
It looked like an ordinary front door, set deep in the mid-Victorian fashion with a rectangular fanlight set above. Close up I could see that the door had been crudely repainted red without stripping the original paint first. I picked a flake off and found it had been at least three different shades, including an appalling orange colour. There was no doorbell but a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. We didn’t bother knocking.
I’d expected the inside to resemble the back of a stage set, but instead we found ourselves in a classic Victorian hallway complete with a badly scuffed black and white tiled floor and yellow wallpaper that had faded to a pale lemon. The only real difference was that instead of running front to back it ran side to side, linking bo
th of the notional terraces. On our left there was a duplicate front door and ordinary interior doors at each end.
I went left. Lesley went right.
Beyond my door was a room with bay windows, net curtains and bare floorboards. There was a smell of dust and machine oil. I spotted something green on the floor and retrieved a lettuce leaf – still crisp. The back wall was plastered, grubby and devoid of windows. It was a locked-room mystery – the case of the missing vegetables. I was just about to go and see if Lesley had had more luck when I noticed that a black iron ring had been inset into a floorboard. A closer inspection revealed that it was the handle for a trap door and, with a surprisingly easy lift, it opened to reveal a six-metre drop onto the tracks below. Carefully I lay down on the floor and stuck my head through the hatchway.
I was disconcerted to see that the two half-houses were held up by a series of wooden beams. They were old, black with soot and spanned the width of the trackway, bolstered at the ends with diagonal beams that had been fitted into the brick walls of the cut. Attached with iron bolts to the nearest beam was a long flattened contraption made of iron, dark-coloured wood and brass. It took me a bit of squinting but I finally realised that it was a staircase in the manner of a folding fire escape neatly concertinaed and stowed to the underside of the house.
Within easy reach of the hatch was a brass and leather lever with a clutch handle like those you find on vintage cars and steam engines. I reached out to see if it would move.
‘What’s down there?’
I turned my head to find Lesley staring down at me.
‘A folding staircase I think,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to see if I can unlock it. It should drop straight down onto the tracks.’
I reached once more for the lever, but as I did so a Circle Line train clattered directly beneath me on its way to Bayswater Station. It took about thirty seconds to go past.
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ asked Lesley.
‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘it would be better if we call BTP first. What do you think?’
‘I think you may be right,’ said Lesley.
So I got to my feet, closed the hatch and called Sergeant Kumar.
‘You know you said that the whole point about secret access points is that they weren’t secret from you?’ I asked. ‘Care to make a bet on that?’
He asked me where and I told him.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Lesley.
‘He said not to do anything stupid until he gets here,’ I said.
‘We’d better find something to keep you occupied then,’ she said and made me call the Murder Team to let them know what we had found and ask whether they’d traced the owner of the warehouse on Kensal Road yet.
Three minutes later Lesley got a phone call. ‘That’s right,’ she said and then looked at me. ‘Not so far,’ she said and then. ‘I’ll tell him – bye.’ She put her phone away.
‘That was Seawoll,’ she said. ‘Stephanopoulos is on her way down and you’re not to do anything stupid until she gets here.’
You burn down one central London tourist attraction, I thought, and they never let you forget it.
Stephanopoulos arrived ten minutes later with a couple of spare DCs in tow. I met her at the front door and showed her around. She stared gloomily down the hatch as another train rumbled underneath. Despite the noise the room stayed remarkably steady.
‘Is this our case, your case or BTP’s case?’ she asked.
I told her that it was probably related to the James Gallagher murder, likely to have ‘unusual’ elements and had definitely spilled into the bailiwick of the British Transport Police.
Stephanopoulos looked abstracted. She was thinking about her budget – I could tell from the way she bit her lip.
‘Let’s say this is your case until we know for sure. Although CTC are going to have a fit if they think person or persons unknown have had unrestricted access to the Underground,’ she said. ‘You know how sensitive they get.’
Having hived her budget problems onto the Folly, Stephanopoulos gave me a grin.
While we were waiting for Kumar we got the finished pool check on the warehouse. Apparently it was owned by a company called Beale Property Services who, as a matter of interest, had owned it under one company name or other since the nineteenth century.
‘Is that significant?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
‘I’d like to know who’s been using it,’ I said.
‘See if you can’t set up an interview at Beale Property Services, the more senior the better,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘I’ll come with.’
Before I could do that, a BTP response vehicle screamed to a halt outside and Sergeant Kumar came running into the half a house with two uniformed BTP officers. I showed them the hatch and they looked down it.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Kumar.
16
South Wimbledon
Beale Property Services were located on a dreary industrial estate off the A24 in Merton. From the outside, the HQ was an equally dreary two-storey brick-built utility office enlivened by cheap blue cladding and festooned with security cameras. Inside it was surprisingly pleasant, with pastel-coloured sofas, glass-walled offices rather than cubicles and at least two articulated lorries’ worth of Christmas decorations hanging from every available hook.
There was also a great absence of people, including behind the mahogany-topped reception desk. Now, there’s a time when an unlocked premises is a positive boon to a police officer as in – I was just looking to ascertain the whereabouts of the proprietor when I stumbled across the Class A controlled substances which were in plain sight in the bottom drawer of a locked desk in an upstairs office, M’lord. Leave the police alone in a room for five minutes and we start looking in drawers, locked or otherwise. It’s a terrible habit
Stephanopoulos’ fingers were actually beginning to twitch when a short balding white guy in a chunky-knit pullover and khaki chinos bustled down the corridor towards us.
‘I’m afraid the office is closed for Christmas,’ he said.
‘Isn’t that a bit premature?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
The man shrugged. ‘Nobody could make it in because of the snow this week,’ he said. ‘So I told everyone to come back after Christmas.’ He had the sort of default BBC accent that a posh person acquires through trying to avoid sounding too much like they went to public school.
‘But it’s not snowing anymore,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s a bugger, isn’t it? What can I do for you?’
‘We’re looking for Graham Beale,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘CEO of Beale Property Services.’
The man grinned. ‘Then you are in luck,’ he said. ‘For that is I.’
We identified ourselves and told him we wanted to ask a few questions about one of his properties. He led us into what was obviously a staff coffee area and asked if we’d like a Baileys.
‘We were planning a bit of a pre-Christmas drink,’ he said and showed us a cupboard stuffed with bottles. Stephanopoulos enthusiastically agreed to a large one but took it upon herself to decline on my behalf.
‘He’s my designated driver,’ she said.
Beale poured two measures of Baileys into a pair of mugs and we sat down around a round table with a white laminated top. Stephanopoulos sipped her drink.
‘That brings back a lot of memories,’ she said.
‘So,’ said Beale. ‘What do you want to know?’
He laughed when Stephanopoulos explained about the warehouse on Kensal Road.
‘Oh god yes,’ he said. ‘That place. The Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company.’
I got out my notebook and pen. Notes, like running after suspects and finding your own parking space, being one of the things Detective Inspectors don’t expect to do themselves.
‘It is owned by your company?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
‘As you can
probably gather,’ said Beale. ‘We are that rarity in this modern age, a family-owned business. And the Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company was once the jewel in the crown. This was all before the war, you understand.’
When there was still an Empire to sell pottery to, I thought.
As the name suggested, the great selling point of Unbreakable Empire Pottery was that it was well nigh unbreakable, or at least it was when compared to ordinary china and stoneware. Thus it could be carried up the Limpopo by bearers or strapped to the flank of an elephant and its owner could still be confident that at the end of a long and arduous journey he would still have a plate to eat off and, more importantly, a pot to piss in. Chamber pots being by far the most popular item.
‘A commercial empire founded on poo,’ said Beale – it was obviously his one big joke.
‘Where were they actually manufactured?’ I asked.
‘In London, in Notting Hill,’ said Beale. ‘Most people don’t realise that London has a rich industrial heritage. Notting Hill used to be known as the Potteries and Piggeries because that’s what it was famous for.’
It also had a reputation for some of the vilest living conditions in Victorian England and – given the competition was Manchester – that was pretty vile.
‘Everybody knows about the kiln on Pottery Lane,’ said Beale. ‘But they think that was all bricks.’ Me and Stephanopoulos exchanged looks. Since we were both completely ignorant of the kiln or the bricks neither of us thought anything of the sort – but we decided it was best to keep that to ourselves. Apparently after six days baking pigs and herding bricks, the inhabitants would kick back with a spot of cock-fighting, bull-baiting and ratting. It was the sort of place an adventurous gentleman might venture only if he didn’t mind being beaten, rolled and catching an exciting venereal disease. All of this was imparted by Beale with the relish of a man whose family hasn’t had to shovel shit for at least three generations. Thanks to Graham Beale’s great-great-grandfather, an illiterate navvy from Kilkenny who founded the company in 1865.
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