Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  All of these details would already have been noted by Stephanopoulos and her team. Even as I crouched beside the body half a dozen forensics techs were waiting to take up samples from anything that wasn’t firmly nailed down and behind them another set of techs with cutting tools to get all the stuff that was. My job was a bit different.

  I put my face mask and protective glasses on, got my face as close to the body as I could without touching it and closed my eyes. Human bodies retain vestigia very badly but any magic powerful enough to kill someone directly, if that was what had happened, is powerful enough to leave a trace. Just using my normal complement of senses I detected blood, dust and a urine smell that was definitely not foxes this time.

  As far as I could tell there were no vestigia associated with the body. I pulled back and looked round at Stephanopoulos. She frowned.

  ‘Why’d you call me in?’ I asked

  ‘There’s just something off about this job,’ she said. ‘I figured I’d rather have you check it now than have to call you in later.’

  Like after breakfast, when I was awake, I didn’t say. You don’t. Not when going out all hours is practically the working definition of a police officer’s job.

  ‘I’ve got nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t you—’ Stephanopoulos gave a little wave with her hand. We don’t generally explain how we do things to the rest of the Met – apart from anything else because we make most of our procedures up as we go along. As a result senior officers like Stephanopoulos know we do something but they’re not really sure what it is.

  I stepped away from the body and the waiting forensics types swarmed past me to finish processing the scene.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Single stab wound to the lower back and the blood trail leads back into the tunnel. We can’t tell whether he was dragged or staggered up here himself.’

  I looked down the tunnel. Cut-and-cover tunnels have their tracks running side by side, just like an outdoor railway, which meant that both tracks would have to stay shut down while they were searched.

  ‘Which direction is that?’ I asked. I’d got turned around somewhere back on the mezzanine level.

  ‘Eastbound,’ said Stephanopoulos. Back towards the Euston and King’s Cross. ‘And it’s worse than that.’ She pointed down the tunnel where it curved to the left. ‘Just past the curve is the junction with the District and Hammersmith so we’re going have to close down the whole interchange.’

  ‘Transport for London’s going to love that,’ I said.

  Stephanopoulos barked a short laugh. ‘They’re already loving it,’ she said.

  The tube was due to reopen in less than three hours for the day’s normal service and if the tracks at Baker Street were closed then the whole system was going to seize up on the opening Monday of the last shopping week before Christmas.

  Stephanopoulos was right though, – there was something off about the scene. More than just a dead guy. When I glanced up the tunnel I got a flash, not of vestigia but of something older, that instinct we all inherit from the evolutionary gap between coming out of the trees and inventing the big stick. From when we were just a bunch of skinny bipedal apes in a world full of apex predators. Back when we were lunch on legs. The warning that tells you that something is watching you.

  ‘Want me to have a look down the tunnel?’ I asked.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  People have a funny idea about police officers. For one thing they seem to think we’re perfectly happy to rush in to whatever emergency there is without any thought for our own safety. And it’s true we’re like fire fighters and soldiers, we tend to go in the wrong direction vis-à-vis trouble, but it doesn’t mean you don’t think. One thing we think about is the electrified third rail and just how easy it is to kill yourself on it. The safety briefing on the joys of electrification were delivered to me and the waiting forensics types by a cheerful-looking BTP sergeant called Jaget Kumar. He was that rare breed, a BTP officer who’d done the five-week course on track safety that allows you to traipse around the heavy engineering even when the tracks are live.

  ‘Not that you want to do that,’ said Kumar. ‘The principal safety tip when dealing with live rails is not to get on the track in the first place.’

  I went in behind Kumar while the rest of the forensics team hung back. They might not be sure what it is I really do but they understand the principle of not contaminating the crime scene. Besides, that way they could wait and see whether Kumar and I were electrocuted or not before putting themselves in danger.

  Kumar waited until we were safely out of earshot before asking whether I really was from the Ghostbusters.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘ECD 9,’ said Kumar. ‘Things that go bump in the night.’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  ‘Is it true you investigate,’ Kumar paused and fished around for an acceptable term, ‘unusual phenomena?’

  ‘We don’t do UFOs and alien abductions,’ I said, because that’s usually the second question.

  ‘Who does the alien stuff?’ asked Kumar. I glanced at him and saw he was taking the piss.

  ‘Can we keep our mind on the job?’ I said.

  The blood trail was easy to follow. ‘He kept to the side,’ said Kumar. ‘Away from the centre rail.’ He shone his torch on a clear boot print in the ballast. ‘He was staying off the sleepers, which makes me think that he had some variety of safety training.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘If you have to walk the tracks with the juice on then you stay off the sleepers. They’re slippery. You slip, you fall, you put your hands out and zap.’

  ‘Zap,’ I said. ‘That’s the technical term for it, is it? What do you call someone who’s been zapped?’

  ‘Mr Crispy,’ said Kumar.

  ‘That’s the best you guys can come up with?’

  Kumar shrugged. ‘It’s not like it’s a major priority.’

  We were around the curve and out of sight of the platform when we reached the place where the blood trail started. So far the ballast and dirt of the track bed had been pretty efficient at soaking up the blood, but here my torch flashed on a sleek irregular pool of dark red.

  ‘I’m going to check further up the tracks – see if I can find where he got in,’ said Kumar. ‘Will you be all right here?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said. ‘I’m good.’

  I crouched down and methodically quartered the area around the pool of blood with the beam of my torch. Less than half a metre back towards the platform I found a brown leather oblong and my torch reflected off the shiny face of a dead or deactivated phone. I almost picked it up but stopped myself.

  I was wearing gloves and had a pocket full of evidence bags and labels and had this been an assault or a burglary or any other lesser offence I’d have bagged and tagged it myself. But this was a murder inquiry and woe betide any officer who breaks the chain of evidence, for they will be sat down and have what went wrong with the OJ Simpson murder trial explained to them at great length. With Power-Point slides.

  I pulled my airwave set out of my pocket, fumbled the batteries back in, called the Exhibits Officer and told him that I had some exhibits for him. I was double-checking the area while I waited when I noticed something odd about the pool of blood. Blood is thicker than water, especially when it’s started to congeal, and so a pool of it doesn’t flatten out in the same way. And, I noticed, it can obscure the thing it’s covering. I leaned in as close as I could without risking contaminating it with my breath. As I did I got a flash of heat, coal dust and an eye-watering shit smell that was like falling face down in a farmyard. I actually sneezed. Now that was vestigia.

  I went down on my front to see if I could work out what it was under all that blood. It was triangular and biscuit-coloured. I thought it was a stone at first but I saw the edged were sharp and reali
sed it was a shard of pottery.

  ‘Something else?’ asked a voice above me – a forensics tech.

  I pointed out the things I’d found and then got out of the way as the photographer stepped in to record them in situ. I shone my torch up the tunnel and caught a reflection off Kumar’s high-visibility jacket thirty metres further on. He flashed back and I walked, carefully, up to join him.

  ‘Anything?’ I asked.

  Kumar used his torch to pick out a set of modern steel doors set in a decidedly Victorian brick arch. ‘I thought he might have got in via the old works access but they’re still sealed – you might want to fingerprint them though.’

  ‘Where are we now?’

  ‘Under Marylebone Road heading east,’ said Kumar. ‘There’s a couple of old ventilation shafts further up I want to check. Coming?’

  It was seven hundred metres to Great Portland Street, the next station. We didn’t go the whole way, just until we could see the platform. Kumar checked his access points and said that had our mystery boy got off the platform there he would have been spotted by the ever-vigilant CCTV operators.

  ‘Where the fuck did he get on the tracks?’ said Kumar.

  ‘Maybe there’s some other way of getting in,’ I said. ‘Something that’s not on the blueprints, something we missed.’

  ‘I’m going to get the regular patrolman down here,’ said Kumar. ‘He’ll know.’ Patrolmen spent their nights walking the tunnels looking for defects and were, according to Kumar, guardians of the secret knowledge of the Underground. ‘Or something,’ he said.

  I left Kumar waiting on his native guide and headed back towards Baker Street. I was halfway there when I slipped over a loose bit of ballast and fell on my face. I threw out my hands to break my fall, as you do, and it didn’t escape my attention that my left palm had come slap down on the electrified middle rail. Crispy fried policeman – lovely.

  I was sweating by the time I climbed back onto the platform. I wiped my face and discovered a thin coating of grime on my cheeks – my hands were black with it. Dust from the ballast, I guessed. Or maybe ancient soot from when steam locomotives pulled upholstered cars full of respectable Victorians through the tunnels.

  ‘For god’s sake somebody get that boy a hanky,’ said a large voice with a Northern accent. ‘And then someone can fucking tell me why he’s here.’

  Detective Chief Inspector Seawoll was a big man from a small town outside Manchester. The kind of place, Stephanopoulos had once said, that explained Morrissey’s cheery attitude to life. We’d worked together before – he’d tried to hang me on stage at the Royal Opera House and I’d stuck him with 5cc of elephant tranquilliser – it all made sense at the time, trust me. I’d have said that we came out about even, except he had to do four months of medical leave which most self-respecting coppers would have considered a bonus.

  Medical leave was obviously over and Seawoll was back in charge of his Murder Investigation Team. He’d taken a position up the platform where he could keep an eye on the forensics without having to change out of his camelhair coat and handmade Tim Little shoes. He beckoned me and Stephanopoulos over.

  ‘Glad to see you feeling better, sir,’ I said before I could stop myself.

  Seawoll looked at Stephanopoulos. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Something about the job felt off,’ she said.

  Seawoll sighed. ‘You’ve been leading my Miriam astray,’ he told me. ‘But I’m back now so I hope we’ll see a return to good old-fashioned evidence-based policing and a marked reduction in the amount of weird bollocks.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  ‘That being said – what kind of weird bollocks have you got me into this time?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think there was any magic …’

  Seawoll shut me up with a sharp gesture of his hand.

  ‘I don’t want to hear the m word coming out of your mouth,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything odd about the way he died,’ I said. ‘Except …’

  Seawoll cut me off again. ‘How did he die?’ he asked Stephanopoulos.

  ‘Nasty stab wound in his lower back, probably organ damage but he died of loss of blood,’ she said.

  Seawoll asked after the murder weapon and Stephanopoulos waved over the Exhibits Officer who held up a clear plastic evidence bag for our inspection. It was the biscuit-coloured triangle I’d found in the tunnel.

  ‘What the fuck is that supposed to be?’ asked Seawoll.

  ‘A bit of a broken plate,’ said Stephanopoulos and she twisted the bag around so we could see what was indeed a triangular section from a shattered plate – it had had a decorative rim. ‘Looks like earthenware,’ she said.

  ‘They’re sure that’s the weapon?’ asked Seawoll.

  Stephanopoulos said that the pathologist was as sure as she could be this side of an autopsy.

  I didn’t really want to tell Seawoll about the concentrated little knot of vestigia that clung to the murder weapon but I figured it would only lead to more trouble later if I didn’t.

  ‘Sir,’ I said. ‘That’s the source of the … weird bollocks.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Seawoll.

  I considered explaining vestigia but Nightingale had warned me that sometimes it was better to give them a nice simple explanation that they can relate to. ‘It just has a kind of glow about it,’ I said.

  ‘A glow?’

  ‘Yeah a glow.’

  ‘That only you can see,’ he said. ‘Presumably with your special mystical powers.’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My special mystical powers.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Seawoll. ‘So our victim gets stabbed in the tunnel with a bit of magic pot, staggers up the track looking for help, climbs up on the platform, collapses and bleeds out.’

  We knew the exact time of death, 1:17 in the morning, because we got it all on a CCTV camera. At 1:14 the footage showed the blur of his white face as he pulled himself onto the platform, the lurch as he tried to get to his feet and that terrible final collapse, that slump down onto his side – the surrender.

  Once the victim had been spotted on the platform it took the station manager less than three minutes to reach him but he was definitely, as the station manager put it, brown bread by the time he found him. We didn’t know how he’d got in the tunnel and we didn’t know how his killer had got out but at least, once forensics had processed the wallet, we knew who he was.

  ‘Oh bollocks,’ said Seawoll. ‘He’s an American.’ He passed me an evidence bag with a laminated card in it. At the top was NEW YORK STATE, below that DRIVER LICENSE, then a name, address and date of birth. His name was James Gallagher, from some town called Albany, NY, and he was twenty-three years old.

  We had a quick argument about what time exactly it was in New York before Seawoll dispatched one of the family liaison officers to contact the Albany Police Department. Albany being the capital of New York State, which I didn’t know until Stephanopoulos told me.

  ‘The scope of your ignorance, Peter,’ said Seawoll, ‘is truly frightening.’

  ‘Well our victim had a thirst for knowledge,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘He was a student at St Martin’s College.’

  There’d been an NUS card in the wallet and a couple of business cards with James Gallagher’s name on them and what we hoped was his London address – a mews just off the Portobello Road.

  ‘I do like it when they make it easy for us,’ said Seawoll.

  ‘What do you reckon,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Home, family, friends – first?’

  I’d mostly kept my mouth shut until then and I’d have, frankly, preferred to have sloped off and gone home but I couldn’t ignore the fact that James Gallagher had been done in with a magical weapon. Well, magical pot shard anyway.

  ‘I’d like to have a look round his gaff,’ I said. ‘Just in case he was a practitioner.’

  ‘Practitioner eh?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Is
that what you call them?’

  I went back to keeping my mouth shut and Seawoll gave me an approving look.

  ‘All right,’ said Seawoll. ‘Home first, round up any friends and family, get him time-lined. BTP are going get some bodies down here to sweep the tunnels.’

  ‘Transport for London aren’t going to like that,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘That’s unfortunate for them, isn’t it?’

  ‘We should tell forensics that the murder weapon may be archaeological,’ I said.

  ‘Archaeological?’ asked Seawoll.

  ‘Could be,’ I said.

  ‘Is that you’re professional opinion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which as usual,’ said Seawoll, ‘is as about as useful as a chocolate teapot.’

  ‘Would you like me to call my boss in?’ I asked.

  Seawoll pursed his lips and I realised with a shock that he was really considering whether to bring Nightingale in. Which annoyed me because it meant he didn’t trust me to do the job and unsettled me because there’d been something comforting about Seawoll’s resistance to any kind of ‘magic wank’ impinging upon his investigations. If he started to take me seriously then the pressure was going to be on me to deliver.

  ‘I heard Lesley’s joined your mob,’ he said.

  Ninety-degree change in direction of the conversation – classic police trick. Didn’t work because I’d been rehearsing the answer to that question ever since Nightingale and the Commissioner came to yet another ‘agreement’.

  ‘Not officially,’ I said. ‘She’s on indefinite medical leave.’

  ‘What a waste,’ said Seawoll shaking his head. ‘It’s enough to make you weep.’

  ‘How do you want to do this, sir?’ I asked. ‘AB do the murder and I do … the other … stuff?’ AB being the radio abbreviation for Belgravia Police station where Seawoll’s Murder Team was located – we police never like to use real words when we can use an incomprehensible bit of jargon instead.

  ‘After how that worked out last time?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Fuck no. You’re going to be operating out of our incident room as a member of the inquiry team. That way I can keep my fucking eye on you.’