The AB local was your classic Victorian corner pub that was hanging on to its traditional ambience by the skin of its teeth, and the fact that it wasn’t fronting the main road. It wasn’t totally overrun by police but it really wouldn’t have been a good place for a random member of the public to pick a pocket or start a fight. You could tell lower ranks because the suits were from D&C and Burtons while senior officers splashed out on bespoke – it wasn’t just that they could afford it, it was also because they were less likely to get random bodily fluids on it.
Seawoll was holding court at one end of the bar and putting them away in the sure and safe knowledge that his most competent DI, Stephanopoulos, was running the case. When he spotted Lesley he beckoned her over. When I moved to follow he stopped me with a raised finger. Lesley had always been his favourite. Still, he sent that first and only pint down the bar to me, so the evening at least got off to the right start.
A dark-haired DC with pale skin whose name I can’t remember sidled over with DC Carey in tow. She wanted to know whether it was true I worked for the Folly or not and, when I said yes, she wanted to know whether magic was real or not.
I told her that while there was a lot of really strange shit around, magic, doing spells and the like, didn’t really exist. I’d taken to giving this explanation to random inquiries ever since Abigail, junior ghost hunter extraordinaire, had taken my flippant confirmation and run with it.
‘Pity,’ she said. ‘I always thought that reality was overrated.’ And shortly after that she drifted off with Carey bobbing behind like a sadly neglected balloon.
She’ll miss him if she lets go and he drifts off, I thought.
I looked over to where Seawoll was making Lesley laugh. She was holding a straight glass full of multicoloured alcohol from which protruded two lemon slices, a paper parasol and a bendy straw. Since she was occupied, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to get an update on the case. There are three basic ways to get yourself up to speed on an ongoing case. One is to log into HOLMES and work your way down the action list, reading statements, evaluating forensic reports and following the investigation tree to see where each branch leads. The primary advantage of this technique is, if you have a terminal at home, you can do it while eating pizza and drinking beer. The second involves gathering your team around a table somewhere and getting each of them to outline their progress so far. Often a white board is involved or – if you’re really unlucky – PowerPoint. The principal advantage of the meeting is that, if you happen to be the Senior Investigating Officer, you can look your subordinates in the eye and tell if they’re talking bollocks or not. The disadvantage is that, beyond about half an hour, everyone around the table below the rank Chief Superintendent will begin to slip into a coma.
The third way is to catch up with the investigation team when they’re in the pub. And the big advantage of the pub ambush, beyond the easy availability of alcohol and salted peanuts, is that nobody wants to talk about the case and in their haste to get rid of you they will boil down their role in the investigation to a sentence. Thus: ‘We did a joint evaluation of video evidence encompassing all possible access points in conjunction with BTP and CLP and despite widening the parameters of our assessment to include registered and non-registered cameras in the high-probability zones we have as yet to achieve a positive identification of James Gallagher prior to his appearance at Baker Street,’ becomes ‘We’ve checked every CCTV camera in the system and it’s as if the fucker beamed down from the Starship Enterprise.’
Accurate, concise – unhelpful. His fellow students thought he was boring, his lecturers thought he was talented but boring and those locals he interacted with thought he was pleasant, respectful and boring. The only interesting things about James Gallagher were periodic gaps in his timeline starting in late September where his movements couldn’t be accounted for.
‘But that could be him going clubbing,’ commented the DC who told me. ‘You always get gaps, and mine’s a pint if you’re getting them in.’
I got them in all night but what I got out was pretty much nothing except to find there was an upper limit to the amount of orange juice I can drink. I was just wondering whether I could risk another pint when Seawoll beckoned me over and I suddenly became very glad I was sober.
Lesley was as pissed as I’ve ever seen her.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I have to powder what’s left of my nose.’
Seawoll winced as he watched her stagger off in the direction of the loos then he turned his attention to me.
‘She was the best of your generation,’ he said. ‘And you broke her.’
Between growing up with my mum, for whom tact is the blue stuff you use to put posters up, and my dad, who prided himself on being your plain-speaking cockney geezer, particularly when his ‘medicine’ was late, I’m pretty immune to the hard stare. Still it wasn’t easy to meet Seawoll’s gaze – and I’ve stared down Molly.
‘But that is as it may be,’ he said, ‘We’re fucking nowhere with this case and it’s got that nasty smell that I’ve come to associate with you and that well dressed piece of shit you work for.’
I bit my lip and waited. He was pushing, I wondered why.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
Strangely, this made him smile. ‘I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment,’ he said. ‘But what I want mostly is a way of getting through this case with a minimum of paperwork, property damage and an actual suspect I can arrest and send up the fucking stairs.’
‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ I said.
‘You know the Covent Garden beheading has never been officially cleared,’ he said. ‘That’s a dent in my clear-up rate, Peter, not yours, because you don’t have a fucking clear-up rate do you?’ He leaned forward. I leaned back. ‘I’ve got a very good clear-up rate, Peter, I’m very proud of it and so at the end of this case I expect there to be a collar – preferably one attached to a human being.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘You do know when to keep your mouth shut,’ said Seawoll. ‘I’ll give you that much. What are your actions for tomorrow?’
‘I’m going to follow Kevin Nolan and see if I can’t establish what his connection with James Gallagher was,’ I said.
‘You’re sure there’s a connection?’
They were both dealing in magic pottery, I didn’t say.
‘You don’t want to know, sir,’ I said. ‘But with luck we can connect them in a more tangible way.’
‘I want you to write up the action plan properly and file it first thing with the case manager,’ said Seawoll. ‘If you get a connection we can use, you call Stephanopoulos immediately and we ramp up the surveillance. No going off on your own – understand?’
There was a crash as a door slammed open and a high-pitched laugh.
Lesley lurched out of the loos, pulled herself up into a semblance of dignity, and looked around in vague puzzlement before fixing on me and Seawoll.
‘Oh dear,’ said Seawoll. ‘Will you look at the state of that? About time you took her home, son.’ He waved at me imperiously and I scuttled off to do his bidding.
Lesley wasn’t so drunk that she didn’t think to check my fitness to drive.
‘I’m definitely below the limit,’ I said as I poured her into the passenger seat and closed the door.
‘Why aren’t you drunk?’ she asked. It had grown cold out while we were in the pub and the inside of the Asbo was freezing – my breath steamed as I leaned over to buckle Lesley in.
‘Because I’m driving,’ I said.
‘You’re so boring,’ she said. ‘You’d think a copper who was a wizard would be more interesting. Harry Potter wasn’t this boring. I bet Gandalf could drink you under the table.’
Probably true, but I don’t remember the bit where Hermione gets so wicked drunk that Harry has to pull the broomstick over on Buckingham Palace Road just so she can be sick in the gutter. Once she
wiped her mouth with the napkins I’d so boringly kept in the glove compartment against such an eventuality, she resumed by pointing out that Merlin had probably had something to teach me about the raising of the wrist.
I would have been subjected to a longer list except Lesley had grown up reading Sophie Kinsella and Helen Fielding and so she ran out of fictional wizards at Severus Snape and our journey home continued in relative quiet.
By the time I’d parked in the Folly’s garage Lesley had gone from belligerent to my best mate. She flopped against me and I felt her breasts squashing against my chest as her arm snaked around my waist. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she mumbled. I was hard enough to make me glad I wasn’t wearing jeans. It certainly didn’t make manoeuvring her through the snow to the back door any easier.
I tried to prop her against the wall while I fumbled for my keys but she kept flopping against me. ‘I could leave the mask on,’ she said. ‘Or wear a paper bag.’
Her hand found my erection and gave it a delighted squeeze. I yelped and dropped the keys. ‘Look what you made me do,’ I said.
‘Never mind that,’ said Lesley and tried to get her hand inside my fly.
I jumped back and she started to sag slowly into the snow. I had to throw both my arms around her to try to hoist her back up, but all I managed to do was half pull both her jumper and blouse off.
‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘I’m up for it if you are.’
The back door opened to reveal Molly, who looked at me, then at Lesley and then back at me.
‘It’s not what you think it is,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it?’ asked Lesley as she staggered upright. ‘Shit.’
‘Let us in, Molly I want to get her into bed,’ I said.
Molly gave me a poisonous look as I half dragged Lesley inside.
‘Well, you put her to bed then,’ I said.
So she did. Molly just reached out and plucked Lesley from my arms and slung her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, only with much less effort than I’d have had to use on a sack of potatoes. Then she slowly turned on the spot and went gliding off into the long shadows of the atrium.
Toby, who’d obviously been waiting until the coast was clear, bounced out of the door to see if I’d brought him a present.
I headed back to the coach house to do some police work – which is, trust me, better than a cold shower.
First thing, I took the image of the Elvish script from the demon trap and ran it through Photoshop, using contrast and edge finding to clarify the letters and more importantly disguise where they came from. Then I put it out onto the great and varied social media sea with a request for a translation. While I waited, I wrote the formal action plan for Seawoll, no doubt snoring boozily in his bed by now, and emailed it to the Inside Inquiry Team.
The Tolkien scholars were obviously slow off the mark that night so I did a preliminary search on Empire Ware and Empire Pottery and got a lot of links to the Empire Porcelain Company of the North Staffordshire potteries. It was nice enough stuff but not only was it from the wrong end of the country, it had ceased trading in the late 1960s – yet was nonetheless considered eminently collectible. It wasn’t until I got past page 36 that I caught a glimpse of what I was looking for: The Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company, established 1865. I changed my search but all I got was a paragraph from an expired Ebay auction. Further research was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way – by sending an email to the SO11 and requesting an Integrated Intelligence Platform check. I referenced OPERATION MATCHBOX and gave my warrant number, making it all slick and official. By the time I’d finished that there were three translations of the Elvish in my inbox.
Bomb disposal experts talk about the bombmaker’s signature, the telltale flourishes that distinguish one mass murderer from another. But identification is so much easier when they just write their name in crayon. I recognised the Faceless Man’s particular sense of humour. The transcription read in English:
IF YOU CAN READ THESE WORDS THEN YOU ARE NOT ONLY A NERD BUT PROBABLY DEAD.
Thursday
14
Westbourne Park
In the good old days when men were real men and members of the Flying Squad dealt with armed robbers the way god intended – with a pickaxe handle – if you wanted to follow a suspect vehicle you needed at least three cars. That way you could run a loose ‘box’ around your target which was not only hard to shake but minimised the risk that one of your cars would be made as a tail. Nowadays, with the authorisation of an officer of Inspector rank or over, you just run up behind the vehicle in question, when it’s stationary obviously, and stick a tracker to the chassis. They’re about half the size of a matchbox and cost about the same as a week’s clubbing in Ibiza.
New Covent Garden at five o’clock on a winter’s morning is a concrete arena full of headlights, smoke and shouting. Trucks, vans and forklifts snort and growl in and out of loading bays while men in reflective coats and woollen hats clutch clipboards and dial their mobiles with clumsy gloved fingers. It was a simple matter to park the Asbo in the shelter of a multi-storey car park and crunch through the snow down to the railway arches where all three Transit vans registered to Nolan and Sons were waiting for the day’s load. Kevin’s van was easy to spot. It was the oldest and dirtiest. It was also at the end of the row furthest from the lockup’s door. I hunched up in my jacket and pulled my hat down over my ears and covered the last twenty metres as nonchalantly as I could. As I got within a couple of metres I heard voices on the other side of the van.
‘What if they come looking?’ asked a whiney voice – Kevin Nolan.
‘They know your name, Kev. If they want to find you it wouldn’t exactly pose an insurmountable problem for them,’ said a deeper, calmer voice. ‘So you might as well make yourself useful.’ Kevin’s big friend or more likely brother.
I felt the top of the tracker to make sure I had it right way up and then, quick as a flash, I bent down and stuck it to the chassis. I wriggled it a few times to make sure it was secure and as I did so my fingers brushed something that shouldn’t have been there. It was roughly the same size and shape as the tracker.
‘I don’t see why we can’t get today’s stuff from Coates and Son,’ said Kevin on other side of the van. ‘Danny says they’re giving it away.’
I pulled the second object out – it was another tracker. It was even, as far as I could tell in the dark, the same make as mine. I balled it in my fist and walked away – quickly.
‘Of course they’re giving it away,’ Kevin’s probable brother’s voice receded behind me. ‘They’re being checked.’
Was someone else running an operation on the Nolans? The Inside Inquiry Team had done a pool check on Kevin Nolan and his family the day before and any police operation would have been flagged. Could it be MI5? Were the Nolans part of some dissident Republican active service unit or part of a supply chain for the same – or informers against? Had Agent Reynolds been right – did the murder actually have an Irish component?
I ducked out of sight behind a truck that was waiting to be loaded.
No, I thought, it still would have been flagged. Not least because DCI Seawoll was one of the most respected and formidable officers in the Met and you’d have to be remarkably stupid to try and do an end run around him.
I got out my torch and examined the tracker, which was identical in every way to mine and probably bought from the same online catalogue. Unless I wanted to open it up, it was about as traceable as a ballpoint pen. I took out my keys and scratched a tiny X into the casing in between the attachment magnets, took a deep breath to calm my nerves and strolled back towards Kevin Nolan’s crap Transit van.
I had to put it back where I found it but I couldn’t leave my tracker next to it, or whoever had planted the first tracker might find mine if they came to retrieve theirs. I couldn’t hear any voices as I reached the van. I hoped this meant they were all inside the lock-up. I bent down, replaced the trac
ker where I’d found it, removed mine and was just heading for the back of the van when the rear doors crashed open.
‘You need to clean this fucking van.’ It was Kevin’s probable brother. I froze, which was about the most stupidly suspicious-looking thing I could do, and the van rocked as someone climbed inside. ‘No wonder they’re not happy. Pass me the broom.’
‘It’s not the van,’ said Kevin from the back. ‘They think they should be getting more.’
‘They get what they pay for,’ said the voice. ‘I didn’t make the stupid deal.’
It’s always a risk when you have a plan that you fixate on it even when things go pear-shaped. I realised that because my plan had been to stick my tracker under the back of the van. I was actually waiting for Kevin and his friend to leave so I could do so – risking discovery the whole time. How stupid is that?
The van rocked rhythmically and I heard god-knows-what being swept out of the back. ‘I thought Franny’s was closed down,’ said Kevin.
I crouched down and put the tracker ahead of the front wheel arch and nonchalantly walked away. It wasn’t as good or secure a position as the back or the mid-section, but the magnets on those things are much better than they used to be.
We’d picked our position on the fourth floor of the car park with care. From there me and Lesley could have set up our camera with the telephoto lens on a tripod and had a direct line of sight on Nolan and Sons – had we only been willing to freeze to death or indeed had remembered to bring the tripod. The Asbo was conspicuously the only car in its row with the engine running.
‘Sorted?’ asked Lesley as I climbed gratefully into the warm interior.
‘Not exactly,’ I said and told her about the second tracker.
I fished out the thermos flask, yet another Folly antique, a khaki cylinder the size of a shell casing, and poured myself a coffee. Lesley was equally sceptical about us being tracked by CTC, but for different reasons.
‘They don’t need to track us. If they want to know something they’d just phone us up and ask. And if MI5 wanted to know something they’d just call CTC who would call us and ask,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the FBI.’
Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) Page 15