Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (10 page)

Nine Elms

G
iven 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.

Portobello Court was a case in point, guarding the crossroads with Elgin Crescent and the transition between antique market and the fruit and veg. Holding the line so that a man could still find double sausage, eggs, beans, toast and chips for a fiver and at the same time keep an eye on the patch allocated to the market stall where, Zach swore, James Gallagher had bought his fruit bowl. He had the fry-up. I had a rather nice mushroom omelette and a cup of tea. Zach picked up a discarded copy of the
Sun
, glanced at the headline –
London E. Coli Outbreak Confirmed –
and turned to the back pages. I kept my eyes focused out the window where the space the patch occupied was vanishing under the fresh snow.

I phoned Lesley. ‘How do I check on the owners of a market stall in Portobello?’ I asked.

Zach paused mid-chew to look at me.

‘You call the Inside Inquiry Team,’ she said. ‘Who are actually paid to answer your stupid questions.’ I could hear street sounds behind her.

‘Where are you?’

‘Gower Street,’ she said. ‘I’ve got another consult.’

I said goodbye and fished about in my address book for the Inside Inquiry Team’s number. Zach gave me an urgent little wave.

‘What?’

‘I’ve got a little confession to make,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t entirely honest.’

‘I’m shocked,’ I said.

‘The actual stall,’ he said. ‘The one you want is that one.’ He pointed to a stall further down the street. It was selling pots, pans and assorted dodgy kitchenware and had been when we’d stepped into the café half an hour earlier.

‘I’ve got a philosophical question,’ I said. ‘Do you realise that your continually lying to me is an erosion of trust that could have adverse consequences at a later date – for instance in about five minutes?’

‘Not really,’ said Zach around a mouthful of chips. ‘I’ve always been a live-in-the-moment kind of guy. A grasshopper not an ant. What happens in five minutes?’

‘I finish my tea,’ I said.

If you live in London just about the last thing you expect is a white Christmas. The stallholder had been ready for the festive season. There was tinsel draped around the struts of his stall and a small plastic Christmas tree with a ‘Last Minute Xmas Bargains!’ sign attached where the fairy should go. But he had to keep knocking the accumulated snow off his awning or risk it collapsing. It also meant he was much more pleased to see me than he might have been – even after seeing my warrant card.

‘My brother, my brother, my brother,’ he said. ‘I know the law never sleeps, but surely you must be looking for something for someone special.’

‘I’m looking for an earthenware fruit bowl,’ I said and showed him a picture on my phone.

‘I remember these,’ he said. ‘The man who sold them said they were unbreakable.’

‘Were they?’

‘Unbreakable? As far as I know.’ The stallholder blew on his hands and then stuffed them into his armpits. ‘He said it was an ancient process whose secrets had been guarded since the dawn of time. But it looked like pottery to me.’

‘Who’d you get them from?’

‘It was one of the Nolan brothers,’ he said. ‘The youngest – Kevin.’

‘Who are the Nolans?’

The stallholder looked at Zach. ‘You know them, Zachy boy, don’t you?’ he said.

Zach bobbed his head noncommittally.

‘Nolan and Sons wholesalers,’ said the stallholders. ‘Only strictly speaking they’re the Nolan Bros. now since the dad died.’

‘Local boys?’

‘Not for ages,’ he said gesturing vaguely south. ‘Covent Garden now.’

I thanked him and gave him a tenner for his trouble. It never hurts to cultivate, and I was thinking that wherever the case went, Portobello needed to be on my radar. I wondered when was the last time Nightingale had been up here – probably not since the 1940s.

‘If you don’t need me anymore,’ said Zach. ‘I’ll be off.’

‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘You can come with me down to Covent Garden.’

Zach twisted up his shoulders. ‘What do you need me for?’

Because you don’t want to go, I thought, and because you’ve marked enough squares on the suspicious behaviour board for me to call bingo.

‘You can be my local guide,’ I said.

New Covent Garden is where old Covent Garden went when it switched from being London’s major fruit, vegetable and flower market to being a refurbished tourist trap with a rather good opera house attached. It’s across the river at Nine Elms so I took the Chelsea Bridge as the lesser of two evils – nobody goes across Vauxhall Bridge in the morning unless they’re new in town or working for MI6.

The river was grey under the snow clouds and as we crossed I could see where the portacabins were beginning to accrete around the solid brick mass of Battersea Power Station. The whole area, including the market, was due to suffer obliteration by urban regeneration in the coming years. I suspected the stacked-Tupperware school of architecture, whose work already lined much of the Thames, would predominate.

I turned off Nine Elms into the access road and stopped at the toll gate. I forked over the entry fee rather than show my warrant card in order to forestall any advance word of my coming. That useful bit of advice had come with the ‘pool report’ from the Inside Inquiry Team who’d managed a pretty exhaustive check on Nolan and Sons in the hour it took me to drive there. The access road dipped under the railway tracks and I followed the signs round into the market proper. The market buildings had been built in the 1960s as a scaled-up replica of the arcade in the original Covent Garden, only this time making sure it was dingily utilitarian in concrete and breezeblock. Two rows of arcades with shop-sized units that allowed display at one end and easy lorry access at their backs. When it’s busy I imagine it’s really impressive, but being a fresh fruit and vegetable market the working day was over by seven in the morning. By the time I drove into the complex the shutters were down and the new snow was already thick around the entrances to the loading bay. Fortunately, Nolan and Sons didn’t run to a place in the main market. They operated out of one of a line of railway arches nearby. Their shutters were up and an aging Transit van was parked outside – Nolan and Sons was written upon a sign at the front of the arch and repeated in flaking paint on the van.

‘Tight bastards,’ muttered Zach. ‘Their dad’s been dead for twenty years and they can’t be arsed to change the signs.’

I’d parked the Asbo under the overhang of the elevated railway tracks three arches down from Nolan and Sons so I could observe for a bit without the windscreen getting covered in snow.

I asked Zach why he hadn’t wanted to come down to the market.

‘I got into a bit of trouble last year – my face is banned from the market,’ he said.

‘But you’re with me,’ I said. ‘I’m the police – that makes it official.’

‘Ha,’ he barked. ‘The police? Please, as if. No offence but you people have no idea what’s really going on.’

‘No? What’s really going on then?’

‘Things you wouldn’t believe,’ he said.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked as a skinny white boy in a blue Adidas hoodie emerged from the arches and half ran, half stumbled, off towards the main market. In this weather wearing just a hoodie was a true example of style over brains. He was that skinny that he must have been freezing.

‘That’s our Kevin,’ said Zach. ‘Not too bright.’

‘What wouldn’t I believe?’ I asked.

‘You still on about that?’ asked Zach.

‘You brought it up.’

‘Let’s just say that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ said Zach. ‘That’s Shakespeare, that is.’

‘Are we talking aliens here?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘But I did see a unicorn in Epping Forest.’

‘When was that?’

‘Back when I was a kid,’ said Zach – he sounded wistful, like it was a real memory. ‘And there’s a shebeen at the top of a council flat where you can get the best beer and bootleg comedy acts this side of the Hudson River. And there’s a girl that lives on the canal at Little Venice who grows blow under water.’

‘You’re sure it’s not seaweed?’ I asked but I was thinking that Zach was a little too well informed to be your average London wide-boy. Not that I was going to let him know that I knew. The golden rule for policing is always try to know more than any suspects, witnesses and officers of superintendent rank and above.

‘This is magic weed,’ he said. ‘I had a block to sell once and I ended up smoking it all myself.’ It had obviously temporarily slipped Zach’s mind that I was police – happens quite a lot with white guys, I’ve noticed. Can be very useful at times.

Kevin Nolan came back dragging a pair of bin bags behind him. He dropped them near the back of the Transit van. We watched as he pulled a stack of plywood crates off a stack and started emptying the contents of the bin bags into them – it looked like greens to me. His movements were exaggeratedly sloppy and sullen, like a child who’d been nagged into tidying his room.

‘What do you think he’s doing?’ I asked.

‘Late bargains,’ said Zach. ‘You can get a lot of cheap stuff if you wait this late in the day and you’re not picky.’

Kevin, the bin bags emptied, started loading the crates into the back of the Transit van. I didn’t want to be chasing him around town in this weather, so I got out of the car.

‘You be here when I get back,’ I told Zach.

‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no intention of leaving this vehicle.’

There’s a number of different ways to handle the initial approach to a member of the public, ranging from the insinuating yourself into a conversation to warming up with a pre-emptive smack on the head with your baton. I decided to go for bold and authoritative, because that usually has the best effect on long thin nervous streaks of piss like Kevin.

I squared my shoulders and advanced with my warrant card in full view.

‘Kevin Nolan,’ I said. ‘Can I have a word.’

It was perfect. I caught him just as he was picking up crates. As soon as he recognised me as police he gave a startled jump and literally looked left and then right, as if contemplating a runner. Then he collected himself and opted, boringly, for sulky belligerence.