Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (21 page)

Leaving Kevin to Lesley’s tender mercies I wandered through the warehouse. In places the shelving had collapsed to create drifts of dinner plates or saucers which could be treacherous underfoot. In the far rooms I found piles of tureens and soup bowls covered in a thick layer of dust and the shelves ragged with old cobwebs. I definitely heard rats scuttling out of my way as I entered each room. In one I found a long shelf on which ranks of salt cellars were lined up like an army of miniature Daleks and on the shelf below a different army of little drunk men in tricorn hats – toby jugs. I pulled a few out for a closer look and as I touched them I felt a little flash of vestigia – the pigsty smell, but also beer and laughter. I saw that the face on each jug was subtly different, as if they’d all been individually made. As I walked out I could feel them leering at my back. In another, amidst what looked like chamber pots and milk jugs I found a shelf of statuettes – my old friend goddess-surprised-by-a-sculptor.

One room, on the ground floor at the back, had been partially cleared of shelves and pottery. In their place stood, almost as tall as Lesley and smothered in bubble wrap, a brand-new 15 kilowatt kiln. I found out later that this was just about the largest and hottest unit it was possible to buy off the shelf. Other packing cases were arrayed around it which turned out to be full of kiln furniture and bags full of mysterious coloured powders which were identified later as ingredients for making various types of ceramic glazes.

I thought of James Gallagher and his new-found interest in ceramics. A kiln like that would have to set you back a couple of thousand quid at least and the Murder Team would have flagged an expenditure like that on day one of the investigation. Likewise if he was renting the warehouse as a studio.

‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ I asked Kevin.

‘Which stuff?’ he asked. Even inside, Kevin kept his hoodie up, as if worried that without it his brains would fly out of his ears.

‘The pottery,’ I said. ‘The stuff what you’ve been trying to sell to the traders on the Portobello.’

‘Comes from here, don’t it?’ he said.

‘Not from Moscow Road then?’

Kevin gave me an accusing look. ‘You’ve been following me?’

‘Yes Kevin, we’ve been following you,’ said Lesley.

‘That’s a violation of my European human rights,’ he said.

I looked at Lesley – surely nobody could really be that stupid? She shrugged. Lesley has a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.

I gestured at the kiln. ‘Do you know whose this is?’ I asked.

Kevin glanced incuriously at the kiln and then shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said.

‘Have you ever noticed anything weird happening around here?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Ghosts, mysterious noises – weird shit?’

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘It’s time to call in Seawoll,’ said Lesley.

We made Kevin sit on the edge of the kiln’s loading pallet and walked out of his hearing.

‘Is this anything he wants to know about?’ I asked.

‘This could be the source of the murder weapon,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s down to the SIO to decide what he wants to know about.’

I nodded, she was right but I was thinking that this could have been where James was sloping off to during those gaps in his timeline. James was a student, but his father was rich.

‘I want to talk to the senator,’ I said. ‘Maybe he paid for all of this.’

Lesley reminded me that little miss FBI agent was likely to take a close interest in any visit, so I phoned Kittredge.

‘Have you found your little lost sheep?’ I said.

‘Why do you ask?’ Special Branch might have been reorganised out of existence but they were still the same cagey bastards they’d been when they were doing the legwork for MI5 during the Cold War.

‘Possible sighting in Ladbroke Grove,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d check with you before wasting any time on it.’

‘She’s back in the bunker,’ he said. ‘Has been since about nine this morning.’

‘That’s the hotel, right?’ I asked, knowing full well it probably wasn’t.

‘Grosvenor Square,’ said Kittredge wearily – meaning the American Embassy.

I thanked him and hung up. CTC was responsible for guarding the embassy, including any secret back doors it might have. If Kittredge said Reynolds was inside then that’s probably where she was.

‘Sitting in front of a laptop watching us drive around,’ said Lesley.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘If I leave the tracker with you, then she’ll never suspect.’

Finding the senator was easy enough. I just called Guleed – knowing where the relatives are is part and parcel of the family liaison role. It comes in useful if they make that unfortunate, but all too common, transition from victim to suspect.

‘We’re at the house in Ladbroke Grove,’ said Guleed.

I left Lesley to baby-sit Kevin and call in the cavalry, and made the short drive in under ten minutes.

The senator was an ordinary-looking man in an expensive suit. He sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jameson’s and a plastic half-pint glass in front of him.

‘Senator?’ I asked. ‘May I have a quick word?’

He looked up at me and gave me a grimace – I figured it was the closest he could get to a polite smile. There was whiskey on his breath.

‘Please, Detective, have a seat,’ he said.

I sat down opposite – he offered me a drink but I declined. He had a long face with a curious lack of expression, although I could see pain in the tension around his eyes. His brown hair was neatly cut into a conservative side parting, his teeth were white and even and his nails were neatly manicured. He looked
maintained –
as polished, dusted and cared for as a vintage automobile.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

I asked whether he, or anyone he knew, had purchased a kiln and associated equipment.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Is it important?’

‘I can’t say yet, sir,’ I said. ‘Did your son have access to an independent source of income – a trust fund perhaps?’

‘Yes,’ said the senator. ‘Several, in fact. But they’ve all been checked and nothing has been taken. Jimmy was always very self-sufficient.’

‘Did you have a lot of contact?’ I asked.

The senator poured a measure of whiskey into his plastic cup.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘The FBI seemed concerned that he might prove embarrassing – politically?’

‘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

T
he 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 both of the notional terraces. On our left there was a duplicate front door and ordinary interior doors at each end.