Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (36 page)

‘As his older brother told it to me,’ whispered Ten-Tons. ‘Kevin wouldn’t harm a fly.’

Beside me Zach snorted – probably thinking of the beating he’d got in Shepherd’s Bush.

‘I believe he’s supplied you with food contaminated with
E.coli
,’ I whispered.

There was no repetition from the crowd and when I saw the blank looks on both the Ten-Tons’ faces I realised it was because they hadn’t understood what I’d just said.

‘The last delivery was tainted,’ I whispered and the crowd took up
tainted
around me and Matthew Ten-Tons looked shocked.

‘Are you certain of this?’ he asked.

I had blow-ups of the pictures Lesley had taken of the pallets Kevin had loaded onto his van. Written on the side was Coates and Son, a wholesaler who had been told, that very morning, to stop trading by the Food Standards Agency but had instead decided to flog off some of their stock – cheap. Which was why Kevin had bought it, stuffed it in the back of his transit van and delivered it to the Quiet People – right in front of me and Lesley.

‘On my oath as an apprentice,’ I said, louder than I meant to. ‘And more importantly, has anyone eaten any of the food that came down the day before yesterday?’

Ten-Tons sat back, his chest heaved, his mouth gaped open and he began making a staccato series of hissing sounds. Then his face turned pink and, still hissing, he leaned forward and slapped his palm on the tabletop.

I flinched, torn between backing away or rushing forward to do the Heimlich manoeuvre, and I was just about to stand up when I realised that he was laughing.

‘We don’t eat that,’ he whispered once he’d got breathing under control. ‘We buy our groceries from the Jew.’

‘Which particular Jew?’ I asked.

Ten-Tons reached out and touched his daughter’s arm to get her attention.

‘What’s the name of the Jew again?’ he asked her.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes at me. Or at least I think she did. It’s hard to tell what with the wraparound shades and all. She whispered; ‘Tesco, he’s talking about Tesco.’

‘You shop at Tesco?’ asked Zach, far too loudly.

‘They deliver,’ hissed Elizabeth.

‘You used to make me go out for stuff,’ whispered Zach.

Ten-Tons wasn’t liking that – he frowned at his daughter, but she ignored him.

‘You were always offering to go,’ she whispered. ‘Like a friendly rat.’

‘What’s this?’ asked Ten-Tons and grabbed Zach’s wrist. ‘You were speaking – behind my back?’

‘Oi!’ I said in my speaking voice and it rippled through the crowd around me like the downdraft from a helicopter. ‘Focus. This is serious – if you don’t eat them, what is it you do with all those bloody vegetables?’

I smelt them way before I met them. There’s something distinctive about pig slurry. Nothing else smells like it or lingers in your nostrils so long.

Like I said, they used to call the area the Potteries and Piggeries, I thought about this and wondered whether Ten-Tons’ ancestors had made the conscious decision to move their pigs underground. Or had their sties slowly sunk beneath the ground like a Thunderbird arriving back at Tracy Island? The latter, I decided when Ten-Tons led me by the hand through a series of domed chambers, dimly lit by carriage lamps, each with its wallow, its trough and its fat albino pigs. The troughs were full of the kind of random greenery we’d watched Kevin Nolan delivering two days ago. Unsurprisingly, I was expected to put my hands on the bloody things. Ten-Tons practically shoved me at a vast sow, who was wallowing chin-deep in mud. Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

The animal flesh under my hand was rough, warm and disturbingly like human skin. I gave an experimental scratch and the sow made an encouraging grunting noise.

‘Good pigs,’ I whispered to Ten-Tons. ‘Very porky.’ I swear I don’t know where this stuff comes from sometimes.

Did
E. coli
travel through the food chain, I wondered – I was going to have to find out. I had to find a way of getting a health inspector down here who a) wouldn’t freak out; b) wouldn’t run screaming to the media or, worse, Thames Water.

It stank here. But in an enclosed underground chamber I reckoned the smell should have killed us. In the gloom I could make out the pale shapes of men, stripped to the waist, shovelling manure into wheelbarrows – which explained where the smell was going. I remembered chatting up a good-looking Greenpeace activist during a protest in Trafalgar Square and she’d told me, in more detail than I would have liked, that pig slurry was essentially useless as manure. More like toxic waste from a factory, she’d said. And the Quiet People couldn’t have been dumping it in the Thames because Mama Thames would have come round and had a ‘conversation’ about same.

‘What do you do with the pig shit?’ I asked.

Ten-Tons squeezed my forearm in what I was beginning to recognise as his way of expressing approval and drew me down a corridor lined with shiny white tiles. ‘Cleans up nice and easily,’ whispered Ten-Tons when I stopped to feel the slick surface.

We were following one of the guys with a barrow as he wheeled it up the corridor to a vaulted chamber lined with the same white tile. There he lifted a hatch in the floor and tipped the slurry down in one practised movement. With a rattle, he seized a bucket of water placed nearby and sluiced down the wheelbarrow and the edges of the hatch. Then he refilled the bucket from a tap mounted in the wall and wheeled his barrow back down the corridor, presumably for more shit shovelling. As he went I saw another barrow wrangler heading towards us with another load of slurry.

When he led me into the next room I thought I knew what I was going to see next.

I was wrong.

I looked up the figures later; your average pig produces over ten times what a human does per kilo body weight and given that these were big pigs, we were talking a shitload of pig shit. Now, not only is that enough to drown in, but it’s also the vilest-smelling animal by-product known to man – which doesn’t endear you to your neighbours. But you can take that slurry and run it through what’s called a horizontal plug flow reactor. Pig shit goes in one end, some seriously good fertilizer comes out the other and you get methane out the top. It also gets rid of the smell, and some farms do it for that reason alone. The thing is, in a cold climate like what we’ve got you have to use most of the methane to maintain a useful operating temperature, which is why this technology has never taken off in Northern Europe. It’s the sort of sustainable low-tech engineering favoured by progressive development NGOs, Greenpeace and middle-aged men in leather-patched tweed jackets.

I was expecting something simple.

What I got was a ten-metre wall of brass pipework festooned with dials and gauges and stop valves. Two older men in moleskin trousers, white shirts and sleeveless leather jerkins were shading their pale faces while they worked two banks of brake levers, the kind I associate with old-fashioned railway signal boxes. A whistle blew, one of an ascending bank mounted near the centre of the contraption, and one of the engineers stepped smartly over to a row of gauges. There he brushed his fingers around the face of the dial – there was no glass – before calmly pulling two levers in quick succession and turning a valve wheel a quarter turn to the left. The whistle stopped.

My industrial chemistry had been leaking out of my head for over seven years, but enough of the basics remained for me to spot a cracking plant – even one that had dropped out of a Jules Verne novel. The Quiet People were refining their pig-generated hydrocarbons on an industrial scale.

And that was when I realised that Tyburn was wrong.

There was no way we could allow the existence of the Quiet People to become general knowledge. If the Health and Safety Executive didn’t close them down then the inhabitants of one of the richest neighbourhoods in London, which the bloody refinery was built under, would. And the HSE would probably be right, because no doubt it had been built with the same concern for worker safety that had made Victorian factories the happy places to work they were.

That wasn’t counting what the farm welfare people would say about the pigs, or OF WAT about the connections to the sewage system, OFSTED about the children’s education – if they even were educated – or Kensington and Chelsea’s social services or housing. The Quiet People would be swept away as quickly and with as little fuss as a pygmy tribe living in an inconveniently mineral-rich part of a rainforest.

‘We’re right proud of this,’ whispered Ten-Tons, mistaking my sudden paralysis for awe.

‘I’ll bet,’ I whispered back, and asked him what it was all in aid of.

The answer turned out to be firing pottery – as if I couldn’t guess.

Ten-Tons led me to a workshop where Stephen – I was getting better at telling them all apart – was throwing a pot on a wheel. Watching were Agent Reynolds and Lesley, who’d been led there by Elizabeth. Lesley caught my arm, in the manner of our hosts, and pulled me down until she could whisper in my ear.

‘We can’t stay here,’ she whispered. ‘Even Nightingale’s not going to wait much longer before he comes in.’

And it would be with as many armed officers as he could muster.

Even in the dim light Lesley could read my face. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And you should see the arsenal these guys have squirrelled away.’

‘You two are going to have to go back,’ I whispered.

‘And leave you here on your own?’ she hissed.

‘If anything happens,’ I whispered, ‘you can come back and get me.’

Lesley turned my head so she could stare me in the eyes.

‘Is this one of your stupid things?’ she asked.

‘Did you get anything from Ten Tons’ daughter?’ I asked.

‘Stephen is her fiancé,’ whispered Lesley. ‘Or at least that’s what her dad thinks. But I reckon Stephen wants to go outside the tribe.’

I glanced over at Stephen, who didn’t, I noticed, wear sunglasses. He didn’t seem worried by bright lights. Less sensitive or just less inhibited?

Lesley explained that it was a love triangle, or possibly a rectangle, but either way a scandal by the standards of the Quiet People who were living in what Lesley described as Jane Austen’s last bunker. Elizabeth was betrothed to Stephen but in the light of his neglect the young princess’s fancy had been caught by the dashing and debonair cousin from across the sea.

‘Ryan Carroll?’ I asked. ‘She obviously likes the artistic type.’

‘Oh, she does,’ whispered Lesley. ‘Only further across the sea than Ireland. Handsome, American, son of a senator, slightly dead.’

James Gallagher.

‘Did they ever—?’

Elizabeth had been far too refined to say it outright but Lesley and Reynolds were pretty certain that some snogging had taken place at the very least. I remembered the way that Zach couldn’t look Elizabeth in the face – unrequited in love. That was a great big square on the Police Bingo Board – I did a quick check to make sure Zach hadn’t sloped off while we were distracted. He was still with us and still gazing at Elizabeth.

‘No cuts on his hand,’ I whispered, but maybe he healed fast.

‘We’ll know when the DNA results come through,’ whispered Lesley. ‘If it is him, then Special Agent Reynolds is going to be so smug.’

We checked to make sure Reynolds wasn’t listening on the sly, but she was staring at Stephen in what looked a lot like awe. I looked down at the pot he was working on. It was glowing with a soft luminescence that, if you’re me or Lesley, was a little bit familiar.

‘All right,’ said Lesley in a normal speaking voice. ‘That explains a lot.’

And I found myself unexpectedly looking at a totally complete Bingo card.

‘I need you to go back to Nightingale right now,’ I whispered. ‘You can leave Zach with me.’

‘This is one of your stupid plans isn’t it?’ she whispered.

I told her not to worry, and it was all going to be fixed in time for Christmas dinner.

‘I’m giving you sixty minutes.’ Her breath tickled my ear. ‘And then I’m coming back in with the SAS.’

‘I’ll be out in half an hour,’ I whispered back.

I had it sorted in less than twenty because I’m just
that
good.

Christmas Day

26

Sloane Square

H
e was the best kind of suspect, the one who thinks he’s got away with it. Not only does it make them easy to find, but you get that great look on their face when they open the door and find you standing outside. He’d been staying in a friend’s semi in Willesden and, as luck would have it, he opened the door himself.

‘Ryan Carroll,’ I said. ‘You’re under arrest for the murder of James Gallagher.’

His eyes flicked from my face to Stephanopoulos’s, then over my shoulder to Reynolds, who we’d brought along as an observer, and to Kittredge, who’d come along to keep an eye on her. For the briefest moment I could see he considered running, but then the sheer futility sank in and his shoulders sagged. Now that is a Christmas present.

I finished the caution and led him to one of the waiting cars. We didn’t bother to handcuff him, which surprised Agent Reynolds. Kittredge told her it was Metropolitan Police policy to avoid handcuffing suspects unless physical restraint is necessary – thus avoiding the risk of chafing, positional asphyxiation and injury sustained by falling over your own feet and smacking your face into the pavement. It was most assuredly not because I’d forgotten to pick up my handcuffs.

We sat him down in the interview room, set him up with some plain digestives and a cup of tea, let him settle for five minutes, and then I went in. Seawoll reckoned we had about half an hour before his brief arrived – so no pressure.

I introduced myself, sat down and asked him if he needed anything.

His face was pale and drawn and his hair was damp with sweat but his eyes were blue and alert behind his spectacles.