Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (6 page)

‘That’s not how the song goes,’ I said but she didn’t get it. ‘I think the governor is going to want to take a close look at Zach, especially if he hasn’t got an alibi.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t think he’s a student,’ I said. ‘He might even have been sleeping rough.’

Guleed gave me a lopsided smile. ‘Must be a villain then.’

‘Have you done a PNC check yet?’

‘Never mind my job, Peter. You’re supposed to be checking for magic or whatever.’ She smiled to show that she was half joking, but only half. I let her get on with her job and stepped into James’ bedroom to see if I could detect any weird bollocks.

Which appeared to be in short supply.

I was surprised by the lack of posters on the walls, but James Gallagher had been twenty-three. Maybe he’d outgrown posters or maybe he was saving the space for more serious work. There was a stack of canvasses leaning against the wall. They were mostly city scenes, local I thought, after recognising Portobello Market. It didn’t look like tourist tat so I figured it was probably his own work – a bit retro for a modern art school student, though.

The bed was rumpled but the sheets had been recently changed and the duvet laid out and turned back. There was a pile of books on the bedside table – art books but of the serious academic kind rather than the coffee table variety; on socialist realism, propaganda posters of the 1930s, classic London Underground posters, and a volume called
Right About Now – art & theory since the 1990s
. The only non-art books were an omnibus edition of Colin MacInnes’ London trilogy and a reference on mental health called
50 Signs of Mental Illness
. I picked up the medical book and dangled it by its spine, but it stubbornly failed to reveal any tell-tale gaps where it had been heavily read.

Looking for material? I wondered. Worried about himself or somebody else? The book was still crisp and relatively new. Was he worried about Zach perhaps?

I looked around the room, but there were no books on the arcane or even the vaguely mystical and not even a vestige of
vestigium
beyond the normal background. This is a classic example of what I was coming to call the inverse law of magical utility – in others words the chance of finding magical phenomena is inversely proportional to how useful it would be to bloody find it.

It was entirely possible that any magical side to the murder rested with the killer, not the victim. I probably should have stayed in the tunnels with Sergeant Kumar and the search team.

So of course I found what I was looking for five minutes later, downstairs, while we were statementing Zach.

Zach had put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt while I’d been upstairs. He was sitting half hunched over the table while Carey took his statement. Guleed had taken a position leaning nonchalantly against the simulation farmhouse kitchen unit just inside Zach’s peripheral vision. She was watching his face carefully and frowning. I guessed she’d spotted the mental health book too.

There was a cup of coffee waiting on the table for me. I sat down next to Carey but kept my posture relaxed, took my coffee and leaned back slightly as I sipped it. Zach’s hands were trembling and he was unconsciously rocking back and forth as we went through his movements in the last twenty-four hours. It’s always useful to have your witnesses a little bit unnerved, but you can have too much of a good thing.

On the table was an earthenware bowl sitting on the kitchen table with two apples, a splotchy banana and a handful of minicab cards inside it. It was the same rich biscuit colour as the shard I’d found in the Underground but too curved to be an identical piece.

I took another gulp of coffee, which was definitely the good stuff, and casually brushed my fingers along the rim of the bowl. There it was, fainter than the shard, heat and charcoal and what I realised was the smell of pig shit and … I wasn’t sure what.

I emptied the fruit and cards from the bowl and traced my fingertips across the smooth curve of its interior. It seemed beautifully shaped but I couldn’t say why. A circle is just a circle, after all. But it was as beautiful as Lesley’s smile. At least how Lesley’s smile used to be.

I realised that the others had fallen silent.

‘Where did this come from?’ I asked Zach.

He looked at me like I was bonkers, so did Guleed and Carey.

‘The bowl?’ he asked.

‘Yes the bowl,’ I said. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘It’s just a bowl,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said slowly. ‘Do you know where it came from?’

Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique. ‘I think he got it from the market.’

‘From Portobello?’

‘Yeah.’

Portobello Market is at least a kilometre long and must have at least a thousand stalls, not to mention the hundred-plus shops that line both sides of Portobello Road and spill out into the side streets.

‘Any chance of you being bit more specific?’ I asked.

‘Top end I think,’ said Zach. ‘You know. Not the posh end, the other end where the normal stalls are. That’s all I know.’

I picked up the bowl, cupped it in my hands and brought it level with my eyes.

‘I’m going to need to package this,’ I said. ‘Has anybody got any bubble wrap?’

4

Archway

T
he answer to that question turned out to be, surprisingly, yes. Apparently, art students often have to transport fragile bits of work around and so a cupboard in the kitchen turned out to be not only full of aging spaghetti and dubious packets of cup-a-soup but bubble wrap, tissue paper and masking tape.

It was also where Zach kept his stash, a ziploc bag of yellow-looking leaf that Carey suggested constituted a seasoning rather than a controlled substance. Nonetheless Carey unofficially confiscated it until it was decided whether we needed to use it as a pretext to arrest Zach or not.

The bowl went into an evidence bag with a white sticky label with my name, rank and number on it sealing it closed. I then, awkwardly, wrote in the time, address and circumstances of seizure in very small writing. I’ve always felt that the lack of a penmanship course in the basic training at Hendon is a major oversight.

I was torn. I wanted to find out where the bowl had come from but I also wanted to check out James Gallagher’s locker, or workspace or whatever art students have, at St Martin’s to see if he had any more magic stuff. I chose to go to St Martin’s first because it was only just past eight o’clock and the full panoply of the market was unlikely to be arrayed until about eleven. In street-market terms early morning is for fruit and veg not for pottery – it takes a couple of hours for the tourists to navigate that tricky bit between Notting Hill tube station and the junction with Pembridge Road.

Somebody had to stay and keep an eye on Zach, who if not exactly a suspect yet was doing a really good impression of one, until Stephanopoulos arrived with the cavalry. Guleed and Carey played rock, paper, scissors for the privilege. Carey lost.

Guleed had to be dropped off at Belgravia nick to leave Zach’s statement with the Inside Inquiry Team who would feed it into the mighty HOLMES computer system whose job is to sift and collate and hopefully prevent us from making ourselves look like idiots in the eyes of the public. Catching the actual offender would be the icing on the cake.

We stepped out into a weak grey light that seemed to make things colder but at least stopped the place looking like a film set. I was carrying my magic bowl with both hands and stepping carefully on the frost-slippery cobbles. All the cars in the street outside were white with frost, including my Asbo. I started the engine and then rummaged around in the glove compartment for the scraper – it took me ages to clear the windshield while Guleed sat in the passenger seat and offered advice.

‘You’ve got a better heater in your car than we have,’ said Guleed as I climbed into the driver’s seat. I glared at her. My hands were numb and I had to drum my fingertips on the steering wheel for a couple of seconds to get enough sensation to drive safely.

I pulled out into Kensington Park Road and put a new pair of driving gloves on my Christmas list.

I was turning into Sloane Street when it started to snow. I thought it was going to be a light dusting, the kind of non-event that was such a disappointment growing up. But soon it was coming down in great heavy flakes, falling vertically in the still air and settling immediately – even on the main roads. Suddenly I could feel the Asbo starting to slip on the turns. I dropped my speed and flinched as a moron in a Range Rover beeped me, overtook, lost control and smacked into the back of a Jaguar XF.

Despite the cold, I lowered the window as I drove carefully past and explained that the superior handling characteristics of a four-wheel-drive vehicle were as naught if one were deficient in basic driving skills.

‘Did you see any injuries?’ I asked Guleed. ‘Do you think we should stop?’

‘Nah,’ said Guleed. ‘Not our job and anyway I think that was just the first of many.’

We saw two more minor collisions before we reached Sloane Square and the snow was already piling up on the tops of cars, the pavement and even the heads and shoulders of the pedestrians. By the time I’d pulled up outside the blocky red-brick exterior of Belgravia nick the traffic had thinned down to a trickle of desperate or overconfident drivers. Even the surface of Buckingham Palace Road was white – I’d never seen that happen before. I left the motor running while Guleed climbed out. She asked if I wanted her to take the bowl but I told her no.

‘I want my boss to look at it first,’ I said.

Once she was safely out of sight I hopped out of the Asbo, opened up the back and pulled out my Metropolitan police issue reflective jacket and, because below a certain temperature even I’m willing to sacrifice style for comfort, a maroon and purple bobble hat that one of my aunts had knitted for me. Once I had them both on I got back in and headed west – slowly.

James Gallagher had been studying not at the brand-new state-of-the-art main campus in King’s Cross but at the smaller Byam Shaw building off the Holloway Road near Archway. This was, according to Eric Huber, James Gallagher’s tutor and the studio manager, a good thing.

‘It’s far too brand-new,’ he said of the main campus. ‘Purpose-built, with all the amenities and lots of office space for the administrators. It’s like trying to be creative inside a McDonald’s.’

Huber was a short middle-aged man dressed in an expensive lavender button-down shirt and tan chinos. He was obviously dressed these days by his life partner, probably a second, younger model if I was any judge, the giveaway being his untidy hair and his winter coat, a cracked leather biker’s jacket, that had obviously come from a previous era and been pressed into service because of the snow.

‘It’s much better to work in a building that’s evolved organically,’ he said. ‘That way you’re making a contribution.’

He’d met me in reception and guided me inside. The college was housed in a couple of brick buildings that had been built as factories at the end of the nineteenth century. Huber proudly recounted that it had been used to make munitions during World War One and thus had thick walls and a light ceiling. The students’ studio space had once been one large factory floor but the college had divided it up with white-painted floor-to-ceiling partitions.

‘You notice that there’s no kind of private space,’ said Huber as he led me through the labyrinth of partitions. ‘We want everyone to see everyone else’s work. There’s no point coming to college and then locking yourself away in a room somewhere.’

Weirdly, it was like stepping back into the art room at school. The same splashes of paint, rolls of paper, jam jars half full of dirty water and brushes. Unfinished sketches on the walls and the faintly rancid smell of linseed oil. Only this was on a grander scale. Hundreds of polyps made of carefully folded coloured paper were arranged on one partition wall. What I thought was a display cabinet with old-fashioned VCR/TVs stored on it turned out to be a half-completed installation.

Most of what we passed, at least the bits that I could identify, were done in the abstract, or part sculpture, or installations made from found objects. So it was a surprise to arrive at James Gallagher’s corner of the studio to find it full of paintings. Nice paintings. The ones back home in his room in Notting Hill
had
been his own work.

‘This is a bit different,’ I said.

‘Contrary to expectations,’ said Huber, ‘we do not shun the figurative.’

The paintings were of London streets, places like Camden Lock, St Paul’s, the Mall, Well Walk in Hampstead, all on sunny days with happy people in colourful clothes. I don’t know about figurative but it looked suspiciously like the sort of stuff that got flogged in dodgy antique shops next to pictures of clowns or dogs in hats.

I asked him if it wasn’t a bit touristy.

‘I’ll be honest. When he made his application we did think his work was ah … naive, but you have to look beyond his subject matter and see how beautiful his technique is,’ said Huber.

And it can’t have hurt that he was a foreign student paying the full whack, and then some, for the privilege.

‘By the way, what has happened to James?’ asked Huber. His tone had become hesitant, cautious.

‘All I can say is that he was found dead this morning and we’re treating it as suspicious.’ It was the standard formula for these things, although a dead body at Baker Street Station was going to come in a close second to ‘commuter anger as snow shuts down London’ on the lunchtime news. Assuming the media didn’t find a way to link both stories.

‘Was it suicide?’

Interesting. ‘Do you have some reason to think it might have been?’ I asked.

‘The tone of his work had begun to progress,’ said Huber. ‘To become more conceptually challenging.’ He stepped over to the corner where a large flat leather art case was propped up against the wall. He snapped it open, flicked through the contents and selected a painting. I could see it was different before it was fully out of the case. The colours were dark, angry. Huber turned and held it across his chest so I could get a good look.