Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (7 page)

Curves of purple and blue suggesting the curved roof of a tunnel while emerging, as if from the shadows, was an elongated inhuman figure sketched with long bold strokes of black and grey paint. Unlike the faces of the people in his earlier work this figure’s face was full of expression, a large mouth twisted into a gaping leer, eyes like saucers under a sleek hairless dome of a head.

‘As you can see,’ said Huber. ‘His work has much improved of late.’

I looked back to the painting of a sun-dappled windowsill – all it was missing was a cat.

‘When did his style change?’ I asked.

‘Oh, his style didn’t change,’ said Huber. ‘The actual technique is remarkably similar to his previous work. What we’re seeing here is much more profound. It’s a radical shift in, I want to say the subject, but I think it goes deeper than that. You only have to look at it – there is emotion, passion even, in that painting that you just don’t see in his earlier work. And not just that he was looking beyond his comfort in terms of technique—’

Huber trailed off.

‘It’s happened before,’ he said. ‘You get these young people and you think they’re showing you one thing and then they take their own lives and you realise what you thought was progress was quite the opposite.’

I’m not totally heartless, so I told him we thought suicide was unlikely. He was so relieved that he didn’t ask me what had happened – which is a square on the suspicious behaviour bingo card in and of itself.

‘You said he was looking beyond his comfort zone,’ I said. ‘What did you mean?’

‘He was asking about new materials,’ said Huber. ‘He was interested in ceramics, which was a bit unfortunate.’

I asked why and Huber explained that they’d had to stop using their onsite kiln.

‘Every firing is expensive, you’ve got to be producing quite a large amount of work to justify running it,’ he said, obviously embarrassed that economic reality had crept into the college.

I was thinking of the shard of pottery that had been used as the murder weapon. I asked whether they had a kiln at the new campus and could James Gallagher have been using that?

‘No,’ said Huber. ‘I’d have organised that, had he asked, but he didn’t.’ He frowned and picked up one of the ‘later’ paintings. A woman’s face, pale, big-eyed, surrounded by purple and black shadow. Huber studied it, sighed and carefully replaced it with the others.

‘Mind you,’ he said. ‘He was certainly spending time elsewhere—’ He trailed off again. I waited a moment to see if there was more, but there wasn’t, before asking whether James Gallagher had a locker.

‘This way,’ said Huber. ‘It’s at the back.’

One of the bank of grey metal boxes was secured with a cheap padlock which I knocked off with a chisel I borrowed from a nearby studio. Huber winced as the padlock hit the floor but I think he was more worried about the chisel than the locker. I pulled on my latex gloves and had a look inside. I found two pencil cases, a brush wallet with half the brushes missing, a paperback with an Oxfam price sticker called
The Eye of the Pyramid
and an AtoZ. Inside the AtoZ was a flyer for an exhibition at the Tate Modern by an artist called Ryan Carroll. Sure enough the flyer had marked the appropriate page in the AtoZ with a pencil circle around the Tate Modern in Southwark.

Definitely planning to go, I thought – the grand opening of the show was listed for the next day. I made a note of the times, dates and names before bagging and tagging the locker contents. Then I used masking tape to secure the locker, gave my card to Mr Huber and headed for home.

I had to clear three centimetres of snow off my windscreen before I could do the twenty-minute drive back to the Folly and put the Asbo back in the safety of the garage. I braved the icy outside staircase to the upper floor of the coach house where I stash my TV, decent stereo, laptop and all the other accoutrements of the twenty-first century that rely on a connection to the outside world. This was because the Folly proper was imbued with mystical defences, not my terminology, that apparently would be weakened by running a decent cable in from the outside. I didn’t suggest a wifi network because I have my own problems with signal security and besides I like having somewhere mostly to myself.

I lit the paraffin heater that I’d found in the Folly’s basement after my electric fan heater blew out the coach house’s antique fusebox for the third time. Then I raided the emergency snack locker, made a mental note to buy some food for it and likewise either clean my small fridge or give up and declare it a biohazard. There was still coffee and half a packet of M&S genuinely biscuit-flavoured biscuits so I decided to finish off my paperwork before hitting Molly’s kitchen.

It took me a couple of hours to finish up Mr Huber’s statement and my observations about the possible change in James Gallagher’s personality as indicated by the abrupt change in his work. To relieve the boredom I Googled Ryan Carroll to see whether there was anything interesting about James Gallagher’s interest in him. His biography was pretty sparse – born and raised in Ireland and until recently based in Dublin. Best known for an installation of one-quarter-sized crofters’ houses made out of Lego and roofed with old library copies of the classics of Irish literature covered in a layer of horseshit. It didn’t seem twee enough for early James Gallagher or twisted enough for his late period. There were a couple of reviews in the online magazines, all within the last couple of months, praising his new work and an interview in which Carroll talked about the importance of recognising the industrial revolution as the fracture point between man as spiritual being and man as consumer. As someone who grew up in Ireland and witnessed at first hand the booming Celtic Tiger and then experienced its bust, Carroll brought a unique insight into the alienation of man and machine – or at least that’s what Carroll thought. His new work was aimed primarily at challenging the way we look at the interface between the human form and the machine.

‘We are machines,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘For turning food into shit and we’ve created other machines that allow us to be more productive – to turn more food into more shit.’ I got the impression that he was considered a man to watch, although possibly not while eating. I added these details to the report – I didn’t know how significant it was that an art student was planning to go to an art gallery, but the golden rule of modern policing is everything goes into the pot. Seawoll, or more likely Stephanopoulos, would read through it and decide whether she wanted it followed up.

I called the Inside Inquiry Team at Belgravia, which is the bit that handles the data entry, and asked them if I could email the statement. They said that was fine providing I handed in the original copy as soon as possible and I labelled it correctly. They also reminded me that unless the Folly had secure evidence storage I would have to turn over everything I’d recovered from James Gallagher’s locker to the Exhibits Officer.

‘Don’t worry. We’re very secure here,’ I told them.

It took me another half an hour to finish the forms and send them off, at which point Lesley called to remind me that we were supposed to be interviewing our suspected Little Crocodile, Nightingale having set out for Henley that morning when it became clear I was going to be busy. So much for getting to see Beverley this year. Lesley wondered if he was going to make it back that evening.

‘He’s too sensible to drive in this,’ I said.

We met up by the back stairs, which were tucked away at the front of the Folly, and she followed me down to the secure storage room which also served as our gun locker. After my exciting encounter with the Faceless Man on a Soho rooftop, Nightingale and our friend Caffrey the ex-Para spent a fun week clearing out weapons and ammunition that had been rotting inside for over sixty years. The bit I found particularly enjoyable was when I accidentally opened a crate of fragmentation grenades that had been sitting in a puddle since 1946 and Caffrey’s voice had shot up two octaves as he told me to back away slowly. We had to have a couple of guys from the Explosives Ordnance Disposal Unit come and take them away. An operation me and Lesley supervised from the café in the park across the road.

The equipment passed for operational by Caffrey had been cleaned and stored on brand-new racks on one side and metal shelving installed on the other for evidence storage. I signed the items in on the clipboard provided and then Lesley and I buggered off to the Barbican.

5

The Barbican

A
fter World War Two there wasn’t much left of English wizardry except for Nightingale, the walking wounded and a number of practitioners too old or not good enough to get themselves killed in that final convulsive battle in the forests near Ettersberg. I don’t know what the fight was about for sure, but I have my theories – Nazis, concentration camps, the occult – a lot of theories. Only Nightingale and a couple of senior wizards, now long dead, had stayed active, the rest having died of the wounds, gone mad or renounced their calling and taken up a mundane life. Breaking their staffs is what Nightingale called that.

Nightingale had been content to fall into a holding pattern, retreating into the Folly and emerging only to deal with occasional supernatural difficulty for the Met and the regional police forces. It was a brand-new world of motorways and global superpowers and atomic bombs. He, like most people in the know, assumed that the magic was fading, that the light was going out of the world and that nobody was practising magic but him.

He turned out to be wrong in almost every respect, but by the time he’d figured that out it was too late – somebody else had been teaching magic since the 1950s. I don’t know why Nightingale was so surprised – I barely knew four and a half spells and you couldn’t have got me to give it up and that’s despite close brushes with death by vampire, hanging, malignant spirit, riot, tiger-man and the ever-present risk of overdoing the magic and getting a brain aneurysm.

As far as we could reconstruct it, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an undistinguished wizard by all accounts, had retired post-war to teach theology at Magdalen College, Oxford. At some point in the mid-1950s he had sponsored a student dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Dining clubs being what posh undergraduates did in the fifties and sixties when they weren’t having doomed love affairs, spying for the Russians or inventing modern satire.

To spice up their evenings, Geoffrey Wheatcroft taught a select number of his young friends the basics of Newtonian magic, which he should not have done, and trained at least one of them up to what Nightingale called ‘mastership’ – which he
really
should not have done. At some point, we don’t know when, this apprentice moved to London and went to the dark side. Actually, Nightingale never calls it the dark side, but me and Lesley can’t resist it.

He did terrible things to people, I know, I’ve seen some of it – the bodyless head of Larry the Lark and the other denizens of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau – and Nightingale has seen more but won’t talk about it.

We know from eyewitness accounts that he used magic to conceal his features. He appeared to have become inactive in the late 1970s and, as far as we could tell, his mantle was not taken up until the one we call the Faceless Man burst onto the scene some time in the last three or four years. He came
this
close to blowing my head off the previous October and I wasn’t in a hurry to meet him again. Not without backup anyway.

However, having an ethically challenged magician running around on our manor was not on. So we decided to adopt an intelligence-led approach to his apprehension. Intelligence-led policing being when you work out what you’re doing
before
you run in and get your head blown off. Hence us working our way down the list of possible known associates and looking to winkle out the Faceless Man’s real identity. Because if it wasn’t a vulnerability why would he want to keep it a secret.

Shakespeare Tower is one of three residential towers that are part of the Barbican complex in the City of London. Designed in the 1960s by adherents to the same Guernsey Gun Emplacement school of architecture as those that built my school, it was another Brutalist tower of jagged concrete that had acquired a Grade II listing because it was that or admit how fucking ugly it was. However, whatever I thought of it aesthetically, Shakespeare Tower had something that was practically unique in London, something that I was very grateful for as I cautiously skidded the Asbo through snow-covered streets – its own underground car park.

We drove in, waved our warrant cards at the guy in the glass booth and parked in the bay allocated to us. He gave us directions but we still managed to wander around in circles for five minutes until Lesley noticed a discreet sign lost amongst the pipes and concrete abutments. We were then buzzed in by the concierge and guided up to the reception area.

‘We’re here to interview Albert Woodville-Gentle,’ I said.

‘And we’d much rather you didn’t tell him we were on our way,’ said Lesley as we stepped into the lift.

‘It’s just an interview,’ I said to her as the door closed.

‘We’re the police, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s always good to arrive as a nasty surprise, makes it harder to keep secrets.’

‘Makes sense,’ I said.

Lesley sighed.

The lobby of each floor was an identical truncated triangle shape with undressed concrete walls, grey carpeting and emergency fire exits the size and shape of U-boat pressure doors. Albert Woodville-Gentle lived two-thirds up the tower on the 30th floor. It was very clean. This much institutional concrete makes me nervous when it’s clean.

I rang the doorbell.

Practically the whole point of being police is that you don’t gather information covertly. You’re supposed to turn up on people’s doorsteps, terrify them with the sheer majesty of your authority, and keep asking questions until they tell you what you want to know. Unfortunately, we at the Folly were under instructions to keep the existence of the supernatural if not exactly secret then certainly low-key – all part of the agreement apparently. This meant starting any interview with the question; Oi did you learn magic at university? was right out, and so we had developed a cunning plan instead. Or rather Lesley came up with a cunning plan instead.