Whispers Under Ground

6 Sloane Square

The Murder Team’s outside inquiry team lives in a big room on the first floor sandwiched between the Inside Inquiry Team and the Intelligence Unit (motto: we do the thinking so that other coppers don’t have to). It was a large room with pale blue walls and dark blue carpet crammed with a dozen desks and a variety of swivel chairs, some of which were held together with duct tape. In the old days it would have smelt of second-hand cigarettes but nowadays it had the familiar tang of police under pressure – I’m not sure it’s an improvement.

I’d been told to attend the seven o’clock morning briefing so I rolled up at a quarter to, to find that I was sharing a desk with Guleed and DC Carey. A full Murder Team is about twenty-five people and most of those arrived in time for the briefing to start at seven fifteen. There was much slurping of coffee and moaning about the snow. I said hello to the officers I knew from the Jason Dunlop case and we all found seats or perched on desks at one end of the room where Seawoll stood in front of a whiteboard – just like they do on the TV.

Sometimes your dreams really can come true.

He ran through where, when, how and who. Stephanopoulos gave a quick victimology of James Gallagher and tapped a photocopy of a picture of Zachary Palmer’s face that had been stuck on the whiteboard.

‘No longer a suspect,’ she said and I realised with a start that nobody had told me he was a suspect. Obviously when you play with the big boys you’re expected to keep up. ‘We have CCTV coverage of the front and back access to the house in Kensington Gardens and there’s no sign of him leaving until we turn up the next morning.’

She started running the various alternative lines of inquiry and one of the DCs near me murmured, ‘It’s going to be a grinder.’

Second day, no prime suspect. He was right, it was going to be a matter of grinding the leads down until something popped. Unless of course there was a supernatural short cut, in which case this was my chance to make an impression. Maybe pick up some favours, get a bit of respect?

I should have smacked myself in the face for having that thought.

Seawoll introduced a thin, brown-haired white woman in a smart but travel-creased skirt suit with a gold badge hung from her belt.

‘This is Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds from the FBI,’ he said and we all went ‘ooh’ – the whole room – we just couldn’t help ourselves. That didn’t bode well for international co-operation because we were all bound to be extra surly to cover up the embarrassment.

‘Since James Gallagher’s father is a US senator, the American embassy has requested that Agent Reynolds be allowed to observe the investigation on their behalf,’ said Seawoll. He nodded at a male DS seated on a desk on the other side from me. ‘Bob there will be handling the security aspects of the case in case they relate back to the senator.’

Bob held up his hand in greeting and Agent Reynolds nodded back, a tad nervously I thought.

‘I’ve asked Agent Reynolds to give us some further background on the victim,’ said Seawoll.

There was nothing nervous about her delivery, though. Her accent sounded like a mixture of Southern and Midwestern but grown clipped through her FBI training and experience. She certainly rattled through James Gallagher’s early life, youngest of three children, born in Albany while his father was a state senator – which was emphatically not the same as being the state’s senator. He was privately educated, showed an aptitude for art, attended college in New York University. One speeding ticket when he was seventeen and his name came up during an inquiry into a fellow student’s overdose a year before he graduated. A canvass of his college friends indicated a young man who was personable and well liked, if rather reserved.

I raised my hand – I didn’t know what else to do.

‘Yes, Peter,’ said Seawoll.

I thought I heard someone snigger but it might have been my paranoia.

‘Is there any history of mental illness in the family?’ I asked.

‘Not that we know of,’ said Reynolds. ‘There are no psychiatric consults and no prescriptions for any medication beyond the usual cold and flu remedies. Do you have some reason to believe there was a psychiatric element to the case?’

I didn’t need to look at Seawoll’s face to know how to answer that one.

‘It was just a thought,’ I said.

For the first time she looked straight at me – she had green eyes.

‘Moving on,’ said Seawoll.

I made a slow tactical fade towards the back of the room.

A murder investigation, like other major police operations, is assigned a name by SCD Operational Support. It used to be done by an administrative assistant with a dictionary who put a line through each word as it was used but now it’s got a bit more sophisticated – if only to avoid PR disasters like SWAMP81 and GERON-IMO. The William Skirmish murder had been OPERATION TURQUOISE, the death of Jason Dunlop OPERATION CARTWHEEL and now James Gallagher’s sad demise would forever be enshrined in the annals of the Metropolitan Police as OPERATION MATCHBOX. It wasn’t much of an epitaph but, as Lesley liked to say, better than the American system where all the jobs would be called a variation on OPERATION CATCH BADGUYS.

I went back to my desk and discovered that during the briefing elves had apparently crept in and placed a couple of purple Ryman’s folders on my bit of the desk. Each had a smaller printed memo stapled to the top corner. It was dated, marked OPERATION MATCHBOX, with my name and under that a line that read: Trace origin of earthenware fruit bowl. Priority: High. The second memo read: Canvass Art Gallery for sightings of James Gallagher, take statements as necessary. Priority: High.

‘Your first actions,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You must be very proud.’

She got me logged in, which was a suspicious amount of help and attention from a Detective Inspector, and explained the priority codes to me.

‘Officially, low means we want it within a week,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Medium is five days and high priority is three.’

‘And really?’ I asked.

‘Today, now and “I want it bloody yesterday.”’

I was logging out when Special Agent Reynolds approached me.

‘Excuse me, Constable Grant,’ she said. ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Call me Peter,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I wonder, Constable, if you could tell me what makes you think there might be mental illness in the family?’ she asked.

I told her about the shift in James’s art work at St Martin’s and how I thought it might have been an indication of incipient mental illness or drug abuse – or both. Reynolds looked sceptical but it was hard to tell, given that she didn’t seem to like making eye contact.

‘Is there any hard evidence?’ she asked.

‘There’s the art work, statement by his tutor, the self-help book on mental illness and his flatmate smoked a lot of dope,’ I said. ‘Apart from that – no.’

‘So you have nothing,’ she said. ‘Do you even have a background in mental health?’

I thought of my parents but I didn’t think they counted so I said no.

‘Then it would be better if you didn’t speculate without evidence,’ she said sharply. Then she shook her head as if to clear it and walked away.

‘Somebody doesn’t know they’re not in Kansas anymore,’ said Stephanopoulos.

‘That was off,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘I did think she was going to ask for your birth certificate at one point,’ she said. ‘Come down to the office before you go. Seawoll wants a word.’

I promised not to run off.

After Stephanopoulos had left I took a moment to stare at Agent Reynolds as she had a drink at the water cooler. She looked tired and ill at ease. I did some mental calculations – assuming half a day of bureaucratic arse-covering I guessed she’d got the overnight from Washington or New York. She’d have had to come straight from the airport – no wonder she looked like shit.

She caught me staring, blinked, remembered who I was, scowled and looked away.

I went downstairs to see how much trouble I was in.

Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had their lair on the first floor in a room that had been divided into four offices, one big one for Seawoll and three small ones for the DIs working under him. This suited everyone, since all us foot soldiers could get on with our work without the oppressive presence of our senior officers and our senior officers could work in peace and quiet in the full knowledge that only something really urgent would motivate us to schlep down the stairs and interrupt them.

Seawoll was waiting for me behind his desk. There was coffee, he was reasonable and I was suspicious.

‘We’ve giving you the actions relating to the pot and the art gallery because you think that’s where the funny business is,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want you haring off into the fucking distance. Because quite frankly I don’t think your career can survive much more in the way of property damage, what with the ambulances and the helicopters.’

‘The helicopter was nothing to do with me,’ I said.

‘Don’t play silly buggers with me, lad,’ said Seawoll. He idly picked a paperclip off his desk and began to methodically torture it. ‘If you get so much as a sniff of a suspect I want to know right away – and I want everything in the statements. Except of course the stuff you can’t put in the statements, in which case you inform Stephanopoulos or me as soon as possible.’

‘The father is a US senator,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Do I need to stress how important it is that neither he, Agent Reynolds or, more importantly, the American media get even a whiff of anything unusual?’

The paperclip broke between Seawoll’s fingers.

‘The Commissioner phoned this morning,’ he said, picking up another paperclip. ‘He wants to make it clear that should the beady eye of the media fall upon you, he expects you to dig a hole, climb in and bleeding stay there until we tell you otherwise. Got it?’

‘Do what I’m told, tell you everything, don’t tell the Americans anything and don’t end up on TV,’ I said.

‘He’s a cheeky bugger,’ said Seawoll.

‘Yes he is,’ said Stephanopoulos.

Seawoll dropped the mangled paperclip back into a little Perspex box where it served, presumably, as an awful warning to the rest of the stationery.

‘Any questions?’ he asked

‘Have you finished with Zachary Palmer yet?’ I asked.

7 Nine Elms

Given 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.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Relax,’ I said. ‘I’m not here about the parking fines.’

He grunted and put the crate he was carrying into the back of the van.

‘What are you here about?’ he asked.

I asked him about the pottery fruit bowl he’d allegedly sold to the stallholder in Portobello Road.

‘Earthenware,’ he said. ‘Is that the stuff that looks like it’s not painted?’

I said it was.

‘What about it?’ he asked and stuck his finger in his ear and twisted it a few times. I wondered if his head was going to hinge open.

‘Where did you get it?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Don’t look at me like that, honestly I don’t remember. Some geezer traded it to me in a pub – I must have been half cut anyway because it was a fucker to shift.’

‘Look, I’m not interested in its provenance or anything,’ I said.

‘Its what?’

‘Its provenance,’ I said slowly. ‘Whether it was stolen or not.’

‘It was tat,’ said Kevin. ‘Why would anyone want to steal it – you couldn’t give it away.’

I gave him my card and told him to phone me if anything similar turned up. I took some encouragement in the fact that he didn’t just ostentatiously throw it away in front of me. I went back to the Asbo where Zach asked me if I’d got what I wanted.

I expressed my displeasure at the current state of my investigation as I started the car up and tried to figure out where the exit was.

‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in this bowl,’ said Zach. ‘It’s not exactly your objet d’art is it? It’s not even a very pretty colour.’

Which was when I remembered the statuette on the mantelpiece back at the James Gallagher’s house. That had been the same dull earthenware as the fruit bowl. I’m not an expert on Victorian knick-knacks but I didn’t think that was a common colour for a figurine.

‘Did James buy a statue as well?’ I asked.

Zach paused too long before saying. ‘Don’t know.’

Meaning yes but you don’t want me to know. Which meant one of two things: either Zach knew the bowl and the statue were connected or he just couldn’t not lie when asked a straight question. Either seemed equally likely.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m going to drop you off back at the house.’

‘Why?’ asked Zach suspiciously.

‘It’s all part of the service, sir,’ I said.

8 Southwark

This is police work: you go from point A to point B where you learn something which forces you to schlep back to point A again to ask questions that you didn’t know to ask the first time. If you’re really unlucky you do both directions in the worst snow since written records began and with Zachary Palmer offering you driving advice while you do it.

Portobello Road was struggling to stay open in the weather. Half the stalls had been dismantled and the remaining stallholders were stamping their feet and gritting their teeth. Fortunately, the entrance to the mews on Kensington Park Gardens had been swept clear by a parade of official vehicles.

The statue was on the mantelpiece in the living room, exactly where I remembered it, and had been dusted for prints but not deemed interesting enough to take away. There was even a cleaning lady called Sonya who was Italian and busy cleaning up the mess left by the forensics people under the watchful eye of DC Guleed.

‘Not that this is supposed to be our job,’ she said testily. Even if you’re family liaison it isn’t really your job to supervise the clean-up before the grieving relatives arrive. I guessed that US senators counted as a special case.

‘Has she been statemented?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Guleed. ‘We completely forgot to ask her about the victim’s movements because we’re just that unprofessional.’

I gave her the hard stare and she sighed.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘The father phoned from the airport – I don’t think he’s taking it well.’

‘Trouble?’

Guleed looked over at Zach, who was rooting around in the kitchen for snacks. ‘I don’t think your friend wants to be here when the senator turns up.’

‘Not my problem,’ I said.

‘Oh, thank you so much for dumping him on me, then,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re happy now you’ve got your statue.’

‘It’s a very special statue,’ I said.

Only it wasn’t really, at least not in and of itself. It depicted the ever-popular ‘Venus-Aphrodite surprised by a sculptor and struggling to cover her tits with one hand and keep her drape at waist height with the other’ so beloved of art connoisseurs in the long weary days before the invention of internet porn. It was twenty centimetres high and only when I picked it up did I realise that it was not only made of the same material as the fruit bowl but also slightly magical. Nothing like the fruit bowl, but had we been talking radioactivity, then my Geiger counter would have been ticking away in a sinister fashion.

I wondered if James Gallagher had noticed the same thing. Was it possible that he’d been a practitioner? Nightingale had told me there was a whole American tradition of wizardry, more than just one in fact, but he thought they’d gone dormant after World War Two as well. He could have been wrong – it’s not like his track record in that area was particularly impressive.

Sonya, from a small village in Brindisi, said that she remembered the statue well. James had bought it from a man not far from where we were now. I asked if she meant the market but she said no, from a private auction at a house in Powis Square. I asked if she was sure of the address.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He asked me for directions.’

Powis Square was a typical late Victorian garden square with townhouses built around a rectangular park that had been rendered as shapeless as a duvet by the snow. Dusk was coming early under slate grey clouds as I parked the car, at an angle to the kerb, on the west side and counted numbers until I reached 25.

The facade was covered in scaffolding, the serious kind with tarpaulins stretched between the poles to keep the dust in – a sign that the money was gutting another terraced house. It used to be that you knocked through the ground-floor rooms but now the fashion amongst the rich was to rip out the whole interior. Surprisingly, given the weather, there were lights on behind the tarpaulins and I could hear people talking in Polish, or Romanian or something else Eastern European. Maybe they were used to the snow.

I stepped inside the scaffolding and made my way up the steps to the front door. It was open to show a narrow hallway that was in the process of being dismantled. A man in a hardhat, a suit and carrying a clipboard turned to stare at me when I entered. He wore a black turtleneck jumper under his suit jacket and the kind of massive multifunction watch that appeals to people who regularly jump from aircraft into the sea while wearing scuba gear. Or at least really wished they did.

Probably the architect, I thought.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked in tones that indicated that he thought it was unlikely.

‘I’m Peter Grant with the Metropolitan Police,’ I said.

‘Really?’ he said and I swear his face lit up. ‘How can I help you?’

I told him that I was looking into report of ‘disturbances’ at the address and had he noticed anything?

The man, who really was the architect, asked when the ‘disturbances’ occurred and, when I told him the previous week, gave me a relieved smile.

‘It wasn’t us, Officer,’ said the man. ‘None of us were here last week.’

Given the scaffolding and how much of the interior was missing they must be working bloody fast – I said so, which got a laugh.

‘If only,’ said the man. ‘We’ve been at this since March. We had to suspend work last week. We were waiting for some marble, white Carrara in fact, and it just completely failed to arrive and until it did arrive, what was I to do?’

He’d sent his contingent of Poles, Romanians and Croats home for the week.

‘I still paid them,’ he said. ‘I’m not entirely heartless.’

‘Was there any sign of a break-in?’ I asked.

Not that he’d noticed, but I was welcome to ask his workers, which I did despite the language barrier. Only one guy reported anything, and that was a vague sense that things might have been moved around while they were gone. I asked them if they’d enjoyed their week off, but they all said they’d gone and found casual work.

Before I left I asked if I could have a quick look round and the architect told me to help myself. The first two storeys of the house had been knocked out. I could see the remnants of the plaster moulding and a dirty line of exposed brickwork like a high tide mark. As I stepped into the middle I got a flash of piano music, a bit of tortured pub upright, roll out the barrel, knees up Mother Brown, it does you good to get out of an evening. And with the piano the smell of gunpowder and patchouli oil and the flick flick flick of an old-fashioned film projector.

It was vestigium, almost a lacuna – a pocket of residual magical effect. Or, as Lesley put it, that feeling where someone walks over your grave. Something magical had happened in the house, but unfortunately all I could tell was either it was recent or very strong and a long time ago.

When I came out I did a quick canvass of the houses either side. Most of the residents hadn’t noticed anything unusual although one had thought that he’d heard piano music a couple of evenings back. I asked what kind of piano music.

‘Old-fashioned,’ said the neighbour, who was white, thin and nervous in an expensive kind of way. ‘Rather like a music hall in fact. Do you know, now I think of it, I believe there was singing.’

I noted that as ‘some evidence that the premises had been in use the week previously by person or persons unknown’ which could go in the report and ‘heavy magical activity’ which would not. I sat in the Asbo with the engine running and wrote out a first draft of my statement. You need to get this stuff down as soon as possible, so you can make a clear distinction between what you plan to write down and what really happened.

I was just detailing the statue and trying to remember where I’d written down its evidence reference number when my phone rang.

I checked – the number was being withheld.

‘PC Grant?’ asked a man.

‘Speaking,’ I said. ‘Who’s this?’

‘Simon Kittredge CTC,’ he said. ‘I’m Special Agent Reynolds’ liaison.’

CTC is SO15, Counter Terrorism Command, which, despite the name, does all the spook-related stuff for the Metropolitan Police. Including providing experienced minders for friendly foreign ‘observers’ to ensure they don’t observe anything that might upset them. I couldn’t think why he was calling me, but I doubted it was good news.

‘What can I do you for?’ I asked.

‘I wondered if Agent Reynolds has made contact with you recently?’ he said.

If he was phoning strangers it could only mean that Reynolds had given him the slip.

‘Why would she want to talk to me?’ I asked.

A definite pause this time as Kittredge weighed up his embarrassment at needing my help against his need to find his wayward American.

‘She was asking after you,’ he said.

‘Really? Did she say why?’

‘No,’ said Kittredge. ‘But she’s picked up the fact that you’re not part of the regular team.’

Bloody hell, that was fast – she’d only just got off the plane.

‘If she makes contact what do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘Call me straight away.’ He gave me his number. ‘And give her some flannel until I can get there.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m good at flannel,’ I said.

‘So I’ve heard,’ said Kittredge and hung up.

Heard from who, I wondered.

I checked my watch.

Time for some culture, I thought.

Onward to point C – in this case Southwark, the traditional home of bear baiting, whorehouses, Elizabethan theatre and now the Tate Modern. Built as an oil-fired power station by the same geezer who designed the famous red telephone box, it was one of the last monumental redbrick buildings before the modernists switched their worship to the concrete altar of brutalism. The power station closed in the 1980s and it was left empty in the hope that it would fall down on its own. When it became clear that the bastard thing was built to last, they decided to use it to house the Tate’s modern art collection.

I parked the Asbo as close to the front entrance as I could get and trudged through the ankle-deep snow that covered the forecourt running from the gallery to the Thames. At the other end of the Millennium Bridge a floodlit St Paul’s rose out of a white and red jumble of refurbished warehouses, the spire brushing the bottom of the clouds. In the distance I saw a couple of Lowry figures scuttling across the bridge.

The central chimney of the museum was a blind wall of brick a hundred metres tall and the main entrances were two horizontal slots either side of its base. An approach path had been swept clear of snow recently but was already starting to refill, and there were plenty of fresh footprints – obviously James Gallagher hadn’t been the only one with a flyer in his AtoZ and a yen for culture.

Inside, it was merely chilly rather than freezing and the floor was wet with snowmelt. There was a temporary rope barrier and a very genteel-looking bouncer who waved me through without asking for an invitation – I suspect they were glad of all the bodies they could get.

A painfully thin white girl in a pink wool minidress and a matching furry hat offered me a glass of wine and a welcoming smile. I took the wine but I avoided the smile, what with me being on duty and everything. Amongst the crowd most of the women were dressed better than the men except for the ones that were gay or dressed by their partners. My dad always says that only working-class boys like him appreciate proper style, which is funny since my mum buys all his clothes. It was a Guardian and Independent sort of crowd, high culture, high rent, talk the talk, walk the walk and send your kids to private school.

I did a quick scan just in case Lady Ty was lurking in a corner somewhere.

The Tate Modern is dominated by the turbine hall, a vast cathedral-like space that is high and wide enough for even the largest artistic ego. I’d come with the school once to see Anish Kapoor’s dirigible-sized pitcher plant thing that had filled the hall from one end to the other. Ryan Carroll didn’t rate the whole hall, but he did have the elevated floor that projected across the middle.

Because of the crowd I had to get quite close to the sculptures before I could see them properly. They were made out of shop mannequins with what looked like bits of steam-powered technology riveted into their bodies. They’d been posed as if twisting in agony and their facial features ground down until they presented smooth faces to the world. It reminded me uncomfortably of Lesley’s mask or the head of the Faceless Man. Brass plaques were attached to the mannequins’ chests, each etched with a single word: Industry on one, Progress on another.

Steampunk for posh people, I thought. Although the posh people didn’t seem particularly interested. I looked around for another glass of fizzy wine and realised someone was watching me. He was a young Chinese guy with a mop of unruly black hair, a beard that looked like a goatee that had got seriously out of hand, black square-framed glasses and a good-quality cream-coloured suit cut baggy and deliberately rumpled. Once he saw he had my attention he slouched over and introduced himself.

‘My name is Robert Su.’ He spoke English with a Canadian accent. ‘I’d like, if I may, to introduce you to my employer.’ He gestured to an elderly Chinese woman in what was either a very expensive dove-grey Alex and Grace suit or the kind of counterfeit that is so well done that the difference becomes entirely metaphysical.

‘Peter Grant,’ I said and shook his hand.

He led me over to the woman who despite her white hair and a stooped posture had a smooth unwrinkled face and startlingly green eyes.

‘May I introduce my employer Madame Teng,’ said Robert.

I gave a clumsy half bow and, because that didn’t make me look stupid enough, I clicked my heels for good measure. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ I said.

She nodded, gave me an amused smile and said something in Chinese to Robert, who looked taken aback but translated anyway.

‘My employer asks what your profession might be,’ he said.

‘I’m a police officer,’ I said and Robert translated.

Madame Teng gave me a sceptical look and spoke again.

‘My employer is curious to know who your master is,’ said Robert. ‘Your true master.’

With the emphasis he put on the word master I was certain he was talking about magical rather than administrative.

‘I have many masters,’ I said, which caused Madame Teng, when it had been translated, to snort with annoyance. I felt it then, that catching on the edge of my perception, as when Nightingale demonstrates an exemplar forma to me, but different. And there was a brief smell of burning paper. I took an instinctive step backwards and Madame Teng smiled with satisfaction.

Lovely, I thought, just what I needed at the end of a long day. Still, Nightingale would want to know who these people were and as police you always want to come out of any conversation knowing more about them than they do about you.

And, being police, you’re totally used to being considered rude and impolite.

‘So are you two from China?’ I asked.

Madame Teng stiffened at the word China and launched into half a minute of rapid Chinese that Robert listened to with an expression of amused martyrdom.

‘We’re from Taiwan,’ he said when his employer had finished. She gave him a sharp look and he sighed. ‘My employer,’ he said, ‘has a great deal to say about the subject. Most of it esoteric and none of it relevant to you or me. If you’d be pleased to just nod occasionally as if I’m recounting the whole tedious argument about sovereignty to you I’d be most grateful.’

I did as he asked, although I had to restrain myself from stroking my chin and saying ‘I see’.

‘What brings you to London?’ I asked.

‘We go all over the place,’ said Robert Su. ‘New York, Paris, Amsterdam. My employer likes to see what’s going on in the world – you could say that is her raison d’être.’

‘Which makes you what? Journalists? Spies?’ I asked.

Madame Teng recognised at least one of those professions and snapped something at Robert, who gave me an apologetic shrug.

‘Madam Teng asks you once again – who is your master?’

‘The Nightingale is his master,’ said a voice behind me.

I turned to find a stocky black woman in a strapless red dress cut low enough to show off broad muscled shoulders and cut high enough to reveal legs that could do an Olympic-time hundred metres without taking off the high heels. Her hair was shaved down to a fuzz and she had a wide mouth, flat nose and her mother’s eyes. I was caught in a wash of clattering machines, hot oil and wet dog. The cold didn’t seem to be bothering her at all.

Madame Teng bowed, properly, as well she might given she was in the presence of a goddess – that of the River Fleet no less. Robert Su bowed lower than his employer because he had to, but I could see that he didn’t understand why.

‘Hello Fleet,’ I said. ‘How’s tricks?’

Fleet ignored me and gave Madame Teng a polite nod.

‘Madame Teng,’ she said. ‘How nice to see you in London again. Will you be staying long?’

‘Madame Teng says thank you,’ translated Robert. ‘And that while, of course, London in December is a true delight she will be leaving in the morning for New York. If Heathrow is open, of course.’

‘I’m sure if you encounter any difficulties while leaving I and my sisters stand ready to render you every assistance,’ said Fleet.

Madame Teng said something sharp to Robert Su, who offered me his business card. I gave him one of mine in return. He looked at the Metropolitan Police crest in amazement.

‘The police,’ he said. ‘Really?’

‘Really,’ I said.

There was another round of carefully calculated nods and bows and the two withdrew. I looked at the business card. It had Robert Su’s name, mobile, email and fax on it – his job description was Assistant to Madame Teng. The reverse showed a simplified silhouette of a Chinese dragon, black against the white card.

‘Who were they?’ I asked.

‘Who do you think?’ asked Fleet.

She held out her hand and snapped her fingers and I swear a complete stranger broke off his conversation, pushed through the crowd until he found a waitress and then pushed back to place a glass of white wine in Fleet’s outstretched fingers. Then he returned to his companions and, despite their quizzical looks, took up his conversation where he’d left off.

Fleet sipped her wine and gave me a pained smile.

‘Don’t tell Mum I did that,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to be blending in.’

I realised suddenly the wet dog smell wasn’t coming from Fleet. I looked down and saw that a dog had crept up unnoticed to sit at her heel. It was a patchy border collie that stared up at me with bright eyes, one amber and one blue. That would have explained the wet dog smell if only the dog hadn’t been perfectly dry.

It gave me ‘the eye’ – the fearsome gaze that sheepdogs use to keep their charges in line. But I gave it ‘the look’ – the stare that policemen use to keep members of the public in a state of randomised guilt. The dog showed me its incisors and I might have escalated as far as kissing my teeth had Fleet not told it to lie down – which it did.

Only then did it occur to me that, technically, dogs weren’t allowed in the gallery.

‘He’s a working dog,’ said Fleet before I could ask.

‘Really? What’s his job?’

‘He’s captain of my dogs,’ said Fleet.

‘How many dogs have you got?’

‘More than I can handle on my own.’ She sipped her white wine. ‘That’s why I need a captain to keep them in order.’

‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

Fleet smiled. ‘Ziggy,’ she said.

Of course it is, I thought.

‘Are you going to call Madame Teng?’ she asked.

Not without checking with Nightingale first, I thought.

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll see how I feel.’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Fleet.

‘I’ve developed a sudden keen interest in contemporary art,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m supposed to be reviewing the show tomorrow night on Radio Four,’ she said. ‘If you miss it live you can always catch it on the website. And you haven’t answered my question.’

‘I thought I had,’ I said.

‘Are you on a job?’

‘I couldn’t possibly say,’ I said. ‘I’m just here to expand my horizons.’

‘Well,’ said Fleet. ‘Check out the pieces at the far end – that should keep you suitably expanded.’

There were only two pieces at the far end of the space, hard up against the bare brick of the exterior wall and the crowd was noticeably thinner. They struck me as soon as I approached, struck me the way the sight of a beautiful woman does, or Lesley’s ruined face, or a sunset or a nasty traffic accident. I could see it was having the same effect on the others that came to view it – none of us got closer than a metre and most retreated slowly away from piece.

I got a sudden rushing, screaming sensation of terror as if I’d been tied onto the front of a tube train and sent hurtling down the Northern Line. No wonder people were stepping back. It was about as powerful a vestigium as I’d ever encountered. Something seriously magical had gone into the making the piece.

I took a deep breath and a slug of wine and stepped up for a closer look. The mannequin was the same make as those in the other gallery but posed, in this case, arms outflung, palms turned upwards as if in prayer or supplication. It wore on its torso what anyone with a passing interest in Chinese history or Dungeons and Dragons would recognise as being like the scale armour worn by the terracotta army – a tunic constructed by fastening together rectangular plates the size of playing cards. Only in this case each plate had a face sculpted onto it. Each of the faces, while simplified to a shape with a mouth, slits or dots for eyes and the barest hint of a nose, was clearly individual and carved into a distinct expression of sadness and despair.

I felt that despair, and a strange sense of awe.

A slender man in his early thirties with a long face, short brown hair and round glasses joined me in front of the sculpture. I recognised him from the flyer in James Gallagher’s locker – it was Ryan Carroll, the artist. He wore a heavy coat and fingerless gloves. Obviously not a man to put style before comfort. I approved.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked. He had a soft Irish accent that if you’d put a gun to my head I’d have identified as middle-class Dublin but not with any real confidence.

‘It’s terrible,’ I said.

‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘And I like to think horrific as well.’

‘That too,’ I said which seemed to please him.

I introduced myself and we shook hands. He had stained fingers and a strong grip.

‘Police?’ he asked. ‘Are you here on business?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘The murder of a young art student called James Gallagher.’ Carroll didn’t react.

‘Do I know him?’ he asked.

‘He was an admirer of yours,’ I said. ‘Was he ever in contact?’

‘What was his name again?’ asked Ryan.

‘James Gallagher,’ I said. Again not a flicker. I pulled up a headshot on my phone and showed him that.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

This is where, as police, you have to make a decision – do you ask for an alibi or not? Fifty years of detective dramas mean that even the densest member of the public knows what it means when you ask them where they were at a certain time or date. Nobody believes ‘just routine’, even when it’s true. With television broadcast levels of vestigia radiating from his art work I figured Ryan Carroll had to be involved in something but I had no evidence that he’d ever come in contact with James Gallagher. I decided that I would write him up tonight and let Seawoll or Stephanopoulos decide whether they wanted him interviewed. If he was statemented by someone else from the Murder Team then I could pursue the magic angle while he was distracted by that.

I love it when a plan comes together, especially when it means someone else will do the heavy lifting. I waved my glass at the mannequin in his coat of despair.

‘Did you make them yourself?’ I asked.

‘With my own little hands,’ he said.

‘You’re going to make a million,’ I said.

‘That’s the plan,’ he said smugly.

A blonde woman in a blue dress waved at Ryan to get his attention. When she had it, she pointed at her watch.

‘You’ll have to excuse me, Constable,’ said Ryan. ‘Duty calls.’ He walked over to the blonde woman who took his arm and pulled him gently back towards the waiting crowd. As they went she fussed at Ryan’s collar and jacket. Manager, I wondered, or better half, or possibly both.

Most of the patrons gathered around them and I heard the woman launch into what was unmistakably a warm-up speech. I guessed that Ryan Carroll was about to take his bow. I looked at his work again. The question was – did he imbue it with its vestigia or did that come from a found object? And if it did, was Ryan aware of its significance?

My phone rang – it was Zach.

‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said.

‘Really? Why’s that?’

‘His old man threw me out of the house,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go.’

‘Try Turning Point. They’ve got a big shelter up west,’ I said. ‘You can stay there tonight.’

‘You owe me,’ said Zach.

‘No I don’t,’ I said. One of the lessons of policing is that everyone has a sad story, including the guy you’ve just arrested for shoving a chip pan in his wife’s face. Obvious chancers like Zach were often way more convincing than those that had real grievances – comes with practice, I suppose.

‘I think they’re after me,’ he added.

‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

There was a round of applause from the crowd.

‘If you pick me up I’ll tell you,’ he said.

Shit, I thought. If I ignored him and he turned up dead I’d be facing some questions from Seawoll and a ton of paperwork.

‘Where are you?’ I asked, reluctantly.

‘Shepherd’s Bush – near the market.’

‘Get on the tube and meet me at Southwark.’

‘I can’t do the tube,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe. You’re going to have to meet me here.’

I asked him which end of the market and headed for the exit. As I traversed the empty hallway I saw Ziggy the dog sitting alertly on his haunches by the door to the gift shop. He looked at me, tilted his head to one side and then tracked me all the way out.

9 Shepherd’s Bush Market

My airwave was squawking about a fatac, a fatal accident, at Hyde Park Corner so once I was across the river I swung north and went via Marylebone. The Westway was eerily deserted as I climbed onto the elevated section and it seemed like I could have reached up and brushed the bottom of the clouds. The snowflakes whipped through the white beam of my headlights and over my bonnet like streamers in a wind tunnel. It’s the closest I’d ever come to driving in a blizzard and yet when I got on the slip road at the White City turnoff, I found myself gliding into a world of pale stillness.

It was only after I rounded Holland Park roundabout and headed through Shepherd’s Bush that I started to see people again. Pedestrians were walking gingerly along the pavements, shops were open and idiots who shouldn’t be driving in adverse conditions were forcing me to drop my speed to just over twenty.

Shepherd’s Bush Market is an elevated station and as I approached the bridge where the tracks crossed the road I started to look out for Zach. I pulled over by the locked battleship-grey gates of the market and got out. I turned to look as headlights approached, but the car, a decomposing early model Nissan Micra, surfed by on the road slush.

If, like me, you’ve spent two years as a PCSO and another two as a PC patrolling central London in the late evenings, you become something of a connoisseur of street violence. You learn to differentiate the bantam posturing of drunks or the shrieking huddle of a girls-night-out gone south from the ugly shoving of a steaming gang and the meaty, strangely quiet, crunch that indicates an intense desire by one human being to do your actual bodily harm to another.

I heard a grunt, a smack, a whimper and before I thought about it I had my extendable baton out and was across the road and heading for the shadows around the alley opposite the market. There were two of them, bulky shapes in cold weather jackets, laying into a third person who was hunched up in the snow.

‘Oi,’ I shouted. ‘Police! What do you think you’re doing?’ It’s traditional.

They turned and stared as I ran at them – there was one big one and one skinny, as is also traditional. I recognised the skinny one. It was Kevin bloody Nolan. He would have bolted, except that his big friend was made of sterner stuff.

The thing about being the police is that to do the job properly part of you has to enjoy getting stuck in. And the thing about members of the public, like the big idiot with Kevin Nolan who started squaring up to me, is that they expect there to be at least some kind of ritual exchange of insults before you get down to it. Something I had no intention of indulging in.

The big one had just enough time to register that I wasn’t going to stop when I drove my shoulder into his chest. He staggered backwards and tripped over the cowering man behind him. As he went down, bellowing, I swiped Kevin bloody Nolan’s thigh with my baton hard enough to give him a dead leg. Then I just reached out and shoved him off his feet.

‘You bastard,’ said the big man as he tried to get up.

‘Stay down or I’ll break your fucking arms,’ I said and then thought. Shit, I only have one set of handcuffs. Luckily the big man lay down again.

‘Are you really the police?’ he asked almost plaintively.

‘Ask your mate Kevin,’ I said.

The big man sighed. ‘You stupid cunt,’ he said, but he was talking to Kevin. ‘You utter, utter moron.’

‘I didn’t know he was going to be here,’ said Kevin.

‘Just keep your gob shut,’ said the big man.

I pushed his legs off the figure in the snow who rolled over and grinned up at me – it was Zach. What a surprise.

‘You know I was really hoping for a St Bernard,’ he said as he sat up.

‘But what you’re asking for is a smacking,’ I said.

I reached for my phone and was about to switch it on and call for backup when Zach tapped me on the leg and pointed up the alley. ‘Look out,’ he said.

A figure came running towards us and I headed to block them.

‘Get back,’ I yelled and the figure reached for a gun.

There’s something unmistakable about the way someone reaches for a concealed weapon. The smooth way he pulled back his jacket with one hand while the other hand dipped under his armpit for the butt of the firearm. I didn’t give him a chance to finish the movement – I made the formae in my head, flung out my left hand, still holding my phone, and shouted, much louder than I’m supposed to, ‘Impello palma.’

Nightingale can put a fireball through ten centimetres of steel armour and I can singe my way through a paper target nine times out of ten but really, in the interests of community policing, it’s better to have something a bit less lethal in your armoury. I’d used impello in anger twice and managed to seriously injure one suspect and kill the second. More importantly, from Nightingale’s point of view, I was twisting the forma out of shape by making a sort of second off-the-cuff forma and ramming it into the back of the first. Turpis vox, he called it, the unseen word, and it was a classic apprentice’s error.

‘You think you’re being innovative,’ Nightingale had said. ‘But what you’re doing is distorting the forma. If you get into the habit of doing that then those formae won’t integrate properly when you start combining them with other formae to create proper spells.’

I made the mistake of saying that the couple of spells I could do seemed to work well enough, which made him sigh and say, ‘Peter you’re still learning first- and second-order spells. Spells that are designed to be easy and forgiving and that’s why you learn them first. Once you start getting to the higher-order spells there’s no margin for error – if you haven’t mastered the formae they’ll go wrong or backfire in unpredictable ways.’

‘You’ve never shown me a high-order spell,’ I said.

‘Really?’ said Nightingale. ‘We must rectify that.’ He took a deep breath and then, with a curiously theatrical wave of his hand, he spoke a long spell that was at least eight formae long.

I pointed out that nothing had happened, which prompted Nightingale to give me one of his rare smiles.

‘Look up,’ he said.

I did and found that above my head a small cloud, about as wide as a tea tray, was gathering. It looked like a compact mass of thick steam and once it finished growing, raindrops began to fall on my upturned face.

I ducked out from under it and it followed me. It wasn’t very fast – you could stay ahead of it with a brisk walking pace, but as soon as you stopped it would drift to a halt overhead and bring a little bit of the English summer to a personal space near you.

I asked Nightingale what on Earth the spell was for. He said it was a favourite of one of his masters at school. ‘At the time I thought he seemed inordinately fond of it, though,’ said Nightingale, as he watched me dodge around the atrium. ‘Although I must say I’m beginning to appreciate its appeal now.’

According to my stopwatch, the spell lasted thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds.

Nightingale did relent and teach me an additional forma, palma, which allowed me to give people a nice evenly spread, hopefully non-lethal smack. I had Nightingale test it on me on the firing range – it feels exactly like running into a glass door.

With a high-pitched grunt the figure went down on his back in the snow. I reached him just as he reached again into his jacket, so I smacked him hard on the wrist. ‘He’ yelped in pain and I realised it was a woman and then I saw her face and recognised her. It was Agent Reynolds.

She looked up at me with bewilderment.

I heard a scuffling sound behind me and Zach yelled, ‘They’re getting away.’

Good, I thought, one less thing to worry about, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t find Kevin Nolan whenever I needed to. ‘Let them go,’ I said.

I couldn’t leave Reynolds lying on her back in the snow, with a possible concussion and/or a broken wrist. I told Zach to stay close and walked back to find that she was sitting up and cradling her wrist.

‘You hit me,’ she said.

‘Wasn’t me,’ I said and crouched down in front of her and tried to see if her eyes were unfocused. ‘You must have slipped on some ice and gone down on your back.’

‘You hit me on the wrist,’ she said.

‘You were reaching for a weapon,’ I said.

‘I’m not carrying a weapon,’ she opened her jacket to prove it.

‘Then what were you reaching for?’ I asked.

She looked away. I understood it had been an automatic reaction just like mine.

‘Hold on,’ she said and felt her nose. ‘If I fell on my back, why does my face hurt?’

‘Have you got a headache?’ I asked. ‘Are you feeling dizzy?’

‘I’m just fine, coach,’ she said and pushed herself to her feet. ‘You can put me back in the game.’ She spotted Zach and took a step towards him. ‘You,’ she said with an excellent command voice. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Oi,’ I said. ‘None of that. Why were you following me?’

‘What makes you think I was following you?’ she asked.

I pushed the jury-rigged power switch on my phone to the on position, gave thanks it had been off when I’d done the spell, and waited impatiently while it jingled at me cheerily and wasted my time with a hello graphic.

‘Who are you calling?’ she asked.

‘I’m calling Kittredge,’ I said. ‘Your liaison.’

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘If I explain, will you leave him out of it?’

‘No promises,’ I said. ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down.’

We ended up, as is traditional, in a kebab shop just the other side of the bridge where I could keep an eye on my car. Although first we had to scuff about in the snow looking for Zach’s repulsive sports bag, which we finally located via its smell. Once inside I forked out for a doner and chips for Zach and a mixed shish kebab for myself. Reynolds seemed appalled by the whole notion of a rotating lamb roast and stuck with a diet coke. Maybe she was worried about contracting that insidious European E. coli. I had a coffee. Usually the coffee in kebab shops is dire but I believe the guy on the counter made me for a cop, so I got something blacker and stronger than usual. Late-night kebab shops fulfil a very particular ecological niche – that of feeding stations for people spilling out of the pubs and clubs. Since the clientele tends to be pissed young men who have utterly failed to pull that night, the staff are always pleased to have the police hanging about.

Under the harsh fluorescent light I saw that the roots of Agent Reynolds’ hair were auburn. She caught me looking and jammed her black knit hat back on her head.

‘How come you dye your hair?’ I asked.

‘It makes me less conspicuous,’ she said.

‘For undercover work?’

‘Just for everyday,’ she said. ‘I want the witnesses talking to the agent not the redhead.’

‘Why were you following me?’ I asked.

‘I wasn’t following you,’ she said. ‘I was following Mr Palmer.’

‘What have I done?’ asked Zach, but Agent Reynolds sensibly ignored him.

‘He was your best suspect,’ she said. ‘And not only did you just let him go, you let him right back into the victim’s home.’

‘I lived there too, you know,’ said Zach.

‘It was his registered address,’ I said.

‘Yes his polling address,’ said Agent Reynolds. ‘A status you can earn by filling in a single form once a year without providing any significant identification whatsoever. I’m amazed your voting security is so lax.’

‘Not as amazed as I am that Zach’s registered to vote,’ I said. ‘Who do you vote for?’

‘The Greens,’ he said.

‘Do you think this is funny?’ she asked and her voice was hoarse. Even if she’d got some sleep on the plane over she had to be pushing twenty-four hours without by now. ‘Is it because the victim is an American citizen? Do you find the murder of American citizens funny?’

I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they’re that strung out. I took a gulp of my coffee to cover my hesitation.

‘What makes you think he’s involved?’ I asked.

‘He’s a criminal,’ she said.

‘We did him for possession,’ I said. ‘Murder would be a bit of a step up.’

‘Not in my experience,’ she said. ‘James Gallagher was his meal ticket. Perhaps James got tired of being freeloaded on.’

‘I’m sitting right here, you know,’ said Zach.

‘I’m trying to forget it,’ said Reynolds.

‘He has an alibi,’ I said.

‘Not a direct one,’ she said. ‘There could be a way out of the back that goes through a blind spot.’

Did she think we were amateurs? Stephanopoulos would have spent most of yesterday trying to break Zach’s alibi and that included the notion of a back way out.

‘Is it usual for FBI agents to exceed their authority in this way?’ I asked.

‘The FBI is legally responsible to investigate crimes committed against American Citizens in foreign countries,’ she said, her eyes fixed on some abstract spot to the left of my head.

‘But you don’t really, do you?’ I said. ‘Not that it wouldn’t have been nice to have a bit of extra manpower, especially for that one assault that we had in Soho. Young man got a crowbar in the face, he was American, no sign of the FBI then.’

She shrugged. ‘His father probably wasn’t a senator.’

‘Apart from the security aspect,’ I said, ‘what are they really worried about?’

‘His father is in a position of moral authority,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t serve any purpose to have him compromised by something his son may have done.’

‘What do you think his son may have done?’

‘There were incidents while he was at college,’ she said.

‘What kind of incidents?’ asked Zach before I could.

I sighed and pointed at a table at the other end of the room. ‘Go and sit over there,’ I said,

‘Do I have to?’ he asked.

‘This is grown-up stuff,’ I said.

‘Don’t patronise me.’

‘I’ll buy you a cake,’ I said.

He sat up like a small dog. ‘Really?’

‘If you go sit over there,’ I said, and he did. I turned to Reynolds. ‘I can see why you consider him a suspect. What kind of incidents?’

‘Narcotics,’ she said. ‘He was arrested twice for possession but the charges were dropped.’

I bet they were, I thought.

‘He did some drugs at university,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that what it’s for?’

‘Some people hold themselves to a higher standard,’ she said primly. ‘Even while at college.’

‘Have you ever been outside America?’ I asked.

‘How is that relevant?’

‘I’m just curious,’ I said. ‘Is this your first time abroad?’

‘Do you think I’m “unsophisticated”, is that it?’ she asked.

So, yeah, I thought. First time abroad.

‘I’m curious as to why they chose you for the assignment,’ I said.

‘I’m known to the senator and his family,’ she said. ‘My superiors felt that it would be helpful if the senator had a friendly face on the ground during the investigation – given the senator’s background and your country’s history.’

‘Really, which bit?’ I asked.

‘Ireland,’ said Reynolds. ‘In his early career he was vocal in his condemnation of the occupation and British human rights abuses. He was worried that the British police might allow their investigation to be prejudiced because of those positions.’

I wondered whether a father, upon learning of his son’s death, would really be so self-centred as to think that. Or whether a canny politician might use any position he could to bolster the investigation. If it was politics, it wasn’t my problem – I could safely kick that up to them that are paid to deal with such matters. Sometimes a rigid command hierarchy is your friend. But Seawoll would want a heads-up about the Irish connection, just in case CTC hadn’t bothered to tell him. It never hurts to curry favour with the boss, I thought.

‘I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Ireland,’ I said. ‘The murder I mean.’

‘What about Ryan Carroll?’ she asked.

She had been following me after all, and she wasn’t beyond lying to me when she was pretending to come clean – useful to know.

‘What about him?’ I wondered if Reynolds’ conversation always ricocheted around its subject like a pinball or whether this was the jet lag talking. I started feeling increasingly knackered just looking at her.

‘Is he a suspect?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘A person of interest?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why did you go and interview him?’

Because some of his ‘pieces’ or whatever you call them are partially constructed with something so strongly imbued with a vestigium that members of the public backed away without knowing why, was what I didn’t say.

‘James Gallagher was a fan,’ I said. ‘I was just there to see if there’d been any contact. Which there wasn’t, I might add.’

‘Just that?’ she asked. ‘I’d say that was a strange use of your time during the early stages of an investigation.’

‘Agent Reynolds,’ I said. ‘I’m just a PC in plain clothes, I’m not even officially a detective yet and about as junior as it is possible to be in the Murder Team without still being at school.’

‘Just a lowly constable?’

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘Sure you are,’ she said.

She knew something. That’s the trouble with detectives – they’re suspicious bastards. But she didn’t know the whys and wherefores, and she hadn’t even hinted that she knew about the weirder shores of policing.

‘Go get some sleep,’ I said. ‘But if I was you I’d call Kittredge first and put him out of his misery.’

‘And what do think I should tell him?’

‘Tell him you fell asleep in your car – jet lag.’

‘Hardly the image the bureau likes to project,’ she said.

‘What do you care what Kittredge thinks?’ I said. ‘Where’re you staying?’

‘Holiday Inn,’ said Reynolds and pulled a card out of her pocket and squinted at it. ‘Earls Court.’

‘Have you got your own transport?’

‘A rental,’ she said. Of course she had – how else had she followed me?

‘Will you be all right driving in this snow?’

She found that hilarious. ‘This isn’t snow,’ she said. ‘Where I’m from you know you have snow when you can’t find your car the next morning.’

I was tempted to drop Zach at the Turning Point shelter or even bang him up again at Belgravia, if only I could have trusted him to keep his mouth shut. But in the end I gave up and took him back to the Folly. Despite the cold I had to leave the window open to combat the tramp smell of Zach’s bag. At one point I seriously considered stopping and making him open it so I could check whether it was full of body parts.

‘Where the fuck are we?’ asked Zach as I pulled into the coach house and parked beside the Jag. ‘And whose is that?’

‘My governor’s,’ I said. ‘Don’t even look at it.’

‘That’s a Mark 2,’ he said.

‘You’re still looking at it,’ I said. ‘I told you not to.’

With a last lingering gaze at the Jag, Zach followed me out of the coach house and across the courtyard to the rear door of the Folly. I’d considered letting him crash in the coach house, but then I considered what was likely to happen if I left Zach alone with six grand’s worth of portable electronics – my personal six grand at that.

I opened the back door and ushered him in – watching him closely as he crossed the threshold, I’d been told once that the protections around the Folly were ‘inimical’ to certain people but Zach didn’t react at all. The back hallway is just a short corridor lined with brass hooks for the hanging of sou’westers, oilskins, capes and other archaic forms of outdoor apparel.

‘You know this is the weirdest nick I’ve ever been in,’ he said.

As we stepped into the main atrium Molly came gliding out to meet us in what would have been a much more sinister fashion had Toby not been dancing and yapping excitedly around her skirts at the same time.

Even so, Zach took one look at her and promptly hid behind me.

‘Who’s that?’ he hissed in my ear.

‘This is Molly,’ I said. ‘Molly – this is Zach who will be staying overnight. Can he use the room next to mine?’

Molly gave me a long stare and then inclined her head at me, exactly the way Ziggy the dog had, before gliding off towards the stairs. Possibly to put fresh linen on the guest bed or possibly to sharpen her meat cleavers – it’s hard to tell with Molly.

Toby had stopped yapping and instead snuffled at Zach’s heels as he made his way across the atrium towards the podium where we keep The Book, well not The Book exactly but a really good late eighteenth-century imprint of The Book open to the title page.

He read the title out loud: ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis.’ With the erroneous soft ‘c’ sound in principia and magicis – Pliny the Elder would have been pissed. I know it annoyed Nightingale when I did it.

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he said and turned to point an accusing finger. ‘You can’t be part of this, you’re … common. This is the Folly, this place is strictly toffs and monsters.’

‘What can I say,’ I said. ‘Standards have been falling lately.’

‘The bloody Isaacs,’ he said. ‘I should have taken my chances with the Nolan brothers.’

I wondered if Nightingale knew we had a nickname. I also wondered how come someone like Zachary Palmer knew what it was.

‘So what are you then?’ I asked – it had to be worth a try.

‘My dad was a fairy,’ said Zach. ‘And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.’