Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

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?’

The 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.