Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

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.

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.’