Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

‘Want me to have a look down the tunnel?’ I asked.

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Stephanopoulos.

People have a funny idea about police officers. For one thing they seem to think we’re perfectly happy to rush in to whatever emergency there is without any thought for our own safety. And it’s true we’re like fire fighters and soldiers, we tend to go in the wrong direction vis-à-vis trouble, but it doesn’t mean you don’t think. One thing we think about is the electrified third rail and just how easy it is to kill yourself on it. The safety briefing on the joys of electrification were delivered to me and the waiting forensics types by a cheerful-looking BTP sergeant called Jaget Kumar. He was that rare breed, a BTP officer who’d done the five-week course on track safety that allows you to traipse around the heavy engineering even when the tracks are live.

‘Not that you want to do that,’ said Kumar. ‘The principal safety tip when dealing with live rails is not to get on the track in the first place.’

I went in behind Kumar while the rest of the forensics team hung back. They might not be sure what it is I really do but they understand the principle of not contaminating the crime scene. Besides, that way they could wait and see whether Kumar and I were electrocuted or not before putting themselves in danger.

Kumar waited until we were safely out of earshot before asking whether I really was from the Ghostbusters.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘ECD 9,’ said Kumar. ‘Things that go bump in the night.’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘Is it true you investigate,’ Kumar paused and fished around for an acceptable term, ‘unusual phenomena?’

‘We don’t do UFOs and alien abductions,’ I said, because that’s usually the second question.

‘Who does the alien stuff?’ asked Kumar. I glanced at him and saw he was taking the piss.

‘Can we keep our mind on the job?’ I said.

The blood trail was easy to follow. ‘He kept to the side,’ said Kumar. ‘Away from the centre rail.’ He shone his torch on a clear boot print in the ballast. ‘He was staying off the sleepers, which makes me think that he had some variety of safety training.’

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘If you have to walk the tracks with the juice on then you stay off the sleepers. They’re slippery. You slip, you fall, you put your hands out and zap.’

‘Zap,’ I said. ‘That’s the technical term for it, is it? What do you call someone who’s been zapped?’

‘Mr Crispy,’ said Kumar.

‘That’s the best you guys can come up with?’

Kumar shrugged. ‘It’s not like it’s a major priority.’

We were around the curve and out of sight of the platform when we reached the place where the blood trail started. So far the ballast and dirt of the track bed had been pretty efficient at soaking up the blood, but here my torch flashed on a sleek irregular pool of dark red.

‘I’m going to check further up the tracks – see if I can find where he got in,’ said Kumar. ‘Will you be all right here?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said. ‘I’m good.’

I crouched down and methodically quartered the area around the pool of blood with the beam of my torch. Less than half a metre back towards the platform I found a brown leather oblong and my torch reflected off the shiny face of a dead or deactivated phone. I almost picked it up but stopped myself.

I was wearing gloves and had a pocket full of evidence bags and labels and had this been an assault or a burglary or any other lesser offence I’d have bagged and tagged it myself. But this was a murder inquiry and woe betide any officer who breaks the chain of evidence, for they will be sat down and have what went wrong with the OJ Simpson murder trial explained to them at great length. With Power-Point slides.

I pulled my airwave set out of my pocket, fumbled the batteries back in, called the Exhibits Officer and told him that I had some exhibits for him. I was double-checking the area while I waited when I noticed something odd about the pool of blood. Blood is thicker than water, especially when it’s started to congeal, and so a pool of it doesn’t flatten out in the same way. And, I noticed, it can obscure the thing it’s covering. I leaned in as close as I could without risking contaminating it with my breath. As I did I got a flash of heat, coal dust and an eye-watering shit smell that was like falling face down in a farmyard. I actually sneezed. Now that was vestigia .

I went down on my front to see if I could work out what it was under all that blood. It was triangular and biscuit-coloured. I thought it was a stone at first but I saw the edged were sharp and realised it was a shard of pottery.

‘Something else?’ asked a voice above me – a forensics tech.

I pointed out the things I’d found and then got out of the way as the photographer stepped in to record them in situ. I shone my torch up the tunnel and caught a reflection off Kumar’s high-visibility jacket thirty metres further on. He flashed back and I walked, carefully, up to join him.

‘Anything?’ I asked.

Kumar used his torch to pick out a set of modern steel doors set in a decidedly Victorian brick arch. ‘I thought he might have got in via the old works access but they’re still sealed – you might want to fingerprint them though.’

‘Where are we now?’

‘Under Marylebone Road heading east,’ said Kumar. ‘There’s a couple of old ventilation shafts further up I want to check. Coming?’

It was seven hundred metres to Great Portland Street, the next station. We didn’t go the whole way, just until we could see the platform. Kumar checked his access points and said that had our mystery boy got off the platform there he would have been spotted by the ever-vigilant CCTV operators.

‘Where the fuck did he get on the tracks?’ said Kumar.

‘Maybe there’s some other way of getting in,’ I said. ‘Something that’s not on the blueprints, something we missed.’

‘I’m going to get the regular patrolman down here,’ said Kumar. ‘He’ll know.’ Patrolmen spent their nights walking the tunnels looking for defects and were, according to Kumar, guardians of the secret knowledge of the Underground. ‘Or something,’ he said.

I left Kumar waiting on his native guide and headed back towards Baker Street. I was halfway there when I slipped over a loose bit of ballast and fell on my face. I threw out my hands to break my fall, as you do, and it didn’t escape my attention that my left palm had come slap down on the electrified middle rail. Crispy fried policeman – lovely.

I was sweating by the time I climbed back onto the platform. I wiped my face and discovered a thin coating of grime on my cheeks – my hands were black with it. Dust from the ballast, I guessed. Or maybe ancient soot from when steam locomotives pulled upholstered cars full of respectable Victorians through the tunnels.

‘For god’s sake somebody get that boy a hanky,’ said a large voice with a Northern accent. ‘And then someone can fucking tell me why he’s here.’

Detective Chief Inspector Seawoll was a big man from a small town outside Manchester. The kind of place, Stephanopoulos had once said, that explained Morrissey’s cheery attitude to life. We’d worked together before – he’d tried to hang me on stage at the Royal Opera House and I’d stuck him with 5cc of elephant tranquilliser – it all made sense at the time, trust me. I’d have said that we came out about even, except he had to do four months of medical leave which most self-respecting coppers would have considered a bonus.

Medical leave was obviously over and Seawoll was back in charge of his Murder Investigation Team. He’d taken a position up the platform where he could keep an eye on the forensics without having to change out of his camelhair coat and handmade Tim Little shoes. He beckoned me and Stephanopoulos over.