Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

‘Glad to see you feeling better, sir,’ I said before I could stop myself.

Seawoll looked at Stephanopoulos. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Something about the job felt off,’ she said.

Seawoll sighed. ‘You’ve been leading my Miriam astray,’ he told me. ‘But I’m back now so I hope we’ll see a return to good old-fashioned evidence-based policing and a marked reduction in the amount of weird bollocks.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘That being said – what kind of weird bollocks have you got me into this time?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think there was any magic…’

Seawoll shut me up with a sharp gesture of his hand.

‘I don’t want to hear the m word coming out of your mouth,’ he said.

‘I don’t think there’s anything odd about the way he died,’ I said. ‘Except…’

Seawoll cut me off again. ‘How did he die?’ he asked Stephanopoulos.

‘Nasty stab wound in his lower back, probably organ damage but he died of loss of blood,’ she said.

Seawoll asked after the murder weapon and Stephanopoulos waved over the Exhibits Officer who held up a clear plastic evidence bag for our inspection. It was the biscuit-coloured triangle I’d found in the tunnel.

‘What the fuck is that supposed to be?’ asked Seawoll.

‘A bit of a broken plate,’ said Stephanopoulos and she twisted the bag around so we could see what was indeed a triangular section from a shattered plate – it had had a decorative rim. ‘Looks like earthenware,’ she said.

‘They’re sure that’s the weapon?’ asked Seawoll.

Stephanopoulos said that the pathologist was as sure as she could be this side of an autopsy.

I didn’t really want to tell Seawoll about the concentrated little knot of vestigia that clung to the murder weapon but I figured it would only lead to more trouble later if I didn’t.

‘Sir,’ I said. ‘That’s the source of the… weird bollocks.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Seawoll.

I considered explaining vestigia but Nightingale had warned me that sometimes it was better to give them a nice simple explanation that they can relate to. ‘It just has a kind of glow about it,’ I said.

‘A glow?’

‘Yeah a glow.’

‘That only you can see,’ he said. ‘Presumably with your special mystical powers.’

I looked him in the eye. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My special mystical powers.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Seawoll. ‘So our victim gets stabbed in the tunnel with a bit of magic pot, staggers up the track looking for help, climbs up on the platform, collapses and bleeds out.’

We knew the exact time of death, 1:17 in the morning, because we got it all on a CCTV camera. At 1:14 the footage showed the blur of his white face as he pulled himself onto the platform, the lurch as he tried to get to his feet and that terrible final collapse, that slump down onto his side – the surrender.

Once the victim had been spotted on the platform it took the station manager less than three minutes to reach him but he was definitely, as the station manager put it, brown bread by the time he found him. We didn’t know how he’d got in the tunnel and we didn’t know how his killer had got out but at least, once forensics had processed the wallet, we knew who he was.

‘Oh bollocks,’ said Seawoll. ‘He’s an American.’ He passed me an evidence bag with a laminated card in it. At the top was NEW YORK STATE, below that DRIVER LICENSE, then a name, address and date of birth. His name was James Gallagher, from some town called Albany, NY, and he was twenty-three years old.

We had a quick argument about what time exactly it was in New York before Seawoll dispatched one of the family liaison officers to contact the Albany Police Department. Albany being the capital of New York State, which I didn’t know until Stephanopoulos told me.

‘The scope of your ignorance, Peter,’ said Seawoll, ‘is truly frightening.’

‘Well our victim had a thirst for knowledge,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘He was a student at St Martin’s College.’

There’d been an NUS card in the wallet and a couple of business cards with James Gallagher’s name on them and what we hoped was his London address – a mews just off the Portobello Road.

‘I do like it when they make it easy for us,’ said Seawoll.

‘What do you reckon,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Home, family, friends – first?’

I’d mostly kept my mouth shut until then and I’d have, frankly, preferred to have sloped off and gone home but I couldn’t ignore the fact that James Gallagher had been done in with a magical weapon. Well, magical pot shard anyway.

‘I’d like to have a look round his gaff,’ I said. ‘Just in case he was a practitioner.’

‘Practitioner eh?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Is that what you call them?’

I went back to keeping my mouth shut and Seawoll gave me an approving look.

‘All right,’ said Seawoll. ‘Home first, round up any friends and family, get him time-lined. BTP are going get some bodies down here to sweep the tunnels.’

‘Transport for London aren’t going to like that,’ said Stephanopoulos.

‘That’s unfortunate for them, isn’t it?’

‘We should tell forensics that the murder weapon may be archaeological,’ I said.

‘Archaeological?’ asked Seawoll.

‘Could be,’ I said.

‘Is that you’re professional opinion?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which as usual,’ said Seawoll, ‘is as about as useful as a chocolate teapot.’

‘Would you like me to call my boss in?’ I asked.

Seawoll pursed his lips and I realised with a shock that he was really considering whether to bring Nightingale in. Which annoyed me because it meant he didn’t trust me to do the job and unsettled me because there’d been something comforting about Seawoll’s resistance to any kind of ‘magic wank’ impinging upon his investigations. If he started to take me seriously then the pressure was going to be on me to deliver.

‘I heard Lesley’s joined your mob,’ he said.

Ninety-degree change in direction of the conversation – classic police trick. Didn’t work because I’d been rehearsing the answer to that question ever since Nightingale and the Commissioner came to yet another ‘agreement’.

‘Not officially,’ I said. ‘She’s on indefinite medical leave.’

‘What a waste,’ said Seawoll shaking his head. ‘It’s enough to make you weep.’

‘How do you want to do this, sir?’ I asked. ‘AB do the murder and I do… the other… stuff?’ AB being the radio abbreviation for Belgravia Police station where Seawoll’s Murder Team was located – we police never like to use real words when we can use an incomprehensible bit of jargon instead.

‘After how that worked out last time?’ asked Seawoll. ‘Fuck no. You’re going to be operating out of our incident room as a member of the inquiry team. That way I can keep my fucking eye on you.’

I looked at Stephanopoulos.

‘Welcome to the murder squad,’ she said.

The Metropolitan Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations, not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers. So you can see I fit in very well.