Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground

‘Is it good coffee?’ shouted Guleed from somewhere upstairs.

‘It’s proper coffee. You make it in a cafetière and everything. It’s bare wicked stuff.’

‘What’s your name?’ asked Carey.

‘Zach,’ said the man. ‘Zachary Palmer.’

‘Is this your house?’

‘I live here but it belongs to my mate, my friend James Gallagher – he’s American. Actually it belongs to some company, but he gets the use of it and I live here with him.’

‘Are you in a relationship with Mr Gallagher?’ asked Carey. ‘Civil partnership, long-term committed… no?’

‘We’re just friends,’ said Zach.

‘In that case, Mr Palmer, I suggest we repair to the kitchen for coffee.’

I got out of the way as Zachary, looking a bit wild-eyed, was herded into the kitchen area by Carey. He’d be looking to get names and addresses of James Gallagher’s friends, and if possible, family as well as establishing Zach’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. You want to do that sort of thing fast before everyone has a chance to co-ordinate their stories. Guleed would be upstairs hunting out any useful diaries, phone books, laptops and anything else that would allow her to expand James Gallagher’s acquaintance tree and fill in the gaps in the timeline of his last movements.

I glanced around the living room. I guessed the house must have come ready furnished because it had that decorated out of a catalogue feel although, judging by the sturdiness of the furniture and the lack of laminated chipboard, it was probably a more expensive catalogue than my mother would have used. The TV was big and flat but two years old. There was a Blu-Ray player, an X-Box but no cable or satellite. I checked the simulation oak shelves beside the TV; the collection was a bit ostentatiously foreign, newly remastered Godards, Truffauts and Tarkovskys. Kurosowa’s Yojimbo was lying sacrilegiously on top of its case, ejected in favour of, judging from the case lying on the floor by the TV, one of the Saw movies.

The original fireplace, a rarity given that the ground floor must have been a coach house, had been bricked up and plastered over but the mantelpiece remained. Perched on it was an expensive Sony mini-system with no iPod attached – something else to look for – an unpainted figurine, a deck of playing cards, a packet of Rizlas and an unwashed cup.

Over in the kitchen area Carey had Zach settled at the table while he pottered around making proper coffee and having a rummage through all the cupboards and shelves for good measure.

If you’re a professional cleaner, like my mum, one of the ways you make sure you get the dust out of the corners is to use a moist mop and swirl it along the skirting board. All the crud gets rolled up into little damp balls, you wait a bit for them to dry and then you hoover them up. It leaves a distinctive swirling pattern in the carpet which I found behind the TV. It meant that James and Zach were not cleaning their own home and that I was unlikely to find anything useful in the living room. I headed for the stairs.

The bathroom was professionally sparkling but I was hoping that whoever the cleaner was she’d drawn the line at going into the bedrooms. Judging by the combination old sock and ganja smell in the smaller of the two bedrooms she had indeed. Zach’s bedroom, I guessed. The clothes scattered on the floor had British labels and there was a high-tech bong vaporiser, improvised out of a converted soldering iron and Perspex tube, stashed under the bed. I only found one bit of luggage, a large gym bag with worn straps and stains on the bottom. I gave it a cautious sniff. It had been washed recently but under the detergent there was just of whiff of something rank. What my dad would call tramp smell.

Whatever it was it wasn’t magical, so I headed out.

Guleed and I met on the landing.

‘No diary or address book – it must be on his phone,’ she said. ‘A couple of airmail letters, his mum I think, same address as the driver’s licence.’ She said she was going to call the police in America and ask them to make contact. I asked her how she was going to find the number.

‘That’s what internet is for,’ she said.

‘That’s not how the song goes,’ I said but she didn’t get it. ‘I think the governor is going to want to take a close look at Zach, especially if he hasn’t got an alibi.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t think he’s a student,’ I said. ‘He might even have been sleeping rough.’

Guleed gave me a lopsided smile. ‘Must be a villain then.’

‘Have you done a PNC check yet?’

‘Never mind my job, Peter. You’re supposed to be checking for magic or whatever.’ She smiled to show that she was half joking, but only half. I let her get on with her job and stepped into James’ bedroom to see if I could detect any weird bollocks.

Which appeared to be in short supply.

I was surprised by the lack of posters on the walls, but James Gallagher had been twenty-three. Maybe he’d outgrown posters or maybe he was saving the space for more serious work. There was a stack of canvasses leaning against the wall. They were mostly city scenes, local I thought, after recognising Portobello Market. It didn’t look like tourist tat so I figured it was probably his own work – a bit retro for a modern art school student, though.

The bed was rumpled but the sheets had been recently changed and the duvet laid out and turned back. There was a pile of books on the bedside table – art books but of the serious academic kind rather than the coffee table variety; on socialist realism, propaganda posters of the 1930s, classic London Underground posters, and a volume called Right About Now – art & theory since the 1990s . The only non-art books were an omnibus edition of Colin MacInnes’ London trilogy and a reference on mental health called 50 Signs of Mental Illness . I picked up the medical book and dangled it by its spine, but it stubbornly failed to reveal any tell-tale gaps where it had been heavily read.

Looking for material? I wondered. Worried about himself or somebody else? The book was still crisp and relatively new. Was he worried about Zach perhaps?

I looked around the room, but there were no books on the arcane or even the vaguely mystical and not even a vestige of vestigium beyond the normal background. This is a classic example of what I was coming to call the inverse law of magical utility – in others words the chance of finding magical phenomena is inversely proportional to how useful it would be to bloody find it.

It was entirely possible that any magical side to the murder rested with the killer, not the victim. I probably should have stayed in the tunnels with Sergeant Kumar and the search team.

So of course I found what I was looking for five minutes later, downstairs, while we were statementing Zach.

Zach had put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt while I’d been upstairs. He was sitting half hunched over the table while Carey took his statement. Guleed had taken a position leaning nonchalantly against the simulation farmhouse kitchen unit just inside Zach’s peripheral vision. She was watching his face carefully and frowning. I guessed she’d spotted the mental health book too.

There was a cup of coffee waiting on the table for me. I sat down next to Carey but kept my posture relaxed, took my coffee and leaned back slightly as I sipped it. Zach’s hands were trembling and he was unconsciously rocking back and forth as we went through his movements in the last twenty-four hours. It’s always useful to have your witnesses a little bit unnerved, but you can have too much of a good thing.

On the table was an earthenware bowl sitting on the kitchen table with two apples, a splotchy banana and a handful of minicab cards inside it. It was the same rich biscuit colour as the shard I’d found in the Underground but too curved to be an identical piece.