Whispers Under Ground

by Ben Aaronovitch

  It got noticeably warmer the closer we got to the back door, so that by the time the girl held out her hand to accept our coats we were already half out of them. She took them into the back bedroom which had been filled with portable clothes racks – we even got tear-off raffle tickets as receipts.

  ‘You go out through the kitchen,’ said the girl.

  We followed her instructions, opened the back door and stepped out into a crisp inexplicable autumn afternoon. The entire width and length of the back garden was filled with a scaffolding frame that rose until it was level with the roof of the house. Plank flooring was raised half a metre above the lawn. From there, ladders led upwards to ‘balconies’ constructed of scaffolding poles and more planking. The construct encompassed an entire tree and was enclosed in white plastic sheeting. Golden sunlight flooded down from above, from an HMI lighting balloon, I learnt later, which explained the cabling snaking up the scaffolding.

  Trestle tables were ranged between the upright poles to form a line of makeshift booths along each side of the garden. I had a look at the first on the right, which sold books, antique hardbacks for the most part, individually wrapped in mylar and arranged face up in wooden trays. I picked up an eighteenth-century reprint of Méric Casaubon’s On Credulity and Incredulity in Things natural, civil and divine that looked very similar to the copy we had back at the Folly. Next to that I found another familiar book, a 1911 copy of Erasmus Wolfe’s Exotica, which was definitely hardcore ‘craft’ and judging from the stamp had been lifted from the Bodleian Library. I flicked through the book and memorised the security code to pass on to Professor Postmartin later. I replaced the book and smiled at the stallholder. He was a young man with ginger hair who appeared to be wearing a tweed suit that was twice as old as he was. He had pale blue eyes that flicked away nervously when I asked him whether he had a copy of the Principia.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of it but I’ve never even seen a copy.’

  I said that was a pity and turned away – he was lying and he’d made me and Lesley as the filth.

  ‘Nightingale was right,’ I said to Lesley. ‘This is a nazareth.’

  Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable readies. They don’t know you, you don’t know them – the only problem is where to meet. Every market needs its place and in London such illegal venues have been called nazareths since the eighteenth century. The goods on sale feed into the twilight economy of the street market, the second-hand shop and the man you met in the pub. There’s more than one, obviously, and they lurch around the city like a drunk banker on bonus day – you have to know someone who knows someone to find them. When things fall off the back of a lorry, a nazareth is where they end up.

  This place, I suspected, was a nazareth for things that were a bit too odd to be travelling by lorry in the first place.

  The next stall sold death masks done in the Roman style and cast in delicate porcelain so that placing a candle behind them would bring their features to flickering life.

  ‘Anyone famous?’ I asked the reassuringly modern goth girl who ran the stall.

  ‘That’s Aleister Crowley,’ she said pointing. ‘That’s Beau Brummell and that’s Marat – he got stabbed in the bath.’

  I took her word for it, because they all looked the same to me. Still, I allowed my fingertips to brush the edge of the Crowley mask, but there wasn’t any vestigium. Fraudulent even in death.

  ‘God, listen to that,’ said Lesley.

  I looked back at her. She had her head cocked to one side, a look of amusement on her face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The music,’ she said. ‘They’re playing Selecter.’

  ‘Is that what this is?’ I asked. It just sounded like generic ska to me.

  ‘This is my dad’s music,’ she said. ‘If the next thing they play is Too Much Pressure then I’ll know they’re just working their way down his favourite play-list.’

  The next song was Too Much Too Young. ‘The Specials,’ said Lesley. ‘Close enough.’

  We checked the other stalls but didn’t find anything in the way of stoneware fruit bowls or statuary, though I did make note of a tarot deck imbued with enough vestigium to keep a family of ghosts in operation for a year.

  ‘Is it relevant to the case?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Moving on,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Where to?’

  Lesley pointed to the makeshift balconies above us.

  I grabbed the ladder to the next level and gave it a shake. It was as securely fastened as a filing cabinet in a health and safety office. I went first. Halfway up I heard Lesley gasp. I stopped and asked what was wrong.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’

  The next level up was obviously the pub. An entire section of the house’s back wall had been removed and replaced with hydraulic jacks. Between them was wedged a walnut counter top from which drinks were served by a trio of young women in black and white check dresses and Mary Quant haircuts. At the other end of the garden the lower branches of the tree had been draped with batik cloth and elaborately woven carpets to form a number of small alcoves in which cast-off garden furniture provided seating. Between the two ends were half a dozen platforms set at varying heights, each festooned with plant pots and mismatched chairs. There was only a scattering of customers, mostly white, unremarkably dressed but strangely difficult to look at – as if resisting my gaze.

  I heard a whistle – loud, piercing, like someone signalling a sheep dog.

  ‘Somebody wants your attention,’ said Lesley.

  I followed her gaze to an alcove at the far end of the garden where a woman with hair extensions of silver and electric blue was waving us over. It was Effra Thames. Tall and elongated like a wicked Jamaican girl who’d got on the wrong side of Willy Wonka, she had a narrow face, a rosebud mouth and eyes that slanted up at the corners. When she was sure that she had our attention she stopped waving, leaned back in her white plastic chair and smiled.

  The platforms were connected by planks of wood laid between them. There were no safety rails and the planks bent alarmingly when you stepped on them. Needless to say, we took our time making our way across.

  Next to Effra sat a large black man with a serious face and strong jaw. He stood politely as we approached and held out his hand. He wore a scarlet frock coat with tails and white facing and gold braid over a black T-shirt tucked into the belt of his winter camouflage trousers.

  ‘My name is Oberon,’ he said. ‘And you must be the famous Constable Grant that I have heard so much about.’ His accent was pure London but deeper, slower, older.

  I shook his hand. It was large, rough-skinned, and there was just a flash of something. Gunpowder I thought, maybe pine needles, shouting, fear, exultation. He turned his attention to Lesley.

  ‘And the equally famous Constable May,’ said Oberon, and instead of shaking her hand lifted it to his lips. Some people can get away with stuff like that. I looked at Effra, who rolled her eyes in sympathy.

  Once Oberon released Lesley’s hand I introduced her to Effra Thames, goddess of the River Effra, Brixton Market and the Peckham branch of the Black Beauticians Society.

  ‘Sit with us,’ said Effra. ‘Have a drink.’

  My knees bent in an involuntary step towards the chair, but given that by this point just about every fricking one of the Thames sisters had tried the glamour on me at some time or other, the compulsion evaporated almost immediately. I pulled the chair out for Lesley instead, which earned me a strange look from her. Oberon smiled slyly and sipped his beer. ‘It’s a terrible habit she’s fallen into,’ he said and ignored a sharp look from Effra. ‘But it’s like that when you’re young and freshly minted.’

  We took our seats opposite.

  ‘I shall buy this round,’ he said. ‘And on my oath a
s a soldier there shall be no obligation upon you and yours for this gift.’ He lifted his hand and clicked his fingers just once and a waitress turned towards us. ‘But you can get the next round in, though,’ he added.

  The waitress skipped across the plank bridges to our platform without looking down, which was a neat trick for someone in white high-heeled sandals. Oberon ordered three ‘Macs’ and a Perrier.

  ‘Fleet says you’ve shown a sudden interest in the finer things in life,’ said Effra. ‘She was well startled to find you in the gallery last night, called me straight away and wouldn’t shut up about it.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘You’re thinking it’s south versus north London, aren’t you? That we don’t talk to each other? She’s my sister. I taught her to read.’

  I love the Rivers, upstream or downstream, they like to chat and if you’re sensible you just keep your mouth shut and eventually they’ll tell you what you want to know.

  ‘And here you are in my ends,’ said Effra. ‘My manor.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘It’s all our manor,’ said Lesley. ‘The whole bleeding city.’

  Whatever Effra planned to say was cut short by the drinks arriving, three brown and one green bottle.

  ‘You’ll like this beer,’ said Oberon. ‘It’s from a micro-brewery in the States. The management brings it over a crate at a time.’ He handed the waitress a fifty. ‘Keep the change,’ he said. ‘It’s damned expensive, though.’

  ‘So are you king of the fairies?’ I asked Oberon.

  He chuckled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My master fancied himself a man of the Enlightenment and a scholar and thus I was named Oberon. It was the practice in those days, many of my friends were called similar – Cassius, Brutus, Phoebe who truly was as beautiful as the sun, and of course Titus.’

  I’d done the Middle Passage in year eight at school – I knew slave names when I heard them. I sipped the beer. It was thick and nutty and should have, I decided, been drunk at room temperature.

  ‘Where was this then?’ I asked.

  ‘New Jersey,’ said Oberon. ‘When I was a cowboy.’

  ‘And when was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked Effra and gave Oberon such a look that even he couldn’t ignore. I winced in sympathy and his lips twitched but he didn’t dare smile.

  I considered pushing it, but I was conscious of how hard Lesley was restraining herself from slapping me upside my head and yelling ‘focus’ in my ear. I showed Oberon and Effra a printed picture of the statue and another of the fruit bowl.

  ‘We’re trying to trace where these came from,’ I said.

  Effra squinted. ‘The bowl looks handmade but the statue is a nineteenth-century knock-off of a Florentine Aphrodite by one of those gay Italians whose name escapes me. Not one of the biggies though, it’s competent but it’s not exactly inspiring. I remember I saw the full-size version in the Galleria dell’ Accademia. Still can’t remember the name of the artist.’

  ‘How come Fleet does the art galleries then?’ I asked.

  ‘Fleet is the one that goes on the radio but I’m the one with the BA in History of Art,’ said Effra.

  ‘Not that this is a source of bitterness, you understand,’ said Oberon.

  ‘I only did it because Mum insisted that we all get a degree and History of Art seemed liked the easiest,’ said Effra. ‘And you did a year in Italy.’

  ‘Meet any nice Italian rivers?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Effra with a sly smile. ‘But down South on the coast every other beach and inlet has a spirit sitting on a Vespa with a body like Adonis and a voice like the way you’d expect Robert De Niro to speak Italian, if he weren’t from New York. The Church never gets all the way to the toe of the boot Cristo si èfermato a Eboli and all that jazz.’ It was notable that Effra’s accent was shifting up and down the class scale at more or less random intervals.

  ‘Moving on,’ said Lesley.

  ‘The bowl looks like the stuff the Beales used to sell,’ said Oberon. ‘Empire Ware, Empire Pottery or some such name. It was supposed to be unbreakable and good for Darjeeling and darkest Africa.’

  ‘You want Hyacinth,’ said Effra. ‘She does the figurines.’

  ‘And where do we find Hyacinth?’ I asked.

  Hyacinth, it turned out, was the goth girl running the stall with death masks. It was noticeable that attitudes towards us had changed while we’d been upstairs having a beer. The stallholders definitely had us pegged as Old Bill now, and the customers, of which there were many more by then, had obviously got the same memo. Not that anyone was surly and rude, instead we moved in our own little bubble of silence as the punters hurriedly shut up while we passed by. We kind of like surly and rude, by the way, because when people are busy being affronted they often forget to watch what they’re saying, which is why me and Lesley whipped out our warrant cards before asking Hyacinth about the statue.

  ‘You people don’t come here,’ she said.

  ‘Give us your official address,’ I said. ‘We’ll come visit you there.’

  ‘Or,’ said Lesley, ‘you could come down to the station and give a statement.’

  ‘You can’t make me,’ said Hyacinth.

  ‘Can’t we?’ I asked Lesley.

  ‘Trading without a licence,’ she said. ‘Criminal trespass, receiving stolen goods, wearing heavy black mascara in a built-up area.’

  Hyacinth opened her mouth, but Lesley leaned forward until what was left of her nose was centimetres from Hyacinth’s.

  ‘Say something about my face,’ said Lesley. ‘Go on, I dare you.’

  Code of the police – you always back your partner in public even when they’ve obviously gone insane – but that didn’t mean you had to be stupid about it.

  ‘Look, Hyacinth,’ I said in my I’m-the-reasonable-one voice. ‘The guy who bought the statue was murdered and we’re just interested in knowing whether there’s a connection or not. We’re not interested in anything else, I swear. Just tell us and we’ll get out of your face.’

  Hyacinth deflated and held up her hands. ‘I got them off Kevin,’ she said.

  ‘Kevin who?’ asked Lesley, but I’d already started writing the capital N in my notebook when Hyacinth confirmed it.

  ‘Kevin Nolan,’ she said. ‘The wanker.’

  ‘Did he say where he got them from?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Nobody ever says where they get their goods from,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And if they do say, you figure they’re lying.’

  ‘So what did Kevin Nolan say?’ I asked.

  ‘He said he got them from Mordor,’ she said.

  ‘Morden?’ asked Lesley. ‘What, in Merton?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Mordor as in “where the shadows lie” from Lord of the Rings.’

  ‘Is that the place with the volcano?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Yes,’ said me and Hyacinth at the same time.

  ‘So probably not the source of the goods,’ said Lesley.

  I was about to say something incredibly geeky when we felt the demon trap go off.

  It came as a shock, a sensation like a machete being hacked into the side of a carcass, like biting an apple and tasting maggot, like the first time I’d met a dead body.

  Last time I’d felt anything like this had been in the decaying grandeur of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau, when Nightingale had done his IED routine. It was so strong I could turn my head to face the direction it came from.

  So could at least two thirds of the denizens of the nazareth, including Hyacinth. I couldn’t be certain, but I had a sick feeling that we were all facing across the river towards the City and Shakespeare Tower. Where Nightingale had gone to interview Woodville-Gentle.

  ‘Demon trap,’ I heard someone whisper. ‘Demon trap,’ it was repeated fearfully around the garden.

  And then everybody turned to look expectantly at me and Lesley.

  Lesley looked back with as much of a curled lip as her injuries would allow.

&nbs
p; ‘Oh, now you want the police,’ she said.

  12

  Barbican

  when you need to get somewhere fast you go blues and twos. It’s just like TV. You turn on your siren and stick the spinner on the roof of your car so that the average driver knows to get the fuck out of the way. What they don’t show is that the spinner keeps falling off the roof and usually ends up dangling by its wire from the passenger window and that there’s always someone on the road in front of you who think the rules apply to someone else. A sheet of glass, a pile of empty boxes, an inexplicable fruit stall – I wish. I nearly rear-ended a BMW on Borough High Street and had to swerve around a Toyota with a Blind Driver on Board sticker in its rear window, but I had her up to sixty as we crossed London Bridge. There was a strange random gap in the traffic and we sailed over an iron-grey Thames in a weird bubble of peace.

  Because I went via Moorgate we couldn’t see Shakespeare Tower, despite its height, until we were as close as Chiswell Street. I don’t know what I’d expected, streets littered with broken glass and fluttering paper, a gaping hole in the side of the block. We’d felt the concussion six kilometres away – surely there must be something. But we didn’t even find a police presence until we turned into the underground car park and found a City of London Police van waiting for us.

  A uniformed sergeant clambered out of the van as we drew up.

  ‘Grant and May?’ he asked.

  We showed our warrant cards and he said that we were expected and that Nightingale had said we’d know our way up to the flat.

  ‘He’s okay?’ I asked.

  ‘He looked just fine to me,’ said the sergeant.

  Me and Lesley, being both English and police, managed to avoid any outward sign of the massive sense of relief we felt. Madame Teng would have been proud.

  ‘Be discreet on your way up,’ said the sergeant, ‘we haven’t had to evacuate yet and we don’t want to start a panic.’