Whispers Under Ground

26 Sloane Square

He was the best kind of suspect, the one who thinks he’s got away with it. Not only does it make them easy to find, but you get that great look on their face when they open the door and find you standing outside. He’d been staying in a friend’s semi in Willesden and, as luck would have it, he opened the door himself.

‘Ryan Carroll,’ I said. ‘You’re under arrest for the murder of James Gallagher.’

His eyes flicked from my face to Stephanopoulos’s, then over my shoulder to Reynolds, who we’d brought along as an observer, and to Kittredge, who’d come along to keep an eye on her. For the briefest moment I could see he considered running, but then the sheer futility sank in and his shoulders sagged. Now that is a Christmas present.

I finished the caution and led him to one of the waiting cars. We didn’t bother to handcuff him, which surprised Agent Reynolds. Kittredge told her it was Metropolitan Police policy to avoid handcuffing suspects unless physical restraint is necessary – thus avoiding the risk of chafing, positional asphyxiation and injury sustained by falling over your own feet and smacking your face into the pavement. It was most assuredly not because I’d forgotten to pick up my handcuffs.

We sat him down in the interview room, set him up with some plain digestives and a cup of tea, let him settle for five minutes, and then I went in. Seawoll reckoned we had about half an hour before his brief arrived – so no pressure.

I introduced myself, sat down and asked him if he needed anything.

His face was pale and drawn and his hair was damp with sweat but his eyes were blue and alert behind his spectacles.

‘Did I ask for my lawyer?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure I still have all sorts of human rights.’

I indicated that he had, and that we expected his solicitor along any minute.

‘But in the meantime,’ I said, ‘I thought we’d have a chat about the things that probably won’t make it into court.’

‘Such as what, exactly?’ he asked. Obviously he was regaining his balance. I couldn’t be having that.

‘The Quiet People,’ I said and he looked genuinely blank, which was a worry. ‘Dark glasses, pale skin, live in the sewers, keep pigs and make pots. Any of this ringing a bell?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You mean the Whisperers.’

‘Is that what you call them?’ I asked, and thought that what we needed was some bloody agreement about nomenclature. An EU directive perhaps, looking to harmonize the terminology appropriate to the uncanny on a Europe-wide basis. Maybe not – it would probably end up all being in French.

‘Did you not notice all the whispering?’ he asked.

‘And the groping,’ I said.

He gave me a half smile. ‘That was more in the way of a perk,’ he said.

‘You don’t seem very surprised that we’re talking about it,’ I said.

‘A race of people living under West London like Morlocks,’ he said. ‘Your actual Victorian submerged nation complete with flat caps and steam engines. I’m Irish so I’m not really that surprised to find that the British security apparatus extends even there.’

‘You would be if you bloody worked for it,’ I said.

He smiled thinly.

‘If you know about the Whisperers,’ he said. ‘What exactly is it you want from me?’

‘You understand that no matter what, you’re going to get done for the murder of James Gallagher,’ I said.

‘I understand nothing of the sort,’ he said, but he unconsciously slipped his right hand, with its fresh bandage, out of sight under the table. He’d worn fingerless gloves at the Tate Modern, not an affectation but a disguise.

‘We have the wounds on your hand which match the murder weapon. In twelve hours we’ll have the DNA results which will match the swab you gave ten minutes ago to the blood we found on the aforesaid weapon.’ I paused to let that sink in. ‘As soon as we knew there were other entry points into the system we pulled the CCTV footage from cameras around Bayswater and Notting Hill. Sooner or later we will break your alibi.’

According to HOLMES, Ryan Carroll had been statemented the day after I’d met him and had been given an alibi by one Siobhán Burke, who claimed to have been sleeping with him on the night in question.

‘Whether or not Ms Burke faces charges of aiding and abetting after the fact,’ I said, ‘rather depends on the outcome of this conversation.’ That was an outright lie. Stephanopoulos would be using the threat of a perjury charge to get Siobhán Burke to flip on Carroll but we figured that he’d respond better if we thought he was the centre of attention. We’ll use your ego against you if we can – we’re not proud.

This approach, trying to roll over your suspect before their lawyer arrives, is high-risk and I could practically hear Seawoll grinding his teeth from next door where he was no doubt monitoring the interview. I suspected that Stephanopoulos was also watching, and definitely Nightingale and probably Agent Reynolds, in which case Kittredge would be there to keep an eye on her. For an interview that wasn’t officially taking place there weren’t half a lot of witnesses.

‘That’s low,’ he said. ‘Even for the police, that’s low.’

‘My point, Ryan,’ I said, ‘is that we don’t need anything more to send you down. But we do want to know why. So we’re giving you this opportunity to get it off your chest and satisfy our curiosity.’

‘You want to keep this secret, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a deal on offer?’

‘No such luck.’ I said. Seawoll had made that much clear.

‘What if I was to threaten to use it as part of my defence,’ he said. ‘Have it all out in open court. Try keeping your secrets then.’

‘You can give that a go if you like,’ I said. ‘Strange little men living in the sewers, keeping pigs and making pots? My money’s on you ending up in Broadmoor with a thorazine drip.’

‘Thorazine,’ said Ryan. ‘That’s so last-century. You get Clorozil and Serdolect these days.’ He sighed. ‘No doubt you have it all sewn up, a nod and a wink and it’s like the story never existed.’

I tried not to show my relief. I mean, we might have been able to keep a lid on it, but the thing about a secret conspiracy is that it never stays secret for long. Tyburn was right about one thing – I didn’t think the status quo was going to be an option much longer.

‘What led you down there in the first place?’ I asked.

‘To the Whisperers you mean?’ he said. ‘Oh, family tradition. We may have all been a proper bourgeois Catholic family of lawyers and doctors, but we kept alive the memory of my Great-Great-Grandfather Matthew Carroll. Old Farmyard Digger himself.’

Who, like Eugene Beale and the Gallagher brothers, had headed for England and worked on the canals, tunnels and railways.

‘So I was hearing stories about the whispering men from an early age,’ said Ryan. ‘Not that I believed any of it.’

‘Is that why you came to London?’ I asked.

Ryan leant back in his chair and laughed in a way that reminded me of Ten-Tons. ‘I’m sorry, no,’ he said. ‘No offence, but it’s not everyone’s dearest wish to come to London. I had a perfectly serviceable career in Dublin.’

‘And yet here you came,’ I said.

‘You have to understand what it was like riding the Celtic Tiger,’ said Ryan. ‘For so many years we’d been this joke of a country and suddenly we were it, Dublin was where it was happening. All at once there were coffee shops and galleries and more than one kind of pub. People were immigrating to live in Ireland and not just by accident either.’

Ryan looked at me and may have detected a distressing lack of sympathy on my part because he leaned forward and said, ‘The thing about the international art market is that the market part of it is essentially dictated by the super-rich and the people that suck their dicks for a living.’ He mimed sucking a dick and it was funny – I laughed.

‘But the art part of the international art market is done by yours truly and other people like me – your actual artist,’ he said. ‘And for us it’s all about the expression of the—’ He faltered, waved his hand, and gave up. ‘The expression of the inexpressible. There’s no point asking what a piece of work means, you know? If we could express it in words do you think we would have spent all that time bisecting a cow or pickling a shark? Do you think bisecting a cow is somebody’s idea of a fun fecking afternoon? And then to have stupid people come up to you and say “It’s very interesting, but is it art?” Yes, it’s fecking art. Do you think I’m planning to eat the fecking thing?’

He sipped his tea and frowned. ‘God, I wish I’d asked for some vodka. Is there any chance of a vodka?’

I shook my head.

‘Did you ever bisect a cow?’ I asked.

‘Only on a dinner plate,’ said Ryan. ‘I don’t mind getting my hands dirty but I draw the line at faeces and dead animals. The hands are important, feeling the medium you’re working with. Did you take art at school?’

‘Drama,’ I said.

‘But you must have played with Plasticine – right?’

‘When I was a kid,’ I said.

‘Do you remember the feeling as it squeezed through your fingers?’ he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And you must have worked with clay at least once in your life.’

I told him I had and that I remembered the slick texture of the clay beneath my fingers and the excitement I felt when it went into the kiln for firing. I didn’t mention that nothing I made ever seemed to survive the firing process, usually exploding and often taking other people’s work with it. After a while the art teacher, Mr Straploss, just refused to let me do pottery. It was one of the reasons I took drama instead.

Ryan claimed that it’s the relationship between the artist and his materials which drove the art. ‘It may look like just a collection of random junk to you,’ he said. ‘But there’s always something. When I was about sixteen, I suddenly understood that I wanted to find the meaning in those juxtapositions, to push the way I saw the world out through the aperture of what little talent I had. Can you understand that?’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ I said, and before I could stop myself. ‘I wanted to be an architect.’

Ryan’s mouth actually dropped open. ‘An architect?’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

‘I was taking the right A-levels but I was told that my draughtsmanship wasn’t good enough,’ I said.

‘I thought it was all done on computers these days,’ said Ryan.

I shrugged. I’d done my best to bury that bit of my life, and I really wasn’t going to talk about it with half a dozen police listening in.

‘It was more complicated than that,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, me?’ he said. ‘I had the luck of the Irish. I was the right boy in the right place at the right time. I burst upon the scene just as Dublin acquired a scene worth bursting upon. I was mad keen on Japan and China and India. Seeing a theme yet? Anything hot and exotic.’

Apparently, they ate it up in Dublin in the roaring years of the Celtic Tiger. The Irish had the bit between their teeth and nothing was going to stop them. ‘Not the British, not the Catholic Church and especially not ourselves,’ said Ryan. ‘And I was close, almost there, local boy makes good.’

And then it all went away. There was the credit crunch, the bank bailout, and suddenly it was like it never happened. ‘And the worst thing was,’ said Ryan. ‘I think people were pleased that it had all gone down the crapper. “Ah, well,” they said. “Nothing lasts for ever.” And they put the old Ireland back on like an ancient, worn but comfortable pair of shoes – the bastards.’ He smacked his empty teacup down on the table. ‘Two more years and I’d have been international – one year if I’d known there was a rush.’

‘So you came to London to make your fortune?’ I asked.

‘You’d like to think that, you English bastard, wouldn’t you?’ said Ryan, but without rancour. ‘Truth is I wanted to go to New York, but you have to have a certain weight, artistically speaking, to make it in the city that never sleeps. So London here I come, and I have to say this about your bloody city – war, depression, peace or whatever – London is always London.’

This was all very interesting, but I was intensely aware that Ryan’s lawyer was fast approaching and Seawoll had been adamant that once it was all legal no one was ever going to bring up ‘any weird shit whatsoever’. As far as the Murder Team were concerned, they had Ryan Carroll bang to rights and they didn’t need to know anything else.

But I had to know if I was right – and this was going to be my last chance.

‘So you made contact through the Beales?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, the Anglo-Irish Beales with the emphasis strictly on the Anglo,’ said Ryan. ‘They put me on to the Nolans, who introduced me to Stephen, and down I went into the very bowels of the earth. I watched him make a fruit bowl, a really plain boring fruit bowl. He shaped the clay, he let it dry and in the kiln it went.’ Ryan grinned. ‘You know they run their kilns on pig farts? Very modern, but we’re talking secret subterranean race here so I’m expecting something a little bit more than pig farts.’ He wagged a finger at me.

‘I know you know what’s coming next, because I saw the way you reacted to the work at my show.’ He folded his arms. ‘Oh, the herd felt something. But you, you recognised it.’

‘Magic,’ I said.

‘The real thing,’ said Ryan. And like me, once he’d seen it in action there was no way he wasn’t going to try to learn it. So Stephen set out to teach Ryan how to make an unbreakable pot, and incidentally imbue it with enough vestigia to give any interested art lovers what Ryan called a ‘Glimpse into the numinous’. What he hadn’t counted on was that learning how to do it would take months.

‘But I’ll bet money you know that already, don’t you?’ said Ryan.

Stephen described the process to Ryan as singing a song in your head while you worked. You worked the clay, sang the song in your head and somehow that made it magical.

‘Month after month I was down there, drinking tea, fondling the clay and singing in my head,’ said Ryan. ‘But being an artist is like being a shark – you’ve got to keep moving or you drown. So I asked Stephen to make the faces, the ones you saw at the Tate, to my specification, and that’s what he did.’

‘How did you get the emotional content?’ I asked. ‘And what did Stephen get in return?’

‘I just told him to think about how each face made him feel. Imagine my surprise when they popped out of the kiln emoting like actors.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Stephen got paid.’

I asked him whether that wasn’t cheating, but he just sighed in an exaggerated way and told me not to be so bourgeois. ‘I didn’t make the mannequins either, or any of the other found objects I used. Art’s about producing something more than the sum of the parts.’ He waved his hand dismissively and I thought, You’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

‘And James Gallagher arrived around this time?’ I asked.

‘Like a bad smell,’ said Ryan. ‘Don’t you hate Americans? Not that James was a bad guy. I never thought he was a bad guy. But he arrives with his money and his family and I’ll be honest – he was a fair painter if your tastes run to the old-fashioned. Send him back to la belle époque and he’d have been knee-deep in Parisian pussy within a week.’

And he had to be branching out into ceramics, he had to be strolling into Ryan’s own hitherto secret world. But Ryan could have lived with all of that if James bloody Gallagher hadn’t been better at singing in his head as well.

‘Not that he just sat down and did it first time, you understand,’ said Ryan. ‘It was me that got him settled, showed him the ropes, pointed out where the loo was.’

‘How long it did it take him to learn?’

‘About three weeks,’ said Ryan. ‘I felt him do it, but you know what? As he sang the song, I did too. In my head. Suddenly it was so simple. And we sang together, sort of both of us with the clay running between our fingers, and for that moment I was in tune with the fabric of the universe. I was singing along with the actual music of the spheres.’

But the proof of the pudding is in the baking. So the next day both of them had rushed back down the sewers for the grand ceremonial opening of the kiln.

‘For Stephen it’s an industrial process,’ said Ryan. ‘Just another day at the office, so we had to wait while he cleared out all the make-work until finally he gets to the layer where our plates are.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘And there they are – beautifully fired both of them. When Stephen put it in my hand, still warm, I knew it was mine. I could feel it through my skin. James and I look at each other and we just start laughing like little kids.’

Ryan trailed off and stared down at his hands. He turned his right hand over and rubbed absently at the bandage for a moment.

‘They test their work by banging it against the side of the kiln,’ said Ryan without looking up. ‘So we did the whole you-first-no-you-first routine and Jimmy boy gets fed up and cracks his plate against the edge of the kiln – the edge mind you – and it rings as sweet as a bell.’ Ryan looked up. ‘You can guess what happened next?’

I suddenly realised I’d talked myself into a trap – if the plate had broken in his hands then it could explain the cuts on his palm and possibly, if his brief was clever, the DNA evidence as well.

‘Yours smashed to pieces?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Ryan. ‘It cracked.’

And I swear I could hear all of them breathing out suddenly, all the way from the monitoring room next door.

‘But from an art point of view it would have been better if it had smashed,’ said Ryan. ‘James looked at me then and it was in his eyes that “Oh well, bad luck you,” look. My failure made his success taste all the sweeter – it’s an American thing. I looked back at him and I think he must have seen it in my eyes, what was coming next, because he made his excuses and left.’ Ryan looked back down at his hands. ‘He ran, I chased, we got lost, I hit him with the plate, it broke, he tried to walk away – I stabbed him in the back. Is that what you wanted to hear?’

It was more than I wanted to hear, but police work is all about the details so I stayed another half an hour going over what he could remember of the chase and the exact sequence of events around the stabbing. None of it was admissible, but it could be used by the Murder Team to double-check the official statements.

After that, Nightingale sent me and Lesley back to the Folly for a sleep. By that time in the morning the slush-covered streets were empty and cold. As we turned into Charing Cross Road Lesley put her hand on my shoulder and said; ‘You did some proper policing there – Merry Christmas.’

Late Christmas morning one of Lesley’s sisters turned up to drive her out to Brightlingsea, where I was informed there would be the traditional turkey, crackers and family squabbles. Nightingale reported that Agent Reynolds had been invited home by an evangelical family at the embassy for much the same experience, only with more cranberries and hopefully fewer arguments. Kumar and Zach spent Christmas delivering Christmas presents to, and taking medical samples from, the Quiet People, and voilà another unwritten ad hoc arrangement was added to the metaphorical book in which we presumably keep them.

Nightingale presented me with a small package neatly wrapped in silver paper. He stood waiting with suspicious casualness but I wasn’t fooled. I was tempted to pretend I was going to open it later but you shouldn’t be that cruel on Christmas. Unwrapped, it turned out to be an original stainless steel Omega, antique, black and silver, automatic winding and therefore magic-proof and worth about seventy to eighty times what I’d bought him. Which was a slim-line Nokia, modified to have a battery interrupt and preprogramed with every relevant number I could think of including the Commissioner, the Mayor and his tailor, Dege & Skinner of Savile Row.

I caught up with my parents at Aunty Jo’s. She’s not really my aunty but my mum and her go back all the way to when they were at school in Kambia together. She has a big house off Holloway Road and a large number of kids, all of whom went to university, that she likes to show off every Christmas. Notice the ‘whom’ there – who says I don’t know my grammar? Anyway, me and my parents go there every year and essentially eat and drink until we explode. I invited Nightingale but he said he said he couldn’t leave Molly alone on Christmas day and it wasn’t until I was squashed onto the sofa and watching the Christmas episode of Doctor Who that I realised he hadn’t said precisely why.