Whispers Under Ground

14 Westbourne Park

In the good old days when men were real men and members of the Flying Squad dealt with armed robbers the way god intended – with a pickaxe handle – if you wanted to follow a suspect vehicle you needed at least three cars. That way you could run a loose ‘box’ around your target which was not only hard to shake but minimised the risk that one of your cars would be made as a tail. Nowadays, with the authorisation of an officer of Inspector rank or over, you just run up behind the vehicle in question, when it’s stationary obviously, and stick a tracker to the chassis. They’re about half the size of a matchbox and cost about the same as a week’s clubbing in Ibiza.

New Covent Garden at five o’clock on a winter’s morning is a concrete arena full of headlights, smoke and shouting. Trucks, vans and forklifts snort and growl in and out of loading bays while men in reflective coats and woollen hats clutch clipboards and dial their mobiles with clumsy gloved fingers. It was a simple matter to park the Asbo in the shelter of a multi-storey car park and crunch through the snow down to the railway arches where all three Transit vans registered to Nolan and Sons were waiting for the day’s load. Kevin’s van was easy to spot. It was the oldest and dirtiest. It was also at the end of the row furthest from the lockup’s door. I hunched up in my jacket and pulled my hat down over my ears and covered the last twenty metres as nonchalantly as I could. As I got within a couple of metres I heard voices on the other side of the van.

‘What if they come looking?’ asked a whiney voice – Kevin Nolan.

‘They know your name, Kev. If they want to find you it wouldn’t exactly pose an insurmountable problem for them,’ said a deeper, calmer voice. ‘So you might as well make yourself useful.’ Kevin’s big friend or more likely brother.

I felt the top of the tracker to make sure I had it right way up and then, quick as a flash, I bent down and stuck it to the chassis. I wriggled it a few times to make sure it was secure and as I did so my fingers brushed something that shouldn’t have been there. It was roughly the same size and shape as the tracker.

‘I don’t see why we can’t get today’s stuff from Coates and Son,’ said Kevin on other side of the van. ‘Danny says they’re giving it away.’

I pulled the second object out – it was another tracker. It was even, as far as I could tell in the dark, the same make as mine. I balled it in my fist and walked away – quickly.

‘Of course they’re giving it away,’ Kevin’s probable brother’s voice receded behind me. ‘They’re being checked.’

Was someone else running an operation on the Nolans? The Inside Inquiry Team had done a pool check on Kevin Nolan and his family the day before and any police operation would have been flagged. Could it be MI5? Were the Nolans part of some dissident Republican active service unit or part of a supply chain for the same – or informers against? Had Agent Reynolds been right – did the murder actually have an Irish component?

I ducked out of sight behind a truck that was waiting to be loaded.

No, I thought, it still would have been flagged. Not least because DCI Seawoll was one of the most respected and formidable officers in the Met and you’d have to be remarkably stupid to try and do an end run around him.

I got out my torch and examined the tracker, which was identical in every way to mine and probably bought from the same online catalogue. Unless I wanted to open it up, it was about as traceable as a ballpoint pen. I took out my keys and scratched a tiny X into the casing in between the attachment magnets, took a deep breath to calm my nerves and strolled back towards Kevin Nolan’s crap Transit van.

I had to put it back where I found it but I couldn’t leave my tracker next to it, or whoever had planted the first tracker might find mine if they came to retrieve theirs. I couldn’t hear any voices as I reached the van. I hoped this meant they were all inside the lock-up. I bent down, replaced the tracker where I’d found it, removed mine and was just heading for the back of the van when the rear doors crashed open.

‘You need to clean this fucking van.’ It was Kevin’s probable brother. I froze, which was about the most stupidly suspicious-looking thing I could do, and the van rocked as someone climbed inside. ‘No wonder they’re not happy. Pass me the broom.’

‘It’s not the van,’ said Kevin from the back. ‘They think they should be getting more.’

‘They get what they pay for,’ said the voice. ‘I didn’t make the stupid deal.’

It’s always a risk when you have a plan that you fixate on it even when things go pear-shaped. I realised that because my plan had been to stick my tracker under the back of the van. I was actually waiting for Kevin and his friend to leave so I could do so – risking discovery the whole time. How stupid is that?

The van rocked rhythmically and I heard god-knows-what being swept out of the back. ‘I thought Franny’s was closed down,’ said Kevin.

I crouched down and put the tracker ahead of the front wheel arch and nonchalantly walked away. It wasn’t as good or secure a position as the back or the mid-section, but the magnets on those things are much better than they used to be.

We’d picked our position on the fourth floor of the car park with care. From there me and Lesley could have set up our camera with the telephoto lens on a tripod and had a direct line of sight on Nolan and Sons – had we only been willing to freeze to death or indeed had remembered to bring the tripod. The Asbo was conspicuously the only car in its row with the engine running.

‘Sorted?’ asked Lesley as I climbed gratefully into the warm interior.

‘Not exactly,’ I said and told her about the second tracker.

I fished out the thermos flask, yet another Folly antique, a khaki cylinder the size of a shell casing, and poured myself a coffee. Lesley was equally sceptical about us being tracked by CTC, but for different reasons.

‘They don’t need to track us. If they want to know something they’d just phone us up and ask. And if MI5 wanted to know something they’d just call CTC who would call us and ask,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the FBI.’

‘All the FBI has to do is ask Kittredge and he’d ask us,’ I said.

‘But we might not tell Kittredge,’ said Lesley. ‘Not to mention we know Agent Reynolds bent the rules already by following you.’

Lesley went quiet and I paused with the coffee halfway to my lips.

‘Go on then,’ I said.

‘Why do I have to do it?’ asked Lesley.

‘Because I went out last time,’ I said. ‘And I’m still freezing.’

Lesley snarled but she got out of the car and while I finished my coffee she checked for bugs. She was back inside in less than two minutes with another identical GPS tracker.

‘Voilà,’ she said and dropped it into my palm. The casing was freezing – it must have been attached for ages.

‘Agent Reynolds,’ I said.

‘Or somebody else,’ said Lesley. ‘That we don’t know about.’

I twirled the rectangular box in my hand. If it had been set up like ours, then it was probably programmed to send a signal if we started moving. Chances were if I deactivated it now the operator wouldn’t notice until she, or possibly a mysterious they, pinged it to check its operating status.

‘Should I fry it?’ I asked Lesley.

‘No,’ she said.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Because if we destroy it they’ll know we know but if we keep it we have the option of feeding whoever it is false information. We could put the tracker on a decoy vehicle and send them on a wild goose chase or we could use it to set up a sting—’

Lesley snorted.

‘We’re the police,’ she said. ‘Remember? We’re not spies, we’re not undercover and we’re conducting a legitimate investigation that’s been authorised at ACPO level. We want them to follow us so we can identify them, call for backup and arrest them. Once we have them in the interview room we’ll be able to tell who they are by what kind of lawyer turns up.’

‘My way’s more fun,’ I said.

‘Your way’s more complicated,’ said Lesley. She dug her finger under the edge of her mask where it itched. ‘I miss being a proper copper,’ she said.

‘Take it off,’ I said. ‘No one’s going to see you here.’

‘Apart from you,’ she said.

‘I’m getting used to it,’ I said. ‘It’s starting to become your real face.’

‘I don’t want it to become my real face,’ hissed Lesley.

I replaced the tracker under the Asbo and we sat in stony silence while the main Nolan and Sons vans were loaded up and driven away. Finally Kevin did his rounds and returned, surprisingly, not with the bin bags of leftovers but with neatly loaded pallets on a forklift. His customers were truly getting the good stuff today. I jumped out of the Asbo, snapped some pictures with the long lens and dived back in again.

‘Turn the tracker on,’ I said.

Lesley opened the laptop and tilted it to show me that the device was already activated and sending a signal every five seconds. I backed the Asbo out of its parking space and headed for the exit ramp. Using a tracker means you don’t have to crowd your target, but you don’t want to be too far away in case they suddenly do something interesting.

Dawn brought a clear sky of dirty blue and illuminated a landscape of pockmarked snow and icy slush. Lesley and I instinctively hunched down into our seats as Kevin Nolan’s Transit lurched past. We waited until we were sure we knew which way he was turning on Nine Elms, and then we followed.

It was all very civilised, but I still would’ve liked to have a pickaxe handle in the back seat – just for tradition’s sake, you understand.

‘Cultural weapon,’ I said out loud.

‘What?’ asked Lesley.

‘If the police had a cultural weapon,’ I said. ‘Like a claymore or an assegai – it would be a pickaxe handle.’

‘Why don’t you do something more useful,’ said Lesley. ‘And keep your eyes open for a car with diplomatic plates.’

We were coming up on Chelsea Bridge, which for all its blue and white painted carriage lamp charm is only three lanes wide – two if you don’t count the bus lane. A good choke point to spot a tail.

All diplomatic cars have distinctive plates which indicate status and nationality, for the ease and convenience of terrorists and potential kidnappers.

I spotted a late-model dark blue Mercedes S class with a D plate and read the code out.

‘Sierra Leone,’ said Lesley and I felt a little borrowed patriotic tug.

‘Have you memorised all of these?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ said Lesley. ‘There’s a list on Wikipedia.’

‘What’s the code for the US then?’ I asked.

‘270 to 274,’ said Lesley.

‘She’s not going to use an embassy car,’ I said. ‘Is she? I mean talk about conspicuous.’

Lesley felt that I had failed to understand the full implications of using a tracking device, i.e.: you can hang back far enough to be inconspicuous so it doesn’t matter what plates you have. And if she did have diplo plates she wouldn’t have to pay congestion charge or parking tickets and it would make it fucking hard to arrest her.

‘Does she have diplomatic immunity?’ asked Lesley.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We could ask Kittredge.’

‘Or we could phone Kittredge now and make it his problem,’ said Lesley. She checked the laptop. ‘Where the fuck is he going?’ she said and tilted the screen so I could see it again – the little dots marking Kevin Nolan’s Transit were heading into Knightsbridge.

Suddenly a luxury car with D plates would have blended in perfectly.

‘Who round here is going to want a van full of dodgy greens?’ asked Lesley. The restaurants in that area generally had their own people to go down to Covent Garden for the best produce.

‘Things are tough all over,’ I said. But our fears for the palates of the diplomats and oligarchs proved baseless as Kevin skirted the west end of Hyde Park and turned up Bayswater Road. When he turned again into a side street I put my foot down and closed the gap. We followed him up a line of deceptively modest-looking terraces until Lesley said, ‘He’s stopping.’ In time for me to find an inconspicuous parking space from which we could keep him in view.

London was mostly built piecemeal and if, like me, you know a little bit of architecture you can see where the initial developers built a string of grand Regency mansions along a country lane. Then as the city ground remorselessly westward a line of neat little Victorian terraced houses was built for those members of the working class that one needed to have close at hand.

Kevin had stopped outside an odd late-Victorian terrace consisting of exactly three houses that abutted the back of a 1930s London brick shopping arcade. I forbore from mentioning this to Lesley because discussion of that sort of thing tends to get her vexed.

‘Here come the greens,’ said Lesley.

Kevin Nolan slouched around to the back of his van, opened the doors and collected the first of the pallets and headed for the front door. Lesley lifted the camera and its telephoto and we watched through the cable link on the laptop while Kevin scrabbled around in his trouser pockets.

‘He’s got his own keys,’ said Lesley.

‘Make sure you get a close-up on the pallet,’ I said. ‘I want to know who the supplier was.’

We watched as he ferried the pallets from the van to the house. Once he’d taken the last one inside, he closed the door behind him. We waited a couple of minutes and then we waited some more.

‘What the fuck is he doing in there?’ asked Lesley.

I rummaged in the stake-out bag and discovered that we’d eaten all the snacks except for Molly’s sandwich surprise, packed neatly in greaseproof paper. I gave them an experimental sniff.

‘Not tripe this time?’ asked Lesley.

‘Spam, I think,’ I said as I opened up the parcels and lifted the top slice of homemade bread. ‘My mistake,’ I said. ‘Spam, cheese and pickle.’

‘He’s coming out,’ said Lesley and raised the camera again.

Kevin emerged from the front door carrying a battered cardboard box. From the way he carried it I assumed it was heavy. This was confirmed when the van sank on its rear axle as he dumped the box in the back. He rested for a moment, panting, breath visible in the cold air, before returning to the house, where a minute or two later he reappeared with a second box and loaded that.

It’s a funny thing, but you only need to be following someone for a very short period of time before you start identifying with them. Watching Kevin stagger out the front door with a third heavy box I had to fight down the urge to jump out of the car and give him a hand. If nothing else, it would have speeded things up. As it was, we waited and watched him bring out two more boxes while taking the occasional picture to relieve the boredom.

Much too Lesley’s disgust I ate the spam, cheese and pickle sandwiches.

‘Are you planning to spend the rest of the day breathing out?’ she asked.

‘It’s an autonomic function,’ I said smugly.

‘Then open the window,’ she said.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘It’s too cold. Tell you what, though.’ I fished out a Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener from the glove box and hung it from the rear-view mirror. ‘There you go.’

I was probably only saved from death, or at least serious injury, by the fact that Kevin chose that moment to get back into his van and drive away. We waited a couple of minutes to make a note of the house number and call AB for a pool check and then drove after him.

Kevin’s next stop was fifteen minutes away on the other side of the Westway in what had to be the last unconverted warehouse in the whole of West London. It still had its double-width wooden loading gates on which the original blue paint had faded to a scabby dark grey.

We drew up and watched as Kevin left his van, stamped over to the gates, unlocked the inset pedestrian door and stepped inside.

‘I’m bored of this,’ said Lesley. ‘Let’s go in and search the place.’

‘If we let him move on,’ I said. ‘We could have the place to ourselves, have a good look around before anyone finds out.’

‘We’d need a search warrant,’ said Lesley. ‘On the other hand if we wait for little Kevin, who I believe you witnessed assaulting someone yesterday, to carry a couple of boxes in then we’re just investigating his suspicious behaviour. And once we’re inside—’

She was right, so that’s what we did. When Kevin opened the gates and drove his van into the warehouse we drove in just behind him. He didn’t even notice until he came round the back his van to unload.

‘It wasn’t me,’ he said.

‘What wasn’t you?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘What’s in the boxes then, Kevin?’ asked Lesley.

Kevin actually opened his mouth to say ‘nothing’ again, but realised that was just too stupid even for him.

‘Plates,’ he said, and it was true. Every box was full of plates all made of the same tough biscuit-coloured stoneware as the fruit bowl in James Gallagher’s flat – and the shard that had killed him. But that wasn’t all.

The loading bay was a wide two-storey space that penetrated through the centre of the warehouse. At the far end was another set of wooden loading gates that opened directly onto the tow path of the Grand Union Canal, which ran along the rear. Opening off the bay on either side were two storage rooms, a pattern duplicated on the first floor and again, albeit with larger rooms, on the second. All but one of the rooms were fitted with rotting wooden shelving itself piled with pottery.

Leaving Kevin to Lesley’s tender mercies I wandered through the warehouse. In places the shelving had collapsed to create drifts of dinner plates or saucers which could be treacherous underfoot. In the far rooms I found piles of tureens and soup bowls covered in a thick layer of dust and the shelves ragged with old cobwebs. I definitely heard rats scuttling out of my way as I entered each room. In one I found a long shelf on which ranks of salt cellars were lined up like an army of miniature Daleks and on the shelf below a different army of little drunk men in tricorn hats – toby jugs. I pulled a few out for a closer look and as I touched them I felt a little flash of vestigia – the pigsty smell, but also beer and laughter. I saw that the face on each jug was subtly different, as if they’d all been individually made. As I walked out I could feel them leering at my back. In another, amidst what looked like chamber pots and milk jugs I found a shelf of statuettes – my old friend goddess-surprised-by-a-sculptor.

One room, on the ground floor at the back, had been partially cleared of shelves and pottery. In their place stood, almost as tall as Lesley and smothered in bubble wrap, a brand-new 15 kilowatt kiln. I found out later that this was just about the largest and hottest unit it was possible to buy off the shelf. Other packing cases were arrayed around it which turned out to be full of kiln furniture and bags full of mysterious coloured powders which were identified later as ingredients for making various types of ceramic glazes.

I thought of James Gallagher and his new-found interest in ceramics. A kiln like that would have to set you back a couple of thousand quid at least and the Murder Team would have flagged an expenditure like that on day one of the investigation. Likewise if he was renting the warehouse as a studio.

‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ I asked Kevin.

‘Which stuff?’ he asked. Even inside, Kevin kept his hoodie up, as if worried that without it his brains would fly out of his ears.

‘The pottery,’ I said. ‘The stuff what you’ve been trying to sell to the traders on the Portobello.’

‘Comes from here, don’t it?’ he said.

‘Not from Moscow Road then?’

Kevin gave me an accusing look. ‘You’ve been following me?’

‘Yes Kevin, we’ve been following you,’ said Lesley.

‘That’s a violation of my European human rights,’ he said.

I looked at Lesley – surely nobody could really be that stupid? She shrugged. Lesley has a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.

I gestured at the kiln. ‘Do you know whose this is?’ I asked.

Kevin glanced incuriously at the kiln and then shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said.

‘Have you ever noticed anything weird happening around here?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Ghosts, mysterious noises – weird shit?’

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘It’s time to call in Seawoll,’ said Lesley.

We made Kevin sit on the edge of the kiln’s loading pallet and walked out of his hearing.

‘Is this anything he wants to know about?’ I asked.

‘This could be the source of the murder weapon,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s down to the SIO to decide what he wants to know about.’

I nodded, she was right but I was thinking that this could have been where James was sloping off to during those gaps in his timeline. James was a student, but his father was rich.

‘I want to talk to the senator,’ I said. ‘Maybe he paid for all of this.’

Lesley reminded me that little miss FBI agent was likely to take a close interest in any visit, so I phoned Kittredge.

‘Have you found your little lost sheep?’ I said.

‘Why do you ask?’ Special Branch might have been reorganised out of existence but they were still the same cagey bastards they’d been when they were doing the legwork for MI5 during the Cold War.

‘Possible sighting in Ladbroke Grove,’ I said. ‘I just thought I’d check with you before wasting any time on it.’

‘She’s back in the bunker,’ he said. ‘Has been since about nine this morning.’

‘That’s the hotel, right?’ I asked, knowing full well it probably wasn’t.

‘Grosvenor Square,’ said Kittredge wearily – meaning the American Embassy.

I thanked him and hung up. CTC was responsible for guarding the embassy, including any secret back doors it might have. If Kittredge said Reynolds was inside then that’s probably where she was.

‘Sitting in front of a laptop watching us drive around,’ said Lesley.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘If I leave the tracker with you, then she’ll never suspect.’

Finding the senator was easy enough. I just called Guleed – knowing where the relatives are is part and parcel of the family liaison role. It comes in useful if they make that unfortunate, but all too common, transition from victim to suspect.

‘We’re at the house in Ladbroke Grove,’ said Guleed.

I left Lesley to baby-sit Kevin and call in the cavalry, and made the short drive in under ten minutes.

The senator was an ordinary-looking man in an expensive suit. He sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jameson’s and a plastic half-pint glass in front of him.

‘Senator?’ I asked. ‘May I have a quick word?’

He looked up at me and gave me a grimace – I figured it was the closest he could get to a polite smile. There was whiskey on his breath.

‘Please, Detective, have a seat,’ he said.

I sat down opposite – he offered me a drink but I declined. He had a long face with a curious lack of expression, although I could see pain in the tension around his eyes. His brown hair was neatly cut into a conservative side parting, his teeth were white and even and his nails were neatly manicured. He looked maintained – as polished, dusted and cared for as a vintage automobile.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

I asked whether he, or anyone he knew, had purchased a kiln and associated equipment.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Is it important?’

‘I can’t say yet, sir,’ I said. ‘Did your son have access to an independent source of income – a trust fund perhaps?’

‘Yes,’ said the senator. ‘Several, in fact. But they’ve all been checked and nothing has been taken. Jimmy was always very self-sufficient.’

‘Did you have a lot of contact?’ I asked.

The senator poured a measure of whiskey into his plastic cup.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘The FBI seemed concerned that he might prove embarrassing – politically?’

‘Do you know what I like about the English?’ asked the senator.

‘The sense of humour?’ I asked.

He gave me a bleak smile to make sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.

‘You’re not a constituency,’ he said. ‘There’s no community leaders or lobbying group ready to crawl up my ass because somebody somewhere takes exception to a joke or just a slip of the tongue. If I was to, hypothetically speaking, call you a limey or a nigger – which one would cause you the most offence?’

‘Was he an embarrassment?’ I asked.

‘Do you know why you evaded that question?’ asked the senator.

Because I’m a professional, I thought. Because I spent a couple of years talking to morose drunks and belligerent shoplifters and people who just wanted someone to shout at because the world was unfair. And the trick of it is simply to keep asking the questions you need the answers for, until finally the sad little sods wind down.

Occasionally, you have to wrestle them to the floor and sit on them until they’re coherent, but I thought that was an unlikely contingency given who I was talking to.

‘In what way would he have been embarrassing?’ I asked.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he said.

‘I’ll tell you what, Senator,’ I said. ‘You tell me about your son and I’ll answer.’

‘I asked first,’ he said. ‘You answer my question and I’ll tell you about my son.’

‘If you call me a nigger you just sound like a racist American,’ I said. ‘And limey is a joke insult. You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.’

The senator squinted at me for a long time and I wondered if I might have been too clever by half, but then he sighed and picked up his plastic cup.

‘He wasn’t an embarrassment – not to me,’ he said. ‘Although I think maybe he thought he was.’ He sipped his whiskey, I noticed, savouring it on his tongue before he swallowed. He put the glass down – rationing himself – I recognised the behaviour from my dad. ‘He liked being here in London, I can tell you that. He said that the city went on for ever. “All the way down” he said.’

His eyes unfocused, just for a moment, and I realised that the senator was phenomenally drunk.

‘So he was in contact with you?’

‘I’d arrange a phone call once a week,’ said the senator. ‘He’d call me every other month or so. Once your kids are out of high school that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘Last week,’ said the senator. His hand twitched towards the whiskey but he stopped himself. ‘I wanted to know if he was coming back for the holidays.’

‘And was he?’

‘Nope,’ said the senator. ‘He said he’d found something, he was excited and the next time he saw me he was going to blow my mind.’

The older coppers always make it very clear that it’s just not good practice to get too involved with your victims. A murder inquiry can last weeks, months or even years and ultimately the victims don’t want you to be sympathetic. They want you to be competent – that’s what you owe them.

But still someone had stabbed James in the back and left his father flailing around in grief and incomprehension. I decided that I didn’t approve of that at all.

I asked some more questions relating to his son’s art work, but it was clear that the senator had been indulgent rather than interested. Guleed, who’d been watching me from the other side of the kitchen, managed to convey, by expression alone, the fact that she’d already asked all the routine questions and unless I had anything new I should shut up now and leave the poor bastard alone.

I was walking back to the car when Lesley phoned me.

‘You know that house?’ she asked.

‘Which house?’

‘The one that Kevin Nolan delivered his greenery to.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘The one where he picked up all the crockery,’ said Lesley. ‘The very crockery that we have just found several metric tons of?’

‘The house off the Moscow Road,’ I said.

‘That house doesn’t exist,’ she said.

15 Bayswater

The British have always been madly over-ambitious and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight. The London Underground was no exception and was built by a breed of entrepreneurs whose grasp was matched only by the size of their sideburns. While their equally gloriously bewhiskered counterparts across the Atlantic were busy blowing each other to pieces in a Civil War they embarked on the construction of the Metropolitan Line knowing only one thing for certain – there was no way they were going to be able to run steam trains through it.

Experience with the established long tunnels of the mainline railways had proven that, unless you liked breathing smoke, you wanted to get through the tunnel as fast as possible. You certainly didn’t want to stay in there permanently, let alone stop at an equally enclosed station to take on passengers. So they tried pneumatic tunnels but they couldn’t maintain a seal. They tried superheated bricks but they weren’t reliable. They burnt coke but the fumes from that proved even more toxic than coal smoke. What they were waiting for was electric trains, but they were twenty years too early.

So steam it was. And because of that the London Underground was a lot less underground than originally planned. Where the tracks ran under an existing roadway they put in steam grates and, wherever the tracks didn’t, they tried to leave the roof off as much as possible. One such ‘cut’ famously existed at Leinster Road where, in order to hide the unsightly railway from sensitive middle-class eyes, two brick facades were built that seamlessly replicated the grand Georgian terrace that had been demolished to dig it. These fake houses, with their convincing but blind painted windows, became an endless source of humour to the kind of people who think making minimum-wage pizza delivery guys go to a false address is the highest form of wit.

Everyone knows about Leinster Road, except perhaps minimum-wage pizza delivery guys, but I’d never heard of any fake houses west of Bayswater Station. Once you knew what you were looking for they were easy to spot on the satellite view of Google Maps, although their nature was somewhat disguised by the oblique angle of the aerial photograph. Me and Lesley talked our way into one of the flats above the shopping arcade on the Moscow Road, which had a good view over the back of the house where Kevin Nolan had delivered his greenery. From there it was obvious that, while the buildings were less than a full house, they were more than just a facade.

‘It’s like someone only built the front rooms,’ said Lesley.

Where the rear rooms and back garden should have been there was a sheer drop to the track bed six metres below.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why?’

Lesley dangled the keys she’d confiscated from Kevin Nolan in front of my face.

‘Why don’t we go find out?’ she said. She must have detached them from Kevin when we put him in a car to send him off to AB to be interviewed.

Both of the houses were part of the same facade but we chose the door that Kevin had used on the basis that he’d known what he was doing.

It looked like an ordinary front door, set deep in the mid-Victorian fashion with a rectangular fanlight set above. Close up I could see that the door had been crudely repainted red without stripping the original paint first. I picked a flake off and found it had been at least three different shades, including an appalling orange colour. There was no doorbell but a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. We didn’t bother knocking.

I’d expected the inside to resemble the back of a stage set, but instead we found ourselves in a classic Victorian hallway complete with a badly scuffed black and white tiled floor and yellow wallpaper that had faded to a pale lemon. The only real difference was that instead of running front to back it ran side to side, linking both of the notional terraces. On our left there was a duplicate front door and ordinary interior doors at each end.

I went left. Lesley went right.

Beyond my door was a room with bay windows, net curtains and bare floorboards. There was a smell of dust and machine oil. I spotted something green on the floor and retrieved a lettuce leaf – still crisp. The back wall was plastered, grubby and devoid of windows. It was a locked-room mystery – the case of the missing vegetables. I was just about to go and see if Lesley had had more luck when I noticed that a black iron ring had been inset into a floorboard. A closer inspection revealed that it was the handle for a trap door and, with a surprisingly easy lift, it opened to reveal a six-metre drop onto the tracks below. Carefully I lay down on the floor and stuck my head through the hatchway.

I was disconcerted to see that the two half-houses were held up by a series of wooden beams. They were old, black with soot and spanned the width of the trackway, bolstered at the ends with diagonal beams that had been fitted into the brick walls of the cut. Attached with iron bolts to the nearest beam was a long flattened contraption made of iron, dark-coloured wood and brass. It took me a bit of squinting but I finally realised that it was a staircase in the manner of a folding fire escape neatly concertinaed and stowed to the underside of the house.

Within easy reach of the hatch was a brass and leather lever with a clutch handle like those you find on vintage cars and steam engines. I reached out to see if it would move.

‘What’s down there?’

I turned my head to find Lesley staring down at me.

‘A folding staircase I think,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to see if I can unlock it. It should drop straight down onto the tracks.’

I reached once more for the lever, but as I did so a Circle Line train clattered directly beneath me on its way to Bayswater Station. It took about thirty seconds to go past.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ asked Lesley.

‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘it would be better if we call BTP first. What do you think?’

‘I think you may be right,’ said Lesley.

So I got to my feet, closed the hatch and called Sergeant Kumar.

‘You know you said that the whole point about secret access points is that they weren’t secret from you?’ I asked. ‘Care to make a bet on that?’

He asked me where and I told him.

‘I’m on my way,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Lesley.

‘He said not to do anything stupid until he gets here,’ I said.

‘We’d better find something to keep you occupied then,’ she said and made me call the Murder Team to let them know what we had found and ask whether they’d traced the owner of the warehouse on Kensal Road yet.

Three minutes later Lesley got a phone call. ‘That’s right,’ she said and then looked at me. ‘Not so far,’ she said and then. ‘I’ll tell him – bye.’ She put her phone away.

‘That was Seawoll,’ she said. ‘Stephanopoulos is on her way down and you’re not to do anything stupid until she gets here.’

You burn down one central London tourist attraction, I thought, and they never let you forget it.

Stephanopoulos arrived ten minutes later with a couple of spare DCs in tow. I met her at the front door and showed her around. She stared gloomily down the hatch as another train rumbled underneath. Despite the noise the room stayed remarkably steady.

‘Is this our case, your case or BTP’s case?’ she asked.

I told her that it was probably related to the James Gallagher murder, likely to have ‘unusual’ elements and had definitely spilled into the bailiwick of the British Transport Police.

Stephanopoulos looked abstracted. She was thinking about her budget – I could tell from the way she bit her lip.

‘Let’s say this is your case until we know for sure. Although CTC are going to have a fit if they think person or persons unknown have had unrestricted access to the Underground,’ she said. ‘You know how sensitive they get.’

Having hived her budget problems onto the Folly, Stephanopoulos gave me a grin.

While we were waiting for Kumar we got the finished pool check on the warehouse. Apparently it was owned by a company called Beale Property Services who, as a matter of interest, had owned it under one company name or other since the nineteenth century.

‘Is that significant?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

‘I’d like to know who’s been using it,’ I said.

‘See if you can’t set up an interview at Beale Property Services, the more senior the better,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘I’ll come with.’

Before I could do that, a BTP response vehicle screamed to a halt outside and Sergeant Kumar came running into the half a house with two uniformed BTP officers. I showed them the hatch and they looked down it.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Kumar.

16 South Wimbledon

Beale Property Services were located on a dreary industrial estate off the A24 in Merton. From the outside, the HQ was an equally dreary two-storey brick-built utility office enlivened by cheap blue cladding and festooned with security cameras. Inside it was surprisingly pleasant, with pastel-coloured sofas, glass-walled offices rather than cubicles and at least two articulated lorries’ worth of Christmas decorations hanging from every available hook.

There was also a great absence of people, including behind the mahogany-topped reception desk. Now, there’s a time when an unlocked premises is a positive boon to a police officer as in – I was just looking to ascertain the whereabouts of the proprietor when I stumbled across the Class A controlled substances which were in plain sight in the bottom drawer of a locked desk in an upstairs office, M’lord. Leave the police alone in a room for five minutes and we start looking in drawers, locked or otherwise. It’s a terrible habit

Stephanopoulos’ fingers were actually beginning to twitch when a short balding white guy in a chunky-knit pullover and khaki chinos bustled down the corridor towards us.

‘I’m afraid the office is closed for Christmas,’ he said.

‘Isn’t that a bit premature?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

The man shrugged. ‘Nobody could make it in because of the snow this week,’ he said. ‘So I told everyone to come back after Christmas.’ He had the sort of default BBC accent that a posh person acquires through trying to avoid sounding too much like they went to public school.

‘But it’s not snowing anymore,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s a bugger, isn’t it? What can I do for you?’

‘We’re looking for Graham Beale,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘CEO of Beale Property Services.’

The man grinned. ‘Then you are in luck,’ he said. ‘For that is I.’

We identified ourselves and told him we wanted to ask a few questions about one of his properties. He led us into what was obviously a staff coffee area and asked if we’d like a Baileys.

‘We were planning a bit of a pre-Christmas drink,’ he said and showed us a cupboard stuffed with bottles. Stephanopoulos enthusiastically agreed to a large one but took it upon herself to decline on my behalf.

‘He’s my designated driver,’ she said.

Beale poured two measures of Baileys into a pair of mugs and we sat down around a round table with a white laminated top. Stephanopoulos sipped her drink.

‘That brings back a lot of memories,’ she said.

‘So,’ said Beale. ‘What do you want to know?’

He laughed when Stephanopoulos explained about the warehouse on Kensal Road.

‘Oh god yes,’ he said. ‘That place. The Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company.’

I got out my notebook and pen. Notes, like running after suspects and finding your own parking space, being one of the things Detective Inspectors don’t expect to do themselves.

‘It is owned by your company?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

‘As you can probably gather,’ said Beale. ‘We are that rarity in this modern age, a family-owned business. And the Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company was once the jewel in the crown. This was all before the war, you understand.’

When there was still an Empire to sell pottery to, I thought.

As the name suggested, the great selling point of Unbreakable Empire Pottery was that it was well nigh unbreakable, or at least it was when compared to ordinary china and stoneware. Thus it could be carried up the Limpopo by bearers or strapped to the flank of an elephant and its owner could still be confident that at the end of a long and arduous journey he would still have a plate to eat off and, more importantly, a pot to piss in. Chamber pots being by far the most popular item.

‘A commercial empire founded on poo,’ said Beale – it was obviously his one big joke.

‘Where were they actually manufactured?’ I asked.

‘In London, in Notting Hill,’ said Beale. ‘Most people don’t realise that London has a rich industrial heritage. Notting Hill used to be known as the Potteries and Piggeries because that’s what it was famous for.’

It also had a reputation for some of the vilest living conditions in Victorian England and – given the competition was Manchester – that was pretty vile.

‘Everybody knows about the kiln on Pottery Lane,’ said Beale. ‘But they think that was all bricks.’ Me and Stephanopoulos exchanged looks. Since we were both completely ignorant of the kiln or the bricks neither of us thought anything of the sort – but we decided it was best to keep that to ourselves. Apparently after six days baking pigs and herding bricks, the inhabitants would kick back with a spot of cock-fighting, bull-baiting and ratting. It was the sort of place an adventurous gentleman might venture only if he didn’t mind being beaten, rolled and catching an exciting venereal disease. All of this was imparted by Beale with the relish of a man whose family hasn’t had to shovel shit for at least three generations. Thanks to Graham Beale’s great-great-grandfather, an illiterate navvy from Kilkenny who founded the company in 1865.

‘Where did he get the money from?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

‘Well spotted,’ said Beale, unaware that ‘Where did the money come from?’ is one of the three standard police questions, along with ‘Where was you on the night in question?’ and ‘Why don’t you just make it easy on yourself?’

‘Where does an impoverished Irishman dig up the readies, especially back then?’ he said. ‘But I can assure you the source of his start-up capital was entirely legal.’

The answer was that navvies were actually very well paid by the standards of the Victorian labouring classes. They had to be, given the need to attract men from all over to do such back-breaking work in such dangerous conditions. In the majority of cases this largesse was pissed against the wall or swindled out of their hands by everyone from corrupt gang-masters, greedy subcontractors or just the army of camp followers that trailed the men around the country.

But if a man was clever and clear-sighted he could form with his mates what was called a butty gang, effectively cutting out the gang master and his cut of the earnings. And if that butty gang had a reputation for being good at, say, tunnelling, then they might strike a good deal with the subcontractor who, more than anything else in the world, wanted to get his section done on time with as little fuss as possible. And, most importantly of all, if that man could persuade his mates to avoid the demon drink and bank their wages in a real bank then that man might finish twenty years with a tidy sum.

Such a man was Eugene Beale, also known as Ten-Ton Digger, who left Ireland out of the inexplicable desire to avoid starving to death and ended up building Vauxhall Station.

‘They were famous as tunnellers,’ said Beale. ‘They built sewers for Bazalgette and the Metropolitan Line for Pearson – all the while keeping their money safe.’ They had lodgings just off Pottery Lane and everyone assumed that’s where they picked up the recipe for Unbreakable Pottery.

‘A secret recipe?’ I asked hopefully.

‘At the time yes,’ said Beale. ‘It’s actually a form of double-fired stoneware very similar to Coade Stone which I believe is still made to this day. Wonderful stuff, very tough and, most importantly for London in those days, resistant to damage from coal smoke.’

‘Do you still know how to manufacture it?’ I asked. Stephanopoulos gave me a sharp look which I had to ignore.

‘Personally?’ asked Beale. ‘Not me. I’m strictly business administration but I understand that these days with electric kilns and whatnot it wouldn’t be that hard. Keeping the temperature constant with those old coke-burning kilns was the real trick.’

‘So where did they have their factory?’ I asked.

Beale hesitated and I realised that we’d tipped over from ‘friendly chat’ to ‘helping police with their inquiries’. I felt Stephanopoulos straighten a fraction in her chair.

‘On Pottery Lane of course,’ said Beale. ‘Care for a refill?’

Stephanopoulos smiled and held out her glass. It’s always better if the person you’re interviewing doesn’t know that you know that they know that they have to be more careful.

‘What, all the way up to the 1960s?’ I asked.

Beale hesitated again as if thinking carefully about the dates.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The work went up North to Staffordshire to one of the potteries there.’

‘Can you remember the name?’

‘Why on Earth do you want to know?’ asked Beale.

‘The Arts and Antiques squad want to know,’ I said. ‘Something to do with stolen figurines on the internet.’

Stephanopoulos gave an involuntary snort but at least managed to suppress a laugh.

‘Oh,’ said Beale. ‘I see. I’m sure I can dig the information out for them – do they need it right away?’

I paused just to see his reaction but he was much smoother than his favourite-uncle-in-a-chunky-jumper persona suggested, and just looked blandly helpful.

‘No,’ I said. ‘After the New Year will be fine.’

Beale took a fortifying gulp of Baileys and explained that unbreakable pottery was all very well but Eugene Beale and the surviving members of his butty gang drew upon their phenomenal tunnelling experience to become engineering subcontractors in their own right. As the work became mechanised and the expendable masses were replaced by massive machines, each new generation of Beales was educated to meet the challenges of the new age.

‘I thought you were business and administration?’ I asked.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘It was my younger brother who was the engineering brains of our generation. Despite our name we do a great deal of civil engineering work, in fact that’s what saved us when the crash came. If it hadn’t been for our Crossrail contracts we would have gone under.’

‘Would it be possible to talk to your brother?’ I asked.

Beale looked away. ‘I’m afraid he was killed in a works accident,’ he said.

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

‘However technological it gets,’ said Beale, ‘tunnelling is still dangerous work.’

‘About the warehouse,’ said Stephanopoulos quickly, presumably to stop me from going off on another tangent. ‘That’s a prime piece of real estate you have there even in the current market. Why haven’t you developed it?’

‘As I was saying,’ said Beale. ‘We are a family firm and like many companies that grow organically, our management structures are not always entirely rational. We leased the warehouse to Nolan and Sons in the early sixties and while the terms of that lease are still running we can’t repossess it.’

‘That’s a very strange contract,’ said Stephanopoulos.

‘That’s probably because it was written on a beer mat and sealed with a handshake,’ said Beale. ‘That’s the way my father liked to do business.’

We stayed a bit longer to get contact details, so that a minion from the Murder Team could have a fun Christmas unpicking the corporate structure of Beale Property Services, just in case it became relevant later. I doubted it would be a priority – perhaps the minion would only have to give up New Year’s Eve.

We walked back to Stephanopoulos’ BMW, picking our way through slippery patches of decomposing snow.

‘I’m as fond of industrial archaeology as the next woman, Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘But what the hell was that all about?’

‘The murder weapon,’ I said.

‘At last,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Something I can relate to.’

‘James Gallagher was stabbed with a shard of a large flat dish,’ I said. ‘Whose chemical composition matches that of the fruit bowl which we have now traced back to a warehouse full of similar stuff.’

‘Identified as the property of the Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘With you so far – wait. Is this where it’s going to get odd?’

‘That depends on how much you want to know, boss.’ I opened the passenger door for her to get in.

‘What are my options?’ she asked as I climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘Meaningless euphemisms at one end and your full-on Unseen University at the other,’ I said. ‘The Unseen University is a bit like Hogwarts—’

Stephanopoulos cut me off. ‘I have read some Terry Pratchett,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘Not really. But her indoors buys them in hardback and reads out bits to me over breakfast,’ she said.

‘So what do you read for fun?’ I asked.

‘I’m partial to the odd misery memoir,’ she said. ‘I find it comforting to know other people had worse childhoods than me.’

I kept my mouth shut – there’s some things you don’t ask senior officers.

‘I’ll settle for meaningful euphemisms,’ she said at last.

I backed out of the car park before explaining.

‘All of the pottery found so far has had the same signature which indicates that it is special,’ I said. ‘But this signature fades with time—’ I was going to say that it was like the half-life of radioactive decay, but I’ve found to my cost that that just usually leads to me explaining what radioactive half-life is. ‘Like a painting that’s been left in the sun,’ I said. ‘The stuff in the warehouse is old, some of it’s very old, but the murder weapon felt brand-new.’

‘What about the boxes of plates that Kevin Nolan arrived with?’

‘Pretty faded,’ I said. ‘I suspect that it’s been stored somewhere else prior to Kevin’s delivery.’

‘Stored where?’ asked Stephanopoulos. ‘And by who?’

‘Someone’s going to have to go underground to find out,’ I said.

Three guesses as to who that was going to be.

17 Bayswater

Rule of underground exploration number one is, according to Sergeant Kumar, minimise the number of people actually underground at any one time. That way if things go wrong there are fewer bodies for the rescuers to dig out. That meant that the party would consist of me, because of my specialist expertise, and Kumar because he was experienced exploring underground. I asked him where all this experience came from.

‘I do potholing in my free time,’ he said. ‘Yorkshire and Dartmoor mostly, but this year I spent a month in Meghalaya.’ Which was a state in north-eastern India and essentially virgin territory for cavers – very exciting and dangerous.

Since London Underground had only just got back to normal service after the snow, there was no way they were going to shut down the Circle Line while we explored. So we were going to wait until the official shut-down at one in the morning. Kumar suggested that I get some rest and reconvene later to get tooled up.

So, leaving Lesley to keep an eye on the house that wasn’t there, I went home to the Folly for a meal and a sleep. I got up at eight, had a hot bath and took Toby for a walk in Russell Square. It was cold and crisp and the sky was so clear that if it hadn’t been for London’s chronic light pollution I’m sure I would have seen stars. I’d agreed to meet Kumar back in Bayswater around ten, so as soon Toby had finished marking his territory I headed back in to get my gear. As I crossed the atrium Molly emerged suddenly from the shadows. I jumped. I always jump, and that seems to give Molly endless amusement.

‘Will you stop doing that?’ I said.

Molly gave me a bland look and held out a holdall bag. I recognised it as Lesley’s. I took it and promised faithfully to make sure she got it. I managed to resist the urge to go rummaging around inside it, my willpower being bolstered by the fact that you never knew when Molly might be watching you from the shadows.

To my surprise, Nightingale was waiting in the garage by the Jag.

‘I’ll drive you over,’ he said. He was in his heavy dark blue suit with a matching Aran jumper and his serious plain brown lace-ups. His Crombie greatcoat was hung up in the back of the car.

‘Are you supervising tonight?’ I asked once we were seated.

Nightingale started the Jag and let the engine warm for a bit. ‘I thought I’d spell Lesley,’ he said. ‘Dr Walid doesn’t want her getting overtired.’

I often forget how good a driver Nightingale is, especially in the Jag. He insinuates himself through the traffic like a tiger padding through a jungle, or at least how I imagine a tiger pads through a jungle. For all I know the damn things swagger through the forest like Rottweilers at a poodle show.

While he drove I filled him in on the complex details of tonight’s operation.

‘Me and Kumar are going to drop down through the hatch, meet up with his patrolman and see if we can track where the veggies went,’ I said.

‘Kumar and I,’ said Nightingale. ‘Not “me and Kumar”.’ Nightingale periodically attempted to improve my grammar and was curiously deaf to what I consider a pretty convincing and sophisticated argument that the rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.

‘Kumar and I,’ I said to keep him happy, ‘will descend while Lesley and a couple of bods from the Murder Team will hang about on the tracks just in case.’

‘Just in case of what?’ asked Nightingale. ‘What are you expecting to find?’

‘I don’t know, tramps, trolls, sentient badgers – you tell me.’

‘Not trolls,’ said Nightingale. ‘They prefer riverbanks, particularly spots overshadowed by stone or brick.’

‘Hence the stories about bridges,’ I said.

‘Precisely,’ said Nightingale. ‘As far as I’m aware, nothing unusual lives in the tunnels, or the sewers for that matter. Although there are always rumours, colonies of vagrants, tribes of navvies that have become trapped underground and turned cannibal.’

‘That was a film,’ I said.

‘Death Line,’ said Nightingale, surprising me. ‘Starring Donald Pleasence. Don’t look so shocked Peter. Just because I’ve never owned a television doesn’t mean I never went to the cinema.’

Actually I’d always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the Commissioner called him on the bat-phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.

‘The cinema of David Lean – yes,’ I said. ‘Low-budget British horror films – no.’

‘It was filmed just around corner from the Folly,’ he said. ‘I was curious.’

‘Any rumours that weren’t made into a film?’ I asked.

‘An old school-chum of mine called Walter once tried to convince me that any system, such as an underground railway or indeed the telephone network, could develop genius loci in the same fashion as the rivers and other sacred sites.’ Nightingale paused to negotiate a tricky knot of traffic as we got off the Harrow Road.

‘Was he right?’ I asked.

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Nightingale. ‘Once he got going I never really understood more than one word in ten, but he really was terribly bright so I’m at least willing to entertain the possibility. Certainly if a Scotsman introduced himself to me as the god of telephones I’d be inclined to take him at his word.’

‘Why a Scotsman?’

‘Because of Alexander Graham Bell,’ said Nightingale, who was obviously in a whimsical mood that night.

We did the strange square Bayswater one-way system and turned up Queensway, which had opted for Christmas lights this year. Many of the shops were open late and the pavements were crowded with shoppers. The weather had obviously concentrated the pre-Christmas rush into a mad panic.

‘Have you found time to buy your presents yet?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Already sorted,’ I said. ‘Got my mum’s’ – an envelope full of cash because my mum is definitely not of the thought that counts school of Christmas giving. ‘And I found a mint 1955 original Easy Geary LP for my dad.’

‘On Hathor?’ asked Nightingale. I was impressed; this was some seriously obscure West Coast jazz we were talking about. I complimented him on his jazz erudition. Buying for Lesley had been a pain and in the end I’d settled for a chunky Aran jumper as worn by Danish TV detectives on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Nightingale didn’t ask me what I’d got him, and I didn’t ask what he’d got me.

The night was still and cold as we pulled up outside the fake houses which conveniently served as staging area and changing room. Kumar had brought me a wetsuit and a bright orange overall with yellow reflector patches to go over it. The neoprene was thinner and the fit looser than I was expecting and I wasn’t going to be making any kind of a fashion statement.

‘I don’t expect us to get that wet unless we end up in the drains,’ said Kumar. ‘You want it loose for movement – and you definitely don’t want to overheat.’ He handed me a set of boots that looked like the unfortunate love child of a pair of Doc Martens and a pair of Wellington boots but were surprisingly comfy. We were changing in what everyone had started calling the trapdoor room, with the hatch closed to prevent me falling down it while I hopped about trying to get my boots on.

‘Do we wear our vests?’ I asked.

‘What do you expect to find down there?’ asked Kumar.

‘I honestly don’t know,’ I said.

The Metvest was especially developed for the Met to be both stab and bullet resistant – emphasis on the word ‘resistant’ you notice, not ‘proof’. I’d worn one for two years while in uniform but the last year had got me out of the habit. Still, a Metvest was a comfort in a tight spot, so on they went.

Our helmets were the same high-visibility orange as our overalls and supported state-of-the-art LED headlamps. We divvied up the remainder of the essentials, Kumar got the rope and rescue tools while I took the first aid kit, the emergency food and the water.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘This is worse than riot training.’

Lesley, who’d been waiting in the next room while we changed, walked in.

‘Nightingale wants to know when you’re going,’ she said.

‘We’re just waiting for the patrolman,’ said Kumar and opened the hatch and stuck his head down to have a look.

‘Are we going to have the place to ourselves?’ I asked.

Kumar climbed to his feet.

‘It’s actually going to be quite crowded down there,’ he said. ‘TfL has every work gang that would take overtime down there tonight. Tomorrow is the last full shopping day before Christmas and it’ll be the first full service day this week – it’s going to be brutal.’

‘Your engineers,’ I said. ‘Are they roughnecks?’

‘The roughest of the rough,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘We know where to run for help, then.’

The flaring beam from a torch flashed suddenly up through the open hatch, followed by a piercing shepherd’s whistle.

‘That’ll be the patrolman,’ said Kumar and then called down into the dark – ‘David. Up here.’

As Kumar exchanged shouts with the patrolman, Lesley fetched Nightingale. The idea was that he’d keep an eye out on the world above ground and be ready to rush to the rescue or, more likely, pick us up if we surfaced far away.

‘We might as well lower the stairs then,’ I said.

‘If they are stairs,’ said Lesley.

I lay down on the floor-boards and put my head through the hatch, looking for the brass handle to operate the folding staircase. From below a light shone in my face.

‘You might want to stand back a bit,’ I shouted down and the light retreated. I was just reaching for the handle when Lesley spoke in my ear.

‘Are you sure that’s safe?’ she asked.

I looked to find that she’d lain down beside me and had hung her head out the hatch as well.

‘Meaning what?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know what it does,’ said Lesley, looking at the handle. ‘It might swing round and snick your arm right off.’

When me and Lesley were doing our probation at Charing Cross nick I’d learnt to listen to her suggestions – especially after the thing with the dwarf, the show girl and the fur coat.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll use a line.’ And scrambled up to find one.

Nightingale waved me aside and muttered something quietly. I felt the forma lining up, a fourth-order spell I thought, with that economy of style and that abrupt twist of strength that I was beginning to recognise as his signare. I heard a creak and a clank which I guessed was the lever pulling itself and then a surprisingly quiet but prolonged rattle of metal as the stairs unfolded and dropped.

‘Or we could do that,’ I said.

‘Was that magic?’ asked Kumar.

‘Can we please get on,’ said Nightingale.

I cautiously put my weight onto the steps, which bounced gently under foot. When it didn’t collapse I walked all the way down. The last step hovered a third of a metre above the rails. A safety measure, I assumed, against electrocution when the track was live. Once they’d seen that I’d made it safely, the others followed me down. Kumar introduced us to a cheerful Welsh geezer called David Lambert – the patrolman. It was his job to walk the line each night checking for faults.

‘I’ve been doing this stretch for six years,’ he said. ‘I always wondered what all that ironwork was for.’

‘You never thought to ask?’ I asked.

‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘It’s not TfL equipment, see, and it’s not like I don’t have enough to worry about down here already.’

Even once we’d stepped out from under the fake houses the bottom of the cut was pitch-black. Fifty-odd metres to the east were the lights of Bayswater Station where gangs of men in high-viz jackets were manhandling heavy equipment onto the tracks.

We knew there had to be a secret door. Even if whoever it was had delivered the pottery overnight, they’d still taken the fresh produce away in the middle of the day while the trains were running. You couldn’t count on more than five minutes without a train on the track, and the window was smaller because you didn’t want to be seen by the drivers. Since there wasn’t an obvious entrance within fifty metres in either direction we had to be talking about a concealed entry.

‘There’s always a secret door,’ I said. ‘That’s why you always need a thief in your party.’

‘You never said you used to play Dungeon and Dragons,’ Lesley had said when I explained my reasoning. I’d been tempted to tell her that I’d been thirteen at the time and anyway it was Call of Cthulhu but I’ve learnt from bitter experience that such remarks generally only makes things worse.

‘Don’t you have to make a perception roll?’ she asked as I walked slowly along the dusty brick wall that lined the cut.

‘You know a suspicious amount about gaming,’ I said.

‘’Yeah well,’ said Lesley. ‘Brightlingsea’s not exactly the entertainment capital of the Essex coast.’

I felt something and paused to trace my fingers along the course of bricks. The surface was gritty beneath my fingers and suddenly there it was – the hot sand smell of the furnace and a whispered muttering sound on the cusp of hearing. Even as vestigium went, it was faint and I doubted I would have spotted it as recently as this summer but I was improving with practice.

‘Got it,’ I said.

I checked the position. On the north side of the cut, underneath the road on which the false houses fronted – in the shadows and hidden from any of the nearby buildings that overlooked the tracks. Less than five metres from the base of the extendable staircase.

I extended my baton and gave the wall a rap. It wasn’t hollow but it was definitely a different pitch from the adjacent section. For extra strength, the walls of the cut had been built with a line of arched alcoves that looked for all the world like bricked-up windows. The easiest way to hide a door, I figured, would be to give it the same dimensions as an alcove. In a film you would be able to open the door by pushing in a false brick. I picked a brick at a convenient waist height and pushed it, just to get that stupid notion out of the way.

The brick slid smoothly in, there was a click, and the door cracked open.

‘Shit,’ said Lesley. ‘A secret door.’

The door was well balanced and definitely oiled and maintained because, despite being really heavy, it opened easily enough when I pulled on it. The back was made out of steel, which explained the weight, with a thick ceramic veneer fused, I have no idea how, onto the front as camouflage.

‘Speak friend and enter,’ said Kumar.

I stepped inside and looked around. It was a brick-lined passageway wide enough for two people with an arched ceiling sufficiently high that I had to stretch to touch it. It ran parallel to the cut in both directions, right towards Bayswater and left towards Notting Hill, in which direction I found a crushed bean sprout on the floor.

‘They went that-a-way,’ I said. The air was still and tasted flat, like water that had been boiled more than once.

‘You follow the breadcrumbs,’ said Nightingale. ‘And I’ll take David here for a quick recce in the opposite direction. See how far the tunnel runs that way.’

‘Do you think it runs as far as Baker Street?’ asked Lesley.

‘That would certainly explain how James Gallagher got where he did,’ said Nightingale.

David the Patroller looked dubious. ‘That would involve passing through Paddington and that’s a big station with open platforms,’ he said.

‘It’s worth a look anyway,’ said Nightingale. ‘Perhaps the tunnel ducks under Paddington.’

‘And what about me?’ asked Lesley.

‘You can guard this secret door and act as communications relay,’ said Nightingale. ‘And in the event that you hear us screaming, you can come rescue us.’

‘Great,’ said Lesley without enthusiasm.

So me and Kumar headed off down the passageway with Lesley glaring at my back. As we went I couldn’t help thinking our little party was short a rogue and a cleric.