Whispers Under Ground

23 Warren Street

I woke up in a private room, the same one Nightingale had been stashed in when he got shot, I thought, to find Lesley asleep in a chair by my bed. She can’t sleep in the mask so she was barefaced but with her head twisted awkwardly away from the door to make sure nobody could look in and see her face. Her mask was clutched in one hand, ready for instant donning if I woke up.

In sleep, her face looked just as horrible but weirdly more like a face. I found it easier to look at when I knew she wasn’t looking back at me – judging my reactions. It was dark outside but this time of year that could be late afternoon or early morning. I weighed up not waking Lesley against her probable reaction should she catch me staring at her face without permission.

I lay back in my bed, closed my eyes and groaned theatrically until Lesley woke up.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it back on.’

I had an inkling how long I’d been asleep when I had to rush to the bathroom down the corridor and spend what seemed an inordinate amount of time having a wee. After a shower and a change into a new and clean but otherwise identical open-back hospital gown, I climbed gratefully back into my bed and went back to sleep.

I woke up to daylight and the smell of McDonald’s – my stomach rumbled.

Lesley had returned with an unauthorised dinner, the newspapers and reassurances that Kumar and Reynolds had both escaped with minor cuts and bruises.

‘And Miss FBI,’ said Lesley. ‘What was all that about?’

In exchange for a Big Mac and the promise that she’d fetch me some clean clothes I told her all about Peter Grant’s adventures underground. She particularly liked the Holland Park rave and the part where I hallucinated myself back into the fourteenth century.

‘I bet he was fit,’ she said. ‘All these supernatural types are fit.’

I was almost afraid to ask. ‘Did we make the papers?’

Lesley held up a tabloid with the understated headline TERROR ON THE UNDERGROUND. I pointed out that they’d missed the Christmas angle so Lesley held up another tabloid with XMAS TUBE FEAR covering the whole front page. I was tempted to lie back down and pull the covers over my head.

The Commissioner had turned up on TV to state categorically that terrorism was not involved and in this he was backed up by Transport for London and the Home Office. It was strongly hinted that a water leak had undermined the platform and caused a localised collapse. The damage was confined to the platform and a resumption of train services was expected in time for the Boxing Day sales.

There was a noticeable absence of CCTV footage or even stuff caught on phone cameras. I discovered later that whatever my friend the Earthbender had done it had fried every chip within ten metres and degraded cameras and phones out to another twenty.

‘Congratulations,’ said Lesley. ‘After this, nobody will even remember the Covent Garden fire.’

‘Do I get a name check?’ I asked.

‘No, amazingly enough,’ said Lesley. ‘Because as they were digging you out a heavily pregnant woman went into labour and gave birth in the casualty triage point practically in front of the cameras.’

‘I’ll bet that got their attention,’ I said.

‘Gets better,’ said Lesley. ‘She had twins.’

That couldn’t possibly be a deliberate distraction by Nightingale or whoever it was who was supposed to arrange these things. I mean, you’d have to have teams of pregnant women on standby – it just wasn’t practical. Damn, but the newspaper editors must be banging their heads on their desks trying to cram the words ‘miracle’ and ‘tot’ into their headlines.

‘My money’s on Christmas Miracle Twins,’ I said.

‘XMAS TWIN TOTS BIRTH JOY,’ said Lesley. ‘The E. coli scare got knocked all the way back to page four.’

‘Has anyone else visited?’ I asked. Seawoll and Stephanopoulos were not going to be happy.

‘Nightingale turned up,’ she said. ‘He was hoping to shout at you a bit to show his affection in a gruff manly and safely non-gay way but you were asleep so he just sort of milled around for a while and then off he went.’

‘So,’ I said. ‘How was your end of the operation?’

‘Unlike some people,’ she said. ‘I devoted my time to some actual police work.’

‘Somebody has to do it,’ I said.

Lesley gave me a long look. Sometimes I can tell what she’s thinking even with the mask on. But sometimes I can’t.

‘They’re all linked,’ said Lesley. ‘The Beales, Gallaghers and Nolans. Want to guess how?’

‘The Unbreakable Empire Pottery?’ I asked.

‘Not the Nolans,’ said Lesley, snagging a satsuma from a bowl by my bed. ‘At least not to start with – they came later. The business was started in 1865 by Eugene Beale, Patrick Gallagher and Matthew Carroll – spot the names.’

‘And that’s significant because they’re such uncommon names,’ I said.

Lesley ignored me.

‘I checked with Companies House,’ she said. ‘The Beale family business goes all the way back to Empire Pottery which, by the time it went effectively bust in the 1950s, was but a small adjunct of the seriously large property, construction and engineering subcontracting business. Matthew Carroll’s son William is listed as running the Dublin branch of the firm – now I know what you’re thinking, but guess who that kiln belonged to?’

‘Ryan Carroll.’

‘Correct,’ said Lesley and waved her notebook at me. ‘He’s using that warehouse rent-free, so either he has a direct family connection or the Beales are just sentimental about the name.’

‘Maybe we should interview Carroll.’ I said.

‘You think?’

‘Do you have a firm connection with James Gallagher?’ I asked.

‘You’re going to like this,’ she said.

Because, according to Lesley, US senators don’t have your common or garden blog pages they have huge fuck-off commercial-quality websites, plural, that tell you everything they need you to know about them. Or at least everything the senator needs you to know.

‘Although they don’t have a lot in the way of humorous cats,’ said Lesley.

But they did have a lot about Senator Gallagher’s family, including the story of Sean Gallagher who emigrated to America in 1864 to seek a new life of freedom, liberty and apple pie.

‘And to avoid arrest on suspicion of murder,’ said Lesley. ‘According to the court records. Glassed some guy in an establishment of the type frequented by ruffians, navvies and others of low character.’

‘Did he do it?’ I asked.

‘This was the old-fashioned coppering,’ said Lesley. ‘He was drunk and Irish and the victim was likewise drunk and Irish, they were known to be arguing but there were no witnesses to the actual killing. Everyone in the establishment having been struck suddenly blind and deaf. Although that might have had something to with the gin they were drinking. Anyway, his bail was stood by his brother Patrick and by Eugene Beale and it was them that paid when he did his flit to the States.’

Where he and his descendants became pillars of the notorious New York political system. Lesley didn’t know what it was notorious for, except that’s how it was always described – notorious.

What had we stumbled into in the sewers? A culture, a secret society? Nightingale would have to be told but Detective Chief Inspector Seawoll would want a great deal more ‘real’ evidence before he started bringing in people for questioning.

‘We need to check the mundane library,’ I said. ‘See if there’s anything about the tunnels dating back to before the 1940s.’

‘You know it’s Christmas Eve, don’t you?’ asked Lesley.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Does this mean you want a present?’

‘It means I’m going home to Essex tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Also, I know you have a strange disregard for basic procedure, but Nightingale is the SIO on the Little Crocodiles case and Seawoll is SIO on the James Gallagher murder. Meaning that you need to talk to at least one of those before you do anything. Including getting out of bed.’

‘At least bring me my laptop,’ I said.

‘Fine,’ said Lesley.

‘And some grapes,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been in hospital overnight and nobody brought me any grapes.’

After Lesley had buggered off, I checked in the waste-paper basket and found not one but two flimsy plastic containers with denuded grape stems in them. I then spent a happy half an hour plotting a series of increasingly bizarre revenge pranks on Lesley before Nightingale arrived with a change of clothes. This being Nightingale, he’d brought my fitted M&S navy suit that was, strictly speaking, reserved for funerals and court appearances.

I told him my theories about the Faceless Man and Crossrail and it started sounding thinner the longer I talked. But Nightingale thought it was worth checking out.

‘At the very least,’ he said, ‘we need to eliminate the possibility.’

We were interrupted by a surprisingly young registrar with stumpy brown fingers and a Brummie accent who took my blood pressure and another blood sample. I asked after Dr Walid and was told that, since I wasn’t in any danger, he’d left for Scotland the night before.

‘Amazingly undamaged,’ said the registrar. ‘But he wants you to stay overnight for observation. You’re suffering from exposure so you need to rest, take on fluids and stay warm.’

I told him that I had no intention of getting out of bed and he wandered off, content. Nightingale said I did look tired and that he was going to leave me alone to get some sleep. When I complained I was bored he left me his copy of the Daily Telegraph and suggested that I try the crossword. He was right – fifteen minutes later I slapped it down on the bed.

‘Twelve down,’ said Tyburn. ‘To owe much to others – six letters.’

She was standing in the doorway wearing brown slacks and a snowy-white lamb’s-wool rollneck jumper.

‘Aren’t you going to wait for me to recover before calling it in?’ I asked.

She entered and sat primly on the end of my bed and looked around the room – frowning.

‘Why haven’t you got any grapes?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been asking myself the same question,’ I said. ‘You didn’t bring flowers, either.’

‘Do you think there’s people living in the sewer system?’ she asked.

‘Do you?’ I asked.

‘I think it’s a possibility,’ she said. ‘And if it’s true it’s an issue that will have to be addressed carefully.’

‘And you think you’re just the woman for the job?’

‘I’m the goddess on the spot, so to speak,’ she said. ‘If not me, then who?’

I wanted to say that me and Nightingale had it all under control but under the circumstances I didn’t think she’d believe me.

Tyburn leant forward and gave me her sincere look.

‘How long do you think the status quo can last?’ she asked. ‘If there are people living in the sewers wouldn’t it be better to bring them into mainstream society?’

‘Put them on social security, get them a council flat and send their kids to school?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps we should regularise where they live now, get them access to healthcare and education. Give them a stake – at least give them a choice.’

‘If there are people down there,’ I said.

‘All I want,’ said Tyburn as she stood up and prepared to leave, ‘is for you to give this some thought.’

I gave a noncommittal grunt and she went. Truth is, I was getting really peckish and was considering getting up and hunting down some food when my parents turned up with a day’s worth of jelof rice, hot beef and, best of all, a freezer container full of freshly cooked deep-fried plantain. My mum, alarmed by the recent E. coli outbreak and having a professionally low opinion of hospital cleaning standards, had decided I shouldn’t eat hospital food. Obedient son that I was, I dutifully stuffed my face and promised faithfully that, no matter what, I would be turning up for Christmas at Aunty Jo’s.

Eating the best part of a kilogram of rice would slow down a hippopotamus, so after Mum and Dad had gone I lay down and dozed off.

I opened my eyes to find Zachary Palmer with his hand in one of my Tupperware boxes.

‘Hey,’ I said.

He stopped scoffing up the deep-fried plantain and grinned at me.

‘Your mum’s a bare wicked cook,’ he said.

‘That’s mine, you thieving git,’ I said and snatched the box off him. Unperturbed, he moved on to the fruit. His sweatshirt was clean and still showed the sharp creases that only Molly can inflict on casual wear.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘I wanted to make sure you were all right, didn’t I?’

‘I’m touched,’ I said.

‘Not for me, you understand, but he was a bit worried,’ said Zach.

‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

Zach froze with a satsuma segment halfway to his lips. ‘Did I say he?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You did.’

‘Can I at least take the plantain?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said and tightened my grip on the Tupperware.

‘Well then. Laters,’ he said and bolted.

You know there’s always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain that the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating or all three. Going to the dentist, asking someone out for the first time, breaking up a stag do outside the Bar Rumba on a Saturday night and, now, chasing a suspect through a hospital while wearing an open-backed hospital gown.

I went straight for the stairs because either Zach would hit the lifts, in which case I could beat him down; or he’d go for the stairs, in which case I’d be right behind him. When I pushed my way through the heavy fire doors there was no sign of him on the staircase, so I went down three steps at a time pausing only to scream loudly when I stubbed my toe halfway to the bottom.

Lesley says that the key to a successful chase is to know where the suspect is running to. Even if you don’t know their ultimate destination you should be able to make an educated guess about where the next choke point is. In Zach’s case, this was the hospital lobby, which is the only public way in or out. So that’s where I went first. Unfortunately, it’s got two exits at opposite ends to each other and what with the icy road conditions, the onset of winter flu and some pretty aggressive full contact shopping, it was full of the walking wounded and their hangers-on.

If Zach had been sensible enough to walk slowly and calmly out he would have got away. But, luckily for me, he was still running when he went out the north exit and all I had to do was follow the yelps of outrage as he pushed through the crowd. They yelled even louder when I steamed past in pursuit, what with me being a half-naked IC3, albeit in winter plumage. They came to all the wrong conclusions and scattered out of my way.

I ran down the wide flight of steps in front of the hospital, staggered once as my bare heel skidded on a bit of rotting ice, recovered and looked right and left. Unless you’re heading for the hospital, that particular stretch of pavement isn’t good for anything except inhaling exhaust fumes – which meant Zach was easy to spot, on my left, still running.

I went after him with my feet reminding me at every step why I spend all that money on trainers. The exertion kept me warm, but a cold breeze around my bum reminded me that I was short in the trouser department – that and the wolf whistle I got as I rounded the corner into Tottenham Court Road.

Zach had obviously thought he’d put his troubles behind him, because he’d slowed down to a fast saunter. I was nearly upon him when he glanced back, saw me and went off like a jackrabbit. He was fast, and one thing was for certain – I wasn’t about to catch him in bare feet. He’d have got away if Lesley hadn’t at that moment come out of Sainsbury’s with her shopping, seen me, seen Zach, and made the kind of lightning decision that got her voted graduate most likely to make chief superintendent by thirty at Hendon.

She didn’t try for anything flashy like a clothesline. She merely stuck out her foot and down he went on his face. Still holding two bags of shopping and my laptop, she skipped over and planted her foot on his back – holding him down until I could arrive. Between us we’d managed to attract a bit of a crowd.

‘Police,’ I said. ‘Move along. Nothing to see here.’

‘You sure about that?’ asked a voice from the crowd.

‘I’m going to let you up now, Zach,’ said Lesley. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

‘I won’t, I won’t,’ he said. ‘Just don’t you do anything hasty.’

‘Hasty?’ I said. ‘You just made me run naked down Tottenham Court Road. You’d rather I gave it some thought?’

A couple of uniforms turned up who neither me nor Lesley knew personally and it could have gone pear-shaped. I know I would have arrested me had I been them, except I dropped Detective Inspector Stephanopoulos’s name into the conversation and suddenly they couldn’t be more helpful. However, once you’ve invoked the name of Stephanopoulos you have to live according to her principles, unless you crave trouble, so we had to get someone from the Murder Team down to arrest Zach. While he was bundled off to an interview room at AB, I sloped back to the hospital to find my clothes and discharge myself. You’d be amazed how long that can take.

24 Sloane Square

I was disappointed to find that there was nothing waiting for me on my desk back at the outside inquiry team office.

‘We assigned them elsewhere when you went into hospital,’ said Stephanopoulos.

Six whole days on the Murder Team and I’d only managed to fulfil about two and a half actions. Not only was it not going to look good on any performance review, but I also doubted that being engaged in a supernatural sewer battle with an underground Earthbender was going to serve as much of an explanation.

Because we wanted to avoid the lengthy booking-in process, we hadn’t charged Zach. But we made it clear that arrest and Christmas in the cells was the true alternative to ‘helping police with their inquiries’.

The interview rooms at AB are featureless cubes with Windsor blue walls and scuffed wooden trim. There was a scarred wooden table, chairs, the standard double tape recorder and a CCTV camera enclosed in an opaque Perspex bubble that hung from the ceiling. In the hour or so since he’d been placed in it, Zach had managed to create a pile of chocolate bar wrappers and shredded polystyrene cup.

‘Hello gorgeous,’ he said as me and Lesley entered.

‘I didn’t know you cared,’ I said.

‘Got anything to eat?’ he asked. ‘I’m bare hungry.’

I swept the rubbish into the bin and slapped down a suspiciously floppy package wrapped in the greaseproof paper in front of him. Zach opened it cautiously, took a sniff and then gave me a broad smile.

‘From Molly?’ he asked.

‘What is it?’ asked Lesley.

‘Brawn sarnie,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Lesley, who as a proper Essex girl knew her lights from her livers. She’d once spent a happy half an hour explaining what strange and secret bits of the animal’s body regularly turned up in Molly’s ‘traditional’ cooking. If you don’t know already I’m not going to tell you what brawn is. Let’s just say that the common name for it is head cheese and leave it at that.

If she hadn’t been wearing a mask, I’m pretty certain that even Lesley would have looked shocked at the enthusiastic way Zach tucked in.

There’s several schools of thought about using tricks and treats in an interview. Seawoll says that in the old days, when just about everyone smoked, if you withheld the fags for long enough your suspect would tell you just about anything in return for a puff. Which was fine, if all you wanted was a result. But if you were looking for accurate information you needed to be a bit trickier.

In our pre-interview discussion the consensus was that the problem with Zach was not going to be making him talk, but getting him to talk sense. We didn’t think low blood sugar would be helpful but, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, we didn’t want him hyper either – hence the offal sandwich.

‘Let’s talk about your friend,’ I said.

‘I’ve got a lot of friends,’ said Zach.

‘Let’s talk about the one that’s good with his hands,’ I said.

Zach gave me a blank look but he wasn’t fooling me.

‘Pale face,’ I said. ‘Hoodie, digs out concrete with his bare hands.’

Zach glanced at where the twin cassette tapes whirred in the recorder.

‘Are you allowed to talk about this stuff?’ he asked.

‘It’s just us here,’ said Lesley.

If only, I thought. There being a good chance that Nightingale, Seawoll and Stephanopoulos were watching on the monitor and maintaining a blow-by-blow commentary complete with score cards.

‘You tried to stall me at the underground rave,’ I said. ‘You didn’t want me going after him.’

‘And look what happened,’ said Zach.

‘So you do know him,’ said Lesley.

‘We may have crossed paths,’ said Zach. ‘Done a little business, socialised a bit.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Lesley.

‘His name’s Stephen,’ said Zach. ‘Any chance of a Mars bar?’

‘Surname?’ I asked.

‘Hot chocolate?’ asked Zach. ‘Nothing finishes off brawn like a hot chocolate.’

‘Surname?’

‘They don’t go in for surnames,’ said Zach.

I wanted to ask who ‘they’ were, but sometimes it’s better to let the interviewee think they’ve got one past you. So I asked where Stephen was from.

‘Peckham,’ said Zach.

We asked whereabouts in Peckham, exactly, but he said he didn’t know.

‘Do you know what he did with his gun?’ I asked.

‘What gun?’ asked Zach.

‘The gun he used to shoot at us,’ I said.

For a moment Zach was staring at us as if we were mad. Then he frowned.

‘Oh, that gun,’ he said. ‘You must have done something, because that gun’s purely for self-protection. I mean, I wouldn’t want you thinking that he just goes around shooting at anyone.’

‘Has he shown it to you?’

‘What?’

‘The gun,’ I said. ‘You ever seen it?’

Zach leant back in his seat and gave an airy wave. ‘Course,’ he said. ‘But not to hold or nothing.’

‘Do you know what kind of gun it was?’ asked Lesley.

‘It was a gun,’ said Zach making a pistol shape with his hand. ‘I don’t really know guns.’

‘Was it a revolver or a semiautomatic pistol?’ asked Lesley.

‘It was a Glock,’ said Zach. ‘Same as what the police use.’

‘I thought you didn’t know guns,’ I said.

‘That’s what Stephen said it was,’ said Zach. He turned to Lesley. ‘Any chance of that hot chocolate – I’m dying here.’

As a largely unarmed police force, the Met have some fairly serious views about the illegal possession of firearms. It tends to get a lot of attention from senior officers who are willing to devote substantial resources to the problem and usually ends in a visit from CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns. Given that Zach must know how seriously we take it, the question had to be – what was so important that he was willing to implicate his friend Stephen in a firearms charge just to cover it up?

Especially given that having interviewed all the witnesses and searched Oxford Circus the Murder Team were pretty certain that Zach’s good friend ‘Stephen’ hadn’t been carrying one when he’d got off the train.

‘Hot chocolate was it?’ asked Lesley getting up.

‘Yes please,’ said Zach.

Lesley asked if I wanted coffee, I said yes and I told the tape recorder that PC Lesley May had left the room. Zach grinned. Obviously he thought he’d kept his secret – which was exactly what we wanted him to think.

‘Your friend Steve?’

‘Stephen,’ said Zach. ‘He doesn’t like Steve.’

‘Your friend Stephen from Peckham,’ I said. ‘How long have you known him?’

‘Since I was a kid,’ he said.

I checked my notes. ‘While you were at St Mark’s Children’s Home?’

‘As it happens, yes,’ said Zach.

‘Which is in Notting Hill,’ I said. ‘Not five minutes’ walk from James Gallagher’s house. That’s a bit of a way from Peckham.’

‘Neither of us likes to be confined,’ said Zach. ‘What with the free bus and everything.’

‘So you used to hang,’ I said.

‘Hang?’ asked Zach. ‘Yeah, we used to hang. We’d often chill as well. And on occasion we’d be jammin’.’

‘Around your ends,’ I said. ‘Portobello, Ladbroke Grove?’

‘There’s always something happening at the market,’ said Zach. ‘Stephen’s a bit of a culture freak isn’t he – and we used to earn a bit of cash running errands and stuff.’

‘Was he into art?’ I asked.

‘He’s good with his hands,’ said Zach, and something about the way he said it made me wonder why he’d be reluctant to talk about art.

‘Did he make pottery?’ I asked.

Zach hesitated, and before he could answer Lesley came in with a tray of hot chocolate, coffee and a plate of biscuits. Unfortunately, this part of the interview had been scripted. So instead of pushing Zach I made a note on the pad in front of me. Stephen → Pottery? → Motive?

Lesley identified herself for the tape and then leaned in to murmur; ‘I swear this nick has the worst coffee.’ I gave Zach a meaningful look.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

Zach looked carefully unconcerned.

‘You say your friend has a pistol,’ I said.

‘Had a pistol,’ said Zach. ‘He’s probably ditched it by now.’

‘He didn’t have one at Oxford Circus,’ I said.

Zach took his hot chocolate. ‘Like I said – he must have ditched it.’

‘No he didn’t,’ said Lesley. ‘Not on the train, not on the tracks not anywhere between the stairs at Holland Park to the platform at Oxford Circus. We’ve looked.’

‘And the funny thing is,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t shot at with a pistol, I was shot at by a Sten gun. And trust me on this, it’s very easy to tell the difference.’

‘Not to mention simple to differentiate in the ballistics lab,’ said Lesley.

‘So I think there was at least two of them,’ I said, and took a sip of my coffee. It was vile. ‘Two big-eyed and pasty-faced geezers, and I don’t think either of them are from Peckham. Are they?’

‘They’re brothers,’ said Zach and you had to admire him, if only for his persistence. But it didn’t matter, because in an interview a lie can almost be as good as the truth. That’s because all good lies contain as much truth as the liar thinks they can get away with. This truth accumulates and, because it’s easier to remember the truth than something you’ve made up, it remains consistent where the lies do not. All you have to do is keep asking variations on the same questions, until you can sort one from the other. That’s why helping the police with their inquiries can take you all day – if you’re lucky.

‘Are they fae?’ asked Lesley.

Zach gave a startled glance at the tape recorder and then at the CCTV camera.

‘Are you sure you’re allowed to talk about that stuff?’ he asked.

‘Are they?’ I asked.

‘You know you guys are the only people that say “fae”,’ said Zach. ‘Out there we don’t call people fae. Not if you want to keep your teeth.’

‘You said your dad was a fairy,’ I said.

‘Well he was,’ said Zach.

‘The Rivers said you were half goblin.’

‘Yeah I ain’t going to say nothing against the Rivers, but they aren’t half a bunch of stuck-up cunts,’ said Zach getting loud at the end.

At last, I thought, a point of entry.

‘Is your friend Stephen a goblin, then?’ asked Lesley.

‘You shouldn’t go around calling people a goblin unless you know what the word means,’ said Zach. his voice back to its cheery cockney geezer normal. But I could hear the agitation underneath. Plus he’d started drumming his fingers on the tabletop.

‘What should we call them, then?’ asked Lesley.

‘You,’ said Zach pointing at me and then Lesley. ‘Shouldn’t be calling them anything at all – you should be leaving them alone.’

‘One of them shot at me,’ I said. ‘With a Sten gun. And another one buried me under the ground, under the fucking ground, Zach, and left me for dead. So I don’t think leaving them alone is going to be a bleeding option.’

‘They were just defending …’ started Zach and then caught himself.

‘Defending what?’ I asked.

‘Themselves,’ said Zach. ‘You’re the Isaacs man – we know all about you from back through the annals of history. We all know what happens if you’re a square peg in a round hole.’

So definitely fae, I thought.

‘So who were they defending?’ I asked.

‘Self-defence,’ said Zach.

Outright lie.

‘What’s his brother’s name?’ I asked.

Hesitation. ‘Marcus,’ said Zach – another lie.

‘Does he eat a lot of greens?’ asked Lesley. ‘Because the Nolan brothers were delivering a ton of vegetables for just two people.’

‘They live an active, healthy life,’ said Zach.

‘Zach,’ I said. ‘How stupid do you think we are?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Zach. ‘Do you want it on a scale of one to ten?’

‘Who are they?’ asked Lesley.

We saw him open his mouth to say – who’s they? But Lesley slapped her palm on the table. ‘My face itches, Zach,’ she hissed. ‘The sooner you tell us the truth the sooner I can go home and get out of this mask.’

‘Who are they?’ I said.

‘They’re just people,’ said Zach. ‘You need to leave them alone.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ I said. ‘Has been since your friend shut down the Central Line during the Christmas rush. They’re talking a closed platform for up to six months, they’re talking millions of pounds. Do you really think they’re going to be satisfied if I just stroll up and say “we know who did it but we’ve decided to leave them alone”?’

Zach slumped forward and pressed his head against the tabletop and groaned – theatrically.

‘Give us something we can take upstairs,’ said Lesley. ‘Then we can do a deal.’

‘I want assurances,’ said Zach.

‘You can have my word,’ I said.

‘No disrespect, Peter,’ said Zach. ‘But I don’t want a promise from the monkey. I want it from the organ grinder – I want it from the Nightingale.’

‘If they’re special,’ I said, ‘then there’s a chance we can keep it low-key. But if you want me to bring in my governor, then you’re going to have to talk to me first.’

‘Who are they?’ asked Lesley.

They were, as far as Zach understood it, people that had met up with Eugene Beale and Patrick Gallagher when they were working on the railways south of the river.

‘Not when they were digging the sewers?’ I asked.

‘From before that,’ said Zach. ‘They helped dig the tunnel at Wapping.’

Which explained why Beale’s butty gang had such a reputation as excavators.

‘You say they’re not fae,’ I said. ‘But they are different?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Different how?’ asked Lesley.

‘Look,’ said Zach. ‘There’s basically two types of different, right? There’s born different. Which is like me and the Thames girls and what you call fae but only because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And there’s choosing to be different, which is like you and the Nightingale.’ He pointed at me and then frowned. ‘Sorry, there’s three basic types, okay? There’s born, those that choose and those that are made different.’ He pointed at Lesley. ‘Like through an accident or something.’

Lesley stared at his finger and he dropped it.

I was just about to ask what he meant by that, when Lesley told Zach to stop getting off the subject.

‘Never mind about me,’ she said. ‘Are these people born different? Is that what you’re saying?’

Zach nodded and I would have written subspecies in my notes if Dr Walid hadn’t once sat me down and given me a stern lecture about using biological classifications when I didn’t know what the terms actually meant. I wrote mutants instead, and then scribbled it out. Dr Walid would just have to be content with born different.

Lesley asked him to speak out loud for the benefit of the tape.

‘Born different,’ said Zach. ‘I don’t know where they came from originally. The Gallagher’s and the Beales hooked up with them back in their excavating days. I don’t know how – maybe they dug them up.’

‘But they’re the people that make the pottery, right?’ I asked.

Zach nodded again and then, after Lesley gave him a look, said, ‘Yes it was them that made the pottery.’

‘Do they have a name?’ asked Lesley.

‘Who?’ asked Zach.

‘These people,’ she said. ‘Are they dwarves, elves, gnomes what?’

‘We call them the Quiet People,’ said Zach.

‘And you took James Gallagher down to meet them?’ I asked, before Lesley had a chance to ask whether they were quiet or not.

‘I heard through the grapevine that he was asking after Empire Pottery and I thought I saw a business opportunity,’ said Zach. ‘So I introduced myself. I told you I was his guide, remember – when you first asked me.’

‘Was it you that bought the fruit bowl?’ I asked.

‘Actually it was that statue,’ said Zach. ‘Or rather I took him down the goblin market and he bought it there.’

Lesley gave me the evil eye as I established that the ‘goblin market’ was the moving nazareth but I thought Nightingale would want to know.

‘You took him to Powis Square?’ I asked.

‘Not there,’ said Zach. ‘The market before that – he got himself to the Powis Square market off his own back. He was a bright boy.’ He stuck his finger in his mug and went hunting for the dregs of his hot chocolate.

‘And the bowl?’ I asked.

‘Spotted it himself,’ said Zach.

I risked Lesley’s ire by going off on another tangent and bringing out the fruit bowl in question brought especially from the Folly. Even through the clear plastic of the forensics bag I could feel vestigia as I pushed it across the table to Zach.

‘Is this the bowl?’ I asked.

Zach barely glanced at it. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘The actual bowl,’ I said. ‘Not just one that looks like it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Zach.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Just can,’ said Zach.

‘Does this work for all pottery, or does your gift for identification extend only to stoneware?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘If I got a plate in from the canteen and showed it to you,’ I said. ‘Would you be able to pick it out of a plate line-up a week later?’

A plate line-up, I thought. God knows what Seawoll is making of this.

‘You’re off your head,’ said Zach. ‘It’s made by the Quiet People, not in some factory in China.’ He spoke slowly to make sure I understood. ‘So each one is different like someone’s face is different – that’s how I can tell them apart.’

I wondered if Zach, half fairy, half goblin, half whatever he was, perceived vestigia differently from the way me, Lesley and Nightingale did. If he did, then it would make sense for him to also respond to it differently, perhaps less powerfully. I made another note for later because I knew Lesley would homing back in on the policing.

‘Moving on,’ she said, right on cue. ‘So you took James Gallagher through the sewers to meet these “quiet people”?’

Zach smiled at her. ‘You can take your mask off, you know – we don’t mind. Do we, Peter?’

I expected Lesley to either ignore Zach or slap him down, but instead she turned to me and gave me an inquiring look.

‘You don’t have to ask my permission,’ I said, half hoping she’d leave it on.

She looked at Zach, who gave her a crooked smile.

‘I’ll take it off,’ said Lesley slowly. ‘If you stop messing us about.’

‘Okay,’ he said without hesitation.

Lesley unclipped her mask and slipped it off. Her face was as horrible as ever and glistening with sweat. I froze for a moment and then thought to hand Lesley some tissues. As she wiped her face I realised that Zach was staring at me – eyes narrowed.

‘The mask is off,’ I said. ‘Your turn.’

‘James Gallagher and the seven dwarves,’ said Lesley.

‘Did I say they were short?’ asked Zach.

We both just stared at him until he got on with it. James, Zach told us, had been persistent in the way that only Americans and double-glazing salesmen seem to be capable of. No matter what Zach said or did, including storming out of the house and all the way down to the off-licence, James wouldn’t let up.

‘So we got some gear together and down the rabbit hole we went,’ said Zach.

A rabbit hole with a horrible smell. I got Zach to pinpoint the exact manhole they’d gone down on a printout of Google Maps. Shockingly, it was located fifty metres up the road from James Gallagher’s house. I wondered if it was the same one that Agent Reynolds had found.

There was a certain amount of farting about as we showed him the boots and he agreed that, yeah, they were James’s boots or at least they looked like the boots James bought for going down the sewers, I mean they could be somebody else’s, couldn’t they? It was not like he was paying a lot of attention to James’s boots – that would be bare strange, wouldn’t it?

‘Unless you’re into boots,’ said Zach. ‘Takes all types.’

I resisted the urge to bang my forehead on the table.

Finally, after Lesley made it clear with many subtle verbal clues that she was resisting the urge to bang Zach’s forehead on the table, we moved on to the point where he introduced James Gallagher to the quiet people.

‘Not that they’re really called the Quiet People,’ said Zach.

‘We got the whole ambiguity thing,’ I said quickly.

Not only was Zach not sure what they called themselves, he wasn’t sure where they lived. ‘I know how to get there underground,’ he said as we pulled out the map again. ‘But I ain’t got the faintest as to where that is, you know, above ground.’ Somewhere in Notting Hill was the best he could do.

I had a suspicion I knew exactly where, but I kept it to myself.

They didn’t live in the sewers, Zach wanted to make that clear, they lived in their own tunnels which were dry and comfortable. He couldn’t tell you what the tunnels looked like however. ‘On account of them liking the dark.’

For James it was love at first feel. ‘He kept on going on about the walls,’ said Zach.

‘What about them?’ I asked.

‘He liked the way they felt,’ said Zach. ‘And the Quiet People liked him – kindred spirits and all that. That was the first time they’d let me past the hallway – and that’s me being friends with Stephen.’

‘So his name really is Stephen,’ said Lesley.

‘Believe it,’ said Zach. ‘I wasn’t making that up. Stephen, George, Henry: they’ve all got names like that. It’s a wonder they don’t wear flat caps and braces.’

Not that they got out much, Stephen being a bit of an exception, because, according to Zach, outgoing people don’t live underground.

‘So what was James looking for?’ asked Lesley.

‘I don’t know,’ said Zach. ‘Something artistic, or it might have been one of the girls. You know what they say. Once you’ve done fae, it don’t go away.’

He knew something – I could tell by the way he kept trying to distract us.

‘So he just went in and left you outside?’ asked Lesley.

‘In the hallway,’ said Zach.

‘You must have some idea of what he was doing,’ she said.

‘I only got as far as the parlour despite everything I’d done for them.’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘I didn’t get the backstage pass.’

‘But they let James in,’ said Lesley. ‘Did that make you angry?’

‘Yeah,’ said Zach. ‘I got to say it did.’

Because it was all hugs and feasts and exclamations of joy for James, and never mind the number of times Zach had personally saved Stephen’s arse or fixed some above-ground problem, because Zach wasn’t a descendant of the Beales or Gallaghers. No fatted calf for Zach – not that they actually ran to a fatted calf. ‘But still,’ said Zach. ‘A bit of appreciation would have been nice.’ Which concluded a textbook illustration of why you should say as little as possible when being interviewed by the police – up until he gave us a motive, his resentment, me and Lesley had pretty much written him off as a suspect.

Now me and Lesley exchanged looks – I could tell she didn’t really think Zach did it, either. It wasn’t until I looked away that I realised that I’d read her expression off her bare face without reacting to what her face had become.

‘Does Graham Beale get the fatted calf?’ I asked. ‘What about Ryan Carroll?’

‘Who’s Ryan Carroll?’ asked Zach

‘Famous artist,’ I said. ‘James was a fan.’

‘Don’t know him – sorry,’ he said. ‘Can’t know everyone. But if he was the right Carroll they’d have let him in too.’

‘What about Graham Beale?’ I asked. ‘The managing director.’

‘He used to visit,’ said Zach. ‘But it was his brother who spent time down there. Mad for digging he was – sad really, him dying like that. Stephen says they never saw Graham Beale again.’

‘How many of them are there?’ asked Lesley.

‘Don’t know,’ said Zach.

‘Ten, twenty, two hundred?’

‘More than twenty,’ said Zach. ‘Several families at least.’

‘Families,’ said Lesley. ‘Jesus.’

‘They’ve been minding their own business for hundreds of years,’ said Zach. ‘I bet your Master didn’t even know they were there. And what now? You going to go down there mob-handed? When you find out their kids haven’t gone to school you going to call in social services, do them for truancy, living under ground without a licence?’

He glared at me.

‘You don’t know what you’re going to do – do you?’

He was right, I didn’t know what I was going to do, but then that’s what god created senior officers for.

Not that they knew what to do either.

‘Did you know about these people?’ Seawoll asked Nightingale.

We’d convened in front of the murder inquiry whiteboard, which was covered in timelines, notes and pictures of people who had had just become totally irrelevant.

‘No,’ said Nightingale.

‘I may be speaking out of turn here, but that seems like a bit of an oversight to me,’ said Seawoll. ‘You see, Thomas, so far this year I’ve made a personal friend in Mr Punch and helped burn down Covent Garden while Miriam here had to deal with women with carnivorous minges and real cat people and now I’ve got to face the possibility that there might be a whole fucking village of mole people armed with fucking Sten guns living under Notting Hill. Given that I have been repeatedly instructed to defer to your expertise in all areas involving irregular and special circumstances, I am well within my rights to express a certain level of dissatisfaction with the way you exercise your responsibilities in this area.’

‘It is certainly unfortunate—’ began Nightingale.

‘It’s more than fucking unfortunate,’ said Seawoll his voice gone very quiet. ‘It’s unprofessional.’

I only saw the flinch because I knew Nightingale well enough to recognise the tiny movement of his head for what it was.

‘You’re right of course,’ he said. ‘And I apologise for the oversight.’

Stephanopoulos gave me a what-the-fuck look but I was just as amazed as she was. Even Seawoll looked suspicious.

‘Before I took over the Folly,’ said Nightingale, ‘I rarely saw “action” in London. I spent most of my time overseas. When we lost the bulk of our—’ He faltered for a moment. ‘Those of my colleagues that dealt with such matters were no longer available. It’s entirely possible that I could find some reference to these people in the literature, but like you I have been somewhat distracted of late.’

Seawoll narrowed his eyes. ‘We want to get down there as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘Before the buggers can dig themselves in.’ He considered what he’d just said. ‘Dig themselves in further.’

‘I suggest we hold off until after Christmas,’ said Nightingale.

‘If only because of the overtime,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You know CO19 and TSG will be busy covering the likely-target list until after the New Year. They’ll make us pay if we want them, and I don’t think we should go down there without some bodies.’

‘Can we at least interview Graham Beale this afternoon?’ said Seawoll. ‘If it’s not too much fucking trouble.’

‘And Ryan Carroll, the artist,’ I said. ‘We need to know whether he was in contact with the Quiet People.’

‘The Quiet fucking People,’ said Seawoll and shook his head. ‘Let’s pick the other known human beings up first thing Boxing Day – they should be nice and fat from Christmas dinner. Then, once everyone’s got over their hangovers, we can venture underground.’

‘I’ll talk to Thames Water,’ said Nightingale.

‘Would you?’ said Seawoll. ‘That would be grand.’

Stephanopoulos sighed and gave me a meaningful look.

‘Coffee?’ I said.

‘If you would, Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos.

The canteen at AB isn’t that bad, despite the strained attempt at festive cheer with tinsel draped around the till and intertwined with the display boxes of chocolate, muesli bars and mini-packets of biscuits. I wasn’t making the same mistake twice – I had tea instead of coffee.

As the Congolese woman behind the till rang up the order I noticed that the tinsel had been strung close enough to the hot food area to allow the occasional strand to dip itself into the perpetual pot of beef stroganoff It’s this kind of attention to food hygiene that explains why the Metropolitan Police loses so many work days to sickness – that and over-exposure to dogs, the elements and members of the public.

Don’t they know there’s an E. coli scare on, I thought.

Then I carefully put my tray down, turned and hared out of the canteen and back up to the outside inquiry office taking the steps three at a time.

Apparently I never did pay for the drinks.

‘We’ve got to go down the tunnels now,’ I said. ‘Before Kevin fucking Nolan manages to kill the lot of them.’

25 Ladbroke Grove

Watching Seawoll in motion was always an education in of itself. Despite the 1970s shouty guv’nor, pickaxe handle, drink you under the table, fuck me, fuck you, old-fashioned copper facade he was, bureaucratically speaking, very light on his feet.

We were going to go in with CO19, the armed wing of the Metropolitan Police, as backup. I know that Nightingale would have preferred to use Caffrey and his merry band of ex-paratroopers, but this was still a Murder Team investigation and Seawoll had old-fashioned views about extra-legal, paramilitary death-squads. Besides, he’d managed to prise a detachment loose by implying that there might be a smidgen of terrorism involved. The drawback to this being that DS Kittredge had to be notified, him being CTC’s officer on the spot.

We all assembled on the west side of Westbourne Park Road which Zach said was the closest sewer access. It was dark and the last dirty remnants of the snow crunched under the weight of our size eleven boots as we decanted from the vehicles.

‘Shit,’ said Stephanopoulos as she skidded on a patch of ice. Seawoll caught her elbow and steadied her. ‘Good thing I didn’t wear the high heels,’ she said.

‘Are you coming down with us, sir?’ I asked Seawoll.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Seawoll. ‘I’m far too fucking senior to go down there. It’s strictly constables, sergeants and lunatics. We’ll keep the kettle on for you.’

Nightingale was standing under a lamppost in a long oyster-white Burberry coat that made him look like something from an old film. All he was missing was a cigarette, a hat and a doomed love affair with a suburban housewife. Lesley stayed in the Sprinter van where she could keep an eye on Zach and avail herself of the coffee thermos and the emergency packets of Hula Hoops. I didn’t have the same luxury on account of this all being my idea in the first place.

We were joined by Kittredge, who turned out to be a tall thin man in a navy blue three-piece suit with a sour expression – although that might just have been a reaction to being out on Christmas Eve. He actually had a sprig of mistletoe in his buttonhole and I had sudden wistful thoughts of Dr Walid six hundred kilometres north in what I imagined to be the squat granite cottage of his ancestors, sitting in front of a roaring fire and toasting his family with a wee theologically unsound dram of the good stuff.

Kittredge frowned at me and turned to Nightingale. ‘We have a problem,’ he said.

‘The American?’ asked Nightingale.

‘She’s seen too much,’ he said.

‘Then you know she must be taken care of,’ said Seawoll.

‘Funny,’ said Kittredge.

‘Who cares what the Yanks know?’ asked Seawoll. ‘They’re not going to give a fuck about all this voodoo shit. Why should they?’

‘That’s not how it was explained to me,’ said Kittredge. ‘There are some things we’re supposed to keep in the family.’

‘Then I suggest we take our young American friend with us,’ said Nightingale.

‘Are you mad?’ asked Kittredge. ‘God knows what the FBI’s going to make of it all. Hasn’t she seen too much all ready?’

‘On the contrary,’ said Nightingale. ‘I don’t think she’s seen enough. Where is she now?’

Kittredge gestured up the street. ‘Round the corner,’ he said. ‘Sitting in a red Skoda Fabia that she borrowed off the second trade attaché’s wife’s nanny.’

‘You’re sure about that, sir?’ I asked Kittredge.

‘I’ve had a whole team watching over her since they dug you out of the ground,’ he said.

‘Touch of the stable door,’ said Nightingale.

‘Don’t you start,’ said Kittredge. ‘This was all routine until you were involved.’

‘I’ve been keeping secrets since before you were born,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’ll just have to trust me on this. Besides, the young lady is exceedingly clever. So it’s nothing she won’t be able to work out for herself.’

‘But at least she wouldn’t be an eyewitness,’ said Kittredge.

‘Fortunately,’ said Nightingale. ‘Seeing isn’t always believing.’ He turned to me. ‘Why don’t you go over and extend her an invitation?’ he said.

I turned and strolled up the road humming the happy tune of the subordinate who knows that whatever shit hits the fan it wouldn’t be him who’d be blamed for turning the bloody thing on.

It’d have been nice to sneak up on Reynolds and give her a shock, but a good rule of thumb is to never startle someone who might be equipped with a loaded firearm. Instead I approached from the front and gave her a wave. The annoyed look on her face – she obviously thought she’d ditched her surveillance – was rewarding enough.

‘Got your sewer gear?’ I asked as she climbed out the car.

‘In the trunk,’ she said. ‘Are we going down again?’

‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

‘Give me five minutes to get ready.’

It might have taken Reynolds five minutes but it took the rest of us about an hour, what with the milling around, strapping stuff on and testing the equipment. This time we’d borrowed the appropriate waist-high orange waders from a surly man from Thames Water. The CO19 boys insisted on retaining their dark blue ballistic vests and helmets as well, which gave them the unfortunate appearance of modern ninjas who’d given up on the whole stealth thing below the waist level. I was wearing a brand-new Metvest but with a high-visibility jacket over the top. I planned to avoid getting shot, through the deployment of peaceful diplomacy and, if that failed, by making sure I stayed back behind the guys with guns. Zach said we’d be better off without the guns, but that’s the thing about armed police. When you need them you generally don’t want to be hanging around waiting for them to arrive.

It was a good plan and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life.

When we were ready, Seawoll gave us a farewell admonition not to fuck things up any worse than they were already. Then he, Stephanopoulos and Kittredge skived off to a nearby pub to set up a ‘command centre’.

The surly man from Thames Water popped the manhole cover and bid us to help ourselves.

Nightingale went down first, then the officers from CO19. I followed them down with Zach behind me while Lesley and Reynolds brought up the rear. I recognised where we were the moment I got off the ladder. It was the same intersection we’d reached before an unknown assailant with a Sten gun had driven us over the duckboard and tumbling down the weir, and on our way to Olympia and Chelsea’s underground rave. Then it had been a raging torrent. This time it was merely damp and surprisingly fragrant, at least by the standards of London sewers.

Kumar was waiting for us.

‘You just couldn’t stay away,’ I said.

‘It’s warmer down here,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you came down at all.’

So was I, to be honest, I hadn’t wanted to go down the manhole, but once I’d made myself do it I was all right. It helped that I was surrounded by people I trusted. As Conan the Barbarian famously said, That which does not kill us does not kill us.

‘Where to now?’ I asked Zach.

He gestured down towards what I now knew was the North Kensington Relief sewer, far too low-ceilinged to walk along upright. The CO19 guys, who were understandably thrilled to be heading down a long straight pipe, wanted to wait until they’d fetched up a set of ballistic shields. But Nightingale waved them back.

‘We’ll do a recce first,’ he said and gestured me and Zach to go with him. The CO19 officers gave us pitying looks as we followed Nightingale into the tunnel. Now, I have allergic reaction to getting out in front of armed officers, but Zach didn’t seem bothered. Either he wasn’t expecting trouble or he had more faith in Nightingale than I did.

We made our way down the tunnel for about twenty metres when Zach told us to stop.

‘We’ve gone past it,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

We backed up two metres while Zach banged his fist at regular intervals on the left side of the tunnel. He stopped suddenly and banged the same spot a few times.

‘This feels like it,’ he said.

I put my hand on the wall where he’d smacked it. There was definitely something like a flash of an open oven and that hint of the pigsty – although given that we were in a sewer that might have been from elsewhere.

Nightingale put his hand next to mine.

‘Extraordinary,’ he said. ‘How do we get in?’

‘Like so,’ said Zach and, turning, put his back against the wall. Then, bracing one foot on the opposite wall, he pushed backwards, forcing a section of the wall to retreat into a recess. The walls were smooth and coated with the same ceramic finish I recognised from the fruit bowl. There was a dull click and the section behind Zach locked into place.

‘Not bad huh?’ he said and pointed upwards. Above him was an open hatch into darkness. ‘It’s like a fire door so it closes automatically. Someone needs to hold it open while I climb up.’

Nightingale lifted his hand and made a small gesture and the movable bit of wall shifted slightly and clicked. Zach gingerly shifted his shoulders.

‘Or you could do that,’ he said.

Nightingale called along the drain for the rest of the party to come up, leaving two of the CO19 officers to guard the junction and two more to man the tunnel. Then he swarmed up through the hatch and, turning, reached down to help me up behind him.

I had a look around while Zach and Lesley followed us up. We were in a space with the mean dimensions of a living room in a council flat, although the ceiling was low even by those standards. Low enough for me to scrape my helmet if I didn’t watch it.

‘Watch your head, darling,’ Zach told Lesley as she came up.

At first I thought the walls were panelled with dark wood in the Victorian fashion, but I quickly realised that the colour was wrong, too pale. When I rapped the panels with my knuckles there was the unmistakable ring of ceramic. But when I brushed them with my fingertips I felt wood grain, and mingled with that was tobacco smoke, beer and whisky. I looked at Nightingale, who was frowning as he too touched the wall. He caught me looking and nodded. The air was still, musty and dry.

‘We need to get on,’ he said and what with Kumar, Reynolds and the last two CO19 officers it was getting a bit tight in there. There was only one exit, a doorway framed with more fake ceramic wood.

Like the well behaved coppers we were, we let the CO19 officers go first. After all, there’s really no point bringing them if you insist on standing between them and any potential targets.

The doorway led to a long corridor lined not with fake wood panelling this time but with nasty mauve wallpaper. If I needed any further indication that the Quiet People didn’t have much of a colour sense then that wallpaper was it. At evenly spaced intervals were hung what looked like empty picture frames. Nightingale put a hand on each of the CO19 officers’ shoulders.

‘Quickly and quietly, lads,’ he said.

Off we went, just as quietly as you’d expect from people wearing half a ton of various types of gear between us. Safety tip: wading trousers – not built for stealth. We pulled up short of where the corridor ended in a T-junction.

‘Which way now?’ Nightingale asked Zach.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This wasn’t here last time.’

‘I really wish you hadn’t said that,’ said Lesley.

I was thinking of Space Hulk myself, but there are some things you don’t say out loud in front of other police.

Nightingale didn’t hesitate. He gestured at the CO19 officers and one went left and one went right. Nightingale went with one and I went with the other.

There was a single gunshot, astonishingly loud in the confined space. I threw myself back round the corner but Nightingale yelled, ‘Hold your fire.’

There was a long moment of silence in which I took the opportunity to pick myself up.

‘I believe that was a warning shot,’ said Nightingale. ‘Peter, if you’d be so good as to ask Mr Palmer to come forward.’

Zach vigorously shook his head but Lesley put her hand on his back and eased him forward until he could stick his head round the corner.

‘Would you be kind enough to tell them we come in peace?’ said Nightingale.

‘Do you think anyone has ever fallen for that one?’ asked Zach.

‘I don’t wish them to fall for anything, Mr Palmer,’ said Nightingale. ‘We need to establish an arrangement, or I fear things could become difficult.’

‘What makes you think they’ll be interested?’ asked Zach.

‘Had they wanted to, they could have shot us down already,’ said Nightingale.

The CO19 officer on the left cleared his throat. ‘We generally seek to de-escalate these confrontations as soon as possible, sir,’ he said. ‘The longer they go on, the greater the likelihood of a sub-optimal outcome.’ It was an impressive speech from a man who was obviously dying to retreat back the way he’d come.

‘Duly noted,’ said Nightingale.

‘For god’s sake Zach,’ I said. ‘Usually we can’t get you to shut up.’

Zach sighed and edged forward until he could look over Nightingale’s shoulder.

‘Yo!’ he called. ‘Is Ten-Tons around? I’ve got a man here wants to talk to him.’

He held our breath. I heard a voice, nothing more than a whisper floating out of the dark.

‘Did you hear that?’ asked Lesley.

Zach shushed her. ‘I’m trying to listen here,’ he said, and then called over Nightingale’s shoulder. ‘What was the last bit?’

Lesley rolled her eyes but stayed quiet – I still couldn’t make out any words.

‘He says that the Nightingale and the soldiers got to stay out, but they’ll talk to the half-caste.’ He looked at me. ‘That’s you, by the way.’

‘Why me?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Zach. ‘Maybe they just don’t rate you very highly.’

‘You’re certainly not proceeding on your own,’ said Nightingale.

We were in total agreement on that.

Half-caste, I thought. I hadn’t heard that one in a while. Not since Mum fell out with Aunty Doris who, having grown up in Jamaica in the 1950s, regarded political correctness as something that happened to other people. If they were old-fashioned about that, I figured, they might be usefully old-fashioned in other ways.

‘Tell them we want to bring in a nurse,’ I said. ‘To make sure everyone is healthy.’

‘What are you thinking, Peter?’ asked Nightingale.

I turned back and beckoned to Agent Reynolds, who was at the back with Kumar, closer.

‘Are you tooled up?’ I asked.

She looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded.

Lesley poked me in the arm. ‘Not without me,’ she said.

‘Two nurses,’ I told Zach.

To preserve their night vision, we were keeping our torches pointed away from the CO19 Officers and Nightingale, but even half shadowed I could see he didn’t like the idea of sending women into danger.

‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Has to be done.’

Nightingale sighed and nodded to Zach, who shouted out that he wanted to bring two nurses to meet them. I still couldn’t make out words in the reply but, after a couple more exchanges, Zach blew out a breath and said that they were willing to talk.

‘Who will we be talking to? I asked.

‘Ten-Tons,’ said Zach. ‘Maybe Ten-Tons’ daughter.’

‘Interesting,’ I said.

‘Who you’re not going to try anything with,’ said Zach.

‘Why would I be trying it on with Ten-Tons’ daughter?’ I asked.

‘Just don’t even think about it,’ said Zach.

‘No hanky panky with Ten-Tons’ daughter,’ I said. ‘Got it.’

‘What was all that about?’ asked Lesley.

‘I have no idea,’ I said, but I thought I probably did.

‘If we’re going to go, we might as well go now,’ said Zach. He called out that we were coming and stepped out in front of the left-hand CO19 officer. As I followed him Nightingale told me to be careful.

‘That’s the plan,’ I told him.

‘There’s a plan?’ asked Reynolds.

‘Do me a favour,’ said Lesley.

We joined Zach. As I shone my torch down the tunnel I thought I saw pale faces in the distance.

‘You want to be pointing your light down – in front of you,’ said Zach.

‘Why’s that?’ asked Lesley.

‘They’ve got sensitive eyes,’ he said.

When you’re police it’s important to always convey the impression that you know more about what’s really going on than any random member of the public. The best way to achieve this is to actually know more about something than people think you do. For example: I was pretty certain I knew where the Quiet People’s settlement was. Me, Lesley and Nightingale had taken to calling it a settlement because we didn’t like the demographic implications of the word village. We weren’t that keen on the word hamlet either.

‘What if it’s a town?’ Lesley had asked during the pre-operation briefing. ‘What if it’s a city?’

‘Let’s hope not,’ said Nightingale.

I’d suggested in that case we should hand the whole problem over to Tyburn. Nightingale was not amused.

He said that we should at least establish the scale of the problem before deciding what to do about it. I didn’t point out that the Quiet People had managed to go at least a hundred and sixty years already without being a problem – or at least a problem that affected the Queen’s Peace. Which was more than can be said, historically speaking, for the place we thought they might be living under.

London was the world’s first megalopolis. You can make a case for Beijing, Constantinople or Rome, but for sheer fuck-off insanely rapid expansion, London was to set the pattern, followed by every big city that came after. In the nineteenth century much of the city went west as the rich and the middle classes tried to escape the poor and the poor tried to escape the rats. Landowners, many of them aristocrats, abandoned their mystical connection to the soil in droves and carved up their farmland into new housing estates. Whole neighbourhoods sprang up in Middlesex overnight and all those villas, terraces and cottages needed one thing – bricks. Millions of bricks. Fortunately, a rich field of good yellow clay was found in a hard-to-drain hollow west of Portobello Road.

The brick makers arrived and soon the freshly named Pottery Lane was lined with brick kilns and the ironically ramshackle houses of the potters. Since nothing sets you up for a hard day making bricks better than a bacon sandwich, the pig keepers moved in – their animals rooting amongst the mud and refuse behind the kilns. But a city is not built on bricks and bacon sarnies alone. The other agent of London’s growth, the railways, thrust their iron fingers into the surrounding countryside. To build them, an army of navvies was needed and they went where the rents were lowest, the booze was handmade and the police hardly ever happened. The area became known as the Potteries and Piggeries. It was where Eugene Beale and his butty gang of excavators lived in the years before they were rich. And Eugene Beale had a nickname, a nom de building site, as it were. It was Ten-Ton Digger – and I didn’t think it was a coincidence.

The centrepiece of the area had been an artificial lake full of pigshit known locally as the Ocean. Because even the Victorians had some standards, when London finally swallowed up the area the Ocean was turned into a park rather than more housing. And I suspected that underneath it, where the good clay is, lay the village of the Quiet People.

They led us down a series of tunnels, all arched, all lined with smooth stoneware tiles. It could have been a particularly drab tube station, except for the lack of lights and CCTV cameras.

The skinny white boys in Adidas hoodies who guided us were familiar if not particularly reassuring. Occasionally, I got a glimpse of pale hands with long fingers as they gestured in which direction they wanted us to go. The two of them flinched away from our torches, despite the fact that they were wearing wraparound shades.

There was a noticeable breeze in one corridor, in another I swear I could hear the rattle of laundromat dryers – there was even the whiff of fabric softener.

One thing was for certain. If they were the cannibalistic descendants of a lost tribe of navvies they were at least better turned out than the ones in the film.

‘They seem to be getting much more relaxed,’ said Lesley as one of the hoodies waved us to stop outside a doorway.

‘That’s because we’re in their ends now, said Zach.

‘Ends?’ asked Reynolds.

‘Manor,’ I said.

‘Patch,’ said Lesley.

‘Yard?’ I tried when Reynolds still looked blank.

‘Hood,’ said Zach.

‘Gotcha,’ said Reynolds.

A hoodie leaned close to Zach and whispered in his ear.

‘He says we have to turn our torches off,’ said Zach. ‘Hurts their eyes.’

We hesitated, all thinking the same thing. I felt Lesley and Agent Reynolds shifting their stance, making some space, freeing up their arms and in Reynolds’ case making sure her Glock was accessible. We couldn’t help it. We’re police – situational paranoia is a professional requirement. They make you sit an exam and everything.

‘Or we can just all go back,’ said Zach. ‘I’m easy.’

I took a breath, let it out and turned my helmet light off, Lesley and Zach followed suit and finally Reynolds, muttering something under her breath, did the same.

I was all right for the first couple of seconds and then suddenly it was like I was back under the platform at Oxford Circus. I heard myself beginning to pant, but even as I tried to control my breathing I started to shake. A firm hand grasped my arm and then finger-walked down to take my hand and squeeze – I was sure it was Lesley. I was so startled that I forgot to panic.

The big doors in front of us opened to reveal a room lit with a dim green light and Lesley let go of my hand.

The room was large with a high domed ceiling from which hung a chandelier in which chemical glowsticks had been used instead of candles. It was wall-to-wall Quiet People, packed in like commuters on a tube train. They came in all shapes and sizes – no children I noticed – but tended to the slender with long pale faces and big eyes. I saw at least two blondes but their hair was predominantly light brown. They were definitely a distinct ethnic group and I realised, belatedly, that I’d done a classic bit of racist misidentification when I’d assumed the guy I’d chased onto the train was the same one who shot at me. For a mixed-race Londoner who’s supposed to be a trained observer that was kind of embarrassing – I blame the bloody hoodies they were wearing.

Zach warned us that the Quiet People would want to touch us.

‘Touch us where?’ asked Lesley.

‘Just think of them being like blind people,’ said Zach. ‘They’re very tactile.’

‘Great,’ said Lesley.

‘And you have to touch them back,’ said Zach. ‘Doesn’t have to be a lot just, you know, bit of brush, cop a bit of feel – just to be polite.’

‘Is there anything else you’d like to share?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Don’t raise your voice. It’s considered a bit of a faux-pas.’ He turned and walked into the room.

I followed him in and the touching started immediately. It wasn’t rough but there was nothing furtive about it. I felt fingers run down my shoulders, a hand briefly caught my thigh and the brush of fingertips on my lip made me sneeze.

‘Oh my god,’ I heard Lesley behind me. ‘It’s like being fifteen again.’

To be polite I let the backs of my hands brush against people as I went past – that seemed to satisfy. They smelt exactly like everyone else, some of sweat, some of food, a whiff of beer and a hint of pigshit. At the centre of the room was a narrow Victorian oak table. It was made of real wood, too. After all the ceramic I could practically smell it.

Waiting politely for us on the other side of the table was a tall thin man in a black bespoke suit cut with seventies lapels and a kipper tie. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses, but his mouth lifted at the corners in wry humour. The power that came off him slapped me in the chest like the best bass speaker ever invented. I’d felt nothing like it since the time I’d come face to face with the Old Man of the River – Father Thames himself. But this was pride and sweat and pickaxes and the smell of steam. The ringing of hammers and the heat of the kiln.

Oh shit, I thought, if this isn’t the Low King of the Dwarves then I’m the President of the Cricklewood branch of the Women’s Institute. It all fits – apart from the fact that he’s not a dwarf, nor does he appear to be a king, and they make dinner plates, not swords or rings of power. Still, definitely another bloody genius loci or something almost as powerful. Nightingale was going to throw a fit. Albeit in a restrained stiff-upper-lip fashion.

‘My name,’ whispered the man, ‘is Matthew Ten-Tons and this is my daughter Elizabeth.’

Beside him stood a young woman in wraparound shades, light brown hair in a French plait that fell over one shoulder, narrow chin, small mouth, big eyes and a little snub nose that was barely enough to hold her glasses up. Despite the green light I saw that her skin was extraordinarily pale, almost translucent. I also noticed that when she turned to us, Zach looked away.

The goblin boy yearns for a princess, I thought. That’s not going to end well.

Matthew Ten-Tons indicated a monstrous leather upholstered and brass-bound bench that ran the length of our side of the table and gestured for us to sit. Elizabeth beckoned Lesley and Reynolds over so that they seated themselves opposite her. As soon as we were all seated the people behind us crowded our backs. Hands came to rest on my shoulders, back and arms, smoothing my clothes, picking imaginary lint from my high-visibility vest and giving me a rather pleasant neck massage. Classic grooming behaviour, Dr Walid told me later, something our fellow primates indulge in it to maintain troop cohesion. Dr Walid said human beings use language for the same purpose – which is why you find yourself talking total bollocks to people you meet at a bus stop and then wonder what the fuck did you do that for?

As I sat down, Ten-Tons seized my hand and pulled me half across the table. He examined my fingers and nails before turning it over and running a calloused palm over mine. He gave a derisive snort, at my palm’s smoothness I assumed, and released me. At the other end of the table Elizabeth did the same with Reynolds and Lesley. Zach’s hands went unfelt – I suspected he’d already been found wanting in the rough skin department.

Ten-Tons leaned across the table until we were close enough for me to feel his breath on my cheek. ‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked.

‘No thanks,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t think we have time.’

That wasn’t the real reason of course, but you don’t insult your host at the first meeting. Captain Picard would have been well pleased with me.

I glanced over to where Elizabeth, Reynolds and Lesley sat with their heads almost touching – I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. Suddenly they all turned to look at Zach – who flinched.

Ten-Tons caught my eye. ‘What’s so urgent that it can’t wait for tea?’

‘Not waiting for tea,’ whispered a voice right behind my head and then it was repeated by a different voice further away and then many voices murmuring into the distance like an echo. Not waiting for tea. Urgent.

‘I believe Kevin Nolan may be trying to kill you,’ I whispered and behind me I heard it repeat across the room. Kevin Nolan … kill you.

Ten-Tons’ lips twisted as he tried not to laugh. ‘I think you are very much mistaken,’ he whispered. ‘Kevin has never graced us with his presence. He has a terrible fear of the quiet places.’

Mistaken, presence, fear, whispered the chorus.

‘I don’t think he’s planning to do it on purpose,’ I said.

Purpose, planning, thinking, whispered the chorus, and I would have paid good money for them to stop.

‘As his older brother told it to me,’ whispered Ten-Tons. ‘Kevin wouldn’t harm a fly.’

Beside me Zach snorted – probably thinking of the beating he’d got in Shepherd’s Bush.

‘I believe he’s supplied you with food contaminated with E.coli,’ I whispered.

There was no repetition from the crowd and when I saw the blank looks on both the Ten-Tons’ faces I realised it was because they hadn’t understood what I’d just said.

‘The last delivery was tainted,’ I whispered and the crowd took up tainted around me and Matthew Ten-Tons looked shocked.

‘Are you certain of this?’ he asked.

I had blow-ups of the pictures Lesley had taken of the pallets Kevin had loaded onto his van. Written on the side was Coates and Son, a wholesaler who had been told, that very morning, to stop trading by the Food Standards Agency but had instead decided to flog off some of their stock – cheap. Which was why Kevin had bought it, stuffed it in the back of his transit van and delivered it to the Quiet People – right in front of me and Lesley.

‘On my oath as an apprentice,’ I said, louder than I meant to. ‘And more importantly, has anyone eaten any of the food that came down the day before yesterday?’

Ten-Tons sat back, his chest heaved, his mouth gaped open and he began making a staccato series of hissing sounds. Then his face turned pink and, still hissing, he leaned forward and slapped his palm on the tabletop.

I flinched, torn between backing away or rushing forward to do the Heimlich manoeuvre, and I was just about to stand up when I realised that he was laughing.

‘We don’t eat that,’ he whispered once he’d got breathing under control. ‘We buy our groceries from the Jew.’

‘Which particular Jew?’ I asked.

Ten-Tons reached out and touched his daughter’s arm to get her attention.

‘What’s the name of the Jew again?’ he asked her.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes at me. Or at least I think she did. It’s hard to tell what with the wraparound shades and all. She whispered; ‘Tesco, he’s talking about Tesco.’

‘You shop at Tesco?’ asked Zach, far too loudly.

‘They deliver,’ hissed Elizabeth.

‘You used to make me go out for stuff,’ whispered Zach.

Ten-Tons wasn’t liking that – he frowned at his daughter, but she ignored him.

‘You were always offering to go,’ she whispered. ‘Like a friendly rat.’

‘What’s this?’ asked Ten-Tons and grabbed Zach’s wrist. ‘You were speaking – behind my back?’

‘Oi!’ I said in my speaking voice and it rippled through the crowd around me like the downdraft from a helicopter. ‘Focus. This is serious – if you don’t eat them, what is it you do with all those bloody vegetables?’

I smelt them way before I met them. There’s something distinctive about pig slurry. Nothing else smells like it or lingers in your nostrils so long.

Like I said, they used to call the area the Potteries and Piggeries, I thought about this and wondered whether Ten-Tons’ ancestors had made the conscious decision to move their pigs underground. Or had their sties slowly sunk beneath the ground like a Thunderbird arriving back at Tracy Island? The latter, I decided when Ten-Tons led me by the hand through a series of domed chambers, dimly lit by carriage lamps, each with its wallow, its trough and its fat albino pigs. The troughs were full of the kind of random greenery we’d watched Kevin Nolan delivering two days ago. Unsurprisingly, I was expected to put my hands on the bloody things. Ten-Tons practically shoved me at a vast sow, who was wallowing chin-deep in mud. Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

The animal flesh under my hand was rough, warm and disturbingly like human skin. I gave an experimental scratch and the sow made an encouraging grunting noise.

‘Good pigs,’ I whispered to Ten-Tons. ‘Very porky.’ I swear I don’t know where this stuff comes from sometimes.

Did E. coli travel through the food chain, I wondered – I was going to have to find out. I had to find a way of getting a health inspector down here who a) wouldn’t freak out; b) wouldn’t run screaming to the media or, worse, Thames Water.

It stank here. But in an enclosed underground chamber I reckoned the smell should have killed us. In the gloom I could make out the pale shapes of men, stripped to the waist, shovelling manure into wheelbarrows – which explained where the smell was going. I remembered chatting up a good-looking Greenpeace activist during a protest in Trafalgar Square and she’d told me, in more detail than I would have liked, that pig slurry was essentially useless as manure. More like toxic waste from a factory, she’d said. And the Quiet People couldn’t have been dumping it in the Thames because Mama Thames would have come round and had a ‘conversation’ about same.

‘What do you do with the pig shit?’ I asked.

Ten-Tons squeezed my forearm in what I was beginning to recognise as his way of expressing approval and drew me down a corridor lined with shiny white tiles. ‘Cleans up nice and easily,’ whispered Ten-Tons when I stopped to feel the slick surface.

We were following one of the guys with a barrow as he wheeled it up the corridor to a vaulted chamber lined with the same white tile. There he lifted a hatch in the floor and tipped the slurry down in one practised movement. With a rattle, he seized a bucket of water placed nearby and sluiced down the wheelbarrow and the edges of the hatch. Then he refilled the bucket from a tap mounted in the wall and wheeled his barrow back down the corridor, presumably for more shit shovelling. As he went I saw another barrow wrangler heading towards us with another load of slurry.

When he led me into the next room I thought I knew what I was going to see next.

I was wrong.

I looked up the figures later; your average pig produces over ten times what a human does per kilo body weight and given that these were big pigs, we were talking a shitload of pig shit. Now, not only is that enough to drown in, but it’s also the vilest-smelling animal by-product known to man – which doesn’t endear you to your neighbours. But you can take that slurry and run it through what’s called a horizontal plug flow reactor. Pig shit goes in one end, some seriously good fertilizer comes out the other and you get methane out the top. It also gets rid of the smell, and some farms do it for that reason alone. The thing is, in a cold climate like what we’ve got you have to use most of the methane to maintain a useful operating temperature, which is why this technology has never taken off in Northern Europe. It’s the sort of sustainable low-tech engineering favoured by progressive development NGOs, Greenpeace and middle-aged men in leather-patched tweed jackets.

I was expecting something simple.

What I got was a ten-metre wall of brass pipework festooned with dials and gauges and stop valves. Two older men in moleskin trousers, white shirts and sleeveless leather jerkins were shading their pale faces while they worked two banks of brake levers, the kind I associate with old-fashioned railway signal boxes. A whistle blew, one of an ascending bank mounted near the centre of the contraption, and one of the engineers stepped smartly over to a row of gauges. There he brushed his fingers around the face of the dial – there was no glass – before calmly pulling two levers in quick succession and turning a valve wheel a quarter turn to the left. The whistle stopped.

My industrial chemistry had been leaking out of my head for over seven years, but enough of the basics remained for me to spot a cracking plant – even one that had dropped out of a Jules Verne novel. The Quiet People were refining their pig-generated hydrocarbons on an industrial scale.

And that was when I realised that Tyburn was wrong.

There was no way we could allow the existence of the Quiet People to become general knowledge. If the Health and Safety Executive didn’t close them down then the inhabitants of one of the richest neighbourhoods in London, which the bloody refinery was built under, would. And the HSE would probably be right, because no doubt it had been built with the same concern for worker safety that had made Victorian factories the happy places to work they were.

That wasn’t counting what the farm welfare people would say about the pigs, or OF WAT about the connections to the sewage system, OFSTED about the children’s education – if they even were educated – or Kensington and Chelsea’s social services or housing. The Quiet People would be swept away as quickly and with as little fuss as a pygmy tribe living in an inconveniently mineral-rich part of a rainforest.

‘We’re right proud of this,’ whispered Ten-Tons, mistaking my sudden paralysis for awe.

‘I’ll bet,’ I whispered back, and asked him what it was all in aid of.

The answer turned out to be firing pottery – as if I couldn’t guess.

Ten-Tons led me to a workshop where Stephen – I was getting better at telling them all apart – was throwing a pot on a wheel. Watching were Agent Reynolds and Lesley, who’d been led there by Elizabeth. Lesley caught my arm, in the manner of our hosts, and pulled me down until she could whisper in my ear.

‘We can’t stay here,’ she whispered. ‘Even Nightingale’s not going to wait much longer before he comes in.’

And it would be with as many armed officers as he could muster.

Even in the dim light Lesley could read my face. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And you should see the arsenal these guys have squirrelled away.’

‘You two are going to have to go back,’ I whispered.

‘And leave you here on your own?’ she hissed.

‘If anything happens,’ I whispered, ‘you can come back and get me.’

Lesley turned my head so she could stare me in the eyes.

‘Is this one of your stupid things?’ she asked.

‘Did you get anything from Ten Tons’ daughter?’ I asked.

‘Stephen is her fiancé,’ whispered Lesley. ‘Or at least that’s what her dad thinks. But I reckon Stephen wants to go outside the tribe.’

I glanced over at Stephen, who didn’t, I noticed, wear sunglasses. He didn’t seem worried by bright lights. Less sensitive or just less inhibited?

Lesley explained that it was a love triangle, or possibly a rectangle, but either way a scandal by the standards of the Quiet People who were living in what Lesley described as Jane Austen’s last bunker. Elizabeth was betrothed to Stephen but in the light of his neglect the young princess’s fancy had been caught by the dashing and debonair cousin from across the sea.

‘Ryan Carroll?’ I asked. ‘She obviously likes the artistic type.’

‘Oh, she does,’ whispered Lesley. ‘Only further across the sea than Ireland. Handsome, American, son of a senator, slightly dead.’

James Gallagher.

‘Did they ever—?’

Elizabeth had been far too refined to say it outright but Lesley and Reynolds were pretty certain that some snogging had taken place at the very least. I remembered the way that Zach couldn’t look Elizabeth in the face – unrequited in love. That was a great big square on the Police Bingo Board – I did a quick check to make sure Zach hadn’t sloped off while we were distracted. He was still with us and still gazing at Elizabeth.

‘No cuts on his hand,’ I whispered, but maybe he healed fast.

‘We’ll know when the DNA results come through,’ whispered Lesley. ‘If it is him, then Special Agent Reynolds is going to be so smug.’

We checked to make sure Reynolds wasn’t listening on the sly, but she was staring at Stephen in what looked a lot like awe. I looked down at the pot he was working on. It was glowing with a soft luminescence that, if you’re me or Lesley, was a little bit familiar.

‘All right,’ said Lesley in a normal speaking voice. ‘That explains a lot.’

And I found myself unexpectedly looking at a totally complete Bingo card.

‘I need you to go back to Nightingale right now,’ I whispered. ‘You can leave Zach with me.’

‘This is one of your stupid plans isn’t it?’ she whispered.

I told her not to worry, and it was all going to be fixed in time for Christmas dinner.

‘I’m giving you sixty minutes.’ Her breath tickled my ear. ‘And then I’m coming back in with the SAS.’

‘I’ll be out in half an hour,’ I whispered back.

I had it sorted in less than twenty because I’m just that good.