Whispers Under Ground

beautiful woman does, or Lesley’s ruined face, or a sunset or a nasty traffic accident. I could see it was having the same effect on the others that came to view it – none of us got closer than a metre and most retreated slowly away from piece.

I got a sudden rushing, screaming sensation of terror as if I’d been tied onto the front of a tube train and sent hurtling down the Northern Line. No wonder people were stepping back. It was about as powerful a vestigium as I’d ever encountered. Something seriously magical had gone into the making the piece.

I took a deep breath and a slug of wine and stepped up for a closer look. The mannequin was the same make as those in the other gallery but posed, in this case, arms outflung, palms turned upwards as if in prayer or supplication. It wore on its torso what anyone with a passing interest in Chinese history or Dungeons and Dragons would recognise as being like the scale armour worn by the terracotta army – a tunic constructed by fastening together rectangular plates the size of playing cards. Only in this case each plate had a face sculpted onto it. Each of the faces, while simplified to a shape with a mouth, slits or dots for eyes and the barest hint of a nose, was clearly individual and carved into a distinct expression of sadness and despair.

I felt that despair, and a strange sense of awe.

A slender man in his early thirties with a long face, short brown hair and round glasses joined me in front of the sculpture. I recognised him from the flyer in James Gallagher’s locker – it was Ryan Carroll, the artist. He wore a heavy coat and fingerless gloves. Obviously not a man to put style before comfort. I approved.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked. He had a soft Irish accent that if you’d put a gun to my head I’d have identified as middle-class Dublin but not with any real confidence.

‘It’s terrible,’ I said.

‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘And I like to think horrific as well.’

‘That too,’ I said which seemed to please him.

I introduced myself and we shook hands. He had stained fingers and a strong grip.

‘Police?’ he asked. ‘Are you here on business?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘The murder of a young art student called James Gallagher.’ Carroll didn’t react.

‘Do I know him?’ he asked.

‘He was an admirer of yours,’ I said. ‘Was he ever in contact?’

‘What was his name again?’ asked Ryan.

‘James Gallagher,’ I said. Again not a flicker. I pulled up a headshot on my phone and showed him that.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

This is where, as police, you have to make a decision – do you ask for an alibi or not? Fifty years of detective dramas mean that even the densest member of the public knows what it means when you ask them where they were at a certain time or date. Nobody believes ‘just routine’, even when it’s true. With television broadcast levels of vestigia radiating from his art work I figured Ryan Carroll had to be involved in something but I had no evidence that he’d ever come in contact with James Gallagher. I decided that I would write him up tonight and let Seawoll or Stephanopoulos decide whether they wanted him interviewed. If he was statemented by someone else from the Murder Team then I could pursue the magic angle while he was distracted by that.

I love it when a plan comes together, especially when it means someone else will do the heavy lifting. I waved my glass at the mannequin in his coat of despair.

‘Did you make them yourself?’ I asked.

‘With my own little hands,’ he said.

‘You’re going to make a million,’ I said.

‘That’s the plan,’ he said smugly.

A blonde woman in a blue dress waved at Ryan to get his attention. When she had it, she pointed at her watch.

‘You’ll have to excuse me, Constable,’ said Ryan. ‘Duty calls.’ He walked over to the blonde woman who took his arm and pulled him gently back towards the waiting crowd. As they went she fussed at Ryan’s collar and jacket. Manager, I wondered, or better half, or possibly both.

Most of the patrons gathered around them and I heard the woman launch into what was unmistakably a warm-up speech. I guessed that Ryan Carroll was about to take his bow. I looked at his work again. The question was – did he imbue it with its vestigia or did that come from a found object? And if it did, was Ryan aware of its significance?

My phone rang – it was Zach.

‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said.

‘Really? Why’s that?’

‘His old man threw me out of the house,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go.’

‘Try Turning Point. They’ve got a big shelter up west,’ I said. ‘You can stay there tonight.’

‘You owe me,’ said Zach.

‘No I don’t,’ I said. One of the lessons of policing is that everyone has a sad story, including the guy you’ve just arrested for shoving a chip pan in his wife’s face. Obvious chancers like Zach were often way more convincing than those that had real grievances – comes with practice, I suppose.

‘I think they’re after me,’ he added.

‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

There was a round of applause from the crowd.

‘If you pick me up I’ll tell you,’ he said.

Shit, I thought. If I ignored him and he turned up dead I’d be facing some questions from Seawoll and a ton of paperwork.

‘Where are you?’ I asked, reluctantly.

‘Shepherd’s Bush – near the market.’

‘Get on the tube and meet me at Southwark.’

‘I can’t do the tube,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe. You’re going to have to meet me here.’

I asked him which end of the market and headed for the exit. As I traversed the empty hallway I saw Ziggy the dog sitting alertly on his haunches by the door to the gift shop. He looked at me, tilted his head to one side and then tracked me all the way out.

9 Shepherd’s Bush Market

My airwave was squawking about a fatac, a fatal accident, at Hyde Park Corner so once I was across the river I swung north and went via Marylebone. The Westway was eerily deserted as I climbed onto the elevated section and it seemed like I could have reached up and brushed the bottom of the clouds. The snowflakes whipped through the white beam of my headlights and over my bonnet like streamers in a wind tunnel. It’s the closest I’d ever come to driving in a blizzard and yet when I got on the slip road at the White City turnoff, I found myself gliding into a world of pale stillness.

It was only after I rounded Holland Park roundabout and headed through Shepherd’s Bush that I started to see people again. Pedestrians were walking gingerly along the pavements, shops were open and idiots who shouldn’t be driving in adverse conditions were forcing me to drop my speed to just over twenty.

Shepherd’s Bush Market is an elevated station and as I approached the bridge where the tracks crossed the road I started to look out for Zach. I pulled over by the locked battleship-grey gates of the market and got out. I turned to look as headlights approached, but the car, a decomposing early model Nissan Micra, surfed by on the road slush.

If, like me, you’ve spent two years as a PCSO and another two as a PC patrolling central London in the late evenings, you become something of a connoisseur of street violence. You learn to differentiate the bantam posturing of drunks or the shrieking huddle of a girls-night-out gone south from the ugly shoving of a steaming gang and the meaty, strangely quiet, crunch that indicates an intense desire by one human being to do your actual bodily