Whispers Under Ground

Road, which forms the northern boundary of Max Roach Park. The snow on the park was still almost white and littered with the half-melted remains of snowmen. We stopped on the park side and Lesley pointed to a terraced house halfway down the road.

‘That’s the one,’ she said.

It was late Victorian with a half basement, orthogonal bay windows and a narrow little front door designed to give the illusion of grand urban living to a new generation of aspirational lower middle class. The same people who would flock into the suburbs a generation or two later.

There was an arrow painted on to a piece of card that had gone curly with damp. It pointed down a set of iron stairs to the door into the half basement, what used to be the tradesmen’s entrance. The curtains in the bay windows were drawn and when we paused to listen we heard nothing from inside the house.

I rang the doorbell.

We waited for about a minute, stepping back to avoid the drips of snowmelt landing on our heads, and then the door opened to reveal a white girl in baggy trousers, braces and pink lipstick.

‘What you want?’ she asked.

I gave her the password. ‘We’ve come to cut the grass,’ I said.

‘Yeah, no motorcycle helmets, swords, spears, glamours and,’ she said, pointing at Lesley, ‘no masks – sorry.’

‘Do you want to wait in the car?’ I asked.

Lesley shook her head and unclipped her mask.

‘I’ll just bet you’re glad to get out of that,’ the girl said and led us into the flat.

It was your basic dingy basement flat. Despite the modern kitchen conversion and Habitat trim, the low ceiling and poor lighting made it seem pinched and mean. I glanced into the front room as we passed and saw that all the furniture had been neatly piled against the far wall. Heavy-duty power cables snaked out of the rooms and down the hallway. They were securely held down with gaffer tape and plastic safety bridges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘God, listen to that,’ said Lesley.

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

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Moving on,’ said Lesley.

‘Where to?’

Lesley pointed to the makeshift balconies above us.

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

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’

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

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

‘Somebody wants your attention,’ said Lesley.

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