Whispers Under Ground

‘Meaning what?’ I asked.

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

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

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

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

‘Or we could do that,’ I said.

‘Was that magic?’ asked Kumar.

‘Can we please get on,’ said Nightingale.

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

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

‘You never thought to ask?’ I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Got it,’ I said.

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

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

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

‘Shit,’ said Lesley. ‘A secret door.’

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

‘Speak friend and enter,’ said Kumar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And what about me?’ asked Lesley.

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

‘Great,’ said Lesley without enthusiasm.

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

Friday

18 Notting Hill Gate

My first thought was, how many people could be supported by five to six boxes of vegetables a day? My second thought, after we’d been walking in a straight line for five hundred metres or so, was this was a hell of a long way to go to the shops. Which was followed by my third thought which was – where would these hypothetical vegetable eaters be getting their protein from? Mushrooms, rats, the occasional commuter? Cannibal navvies – thank you so much Inspector Nightingale.

‘When do you think this was built?’ asked Kumar.

‘The same time as the cut was dug,’ I said. ‘See the way the bricks are laid? That style’s called an English Bond. It matches the work on the tracks and it’s the same kind of London brick. Probably made locally.’

‘They teach you this stuff at Hendon?’ asked Kumar.

‘I had an education before Hendon,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of training to be an architect.’

‘But you were lured away by the glamour of police work,’ said Kumar. ‘Not to mention the high pay and the respect of your peers.’

‘Architecture didn’t work out,’ I said.