Whispers Under Ground

just refused to let me do pottery. It was one of the reasons I took drama instead.

Ryan claimed that it’s the relationship between the artist and his materials which drove the art. ‘It may look like just a collection of random junk to you,’ he said. ‘But there’s always something. When I was about sixteen, I suddenly understood that I wanted to find the meaning in those juxtapositions, to push the way I saw the world out through the aperture of what little talent I had. Can you understand that?’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ I said, and before I could stop myself. ‘I wanted to be an architect.’

Ryan’s mouth actually dropped open. ‘An architect?’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

‘I was taking the right A-levels but I was told that my draughtsmanship wasn’t good enough,’ I said.

‘I thought it was all done on computers these days,’ said Ryan.

I shrugged. I’d done my best to bury that bit of my life, and I really wasn’t going to talk about it with half a dozen police listening in.

‘It was more complicated than that,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, me?’ he said. ‘I had the luck of the Irish. I was the right boy in the right place at the right time. I burst upon the scene just as Dublin acquired a scene worth bursting upon. I was mad keen on Japan and China and India. Seeing a theme yet? Anything hot and exotic.’

Apparently, they ate it up in Dublin in the roaring years of the Celtic Tiger. The Irish had the bit between their teeth and nothing was going to stop them. ‘Not the British, not the Catholic Church and especially not ourselves,’ said Ryan. ‘And I was close, almost there, local boy makes good.’

And then it all went away. There was the credit crunch, the bank bailout, and suddenly it was like it never happened. ‘And the worst thing was,’ said Ryan. ‘I think people were pleased that it had all gone down the crapper. “Ah, well,” they said. “Nothing lasts for ever.” And they put the old Ireland back on like an ancient, worn but comfortable pair of shoes – the bastards.’ He smacked his empty teacup down on the table. ‘Two more years and I’d have been international – one year if I’d known there was a rush.’

‘So you came to London to make your fortune?’ I asked.

‘You’d like to think that, you English bastard, wouldn’t you?’ said Ryan, but without rancour. ‘Truth is I wanted to go to New York, but you have to have a certain weight, artistically speaking, to make it in the city that never sleeps. So London here I come, and I have to say this about your bloody city – war, depression, peace or whatever – London is always London.’

This was all very interesting, but I was intensely aware that Ryan’s lawyer was fast approaching and Seawoll had been adamant that once it was all legal no one was ever going to bring up ‘any weird shit whatsoever’. As far as the Murder Team were concerned, they had Ryan Carroll bang to rights and they didn’t need to know anything else.

But I had to know if I was right – and this was going to be my last chance.

‘So you made contact through the Beales?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, the Anglo-Irish Beales with the emphasis strictly on the Anglo,’ said Ryan. ‘They put me on to the Nolans, who introduced me to Stephen, and down I went into the very bowels of the earth. I watched him make a fruit bowl, a really plain boring fruit bowl. He shaped the clay, he let it dry and in the kiln it went.’ Ryan grinned. ‘You know they run their kilns on pig farts? Very modern, but we’re talking secret subterranean race here so I’m expecting something a little bit more than pig farts.’ He wagged a finger at me.

‘I know you know what’s coming next, because I saw the way you reacted to the work at my show.’ He folded his arms. ‘Oh, the herd felt something. But you, you recognised it.’

‘Magic,’ I said.

‘The real thing,’ said Ryan. And like me, once he’d seen it in action there was no way he wasn’t going to try to learn it. So Stephen set out to teach Ryan how to make an unbreakable pot, and incidentally imbue it with enough vestigia to give any interested art lovers what Ryan called a ‘Glimpse into the numinous’. What he hadn’t counted on was that learning how to do it would take months.

‘But I’ll bet money you know that already, don’t you?’ said Ryan.

Stephen described the process to Ryan as singing a song in your head while you worked. You worked the clay, sang the song in your head and somehow that made it magical.

‘Month after month I was down there, drinking tea, fondling the clay and singing in my head,’ said Ryan. ‘But being an artist is like being a shark – you’ve got to keep moving or you drown. So I asked Stephen to make the faces, the ones you saw at the Tate, to my specification, and that’s what he did.’

‘How did you get the emotional content?’ I asked. ‘And what did Stephen get in return?’

‘I just told him to think about how each face made him feel. Imagine my surprise when they popped out of the kiln emoting like actors.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘Stephen got paid.’

I asked him whether that wasn’t cheating, but he just sighed in an exaggerated way and told me not to be so bourgeois. ‘I didn’t make the mannequins either, or any of the other found objects I used. Art’s about producing something more than the sum of the parts.’ He waved his hand dismissively and I thought, You’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

‘And James Gallagher arrived around this time?’ I asked.

‘Like a bad smell,’ said Ryan. ‘Don’t you hate Americans? Not that James was a bad guy. I never thought he was a bad guy. But he arrives with his money and his family and I’ll be honest – he was a fair painter if your tastes run to the old-fashioned. Send him back to la belle epoque and he’d have been knee-deep in Parisian pussy within a week.’

And he had to be branching out into ceramics, he had to be strolling into Ryan’s own hitherto secret world. But Ryan could have lived with all of that if James bloody Gallagher hadn’t been better at singing in his head as well.

‘Not that he just sat down and did it first time, you understand,’ said Ryan. ‘It was me that got him settled, showed him the ropes, pointed out where the loo was.’

‘How long it did it take him to learn?’

‘About three weeks,’ said Ryan. ‘I felt him do it, but you know what? As he sang the song, I did too. In my head. Suddenly it was so simple. And we sang together, sort of both of us with the clay running between our fingers, and for that moment I was in tune with the fabric of the universe. I was singing along with the actual music of the spheres.’

But the proof of the pudding is in the baking. So the next day both of them had rushed back down the sewers for the grand ceremonial opening of the kiln.

‘For Stephen it’s an industrial process,’ said Ryan. ‘Just another day at the office, so we had to wait while he cleared out all the make-work until finally he gets to the layer where our plates are.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘And there they are – beautifully fired both of them. When Stephen put it in my hand, still warm, I knew it was mine. I could feel it through my skin. James and I look at each other and we just start laughing like little kids.’

Ryan trailed off and stared down at his hands. He turned his right hand over and rubbed absently at the bandage for a moment.

‘They test their work by banging it against the side of the kiln,’ said Ryan without looking up. ‘So we did the whole you-first-no-you-first routine and Jimmy boy gets fed up and cracks his plate against the edge of the kiln – the edge mind you – and it rings as sweet as a bell.’ Ryan looked up. ‘You can guess what happened next?’

I suddenly realised I’d talked myself into a trap – if the plate had broken in his hands then it could explain the cuts on his palm and possibly, if his brief was clever, the DNA evidence as well.

‘Yours smashed to pieces?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Ryan. ‘It cracked.’

And I swear I could hear all of them breathing out suddenly, all the way from the monitoring room next door.

‘But from an art point of view it would have been better if it had smashed,’ said Ryan. ‘James looked at me then and it was in his eyes that “Oh well, bad luck you,” look. My failure made his success taste all the sweeter – it’s an American thing. I looked back at him and I think he must have seen it in my eyes, what was coming next, because he made his excuses and left.’ Ryan looked back down at his hands. ‘He ran, I chased, we got lost, I hit him with the plate, it broke, he tried to walk away – I stabbed him in the back. Is that what you wanted to hear?’

It was more than I wanted to hear, but police work is all about the details so I stayed another half an hour going over what he could remember of the chase and the exact sequence of events around the stabbing. None of it