Whispers Under Ground

favours on those rare occasions when she remembers she’s supposed to be a Christian.

My dad only attended a church if he rated their band, so you can imagine how often that happened. When I was really young I liked the dressing up in the good clothes and there were usually other kids to play with, but it never lasted. After a couple of months my mum would get a Sunday cleaning gig or pick a fight with the pastor or just lose interest. Then we’d go back to Sunday being a day I got to stay in and watch cartoons and change records on my dad’s turntable.

I got out of the car and into an eerie silence. The air was still, sounds were muffled, the shop windows were blind in the flat yellow glare of the street lamps and had the artificiality of a film set. The clouds were low and sullen with reflected light. The slam of the car doors was muffled in the moist air.

‘It’s going to snow,’ said Carey.

It was certainly cold enough. I could stick my hands in my pockets but my ears were starting to freeze. Guleed pulled a big furry hat with ear flaps down over her hijab and looked at me and Carey, bare-headed and frozen-eared, with amusement.

‘Practical and modest,’ she said.

Neither of us gave her the satisfaction of an answer.

We headed for the mews.

‘Where did you get the hat?’ I asked.

‘Nicked it off my brother,’ she said.

‘I heard it gets cold in the desert,’ said Carey. ‘You’d need a hat like that.’

Guleed and I exchanged looks, but what can you do?

For decades Notting Hill has been fighting a valiant rearguard action against the rising tide of money that’s been creeping in now that Mayfair has been given over entirely to the oligarchs. I could see that whoever had done the conversion on the mews had adopted the spirit of the place because nothing says I’m part of a vibrant local community quite like sticking a bloody great security gate at the entrance to your street. Guleed, Carey and I stared through the bars like Victorian children.

It was your typical Notting Hill mews, a cobbled cul-de-sac lined with what used to be the coach-houses of the wealthy, now converted into houses and flats. It was the sort of place that gay cabinet ministers used to stash their boyfriends back when that sort of thing would have caused a scandal. These days it was probably full of bankers and the children of bankers. All the windows were dark but there were BMWs, Range Rovers and Mercedes parked awkwardly in the narrow roadway.

‘Do you think we should wait for the Stephanopoulos?’ asked Carey.

We gave it some careful thought but not for too long since the religiously non-observant amongst us were freezing our ears off. There was a grey intercom box welded to the gate, so I pressed the number of Gallagher’s house. No answer. I tried a couple more times. Nothing.

‘Could be broken,’ said Guleed. ‘Should we try the neighbours?’

‘I don’t want to have to deal with the neighbours yet,’ said Carey.

I checked the gate. It was topped with blunt spikes, widely spaced, but there was a white bollard situated conveniently close enough to give me a stepping point. The metal was painfully cold under my hands but it took me less than five seconds to get my foot on the top bar, swing myself over and jump down. My shoes skidded on the cobbles but I managed to recover without falling over.

‘What do you think?’ asked Carey. ‘Nine point five.’

‘Nine point two,’ said Guleed. ‘He lost points for the dismount.’

There was an exit button on the wall just beyond arm’s reach of the gate. I pushed it and buzzed the others in.

Given that all three of us were Londoners, we paused a moment to carry out the ritual of the ‘valuation of the property’. I guessed that, given the area, it was at least a million and change.

‘Million and a half easy,’ said Carey.

‘More,’ said Guleed. ‘If it’s freehold.’

There was a ye olde carriage lamp mounted next to the front door just to show that money can’t buy you taste. I rang the doorbell and we heard it going off upstairs. I left my finger on it – that’s the beauty of being the police – you don’t have to be considerate at five o’clock in the morning.

We heard flat-footed steps coming down a staircase and a voice yelling – ‘I’m coming, hold your fucking horses …’ And then the door opened.

He was tall, white, early twenties, unshaven, with a mop of brown hair and naked except for a pair of underpants. He was thin though not unhealthy. His ribs stuck out but he almost had a six-pack and his shoulders, arms and legs were muscled. He had a big mouth in a thin face that opened wide when he saw us.

‘Oi,’ he said. ‘Who the fuck are you supposed to be?’

We all showed him our warrant cards. He stared at them for a long second.

‘How about a five-minute head start to hide my stash?’ he said finally.

We surged forward as one.

The ground floor had obviously been converted from a garage and then notionally split in two – faux rusticated kitchen area at the back, open-plan ‘reception’ at the front, with an open-sided staircase running up the left wall. Open-plan houses are all very well, but without a traditional hallway to act as a choke point it’s laughably easy for a trio of eager police to roll right over you and take control.

I got between him and the stairs, Guleed slipped past me and up the stairs to check there was nobody else in the house and Carey stood in front of the man deliberately placing himself just inside the guy’s personal space.

‘We’re family liaison officers,’ he said. ‘So in the normal course of events we’re not that bothered about your recreational drug use, but this attitude depends entirely on whether you give us your wholehearted cooperation.’

‘And provide coffee,’ I said.

‘You do have coffee?’ asked Carey.

‘We’ve got coffee,’ said the man.

‘Is it good coffee?’ shouted Guleed from somewhere upstairs.

‘It’s proper coffee. You make it in a cafetiere and everything. It’s bare wicked stuff.’

‘What’s your name?’ asked Carey.

‘Zach,’ said the man. ‘Zachary Palmer.’

‘Is this your house?’

‘I live here but it belongs to my mate, my friend James Gallagher – he’s American. Actually it belongs to some company, but he gets the use of it and I live here with him.’

‘Are you in a relationship with Mr Gallagher?’ asked Carey. ‘Civil partnership, long-term committed … no?’

‘We’re just friends,’ said Zach.

‘In that case, Mr Palmer, I suggest we repair to the kitchen for coffee.’

I got out of the way as Zachary, looking a bit wild-eyed, was herded into the kitchen area by Carey. He’d be looking to get names and addresses of James Gallagher’s friends, and if possible, family as well as establishing Zach’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. You want to do that sort of thing fast before everyone has a chance to co-ordinate their stories. Guleed would be upstairs hunting out any useful diaries, phone books, laptops and anything else that would allow her to expand James Gallagher’s acquaintance tree and fill in the gaps in the timeline of his last movements.

I glanced around the living room. I guessed the house must have come ready furnished because it had that decorated out of a catalogue feel although, judging by the sturdiness of the furniture and the lack of laminated chipboard, it was probably a more expensive catalogue than my mother would have used. The TV was big and flat but two years old. There was a Blu-Ray player, an X-Box but no cable or satellite. I checked the simulation oak shelves beside the TV; the collection was a bit ostentatiously foreign, newly remastered Godards, Truffauts and Tarkovskys. Kurosowa’s Yojimbo was lying sacrilegiously on top of its case, ejected in favour of, judging from the case lying on the floor by the TV, one of the Saw movies.

The original fireplace, a rarity given that the ground floor must have been a coach house, had been bricked up and plastered over but the mantelpiece remained. Perched on it was an expensive Sony mini-system with no iPod