attached – something else to look for – an unpainted figurine, a deck of playing cards, a packet of Rizlas and an unwashed cup.
Over in the kitchen area Carey had Zach settled at the table while he pottered around making proper coffee and having a rummage through all the cupboards and shelves for good measure.
If you’re a professional cleaner, like my mum, one of the ways you make sure you get the dust out of the corners is to use a moist mop and swirl it along the skirting board. All the crud gets rolled up into little damp balls, you wait a bit for them to dry and then you hoover them up. It leaves a distinctive swirling pattern in the carpet which I found behind the TV. It meant that James and Zach were not cleaning their own home and that I was unlikely to find anything useful in the living room. I headed for the stairs.
The bathroom was professionally sparkling but I was hoping that whoever the cleaner was she’d drawn the line at going into the bedrooms. Judging by the combination old sock and ganja smell in the smaller of the two bedrooms she had indeed. Zach’s bedroom, I guessed. The clothes scattered on the floor had British labels and there was a high-tech bong vaporiser, improvised out of a converted soldering iron and Perspex tube, stashed under the bed. I only found one bit of luggage, a large gym bag with worn straps and stains on the bottom. I gave it a cautious sniff. It had been washed recently but under the detergent there was just of whiff of something rank. What my dad would call tramp smell.
Whatever it was it wasn’t magical, so I headed out.
Guleed and I met on the landing.
‘No diary or address book – it must be on his phone,’ she said. ‘A couple of airmail letters, his mum I think, same address as the driver’s licence.’ She said she was going to call the police in America and ask them to make contact. I asked her how she was going to find the number.
‘That’s what internet is for,’ she said.
‘That’s not how the song goes,’ I said but she didn’t get it. ‘I think the governor is going to want to take a close look at Zach, especially if he hasn’t got an alibi.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I don’t think he’s a student,’ I said. ‘He might even have been sleeping rough.’
Guleed gave me a lopsided smile. ‘Must be a villain then.’
‘Have you done a PNC check yet?’
‘Never mind my job, Peter. You’re supposed to be checking for magic or whatever.’ She smiled to show that she was half joking, but only half. I let her get on with her job and stepped into James’ bedroom to see if I could detect any weird bollocks.
Which appeared to be in short supply.
I was surprised by the lack of posters on the walls, but James Gallagher had been twenty-three. Maybe he’d outgrown posters or maybe he was saving the space for more serious work. There was a stack of canvasses leaning against the wall. They were mostly city scenes, local I thought, after recognising Portobello Market. It didn’t look like tourist tat so I figured it was probably his own work – a bit retro for a modern art school student, though.
The bed was rumpled but the sheets had been recently changed and the duvet laid out and turned back. There was a pile of books on the bedside table – art books but of the serious academic kind rather than the coffee table variety; on socialist realism, propaganda posters of the 1930s, classic London Underground posters, and a volume called
Looking for material? I wondered. Worried about himself or somebody else? The book was still crisp and relatively new. Was he worried about Zach perhaps?
I looked around the room, but there were no books on the arcane or even the vaguely mystical and not even a vestige of
It was entirely possible that any magical side to the murder rested with the killer, not the victim. I probably should have stayed in the tunnels with Sergeant Kumar and the search team.
So of course I found what I was looking for five minutes later, downstairs, while we were statementing Zach.
Zach had put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt while I’d been upstairs. He was sitting half hunched over the table while Carey took his statement. Guleed had taken a position leaning nonchalantly against the simulation farmhouse kitchen unit just inside Zach’s peripheral vision. She was watching his face carefully and frowning. I guessed she’d spotted the mental health book too.
There was a cup of coffee waiting on the table for me. I sat down next to Carey but kept my posture relaxed, took my coffee and leaned back slightly as I sipped it. Zach’s hands were trembling and he was unconsciously rocking back and forth as we went through his movements in the last twenty-four hours. It’s always useful to have your witnesses a little bit unnerved, but you can have too much of a good thing.
On the table was an earthenware bowl sitting on the kitchen table with two apples, a splotchy banana and a handful of minicab cards inside it. It was the same rich biscuit colour as the shard I’d found in the Underground but too curved to be an identical piece.
I took another gulp of coffee, which was definitely the good stuff, and casually brushed my fingers along the rim of the bowl. There it was, fainter than the shard, heat and charcoal and what I realised was the smell of pig shit and … I wasn’t sure what.
I emptied the fruit and cards from the bowl and traced my fingertips across the smooth curve of its interior. It seemed beautifully shaped but I couldn’t say why. A circle is just a circle, after all. But it was as beautiful as Lesley’s smile. At least how Lesley’s smile used to be.
I realised that the others had fallen silent.
‘Where did this come from?’ I asked Zach.
He looked at me like I was bonkers, so did Guleed and Carey.
‘The bowl?’ he asked.
‘Yes the bowl,’ I said. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘It’s just a bowl,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said slowly. ‘Do you know where it came from?’
Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique. ‘I think he got it from the market.’
‘From Portobello?’
‘Yeah.’
Portobello Market is at least a kilometre long and must have at least a thousand stalls, not to mention the hundred-plus shops that line both sides of Portobello Road and spill out into the side streets.
‘Any chance of you being bit more specific?’ I asked.
‘Top end I think,’ said Zach. ‘You know. Not the posh end, the other end where the normal stalls are. That’s all I know.’
I picked up the bowl, cupped it in my hands and brought it level with my eyes.
‘I’m going to need to package this,’ I said. ‘Has anybody got any bubble wrap?’
4
Archway
The answer to that question turned out to be, surprisingly, yes. Apparently, art students often have to transport fragile bits of work around and so a cupboard in the kitchen turned out to be not only full of aging spaghetti and dubious packets of cup-a-soup but bubble wrap, tissue paper and masking tape.
It was also where Zach kept his stash, a ziploc bag of yellow-looking leaf that Carey suggested constituted a seasoning rather than a controlled substance. Nonetheless Carey unofficially confiscated it until it was decided
