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  ‘Why haven’t you got any grapes?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been asking myself the same question,’ I said. ‘You didn’t bring flowers, either.’

  ‘Do you think there’s people living in the sewer system?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you?’ I asked.

  ‘I think it’s a possibility,’ she said. ‘And if it’s true it’s an issue that will have to be addressed carefully.’

  ‘And you think you’re just the woman for the job?’

  ‘I’m the goddess on the spot, so to speak,’ she said. ‘If not me, then who?’

  I wanted to say that me and Nightingale had it all under control but under the circumstances I didn’t think she’d believe me.

  Tyburn leant forward and gave me her sincere look.

  ‘How long do you think the status quo can last?’ she asked. ‘If there are people living in the sewers wouldn’t it be better to bring them into mainstream society?’

  ‘Put them on social security, get them a council flat and send their kids to school?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps we should regularise where they live now, get them access to healthcare and education. Give them a stake – at least give them a choice.’

  ‘If there are people down there,’ I said.

  ‘All I want,’ said Tyburn as she stood up and prepared to leave, ‘is for you to give this some thought.’

  I gave a noncommittal grunt and she went. Truth is, I was getting really peckish and was considering getting up and hunting down some food when my parents turned up with a day’s worth of jelof rice, hot beef and, best of all, a freezer container full of freshly cooked deep-fried plantain. My mum, alarmed by the recent E. coli outbreak and having a professionally low opinion of hospital cleaning standards, had decided I shouldn’t eat hospital food. Obedient son that I was, I dutifully stuffed my face and promised faithfully that, no matter what, I would be turning up for Christmas at Aunty Jo’s.

  Eating the best part of a kilogram of rice would slow down a hippopotamus, so after Mum and Dad had gone I lay down and dozed off.

  I opened my eyes to find Zachary Palmer with his hand in one of my Tupperware boxes.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  He stopped scoffing up the deep-fried plantain and grinned at me.

  ‘Your mum’s a bare wicked cook,’ he said.

  ‘That’s mine, you thieving git,’ I said and snatched the box off him. Unperturbed, he moved on to the fruit. His sweatshirt was clean and still showed the sharp creases that only Molly can inflict on casual wear.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’m touched,’ I said.

  ‘Not for me, you understand, but he was a bit worried,’ said Zach.

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

  Zach froze with a satsuma segment halfway to his lips. ‘Did I say he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You did.’

  ‘Can I at least take the plantain?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said and tightened my grip on the Tupperware.

  ‘Well then. Laters,’ he said and bolted.

  You know there’s always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain that the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating or all three. Going to the dentist, asking someone out for the first time, breaking up a stag do outside the Bar Rumba on a Saturday night and, now, chasing a suspect through a hospital while wearing an open-backed hospital gown.

  I went straight for the stairs because either Zach would hit the lifts, in which case I could beat him down; or he’d go for the stairs, in which case I’d be right behind him. When I pushed my way through the heavy fire doors there was no sign of him on the staircase, so I went down three steps at a time pausing only to scream loudly when I stubbed my toe halfway to the bottom.

  Lesley says that the key to a successful chase is to know where the suspect is running to. Even if you don’t know their ultimate destination you should be able to make an educated guess about where the next choke point is. In Zach’s case, this was the hospital lobby, which is the only public way in or out. So that’s where I went first. Unfortunately, it’s got two exits at opposite ends to each other and what with the icy road conditions, the onset of winter flu and some pretty aggressive full contact shopping, it was full of the walking wounded and their hangers-on.

  If Zach had been sensible enough to walk slowly and calmly out he would have got away. But, luckily for me, he was still running when he went out the north exit and all I had to do was follow the yelps of outrage as he pushed through the crowd. They yelled even louder when I steamed past in pursuit, what with me being a half-naked IC3, albeit in winter plumage. They came to all the wrong conclusions and scattered out of my way.

  I ran down the wide flight of steps in front of the hospital, staggered once as my bare heel skidded on a bit of rotting ice, recovered and looked right and left. Unless you’re heading for the hospital, that particular stretch of pavement isn’t good for anything except inhaling exhaust fumes – which meant Zach was easy to spot, on my left, still running.

  I went after him with my feet reminding me at every step why I spend all that money on trainers. The exertion kept me warm, but a cold breeze around my bum reminded me that I was short in the trouser department – that and the wolf whistle I got as I rounded the corner into Tottenham Court Road.

  Zach had obviously thought he’d put his troubles behind him, because he’d slowed down to a fast saunter. I was nearly upon him when he glanced back, saw me and went off like a jackrabbit. He was fast, and one thing was for certain – I wasn’t about to catch him in bare feet. He’d have got away if Lesley hadn’t at that moment come out of Sainsbury’s with her shopping, seen me, seen Zach, and made the kind of lightning decision that got her voted graduate most likely to make chief superintendent by thirty at Hendon.

  She didn’t try for anything flashy like a clothesline. She merely stuck out her foot and down he went on his face. Still holding two bags of shopping and my laptop, she skipped over and planted her foot on his back – holding him down until I could arrive. Between us we’d managed to attract a bit of a crowd.

  ‘Police,’ I said. ‘Move along. Nothing to see here.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ asked a voice from the crowd.

  ‘I’m going to let you up now, Zach,’ said Lesley. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘I won’t, I won’t,’ he said. ‘Just don’t you do anything hasty.’

  ‘Hasty?’ I said. ‘You just made me run naked down Tottenham Court Road. You’d rather I gave it some thought?’

  A couple of uniforms turned up who neither me nor Lesley knew personally and it could have gone pear-shaped. I know I would have arrested me had I been them, except I dropped Detective Inspector Stephanopoulos’s name into the conversation and suddenly they couldn’t be more helpful. However, once you’ve invoked the name of Stephanopoulos you have to live according to her principles, unless you crave trouble, so we had to get someone from the Murder Team down to arrest Zach. While he was bundled off to an interview room at AB, I sloped back to the hospital to find my clothes and discharge myself. You’d be amazed how long that can take.

  24

  Sloane Square

  I was disappointed to find that there was nothing waiting for me on my desk back at the outside inquiry team office.

  ‘We assigned them elsewhere when you went into hospital,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  Six whole days on the Murder Team and I’d only managed to fulfil about two and a half actions. Not only was it not going to look good on any performance review, but I also doubted that being engaged in a supernatural sewer battle with an underground Earthbender was going to serve as much of an explanation.

  Because we wanted to avoid the lengthy booking-in process, we hadn’t charged Zach. But we made it clear that arrest and Christmas in the cells was the true altern
ative to ‘helping police with their inquiries’.

  The interview rooms at AB are featureless cubes with Windsor blue walls and scuffed wooden trim. There was a scarred wooden table, chairs, the standard double tape recorder and a CCTV camera enclosed in an opaque Perspex bubble that hung from the ceiling. In the hour or so since he’d been placed in it, Zach had managed to create a pile of chocolate bar wrappers and shredded polystyrene cup.

  ‘Hello gorgeous,’ he said as me and Lesley entered.

  ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ I said.

  ‘Got anything to eat?’ he asked. ‘I’m bare hungry.’

  I swept the rubbish into the bin and slapped down a suspiciously floppy package wrapped in the greaseproof paper in front of him. Zach opened it cautiously, took a sniff and then gave me a broad smile.

  ‘From Molly?’ he asked.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Brawn sarnie,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Lesley, who as a proper Essex girl knew her lights from her livers. She’d once spent a happy half an hour explaining what strange and secret bits of the animal’s body regularly turned up in Molly’s ‘traditional’ cooking. If you don’t know already I’m not going to tell you what brawn is. Let’s just say that the common name for it is head cheese and leave it at that.

  If she hadn’t been wearing a mask, I’m pretty certain that even Lesley would have looked shocked at the enthusiastic way Zach tucked in.

  There’s several schools of thought about using tricks and treats in an interview. Seawoll says that in the old days, when just about everyone smoked, if you withheld the fags for long enough your suspect would tell you just about anything in return for a puff. Which was fine, if all you wanted was a result. But if you were looking for accurate information you needed to be a bit trickier.

  In our pre-interview discussion the consensus was that the problem with Zach was not going to be making him talk, but getting him to talk sense. We didn’t think low blood sugar would be helpful but, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, we didn’t want him hyper either – hence the offal sandwich.

  ‘Let’s talk about your friend,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of friends,’ said Zach.

  ‘Let’s talk about the one that’s good with his hands,’ I said.

  Zach gave me a blank look but he wasn’t fooling me.

  ‘Pale face,’ I said. ‘Hoodie, digs out concrete with his bare hands.’

  Zach glanced at where the twin cassette tapes whirred in the recorder.

  ‘Are you allowed to talk about this stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just us here,’ said Lesley.

  If only, I thought. There being a good chance that Nightingale, Seawoll and Stephanopoulos were watching on the monitor and maintaining a blow-by-blow commentary complete with score cards.

  ‘You tried to stall me at the underground rave,’ I said. ‘You didn’t want me going after him.’

  ‘And look what happened,’ said Zach.

  ‘So you do know him,’ said Lesley.

  ‘We may have crossed paths,’ said Zach. ‘Done a little business, socialised a bit.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘His name’s Stephen,’ said Zach. ‘Any chance of a Mars bar?’

  ‘Surname?’ I asked.

  ‘Hot chocolate?’ asked Zach. ‘Nothing finishes off brawn like a hot chocolate.’

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘They don’t go in for surnames,’ said Zach.

  I wanted to ask who ‘they’ were, but sometimes it’s better to let the interviewee think they’ve got one past you. So I asked where Stephen was from.

  ‘Peckham,’ said Zach.

  We asked whereabouts in Peckham, exactly, but he said he didn’t know.

  ‘Do you know what he did with his gun?’ I asked.

  ‘What gun?’ asked Zach.

  ‘The gun he used to shoot at us,’ I said.

  For a moment Zach was staring at us as if we were mad. Then he frowned.

  ‘Oh, that gun,’ he said. ‘You must have done something, because that gun’s purely for self-protection. I mean, I wouldn’t want you thinking that he just goes around shooting at anyone.’

  ‘Has he shown it to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The gun,’ I said. ‘You ever seen it?’

  Zach leant back in his seat and gave an airy wave. ‘Course,’ he said. ‘But not to hold or nothing.’

  ‘Do you know what kind of gun it was?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘It was a gun,’ said Zach making a pistol shape with his hand. ‘I don’t really know guns.’

  ‘Was it a revolver or a semiautomatic pistol?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘It was a Glock,’ said Zach. ‘Same as what the police use.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know guns,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what Stephen said it was,’ said Zach. He turned to Lesley. ‘Any chance of that hot chocolate – I’m dying here.’

  As a largely unarmed police force, the Met have some fairly serious views about the illegal possession of firearms. It tends to get a lot of attention from senior officers who are willing to devote substantial resources to the problem and usually ends in a visit from CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns. Given that Zach must know how seriously we take it, the question had to be – what was so important that he was willing to implicate his friend Stephen in a firearms charge just to cover it up?

  Especially given that having interviewed all the witnesses and searched Oxford Circus the Murder Team were pretty certain that Zach’s good friend ‘Stephen’ hadn’t been carrying one when he’d got off the train.

  ‘Hot chocolate was it?’ asked Lesley getting up.

  ‘Yes please,’ said Zach.

  Lesley asked if I wanted coffee, I said yes and I told the tape recorder that PC Lesley May had left the room. Zach grinned. Obviously he thought he’d kept his secret – which was exactly what we wanted him to think.

  ‘Your friend Steve?’

  ‘Stephen,’ said Zach. ‘He doesn’t like Steve.’

  ‘Your friend Stephen from Peckham,’ I said. ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘Since I was a kid,’ he said.

  I checked my notes. ‘While you were at St Mark’s Children’s Home?’

  ‘As it happens, yes,’ said Zach.

  ‘Which is in Notting Hill,’ I said. ‘Not five minutes’ walk from James Gallagher’s house. That’s a bit of a way from Peckham.’

  ‘Neither of us likes to be confined,’ said Zach. ‘What with the free bus and everything.’

  ‘So you used to hang,’ I said.

  ‘Hang?’ asked Zach. ‘Yeah, we used to hang. We’d often chill as well. And on occasion we’d be jammin’.’

  ‘Around your ends,’ I said. ‘Portobello, Ladbroke Grove?’

  ‘There’s always something happening at the market,’ said Zach. ‘Stephen’s a bit of a culture freak isn’t he – and we used to earn a bit of cash running errands and stuff.’

  ‘Was he into art?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s good with his hands,’ said Zach, and something about the way he said it made me wonder why he’d be reluctant to talk about art.

  ‘Did he make pottery?’ I asked.

  Zach hesitated, and before he could answer Lesley came in with a tray of hot chocolate, coffee and a plate of biscuits. Unfortunately, this part of the interview had been scripted. So instead of pushing Zach I made a note on the pad in front of me. Stephen → Pottery? → Motive?

  Lesley identified herself for the tape and then leaned in to murmur; ‘I swear this nick has the worst coffee.’ I gave Zach a meaningful look.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Interesting.’

  Zach looked carefully unconcerned.

  ‘You say your friend has a pistol,’ I said.

  ‘Had a pistol,’ said Zach. ‘He’s probably ditched it by now.’

  ‘He did
n’t have one at Oxford Circus,’ I said.

  Zach took his hot chocolate. ‘Like I said – he must have ditched it.’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ said Lesley. ‘Not on the train, not on the tracks not anywhere between the stairs at Holland Park to the platform at Oxford Circus. We’ve looked.’

  ‘And the funny thing is,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t shot at with a pistol, I was shot at by a Sten gun. And trust me on this, it’s very easy to tell the difference.’

  ‘Not to mention simple to differentiate in the ballistics lab,’ said Lesley.

  ‘So I think there was at least two of them,’ I said, and took a sip of my coffee. It was vile. ‘Two big-eyed and pasty-faced geezers, and I don’t think either of them are from Peckham. Are they?’

  ‘They’re brothers,’ said Zach and you had to admire him, if only for his persistence. But it didn’t matter, because in an interview a lie can almost be as good as the truth. That’s because all good lies contain as much truth as the liar thinks they can get away with. This truth accumulates and, because it’s easier to remember the truth than something you’ve made up, it remains consistent where the lies do not. All you have to do is keep asking variations on the same questions, until you can sort one from the other. That’s why helping the police with their inquiries can take you all day – if you’re lucky.

  ‘Are they fae?’ asked Lesley.

  Zach gave a startled glance at the tape recorder and then at the CCTV camera.

  ‘Are you sure you’re allowed to talk about that stuff?’ he asked.

  ‘Are they?’ I asked.

  ‘You know you guys are the only people that say “fae”,’ said Zach. ‘Out there we don’t call people fae. Not if you want to keep your teeth.’

  ‘You said your dad was a fairy,’ I said.

  ‘Well he was,’ said Zach.

  ‘The Rivers said you were half goblin.’

  ‘Yeah I ain’t going to say nothing against the Rivers, but they aren’t half a bunch of stuck-up cunts,’ said Zach getting loud at the end.

  At last, I thought, a point of entry.

  ‘Is your friend Stephen a goblin, then?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘You shouldn’t go around calling people a goblin unless you know what the word means,’ said Zach. his voice back to its cheery cockney geezer normal. But I could hear the agitation underneath. Plus he’d started drumming his fingers on the tabletop.