Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (32 page)

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 alternative 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 didn’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.

‘What should we call them, then?’ asked Lesley.

‘You,’ said Zach pointing at me and then Lesley. ‘Shouldn’t be calling them anything at all – you should be leaving them alone.’

‘One of them shot at me,’ I said. ‘With a Sten gun. And another one buried me under the ground, under the fucking ground, Zach, and left me for dead. So I don’t think leaving them alone is going to be a bleeding option.’

‘They were just defending …’ started Zach and then caught himself.

‘Defending what?’ I asked.

‘Themselves,’ said Zach. ‘You’re the Isaacs man – we know all about you from back through the annals of history. We all know what happens if you’re a square peg in a round hole.’

So definitely fae, I thought.

‘So
who
were they defending?’ I asked.

‘Self-defence,’ said Zach.

Outright lie.

‘What’s his brother’s name?’ I asked.

Hesitation. ‘Marcus,’ said Zach – another lie.

‘Does he eat a lot of greens?’ asked Lesley. ‘Because the Nolan brothers were delivering a ton of vegetables for just two people.’

‘They live an active, healthy life,’ said Zach.

‘Zach,’ I said. ‘How stupid do you think we are?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Zach. ‘Do you want it on a scale of one to ten?’

‘Who are they?’ asked Lesley.

We saw him open his mouth to say – who’s they? But Lesley slapped her palm on the table. ‘My face itches, Zach,’ she hissed. ‘The sooner you tell us the truth the sooner I can go home and get out of this mask.’

‘Who are they?’ I said.

‘They’re just people,’ said Zach. ‘You need to leave them alone.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ I said. ‘Has been since your friend shut down the Central Line during the Christmas rush. They’re talking a closed platform for up to six months, they’re talking millions of pounds. Do you really think they’re going to be satisfied if I just stroll up and say “we know who did it but we’ve decided to leave them alone”?’

Zach slumped forward and pressed his head against the tabletop and groaned – theatrically.

‘Give us something we can take upstairs,’ said Lesley. ‘Then we can do a deal.’

‘I want assurances,’ said Zach.

‘You can have my word,’ I said.

‘No disrespect, Peter,’ said Zach. ‘But I don’t want a promise from the monkey. I want it from the organ grinder – I want it from the Nightingale.’

‘If they’re
special
,’ I said, ‘then there’s a chance we can keep it low-key. But if you want me to bring in my governor, then you’re going to have to talk to me first.’

‘Who are they?’ asked Lesley.

They were, as far as Zach understood it, people that had met up with Eugene Beale and Patrick Gallagher when they were working on the railways south of the river.

‘Not when they were digging the sewers?’ I asked.

‘From before that,’ said Zach. ‘They helped dig the tunnel at Wapping.’

Which explained why Beale’s butty gang had such a reputation as excavators.

‘You say they’re not fae,’ I said. ‘But they are different?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Different how?’ asked Lesley.

‘Look,’ said Zach. ‘There’s basically two types of different, right? There’s born different. Which is like me and the Thames girls and what you call
fae
but only because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And there’s choosing to be different, which is like you and the Nightingale.’ He pointed at me and then frowned. ‘Sorry, there’s three basic types, okay? There’s born, those that choose and those that are made different.’ He pointed at Lesley. ‘Like through an accident or something.’