MONDAY

CHAPTER 2

Baker Street

I MISS the company of other police. Don’t get me wrong, my assignment at the Folly has given me a shot at Detective Constable at least two years ahead of schedule, but what with the current unit complement being me, Detective Inspector Nightingale, and, possibly soon, PC Lesley May, it’s not like I go about my duties mob-handed. It’s one of those things you don’t miss until it’s gone, the smell of wet waterproofs in the locker room, the rush for a terminal in the PC’s writing room on a Friday morning when they put the new jobs on the system, grunting and joking at the 6:00 A.M. briefing. That feeling of there being a lot of you in one place, all mainly caring about the same stuff.

Which was why when I saw the sea of blue lights outside the Baker Street Underground station it was a little bit like coming home. Rising out of the lights was the three-meter statue of Sherlock Holmes complete with deerstalker and hash pipe—there to oversee our detective work and ensure that it was held to the highest fictional standards. The metal lattice gates were folded back and a couple of PCs from the British Transport Police were tucked inside as if hiding from Sherlock’s stern gaze, but more likely because it was freezing. They barely looked at my warrant card, waving me through on the basis that nobody else but a police officer would be stupid enough to be out that early.

I went down the stairs to the main ticket hall. A bunch of guys in high-visibility jackets and heavy boots were standing around drinking coffee, chatting, and playing games on their phones. That night’s routine engineering work was definitely not getting done—expect delays.

Baker Street opened in 1863 but most of it is retrofitted cream tile, wood paneling, and wrought iron from the 1920s, itself overgrown with layers of cables, junction boxes, speakers, and CCTV cameras.

It isn’t that hard to find the bodies at a major crime, even one at a complicated scene like an Underground station—you just look for the highest concentration of disposable paper suits and head that way. When I stepped out onto platform three, the far end looked like an anthrax outbreak. It had to be foul play, then, because you don’t get this much attention if you’re a suicide or one of the five to ten people that manage to accidentally kill themselves on the Underground each year.

Platform three was built in the old cut-and-cover system in which you got a couple of thousand navvies to dig a bloody great big trench, then you put a railway at the bottom and covered it over again. They ran steam trains back then, so half the length of the station was open to the sky to let the steam out and the weather in.

Getting onto a crime scene is like getting into a club—as far as the bouncer is concerned, if you’re not on the list you don’t get in. The list in this case being the crime scene log, and the bouncer being a very serious-looking BTP constable. I told him my name and rank and he glanced over to where a short stocky woman with an unfortunate flattop was glowering at us from farther up the platform. This was the newly minted Detective Inspector Miriam Stephanopoulos and, I realized, it was her first official shout as a D.I. We’d worked together before, which is probably why she hesitated before nodding to the constable. That’s the other way you get into the crime scene—by knowing the management.

I signed into the logbook and availed myself of one of the forensic suits draped over a folding chair. Once I was kitted out I walked over to where Stephanopoulos was supervising the Exhibits Officer as he in turn supervised the forensic team swarming over the far end of the platform.

“Morning, boss,” I said. “You rang?”

“Peter,” she said. Around the Met it’s rumored she keeps a collection of human testicles in a jar by her bed—souvenirs courtesy of the men unwise enough to express a humorous opinion about her sexual orientation. Mind you I’ve also heard that she had a big house outside the North Circular where she and her partner kept chickens, but I never worked up the nerve to ask her about it.

The guy lying dead at the end of platform three had once been handsome, but he wasn’t anymore. He was lying on his side, his face resting on his outflung arm, his back half curled and his legs bent at the knees. Not quite what the pathologists call the pugilistic position, more like the recovery position I’d been taught in first aid.

“Was he moved?” I asked.

“The station manager found him like that,” said Stephanopoulos.

He was wearing pre-faded jeans and a navy suit jacket over a black cashmere roll-neck sweater. The jacket was good quality fabric cut really well—definitely bespoke. Weirdly, though, on his feet, he wore a pair of Doctor Martens, classic type 1460—work boots, not shoes. They were encrusted with mud from their soles to the third eyelet. The leather above the mud line was matte, supple, uncracked—practically brand-new.

He was white, his face pale, straight nose, strong chin. Like I said, probably handsome. His hair was fair and cut into an emo fringe style, with long bangs that hung lankly across his forehead. His eyes were closed.

All of these details would already have been noted by Stephanopoulos and her team. Even as I crouched beside the body, half a dozen forensic techs were waiting to take up samples from anything that wasn’t firmly nailed down, and behind them another set of techs with cutting tools to get all the stuff that was. My job was a bit different.

I put my face mask and protective glasses on, got my face as close to the body as I could without touching it, and closed my eyes. Human bodies retain vestigia very badly, but any magic powerful enough to kill someone directly—if that was what had happened—is powerful enough to leave a trace. Just using my normal complement of senses, I detected blood, dust, and a urine smell that was definitely not foxes this time.

As far as I could tell there was no vestigium associated with the body. I pulled back and looked around at Stephanopoulos. She frowned.

“Why’d you call me in?” I asked

“There’s just something off about this job,” she said. “I figured I’d rather have you check it now than have to call you in later.”

Like after breakfast, when I was awake. But I didn’t say that. You don’t. Not when going out at all hours is practically the working definition of a police officer’s job.

“I’ve got nothing,” I said.

“Couldn’t you …” Stephanopoulos gave a little wave with her hand. We don’t generally explain how we do things to the rest of the Met—apart from anything else, because we make most of our procedures up as we go along. As a result, senior officers like Stephanopoulos know we do something but they’re not really sure what it is.

I stepped away from the body, and the waiting forensic types swarmed past me to finish processing the scene.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet,” said Stephanopoulos. “Single stab wound to the lower back and the blood trail leads back into the tunnel. We can’t tell whether he was dragged or staggered up here himself.”

I looked down the tunnel. Cut-and-cover tunnels have their tracks running side by side, just like an outdoor railway, which meant that both tracks would have to stay shut down while they were searched.

“Which direction is that?” I asked. I’d got turned around somewhere back on the mezzanine level.

“Eastbound,” said Stephanopoulos. Back toward Euston and Kings Cross. “And it’s worse than that.” She pointed down the tunnel where it curved to the left. “Just past the curve is the junction with the District and Hammersmith, so we’re going to have to close down the whole interchange.”

“Transport for London’s going to love that,” I said.

Stephanopoulos barked a short laugh. “They’re already loving it,” she said.

The tube was due to reopen in less than three hours for the day’s normal service, and if the tracks at Baker Street were closed, then the whole system was going to seize up on the opening Monday of the last shopping week before Christmas.

Stephanopoulos was right, though—there was something off about the scene. More than just a dead guy. When I glanced up the tunnel I got a flash, not of vestigia but of something older, that instinct we all inherit from the evolutionary gap between coming out of the trees and inventing the big stick. From when we were just a bunch of skinny bipedal apes in a world full of apex predators. Back when we were lunch on legs. The warning that tells you that something is watching you.

“Want me to have a look down the tunnel?” I asked.

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Stephanopoulos.

PEOPLE HAVE funny ideas about police officers. For one thing they seem to think we’re perfectly happy to rush into whatever emergency there is without any thought of our own safety. And it’s true that like firefighters and soldiers, we tend to go in the wrong direction vis-à-vis trouble, but it doesn’t mean we don’t think. One thing we think about is the electrified third rail and just how easy it is to kill yourself on it. The safety briefing on the joys of electrification were delivered to me and the waiting forensic types by a cheerful-looking sergeant named Jaget Kumar. He was that rare breed, a BTP officer who’d done the five-week course on track safety that allows you to traipse around the heavy engineering even when the tracks are live.

“Not that you want to do that,” said Kumar. “The principal safety tip when dealing with live rails is not to get on the track in the first place.”

I went in behind Kumar while the rest of the forensic team hung back. They might not have been sure what it is I really do, but they understood the principle of not contaminating the crime scene. Besides, that way they could wait and see whether Kumar and I were electrocuted before putting themselves in danger.

Kumar waited until we were safely out of earshot before asking whether I really was from the Ghostbusters.

“What?” I asked.

“The SAU,” said Kumar. “The Ghostbusters?”

Officially we’re the Specialist Crime Directorate 9 otherwise known as the Specialist Assessment Unit otherwise known as the Folly otherwise known as “the ones you go to if things get weird.” At least that’s what we are this year—the Met likes to reorganize on a three year rolling program. Presumably because it makes it harder for criminals to work out who’s arresting them.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Is it true you investigate …” Kumar paused and fished around for an acceptable term. “… unusual phenomena?”

“We don’t do UFOs and alien abductions,” I said, because that’s usually the second question.

“Who does the alien stuff?” asked Kumar. I glanced at him and saw he was taking the piss.

“Can we keep our mind on the job?” I said.

The blood trail was easy to follow. “He kept to the side,” said Kumar. “Away from the center rail.” He shone his torch on a clear boot print in the ballast. “He was staying off the sleepers, which makes me think that he had some variety of safety training.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“If you have to walk the tracks with the juice on then you stay off the sleepers. They’re slippery. You slip, you fall, you put your hands out—and zap.”

“Zap,” I said. “That’s the technical term for it, is it? What do you call someone who’s been zapped?”

“Mr. Crispy,” said Kumar.

“That’s the best you guys can come up with?”

Kumar shrugged. “It’s not like it’s a major priority.”

We were around the curve and out of sight of the platform when we reached the place where the blood trail started. So far the ballast and dirt of the track bed had been pretty efficient at soaking up the blood, but here my torch flashed on a sleek irregular pool of dark red.

“I’m going to check farther up the tracks—see if I can find where he got in,” said Kumar. “Will you be all right here?”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m good.”

I crouched down and methodically quartered the area around the pool of blood with the beam of my torch. Less then half a meter back toward the platform I found a brown leather oblong and my torch reflected off the shiny face of a dead or deactivated phone. I almost picked it up but stopped myself.

I was wearing gloves, had a pocket full of evidence bags and labels, and had this been an assault or a burglary or any other lesser offense I’d have bagged and tagged it myself. But this was a murder inquiry, and woe betide any officer who breaks the chain of evidence, for they will be sat down and have what went wrong with the O. J. Simpson murder trial explained to them at great length. With PowerPoint slides.

I pulled my airwave set out of my pocket, fumbled the batteries back in, called the Exhibits Officer, and told him I had some exhibits for him. I was double-checking the area while I waited when I noticed something odd about the pool of blood. Blood is thicker than water, especially when it’s started to congeal, and so a pool of it doesn’t flatten out in the same way. And, I noticed, it can obscure the thing it’s covering. I leaned in as close as I could without risking contaminating it with my breath. As I did I got a flash of heat, coal dust, and an eye-watering shit smell that was like falling facedown in a farmyard. I actually sneezed. Now, that was vestigia.

I went down on my front to see if I could work out what it was under all that blood.

It was triangular and biscuit-colored. I thought it was a stone at first but saw the edges were sharp and realized it was a shard of pottery.

“Something else?” asked a voice above me—a forensic tech.

I pointed out the things I’d found and then got out of the way as the photographer stepped in to record them in situ. I shone my torch up the tunnel and caught a reflection off Kumar’s high-visibility jacket thirty meters farther on. He flashed back and I walked, carefully, up to join him.

“Anything?” I asked.

Kumar used his torch to pick out a set of modern steel doors set in a decidedly Victorian brick arch. “I thought he might have got in via the old works access but they’re still sealed—you might want to fingerprint them, though.”

“Where are we now?”

“Under Marylebone Road heading east,” he said. “There’s a couple of old ventilation shafts farther up I want to check. Coming?”

It was seven hundred meters to Great Portland Street, the next station. We didn’t go the whole way, just until we could see the platform. Kumar checked his access points and said that had our mystery boy got off the platform there he would have been spotted by the ever-vigilant CCTV operators.

“Where the fuck did he get on the tracks?” said Kumar.

“Maybe there’s some other way of getting in,” I said. “Something that’s not on the blueprints, something we missed.”

“I’m going to get the regular patrolman down here,” said Kumar. “He’ll know.” Patrolmen spent their nights walking the tunnels looking for defects, and were, according to Kumar, guardians of the secret knowledge of the Underground. “Or something,” he said.

I left him waiting on his native guide and headed back toward Baker Street. I was halfway there when I slipped over a loose bit of ballast and fell on my face. I threw out my hands to break my fall, as you do, and it didn’t escape my attention that my left palm had come slap down on the electrified middle rail, which, had the system been switched on, would have been carrying the current. Crispy-fried policeman—lovely.

I was sweating by the time I climbed back onto the platform. I wiped my face and discovered a thin coating of grime on my cheeks—my hands were black with it. Dust from the ballast, I guessed. Or maybe ancient soot from when steam locomotives pulled upholstered cars full of respectable Victorians through the tunnels.

“For God’s sake somebody get that boy a hanky,” said a large voice with a northern accent. “And then someone can fucking tell me why he’s here.”

DETECTIVE CHIEF Inspector Seawoll was a big man from a small town outside Manchester. We’d worked together before—he’d tried to hang me onstage at the Royal Opera House and I’d stuck him with 5cc of elephant tranquilizer; it all made sense at the time, trust me. I’d have said that we came out about even, except he had to do four months of medical leave, which most self-respecting coppers would have considered a bonus.

Medical leave was obviously over and Seawoll was back in charge of his Murder Investigation Team. He’d taken a position up the platform where he could keep an eye on the forensics without having to change out of his camel-hair coat and handmade Tim Little shoes. He beckoned me and Stephanopoulos over.

“Glad to see you feeling better, sir,” I said before I could stop myself.

Seawoll looked at Stephanopoulos. “What’s he doing here?”

“Something about the job felt off,” she said.

Seawoll sighed. “You’ve been leading my Miriam astray,” he told me. “But I’m back now so I hope we’ll see a return to good old-fashioned evidence-based policing and a marked reduction in the amount of weird bollocks.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“That being said—what kind of weird bollocks have you got me into this time?” he asked.

“I don’t think there was any magic—”

Seawoll shut me up with a sharp gesture of his hand.

“I don’t want to hear the m-word coming out of your mouth,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s anything odd about the way he died,” I said, “except—”

Seawoll cut me off again. “How did he die?” he asked Stephanopoulos.

“Nasty stab wound in his lower back,” she said, “probably organ damage, but he died of loss of blood.”

Seawoll asked after the murder weapon, and Stephanopoulos waved over the Exhibits Officer, who held up a clear plastic evidence bag for our inspection. It was the biscuit-colored triangle I’d found in the tunnel.

“What the fuck is that supposed to be?” asked Seawoll.

“A bit of a broken plate.” Stephanopoulos twisted the bag around so we could see that it was indeed a triangular section from a shattered plate with a decorative rim. “Looks like earthenware,” she said.

“They’re sure that’s the weapon?” asked Seawoll.

Stephanopoulos said that the pathologist was as sure as she could be this side of an autopsy.

I didn’t really want to tell Seawoll about the concentrated little knot of vestigia that clung to the murder weapon, but I figured it would only lead to more trouble later if I didn’t.

“Sir,” I said. “That’s the source of the … weird bollocks.”

“How do you know?” asked Seawoll.

I considered explaining vestigia but Nightingale had warned me that sometimes it was better to give them a nice simple explanation that they can relate to. “It just has a kind of glow about it,” I said.

“A glow?”

“Yeah, a glow.”

“That only you can see,” he said. “Presumably with your special mystical powers.”

I looked him in the eye. “Yes,” I said. “My special mystical powers.”

“Fair enough,” said Seawoll. “So our victim gets stabbed in the tunnel with a bit of magic pot, staggers up the track looking for help, climbs up on the platform, collapses, and bleeds out.”

We knew the exact time of death, 1:17 in the morning, because we got it all on a CCTV camera. At 1:14 the footage showed the blur of his white face as he pulled himself onto the platform, the lurch as he tried to get to his feet, and that terrible final collapse, that slump down onto his side—the surrender.

Once the victim had been spotted on the platform it took the station manager less than three minutes to reach him but he was definitely, as the station manager put it, brown bread by the time he found him. We didn’t know how he’d got into the tunnel and we didn’t know how his killer had got out, but at least, once forensics processed the wallet, we knew who he was.

“Oh bollocks,” said Seawoll. “He’s an American.” He passed me an evidence bag with a laminated card in it. At the top was NEW YORK STATE, below that DRIVER LICENSE, then a name, address, and date of birth. His name was James Gallagher, from some town called Albany, New York, and he was twenty-three years old.

We had a quick argument about what time exactly it was in New York before Seawoll dispatched one of the family liaison officers to contact the Albany Police Department. Albany being the capital of New York State, which I didn’t know until Stephanopoulos told me.

“The scope of your ignorance, Peter,” said Seawoll, “is truly frightening.”

“Well, our victim had a thirst for knowledge,” said Stephanopoulos. “He was a student at St. Martins College.”

There’d been a National Union of Students card in the wallet and a couple of business cards with James Gallagher’s name on them and what we hoped was his London address—a mews just off the Portobello Road.

“I do like it when they make it easy for us,” said Seawoll.

“What do you reckon,” said Stephanopoulos. “Home, family, friends—first?”

I’d mostly kept my mouth shut until then and I’d have, frankly, preferred to have sloped off and gone home but I couldn’t ignore the fact that James Gallagher had been done in with a magical weapon. Well, magical potsherd anyway.

“I’d like to have a look ’round his gaff,” I said. “Just in case he was a practitioner.”

“Practitioner, eh?” asked Seawoll. “Is that what you call them?”

I went back to keeping my mouth shut, and Seawoll gave me an approving look.

“All right,” he said. “Home first, round up any friends and family, get him time-lined. BTP are going to get some bodies down here to sweep the tunnels.”

“Transport for London isn’t going to like that,” said Stephanopoulos.

“That’s unfortunate for them, isn’t it?”

“We should tell forensics that the murder weapon may be archaeological,” I said.

“Archaeological?” asked Seawoll.

“Could be,” I said.

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Which as usual,” said Seawoll, “is as about as useful as a chocolate teapot.”

“Would you like me to call my boss in?” I asked.

Seawoll pursed his lips, and I realized with a shock that he was really considering whether to bring Nightingale in. Which annoyed me because it meant he didn’t trust me to do the job, and unsettled me because there’d been something comforting about Seawoll’s resistance to any kind of “magic wank” impinging upon his investigations. If he started to take me seriously, then the pressure was going to be on me to deliver.

“I heard Lesley’s joined your mob,” he said.

Ninety-degree change in direction of the conversation—classic police trick. Didn’t work because I’d been rehearsing the answer to that question ever since Nightingale and the commissioner came to yet another “agreement.”

“Not officially,” I said. “She’s on indefinite medical leave.”

“What a waste,” said Seawoll, shaking his head. “It’s enough to make you weep.”

“How do you want to do this, sir?” I asked. “AB do the murder and I do … the other … stuff?” AB being the radio abbreviation for Belgravia Police Station, where Seawoll’s Murder Team was located—we police never like to use real words when we can use an incomprehensible bit of jargon instead.

“After how that worked out last time?” said Seawoll. “Fuck no. You’re going to be operating out of our incident room as a member of the inquiry team. That way I can keep my fucking eye on you.”

I looked at Stephanopoulos.

“Welcome to the murder squad,” she said.