CHAPTER 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 whether we needed to use it as a pretext to arrest Zach.

The bowl went into an evidence bag that was sealed with a white sticky label with my name, rank, and number on it. I then, awkwardly, wrote in the time, address, and circumstances of seizure in very small writing. I’ve always felt that the lack of a penmanship course in the basic training at Hendon is a major oversight.

I was torn. I wanted to find out where the bowl had come from but I also wanted to check out James Gallagher’s locker, or work space, or whatever art students have, at St. Martins to see if he had any more magic stuff. I chose to go to St. Martins first because it was only just past eight o’clock and the full panoply of the market was unlikely to be arrayed until about eleven. It takes a couple of hours for the tourists to navigate that tricky bit between Notting Hill tube station and the junction with Pembridge Road, and in street market terms early morning is for fruit and vegetables, not pottery.

Somebody had to stay and keep an eye on Zach, who if not exactly a suspect yet was doing a really good impression of one, until Stephanopoulos arrived with the cavalry. Guleed and Carey played rock, paper, scissors for the privilege. Carey lost.

Guleed had to be dropped off at Belgravia nick to leave Zach’s statement with the Inside Inquiry Team, who would feed it into the mighty Holmes computer system whose job is to sift and collate and hopefully prevent us from making ourselves look like idiots in the eyes of the public. Catching the actual offender would be the icing on the cake.

We stepped out into a weak gray light that seemed to make things colder but at least kept the place from looking like a film set. I was carrying my magic bowl with both hands and stepping carefully on the frost-slippery cobbles. All the cars in the street were white with frost including my Asbo. I started the engine and then rummaged around in the glove compartment for the scraper—it took me ages to clear the windshield while Guleed sat in the passenger seat and offered advice.

“You’ve got a better heater in your car than we have,” said Guleed as I climbed into the driver’s seat. I glared at her. My hands were numb and I had to drum my fingertips on the steering wheel for a couple of seconds to get enough sensation to drive safely.

I pulled out into Kensington Park Road and put a new pair of driving gloves on my Christmas list. As I was turning into Sloane Street it started to snow. I thought it was going to be a light dusting, the kind of nonevent that was such a disappointment growing up. But soon it was coming down in great heavy flakes, falling vertically in the still air and immediately sticking, even on the main roads. Suddenly I could feel the Asbo slipping on the turns. I dropped my speed and flinched as a moron in a Range Rover beeped, overtook me, lost control, and smacked into the back of a Jaguar XF.

Despite the cold, I lowered the window as I drove carefully past and explained that the superior handling characteristics of a four-wheel-drive vehicle were as naught if one were deficient in basic driving skills.

“Did you see any injuries?” I asked Guleed. “Do you think we should stop?”

“Nah,” she said. “Not our job, and anyway I think that was just the first of many.”

We saw two more minor collisions before we reached Sloane Square. The snow was already piling up on cars, the pavement, and even the heads and shoulders of pedestrians. By the time I’d pulled up outside the blocky redbrick exterior of the Belgravia nick, the traffic had thinned down to a trickle of desperate or overconfident drivers. Even the surface of Buckingham Palace Road was white—I’d never seen that happen before. I left the motor running while Guleed climbed out. She asked if I wanted her to take the bowl and I told her no.

“I want my boss to look at it first,” I said.

Once she was safely out of sight I hopped out of the Asbo, opened up the back, and pulled out my Metropolitan Police reflective jacket and, because below a certain temperature even I’m willing to sacrifice style for comfort, a maroon and purple beanie that one of my aunts had knitted for me. Once I had them both on I got back in and headed west—slowly.

JAMES GALLAGHER had been studying not at the brand-new state-of-the-art main campus in Kings Cross but at the smaller Byam Shaw building off Holloway Road near Archway. According to Eric Huber, Gallagher’s tutor and the studio manager, this was a good thing.

“It’s far too brand-new,” he said of the main campus. “Purpose-built, with all the amenities and lots of office space for the administrators. It’s like trying to be creative inside a McDonald’s.”

Huber was a short middle-aged man in an expensive lavender button-down shirt and tan chinos. He was obviously dressed these days by his life partner—probably a second, younger model, if I was any judge—the giveaway being his untidy hair and his winter coat, a cracked leather biker’s jacket that had obviously come from a previous era and had been pressed into service because of the snow.

“It’s much better to work in a building that’s evolved organically,” he said. “That way you’re making a contribution.”

He’d met me in Reception and guided me inside. The college was housed in a couple of brick buildings built as factories at the end of the nineteenth century. Huber proudly recounted that it was used to make munitions during World War One and thus had thick walls and a light ceiling. The students’ studio space had been one large factory floor before the college divided it up with white-painted floor-to-ceiling partitions.

“You notice that there’s no kind of private space,” he said as he led me through the labyrinth of partitions. “We want everyone to see everyone else’s work. There’s no point coming to college and then locking yourself away in a room somewhere.”

Weirdly, it was like stepping back into the art room at school. The same splashes of paint, rolls of paper, jam jars half full of dirty water and brushes. Half-finished sketches on the walls and the faintly rancid smell of linseed oil. Only this was on a grander scale. Hundreds of polyps made of carefully folded colored paper were arranged on one partition wall. What I thought was a display cabinet with old-fashioned VCR/TVs stored on it turned out to be a half-completed installation.

Most of what we passed, at least the bits that I could identify, were done in the abstract, or part sculpture, or installations made from found objects. So it was a surprise to arrive at James Gallagher’s corner of the studio to find it full of paintings. Nice paintings. The ones back home in his room in Notting Hill had been his own work.

“This is a bit different,” I said.

“Contrary to expectations,” said Huber, “we do not shun the figurative.”

The paintings were of London streets, places like Camden Lock, St. Paul’s, the Mall, Well Walk in Hampstead, all on sunny days with happy people in colorful clothes. I don’t know about figurative but it looked suspiciously like the sort of stuff that got flogged in dodgy antiques shops next to pictures of clowns or dogs in hats.

I asked him if it wasn’t a bit touristy.

“I’ll be honest. When he made his application we did think his work was … ah … naive, but you have to look beyond his subject matter and see how beautiful his technique is,” said Huber.

And it can’t have hurt that he was a foreign student paying the full whack, and then some, for the privilege.

“By the way, what has happened to James?” he asked. His tone had become hesitant, cautious.

“All I can say is that he was found dead this morning and we’re treating it as suspicious.” It was the standard formula for these things, although a dead body at Baker Street Station was going to come in a close second to “commuter anger as snow shuts down London” on the lunchtime news. Assuming the media didn’t find a way to link both stories.

“Was it suicide?”

Interesting. “Do you have some reason to think it might have been?” I asked.

“The tone of his work had begun to progress,” said Huber. “To become more conceptually challenging.” He stepped over to the corner where a large flat leather art case was propped up against the wall. He snapped it open, flicked through the contents, and selected a painting. I could see it was different before it was fully out of the case. The colors were dark, angry. Huber turned and held it across his chest so I could get a good look.

Curves of purple and blue suggested the curved roof of a tunnel, while emerging, as if from the shadows, was an elongated inhuman figure sketched with long bold strokes of black and gray paint. Unlike the faces of the people in Gallagher’s earlier work, this figure’s face was full of expression, a large mouth twisted into a gaping leer, eyes like saucers under a sleek hairless dome of a head.

“As you can see,” said Huber, “his work has much improved of late.”

I looked back to the painting of a sun-dappled windowsill—all it was missing was a cat.

“When did his style change?” I asked.

“Oh, his style didn’t change,” said Huber. “The actual technique is remarkably similar to his previous work. What we’re seeing here is much more profound. It’s a radical shift in—I want to say the subject, but I think it goes deeper than that. You only have to look at it—there is emotion, passion even, in that painting that you just don’t see in his earlier work. And not just that he was looking beyond his comfort in terms of technique …”

Huber trailed off.

“It’s happened before,” he went on. “You get these young people and you think they’re showing you one thing and then they take their own lives and you realize what you thought was progress was quite the opposite.”

I’m not totally heartless, so I told him we thought suicide was unlikely. He was so relieved that he didn’t ask me what had happened—which is a square on the suspicious behavior bingo card in and of itself.

“You said he was looking beyond his comfort zone,” I said. “What did you mean?”

“He was asking about new materials,” said Huber. “He was interested in ceramics, which was a bit unfortunate.”

I asked why, and he explained that they’d had to stop using their on-site kiln.

“Every firing is expensive. You’ve got to produce quite a large amount of work to justify running it,” he said, obviously embarrassed that economic reality had crept into the college.

Thinking of the shard of pottery used as the murder weapon, I asked whether they had a kiln at the new campus and could James Gallagher have been using that.

“No,” said Huber. “I’d have organized that, had he asked, but he didn’t.” He frowned and picked up one of the “later” paintings. A woman’s face, pale, big-eyed, surrounded by purple and black shadow. He studied it, sighed, and carefully replaced it with the others.

“Mind you,” he said, “he was certainly spending time elsewhere …” He trailed off again. I waited a moment to see if there was more, but there wasn’t, before asking whether James Gallagher had a locker.

“This way,” said Huber. “It’s at the back.”

One in a bank of gray metal boxes was secured with a cheap padlock, which I knocked off with a chisel I borrowed from a nearby studio. Huber winced as the cheap padlock hit the floor but I think he was more worried about the chisel than the locker. I pulled on my latex gloves and had a look inside. I found two pencil cases, a brush wallet with half the brushes missing, a paperback with an Oxfam price sticker called The Eye of the Pyramid, and an A to Z Guide. Inside the A to Z was a flyer for an exhibition at the Tate Modern by an artist named Ryan Carroll. Sure enough, the flyer had marked the appropriate page in the A to Z with a pencil circle around the Tate Modern in Southwark.

Definitely planning to go, I thought—the grand opening of the show was listed for the next day. I made a note of the times, dates, and names before bagging and tagging the locker contents. Then I used masking tape to secure the locker, gave my card to Mr. Huber, and headed for home.

I HAD to clear three centimeters of snow off my windscreen before I could do the twenty-minute drive back to the Folly and put the Asbo back in the safety of the garage. I braved the icy outside staircase to the upper floor of the coach house where I stash my TV, decent stereo, laptop, and all the other accoutrements of the twenty-first century that rely on a connection to the outside world. This was because the Folly proper was imbued with mystical defenses—not my terminology—that apparently would be weakened by running a decent cable in from the outside. I didn’t suggest a Wi-Fi network because I have my own problems with signal security, and besides, I like having somewhere mostly to myself.

I lit the paraffin heater that I’d found in the Folly’s basement after my electric fan heater blew out the coach house’s antique fuse box for the third time. Then I raided the emergency snack locker, made a mental note to buy some food for it and likewise either clean my small fridge or give up and declare it a biohazard. There was still coffee and half a packet of M&S genuinely biscuit-flavored biscuits, so I decided to finish off my paperwork before hitting Molly’s kitchen.

It took me a couple of hours to finish up Mr. Huber’s statement and my observations about the possible change in James Gallagher’s personality as indicated by the abrupt change in his work. To relieve the boredom I Googled Ryan Carroll to see whether there was anything interesting about James Gallagher’s interest in him. His biography was pretty sparse—born and raised in Ireland and until recently based in Dublin. Best known for an installation of one-quarter-sized crofter’s houses made out of Legos and roofed with old library copies of the classics of Irish literature, all of it covered in a layer of horseshit. It didn’t seem twee enough for early James Gallagher or twisted enough for his late period. There were a couple of reviews in the online magazines, all within the last couple of months, praising his new work, and an interview in which Carroll talked about the importance of recognizing the industrial revolution as the fracture point between man as spiritual being and man as consumer. As someone who grew up in Ireland, witnessed firsthand the booming Celtic Tiger, and then experienced its bust, Carroll brought a unique insight into the alienation of man and machine—or at least that’s what Carroll thought. His new work was aimed primarily at challenging the way we look at the interface between the human form and the machine.

“We are machines,” he was quoted as saying, “for turning food into shit, and we’ve created other machines that allow us to be more productive—to turn more food into more shit.” I got the impression that he was considered a man to watch, although possibly not while eating. I added these details to the report—I didn’t know how significant it was that an art student was planning to go to an art gallery, but the golden rule of modern policing is, everything goes into the pot. Seawoll, or more likely Stephanopoulos, would read through it and decide whether she wanted it followed up.

I called the Inside Inquiry Team at Belgravia, which is the bit that handles the data entry, and asked them if I could email the statement. They said that was fine, providing I handed in the original copy as soon as possible and I labeled it correctly. They also reminded me that unless the Folly had secure evidence storage, I would have to turn over everything I’d recovered from James Gallagher’s locker to the Exhibits Officer.

“Don’t worry. We’re very secure here,” I told them.

It took me another half an hour to finish the forms and send them off, at which point Lesley called to remind me that we were supposed to be interviewing our suspected Little Crocodile, Nightingale having set out for Henley that morning when it became clear I was going to be busy. So much for getting to see Beverley this year. Lesley wondered if he was going to make it back that evening.

“He’s too sensible to drive in this,” I said.

We met up by the back stairs, which were tucked away at the front of the Folly, and she followed me down to the secure storage room, which also served as our gun locker. After my exciting encounter with the Faceless Man on a Soho rooftop, Nightingale and our friend Caffrey the ex-Para spent a fun week clearing out weapons and ammunition that had been rotting inside for over sixty years. The bit I found particularly enjoyable was when I accidentally opened a crate of fragmentation grenades that had been sitting in a puddle since 1946, and Caffrey’s voice shot up two octaves as he told me to back away slowly. We had to have a couple of guys from the Explosives Ordnance Disposal Unit come and take them away. An operation me and Lesley supervised from the café in the park across the road.

The equipment passed for operational by Caffrey had been cleaned and stored on brand-new racks on one side and metal shelving installed on the other for evidence storage. I signed the items in on the clipboard provided and then Lesley and I buggered off to the Barbican.