THURSDAY

CHAPTER 14

Westbourne Park

IN THE good old days when men were real men and members of the Flying Squad dealt with armed robbers the way God intended—with a pickaxe handle—if you wanted to follow a suspect vehicle you needed at least three cars. That way you could run a loose “box” around your target, which was not only hard to shake but minimized the risk that one of your cars would be made as a tail. Nowadays, with the authorization of an officer of Inspector rank or over, you just run up behind the vehicle in question—when it’s stationary, obviously—and stick a tracker to the chassis. They’re about half the size of a matchbox and cost about the same as a week’s clubbing in Ibiza.

New Covent Garden at five o’clock on a winter’s morning is a concrete arena full of headlights, smoke, and shouting. Trucks, vans, and forklifts snort and growl in and out of loading bays while men in reflective coats and woolen hats clutch clipboards and dial their mobiles with clumsy gloved fingers. It was a simple matter to park the Asbo in the shelter of a multistory car park and crunch through the snow down to the railway arches where all three Transit vans registered to Nolan and Sons were waiting for the day’s load. Kevin’s van was easy to spot. It was the oldest and dirtiest. It was also at the end of the row farthest from the garage door. I hunched up in my jacket, pulled my hat down over my ears, and covered the last twenty meters as nonchalantly as I could. As I got within a couple of meters I heard voices on the other side of the van.

“What if they come looking?” asked a whiney voice—Kevin Nolan.

“They know your name, Kev. If they want to find you it wouldn’t exactly pose an insurmountable problem for them,” said a deeper, calmer voice. “So you might as well make yourself useful.” Kevin’s big friend or more likely brother.

I felt the top of the tracker to make sure I had it right side up and then, quick as a flash, bent down and stuck it to the chassis. I wriggled it a few times to make sure it was secure, and as I did so my fingers brushed something that shouldn’t have been there. It was roughly the same size and shape as the tracker.

“I don’t see why we can’t get today’s stuff from Coates and Son,” said Kevin on other side of the van. “Danny says they’re giving it away.”

I pulled the second object out—it was another tracker. It was even, as far as I could tell in the dark, the same make as mine. I balled it in my fist and walked away—quickly.

“Of course they’re giving it away.” Kevin’s probable brother’s voice receded behind me. “They’re being checked.”

Was someone else running an operation on the Nolans? The Inside Inquiry Team had run a pool check on Kevin Nolan and his family the day before, and any police operation would have been flagged. Could it be MI5? Were the Nolans part of some dissident Irish Republican active service unit or part of a supply chain for the same—or informers against? Had Agent Reynolds been right—did the murder actually have an Irish component?

I ducked out of sight behind a truck waiting to be loaded. No, I thought, it still would have been flagged. Not least because DCI Seawoll was one of the most respected and formidable officers in the Met and you’d have to be remarkably stupid to try and do an end run around him.

I got out my torch and examined the tracker, which was identical in every way to my tracker and probably bought from the same online catalogue. Unless I wanted to open it up, it was about as traceable as a ballpoint pen. I took out my keys and scratched a tiny X into the casing in between the attachment magnets, took a deep breath to calm my nerves, and strolled back toward Kevin Nolan’s crap Transit van.

I had to put it back where I found it but couldn’t leave my tracker next to it, or whoever planted the first tracker might find mine if they came to retrieve theirs. I couldn’t hear any voices as I reached the van. I hoped this meant they were all inside the garage. I bent down, replaced the tracker where I’d found it, removed mine, and was just heading for the back of the van when the rear doors crashed open.

“You need to clean this fucking van.” It was Kevin’s probable brother. I froze, which was about the most suspicious-looking thing I could do, and the van rocked as someone climbed inside. “No wonder they’re not happy. Pass me the broom.”

“It’s not the van,” said Kevin from the back. “They think they should be getting more.”

“They get what they pay for,” said the voice. “I didn’t make the stupid deal.”

It’s always a risk when you have a plan that you stupidly fixate on it even when things go pear-shaped. I realized that because my plan had been to stick my tracker under the back of the van. I was actually waiting for Kevin and his friend to leave so I could do so—risking discovery the whole time. How stupid is that?

The van rocked rhythmically and I heard God-knows-what being swept out of the back. “I thought Franny’s was closed down,” said Kevin.

I crouched down, put the tracker ahead of the front wheel arch, and nonchalantly walked away. It wasn’t as good or secure a position as the back or the midsection, but the magnets on those things are much better than they used to be.

We’d picked our position on the fourth floor of the car park with care. From there me and Lesley could have set up our camera with the telephoto lens on a tripod and had a direct line of sight on Nolan and Sons—had we only been willing to freeze to death or indeed remembered to bring the tripod. The Asbo was conspicuously the only car in its row with the engine running.

“Sorted?” asked Lesley as I climbed gratefully into the warm interior.

“Not exactly,” I said, and told her about the second tracker.

I fished out the thermos flask, yet another Folly antique, a khaki cylinder the size of a shell casing, and poured myself a coffee. Lesley was equally skeptical about us being tracked by CTC, but for different reasons.

“They don’t need to track us,” she said. “If they want to know something they’d just phone us up and ask. And if MI5 wanted to know something they’d just call CTC, who would call us and ask. I think it’s the FBI.”

“All the FBI has to do is ask Kittredge and he’d ask us,” I said.

“But we might not tell Kittredge,” said Lesley. “Not to mention we know Agent Reynolds’s bent the rules already by following you.”

Lesley went quiet and I paused with the coffee halfway to my lips.

“Go on, then,” I said.

“Why do I have to do it?” asked Lesley.

“Because I went out last time,” I said. “And I’m still freezing.”

Lesley snarled but she got out of the car and while I finished my coffee she checked for bugs. She was back inside in less than two minutes with another identical GPS tracker.

“Voilà,” she said, and dropped it into my palm. The casing was freezing—it must have been attached for ages.

“Agent Reynolds,” I said.

“Or somebody else,” said Lesley. “That we don’t know about.”

I twirled the rectangular box in my hand. If it had been set up like ours, then it was probably programmed to send a signal if we started moving. Chances were if I deactivated it now the operator wouldn’t notice until she, or possibly a mysterious they, pinged it to check its operating status.

“Should I fry it?” I asked Lesley.

“No,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said. “Because if we destroy it they’ll know we know, but if we keep it we have the option of feeding whoever it is false information. We could put the tracker on a decoy vehicle and send them on a wild-goose chase, or we could use it to set up a sting—”

Lesley snorted.

“We’re the police,” she said. “Remember? We’re not spies, we’re not undercover, and we’re conducting a legitimate investigation that’s been authorized at the senior officer level. We want them to follow us so we can identify them, call for backup, and arrest them. Once we have them in the interview room we’ll be able to tell who they are by what kind of lawyer turns up.”

“My way’s more fun,” I said.

“Your way’s more complicated,” said Lesley. She dug her finger under the edge of her mask where it itched. “I miss being a proper copper,” she said.

“Take it off,” I said. “No one’s going to see you here.”

“Apart from you,” she said.

“I’m getting used to it,” I said. “It’s starting to become your real face.”

“I don’t want it to become my real face,” hissed Lesley.

I replaced the tracker under the Asbo and we sat in stony silence while the main Nolan and Sons vans were loaded up and driven away. Finally Kevin did his rounds and returned, surprisingly, not with the garbage bags of leftovers but with neatly loaded pallets on a forklift. His customers were truly getting the good stuff today. I jumped out of the Asbo, snapped some pictures with the long lens, and dived back in again.

“Turn the tracker on,” I said.

Lesley opened the laptop and tilted it to show me that the device was already activated and sending a signal every five seconds. I backed the Asbo out of its parking space and headed for the exit ramp. Using a tracker means you don’t have to crowd your target, but you don’t want to be too far away in case they suddenly do something interesting.

Dawn brought a clear sky of dirty blue and illuminated a landscape of pockmarked snow and icy slush. Lesley and I instinctively hunched down into our seats as Kevin Nolan’s van lurched past. We waited until we were sure we knew which way he was turning on Nine Elms and then followed.

It was all very civilized, but I still would’ve liked to have a pickaxe handle in the backseat—just for tradition’s sake, you understand.

“Cultural weapon,” I said out loud.

“What?” asked Lesley.

“If the police had a cultural weapon,” I said. “Like a claymore or an assegai—it would be a pickaxe handle.”

“Why don’t you do something more useful,” she said, “and keep your eyes open for a car with diplomatic plates.”

We were coming up on Chelsea Bridge, which for all its blue-and-white-painted carriage lamp charm is only three lanes wide—two if you don’t count the bus lane. A good choke point to spot a tail.

All diplomatic cars have distinctive plates that indicate status and nationality, for the ease and convenience of terrorists and potential kidnappers.

I spotted a late-model dark blue Mercedes S class with a D plate and read the code out.

“Sierra Leone,” said Lesley, and I felt a little borrowed patriotic tug.

“Have you memorized all of these?” I asked.

“Nah,” she said. “There’s a list on Wikipedia.”

“What’s the code for the U.S., then?” I asked.

“It’s 270 to 274,” said Lesley.

“She’s not going to use an embassy car,” I said. “Is she? I mean, talk about conspicuous.”

Lesley felt that I had failed to understand the full implications of using a tracking device: you can hang back far enough to be inconspicuous, so it doesn’t matter what plates you have. And if she did have diplo plates she wouldn’t have to pay the congestion charge or parking tickets and it would make it fucking hard to arrest her.

“Does she have diplomatic immunity?” asked Lesley.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We could ask Kittredge.”

“Or we could phone Kittredge now and make it his problem.” She checked the laptop. “Where the fuck is he going?” she said, and tilted the screen so I could see it again—the little dots marking Kevin Nolan’s van were heading into Knightsbridge.

Suddenly, a luxury car with D plates would have blended in perfectly.

“Who ’round here is going to want a van full of dodgy greens?” asked Lesley. The restaurants in that area generally had their own people to go down to Covent Garden for the best produce.

“Things are tough all over,” I said. But our fears for the palates of the diplomats and oligarchs proved baseless as Kevin skirted the west end of Hyde Park and turned up Bayswater Road. When he turned again into a side street, I put my foot down and closed the gap. We followed him up a line of deceptively modest-looking terraces until Lesley said, “He’s stopping.” In time for me to find an inconspicuous parking space from which we could keep him in view.

London was mostly built piecemeal, and if, like me, you know a little bit of architecture, you can see where the initial developers built a string of grand Regency mansions along a country lane. Then as the city ground remorselessly westward a line of neat little Victorian terraced houses were built for those members of the working class one needed to have close at hand.

Kevin had stopped outside an odd late-Victorian terrace consisting of exactly three houses that abutted the back of a 1930s London brick shopping arcade. I forbore mentioning this to Lesley because discussion of that sort of thing tends to get her vexed.

“Here come the greens,” said Lesley.

Kevin Nolan slouched around to the back of his van, opened the doors, collected the first of the pallets, and headed for the front door. Lesley lifted the camera and its telephoto and we watched through the cable link on the laptop while Kevin scrabbled around in his trouser pockets.

“He’s got his own keys,” said Lesley.

“Make sure you get a close-up on the pallet,” I said. “I want to know who the supplier was.”

We watched as he ferried the pallets from the van to the house. Once he’d taken the last one inside, he closed the door behind him. We waited a couple of minutes and then waited some more.

“What the fuck is he doing in there?” asked Lesley.

I rummaged in the stakeout bag and discovered that we’d eaten all the snacks except for Molly’s sandwich surprises, packed neatly in greaseproof paper. I gave them an experimental sniff.

“Not tripe this time?” asked Lesley.

“Spam, I think,” I said, opened up the parcels, and lifted the top slice of homemade bread. “My mistake,” I said. “Spam, cheese, and pickle.”

“He’s coming out,” said Lesley and raised the camera again.

Kevin emerged from the front door carrying a battered cardboard box. From the way he carried it I assumed it was heavy. This was confirmed when the van sank on its rear axle as he dumped the box in the back. He rested for a moment, panting, breath visible in the cold air, before returning to the house, where a minute or two later he reappeared with a second box and loaded that.

It’s a funny thing, but you only need to be following someone for a very short period of time before you start identifying with them. Watching Kevin stagger out the front door with a third heavy box, I had to fight down the urge to jump out of the car and give him a hand. If nothing else, it would have speeded things up. As it was, we waited and watched him bring out two more boxes while taking the occasional picture to relieve the boredom.

Much to Lesley’s disgust I ate the spam, cheese, and pickle sandwiches.

“Are you planning to spend the rest of the day breathing out?” she asked.

“It’s an autonomic function,” I said smugly.

“Then open the window,” she said.

“Nah. It’s too cold. Tell you what, though.” I fished out a Christmas tree–shaped air freshener from the glove box and hung it from the rearview mirror. “There you go.”

I was probably only saved from death, or at least serious injury, by the fact that Kevin chose that moment to get back into his van and drive away. We waited a couple of minutes to make a note of the house number and call AB for an intelligence check, then drove after him.

Kevin’s next stop was fifteen minutes away on the other side of the Westway in what had to be the last unconverted warehouse in the whole of West London. It still had its double-width wooden loading gates on which the original blue paint had faded to a scabby dark gray.

We drew up and watched as he left his van, stamped over to the gates, unlocked the inset pedestrian door, and stepped inside.

“I’m bored of this,” said Lesley. “Let’s go in and search the place.”

“If we let him move on,” I said, “we could have the place to ourselves, have a good look around before anyone finds out.”

“We’d need a search warrant,” said Lesley. “On the other hand if we wait for little Kevin, who I believe you witnessed assaulting someone yesterday, to carry a couple of boxes in, then we’re just investigating his suspicious behavior. And once we’re inside …”

She was right, so that’s what we did. When Kevin opened the gates and drove his van into the warehouse, we drove in just behind him. He didn’t even notice until he came around the back of his van to unload.

“It wasn’t me,” he said.

“What wasn’t you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“What’s in the boxes, then, Kevin?” asked Lesley.

He actually opened his mouth to say Nothing again, but realized that was just too stupid even for him.

“Plates,” he said, and it was true. Every box was full of plates, all made of the same tough biscuit-colored stoneware as the fruit bowl in James Gallagher’s flat—and the shard that had killed him. But that wasn’t all.

The loading bay was a wide two-story space that penetrated through the center of the warehouse. At the far end another set of wooden loading gates opened directly onto the towpath of the Grand Union Canal, which ran along the rear. Opening off the bay on either side were two storage rooms, a pattern duplicated on the first floor and again, albeit with larger rooms, on the second. All but one of the rooms was fitted with rotting wooden shelving piled with pottery.

Leaving Kevin to Lesley’s tender mercies, I wandered through the warehouse. In places the shelving had collapsed to create drifts of dinner plates or saucers that could be treacherous underfoot. In the far rooms I found piles of tureens and soup bowls covered in a thick layer of dust, and shelves ragged with old cobwebs. I definitely heard rats scuttling out of my way as I entered each room. In one I found a long shelf on which ranks of saltcellars were lined up like an army of miniature Daleks; and on the shelf below, a different army of little drunk men in tricorn hats—toby jugs. I pulled a few out for a closer look, and as I touched them I felt a little flash of vestigia—the pigsty smell, but also beer and laughter. I saw that the face on each jug was subtly different, as if they’d all been individually made. As I walked out I could feel them leering at my back. In another, amid what looked like chamber pots and milk jugs, I found a shelf of statuettes—my old friend goddess-surprised-by-a-sculptor.

One room, on the ground floor at the back, had been partially cleared of shelves and pottery. In their place stood, almost as tall as Lesley and smothered in bubble wrap, a brand-new fifteen kilowatt kiln. I found out later it was just about the largest and hottest unit it was possible to buy off the shelf. Other packing cases arrayed around it turned out to be full of kiln furniture and bags of mysterious-colored powders, later identified as ingredients for making various types of ceramic glazes.

I thought of James Gallagher and his newfound interest in ceramics. A kiln like that would set you back a couple of thousand quid at least, and the Murder Team would have flagged an expenditure like that on day one of the investigation. Likewise if he was renting the warehouse as a studio.

“Where did all this stuff come from?” I asked Kevin.

“Which stuff?” he asked. Even inside Kevin kept his hoodie up, as if worried that without it his brains would fly out of his ears.

“The pottery,” I said. “The stuff that you’ve been trying to sell to the traders on the Portobello.”

“Comes from here, don’t it?” he said.

“Not from Moscow Road, then?”

He gave me an accusing look. “You’ve been following me?”

“Yes, Kevin, we’ve been following you,” said Lesley.

“That’s a violation of my European human rights,” he said.

I looked at Lesley—surely nobody could really be that stupid? She shrugged. Lesley has a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.

I gestured at the kiln. “Do you know whose this is?” I asked.

Kevin glanced incuriously at the kiln and then shrugged. “No idea,” he said.

“Have you ever noticed anything weird happening around here?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Ghosts, mysterious noises—weird shit?”

“Not really,” he said.

“It’s time to call in Seawoll,” said Lesley.

We made Kevin sit on the edge of the kiln’s loading pallet and walked out of his hearing.

“Is this anything he wants to know about?” I asked.

“This could be the source of the murder weapon,” said Lesley. “It’s down to the SIO to decide what he wants to know about.”

I nodded. She was right but I was thinking that this could have been where James was sloping off to during those gaps in his timeline. James was a student, but his father was rich.

“I want to talk to the senator,” I said. “Maybe he paid for all of this.”

Lesley reminded me that Little Miss FBI agent was likely to take a close interest in any visit, so I phoned Kittredge.

“Have you found your little lost sheep?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?” Special Branch might have been reorganized out of existence but they were still the same cagey bastards they’d been when they were doing the legwork for MI5 during the Cold War.

“Possible sighting in Ladbroke Grove,” I said. “I just thought I’d check with you before wasting any time on it.”

“She’s back in the bunker,” he said. “Has been since about nine this morning.”

“That’s the hotel, right?” I asked, knowing full well it probably wasn’t.

“Grosvenor Square,” said Kittredge wearily—meaning the American embassy.

I thanked him and hung up. CTC was responsible for guarding the embassy, including any secret back doors it might have. If Kittredge said Reynolds was inside, then that’s probably where she was.

“Sitting in front of a laptop watching us drive around,” said Lesley.

“Good,” I said. “If I leave the tracker with you, then she’ll never suspect.”

Finding the senator was easy enough. I just called Guleed—knowing where the relatives are is part and parcel of the family liaison role. It comes in useful if they make that unfortunate but all too common transition from victim to suspect.

“We’re at the house in Ladbroke Grove,” said Guleed.

I left Lesley to babysit Kevin and call in the cavalry, and made the short drive in under ten minutes.

THE SENATOR was an ordinary-looking man in an expensive suit. He sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jameson’s and a plastic half-pint glass in front of him.

“Senator?” I said. “May I have a quick word?”

He looked up and gave me a grimace—I figured it was the closest he could get to a polite smile. There was whiskey on his breath.

“Please, Detective, have a seat,” he said.

I sat down opposite—he offered me a drink but I declined. He had a long face with a curious lack of expression, although I could see pain in the tension around his eyes. His brown hair was neatly cut into a conservative side parting, his teeth were white and even, and his nails were neatly manicured. He looked maintained—as polished, dusted, and cared for as a vintage automobile.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

I asked whether he, or anyone he knew, had purchased a kiln and associated equipment.

“No,” he said. “Is it important?”

“I can’t say yet, sir,” I said. “Did your son have access to an independent source of income—a trust fund perhaps?”

“Yes,” said the senator. “Several, in fact. But they’ve all been checked and nothing has been taken. Jimmy was always very self-sufficient.”

“Did you have a lot of contact?” I asked.

The senator poured a measure of whiskey into his plastic cup.

“Why do you ask?”

“The FBI seemed concerned that he might prove embarrassing—politically?”

“Do you know what I like about the English?” asked the senator.

“The sense of humor?” I asked.

He gave me a bleak smile to make sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.

“You’re not a constituency,” he said. “There’s no community leaders or lobbying group ready to crawl up my ass because somebody somewhere takes exception to a joke or just a slip of the tongue. If I was to—hypothetically speaking—call you a limey or a nigger, which one would cause you the most offense?”

“Was he an embarrassment?” I asked.

“Do you know why you evaded that question?” asked the senator.

Because I’m a professional, I thought. Because I spent a couple of years talking to morose drunks and belligerent shoplifters and people who just wanted someone to shout at because the world was unfair. And the trick of it is simply to keep asking the questions you need the answers for, until finally the sad little sods wind down.

Occasionally you have to wrestle them to the floor and sit on them until they’re coherent, but I thought that was an unlikely contingency given who I was talking to.

“In what way would he have been embarrassing?” I asked.

“You haven’t answered my question,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what, Senator,” I said. “You tell me about your son and I’ll answer.”

“I asked first,” he said. “You answer my question and I’ll tell you about my son.”

“If you call me a nigger you just sound like a racist American,” I said. “And limey is a joke insult. You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.”

The senator squinted at me for a long time and I wondered if I might have been too clever by half, but then he sighed and picked up his plastic cup.

“He wasn’t an embarrassment—not to me,” he said. “Although I think maybe he thought he was.” He sipped his whiskey, I noticed, savoring it on his tongue before he swallowed. He put the glass down—rationing himself—I recognized the behavior from my dad. “He liked being here in London, I can tell you that. He said that the city went on forever. ‘All the way down,’ he said.”

His eyes unfocused, just for a moment, and I realized that the senator was phenomenally drunk.

“So he was in contact with you?”

“I’d arrange a phone call once a week,” he said. “He’d call me every other month or so. Once your kids are out of high school that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.”

“When did you last speak to him?”

“Last week,” said the senator. His hand twitched toward the whiskey but he stopped himself. “I wanted to know if he was coming back for the holidays.”

“And was he?”

“Nope,” said the senator. “He said he’d found something, he was excited, and the next time he saw me he was going to blow my mind.”

The older coppers always make it very clear that it’s just not good practice to get too involved with your victims. A murder inquiry can last weeks, months, or even years, and ultimately the victims don’t want you to be sympathetic. They want you to be competent—that’s what you owe them.

But still someone had stabbed James in the back and left his father flailing around in grief and incomprehension. I decided I didn’t approve of that at all.

I asked some more questions relating to his son’s artwork, but it was clear that the senator had been indulgent rather than interested. Guleed, who’d been watching me from the other side of the kitchen, managed to convey, by expression alone, the fact that she’d already asked all the routine questions and unless I had anything new I should shut up now and leave the poor bastard alone.

I was walking back to the car when Lesley phoned me.

“You know that house?” she asked.

“Which house?”

“The one that Kevin Nolan delivered his greenery to.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“The one where he picked up all the crockery. The very crockery that we have just found several metric tons of?”

“The house off the Moscow Road,” I said.

“That house doesn’t exist,” she said.