CHAPTER 25

Ladbroke Grove

WATCHING SEAWOLL in motion was always an education in and of itself. Despite the 1970s shouty guv’nor, pickaxe handle, drink you under the table, fuck me, fuck you, old-fashioned copper facade, he was—bureaucratically speaking—very light on his feet.

We were going to go in with CO19, the armed wing of the Metropolitan Police, as backup. I know that Nightingale would have preferred to use Caffrey and his merry band of ex-paratroopers, but this was still a Murder Team investigation, and Seawoll had old-fashioned views about extralegal, paramilitary death squads. Besides, he’d managed to prize a detachment loose by implying there might be a smidgen of terrorism involved. The drawback to this being that DS Kittredge had to be notified, him being the CTC officer on the spot.

We all assembled on the west side of Westbourne Park Road, which Zach said was the closest sewer access. It was dark, and the last dirty remnants of snow crunched under the weight of our size eleven boots as we decanted from the vehicles.

“Shit,” said Stephanopoulos as she skidded on a patch of ice. Seawoll caught her elbow and steadied her. “Good thing I didn’t wear the high heels,” she said.

“Are you coming down with us, sir?” I asked Seawoll.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Seawoll. “I’m far too fucking senior to go down there. It’s strictly constables, sergeants, and lunatics. We’ll keep the kettle on for you.”

Nightingale was standing under a lamppost in a long oyster white Burberry coat that made him look like something from an old film. All he was missing was a cigarette, a hat, and a doomed love affair with a suburban housewife. Lesley stayed in the Sprinter van, where she could keep an eye on Zach and avail herself of the coffee thermos and the emergency packets of Hula Hoops. I didn’t have the same luxury on account of this being my idea in the first place.

We were joined by Kittredge, who turned out to be a tall, thin man with a sour expression in a navy blue three-piece suit—although that might just have been a reaction to being out on Christmas Eve. He actually had a sprig of mistletoe in his buttonhole, and I had sudden wistful thoughts of Dr. Walid six hundred kilometers north in what I imagined to be the squat granite cottage of his ancestors, sitting in front of a roaring fire and toasting his family with a wee theologically unsound dram of the good stuff.

Kittredge frowned at me and turned to Nightingale. “We have a problem,” he said.

“The American?” asked Nightingale.

“She’s seen too much,” he said.

“Then you know she must be taken care of,” said Seawoll.

“Funny,” said Kittredge.

“Who cares what the Yanks know?” asked Seawoll. “They’re not going to give a fuck about all this voodoo shit. Why should they?”

“That’s not how it was explained to me,” said Kittredge. “There are some things we’re supposed to keep in the family.”

“Then I suggest we take our young American friend with us,” said Nightingale.

“Are you mad?” asked Kittredge. “God knows what the FBI’s going to make of it all. Hasn’t she seen too much already?”

“On the contrary,” said Nightingale. “I don’t think she’s seen enough. Where is she now?”

Kittredge gestured up the street. “ ’Round the corner,” he said. “Sitting in a red Skoda Fabia that she borrowed off the second trade attaché’s wife’s nanny.”

“You’re sure about that, sir?” I asked Kittredge.

“I’ve had a whole team watching over her since they dug you out of the ground,” he said.

“Touch of the stable door,” said Nightingale.

“Don’t you start,” said Kittredge. “This was all routine until you were involved.”

“I’ve been keeping secrets since before you were born,” said Nightingale. “You’ll just have to trust me on this. Besides, the young lady is exceedingly clever. So it’s nothing she won’t be able to work out for herself.”

“But at least she wouldn’t be an eyewitness,” said Kittredge.

“Fortunately,” said Nightingale, “seeing isn’t always believing.” He turned to me. “Why don’t you go over and extend her an invitation?”

I turned and strolled up the road humming the happy tune of the subordinate who knows that whatever shit hits the fan it wasn’t him who’d be blamed for turning the bloody thing on.

It would have been nice to sneak up on Reynolds and give her a shock, but a good rule of thumb is to never startle someone who might be equipped with a loaded firearm. Instead I approached from the front and gave her a wave. The annoyed look on her face—she obviously thought she’d ditched her surveillance—was rewarding enough.

“Got your sewer gear?” I asked as she climbed out of the car.

“In the trunk,” she said. “Are we going down again?”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Give me five minutes to get ready.”

IT MIGHT have taken Reynolds five minutes, but it took the rest of us about an hour, what with the milling around, strapping stuff on, and testing the equipment. This time we’d borrowed the appropriate waist-high orange waders from a surly man from Thames Water. The CO19 boys insisted on retaining their dark blue ballistic vests and helmets as well, which gave them the unfortunate appearance of modern ninjas who’d given up on the whole stealth thing below the waist. I was wearing a brand-new stab vest but with a high-visibility jacket over it. I planned to avoid getting shot, through the deployment of peaceful diplomacy and, if that failed, by making sure I stayed back behind the guys with guns. Zach said we’d be better off without the guns, but that’s the thing about armed police. When you need them, you generally don’t want to be hanging around waiting for them to arrive.

It was a good plan, and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life.

When we were ready, Seawoll gave us a farewell admonition not to fuck things up any worse than they were already. Then he, Stephanopoulos, and Kittredge skived off to a nearby pub to set up a “command center.”

The surly man from Thames Water popped the manhole cover and bid us to help ourselves.

Nightingale went down first, followed by the officers from CO19. I followed them down with Zach behind me, while Lesley and Reynolds brought up the rear. I recognized where we were the moment I got off the ladder. It was the same intersection we’d reached before an unknown assailant with a Sten gun had driven us over the duck board and tumbling down the weir, and on our way to Olympia and Chelsea’s Underground rave. Then it had been a raging torrent. This time it was merely damp and surprisingly fragrant, at least by the standards of London sewers.

Kumar was waiting for us.

“You just couldn’t stay away,” I said.

“It’s warmer down here,” he said. “I’m surprised you came down at all.”

So was I, to be honest, I hadn’t wanted to go down the manhole, but once I’d made myself do it I was all right. It helped that I was surrounded by people I trusted. As Conan the Barbarian famously said, “That which does not kill us does not kill us.”

“Where to now?” I asked Zach.

He gestured down toward what I now knew was the North Kensington Relief sewer, far too low-ceilinged to walk along upright. The CO19 guys, who were understandably thrilled to be heading down a long straight pipe, wanted to wait until they’d fetched up a set of ballistic shields. But Nightingale waved them back.

“We’ll do a recce first,” he said and gestured me and Zach to go with him. The CO19 officers gave us pitying looks as we followed Nightingale into the tunnel. Now, I have an allergic reaction to getting out in front of armed officers, but Zach didn’t seem bothered. Either he wasn’t expecting trouble or he had more faith in Nightingale than I did.

We made our way down the tunnel for about twenty meters when Zach told us to stop.

“We’ve gone past it,” he said. “Sorry.”

We backed up two meters while Zach banged his fist at regular intervals on the left side of the tunnel. He stopped suddenly and banged the same spot a few times.

“This feels like it,” he said.

I put my hand on the wall where he’d smacked it. There was definitely something like a flash of an open oven and that hint of the pigsty—although given that we were in a sewer, it might have been from elsewhere.

Nightingale put his hand next to mine.

“Extraordinary,” he said. “How do we get in?”

“Like so,” said Zach, and turning, put his back against the wall. Then, bracing one foot on the opposite wall, he pushed backward, forcing a section of the wall to retreat into a recess. The walls were smooth and coated with the same ceramic finish I recognized from the fruit bowl. There was a dull click and the section behind Zach locked into place.

“Not bad, huh?” he said and pointed upward. Above him was an open hatch into darkness. “It’s like a fire door, so it closes automatically. Someone needs to hold it open while I climb up.”

Nightingale lifted his hand and made a small gesture, and the movable bit of wall shifted slightly and clicked. Zach gingerly shifted his shoulders.

“Or you could do that,” he said.

Nightingale called along the drain for the rest of the party to come up, leaving two of the CO19 officers to guard the junction and two more to man the tunnel. Then he swarmed up through the hatch and, turning, reached down to help me up behind him.

I had a look around while Zach and Lesley followed us up. We were in a space with the mean dimensions of a living room in a council flat, although the ceiling was low even by those standards. Low enough for me to scrape my helmet if I didn’t watch it.

“Watch your head, darling,” Zach told Lesley as she came up.

At first I thought the walls were paneled with dark wood in the Victorian fashion, but I quickly realized that the color was wrong, too pale. When I rapped the panels with my knuckles there was the unmistakable ring of ceramic. But when I brushed them with my fingertips I felt wood grain and, mingled with that, tobacco smoke, beer, and whiskey. I looked at Nightingale, who was frowning as he too touched the wall. He caught me looking and nodded. The air was still, musty, and dry.

“We need to get on,” he said, and what with Kumar, Reynolds, and the last two CO19 officers, it was getting a bit tight in there. There was only one exit, a doorway framed with more fake ceramic wood.

Like the well-behaved coppers we were, we let the CO19 officers go first. After all, there’s really no point bringing them if you insist on standing between them and any potential targets.

The doorway led to a long corridor lined not with fake wood paneling this time but with a nasty mauve wallpaper. If I needed any further indication that the Quiet People didn’t have much of a color sense, then that wallpaper was it. At evenly spaced intervals were hung what looked like empty picture frames. Nightingale put a hand on each of the CO19 officers’ shoulders.

“Quickly and quietly, lads,” he said.

Off we went, just as quietly as you’d expect from people wearing half a ton of various types of gear between us. Safety tip: wading trousers—not built for stealth. We pulled up short of where the corridor ended in a T-junction.

“Which way now?” Nightingale asked Zach.

“I don’t know,” he said. “This wasn’t here last time.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” said Lesley.

I was thinking of Space Hulk myself, but there are some things you don’t say out loud in front of other police.

Nightingale didn’t hesitate. He gestured at the CO19 officers and one went left and one went right. Nightingale went with one and I went with the other.

There was a single gunshot, astonishingly loud in the confined space. I threw myself back around the corner but Nightingale yelled, “Hold your fire!”

There was a long moment of silence in which I took the opportunity to pick myself up.

“I believe that was a warning shot,” said Nightingale. “Peter, if you’d be so good as to ask Mr. Palmer to come forward.”

Zach vigorously shook his head, but Lesley put her hand on his back and eased him forward until he could stick his head around the corner.

“Would you be kind enough to tell them we come in peace?” said Nightingale.

“Do you think anyone has ever fallen for that one?” asked Zach.

“I don’t wish them to fall for anything, Mr. Palmer,” said Nightingale. “We need to establish an arrangement, or I fear things could become difficult.”

“What makes you think they’ll be interested?” asked Zach.

“Had they wanted to, they could have shot us down already,” said Nightingale.

The CO19 officer on the left cleared his throat. “We generally seek to deescalate these confrontations as soon as possible sir,” he said. “The longer they go on, the greater the likelihood of a suboptimal outcome.” It was an impressive speech from a man who was obviously dying to retreat back the way he’d come.

“Duly noted,” said Nightingale.

“For God’s sake, Zach,” I said. “Usually we can’t get you to shut up.”

Zach sighed and edged forward until he could look over Nightingale’s shoulder.

“Yo!” he called. “Is Ten-Ton around? I’ve got a man here wants to talk to him.”

We held our breath. I heard a voice, nothing more than a whisper floating out of the dark.

“Did you hear that?” asked Lesley.

Zach shushed her. “I’m trying to listen here,” he said, and then called over Nightingale’s shoulder, “What was the last bit?”

Lesley rolled her eyes but stayed quiet—I still couldn’t make out any words.

“He says that the Nightingale and the soldiers got to stay out, but they’ll talk to the half-caste,” said Zach, looking at me. “That’s you, by the way.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Zach. “Maybe they just don’t rate you very highly.”

“You’re certainly not proceeding on your own,” said Nightingale.

We were in total agreement on that.

Half-caste, I thought. I hadn’t heard that one in a while. Not since Mum fell out with Aunty Doris, who having grown up in Jamaica in the 1950s regarded political correctness as something that happened to other people. If they were old-fashioned about that, I figured, they might be usefully old-fashioned in other ways.

“Tell them we want to bring in a nurse,” I said. “To make sure everyone is healthy.”

“What are you thinking, Peter?” asked Nightingale.

I turned back and beckoned to Agent Reynolds, who was at the back with Kumar.

“Are you tooled up?” I asked her when she moved closer.

She looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded.

Lesley poked me in the arm. “Not without me,” she said.

“Two nurses,” I told Zach.

To preserve their night vision, we were keeping our torches pointed away from the CO19 officers and Nightingale, but even half-shadowed I could see he didn’t like the idea of sending women into danger.

“Sir,” I said. “Has to be done.”

Nightingale sighed and nodded to Zach, who shouted out that he wanted to bring two nurses to meet them. I still couldn’t make out words in the reply, but after a couple more exchanges Zach blew out a breath and said they were willing to talk.

“Who will we be talking to?” I asked.

“Ten-Ton,” said Zach. “Maybe Ten-Ton’s daughter.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Who you’re not going to try anything with,” said Zach.

“Why would I be trying it on with Ten-Ton’s daughter?” I asked.

“Just don’t even think about it,” said Zach.

“No hanky-panky with Ten-Ton’s daughter,” I said. “Got it.”

“What was all that about?” asked Lesley.

“I have no idea,” I said, but I thought I probably did.

“If we’re going, we might as well go now,” said Zach. He called out that we were coming and stepped out in front of the left-hand CO19 officer. As I followed him Nightingale told me to be careful.

“That’s the plan,” I told him.

“There’s a plan?” asked Reynolds.

We joined Zach. As I shone my torch down the tunnel I thought I saw pale faces in the distance.

“You want to be pointing your light down—in front of you,” said Zach.

“Why’s that?” asked Lesley.

“They’ve got sensitive eyes,” he said.

WHEN YOU’RE police it’s important to always convey the impression that you know more about what’s really going on than any random member of the public. The best way to achieve this is to actually know more about something than people think you do. For example, I was pretty certain I knew where the Quiet People’s settlement was. Me, Lesley, and Nightingale had taken to calling it a settlement because we didn’t like the demographic implications of the word “village.” We weren’t that keen on the word “hamlet” either.

“What if it’s a town?” Lesley had asked during the preoperation briefing. “What if it’s a city?”

“Let’s hope not,” said Nightingale.

I’d suggested in that case we should hand the whole problem over to Tyburn. Nightingale was not amused.

He said we should at least establish the scale of the problem before deciding what to do about it. I didn’t point out that the Quiet People had managed to go at least 160 years already without being a problem—or at least a problem that affected the Queen’s Peace. Which was more than can be said, historically speaking, for the place we thought they might be living under.

London was the world’s first megalopolis. You can make a case for Beijing, Constantinople, or Rome, but for sheer fuck-off insanely rapid expansion, London was to set the pattern followed by every big city that followed. In the nineteenth century much of the city went west as the rich and the middle classes tried to escape the poor and the poor tried to escape the rats. Landowners, many of them aristocrats, abandoned their mystical connection to the soil in droves and carved up their farmland into new housing estates. Whole neighborhoods sprang up in Middlesex overnight, and all those villas, terraces, and cottages needed one thing—bricks. Millions of bricks. Fortunately, a rich field of good yellow clay was found in a difficult to drain hollow west of Portobello Road.

The brick makers arrived and soon the freshly named Pottery Lane was lined with brick kilns and the ironically ramshackle houses of the potters. Since nothing sets you up for a hard day making bricks better than a bacon sandwich, the pig keepers moved in—their animals rooting amid the mud and refuse behind the kilns. But a city is not built on bricks and bacon sarnies alone. The other agent of London’s growth, the railways, thrust their iron fingers into the surrounding countryside. To build them, an army of navvies was needed, and they went where the rents were lowest, the booze was handmade, and the police hardly ever happened. The area became known as the Potteries and Piggeries. It was where Eugene Beale and his butty gang of excavators lived in the years before they were rich. And Eugene Beale had a nickname, a nom de building site, as it were. It was Ten-Ton Digger—and I didn’t think it was a coincidence.

The centerpiece of the area had been an artificial lake full of pig shit known locally as the Ocean. Because even the Victorians had some standards, when London finally swallowed up the area, the Ocean was turned into a park rather than more housing. And I suspected that underneath it, where the good clay is, lay the village of the Quiet People.

They led us down a series of tunnels, all arched, all lined with smooth stoneware tiles. It could have been a particularly drab tube station, except for the lack of lights and CCTV cameras.

The two skinny white boys in Adidas hoodies who guided us were familiar if not particularly reassuring. Occasionally I got a glimpse of pale hands with long fingers as they gestured in which direction they wanted us to go. They flinched away from our torches, despite the fact that they were wearing wraparound shades.

There was a noticeable breeze in one corridor, in another I swear I could hear the rattle of Laundromat dryers—there was even the whiff of fabric softener.

One thing was for certain. If they were the cannibalistic descendants of a lost tribe of navvies, they were at least better turned out than the ones in the film.

“They seem to be getting much more relaxed,” said Lesley as one of the hoodies waved us to stop outside a doorway.

“That’s because we’re in their ends now,” said Zach.

“Ends?” asked Reynolds.

“Manor,” I said.

“Patch,” said Lesley.

“Yard?” I tried when Reynolds still looked blank.

“Hood,” said Zach.

“Gotcha,” said Reynolds.

A hoodie leaned close to Zach and whispered in his ear.

“He says we have to turn our torches off,” said Zach. “Hurts their eyes.”

We hesitated, all thinking the same thing. I felt Lesley and Agent Reynolds shifting their stances, making some space, freeing up their arms, and in Reynolds’s case making sure her Glock was accessible. We couldn’t help it. We’re police—situational paranoia is a professional requirement. They make you sit an exam and everything.

“Or we can just all go back,” said Zach. “I’m easy.”

I took a breath, let it out, and turned my helmet light off. Lesley and Zach followed suit, and finally Reynolds, muttering something under her breath, did the same.

I was all right for the first couple of seconds and then suddenly it was like I was back under the platform at Oxford Circus. I heard myself beginning to pant, but even as I tried to control my breathing I started to shake. A firm hand grasped my arm and then finger-walked down to take my hand and squeeze—I was sure it was Lesley. I was so startled that I forgot to panic.

The big doors in front of us opened to reveal a room lit with a dim green light, and Lesley let go of my hand.

The room was large with a high domed ceiling from which hung a chandelier in which chemical glow sticks had been used instead of candles. It was wall-to-wall Quiet People, packed in like commuters on a tube train. They came in all shapes and sizes—no children, I noticed—but tended to the slender, with long pale faces and big eyes. I saw at least two blondes but their hair was predominantly light brown. They were definitely a distinct ethnic group, and I realized, belatedly, that I’d done a classic bit of racist misidentification when I assumed the guy I’d chased onto the train was the same one who shot at me. For a mixed-race Londoner who’s supposed to be a trained observer that was kind of embarrassing—I blame the bloody hoodies they were wearing.

Zach warned us that the Quiet People would want to touch us.

“Touch us where?” asked Lesley.

“Just think of them like blind people,” said Zach. “They’re very tactile.”

“Great,” said Lesley.

“And you have to touch them back,” said Zach. “Doesn’t have to be a lot, just, you know, bit of brush, cop a bit of feel—just to be polite.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to share?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t raise your voice. It’s considered a bit of a faux pas.” He turned and walked into the room.

I followed him, and the touching started immediately. It wasn’t rough but there was nothing furtive about it. I felt fingers run down my shoulders, a hand briefly caught my thigh, and the brush of fingertips on my lip made me sneeze.

“Oh my God,” I heard Lesley say behind me. “It’s like being fifteen again.”

To be polite I let the backs of my hands brush against people as I went past—that seemed to satisfy. They smelled exactly like everyone else, some of sweat, some of food, a whiff of beer, and a hint of pig shit. At the center of the room was a narrow Victorian oak table. It was made of real wood too. After all the ceramic, I could practically smell it.

Waiting politely for us on the other side of the table was a tall thin man in a black bespoke suit cut with seventies lapels and a kipper tie. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses, but his mouth lifted at the corners in wry humor. The power that came off him slapped me in the chest like the best bass speaker ever invented. I’d felt nothing like it since the time I’d come face-to-face with the Old Man of the River—Father Thames himself. But this was pride and sweat and pickaxes and the smell of steam. The ringing of hammers and the heat of the kiln.

Oh shit, I thought, if this isn’t the Low King of the Dwarves then I’m the President of the Cricklewood Branch of the Women’s Institute. It all fit—apart from the fact that he wasn’t a dwarf, nor did he appear to be a king, and they made dinner plates, not swords or rings of power. Still, definitely another bloody genius loci or something almost as powerful. Nightingale was going to throw a fit. Albeit in a restrained stiff-upper-lip fashion.

“My name,” whispered the man, “is Mathew Ten-Tons and this is my daughter Elizabeth.”

Beside him stood a young woman in wraparound shades, light brown hair in a French plait that fell over one shoulder, narrow chin, small mouth, and a little snub nose that was barely enough to hold her glasses up. Despite the green light, I saw that her skin was extraordinarily pale, almost translucent. I also noticed that when she turned to us, Zach looked away.

The goblin boy yearns for a princess, I thought. That’s not going to end well.

Mathew Ten-Tons indicated a monstrous leather-upholstered and brass-bound bench that ran the length of our side of the table and gestured for us to sit. Elizabeth beckoned Lesley and Reynolds over so that they seated themselves opposite her. As soon as we were all seated the people behind us crowded our backs. Hands came to rest on my shoulders, back, and arms, smoothing my clothes, picking imaginary lint from my high-visibility vest, and giving me a rather pleasant neck massage. Classic grooming behavior, Dr. Walid told me later, something our fellow primates indulge in to maintain troop cohesion. Dr. Walid said human beings use language for the same purpose—which is why you find yourself talking total bollocks to people you meet at a bus stop and then wonder what the fuck did I do that for?

As I sat down, Ten-Tons seized my hand and pulled me half across the table. He examined my fingers and nails before turning it over and running a calloused palm over mine. He gave a derisive snort—at my palm’s smoothness, I assumed—and released me. At the other end of the table Elizabeth did the same with Reynolds and Lesley. Zach’s hands went unfelt—I suspected he’d already been found wanting in the rough skin department.

Ten-Tons leaned across the table until we were close enough for me to feel his breath on my cheek. “Would you like some tea?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I whispered. “I don’t think we have time.”

That wasn’t the real reason, of course, but you don’t insult your host at the first meeting. Captain Picard would have been well pleased with me.

I glanced over to where Elizabeth, Reynolds, and Lesley sat with their heads almost touching—I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. Suddenly they all turned to look at Zach—who flinched.

Ten-Tons caught my eye. “What’s so urgent that it can’t wait for tea?”

“Not waiting for tea,” whispered a voice right behind my head, and then it was repeated by a different voice farther away, and then many voices murmuring into the distance like an echo. Not waiting for tea. Urgent.

“I believe Kevin Nolan may be trying to kill you,” I whispered, and behind me I heard it repeated across the room. Kevin Nolan … kill you.

Ten-Tons’s lips twisted as he tried not to laugh. “I think you are very much mistaken,” he whispered. “Kevin has never graced us with his presence. He has a terrible fear of the quiet places.”

Mistaken, presence, fear, whispered the chorus.

“I don’t think he’s planning to do it on purpose,” I said.

Purpose, planning, thinking, whispered the chorus, and I would have paid good money for them to stop.

“As his older brother told it to me,” whispered Ten-Tons. “Kevin wouldn’t harm a fly.”

Beside me Zach snorted—probably thinking of the beating he’d got in Shepherd’s Bush.

“I believe he’s supplied you with food contaminated with E. coli,” I whispered.

There was no repetition from the crowd, and when I saw the blank looks on the faces of both Ten-Tons, I realized it was because they hadn’t understood what I’d just said.

“The last delivery was tainted,” I whispered, and the crowd took up tainted around me and Mathew Ten-Tons looked shocked.

“Are you certain of this?” he asked.

I had blowups of the pictures Lesley had taken of the pallets Kevin loaded onto his van. Written on the side was Coates and Son, a wholesaler who had been told by the Food Standards Agency, that very morning, to stop trading but instead decided to flog off some of their stock—cheap. Which was why Kevin had bought it, stuffed it in the back of his Transit van, and delivered it to the Quiet People—right in front of me and Lesley.

“On my oath as an apprentice,” I said, louder than I meant to. “And more important, has anyone eaten any of the food that came down the day before yesterday?”

Ten-Tons sat back, his chest heaved, his mouth gaped open, and he began making a staccato series of hissing sounds. Then his face turned pink and, still hissing, he leaned forward and slapped his palm on the tabletop.

I flinched, torn between backing away or rushing forward to do the Heimlich maneuver, and I was just about to stand up when I realized he was laughing.

“We don’t eat that,” he whispered once he’d got his breathing under control. “We buy our groceries from the Jew.”

“Which particular Jew?” I asked.

Ten-Tons reached out and touched his daughter’s arm to get her attention.

“What’s the name of the Jew again?” he asked her.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes at me. Or at least I think she did. It was hard to tell, what with the wraparound shades and all. She whispered, “Tesco, he’s talking about Tesco.”

“You shop at Tesco?” asked Zach, far too loudly.

“They deliver,” hissed Elizabeth.

“You used to make me go out for stuff,” whispered Zach.

Ten-Tons wasn’t liking that—he frowned at his daughter, but she ignored him.

“You were always offering to go,” she whispered. “Like a friendly rat.”

“What’s this?” asked Ten-Tons, and grabbed Zach’s wrist. “You were speaking—behind my back?”

“Oi!” I said in my speaking voice, and it rippled through the crowd around me like the downdraft from a helicopter. “Focus. This is serious—if you don’t eat them, what is it you do with all those bloody vegetables?”

I SMELLED them way before I met them. There’s something distinctive about pig slurry. Nothing else smells like it or lingers in your nostrils so long.

Like I said, they used to call the area the Potteries and Piggeries. I thought about that and wondered whether Ten-Tons’s ancestors had made the conscious decision to move their pigs underground. Or had their sties slowly sunk beneath the ground like a Thunderbird arriving back at Tracy Island? The latter, I decided when Ten-Tons led me by the hand through a series of domed chambers, dimly lit by carriage lamps, each with its wallow, its trough, and its fat albino pigs. The troughs were full of the kind of random greenery we’d watched Kevin Nolan delivering two days ago.

Unsurprisingly, I was expected to put my hands on the bloody things. Ten-Tons practically shoved me at a vast sow, who was wallowing chin-deep in mud. Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I’m not a country person. I don’t like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

The animal flesh under my hand was rough, warm, and disturbingly like human skin. I gave an experimental scratch and heard the sow make an encouraging grunting noise.

“Good pigs,” I whispered to Ten-Tons. “Very porky.” I swear I don’t know where this stuff comes from sometimes.

Did E. coli travel through the food chain? I wondered. I was going to have to find out. I had to find a way of getting a health inspector down there who (a) wouldn’t freak out and (b) wouldn’t run screaming to the media, or worse, Thames Water.

It stank there. But in an enclosed underground chamber I reckoned the smell should have killed us. In the gloom I could make out the pale shapes of men, stripped to the waist, shoveling manure into wheelbarrows, which explained where the smell was going. I remembered once chatting up a good-looking Greenpeace activist during a protest in Trafalgar Square and she’d told me, in more detail than I would have liked, that pig slurry was essentially useless as manure. More like toxic waste from a factory, she said. And the Quiet People couldn’t have been dumping it in the Thames because Mama Thames would have come around and had a “conversation” about same.

“What do you do with the pig shit?” I asked.

Ten-Tons squeezed my forearm in what I was beginning to recognize as his way of expressing approval and drew me down a corridor lined with shiny white tiles. “Cleans up nice and easily,” he whispered when I stopped to feel the slick surface.

We were following one of the guys with a barrow as he wheeled it up the corridor to a vaulted chamber lined with the same white tile. There, he lifted a hatch in the floor and tipped the slurry down in one practiced movement. With a rattle he seized a bucket of water placed nearby and sluiced down the wheelbarrow and the edges of the hatch. Then he refilled the bucket from a tap mounted in the wall and wheeled his barrow back down the corridor, presumably for more shit shoveling. As he went I saw another barrow wrangler heading toward us with another load of slurry.

When Ten-Tons led me into the next room I thought I knew what I was going to see next.

I was wrong.

I looked up the figures later; your average pig produces over ten times what a human does per kilo body weight, and given that these were big pigs, we were talking a shitload of pig shit. Now, not only is that enough to drown in, but it’s also the vilest-smelling animal by-product known to man—which doesn’t endear you to your neighbors. But you can take that slurry and run it through what’s called a horizontal plug flow reactor. Pig shit goes in one end, some seriously good fertilizer comes out the other, and you get methane out the top. It also gets rid of the smell, and some farms do it for that reason alone. The thing is, in a cold climate like what we’ve got, you have to use most of the methane to maintain a useful operating temperature, which is why this technology has never taken off in Northern Europe. It’s the sort of sustainable low-tech engineering favored by progressive development NGOs, Greenpeace, and middle-aged men in leather-patched tweed jackets.

I was expecting something simple.

What I got was a ten meter wall of brass pipework festooned with dials and gauges and stop valves. Two older men in moleskin trousers, white shirts, and sleeveless leather jerkins were shading their pale faces while they worked two banks of brake levers, the kind I associate with old-fashioned railway signal boxes. A whistle blew, one of an ascending bank mounted near the center of the contraption, and one of the engineers stepped smartly over to a row of gauges. He brushed his fingers around the face of the dial—there was no glass—before calmly pulling two levers in quick succession and turning a valve wheel a quarter turn to the left. The whistle stopped.

My industrial chemistry had been leaking out of my head for over seven years, but enough of the basics remained for me to spot a cracking plant—even one that had dropped out of a Jules Verne novel. The Quiet People were refining their pig-generated hydrocarbons on an industrial scale.

And that was when I realized that Tyburn was wrong.

There was no way we could allow the existence of the Quiet People to become general knowledge. If the Health and Safety Executive didn’t close them down, then the inhabitants of one of the richest neighborhoods in London, which the bloody refinery was built under, would. And the HSE would probably be right, because no doubt it had been built with the same concern for worker safety that made Victorian factories the happy places to work they were.

That wasn’t counting what the farm welfare people would say about the pigs, or OFWAT about the connections to the sewage system, OFSTED about the children’s education—if they even were educated—or the Kensington and Chelsea Social Services or Housing. The Quiet People would be swept away as quickly and with as little fuss as a pygmy tribe living in an inconveniently mineral-rich part of a rain forest.

“We’re right proud of this,” whispered Ten-Tons, mistaking my sudden paralysis for awe.

“I’ll bet,” I whispered back, and asked him what it was all in aid of.

The answer turned out to be firing pottery—as if I couldn’t guess.

Ten-Tons led me to a workshop where Stephen—I was getting better at telling them all apart—was throwing a pot on a wheel. Watching were Agent Reynolds and Lesley, who’d been led there by Elizabeth. Lesley caught my arm, in the manner of our hosts, and pulled me down until she could whisper in my ear.

“We can’t stay here,” she whispered. “Even Nightingale’s not going to wait much longer before he comes in.”

And it would be with as many armed officers as he could muster.

Even in the dim light Lesley could read my face. “Yeah,” she said. “And you should see the arsenal these guys have squirreled away.”

“You two are going to have to go back,” I whispered.

“And leave you here on your own?” she hissed.

“If anything happens,” I whispered, “you can come back and get me.”

Lesley turned my head so she could stare in my eyes.

“Is this one of your stupid things?” she asked.

“Did you get anything from Ten-Tons’s daughter?” I asked.

“Stephen is her fiancé,” whispered Lesley. “Or at least that’s what her dad thinks. But I reckon Stephen wants to go outside the tribe.”

I glanced over at Stephen, who didn’t, I noticed, wear sunglasses. He didn’t seem worried by bright lights. Less sensitive or just less inhibited?

Lesley explained that it was a love triangle, or possibly a rectangle, but either way a scandal by the standards of the Quiet People, who were living in what Lesley described as Jane Austen’s last bunker. Elizabeth was betrothed to Stephen, but in light of his neglect, the young princess’s fancy was caught by the dashing and debonair cousin from across the sea.

“Ryan Carroll?” I asked. “She obviously likes the artistic type.”

“Oh, she does,” whispered Lesley. “Only farther across the sea than Ireland. Handsome, American, son of a senator, slightly dead.”

James Gallagher.

“Did they ever …?”

Elizabeth had been far too refined to say it outright but Lesley and Reynolds were pretty certain that some snogging had taken place, at the very least. I remembered the way Zach couldn’t look Elizabeth in the face—unrequited in love. That was a great big square on the Police Bingo Board—I did a quick check to make sure Zach hadn’t sloped off while we were distracted. He was still with us and still gazing at Elizabeth.

“No cuts on his hand,” I whispered, but maybe he healed fast.

“We’ll know when the DNA results come through,” whispered Lesley. “If it is him, then Special Agent Reynolds is going to be so smug.”

We checked to make sure Reynolds wasn’t listening on the sly, but she was staring at Stephen in what looked a lot like awe. I looked down at the pot he was working on. It was glowing with a soft luminescence that, if you’re me or Lesley, was a little bit familiar.

“All right,” said Lesley in a normal speaking voice. “That explains a lot.”

And I found myself unexpectedly looking at a totally complete bingo card.

“I need you to go back to Nightingale right now,” I whispered. “You can leave Zach with me.”

“This is one of your stupid plans, isn’t it?” she whispered.

I told her not to worry, and it was all going to be fixed in time for Christmas dinner.

“I’m giving you sixty minutes.” Her breath tickled my ear. “And then I’m coming back in with the SAS.”

“I’ll be out in half an hour,” I whispered back.

I had it sorted in less than twenty minutes because I’m just that good.