CHAPTER 9

Shepherd’s Bush Market

MY AIRWAVE was squawking about a fatac—a fatal accident—at Hyde Park Corner, so once I was across the river I swung north and went via Marylebone. The Westway was eerily deserted as I climbed onto the elevated section, and it seemed I could have reached up and brushed the bottom of the clouds. The snowflakes whipped through the white beam of my headlights and over my bonnet like streamers in a wind tunnel. It’s the closest I’d ever come to driving in a blizzard and yet when I got on the slip road at the White City turnoff, I found myself gliding into a world of pale stillness.

It was only after the Holland Park roundabout, when I headed through Shepherd’s Bush, that I saw people again. Pedestrians were walking gingerly along the pavement, shops were open, and idiots who shouldn’t have been driving in adverse conditions were forcing me to drop my speed to just over twenty.

Shepherd’s Bush Market is an elevated station, and as I approached the bridge where the tracks crossed the road I started to look out for Zach. I pulled over by the locked battleship-gray gates of the market and got out. I turned to look as headlights approached, but the car, a decomposing early-model Nissan Micra, surfed by on the road slush.

If, like me, you’ve spent two years as a Police Community Safety Officer and another two as a PC patrolling central London in the late evenings, you become something of a connoisseur of street violence. You learn to differentiate the bantam posturing of drunks or the shrieking huddle of a girls-night-out gone south from the ugly shoving of a steaming gang and the meaty, strangely quiet crunch that indicates an intense desire by one human being to do bodily harm to another.

I heard a grunt, a smack, a whimper, and before I thought about it I had my extendable baton out and was across the road and heading for the shadows around the alley opposite the market. There were two of them, bulky shapes in cold-weather jackets, laying into a third person, who was hunched up in the snow.

“Oi,” I shouted. “Police! What do you think you’re doing?” It’s traditional.

They turned and stared as I ran at them—there was one big one and one skinny, as is also traditional. I recognized the skinny one. It was Kevin bloody Nolan. He would have bolted, except that his big friend was made of sterner stuff.

The thing about being the police is that to do the job properly part of you has to enjoy mixing it up. And the thing about members of the public, like the big idiot with Kevin Nolan who started squaring up to me, is that they expect there to be at least some kind of ritual exchange of insults before you get down to it. The big one had just enough time to register that I wasn’t going to stop when I drove my shoulder into his chest. He staggered backward and tripped over the cowering man behind him. As he went down, bellowing, I swiped Kevin bloody Nolan’s thigh with my baton hard enough to give him a dead leg. Then I just reached out and shoved him off his feet.

“You bastard,” said the big man as he tried to get up.

“Stay down or I’ll break your fucking arms,” I said, and then thought, Shit, I only have one set of handcuffs. Luckily the big man lay down again.

“Are you really the police?” he asked almost plaintively.

“Ask your mate Kevin,” I said.

The big man sighed. “You stupid cunt,” he said, but he was talking to Kevin. “You utter, utter moron.”

“I didn’t know he was going to be here,” said Kevin.

“Just keep your gob shut,” said the big man.

I pushed his legs off the figure in the snow, who rolled over and grinned up at me—it was Zach. What a surprise.

“You know I was really hoping for a Saint Bernard,” he said as he sat up.

“But what you’re asking for is a smacking,” I said.

I reached for my phone and was about to switch it on and call for backup when Zach tapped me on the leg and pointed up the alley. “Look out,” he said.

A figure came running toward us, and I headed to block them.

“Get back,” I yelled, and the figure reached for a gun.

There’s something unmistakable about the way someone reaches for a concealed weapon. The smooth way he pulled back his jacket with one hand while the other hand dipped under his armpit for the butt of the firearm. I didn’t give him a chance to finish the movement—I made the forma in my head, flung out my left hand, still holding my phone, and shouted, much louder than I’m supposed to, “Impello palma.”

NIGHTINGALE CAN put a fireball through ten centimeters of steel armor, and I can singe my way through a paper target nine times out of ten, but really, in the interests of community policing, it’s better to have something a bit less lethal in your armory. I’d used impello in anger twice and managed to seriously injure one suspect and kill the second. More important, from Nightingale’s point of view, I was twisting the forma out of shape by making a sort of second off-the-cuff forma and ramming it into the back of the first. Turpis vox, he called it, the unseen word, and it was a classic apprentice’s error.

“You think you’re being innovative,” Nightingale had said. “But what you’re doing is distorting the forma. If you get into the habit of doing that, then those formae won’t integrate properly when you start combining them with other formae to create proper spells.”

I made the mistake of saying that the couple of spells I could do seemed to work well enough, which made him sigh and say, “Peter, you’re still learning first- and second-order spells. Spells that are designed to be easy and forgiving, and that’s why you learn them first. Once you start getting to the higher-order spells there’s no margin for error—if you haven’t mastered the formae they’ll go wrong or backfire in unpredictable ways.”

“You’ve never shown me a high-order spell,” I said.

“Really?” said Nightingale. “We must rectify that.” He took a deep breath and then, with a curiously theatrical wave of his hand, spoke a long spell that was at least eight formae long.

I pointed out that nothing had happened, which prompted Nightingale to give me one of his rare smiles.

“Look up,” he said.

I did and found that above my head a small cloud, about as wide as a tea tray, was gathering. It looked like a compact mass of thick steam, and once it finished growing, raindrops began to fall on my upturned face.

I ducked out from under it and it followed me. It wasn’t very fast—you could stay ahead of it with a brisk walking pace—but as soon as you stopped it would drift to a halt overhead and bring a little bit of the English summer to a personal space near you.

I asked Nightingale what on earth the spell was for and he said it was a favorite of one of his masters at school. “At the time I thought he seemed inordinately fond of it, though,” he said as he watched me dodge around the atrium. “Although I must say I’m beginning to appreciate its appeal now.”

According to my stopwatch, the spell lasted thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds.

Nightingale did relent and teach me an additional forma, palma, which allowed me to give people a nice, evenly spread, hopefully nonlethal smack. I had him test it on me on the firing range. It felt exactly like running into a glass door.

WITH A high-pitched grunt the figure went down on its back in the snow. I got to him just as he reached again into his jacket, so I smacked him hard on the wrist. “He” yelped in pain, and I realized it was a woman and then saw her face and recognized her. It was Agent Reynolds.

She looked up at me with bewilderment.

I heard a scuffling sound behind me, and Zach yelled, “They’re getting away.”

Good, I thought, one less thing to worry about, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t find Kevin Nolan whenever I needed to. “Let them go,” I said.

I couldn’t leave Reynolds lying on her back in the snow with a possible concussion and/or a broken wrist. I told Zach to stay close and walked back to see her sitting up and cradling her wrist.

“You hit me,” she said.

“Wasn’t me,” I said, crouched down in front of her and trying to see if her eyes were unfocused. “You must have slipped on some ice and gone down on your back.”

“You hit me on the wrist,” she said.

“You were reaching for a weapon,” I said.

“I’m not carrying a weapon.” She opened her jacket to prove it.

“Then what were you reaching for?” I asked.

She looked away. I understood it had been an automatic reaction just like mine.

“Hold on,” she said and felt her nose. “If I fell on my back, why does my face hurt?”

“Have you got a headache?” I asked. “Are you feeling dizzy?”

“I’m just fine, coach,” she said, and pushed herself to her feet. “You can put me back in the game.” She spotted Zach and took a step toward him. “You,” she said with an excellent command voice. “I want to talk to you.”

“Oi,” I said. “None of that. Why were you following me?”

“What makes you think I was following you?” she asked.

I pushed the jury-rigged power switch on my phone to the On position, gave thanks it had been off when I’d done the spell, and waited impatiently while it jingled at me cheerily and wasted my time with a hello graphic.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“I’m calling Kittredge,” I said. “Your liaison.”

“Wait. If I explain, will you leave him out of it?”

“No promises,” I said. “Let’s find somewhere to sit down.”

WE ENDED up, as is traditional, in a kebab shop just the other side of the bridge where I could keep an eye on my car. Although first we had to scuff about in the snow looking for Zach’s repulsive sports bag, which we finally located via its smell. Once inside I forked out for a kebab and chips for Zach and a mixed shish kebab for myself. Reynolds seemed appalled by the whole notion of a rotating lamb roast and stuck with a Diet Coke. Maybe she was worried about contracting that insidious European E. coli. I had a coffee. Usually the coffee in kebab shops is dire, but I believe the guy on the counter made me for a cop, so I got something blacker and stronger than usual. Late-night kebab shops fulfill a very particular ecological niche—that of feeding stations for people spilling out of the pubs and clubs. Since the clientele tends to be pissed young men who have utterly failed to pull that night, the staff are always pleased to have the police hanging about.

Under the harsh fluorescent light I saw that the roots of Agent Reynolds’s hair were auburn. She caught me looking and jammed her black knit hat back on her head.

“How come you dye your hair?” I asked.

“It makes me less conspicuous,” she said.

“For undercover work?”

“Just for everyday,” she said. “I want the witnesses talking to the agent not the redhead.”

“Why were you following me?” I asked.

“I wasn’t following you,” she said. “I was following Mr. Palmer.”

“What have I done?” asked Zach, but Agent Reynolds sensibly ignored him.

“He was your best suspect,” she said. “And not only did you just let him go, you let him right back into the victim’s home.”

“I lived there too, you know,” said Zach.

“It was his registered address,” I said.

“Yes, his polling address,” said Agent Reynolds. “A status you can earn by filling in a single form once a year without providing any significant identification whatsoever. I’m amazed your voting security is so lax.”

“Not as amazed as I am that Zach’s registered to vote.” I asked him, “Who do you vote for?”

“The Greens,” he said.

“Do you think this is funny?” she asked, and her voice was hoarse. Even if she’d got some sleep on the plane over she had to be pushing twenty-four hours without it by now. “Is it because the victim is an American citizen? Do you find the murder of American citizens funny?”

I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humor, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they’re that strung out. I took a gulp of my coffee to cover my hesitation.

“What makes you think he’s involved?” I asked.

“He’s a criminal,” she said.

“We did him for possession,” I said. “Murder would be a bit of a step up.”

“Not in my experience,” she said. “James Gallagher was his meal ticket. Perhaps James got tired of being free-loaded on.”

“I’m sitting right here, you know,” said Zach.

“I’m trying to forget it,” said Reynolds.

“He has an alibi,” I said.

“Not a direct one,” she said. “There could be a way out of the back that goes through a blind spot.”

Did she think we were amateurs? Stephanopoulos would have spent most of yesterday trying to break Zach’s alibi, and that included the notion of a back way out.

“Is it usual for FBI agents to exceed their authority in this way?” I asked.

“The FBI is legally responsible to investigate crimes committed against American citizens in foreign countries,” she said, her eyes fixed on some abstract spot to the left of my head.

“But you don’t really, do you?” I said. “Not that it wouldn’t have been nice to have a bit of extra manpower, especially for that one assault we had in Soho. Young man got a crowbar in the face, he was American, no sign of the FBI then.”

She shrugged. “His father probably wasn’t a senator.”

“Apart from the security aspect,” I said, “what are they really worried about?”

“His father is in a position of moral authority,” she said. “It wouldn’t serve any purpose to have him compromised by something his son may have done.”

“What do you think his son may have done?”

“There were incidents while he was at college.”

“What kind of incidents?” asked Zach before I could.

I sighed and pointed at a table at the other end of the room. “Go and sit over there,” I said.

“Do I have to?” he asked.

“This is grown-up stuff,” I said.

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’ll buy you a cake,” I said.

He sat up like a small dog. “Really?”

“If you go sit over there,” I said, and he did. I turned to Reynolds. “I can see why you consider him a suspect. What kind of incidents?”

“Narcotics,” she said. “He was arrested twice for possession but the charges were dropped.”

I bet they were, I thought.

“He did some drugs at university,” I said. “Isn’t that what it’s for?”

“Some people hold themselves to a higher standard,” she said primly. “Even while at college.”

“Have you ever been outside America?” I asked.

“How is that relevant?”

“I’m just curious,” I said. “Is this your first time abroad?”

“Do you think I’m ‘unsophisticated,’ is that it?” she asked.

So, yeah, I thought. First time abroad.

“I’m curious as to why they chose you for the assignment,” I said.

“I’m known to the senator and his family,” she said. “My superiors felt that it would be helpful if the senator had a friendly face on the ground during the investigation—given the senator’s background and your country’s history.”

“Really, which bit?” I asked.

“Ireland,” said Reynolds. “In his early career he was vocal in his condemnation of the occupation and British human rights abuses. He was worried that the British police might allow their investigation to be prejudiced because of those positions.”

I wondered whether a father, upon learning of his son’s death, would really be so self-centered as to think that. Or whether a canny politician might use any position he could to bolster the investigation. If it was politics, it wasn’t my problem—I could safely kick that up to those that are paid to deal with such matters. Sometimes a rigid command hierarchy is your friend. But Seawoll would want a heads-up about the Irish connection, just in case CTC hadn’t bothered to tell him. It never hurts to curry favor with the boss, I thought.

“I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Ireland,” I said. “The murder, I mean.”

“What about Ryan Carroll?” she asked.

She had been following me after all, and she wasn’t beyond lying to me when she was pretending to come clean—useful to know.

“What about him?” I wondered if Reynolds’s conversation always ricocheted around its subject like a pinball or whether this was the jet lag talking. I started feeling increasingly knackered just looking at her.

“Is he a suspect?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“A person of interest?”

“Not really.”

“Why did you go and interview him?”

Because some of his “pieces,” or whatever you call them, are partially constructed with something so strongly imbued with vestigia that members of the public backed away without knowing why, was what I didn’t say.

“James Gallagher was a fan,” I said. “I was just there to see if there’d been any contact. Which there wasn’t, I might add.”

“Just that?” she asked. “I’d say that was a strange use of your time during the early stages of an investigation.”

“Agent Reynolds,” I said, “I’m just a PC in plainclothes. I’m not even officially a detective yet and about as junior as it is possible to be in the Murder Team without still being at school.”

“Just a lowly constable?”

“That’s me,” I said.

“Sure you are,” she said.

She knew something. That’s the trouble with detectives—they’re suspicious bastards. But she didn’t know the whys and wherefores, and she hadn’t even hinted that she knew about the weirder shores of policing.

“Go get some sleep,” I said. “But if I was you I’d call Kittredge first and put him out of his misery.”

“And what do you think I should tell him?”

“Tell him you fell asleep in your car—jet lag.”

“Hardly the image the Bureau likes to project,” she said.

“What do you care what Kittredge thinks?” I asked. “Where’re you staying?”

“Holiday Inn,” said Reynolds, then pulled a card out of her pocket and squinted at it. “Earls Court.”

“Have you got your own transport?”

“A rental,” she said. Of course she did—how else had she followed me?

“Will you be all right driving in this snow?”

She found that hilarious. “This is not snow,” she said. “Where I’m from, you know, you have snow when you can’t find your car the next morning.”

I WAS tempted to drop Zach at the Turning Point shelter or even bang him up again at Belgravia, if only I could have trusted him to keep his mouth shut. But in the end I gave up and took him back to the Folly. Despite the cold, I had to leave the window open to combat the tramp smell of his bag. At one point I seriously considered stopping and making him open it so I could check whether it was full of body parts.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asked as I pulled into the coach house and parked beside the Jag. “And whose is that?”

“My governor’s,” I said. “Don’t even look at it.”

“That’s a Mark 2,” he said.

“You’re still looking at it,” I said. “I told you not to.”

With a last lingering gaze at the Jag, Zach followed me out of the coach house and across the courtyard to the rear door of the Folly. I’d considered letting him crash in the coach house, but then realized what was likely to happen if I left him alone with six grand worth of portable electronics—my personal six grand at that.

I opened the back door and ushered him in—watching him closely as he crossed the threshold. I’d been told once that the protections around the Folly were “inimical” to certain people, but Zach didn’t react at all. The back hallway is just a short corridor lined with brass hooks for hanging sou’westers, oilskins, capes, and other archaic forms of outdoor apparel.

“You know, this is the weirdest nick I’ve ever been in,” he said.

As we stepped into the main atrium, Molly came gliding out to meet us in what would have been a much more sinister fashion had Toby not been dancing and yapping excitedly around her skirts at the same time.

Even so, Zach took one look at her and promptly hid behind me.

“Who’s that?” he hissed in my ear.

“This is Molly,” I said. “Molly—this is Zach, who will be staying overnight. Can he use the room next to mine?”

Molly gave me a long stare and then inclined her head at me, exactly the way Ziggy the dog had, before gliding off toward the stairs. Possibly to put fresh linen on the guest bed or perhaps to sharpen her meat cleavers—it’s hard to tell with Molly.

Toby had stopped yapping and instead snuffled at Zach’s heels as he made his way across the atrium toward the podium where we keep the Book; well not the Book exactly but a really good late-eighteenth-century imprint of the Book open to the title page.

He read the title out loud: “ ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis.’ ” With the erroneous soft “c” sound in “principia” and “magicis”—Pliny the Elder would have been pissed. I know it annoyed Nightingale when I did it.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said, and turned to point an accusing finger. “You can’t be part of this, you’re … common. This is the Folly; this place is strictly toffs and monsters.”

“What can I say,” I said. “Standards have been falling lately.”

“The bloody Isaacs,” he said. “I should have taken my chances with the Nolan brothers.”

I wondered if Nightingale knew we had a nickname. I also wondered how come someone like Zachary Palmer knew what it was.

“So what are you, then?” I asked—it had to be worth a try.

“My dad was a fairy,” said Zach. “And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.”