Whispers Under Ground

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 that they were willing to talk.
    ‘Who will we be talking to? I asked.
    ‘Ten-Tons,’ said Zach. ‘Maybe Ten-Tons’ daughter.’
    ‘Interesting,’ I said.
    ‘Who you’re not going to try anything with,’ said Zach.
    ‘Why would I be trying it on with Ten-Tons’ daughter?’ I asked.
    ‘Just don’t even think about it,’ said Zach.
    ‘No hanky panky with Ten-Tons’ 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 to go, 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.
    ‘Do me a favour,’ said Lesley.
    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 pre-operation 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 that 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 a hundred and sixty 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 came after. 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 neighbourhoods 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 hard-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 amongst 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 centrepiece of the area had been an artificial lake full of pigshit 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