Whispers Under Ground

reference on mental health called 50 Signs of Mental Illness . I picked up the medical book and dangled it by its spine, but it stubbornly failed to reveal any tell-tale gaps where it had been heavily read.
    Looking for material? I wondered. Worried about himself or somebody else? The book was still crisp and relatively new. Was he worried about Zach perhaps?
    I looked around the room, but there were no books on the arcane or even the vaguely mystical and not even a vestige of vestigium beyond the normal background. This is a classic example of what I was coming to call the inverse law of magical utility – in others words the chance of finding magical phenomena is inversely proportional to how useful it would be to bloody find it.
    It was entirely possible that any magical side to the murder rested with the killer, not the victim. I probably should have stayed in the tunnels with Sergeant Kumar and the search team.
    So of course I found what I was looking for five minutes later, downstairs, while we were statementing Zach.
    Zach had put on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt while I’d been upstairs. He was sitting half hunched over the table while Carey took his statement. Guleed had taken a position leaning nonchalantly against the simulation farmhouse kitchen unit just inside Zach’s peripheral vision. She was watching his face carefully and frowning. I guessed she’d spotted the mental health book too.
    There was a cup of coffee waiting on the table for me. I sat down next to Carey but kept my posture relaxed, took my coffee and leaned back slightly as I sipped it. Zach’s hands were trembling and he was unconsciously rocking back and forth as we went through his movements in the last twenty-four hours. It’s always useful to have your witnesses a little bit unnerved, but you can have too much of a good thing.
    On the table was an earthenware bowl sitting on the kitchen table with two apples, a splotchy banana and a handful of minicab cards inside it. It was the same rich biscuit colour as the shard I’d found in the Underground but too curved to be an identical piece.
    I took another gulp of coffee, which was definitely the good stuff, and casually brushed my fingers along the rim of the bowl. There it was, fainter than the shard, heat and charcoal and what I realised was the smell of pig shit and … I wasn’t sure what.
    I emptied the fruit and cards from the bowl and traced my fingertips across the smooth curve of its interior. It seemed beautifully shaped but I couldn’t say why. A circle is just a circle, after all. But it was as beautiful as Lesley’s smile. At least how Lesley’s smile used to be.
    I realised that the others had fallen silent.
    ‘Where did this come from?’ I asked Zach.
    He looked at me like I was bonkers, so did Guleed and Carey.
    ‘The bowl?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes the bowl,’ I said. ‘Where did it come from?’
    ‘It’s just a bowl,’ he said.
    ‘I know,’ I said slowly. ‘Do you know where it came from?’
    Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique. ‘I think he got it from the market.’
    ‘From Portobello?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Portobello Market is at least a kilometre long and must have at least a thousand stalls, not to mention the hundred-plus shops that line both sides of Portobello Road and spill out into the side streets.
    ‘Any chance of you being bit more specific?’ I asked.
    ‘Top end I think,’ said Zach. ‘You know. Not the posh end, the other end where the normal stalls are. That’s all I know.’
    I picked up the bowl, cupped it in my hands and brought it level with my eyes.
    ‘I’m going to need to package this,’ I said. ‘Has anybody got any bubble wrap?’

4
    Archway
    T he answer to that question turned out to be, surprisingly, yes. Apparently, art students often have to transport fragile bits of work around and so a cupboard in the kitchen turned out to be not only full of aging spaghetti and dubious packets of cup-a-soup but bubble wrap, tissue paper and masking tape.
    It was also where Zach kept his stash, a ziploc bag of yellow-looking leaf that Carey suggested constituted a seasoning rather than a controlled substance. Nonetheless Carey unofficially confiscated it until it was decided whether we needed to use it as a pretext to arrest Zach or not.
    The bowl went into an evidence bag with a white sticky label with my name, rank and number on