Whispers Under Ground

Stephanopoulos had left I took a moment to stare at Agent Reynolds as she had a drink at the water cooler. She looked tired and ill at ease. I did some mental calculations – assuming half a day of bureaucratic arse-covering I guessed she’d got the overnight from Washington or New York. She’d have had to come straight from the airport – no wonder she looked like shit.
    She caught me staring, blinked, remembered who I was, scowled and looked away.
    I went downstairs to see how much trouble I was in.
    Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had their lair on the first floor in a room that had been divided into four offices, one big one for Seawoll and three small ones for the DIs working under him. This suited everyone, since all us foot soldiers could get on with our work without the oppressive presence of our senior officers and our senior officers could work in peace and quiet in the full knowledge that only something really urgent would motivate us to schlep down the stairs and interrupt them.
    Seawoll was waiting for me behind his desk. There was coffee, he was reasonable and I was suspicious.
    ‘We’ve giving you the actions relating to the pot and the art gallery because you think that’s where the funny business is,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want you haring off into the fucking distance. Because quite frankly I don’t think your career can survive much more in the way of property damage, what with the ambulances and the helicopters.’
    ‘The helicopter was nothing to do with me,’ I said.
    ‘Don’t play silly buggers with me, lad,’ said Seawoll. He idly picked a paperclip off his desk and began to methodically torture it. ‘If you get so much as a sniff of a suspect I want to know right away – and I want everything in the statements. Except of course the stuff you can’t put in the statements, in which case you inform Stephanopoulos or me as soon as possible.’
    ‘The father is a US senator,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Do I need to stress how important it is that neither he, Agent Reynolds or, more importantly, the American media get even a whiff of anything unusual?’
    The paperclip broke between Seawoll’s fingers.
    ‘The Commissioner phoned this morning,’ he said, picking up another paperclip. ‘He wants to make it clear that should the beady eye of the media fall upon you, he expects you to dig a hole, climb in and bleeding stay there until we tell you otherwise. Got it?’
    ‘Do what I’m told, tell you everything, don’t tell the Americans anything and don’t end up on TV,’ I said.
    ‘He’s a cheeky bugger,’ said Seawoll.
    ‘Yes he is,’ said Stephanopoulos.
    Seawoll dropped the mangled paperclip back into a little Perspex box where it served, presumably, as an awful warning to the rest of the stationery.
    ‘Any questions?’ he asked
    ‘Have you finished with Zachary Palmer yet?’ I asked.

7
    Nine Elms
    G iven that I was not only getting him out of the custody suite but also offering him a lift home, Zachary Palmer seemed curiously displeased to see me.
    ‘How come you locked me up?’ he asked as we drove back.
    I pointed out that he hadn’t been under arrest and could have just asked to leave whenever he wanted to. He seemed surprised to learn that, which confirmed that either he wasn’t a career criminal or he was too stupid to pass the entrance exam.
    ‘I wanted to clean the house up,’ he said. ‘You know, so it would nice for when his parents visited.’
    It had stopped snowing overnight and the sheer weight of London traffic had cleared the main roads. You still had to be careful in the side streets, not least because gangs of kids had taken to snowballing passing cars.
    ‘You’ve got a cleaning lady, don’t you?’ I said.
    ‘Oh yeah,’ said Zach as if remembering suddenly. ‘But I don’t think she comes in today and anyway she’s not my cleaning lady, she was Jim’s. Now he’s not there she probably won’t come. I don’t want them to think I’m a slacker – his parents – I want them to know he had a mate.’
    ‘How did you meet James Gallagher?’ I asked.
    ‘Why do you always do that?’
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Call him by both his names all the time,’ said Zach slouching down in his seat. ‘He liked being called Jim.’
    ‘It’s a police thing,’ I said. ‘It avoids confusion and shows some respect. How did you meet him?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Your friend Jimmy,’ I said.
    ‘Can we stop off for some breakfast?’
    ‘You know it’s