Whispers Under Ground

London just about the last thing you expect is a white Christmas. The stallholder had been ready for the festive season. There was tinsel draped around the struts of his stall and a small plastic Christmas tree with a ‘Last Minute Xmas Bargains!’ sign attached where the fairy should go. But he had to keep knocking the accumulated snow off his awning or risk it collapsing. It also meant he was much more pleased to see me than he might have been – even after seeing my warrant card.
    ‘My brother, my brother, my brother,’ he said. ‘I know the law never sleeps, but surely you must be looking for something for someone special.’
    ‘I’m looking for an earthenware fruit bowl,’ I said and showed him a picture on my phone.
    ‘I remember these,’ he said. ‘The man who sold them said they were unbreakable.’
    ‘Were they?’
    ‘Unbreakable? As far as I know.’ The stallholder blew on his hands and then stuffed them into his armpits. ‘He said it was an ancient process whose secrets had been guarded since the dawn of time. But it looked like pottery to me.’
    ‘Who’d you get them from?’
    ‘It was one of the Nolan brothers,’ he said. ‘The youngest – Kevin.’
    ‘Who are the Nolans?’
    The stallholder looked at Zach. ‘You know them, Zachy boy, don’t you?’ he said.
    Zach bobbed his head noncommittally.
    ‘Nolan and Sons wholesalers,’ said the stallholders. ‘Only strictly speaking they’re the Nolan Bros. now since the dad died.’
    ‘Local boys?’
    ‘Not for ages,’ he said gesturing vaguely south. ‘Covent Garden now.’
    I thanked him and gave him a tenner for his trouble. It never hurts to cultivate, and I was thinking that wherever the case went, Portobello needed to be on my radar. I wondered when was the last time Nightingale had been up here – probably not since the 1940s.
    ‘If you don’t need me anymore,’ said Zach. ‘I’ll be off.’
    ‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘You can come with me down to Covent Garden.’
    Zach twisted up his shoulders. ‘What do you need me for?’
    Because you don’t want to go, I thought, and because you’ve marked enough squares on the suspicious behaviour board for me to call bingo.
    ‘You can be my local guide,’ I said.
    New Covent Garden is where old Covent Garden went when it switched from being London’s major fruit, vegetable and flower market to being a refurbished tourist trap with a rather good opera house attached. It’s across the river at Nine Elms so I took the Chelsea Bridge as the lesser of two evils – nobody goes across Vauxhall Bridge in the morning unless they’re new in town or working for MI6.
    The river was grey under the snow clouds and as we crossed I could see where the portacabins were beginning to accrete around the solid brick mass of Battersea Power Station. The whole area, including the market, was due to suffer obliteration by urban regeneration in the coming years. I suspected the stacked-Tupperware school of architecture, whose work already lined much of the Thames, would predominate.
    I turned off Nine Elms into the access road and stopped at the toll gate. I forked over the entry fee rather than show my warrant card in order to forestall any advance word of my coming. That useful bit of advice had come with the ‘pool report’ from the Inside Inquiry Team who’d managed a pretty exhaustive check on Nolan and Sons in the hour it took me to drive there. The access road dipped under the railway tracks and I followed the signs round into the market proper. The market buildings had been built in the 1960s as a scaled-up replica of the arcade in the original Covent Garden, only this time making sure it was dingily utilitarian in concrete and breezeblock. Two rows of arcades with shop-sized units that allowed display at one end and easy lorry access at their backs. When it’s busy I imagine it’s really impressive, but being a fresh fruit and vegetable market the working day was over by seven in the morning. By the time I drove into the complex the shutters were down and the new snow was already thick around the entrances to the loading bay. Fortunately, Nolan and Sons didn’t run to a place in the main market. They operated out of one of a line of railway arches nearby. Their shutters were up and an aging Transit van was parked outside – Nolan and Sons was written upon a sign at the front of the arch and repeated in flaking paint on the van.
    ‘Tight bastards,’ muttered Zach.