Whispers Under Ground

and jacket. Manager, I wondered, or better half, or possibly both.
    Most of the patrons gathered around them and I heard the woman launch into what was unmistakably a warm-up speech. I guessed that Ryan Carroll was about to take his bow. I looked at his work again. The question was – did he imbue it with its vestigia or did that come from a found object? And if it did, was Ryan aware of its significance?
    My phone rang – it was Zach.
    ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said.
    ‘Really? Why’s that?’
    ‘His old man threw me out of the house,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go.’
    ‘Try Turning Point. They’ve got a big shelter up west,’ I said. ‘You can stay there tonight.’
    ‘You owe me,’ said Zach.
    ‘No I don’t,’ I said. One of the lessons of policing is that everyone has a sad story, including the guy you’ve just arrested for shoving a chip pan in his wife’s face. Obvious chancers like Zach were often way more convincing than those that had real grievances – comes with practice, I suppose.
    ‘I think they’re after me,’ he added.
    ‘Who’s they?’ I asked.
    There was a round of applause from the crowd.
    ‘If you pick me up I’ll tell you,’ he said.
    Shit, I thought. If I ignored him and he turned up dead I’d be facing some questions from Seawoll and a ton of paperwork.
    ‘Where are you?’ I asked, reluctantly.
    ‘Shepherd’s Bush – near the market.’
    ‘Get on the tube and meet me at Southwark.’
    ‘I can’t do the tube,’ he said. ‘It’s not safe. You’re going to have to meet me here.’
    I asked him which end of the market and headed for the exit. As I traversed the empty hallway I saw Ziggy the dog sitting alertly on his haunches by the door to the gift shop. He looked at me, tilted his head to one side and then tracked me all the way out.

9
    Shepherd’s Bush Market
    M y 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 like 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 I rounded Holland Park roundabout and headed through Shepherd’s Bush that I started to see people again. Pedestrians were walking gingerly along the pavements, shops were open and idiots who shouldn’t be 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-grey 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 PCSO 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 your actual 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 recognised 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 getting stuck in. 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