Whispers Under Ground

heads-up about the Irish connection, just in case CTC hadn’t bothered to tell him. It never hurts to curry favour with the boss, I thought.
    ‘I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Ireland,’ I said. ‘The murder I mean.’
    ‘What about Ryan Carroll?’ she asked.
    She had been following me after all, and she wasn’t beyond lying to me when she was pretending to come clean – useful to know.
    ‘What about him?’ I wondered if Reynolds’ conversation always ricocheted around its subject like a pinball or whether this was the jet lag talking. I started feeling increasingly knackered just looking at her.
    ‘Is he a suspect?’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘A person of interest?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘Why did you go and interview him?’
    Because some of his ‘pieces’ or whatever you call them are partially constructed with something so strongly imbued with a vestigium that members of the public backed away without knowing why, was what I didn’t say.
    ‘James Gallagher was a fan,’ I said. ‘I was just there to see if there’d been any contact. Which there wasn’t, I might add.’
    ‘Just that?’ she asked. ‘I’d say that was a strange use of your time during the early stages of an investigation.’
    ‘Agent Reynolds,’ I said. ‘I’m just a PC in plain clothes, I’m not even officially a detective yet and about as junior as it is possible to be in the Murder Team without still being at school.’
    ‘Just a lowly constable?’
    ‘That’s me,’ I said.
    ‘Sure you are,’ she said.
    She knew something. That’s the trouble with detectives – they’re suspicious bastards. But she didn’t know the whys and wherefores, and she hadn’t even hinted that she knew about the weirder shores of policing.
    ‘Go get some sleep,’ I said. ‘But if I was you I’d call Kittredge first and put him out of his misery.’
    ‘And what do think I should tell him?’
    ‘Tell him you fell asleep in your car – jet lag.’
    ‘Hardly the image the bureau likes to project,’ she said.
    ‘What do you care what Kittredge thinks?’ I said. ‘Where’re you staying?’
    ‘Holiday Inn,’ said Reynolds and pulled a card out of her pocket and squinted at it. ‘Earls Court.’
    ‘Have you got your own transport?’
    ‘A rental,’ she said. Of course she had – how else had she followed me?
    ‘Will you be all right driving in this snow?’
    She found that hilarious. ‘This isn’t snow,’ she said. ‘Where I’m from you know you have snow when you can’t find your car the next morning.’
    I was tempted to drop Zach at the Turning Point shelter or even bang him up again at Belgravia, if only I could have trusted him to keep his mouth shut. But in the end I gave up and took him back to the Folly. Despite the cold I had to leave the window open to combat the tramp smell of Zach’s bag. At one point I seriously considered stopping and making him open it so I could check whether it was full of body parts.
    ‘Where the fuck are we?’ asked Zach as I pulled into the coach house and parked beside the Jag. ‘And whose is that?’
    ‘My governor’s,’ I said. ‘Don’t even look at it.’
    ‘That’s a Mark 2,’ he said.
    ‘You’re still looking at it,’ I said. ‘I told you not to.’
    With a last lingering gaze at the Jag, Zach followed me out of the coach house and across the courtyard to the rear door of the Folly. I’d considered letting him crash in the coach house, but then I considered what was likely to happen if I left Zach alone with six grand’s worth of portable electronics – my personal six grand at that.
    I opened the back door and ushered him in – watching him closely as he crossed the threshold, I’d been told once that the protections around the Folly were ‘inimical’ to certain people but Zach didn’t react at all. The back hallway is just a short corridor lined with brass hooks for the hanging of sou’westers, oilskins, capes and other archaic forms of outdoor apparel.
    ‘You know this is the weirdest nick I’ve ever been in,’ he said.
    As we stepped into the main atrium Molly came gliding out to meet us in what would have been a much more sinister fashion had Toby not been dancing and yapping excitedly around her skirts at the same time.
    Even so, Zach took one look at her and promptly hid behind me.
    ‘Who’s that?’ he hissed in my ear.
    ‘This is Molly,’ I said. ‘Molly – this is Zach who will be staying overnight. Can he use the