Whispers Under Ground

about the English?’ asked the senator.
    ‘The sense of humour?’ I asked.
    He gave me a bleak smile to make sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.
    ‘You’re not a constituency,’ he said. ‘There’s no community leaders or lobbying group ready to crawl up my ass because somebody somewhere takes exception to a joke or just a slip of the tongue. If I was to, hypothetically speaking, call you a limey or a nigger – which one would cause you the most offence?’
    ‘Was he an embarrassment?’ I asked.
    ‘Do you know why you evaded that question?’ asked the senator.
    Because I’m a professional, I thought. Because I spent a couple of years talking to morose drunks and belligerent shoplifters and people who just wanted someone to shout at because the world was unfair. And the trick of it is simply to keep asking the questions you need the answers for, until finally the sad little sods wind down.
    Occasionally, you have to wrestle them to the floor and sit on them until they’re coherent, but I thought that was an unlikely contingency given who I was talking to.
    ‘In what way would he have been embarrassing?’ I asked.
    ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll tell you what, Senator,’ I said. ‘You tell me about your son and I’ll answer.’
    ‘I asked first,’ he said. ‘You answer my question and I’ll tell you about my son.’
    ‘If you call me a nigger you just sound like a racist American,’ I said. ‘And limey is a joke insult. You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.’
    The senator squinted at me for a long time and I wondered if I might have been too clever by half, but then he sighed and picked up his plastic cup.
    ‘He wasn’t an embarrassment – not to me,’ he said. ‘Although I think maybe he thought he was.’ He sipped his whiskey, I noticed, savouring it on his tongue before he swallowed. He put the glass down – rationing himself – I recognised the behaviour from my dad. ‘He liked being here in London, I can tell you that. He said that the city went on for ever. “All the way down” he said.’
    His eyes unfocused, just for a moment, and I realised that the senator was phenomenally drunk.
    ‘So he was in contact with you?’
    ‘I’d arrange a phone call once a week,’ said the senator. ‘He’d call me every other month or so. Once your kids are out of high school that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.’
    ‘When did you last speak to him?’
    ‘Last week,’ said the senator. His hand twitched towards the whiskey but he stopped himself. ‘I wanted to know if he was coming back for the holidays.’
    ‘And was he?’
    ‘Nope,’ said the senator. ‘He said he’d found something, he was excited and the next time he saw me he was going to blow my mind.’
    The older coppers always make it very clear that it’s just not good practice to get too involved with your victims. A murder inquiry can last weeks, months or even years and ultimately the victims don’t want you to be sympathetic. They want you to be competent – that’s what you owe them.
    But still someone had stabbed James in the back and left his father flailing around in grief and incomprehension. I decided that I didn’t approve of that at all.
    I asked some more questions relating to his son’s art work, but it was clear that the senator had been indulgent rather than interested. Guleed, who’d been watching me from the other side of the kitchen, managed to convey, by expression alone, the fact that she’d already asked all the routine questions and unless I had anything new I should shut up now and leave the poor bastard alone.
    I was walking back to the car when Lesley phoned me.
    ‘You know that house?’ she asked.
    ‘Which house?’
    ‘The one that Kevin Nolan delivered his greenery to.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said.
    ‘The one where he picked up all the crockery,’ said Lesley. ‘The very crockery that we have just found several metric tons of?’
    ‘The house off the Moscow Road,’ I said.
    ‘That house doesn’t exist,’ she said.

15
    Bayswater
    T he British have always been madly over-ambitious and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight. The London Underground was no exception and was built by a breed of entrepreneurs whose grasp was matched only by the size of their sideburns. While their equally gloriously bewhiskered counterparts across