Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch Read Free Book Online

unwashed cup.
    Over in the kitchen area Carey had Zach settled at the table while he pottered around making proper coffee and having a rummage through all the cupboards and shelves for good measure.
    If you’re a professional cleaner, like my mum, one of the ways you make sure you get the dust out of the corners is to use a moist mop and swirl it along the skirting board. All the crud gets rolled up into little damp balls, you wait a bit for them to dry and then you hoover them up. It leaves a distinctive swirling pattern in the carpet which I found behind the TV. It meant that James and Zach were not cleaning their own home and that I was unlikely to find anything useful in the living room. I headed for the stairs.
    The bathroom was professionally sparkling but I was hoping that whoever the cleaner was she’d drawn the line at going into the bedrooms. Judging by the combination old sock and ganja smell in the smaller of the two bedrooms she had indeed. Zach’s bedroom, I guessed. The clothes scattered on the floor had British labels and there was a high-tech bong vaporiser, improvised out of a converted soldering iron and Perspex tube, stashed under the bed. I only found one bit of luggage, a large gym bag with worn straps and stains on the bottom. I gave it a cautious sniff. It had been washed recently but under the detergent there was just of whiff of something rank. What my dad would call tramp smell.
    Whatever it was it wasn’t magical, so I headed out.
    Guleed and I met on the landing.
    ‘No diary or address book – it must be on his phone,’ she said. ‘A couple of airmail letters, his mum I think, same address as the driver’s licence.’ She said she was going to call the police in America and ask them to make contact. I asked her how she was going to find the number.
    ‘That’s what internet is for,’ she said.
    ‘That’s not how the song goes,’ I said but she didn’t get it. ‘I think the governor is going to want to take a close look at Zach, especially if he hasn’t got an alibi.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘I don’t think he’s a student,’ I said. ‘He might even have been sleeping rough.’
    Guleed gave me a lopsided smile. ‘Must be a villain then.’
    ‘Have you done a PNC check yet?’
    ‘Never mind my job, Peter. You’re supposed to be checking for magic or whatever.’ She smiled to show that she was half joking, but only half. I let her get on with her job and stepped into James’ bedroom to see if I could detect any weird bollocks.
    Which appeared to be in short supply.
    I was surprised by the lack of posters on the walls, but James Gallagher had been twenty-three. Maybe he’d outgrown posters or maybe he was saving the space for more serious work. There was a stack of canvasses leaning against the wall. They were mostly city scenes, local I thought, after recognising Portobello Market. It didn’t look like tourist tat so I figured it was probably his own work – a bit retro for a modern art school student, though.
    The bed was rumpled but the sheets had been recently changed and the duvet laid out and turned back. There was a pile of books on the bedside table – art books but of the serious academic kind rather than the coffee table variety; on socialist realism, propaganda posters of the 1930s, classic London Underground posters, and a volume called Right About Now – art & theory since the 1990s . The only non-art books were an omnibus edition of Colin MacInnes’ London trilogy and a reference on mental health called 50 Signs of Mental Illness . I picked up the medical book and dangled it by its spine, but it stubbornly failed to reveal any tell-tale gaps where it had been heavily read.
    Looking for material? I wondered. Worried about himself or somebody else? The book was still crisp and relatively new. Was he worried about Zach perhaps?
    I looked around the room, but there were no books on the arcane or even the vaguely mystical and not even a vestige of vestigium