Whispers Under Ground

and satisfy our curiosity.’
    ‘You want to keep this secret, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a deal on offer?’
    ‘No such luck.’ I said. Seawoll had made that much clear.
    ‘What if I was to threaten to use it as part of my defence,’ he said. ‘Have it all out in open court. Try keeping your secrets then.’
    ‘You can give that a go if you like,’ I said. ‘Strange little men living in the sewers, keeping pigs and making pots? My money’s on you ending up in Broadmoor with a thorazine drip.’
    ‘Thorazine,’ said Ryan. ‘That’s so last-century. You get Clorozil and Serdolect these days.’ He sighed. ‘No doubt you have it all sewn up, a nod and a wink and it’s like the story never existed.’
    I tried not to show my relief. I mean, we might have been able to keep a lid on it, but the thing about a secret conspiracy is that it never stays secret for long. Tyburn was right about one thing – I didn’t think the status quo was going to be an option much longer.
    ‘What led you down there in the first place?’ I asked.
    ‘To the Whisperers you mean?’ he said. ‘Oh, family tradition. We may have all been a proper bourgeois Catholic family of lawyers and doctors, but we kept alive the memory of my Great-Great-Grandfather Matthew Carroll. Old Farmyard Digger himself.’
    Who, like Eugene Beale and the Gallagher brothers, had headed for England and worked on the canals, tunnels and railways.
    ‘So I was hearing stories about the whispering men from an early age,’ said Ryan. ‘Not that I believed any of it.’
    ‘Is that why you came to London?’ I asked.
    Ryan leant back in his chair and laughed in a way that reminded me of Ten-Tons. ‘I’m sorry, no,’ he said. ‘No offence, but it’s not everyone’s dearest wish to come to London. I had a perfectly serviceable career in Dublin.’
    ‘And yet here you came,’ I said.
    ‘You have to understand what it was like riding the Celtic Tiger,’ said Ryan. ‘For so many years we’d been this joke of a country and suddenly we were it, Dublin was where it was happening. All at once there were coffee shops and galleries and more than one kind of pub. People were immigrating to live in Ireland and not just by accident either.’
    Ryan looked at me and may have detected a distressing lack of sympathy on my part because he leaned forward and said, ‘The thing about the international art market is that the market part of it is essentially dictated by the super-rich and the people that suck their dicks for a living.’ He mimed sucking a dick and it was funny – I laughed.
    ‘But the art part of the international art market is done by yours truly and other people like me – your actual artist,’ he said. ‘And for us it’s all about the expression of the—’ He faltered, waved his hand, and gave up. ‘The expression of the inexpressible. There’s no point asking what a piece of work means, you know? If we could express it in words do you think we would have spent all that time bisecting a cow or pickling a shark? Do you think bisecting a cow is somebody’s idea of a fun fecking afternoon? And then to have stupid people come up to you and say “It’s very interesting, but is it art?” Yes, it’s fecking art. Do you think I’m planning to eat the fecking thing?’
    He sipped his tea and frowned. ‘God, I wish I’d asked for some vodka. Is there any chance of a vodka?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Did you ever bisect a cow?’ I asked.
    ‘Only on a dinner plate,’ said Ryan. ‘I don’t mind getting my hands dirty but I draw the line at faeces and dead animals. The hands are important, feeling the medium you’re working with. Did you take art at school?’
    ‘Drama,’ I said.
    ‘But you must have played with Plasticine – right?’
    ‘When I was a kid,’ I said.
    ‘Do you remember the feeling as it squeezed through your fingers?’ he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And you must have worked with clay at least once in your life.’
    I told him I had and that I remembered the slick texture of the clay beneath my fingers and the excitement I felt when it went into the kiln for firing. I didn’t mention that nothing I made ever seemed to survive the firing process, usually exploding and often taking other people’s work with it. After a while the art teacher, Mr Straploss, just refused to let me do pottery. It was one of the reasons I took drama instead.
    Ryan claimed that it’s