Broken Homes

9

Only London didn’t get any stranger. It stayed resolutely normal for the next week or so — at least on the surface.

Operation Tinker, the investigation into the murder of Patrick Mulkern, was headed by Bromley Murder Investigation Team under DCI Duffy, although Nightingale made a point of attending every morning briefing in case something magical came up. My presence, or Lesley’s, was apparently not required.

‘You have a relationship with the Belgravia team,’ Nightingale had said as explanation. ‘And Westminster has a tradition of dealing with unusual cases that Bromley does not share. Inspector Duffy wants someone senior enough to shoulder the blame should things go seriously awry.’

Still, there’s never any shortage of work for idle police hands, especially ones that double up as apprentices, so me and Lesley got on with our paperwork, chasing the paper trail made by our suspected Little Crocodiles and doing the preliminary reading for the detective exams we hoped we’d be taking by the end of the year. At least, I was hoping to take them by the end of the year. Lesley’s current status of being on semi-permanent medical leave was causing her grief.

Professor Postmartin wrote me a letter in which he thanked me for the list of books at Stromberg’s Highgate villa and said that he was appending a list of texts in English, German and Latin that were associated with the 1920s. I dutifully passed this on to Bromley MIT to add to their inquiry database with flags to contact me if anything turned up.

Despite the best efforts of the Spring Court it snowed that weekend, although it didn’t settle inside London’s urban heat island. It certainly didn’t deter Abigail, who arrived on Sunday morning for what Lesley insisted on calling Junior Apprentice. Then, as I did each week, I attempted to find new ways to keep Abigail occupied and out of trouble. Often this involved us following up things she’d put down in her notebook, working our way through the ghost-spotting books, playing what Nightingale called the Game of Jewels or, if we were really desperate, teaching her some Latin. The high point was usually tea downstairs in the atrium, especially since Molly had reached the cake section in the Jamie Oliver book.

‘What is Oberon?’ she asked that Sunday.

‘I don’t know,’ I said and looked at Nightingale.

‘Some variety of fae I presume,’ he said stirring his tea.

‘Yeah,’ said Abigail. ‘But fae just means different, don’t it?’

Nightingale nodded.

‘Is he king of the fairies?’ she asked.

‘Royalty amongst the fae is a strictly protean concept,’ said Nightingale. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘There was this Asian kid that got lost and Oberon got into an argument with Effra about who got to keep him,’ she said and showed me his picture on the phone.

He was a very handsome brown-skinned child with black ringlets and mahogany eyes. The kind of boy who was going to be mistaken for a girl until his teens and would leave a trail of broken hearts behind him thereafter.

‘What do you mean Effra wanted to keep him?’ asked Lesley suspiciously.

She never had so sweet a changeling, I thought. We’d done A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream at school when I was twelve — I was third magic tree on the left. I’d wanted to play Bottom, but then so did everyone else.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Abigail. ‘I got his name out of him and then got Reynard to sniff out his parents.’

‘Who’s Raymond?’ I asked.

‘Reynard,’ said Abigail. ‘Just this guy. You know. .’

‘No we don’t know,’ I said.

‘You met him,’ she said. ‘You know — earlier.’

‘You mean the fox?’ said Lesley. ‘The one that was trying to chat you up?’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Is that the same fox that talked to you at Christmas?’

‘Not unless he’s shed a lot of fur,’ said Abigail, ‘started walking upright, oh and let’s see, put on about fifty kilograms. . Unless you think that’s possible.’

I wasn’t sure what to say. There were reports of were-creatures and shape changers in the Folly’s library, but nothing after the nineteenth century. Nightingale had taught me to be cautious of the early sources. ‘A great deal of it is accurate,’ he’d said. ‘And great deal is less so. Unfortunately it can be difficult to determine which is which.’

‘Unlikely,’ Nightingale told Abigail. ‘But I have to say that recently I have lost my faith in the word impossible.’

But ‘impossible’ still seemed to apply to catching a break in any of our cases. Nightingale returned from the Monday morning briefing and reported that the mood was not optimistic.

‘At this rate,’ said Lesley, ‘no one’s going to want to work with us. We’re clear-up rate poison.’

Nightingale — who came from an era when clear-up rates were something applied to char ladies — decided, as he had threatened in the aftermath of the Spring Court, to teach us some magical blacksmithing. So we trooped into the classroom with a forge — Nightingale insisted that we call it the smithy — and donned our heavy leather aprons and protective goggles.

The forge itself looked bolted together out of random sheets of blackened steel. There was an extractor hood surmounted by what appeared to be a lawnmower engine and a shelf filled with coke at groin level which was fed by what looked to me to be a suspiciously jury-rigged gas line.

‘The Sons of Weyland maintain,’ said Nightingale as he turned the gas on, ‘that the smiths were the first true practitioners of magic.’ He lit the forge with a practised flick of his finger and a lux spell.

For the hardy men of the North, the alchemists and the astrologers that preceded the Newtonian revolution were a bunch of conmen and grifters. ‘As above, so below,’ was so much bollocks. Not that Nightingale used the word bollocks. Craft, dedication, hard work and hitting bits of metal very hard with a hammer — that was the true path to wisdom.

‘And it is true,’ said Nightingale. ‘That you can always tell where a smithy stood by the vestigium it leaves behind.’

‘What about hospitals?’ asked Lesley. ‘You get tons of vestigia off old hospitals.’

‘But not the new ones,’ said Nightingale. ‘Have you noticed that?’

I hadn’t, until he pointed it out.

‘Sudden death seems to imbue a locality with a degree of power,’ he said. ‘People don’t die in hospitals in the quantity they once did.’ He paused and frowned. ‘Or perhaps the technology mutes the effect. In either case, it is of a quite different quality from the sensus illic of a smithy.’

‘You don’t get much around graveyards,’ I said.

‘The magic is released upon the point of death,’ said Nightingale. ‘Despite the attachment spirits have for their bodies, I was taught that little magic stays with those earthly remains.’

‘What about massacre sites?’ I asked. ‘You know like when they get the victims to dig a pit and then-’

‘Extremely magical and extremely unpleasant,’ said Nightingale. ‘I suggest you try to avoid such sites if you wish to sleep soundly again. Although I imagine becoming inured would be worse.’

He pulled out a steel rod, ten centimetres long, from a box on a nearby work surface.

‘This will be our raw material,’ he said. ‘One rod of sprung steel, six of mild.’

But first they needed cleaning with wire wool, which can be a surprisingly painful experience if you’re not careful. By the time we’d finished, the forge was good and hot — two thousand degrees Fahrenheit according to Nightingale, which was just over a grand in real temperature.

‘You need to learn to read the colour of the flame,’ he said.

He bundled the seven rods together with wire and pushed one end into the glowing centre of the forge.

‘Now, this is where you need to watch carefully,’ he said, and stretched his hand over the forge. He said the spell quietly and I caught that weird echo you get when someone does some serious magic in your presence. Heat bloomed off the forge, real heat not vestigia, that crisped the hairs on my forearm and made me and Lesley step smartly backwards. Nightingale pulled back his hand equally sharply and, using a pair of tongs, rotated the bundle of rods a couple of times before withdrawing them from the forge.

For a moment the heated end shone like a magnesium flare and I added an arc welding mask to my list of things to acquire before the next lesson. The light faded to merely bright as Nightingale swung around and placed the bundle on the anvil.

‘What now?’ asked Lesley.

‘Now?’ said Nightingale. ‘Now, we hit it with a hammer.’

At breakfast the next morning Lesley pitched her plan for using the weird way of the Sons of Weyland and the staffs they made to lure out the Faceless Man.

‘Because he’s bound to want to know how it’s done,’ she said.

Nightingale finished a mouthful of scrambled egg before speaking.

‘I understand the principle,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure of the practicalities.’

‘Such as?’ asked Lesley.

‘Where do we cast our lure?’

‘I thought we’d start at the Goblin Fair,’ she said.

Nightingale nodded.

‘We should be looking to maintain a presence at the fairs anyway,’ I said. ‘We need to get that whole community used to seeing us out and about.’

‘The community?’ asked Nightingale.

‘The,’ I groped for a word, but I couldn’t find any other term that fit, ‘magical community. We need to open up channels of communication.’ It was your basic policing by consent, currently referred to as stakeholder engagement, and we’d done at least one lecture on it at Hendon — although judging by Lesley’s amused snort I might have been the only one who stayed awake.

She exchanged looks with Nightingale, who shrugged.

‘Perhaps we could do with a bit of dredging in that direction,’ he said. But before I could ask what that meant, he asked Lesley for specifics.

‘We go in as if we’re looking to scoop up any staffs floating around on the open market,’ she said, and explained that having established our interest we’d then imply that we were looking for the materials to construct new ones. ‘We want to make,’ she tilted her head at me, ‘the community link our presence with the staffs. That might be enough to draw the Faceless Man out — although I think it might be a bit of a long-term strategy.’

Nightingale sipped his coffee and gave it some thought.

‘It’s worth a try,’ he said. ‘And who knows? We might recover some genuine staffs into the bargain. Do we know when the next fair is?’

‘We know a man who does,’ I said.

‘I presume that would be our Mr Zach Taylor?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Well if you want to know where the goblins are. .’ said Lesley.

The Goblin Fair was, as far as we could tell, a combination mobile social club, shabeen and car boot sale for London’s supernatural community. I’d actually gone digging in the mundane library and found references to a Goblin Fayre and to a hidden market that was tucked into great St Bartholomew’s feast as a flea hides upon a dog. The earliest reference was recorded in 1534, which meant that the institution predated Isaac Newton and the establishment of the Folly.

Nightingale had said that there’d always been a supernatural demi-monde at the fringes of the great horse fairs and the traditional markets, but he’d never had anything to do with them.

‘Not my department,’ he’d said.

Not that the Folly had departments, you understand, it being the child of an era when a gentleman might serve his country in any number of ways regardless of previous experience, probity or talent. And if at the same time he might accrue some influence, some status and a huge estate in Warwickshire — then so much the better. Still, Nightingale had worked abroad at the behest of the Foreign and Colonial Offices while others had worked with the Home Office, offering assistance to the police and other civil authorities. Some had done what I considered scientific research, and others still had researched by studying the classics or collecting folklore. Many just used the Folly as their London club while in town from their parsonages, estates or university positions — ‘Hedge Wizards’ Nightingale called them.

At least a couple of those had probably taken an interest in the goblin fairs and had perhaps written a useful tome on the subject. It was just possible that one day I might stumble upon it in the library or an Oxfam in Twickenham — you never know.

Still, as Lesley said, why do it the hard way when we could just call Zach.

According to Zach, the next fair was due the day after and was in north London. Athlone Street, off Grafton Road, Kentish Town — my manor, as it happens. One of my first girlfriends used to live up the other end, so I’d walked down it enough times.

‘Did you get any?’ asked Lesley as we parked the Asbo. We were suffering a standard grey London drizzle, the sort that makes it clear that it can keep it up all day if needs be.

‘I was twelve,’ I said.

‘I bet you were precocious, though,’ said Lesley. ‘She was older, wasn’t she?’

‘Why’d you say that?’ I asked. It was true. Her name had been Catherine and she’d been a year above me in school.

‘It was your big brown eyes wasn’t it?’

I didn’t know what to say. When I was twelve, introspection was not my most prominent characteristic.

‘We were in the swimming club together,’ I said.

The address was a strange Victorian wedge of a building that backed into a railway viaduct. The ground floor was given over to a print shop, and according to Lesley’s intelligence there should be a sign advertising this. This intelligence came from Zach Palmer, who was half human and half — we weren’t really sure what, including the possibility that the other half might be human as well. But anyway he was hooked into what Nightingale insisted on calling the demi-monde.

Speaking of which. .

‘You know the Fleet runs under here,’ I said.

Lesley groaned. ‘Do you think she’s in there?’

‘Believe it,’ I said.

‘At least it will be out of the rain,’ she said.

There was a sign — a sad bit of damp cardboard cut into the shape of an arrow with the word ‘VENUS’ handwritten and pointing to a side door. Lesley knocked.

‘What’s the password?’ shouted someone from inside.

‘It’s a slippery slope,’ I shouted back.

‘What?’ shouted the voice.

‘It’s a slippery slope,’ I shouted louder.

‘What kind of slope?’ shouted the voice.

‘A fucking slippery one,’ yelled Lesley. ‘Now open the bloody door before we kick it down.’

The door opened to reveal a tiny hallway and a flight of stairs leading upwards. Peering cautiously around the door was a small white boy of about ten, wearing a black and white bobble hat, fingerless gloves and an adult-sized lime coloured lambswool cardigan that was draped over him like a rain cape.

‘You’re the Isaacs,’ he said. ‘What you doing here?’

‘Why aren’t you in school?’ asked Lesley.

‘I’m home tutored,’ he said.

‘Really,’ said Lesley. ‘What are you learning at the moment?’

‘Never talk to the filth,’ he said.

I told him that we didn’t want him to talk to us.

‘On the contrary,’ said Lesley. ‘We just want to get out of the rain.’

‘Nothing’s stopping you,’ said the boy.

We stepped inside, but before we could troop up the stairs the boy tapped Lesley on the arm.

‘Miss,’ he said. ‘You can’t-’

‘I know,’ she said and took off her mask.

‘Oh,’ said the boy staring up at her. ‘You’re that one.’

‘Yes I am,’ she said and then waited until we were safely up the stairs to whisper, ‘That one what?’

I said that I hadn’t got the faintest idea.

At the top of the drab staircase was a windowless hallway lit by a forty watt bulb in a red Chinese paper lamp shade that managed to make it seem even darker. We had a choice of going up another flight of stairs or out through a door, but before we could even express our indecision the door slammed open and we were confronted by a young white woman in a pink tracksuit with an Adidas logo on it. I recognised her as one of the waitresses from the Goblin Fair we’d visited back in December.

‘What can I do you for?’ she asked.

‘We’re here to buy some stuff,’ said Lesley.

‘Yeah? What kind of stuff?’

‘Stuff from the far off land of mind-your-own-business,’ said Lesley.

‘Scrap metal,’ I said. ‘Stuff that’s a little bit — you know.’ I wiggled my fingers.

Lesley gave me a theatrical glare. ‘Have you quite finished broadcasting our business to all and sundry?’ she asked.

The girl gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Upstairs,’ she said. ‘You want to talk to the gentry.’

‘Thanks,’ I said and wondered who the hell the gentry were, and if they were like the Quiet People or the Pale Lady. What was it with this general lack of personal pronouns? I remembered that I’d heard Nightingale referred to as ‘The Nightingale’ and realised that I’d only assumed that was his actual name.

I followed Lesley, who was having trouble stopping herself from laughing, up the narrow staircase.

‘The far off land of mind-your-own-business?’ I whispered.

‘I didn’t want to seem too obvious,’ she whispered back.

‘No, that wasn’t obvious at all,’ I said.

We were two thirds of the way up the stairs when the door at the top opened and a woman stepped out onto the landing. She was white, middle aged, with dirty blonde hair cut into a neat business-like bob. She wore an expensive charcoal grey skirt suit of conservative cut and carried a slim burgundy attache case. Her eyes were a faded blue.

Recognising faces is a key cop skill, and although she was looking younger and happier than we’d last seen her I remembered her immediately — Varenka Debroslova, probably an alias — former live-in nurse to one Geoffrey Wheatcroft a.k.a. the Faceless Man version one.

She recognised us at the same time — well, Lesley’s very distinctive — and took an automatic step back. Lesley didn’t hesitate. She lunged up the last couple of steps and I followed her.

The normal thing to do in Varenka’s situation would be to bolt back up and out the door. But instead she lifted her attache case in both hands and shoved it into Lesley’s face. As Lesley recoiled backwards into me, Varenka practically launched herself headfirst down the stairs towards us. Lesley was knocked back towards me and I had no choice but to catch her and try and twist us both out of the way as Varenka landed on us. She’d obviously planned to surf down the stairs on top of us, but I wasn’t playing that game. I ducked down over Lesley and let the other woman roll across my back towards a hard landing.

Or that was the plan, anyway. Unfortunately, the staircase was too narrow and too steep, so we all bumped down it together. Stairs are a killer and we all might have ended up with sundry cracked ribs and broken legs except we were jammed in so tight we went down in slow motion. Even so, my shoulder slammed into a riser hard enough to make my teeth click, somebody’s knee slammed into my back and I definitely smacked my head on the rough plasterboard wall at one point.

Lesley yelled in fury as we tumbled out onto the landing. In a fight, if you want to be the last man standing it’s important to be the first guy back on your feet. So I levered myself off Varenka’s back and tried to grab her arm. But she had other ideas. She sprang to her feet and used my own grip on her arm to pull me off balance and slam me against the wall. It would have gone much harder on me if Lesley hadn’t grabbed a handful of expensive suit jacket and climbed up Varenka’s back.

‘Oi,’ yelled the girl in the pink tracksuit. ‘None of that. It’s Pax bloody Domus here.’ I noticed that she was putting the stress on the wrong syllable. It’s pax-blud-eee DO-mus, I thought, and I might have gone on to mention this except that Varenka put an elbow in my stomach that left me disinclined to discuss the finer points of Latin pronunciation.

I got my leg out of the way of a kick that would have broken my knee, and felt like it broke my thigh bone instead, and realised that Varenka had not said a single word since she’d met us on the stairs. There was something terrifying about the ferocity and silence with which she fought. I understood suddenly that this was a woman who had done real fighting, against people who’d been trying to kill her. We were just trying to restrain her, but she was trying to maim us — if we didn’t shut her down quick she was going to cut us to pieces.

Varenka whipped round and sent Lesley staggering across the hallway and into the girl in the pink tracksuit who went down swearing. Then Varenka spun to face me but with Lesley clear that was my chance to summon up the impello-palma combination that I feel is my own personal contribution to specialist law enforcement.

Varenka reacted even before I’d finished the spell, and flung up her arm to protect her face as it slammed into her like a body block from an invisible riot shield. She rocked back on her heels and I realised the implications of her early reaction just in time to feel her building a counter spell. In the confines of the landing there wasn’t anywhere to go but back up the stairs, so I faked towards the landing door and then lunged up the steps.

I felt the bite of cold metal and caught the smell of alcohol and wet dog. Something went past me with the instant violence of an articulated lorry slipstreaming a lay-by, wood splintered, somebody screamed and a billow of choking white plaster dust filled the landing. A metre-wide section of the doorjamb and the wall beside it had smashed open. Through the hole I could see chairs and tables and startled pale faces.

‘That’s it,’ screamed the girl. ‘You three are barred!’

But it was just us up there, Varenka having scarpered.

‘Watch it,’ I yelled as Lesley cautiously peered down the staircase towards the exit. ‘She’s a practitioner.’

‘No shit,’ said Lesley and vanished down the stairs

I followed her down using both hands for balance as I took the stairs three at time. When I reached the bottom there was no sign of the boy who’d let us in and I hoped he’d been smart enough to do a runner.

Lesley was too good a copper just to bang through the door. She paused to check that Varenka wasn’t waiting in ambush before slipping out. She veered left as she went, so I veered right. Varenka was the other side of Grafton Road yanking open the driver’s side door of a silver Audi. When she saw us, she gave an exasperated snarl and flung out her arm in my direction. I did a dive behind the nearest car and slapped the pavement just in time for something to smash into the side of the vehicle with a noise of breaking glass. The car alarm went off, but behind the endless electronic hooting I heard the Audi pulling way. I thumbed the jury-rigged battery switch on my mobile and risked a glance over the bonnet just in time to be able to read the index on the back of the Audi as it accelerated south down Grafton Road.

The other side of the car I’d been sheltering behind, a red VW Golf, had been smashed in and was white with what looked like frost. I resisted the urge to touch it, just in case. I looked over and found that Lesley was unhurt and walking to join me.

My phone jingled to let me know it was finally ready. I rang Metcall, gave my rank and name and asked to speak to the supervisor for EK, meaning Camden. While I waited to be put through I wrote the index number on my arm with the biro Lesley handed me. When the supervisor came on I asked for an urgent circulation on a vehicle and gave them the index.

‘If seen it must not be stopped without Falcon assistance, repeat Falcon assistance,’ I said. Falcon was our brand new call sign and I said it twice because it doesn’t get used much and I didn’t want some poor sod in an IRV coming to grief tackling somebody as obviously dangerous as Varenka. I invoked Nightingale’s authority to back it up, since a chief inspector goes a long way to smoothing out any bureaucratic lumps and bumps. I looked over to confirm that Lesley had Nightingale on her phone and she nodded when she saw me and signalled ‘ten minutes’. Once I was sure Metcall was going to put out the action report, I hung up and trotted over to the Asbo to grab our airwave sets.

‘You know, if you’d grabbed your airwave first you could have circulated the report on the local channel,’ said Lesley when I handed over her set. ‘Just saying.’

I noticed that my hand was trembling, not shaking you understand, but definitely a reaction. Lesley glanced at my hand and then gave me a wry look. We both looked back at the red VW Golf. The driver’s side door had been stoved in as if hit by a girder end on. Slashes of silver metal showed through where the paint had been stripped away.

‘You wouldn’t want to be standing in front of that, would you?’ said Lesley.

Members of the public were beginning to arrive in numbers and Lesley stepped forward to shoo them back. There were a couple of gasps and one half shriek from the crowd.

What now? I thought and looked around to see if there was a new threat or a body or something equally unpleasant. I wondered about the boy at the door again, but saw that he was back at his post. I checked back with the crowd to see what they were staring at, and realised that it was Lesley.

She’d come out of the fair without her mask. She looked at me and I could tell from her expression that she’d only just realised it too. A couple of white teenaged girls had their phones up and had them pointed at Lesley. A third girl was too transfixed by the sight to do more than clap her hand over her mouth.

‘Shit,’ said Lesley softly. ‘I must have left it inside.’

‘Oi.’ I turned to the gathering crowd. ‘Back you go. You’ve all watched enough telly to know we need to keep the area clear.’

Behind me Lesley walked briskly back towards the Goblin Fair.

‘Back up,’ I shouted. ‘Nothing to see here.’