Broken Homes

10

Varenka abandoned the Audi five minutes’ drive away on the Chalk Farm Road and presumably ducked straight into Camden Lock where she could lose herself amongst the crowds and leave the area on no less than five modes of transport, including canal boat. We could have pulled all the surrounding CCTV but we didn’t have the manpower, budget or stamina to wade through that much tape. Besides, as Lesley pointed out, this was Camden Lock where she could have bought a complete change of clothes, had her hair dyed, sipped a fresh latte and acquired a nice handcrafted henna tattoo before leaving.

That didn’t stop Nightingale screeching to a halt outside in true Sweeney style and striding into the Market, kicking down doors and putting the frighteners on the locals with some pithy Latin tags. At least, I’d like to think that’s what he did. But I wasn’t there because me and Lesley were under strict instructions to secure the crime scene around the Goblin Fair, and see if we couldn’t dig up any witnesses. Only everyone including the boy from the door and the girl in the pink track suit had vanished — all except Zachary Palmer.

‘They all went out the emergency exit,’ said Zach.

I’d found him on the roof sitting at a round cafe table covered in a red-and-white checked tablecloth and laid out for dinner for two. A fluted glass vase with a single yellow rose sat in the centre and a champagne bottle in a frosted brass ice-bucket sat on a separate stand at his elbow.

The roof was triangular in shape and littered with scraps of plastic, abandoned white polystyrene cups rolling around in the breeze and free copies of the Metro. They’d taken all their stock with them, so it couldn’t have been that much of a panic.

‘You know,’ said Zach, ‘until you came along I used to be the local loose cannon. Now people have started warning me about the dangers of associating with you.’

A London Overground train growled past us. The tracks were less than a metre from the edge of the roof and the carriage windows were level with our kneecaps.

I gestured at the waiting champagne.

‘We didn’t interrupt your dinner, did we?’

‘Nah,’ said Zach and tapped his foot against a wicker hamper with F amp;M stencilled on its side. ‘I’m just waiting for your colleague. It was part of the deal.’

I went downstairs to where Lesley was searching the room at the bottom of the landing — the one Varenka had blown a hole in. It was full of overstuffed furniture, chintz and white plaster dust. I contacted Nightingale on the airwave to see if we were needed, but he said no.

‘She’s long gone,’ he said. ‘I’m going to arrange for her car to be towed away and then I’ll be with you in an hour. Any luck your end?’

I told him that nobody was left except Zach.

‘At least getting him to talk shouldn’t be that hard,’ said Nightingale and signed off.

‘Isn’t that Peter O’Toole?’ asked Lesley who was pointing to a row of framed photographs on the wall. It looked like a publicity still from Lawrence of Arabia and had been signed. The other photographs were also vintage actors in black and white portraits, most of whom I recognised in the it’s-that-guy way you do with people who were famous before you were born.

‘If you’ve got time for refs,’ I said, ‘then your boy Zach is upstairs and waiting.’

‘I did promise,’ said Lesley.

‘Save some for me,’ I called after her as she went up the stairs and then wondered what exactly it was you got in a Fortnum and Mason hamper — beyond ‘posh stuff’, that is.

She was still up there when Nightingale arrived so I left them to it and met him down by the VW Golf. He was sitting comfortably on his heels, staring at the stoved in side panels and stroking his chin.

‘It was covered in frost,’ I said when I joined him. ‘Immediately after. Like it had been frozen.’

‘This is a worrying development,’ he said.

I tapped the mangled metal. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘Especially at the time. Any idea who trained her?’

‘Not our man in the mask, that’s for certain.’ He nodded at the car. ‘Not with that spell.’

Lesley emerged from the house and joined us — her own mask back on. Nightingale straightened when he saw her.

‘Did Mr Palmer have anything useful to say?’ he asked.

‘Not noticeably,’ said Lesley. ‘He did tell me that he’s only seen Varenka at the fair recently and that she just seemed to be there for the same reasons as everyone else — a bit of shopping, the odd glass and gossip.’

‘Did she gossip with anyone in particular?’

‘Not that he noticed,’ she said.

‘I assume you asked him to keep an eye out,’ said Nightingale.

‘Yep,’ she and held up a large jar with an old-fashioned orange label. ‘And this is for you.’

Nightingale took the jar, read the label and smiled.

‘Game relish,’ he said. ‘Excellent — we’ll have to see what Molly can do to this.’

The jar vanished into his coat pocket and his face became grim.

‘When she cast the spell did you get a sense of her signare?’

‘Weirdly yeah,’ I said. ‘Bread, grain, something yeasty.’

‘Hungry dog,’ said Lesley.

‘Dog or wolf?’ asked Nightingale.

Lesley shrugged. ‘To be honest I don’t think I’d know the difference.’

‘Nochnye Koldunyi,’ said Nightingale. ‘A Night Witch.’

‘Is that like a person or another thing?’ asked Lesley. ‘Like Peter’s Pale Lady?’

‘A type of Russian practitioner,’ said Nightingale. ‘Recruited during the war, the training had a very narrow scope. It was concentrated almost entirely on combat. We heard rumours that there were whole regiments of women trained in this manner. Hence the nickname.’

‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ I said.

‘We tried something very similar ourselves in 1939,’ said Nightingale. ‘Unfortunately it didn’t turn out well, and the whole project had to be abandoned.’

‘Why?’ asked Lesley.

‘Half of everything I try and teach you is to stop you from killing yourselves,’ said Nightingale. ‘Skimp on that aspect of the training and many more of your apprentices will die. We felt that the casualty rate with the New Training was too high — I suspect the Russians were willing to make greater sacrifices. Our war was pretty desperate but theirs was a war of annihilation — victory or death was not an empty slogan.’

‘Hold on,’ said Lesley. ‘That was seventy years ago — she’d be an old woman.’ She paused and narrowed her eyes at Nightingale. ‘Unless she’s doing the backwards aging thing, like you.’

‘Or she might have been trained by her mother,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps the Russians still have a military magic programme.’

‘Maybe she’s an unauthorised agent,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe we should tell the Russians.’

‘Well, prior to that,’ said Nightingale, ‘we’d have to determine which Russians to tell. We’d better consult with the Professor about that.’

‘If we can pry him away from his new German grimoire,’ I said.

‘Nonetheless,’ said Nightingale. ‘Regardless of her provenance, the fact is we now have two confirmed fully trained practitioners at large in London. You two are going to have to be even more careful when operating without me. In fact, I don’t want either of you operating alone or without letting me know where you are — you can consider that an order.’

‘We should start routinely carrying tasers,’ said Lesley. ‘That would be our best bet — zap them before they know we’re there. I’d like see someone concentrate on a forma with fifty thousand volts running through them.’

‘No warning,’ I said. ‘I like it.’

Lesley glared at me and I realised she was serious.

Nightingale nodded. ‘I’ll have to clear it with the Commissioner first. And I’ll need you both to demonstrate to me that you’ll hit the target you’re aiming at.’

‘In the meantime?’ I asked.

‘In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t bowl over Varenka before she has a chance to go to ground,’ said Nightingale.

Criminals, even professional ones, are not spies. They might be cautious but they don’t practise what professional agents call ‘tradecraft’, especially when they’re off the clock. Case in point, Varenka’s Audi which was registered to one Varvara Tamonina aged sixty-two — that got a snort of derision from Lesley — but the picture matched the face we’d seen briefly trying to kill us that morning. The licence gave us an address in Wimbledon but when Nightingale and Lesley went knocking with a warrant there was no sign that Varenka, or Varvara Tamonina, had lived there in years. Then they started a bit of door to door on her neighbours, because you never know what you might find.

Meanwhile I got stuck compiling the intelligence report which consisted of me wading through a ton of IIP responses and seeing if Ms Varvara Tamonina’s vehicle had popped up in relation to another inquiry. This led me to DAFT, Southwark’s Drugs and Firearm Team and winner of the mostly badly thought out acronym award three years running, who’d spotted the car while running surveillance on a drug network in Elephant and Castle. I checked with them to see if they’d followed up and found that the inquiry had wound down shortly afterwards.

‘The principal suspect dropped dead,’ said a helpful DC.

‘Suspiciously?’

‘Nope,’ said the DC. ‘Died of a heart attack.’

Aged twenty-six, most likely a congenital heart defect that had gone undetected until one day he went face down in his breakfast cereal.

‘Couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer guy,’ said the DC.

His name had been Richard Dewsbury and he’d been heavily involved in the drug trade around Elephant and Castle since his fifteenth birthday. Suspected of running most of it for at least five years before keeling over at his mum’s kitchen table.

‘And guess where his mum’s kitchen table was?’ I asked.

‘Skygarden,’ said Lesley.

I was briefing Nightingale and Lesley over coffee in the atrium — still pretty much the warmest bit of the Folly. It had actually snowed a couple of days after the Spring Court and, despite one sunny day, the weather had stayed unseasonably cold.

‘The very same,’ I said.

Lesley had taken off her mask and I saw that patches of skin on her face were so white with cold as to be almost blue. Dr Walid had warned that the reduced circulation in the damaged skin around her mouth and cheeks could make them susceptible to chilblains and/or tissue necrosis — which is exactly as horrible as it sounds.

‘If we combine that with the architect and the unfortunate planner, it would seem that all roads lead to Elephant and Castle,’ said Nightingale.

‘Circumstantially,’ said Lesley.

Molly glided over with a folded towel resting on a tray and offered it to Lesley. The towel was sky blue, fluffy and steaming gently. Lesley thanked Molly, tested the temperature with the back of her hand and then draped it over her face with a contented sigh.

Molly looked at Nightingale and tilted her head.

‘That will be all,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Molly drifted away silently towards the back stairs.

‘God, that feels good,’ said Lesley, her voice muffled under the thickness of the towel.

‘Circumstantial but enough that I believe we should take a closer look,’ said Nightingale, getting back to Elephant and Castle.

‘We could talk to the local Safer Neighbourhood team,’ I said.

Lesley mumbled something under the towel.

‘What?’ I asked.

She lifted the towel off her mouth long enough to say, ‘That’s the East Walworth team. They work out of Walworth nick.’

‘Peter can go down and see them tomorrow,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley, you can stay in the warm and check whether our Russian friend has emerged onto the radar anywhere else. Meanwhile I’ll see if any of my contacts at the Foreign Office are still alive.’

There was a skittering sound from the back stairs and then Toby burst into the atrium and scampered towards us, his claws clicking on the marble floor. When he reached our table he snuffled around our chairs before stopping beside Lesley’s and barking twice. Then he sat on his haunches and looked up expectantly. When she offered him a biscuit, he ignored it and instead swung his snout until it pointed at where she’d put the discarded the face towel.

‘Do you want this?’ asked Lesley and dangled the towel in front of him.

Toby barked once, seized the towel in his jaws and scampered off with his stubby little tail wagging. We all watched him go.

‘Do you think Molly trained him to. .?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure that’s an alliance we want to encourage,’ said Nightingale.

‘We should get Dr Walid to look at Richard Dewsbury’s PM report,’ I said, suddenly remembering my visit to DAFT. ‘Just in case it was something other than a heart attack.’

‘Aren’t heart attacks a bit subtle for the Faceless Man?’ said Lesley.

‘There’s merit in having two forms of attack,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you’re principally known for setting your enemies on fire you could well avoid suspicion by poisoning one instead.’

‘And if Varenka-’

‘Varvara,’ said Lesley.

‘And if Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina,’ I said slowly, ‘did the deed, then maybe heart attacks are her speciality. How hard would it be to give someone a heart attack?’

‘With magic?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Yes.’

‘Not hard as such,’ he said. ‘But complex and laborious. I think I’d have to be in the same room as my target to do it as well. Much better to poison them or to use a glamour to make them poison themselves.’

‘What makes it so complicated?’ asked Lesley suddenly leaning forward — eyes fixed on Nightingale.

‘The human body resists magic,’ he said. ‘Particularly if you try to make gross physical changes.’

Lesley unconsciously lifted a hand to her face.

‘Stopping somebody’s heart with magic is a fifth- or sixth-order spell, depending on how one attempts it, and even then the results would be less certain than setting the victim’s bones on fire.’

I thought of the braised corpse of Patrick Mulkern and really wished Nightingale had used another example.

‘Abdul has a theory about why,’ said Nightingale. ‘You can ask him next time you see him.’

Lesley lowered her hand from her face and nodded slowly.

‘I think I might just do that,’ she said.

‘Richard Dewsbury,’ said Sergeant Daverc. ‘He was one in a million — thank god.’

Sergeant William Daverc was in his early fifties and had a proper London accent to go with his proper Huguenot name which was properly pronounced D’Averc. He’d been patrolling Southwark since his probation thirty years ago and was a famous pioneer of community policing from back in the days when it was just called ‘policing’.

‘Ricky when he was younger,’ said Daverc who’d met me in his team’s office at Walworth nick. ‘Mister Dewsbury as soon as he was middle management — didn’t have a “street” name and that should have been a giveaway right from the start.’

‘Violent?’ I asked.

‘Not particularly,’ said Daverc. ‘Single minded. He was a tower boy, you understand.’

Meaning born and raised in the central tower of Skygarden, not the surrounding blocks. Local folklore said that people from the tower never did anything by half, never settled for mediocrity or middle management — not even in the drug trade. The tower had produced a footballer, two pop stars, a stand up comedian, a high court judge, a semi-finalist on Britain’s Got Talent and the most ruthlessly efficient drug baron in south London.

‘When he popped his clogs you could hear the dealers giving a sigh of relief from Rotherhithe to Wimbledon,’ said Daverc. ‘Without him it was the usual story — his organisation fell apart, turf wars — the usual aggro. But your lot don’t care about drugs. Do you?’

I told him that we had reason to believe that there might be activities going on inside the tower that could lead to breaches of the peace of a more esoteric nature.

‘Like what?’ asked Daverc, who’d spent too long as an operational copper to be fobbed off with generalities. I tried honesty.

‘We have no fucking idea,’ I said. ‘We have a break-in and murder related to the original architect, we have an apparent suicide of a Southwark planning officer who was, in part, responsible for the estate and we have this link to Richard Dewsbury, local resident and pharmaceutical entrepreneur. We were sort of hoping you’d have something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Anything strange,’ I said.

‘The tower’s always been strange,’ he said. ‘Even more so now they’ve closed down the surrounding blocks.’

‘I heard about that,’ I said. ‘Are they knocking it down or not?’

‘I’ve given up trying to work out what the council’s doing at Skygarden,’ said Daverc. ‘I know they want to flatten it and turn it over to the developers in return for some new build — they had all the plans on show and we was even doing our preliminary impact studies and then it all seemed to fizzle out.’

‘Have you got any contacts in the tower?’ I asked.

‘I go up there regular,’ he said. ‘I have my community liaisons who bend my ear about kids nicking stuff and people weeing in the lifts.’ He paused and narrowed his eyes. ‘If you want to know what’s going on in the tower, guy like you, your best bet would be to move in yourself.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard flats aren’t that easy to get.’

‘I’ve got access to one,’ said Daverc. ‘I set it up for DAFT so they could get someone on the inside — they were going to share their intelligence with me — only Richard Dewsbury keels over and DAFT lost interest. Say the word and I can get you in there in less than twenty-four hours.’ He paused to give me another shrewd look.

‘If you’re interested.’

There’s two approaches to dealing with large bureaucracies. Well, technically there’s three but the last one is only available to officers of ACPO rank and people who went to the right school. On the one hand you can phone ahead, explain that you’re the police, give a quick and largely inaccurate summary of your investigation and make an appointment to see the relevant supervisor stroke line manager. Or, if you’re in a hurry, you can flash your warrant card at the security guards, fast talk your way past the reception and see how far up the hierarchy some classic cockney bullshit will take you.

In this case it took me through the fiercely rectangular and marble-lined atrium at Southwark Town Hall via Grace on the front desk — it turned out that, while we weren’t related to each other, we definitely had family in the same part of Freetown — into the lifts and before anyone could say ‘Hey you what are you doing here?’ into the work area of one Louise Talacre who was employed in the same office as the late Richard Lewis.

She was a ridiculously cheerful young woman with Italian looks and a Midlands accent who was happy to help the police in any way she could — you’d be surprised how many people are.

She was familiar with the Skygarden redevelopment and knew that Richard had been particularly involved in trying to get the estate unlisted.

‘He said it shouldn’t even have been listed in the first place,’ she said but someone — Louise always thought Richard might know who, although he never said — had swung a Grade II so that it wouldn’t be pulled down in the late 80s. The council had to spend millions on refurbishment and remedial repairs and resented every penny.

‘They put in a concierge system and everything,’ said Louise in a horrified tone. ‘But you still hear stories about what went on in that tower.’

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘I heard there was a bunch of New Age druids squatting in one of the blocks and worshipping the trees,’ she said.

Druids, I thought. I asked for that one.

‘But he never got the tower unlisted, though?’

‘He wasn’t happy about that,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t seem happy about anything towards the end. I told your lot that the first time they came round.’ That would have been the BTP investigation. Jaget’s people. ‘Not that I thought he would. . you know. .’

Now Lesley may contend that I am, occasionally, lacking in the police work department but even I can spot a lead when a witness waves it in front of my face.

‘Did he seem like he was under pressure?’ I asked.

‘Well, we’re all under pressure aren’t we,’ said Louise. ‘What with the cuts and everything.’

I explained that I meant outside pressure — say from unscrupulous developers and the like.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘They never bother with the likes of us. They always go for the CEOs or the councillors.’ She pulled a face. ‘We never get no baksheesh. Still, you know, now you mention it, there. . no, that sounds stupid.’

‘What does?’

‘About a year ago when we thought the tower was going to be delisted or unlisted or whatever they call it,’ said Louise. ‘He came in all happy and smiling and of course I asked him what he was so happy about and he said that he was soon going out of this dreadful city for good. And then when they announced that it was going to stay listed he looked like he was going to burst into tears. I say that, but it might have been hay fever — he was never what you’d call demonstrative. He said that he couldn’t leave until the tower came down.’

‘I want you to think very carefully,’ I said. ‘What were his exact words?’

‘Wait a minute,’ Louise held her fingers by her temples and wiggled them. ‘He said, “He won’t let me go until the tower comes down.”’

‘Did he say who “he” was?’

‘Might not have been “he”,’ said Louise. ‘It might have been “they”.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I’d have asked him, you know, but he wasn’t exactly sociable,’ said Louise. ‘I didn’t even know he was married, a mail order bride I heard — from Thailand or somewhere like that.’

Okay, so dying to be helpful. But not actually particularly helpful except to point the finger at Skygarden again. Something that I reported back at the Folly during the daily seven thirty briefing session, otherwise known as the evening meal. Nightingale, running on some internal calendar of Mayan complexity, had declared that evening a full dress dinner. So me and Lesley donned our best approximation while Nightingale slummed it in an exquisite navy-blue evening jacket and his blood-red regimental tie.

Molly always wore her most Edwardian servant’s outfit for these occasions and swept around the dining room so silently that even Nightingale was unnerved when she materialised suddenly at his elbow with the next dish.

Fortunately the next dish was spinach tortellini with ricotta, herbs and parmesan, indicating that Molly had reached the pasta section of The Naked Chef and, judging by the absence of those esoteric animal offcuts that get the traditionalist all excited, was getting better at interpreting modern recipe books. Lesley and Nightingale were considering slipping in a Nigella, but I’ve got to say I was beginning to miss the suet puddings.

‘I thought Sergeant D’Averc’s notion had some merit,’ said Nightingale. ‘Even if we were only there for a short time it would give us easier access to the whole building.’

I paused with a forkful of green pasta halfway to my mouth.

‘Us sir?’ I asked.

‘If the tower is indeed the fulcrum of this case,’ said Nightingale, ‘it must follow that the Faceless Man will be taking an equal interest. Now that we know he’s working with a trained Night Witch it would be extremely unwise if we didn’t operate as a mutually supporting unit.’

I unpacked that to mean — I need to be close enough to intervene before you get yourselves killed.

Me and Lesley exchanged glances.

‘You don’t think I’m capable of blending in?’ he asked.

‘Molly’s getting very handy with the parmesan,’ said Lesley politely.

‘Yes, you may be right,’ said Nightingale, considering. ‘However, I plan to position myself nearby in the event that you need reinforcing.’

Lesley glanced down to where Toby, having established that this was to be a largely sausage-free supper, had curled up and gone to sleep.

‘Are we going to take the dog?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Combination excuse to go out walking at odd hours and magic detector.’

Lesley nodded and then looked back at Nightingale.

‘How will you know if we need reinforcing?’ she asked.

‘I think you’ll find I am perfectly capable of using a radio,’ said Nightingale. ‘And if that fails, I’m sure Peter here can be relied on to blow something up.’