Broken Homes

12

I woke up early to bright sunshine pouring through the patio doors. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and stepped out onto the balcony to drink it. Our floor was high enough to overlook the blocks and see all the way out across the grey-green smear of southeast London to the green belt beyond Croydon. The balcony really was ridiculously huge, with unnecessarily thick parapets that had mysterious trough-shaped depressions along their tops — built-in window boxes I decided in the end. I was high enough for the air to be as fresh as it can get in London, the traffic was a muted rumble in the distance and somewhere nearby a bird was singing.

Despite the sun, the wind was too chilly to stand out there in my underwear so I went back inside and wrestled myself in and out of the tiny shower retrofitted into the bathroom. I stuck my head round Lesley’s door to ask if she wanted to go check out the garden with me, but she threw a pillow at my head.

I told Toby it was time for walkies but he was already waiting by the front door.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park — it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness. It was also, in the case of Skygarden, strangely hard to access.

Me and Toby first went down to the lower ground floor, where we’d unpacked the van the day before, and did a full circuit of the base of the tower before we realised that there was no access from there. The whole circumference was lined with garages topped with a fence with not even a ladder to get you up to the greenery. Half the garages were sealed with more of the County Gard’s shiny steel doors — Southwark Council’s reluctance to reallocate locked garages to residents had been a major grievance at the TRA meeting.

I remembered the drive in through the culvert and figured you’d have to walk practically the entire distance back to the Walworth Road before you reached ground level. Rather than slog all the way there, me and Toby jogged up the first flight of stairs to the ground floor and checked the elevated walkways. A third of the way along the one leading to Heygate Road there was a ramp spiralling down into the green. I almost missed it because it was overshadowed by one of the big plane trees. You practically had to duck under a branch to walk down it.

Toby cautiously stayed close to my heel as we descended. There was a gravel path winding away through the hummocks and random slopes that landscape designers like to litter their designs with. The path was poorly maintained, the gravel scattered and wearing thin. A couple of times I had to step over places where giant roots had rumpled the path out of existence. The sun was well over the top of the housing blocks now, the light tinged with green and falling on secondary growths of tall skinny trees with silver bark and bushy things that I’m sure Nightingale could have identified for me — at length — had he been there.

But even I can recognise cherry blossom trees when they are white and pink as candyfloss.

Unless they were peach blossom, of course.

The, probably, cherry trees lined one side of what had obviously been a children’s play area before the council had removed all the play equipment — presumably to stop children playing on it.

Toby growled and I stopped to see what he was looking at.

A white girl was watching us from across the defunct playground. She was wearing an old-fashioned Mary Quant dress in green and yellow and her blonde hair was cut into a pixie bob under a battered straw sunhat. Her face and limbs were long and thin and seemed oddly out of proportion with her torso. She was standing in the shade of one of the smaller plane trees, so still that I wasn’t sure she hadn’t been standing all the time I’d been walking up and I just hadn’t seen her.

I heard a child giggling from behind a nearby tree and the girl gave me a smile that was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Then she pivoted and skipped away so fast that I could barely follow the movement. A moment later a small brown imp of a girl broke cover from behind her tree and dashed after the older girl. This one I recognised — it was Nicky, who I’d last seen wearing Imperial Yellow at the Spring Court. Her river, the Neckinger, practically ran right under the estate.

Toby gave chase, yapping continuously, his stubby tail wagging as he vanished into the shade. I followed at my own pace, letting the sound of Toby’s barking lead me in the right general direction. I’d gone ten metres or so when Nicky jumped out from behind a tree and yelled, ‘Boo.’

I pretended to jump, which went down well — I’ve got a play centre’s worth of younger cousins, so I know how that game is played.

‘Behind you,’ shouted Nicky.

I turned theatrically to find nothing behind me.

‘There’s nothing behind me,’ I said, which caused more laughter.

I turned back to Nicky and this time I did jump — well, more accurately, I flinched.

The girl in the green dress was standing right in front of me, her face centimetres from mine, her eyes were large and hazel with golden flecks around the iris. This close she smelt of rough bark and crushed leaves. I could also see that she was a grown woman, physically in her twenties, and that I’d been fooled by her body language into thinking her younger.

‘Boo,’ she shouted and laughed when I started back.

‘Old man,’ shouted Nicky.

I turned to look, and when I turned back the woman in a green dress was gone — and so was Nicky.

Toby came scampering towards me, stuck his nose into the grass in front of my feet and snuffled around. Obviously finding nothing, he looked up at me and gave me a frustrated yap.

I told him to be quiet — I could see someone else approaching. Jake Phillips, activist at large.

‘I see you’ve discovered the true secret of Skygarden,’ he said and for a moment I thought he might be yet another supernatural something or other, but he went on to say that the trees were some of the finest examples of their kind of London.

‘They’re the real reason the council couldn’t get the tower delisted,’ he said.

Behind him I saw two impish faces peering around a tree trunk and sniggering.

‘But there’s no one here,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be like this if people were still living in the blocks.’

‘You reckon?’

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘This would be dog shit central during the day and pusher park at night.’

He squinted at me. ‘Are you working for the council?’

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ I said.

‘Or the media, or County Gard?’ he asked.

‘Who’s County Gard?’ I asked, because the easiest way to deflect suspicion is to side track your questioner onto a subject that they love to talk about. Sure enough, Jake Phillips started in on a lengthy diatribe which I cut short because I couldn’t keep track without taking notes — and that would have been suspicious.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to finish walking the dog but I am interested in hearing more.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ he said.

‘No, seriously,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe in backing away from a fight. Besides, I’ve only just got here and I can’t be arsed to move again.’

I may have come across as a little bit too keen, but characters like Jake Phillips have been fighting the long defeat too long to pass up any help they can get.

‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you and your partner come around to my place for tea?’ he said and gave me his flat number.

I said I would, and we parted company — Toby was nowhere to be seen.

I found Toby further along the vanishing path in a glade full of sunlight and shining dust motes. A wool blanket of scarlet and green had been spread upon the grass and upon it sprawled, in the approved French impressionist manner, Oberon, Effra and Beverley Brook. Disappointingly, however, Beverley was wearing all her clothes.

Toby was sitting up at the edge of the blanket and doing his best small dog on the edge of starvation impression while Effra teased him with an M amp;S partysized sausage roll. When she saw me she smiled and flicked the roll at Toby, who caught it in midair.

Oberon gestured grandly at a space on the blanket and I joined them.

Effra offered me a glass of white wine. Her nails added at least two centimetres to the length of her fingers and were painted with intricate designs in black, gold and red. I accepted the wine, it was a bit early in the day for me but that’s not why I hesitated before drinking.

‘Take this as a gift freely given,’ said Effra. ‘Drink with no obligations.’

I drank. But if it was a fine vintage, it was totally wasted on me.

‘So what brings you south of the river?’ asked Beverley. She was wearing a bright blue jumper with a loose enough neck to show the bare brown curve of her shoulder. ‘Business or pleasure?’

‘Just work,’ I said.

‘Is there anything we can help with?’ asked Oberon.

I caught a flash of green and yellow in the corner of my eye. But by the time I’d turned my head all I saw was Nicky in laughing pursuit of the vanished young woman.

‘You can tell me who that is,’ I said.

‘You could call her Sky,’ said Effra, which caused Beverley to choke on her wine.

‘No?’ I asked Beverley.

‘Sky for short,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

‘And what is she?’ I asked. ‘And don’t give me any of that stuff about reductionism and the dangers of labelling things you don’t understand. I get enough of that from Nightingale and Dr Walid.’

‘I suppose you’d call her a dryad,’ said Effra and then looked at Oberon for confirmation. ‘Yes?’

‘Drys, in all truth refers to the oak tree,’ said Oberon which caused Beverley to roll her eyes. ‘Tree nymph would be more accurate, although I doubt the ancients had the London Plane in mind when they named them.’

‘Didn’t you do this at uni?’ I asked Effra, who had a history of art degree.

‘I avoided the Pre-Raphaelites,’ she said. ‘All those virgins in the water. It was too much like my home life.’

‘Can I talk to her?’ I asked.

Effra frowned. ‘I think I’d have to ask why first.’

So I told them that there had been suspicious activity around the tower recently and that we were just checking it. Lesley would have been pissed off, had she found out. She thinks that however polite we’re being, the police should never concede anything to anyone short of a full public inquiry. And even then we should lie like fuck on general principles, Lesley being part of the ‘you can’t handle the truth’ school of policing.

I, being a sophisticated modern police officer — given the specialist field I was working in — preferred to actively promote police/magic community stakeholder engagement in order to facilitate intelligence gathering. Besides, I knew better than to mess Effra about.

Effra nodded and called Nicky’s name in a tone of voice that actually caused me to flinch guiltily. Oberon noticed my reaction and raised his glass in salute.

Nicky rushed in from the trees and flung herself on my back, little arms half strangling me, her cheek pressed against mine — I could feel her grinning. Sky, the possibly tree-nymph, despite being the size of a fully grown adult, jumped on Oberon’s back. He didn’t even grunt under the impact — the flash git. Sky leaned over his head and grabbed a bottle of Highland Spring off the picnic blanket, but the cap defeated her. Effra took the bottle from her hand, twisted the top offand handed it back.

‘Peter here would like to ask you a few questions,’ she said. ‘But you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’

‘Hello, Sky,’ I said.

‘Lo,’ said Sky, fidgeting her Highland Spring bottle from side to side.

‘Do you live down here all the time?’

‘I’ve got a tree,’ she said proudly.

‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Do you live with your tree?’

Sky gave me a strange look, and then lowered her head to whisper something in Oberon’s ear.

‘No, he lives in a big house on the other side of the river,’ he said.

‘It’s the prettiest tree in the world,’ said Sky, answering my question.

‘I’m sure it is,’ I said and Sky beamed at me. ‘All I want to know is if you’ve seen anything strange happening near the tower.’

‘The tower is pretty, too,’ said Sky. ‘It’s full of lights and it makes music.’

‘What kind of music?’

Sky’s face screwed up as she thought of it.

‘Happy music,’ she said and pointed up. ‘At the top.’

Skygarden had once been famous as the site of Sanction FM, a pirate radio station which I used to listen to in my teens, even though the signal tended to go in and out. At least two Sanction DJs had gone on to hit the mainstream big time — one now had a two-hour prime slot on Radio IXtra. But I didn’t think Sky was listening in on her FM radio. I tried to get her to clarify the kind of music she’d heard, but what she described could have been a distant party or the wind blowing around the strange angles of the tower.

Sky fell off Oberon’s shoulders and sprawled melodramatically on her back. I was losing the witness and, while I’ve never done the training, I know that interviews with children or witnesses with low mental ages can take days. Because once they’ve stopped talking to you, they’ve really stopped talking to you. I asked whether she’d seen anything happening at the bottom of the tower.

‘Lorries,’ she said.

‘You saw lorries?’

‘Lots of lorries,’ she said and sighed.

‘When did you see the lorries?’

‘Days ago,’ she said.

‘How many days ago?’ I asked.

‘It was cold,’ she said, which could have been any time in the last four months. ‘I’m going to go play now.’ Sky launched herself to her feet in one fluid motion, and was gone before I could open my mouth. Nicky whooped and, putting her knee between my shoulder blades, launched herself in pursuit.

‘Any use?’ asked Beverley.

‘I don’t know,’ I said and got to my feet. ‘I may have to talk to her again.’

‘One of us,’ Effra indicated herself and Oberon, ‘would need to be on hand.’

‘Really, why’s that?’

‘She shouldn’t be questioned without a responsible adult present,’ said Effra.

‘These plane trees were planted in the 1970s,’ I said. ‘She’s older than I am.’

‘And in the spring she’s not competent to be questioned,’ said Effra.

‘Perhaps I should call social services,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Effra. ‘Do you think she has a birth certificate?’

‘You can’t have it both ways, Effra,’ I said. ‘You can’t have protection from the law and then pretend it doesn’t exist when it suits you.’

‘Technically, we can,’ said Effra. ‘Human rights are not contingent upon the behaviour of the individual.’

This is not an argument you want to use with the police, but before I could counter with the traditional rebuttal centring around the competing notions of citizenship — and the fact that I had a body in the morgue that had been set on fire from the inside, and would you like to talk about my right not to have my head bashed in by a psychotic Russian witch? And in any case I didn’t see your family helping with the clean up the other day — Oberon spoke.

‘It is the spirit of the law that you should follow,’ he said. ‘In this instance she has the mind of a child and what blackguard would take advantage of her innocence to advance his cause, however noble?’

I didn’t really have a counter argument for that, although I’m fairly certain Lesley would have, so I climbed to my feet with as much dignity as I could muster. Beverley followed me up and said that I could make myself useful and walk her back to her car. As we walked towards the Walworth Road, Nicky and Sky took turns to sneak up behind us and make hilarious farting noises.

‘Is Sky always this childish?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ she said, ‘this is just spring. She goes clubbing in the summer and does evening classes in the autumn.’

‘And in the winter?’

‘In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.’

‘Where does she do that, then?’

‘There are some questions it’s not polite to ask,’ she said. ‘And some questions you shouldn’t ask unless you’re sure you want the answer.’

We reached her car, which turned out to be another two-seater Mini Roadster a bit like the one that got torched at Covent Garden, only with a honking 2-litre diesel engine and painted fire-engine red.

‘What’s with you and the Minis?’ I asked.

‘The Thames Valley,’ she said as she climbed in. ‘It’s not just cottages and universities you know. There’s still a bit of industry left.’ Then she flicked her dreads over her shoulder and drove away.

When she was safely out of sight I called Lesley.

‘I think it’s time we checked the basement,’ I said. ‘Bring the bag with you.’

Lesley met me and Toby in the lift foyer of the lower ground floor. I took a moment to tell her about Sky the wood nymph. She seemed to find Beverley’s appearance amusing.

‘And she just happened to be there, didn’t she?’ she said. ‘Total coincidence.’

We had two grey metal doors to choose from, one on either side of the entrance.

‘Which one?’ asked Lesley and she dumped the black nylon carry bag at my feet.

‘Either,’ I said. ‘It’s a circular plan — we should be able to work our way round.’

Lesley chose a door at random and used the skeleton key that Sergeant Daverc had provided to open it up. She quickly found the light switch and stepped inside, so I grabbed the bag and followed. After a moment’s hesitation, Toby followed me.

Inside, the room smelt of breezeblocks and moist cement. A row of metal lockers lined the exterior and interior walls. A door at the far end was marked with a yellow ‘Danger Electricity’ triangle. I figured the wet cement smell came from what looked like recent work on the floor, visible as a darker-coloured strip running across the room. I opened the bag and me and Lesley took a couple of minutes to tool up.

‘Feel anything?’ asked Lesley as I slipped on my Metvest, the undercover beige version without pockets that theoretically fits under your jacket.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘Do you think that’s normal?’

‘Too early to tell,’ I said.

Once we had our Metvests on under our jackets we turned off our main phones and fired up a pair of airwave handsets that, while actually more expensive than our phones, were provided out of the police budget and thus expendable. These went on our tactical belts on which we also hung extendable batons, cuffs and pepper spray — but alas no taser yet.

‘They’re probably waiting for one of us to get freeze dried,’ said Lesley, whose attitude towards taser deployment was that people with heart conditions, epilepsy and an aversion to electrocution should not embark upon breaches of the peace in the first place.

Once we were kitted up, all we were missing was a motion tracker — the kind that makes sinister pinging noises. Instead we had to make do with Toby. Given the electrocution warnings, I picked him up as Lesley used the skeleton key on the next door.

‘I want a nice clean dispersal this time,’ I said, and in we went.

The trick to spotting vestigia, or any of the other weird sensory impressions you get hanging around magic or magical folks, is separating them from all the memories, daydreams and randomly misfiring neurones that is the background noise of your brain. You start by spotting things that couldn’t possibly be related to your current situation — as when you think of a barking dog while examining a man with his head knocked off. Your teacher reinforces your perception by confirming when you’re right. The more you practise, the better you get. And it’s not long before you ask the question — is this what causes schizophrenia?

Well, if you’re me you ask that question. It never seemed to have occurred to Nightingale at all.

When I raised it with Dr Walid he said one test would be for me to take anti-psychotic drugs and see if the vestigia went away. I declined, but I’m not sure whether I was more worried that it might work than that it might not.

There’s a sort of background level of vestigia which I’ve come to expect pretty much everywhere in London. It falls away noticeably in the countryside, but you can get some very strong hot spots and what Nightingale calls lacunae — the remnants of recent magic. Because where you find high levels of vestigia, you generally also find the weird shit that the Folly is supposed to deal with. So me and Lesley have got into the habit of checking any new scene before we do anything else. This procedure, were we more integrated into the Met proper, would be called an Initial Vestigia Assessment or IVA pronounced i-VAH as in — I knew that Gandalf was a villain as soon I’d finished my IVA.

As far as I can tell, vestigia build up over time. So modern buildings like Skygarden tend to exhibit low background levels.

The next room was the building’s power incomer, its electrical substation, recently modernised judging by the clean and compact grey boxes that lined one wall. The lighting was good, all the better to see the many warning symbols — particularly the one which showed a body lying on the ground with a stylised lightning bolt in its chest.

‘Danger of death,’ read Lesley.

‘Moving on,’ I said.

The next door put us in what I recognised as the base of the northern fire exit, and unlike everything else in the estate it was well designed. Fleeing residents were neatly channelled off the bottom flight of stairs and out through a pair of double fire doors.

‘What’s that smell?’ asked Lesley.

‘Old urine,’ I said. ‘And bleach.’ Almost from day one people would have used the stairwell as a convenient spot for a crafty slash and every two to three years the council would have brought in high pressure hoses and scrubbed it down.

‘Animals,’ said Lesley.

‘I think the dogs did it outside,’ I said. ‘It’s odd that the doors are securely closed.’

‘They’re alarmed,’ said Lesley pointing to a set of sensors at the top of the doors.

‘This block is on the council shit list,’ I said. ‘The response to repeated abuse would be to shut the alarms off permanently. The doors should be propped open with bricks and there should be needles and condoms all over the floor.’

‘Mysterious, yes,’ said Lesley and then nodded at Toby who was yawning. ‘Magical, no. Next door.’

We found the stairs down in the next room. As far as I could tell, we’d been working our way around the circumference on the lower ground floor and were now opposite the main entrance foyer. The breezeblock walls were bare but there had been work done on the floor here too — a strip of freshly laid cement running from the interior wall to the outer. A new damp course? I wondered.

A wide staircase descended to a familiarly shiny door with a County Gard logo and not one but two serious-looking padlocks in addition to the door’s own lock. All three were resistant to the skeleton key.

‘That’s a health and safety violation,’ I said. ‘We’ve got the same key as the Fire Brigade.’

‘What’s behind the door, do you think?’ asked Lesley.

‘The base of the central shaft for one thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like to find out what the fuck Stromberg was thinking of when he built it.’

‘We could burn the locks off,’ said Lesley.

‘Subtle. I like it.’

‘Nah, you’re right,’ said Lesley. ‘We can get Frank to ask County Gard to provide keys.’

Frank Caffrey, as an official fire investigator, could just demand access. After Southwark got pasted for the six fire deaths at Lakanal House neither they nor their contractors were going to mess with the Fire Brigade. I wished I’d thought of that.

‘Let’s finish the rest of this floor,’ said Lesley, and that’s what we did. We worked our way through the southern emergency exit, as suspiciously unsoiled as the northern one, the water incomer and another room with lockers. Apart from the now familiar fresh cement on the floor they were resolutely uninteresting. Toby didn’t so much as growl which was, if anything, said Lesley, a sign of even less than background magic.

Our IVA completed, we put our kit back in the bag and let ourselves out into the foyer.

‘Well, that was rewarding,’ said Lesley as we rode up in the lift.

‘I don’t think this place was built for people,’ I said.

‘You say that about all modern architecture,’ said Lesley. ‘You want us all to live in pyramids.’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘did you know the Egyptians invented the terrace?’

‘Really?’

‘They did sleep on the roof in the summer though.’

‘That must have been nice,’ said Lesley.

‘I think Stromberg built this place as a magical experiment,’ I said.

The lift door opened and we stepped out.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘How many estates do you know that have wood nymphs living in the middle?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Peter,’ said Lesley with a sigh. ‘Maybe all of them do. Certainly everywhere we go we seem to be tripping over these supernatural buggers.’ She stopped suddenly outside our door and pointed at the door jamb — the slip of paper we’d agreed to leave wedged into it was missing. I unzipped the bag and extracted our batons and passed Lesley hers. They made comforting little shink sounds as we flicked them open.

Lesley turned the key in the lock as quietly as she could, and nodded down from three. On zero she flung the door open and charged in, I went in a metre behind to avoid the embarrassing police dog-pile effect you get if the officer in front trips over something — say a skateboard. It’s hard to project the full majesty and authority of the law when Lesley is sitting on your back and calling you a muppet.

Lesley went into the kitchen and yelled, ‘In here!’ And I piled in behind her.

‘I surrender,’ said Zach around a mouthful of cereal. He was sitting at our tiny kitchen table with a packet of Weetabix, an open loaf of bread, a now almost empty litre bottle of milk and open jars of raspberry jam and honey in front of him — both with knives stuck in them.

‘How did you get in?’

‘I’ve got a way with locks,’ he said. ‘It’s a family thing.’

‘This would be the thieving side of the family,’ said Lesley.

‘There’s another side to his family?’ I asked.

‘Hey, leave my family out of this,’ said Zach, fishing the last two Weetabix out of the packet and then reaching for the milk.

‘Is there a reason you came round, or did you just run out of food?’ I asked.

Lesley put the kettle on and snatched the milk from Zach before he could finish it.

‘There’s this pub up west that Lesley wanted to know about,’ said Zach. ‘I can get me and her in this afternoon.’

I looked at Lesley, who shrugged.

‘We never did get to lay out our bait for the Faceless Man,’ she said.

‘What’s so special about this pub?’ I asked.

‘Full of fairies,’ said Zach.

‘I’ve got to come with you,’ I said.

‘Better if you don’t,’ said Zach as he spread honey on his cereal. ‘You’re a little bit too closely associated with the Thames girls, if you know what I mean. Makes the gentry a tad nervous.’

‘Besides, if we go in as a pair we will look like Old Bill. If I go in with Zach it will look more natural,’ said Lesley.

‘Just another victim of my legendary charm,’ said Zach.

‘And if our Night Witch is in there getting a rum and black?’ I asked. ‘What’re you going to do then?’

‘Trust me, bro, it’s not that kind of place, is it?

‘Isn’t it?’

‘They wouldn’t let your boss through the door, and he’s respected,’ said Zach. ‘It’s all strictly fae plus one and no wizards.’

‘Except Lesley?’

‘Lesley’s the exception that proves the rule, ain’t she?’ said Zach and I couldn’t argue with that.

‘Are you going to clear it with Nightingale?’ I asked her.

‘Duh!’ said Lesley and handed me a cup of instant.

‘In that case, I’m going to take Mr Phillips up on his invitation. I bet he keeps an eye on who comes and goes,’ I said. ‘And while you’re out you can pick up some more Weetabix.’ I checked the kitchen. ‘And bread and the cheese and — did you eat the dog food?’

‘Of course not,’ said Zach. ‘I fed the dog.’

I checked Toby’s bowl and saw he was already working his way through a suitable pile.

‘Although I’ll put my hand up to having some of his biscuits,’ said Zach.