Broken Homes

18

It hadn’t really sunk in at the time, but my beloved Ford Focus ST was kaput. If the half a ton of bricks falling on it hadn’t written it off, the fact that an elephant had gone for a kip on the bonnet would have. Nightingale never could figure out whether that was something he or Varvara Sidorovna had done, and she just laughed in my face.

Nightingale’s Jag had been safely parked a hundred metres further down the farm access road. He said he’d conjured the sound of his arrival to distract whoever was holding us in the barn while he sneaked around the back.

We spent the night in the Chelmsford Travelodge. I had a room with a charming view of the nearby flyover, but at least the bed was soft and the shower worked. In the morning me and Lesley had a competition to see who could pile the most food on their plate at the continental style all-you-could-eat breakfast. There were no sausages, bacon or fried slice — neither Toby nor Molly would have approved.

DCI Duffy arrived mid-morning with a car full of officers from Bromley and took over interviews with Max and Barry — criminal damage — while throwing Danny back to the Essex mob — illegal possession of a firearm, threatening behaviour and bringing rural England into disrepute.

We had to give our own statements which took most of the day, because we had to keep stopping and reworking sections that DCI Duffy and the Assistant Chief Constable overseeing the case found to be ‘problematic’ — which was pretty much everything. In the end we blamed most of the property damage on an accidental fire and Calor Gas cylinder explosions, plural.

Nightingale had to stay in close proximity to Varvara Sidorovna, so we went out to a seafood bar by the River Chelmer to fetch some fancy fish and chips. Before we hauled them back to the nick we spent a couple of minutes on a walkway by the river feeding chips to the ducks and seeing if anyone was at home. No joy.

‘Maybe not every river’s got a personality,’ said Lesley.

We spent the rest of the evening completing our notebooks and typing our reports for not one but two major inquiries, and then back to the Travelodge. We set our alarms early so we could stuff our faces at the breakfast before we had to leave.

Essex Police provided us a car and driver, the better to speed us out of their force area. We headed back to London in the back seat with our pockets stuffed full of Babybel cheese miniatures and our hearts full of doubts.

Without my beloved Asbo, the first order of business was getting some wheels. We tossed a coin, I lost, and so it was me that got dropped off at Skygarden to check on Toby while Lesley headed off to look up a friendly civilian auto worker she knew who handled fleet re-sales. My bet was that it would be a silver Astra, but you never know.

From the walkway, the garden around the tower didn’t look different. Still green in the patchy sunlight. According to the specialist Bromley had called in, it would take years for the big trees to die. So why had Sky died that night — almost instantly? And why had the Faceless Man had the trees destroyed? And so clumsily, using such incompetent cut-outs as Barry, Max, Danny and their late lamented and drowned mate — now identified as Martin Brown of Long Riding, Basildon. All of them in that category of low-level chancers whose ambitions to become professional criminals were frustrated by their inability to pass the entrance exam.

I wanted to go down to the garden, but there were still officers from Bromley MIT amongst the trees doing a last sweep before they packed away. I didn’t want to be identified while there was still mileage to be had by staying undercover.

Why had the Faceless Man wanted the trees dead? Jake Phillips had said that the trees were what kept Skygarden as a listed building. Had they been destroyed so that the tower could be delisted and the demolition begun? There was a vast amount of money involved in the redevelopment project. Was it possible that the Faceless Man’s motive was that mundane?

I glanced down at the garages, at the ones with the County Gard seals and the line of curing concrete that stretched from four of them into the base of the tower. No, this was not a real-estate scam — in the first place those kinds of scams were effectively legal, and in the second place they hardly needed magical assistance.

Had he known about Sky when he’d arranged to have the trees killed? Probably not, given the people he’d tasked with the job. But why not just get Varvara Sidorovna to do it? I was certain she could have blighted the whole garden with a killer frost had she wanted to. If she’d timed it right it could have been put down to freak weather.

But not by us, not by the Isaacs, because we would know better.

Which meant the Faceless Man either knew we were here, or at the very least was keeping a close eye on the place.

But why take the risk — even with the expendable Essex boys?

Unless he was on a time table and he couldn’t postpone regardless of our presence.

From the walkway I spotted that the doors to the lower ground floor had been wedged open, which was a sure-fire sign either that the council had workmen in, that someone was moving out, or burglars were looting a flat. I checked the car park for clues and saw only a white Citroen van with the Southwark Council logo stencilled on its side. But, because it’s good practice, I made a note of its index.

It was dark and cool inside the ground floor foyer. I hit the button for the lift and while I waited I gazed at the not-really-a-tuned-mass-damper that hung down the centre of the tower. Stromberg had designed Skygarden to soak up vestigia from its environment, and if it had done its job then that power had to have gone somewhere. We’d assumed that the whole grandiose scheme had failed because it hadn’t been channelled up and out of the Stadtkrone on the roof. But what if the power had accumulated, but hadn’t been released?

What if it was still stored in the thirty-storey length of plastic hanging over there? I ignored the lift doors as they opened behind me.

Power that could be drained off into the metal plates stacked neatly in the garages that surrounded the tower. The Faceless Man didn’t need the staff technology Nightingale was teaching us — he’d adapted the demon trap technique to create vessels for storing the power — dog batteries.

This was not a real-estate scam, I realised. It was a heist.

I turned to rush up to the flat, but the lift doors had closed now and I had to wait for it to come back down again.

When I let myself into the flat I found that the living room was full of bodies.

The curtains were drawn and the lights were off. In the gloom I could make out at least three people lying on the sofa-bed and another five or so on the floor. They all seemed to be men and, judging from the smell of spilt beer and the layer of crisp packets and takeaway cartons, they were sleeping off a serious night in. I noted the donkey jackets with the high-viz strips and made an educated guess as to who they were.

I slowly pushed open the bedroom door and peered inside. Stromberg had carefully designed the master bedroom to be too narrow for a king-size bed placed across it and, when placed lengthways, to provide a mere fifteen centimetres of clearance between bed and wall. The width of the end wall was taken up with a sliding patio door and the length precisely calculated so that you could have a wardrobe, but only if it blocked access to either the patio or the rest of the flat. It was for such attention to details that Erik Stromberg was once described by the Guardian architectural correspondent as emblematic of modern British architecture at its most iconoclastic.

Zach lay face down on the bed naked except for his bright red underpants and, despite his eating habits, I couldn’t help noticing that he was skinny enough for me to count every vertebra on his back.

Carefully, I crouched down until I could put my lips a couple of centimetres from his ear and shout, ‘Police!’

The results were instructive. Not only did he leap at least a metre upwards, but he was already twisting like a cat so that he came down on all fours with the bed between us.

‘Shit,’ he shouted, and then slapped his hand over his mouth.

‘Why have you filled my living room with Quiet People?’ I whispered.

‘Community outreach,’ whispered Zach. ‘I’m trying to get them used to interacting with the surface world.’

‘You took them on a pub crawl, didn’t you?’

And Zach claimed it had worked, too.

‘One of them ordered a souvlaki up Green Lanes,’ said Zach. We’d retired to the kitchen for coffee and conversation in something close to a normal voice. ‘Brought a tear to my eye, I was that proud.’

‘Why did you bring them here?’

‘It was late. This was the closest.’

‘You got any tea?’ asked a figure in the doorway. He was short and wiry with that bantamweight boxer aura of density and strength. His face was long and pale, his eyes were huge, grey and beautiful. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and resonant but barely louder than a murmur. He looked me up and down and stuck out a hand.

‘Stephen,’ he said. His hand was strong, the skin as rough as sandpaper.

‘Peter,’ I said. ‘We’ve already met — you buried me under a platform at Oxford Circus.’

Stephen shrugged. ‘You needed the rest,’ he said.

‘How was the pub crawl?’ I asked.

‘Mildly successful,’ he said. ‘Better if we could have slept in, but the drilling keeps waking me up.’

Me and Zach listened, but we couldn’t hear anything beyond distant traffic and the kettle coming to a boil.

‘What drilling?’ I asked — thinking about the council contractors downstairs.

Stephen put his hand against the outside wall of the kitchen and closed his eyes. ‘Downstairs, about thirty feet. Half-inch masonry drill bit going six inches into concrete. The good quality stuff,’ said Stephen and rapped the wall with his knuckle. ‘Not this crap.’

Zach handed him a mug of tea.

My tea, I thought, that I bought from all the way down the road. But, given we’d left Zach in the flat for two days, I was probably lucky there was anything left at all. Which reminded me.

‘Where’s Toby?’

Toby was down in the deconstructed children’s playground frolicking amongst the fallen cherry blossom which lay everywhere like old snow. There was nobody in sight, so I floated a couple of water balls around for him to chase and thought about how it really was past time that the Faceless Man went away. Up the steps or down the mortuary, I really didn’t care which.

‘He’s just another criminal,’ Nightingale had said. ‘He doesn’t have a plan for every contingency.’

He didn’t reckon on us finding the book, I thought, or connecting it with Skygarden. Or turning up just as his plans, whatever they are, were getting under way. He panicked — hence the attack on the garden and then getting Varvara Sidorovna to clean up the evidence. If we push him again, we can keep him off balance. But where to push?

He wears a mask and he moves in the shadows, but he still has to act in the mundane world. Somebody had to load those garages with dog batteries, a somebody who then sealed them up behind shiny steel doors with a neat logo stencilled on the front — everyone’s favourite full service lackey of capitalism — County Gard.

I could have contacted Bromley MIT and seen whether they’d done an Integrated Intelligence Platform check on the company yet. But I really didn’t want to aggravate them any more than I already had, so I went to the next best thing.

‘Why do you want to know?’ asked Jake Phillips as he warily eyed Toby sniffing the base of his palm tree.

‘I thought I’d pay County Gard a visit,’ I said.

‘In what capacity?’ he asked and for a moment I thought he’d twigged I was police.

‘As a committed blogtavist,’ I said. ‘Ready to harness the might of social media in the service of a brave new world. I want to save this place.’

‘You’ve only been here a week,’ he said.

‘But what,’ I said and waved my hand at his garden in the sky, ‘if all the balconies were fixed like this, this place would be like the hanging gardens of Babylon — this could be a wonder of the world.’

A lifetime of disappointment had made him cynical, but you don’t stay an activist without a core of stubborn belief that things can get better — it’s a bit like being a Spurs supporter really.

‘You think so?’ he asked.

‘I think it’s worth fighting for,’ I said and realised even as I said it that I was telling the truth.

So, humming the Internationale under his breath, Jake led me to his spare room stroke office where he had genuine grey metal filing cabinets — saved from a skip in 1996 he said. He pulled a fat manila folder from a middle drawer and found the information. Just in time I remembered to ask him for scrap paper rather than pulling my notebook out, and wrote down the details.

I trotted down the four flights to our floor and entered the flat to find Lesley arguing with Zach. It was one of those low-key arguments where one party hasn’t twigged that the other party’s mind is completely made up.

‘You can’t stay here,’ said Lesley. Then she saw me and cruelly dragged me into it. ‘Can he, Peter?’

‘If it’s about all the food, I can totally go shopping,’ he said.

In the living room Stephen and the rest of the Quiet People were standing around with the embarrassed air of people who were more than ready to move on before the crockery started flying.

‘We’re running an operation here,’ said Lesley. ‘This is work and you’re a distraction — sorry.’

Zach looked at me for confirmation and I nodded — because you always back your partner up. He sighed and, after a bit of furtive kissing, which I went into the bathroom to avoid, Zach and his cohort of underground denizens left.

‘One less set of people to worry about,’ she said quietly and then, louder, to me, ‘Are we going to stay here or pack it in?’

‘Neither,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d go and cause a bit of trouble.’

County Gard and its sister companies County Watch, County Finance Management (‘You Can Count On Us’) and County System Co. were all located in a place off Scrutton Street in Shoreditch. They resided in rented offices in a converted nineteenth-century warehouse with blue plaster rustication around its main gate. It was the sort of place you’d expect to find a software start-up or TV production company that had fallen out of favour — not a full service property management company. Especially one that had a fleet of liveried vehicles. There was definitely no parking around Scrutton Street, as we found when we looked for somewhere to put our brand new wheels — well, not brand new, but at least not a silver Astra. Another Ford Asbo with 2010 plates and a painfully high number on the clock, but obviously loved by someone because it was still sweet to drive. Sadly, it wasn’t orange but a rather serviceable dark blue which at least meant it wouldn’t stand out so much on an obbo.

In the end we wedged totally illegally onto the pavement and hoped we wouldn’t be there long enough to get a ticket.

We showed our warrant cards at the building reception desk and asked for directions. After one flight of steps and a slight mistake where we went left instead of right, we found ourselves outside a plain grey reinforced metal door with the County Gard logo printed on a piece of A4 paper which was attached to the door with Sellotape. I tried the handle — it was locked. I knocked on the door, we waited, but there was no answer.

I checked my watch. It was three o’clock in the afternoon — no office closes that early. I put my ear to the door and listened.

‘There’s nobody in there,’ I said, but even as I said it I heard a hoover starting up. I banged the door hard with the flat of my hand and yelled ‘Police — open up.’ I listened again and heard the hoover turn off. It seemed to take a long time for the door to open.

When it did, we found ourselves face to face with the tallest Somali woman I’ve ever met. Mid thirties, I thought, and a good ten centimetres taller than I was, with a grave calm face and sad brown eyes. She wore a blue polyester cleaner’s coat which fit her like a waistcoat and her hijab was an expensive purple silk one.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ Her accent was Somali but her English was smooth enough that I figured she’d learnt it as part of an expensive education back in Africa.

I showed my warrant card and explained that we were investigating County Gard.

‘That has nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘I’m employed by Fontaine Office Services.’

Lesley slipped past us to check the office.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘About eleven years,’ she said. ‘I have a passport.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in this particular office today?’

‘Oh,’ she brightened. ‘I just got in.’

‘Do you know where all the people are?’

‘I thought it might be a company holiday.’

‘Peter,’ called Lesley urgently. ‘Come and have a look at this.’

It was your standard open-plan office laid out with cubicles for the ants and glass box meeting-rooms for the grasshoppers. It looked like every working office I’ve ever seen, including the outside inquiry office of a Major Investigation Team — papers, coffee mugs, post-it notes, telephones, lamps, occasional human touches — photographs and the like.

‘What am I looking at?’ I asked.

‘What’s missing?’ asked Lesley.

Then I saw it. Every cubicle desk had its bog standard flat screen monitor and cheap keyboard, but the main columns were missing. Paperwork was still piled up in in-trays, desk calendars were still pinned to the beige fabric-covered partition walls and one worker seemed to be deliberately trying to create the Olympic symbol using coffee rings, but there wasn’t a single operating hard-drive in the office.

I walked back to the cleaning lady and asked whether she’d been in the day before and whether the office had been staffed.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It was very busy yesterday. It was hard to get my work done.’

I reassured her a bit, took her name, Awa Shambir, and her details and told her that she might as well move onto her next job since I didn’t think this particular office was going to re-open.

‘Friend of your mum’s?’ asked Lesley as we watched the lady neatly stow her cleaning gear and collect her personal things.

‘Don’t think so,’ I said. My mum doesn’t know every cleaner in London, just the Sierra Leoneans, most of the Nigerians and that Bulgarian contingent she’s been working with in King’s Cross. ‘Remind me to run her name when we get a moment.’

‘If you’re suspicious, we should stop her now,’ said Lesley.

She’d handled her gear like a professional, but I don’t know any cleaners who’d go to work in an expensive hijab like she’d been wearing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We need to get back to the tower. This is his legitimate front organisation. If he’s shut it down it means he either doesn’t need it any more or after today it might be a security risk.’

‘Hence all the missing computers,’ said Lesley.

‘Whatever he’s planning, I think he’s doing it today or tonight.’

I felt weirdly panicky all the way back across the river, and through the vile traffic around Elephant and Castle. But I couldn’t work out why.

‘Somebody tried to kill us a couple of days ago,’ said Lesley when I mentioned it. ‘I’m amazed we’re not on psychiatric medical leave.’

‘That which does not kill us,’ I said, ‘has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.’

Lesley said she was glad to hear it but she was putting more reliance on the fact that we’d been authorised to deploy with tasers in any Falcon operation. She’d picked them up from the Folly on her way back.

Lesley had also called Nightingale, who was still stuck in Essex guarding Varvara Sidorovna, and he said he’d talk to DCI Duffy. Bromley MIT could follow up on the office.

The council work vans were still in the car park when we got back.

‘You keep an eye on them while I get the go bag,’ I said.

‘Are you expecting trouble?’ asked Lesley.

‘Just want to be on the safe side,’ I said. I wanted my Metvest, if only for the psychological comfort. See, I thought as I waited for the lift, someone tries to kill you and suddenly you’re all cautious.

Emma Wall, looking very cheerful for once, stepped out of the lift when the doors opened — she practically jumped when she saw me.

‘Hello, Peter,’ she said. ‘I’m just going out to the shops. Do you want anything? I can pick you something up. Where’s Lesley?’

‘Outside,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Emma. ‘See you.’ And half ran out of the door, without waiting for a reply to her shopping offer.

Definitely drugs, I thought as I rode up in the lift. That’s what brung our fallen princess low — definitely drugs.

Toby started barking as soon as he heard the key in the lock and stayed barking as I suddenly paused before unlocking. Emma’s flat had been sealed with one of County Gard’s shiny steel doors. Could she have left or been evicted? But she’d said that she was just going out to the shops. And that was fast work for a company whose office was currently empty.

I finished opening the door and ignored Toby as he bounced eagerly around my legs. I grabbed the go bag and took it back out onto the landing where Toby did his best to climb inside. I pulled out my mobile and speed-dialled Lesley.

‘Is Emma with you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘She’s gone to the shops.’

‘If you see her, grab her and don’t let those vans leave before I get down there.’

Lesley said she thought I was becoming unhinged, but she agreed to park the new Asbo across the culvert so they couldn’t escape.

Your Metvest comes in two bits, the knife- and bullet-resistant panels and a tough fabric sheath — the vest bit. The plain sheath was for plain clothes, but this time I wanted my multi-pocketed and comforting blue uniform vest with POLICE on the back in fluorescent letters. Once I’d distributed my kit about my person, I walked over to the newly installed County Gard security door and, pausing only to turn my phone off, blew the lock out with a fireball.

Then I had to wait about two minutes for the metal to cool off, which made me wonder whether I could get Varvara Sidorovna to teach me the formae for that freeze-ray she kept flinging at me.

Finally I used the end of my baton to prise the door open and, keeping the baton extended and ready, I stepped inside the flat. If she’d really moved out or been evicted then she certainly believed in travelling light. The flat was dirty in the way I remembered from the last time I lived with a bunch of male coppers, not squalid but unkempt with dirt accumulating in the corners. My mum wouldn’t have tolerated it. In the bedroom, underwear hung halfway out of drawers, the duvet was rumpled and the pillows had fallen on the floor. The living room was nasty with a filled ashtray acting as a centrepiece for a stained coffee table — no obvious signs of paraphernalia, I noticed.

Out in the hallway of the flat Toby sneezed, raising a little cloud of tan-coloured dust. I hadn’t noticed him follow me in.

Dust covered half the hallway and was concentrated in front of the door of a storage cupboard to the left of the front door. I could see where heavy boots had ground the dust into the imitation wood flooring.

‘Many men have passed this way, Toby,’ I said and remembered Stephen’s complaint about the drilling. ‘Carrying heavy DIY equipment.’

Stromberg had designed Skygarden to be supported by nine big pillars that ran up the height of the tower. He’d tried to keep them from intruding into his nice rectilinear flats, but four of the flats on every level ended up with the rounded circumference in what was supposed to be their bathroom. Stromberg’s solution was to pretend that he’d always intended the bathrooms to be the size of a telephone box and build a ‘cupboard space’ around the curved side of the pillar.

I think I must have subconsciously known what I was going to find, because I found myself opening the cupboard door very carefully. When I saw what was inside I stopped breathing.

A grid of holes had been drilled into the concrete of the support pillar and then stuffed with a material that looked exactly like grey Plasticine. From their squidgy ends protruded grey cylinders which sprouted wires which were neatly gathered and fed down into a grey container the size and shape of cashbox that had been securely duct-taped to the pillar.

I wondered what would happen if I just yanked all the detonators out at once. Then I noticed a yellow post-it note that had fallen to the floor below the box. I picked it up and read, This device has been fitted with counter measures. Please do not tamper, as being blown up often offends.