Broken Homes

15

Which turned out to be an understatement.

‘It’s just a padlock,’ said Zach as he casually tossed it to me and then checked Lesley to make sure she’d been watching.

It had taken Zach less than thirty minutes to arrive at our front door, wearing a surprisingly clean red T-shirt with the Clash logo on the chest and trailing the smell of antiperspirant — applied, I reckoned, when he was on his way up in the lift. He held up a plastic Lidl bag containing a three-litre plastic bottle of Strongbow.

‘Where’s the party?’ he asked.

‘Downstairs,’ said Lesley.

I examined the padlock Zach threw me and found that it was unmarked. We could put it back in place on the way out, and no one would be any the wiser.

‘Is this entirely legal?’ asked Zach.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley. ‘That was a clear health and safety violation.’

‘That’s all right then,’ said Zach standing back so that me and Lesley could access the door to the basement. ‘I wouldn’t want to think that you two were leading me into anything illicit.’

‘We’re the law,’ said Lesley. ‘Remember?’

‘You’re the Isaacs,’ said Zach. ‘And that ain’t quite the same thing.’

Without the padlock, the door to the basement opened easily and we went inside.

We found ourselves at the bottom of Skygarden’s pointlessly wide central shaft. Two floors above us, wire mesh had been strung across the width of the shaft, presumably so people could work at the bottom without being hit by rubbish dropped from above. Over thirty years of careful housekeeping the mesh had acquired such a thick layer of old newspapers, burger boxes, empty drink cans and stuff I didn’t want to identify, that it blocked much of the light coming from above.

‘That’s a fire hazard,’ said Zach.

Fortunately, enough of the strip lights mounted on the walls were still working for us to see what we were doing. I peered up through the accumulated rubbish to trace the descent of Stromberg’s so-called tuned mass damper down the centre of the shaft until it terminated in the basement where we stood. Close up I could see it was a cylinder thirty centimetres across and it terminated a metre above the ground.

‘What’s holding it up?’ asked Zach.

‘There’s cross cables at every other floor,’ I said. ‘The ones without walkways. And it’s attached at the top.’ To a PVC plinth with occult symbols, no less. And I realised that this was Stromberg’s mine shaft or drill bit or whatever — crystallising the magic out of wherever it was coming from and connecting it to the Stadtkrone.

‘That’s got to be supporting some of the weight,’ said Lesley, pointing up.

A metre above our heads what looked like heating ducts emerged from four of the walls and met in the middle in a boxy girdle mounted around the fake mass damper.

‘Look how clean they are,’ I said. ‘They’re practically brand new.’ I made a mental note about where the ducts would come out on the other side of the walls. I jogged back out the door and up the stairs to the Lower Ground Floor plant room and found the darkish strip which marked where the new cement had been laid.

Plastic, I was thinking. . Certain plastics retain vestigia. Nightingale had been right. I was replicating work from the 1920s, only not by members of the Folly, and not by British researchers but Germans. Professor Postmartin had said they’d been more advanced than us prior to the 1930s — and that included the chemical industry. At school Mrs Lemwick had been big on German industrial superiority when we did the origins of the First World War.

‘What’s he up to?’ asked Zach, who had followed me up here with Lesley, and was now staring at me oddly.

‘He’s doing his Sherlock Holmes impression,’ said Lesley.

I went out through the main doors into the rain and found the point where a freshly resurfaced strip of the tarmac emerged from the wall and headed for the garages.

‘My granddad said he was bonkers,’ said Zach.

‘Sherlock Homes?’ asked Lesley.

‘Arthur Conan Doyle,’ said Zach.

The strip vanished under the door of a garage sealed with a County Gard steel plate and another shiny padlock.

‘You want to get this?’ I asked Zach.

Zach pulled a pick from his jeans pocket and went to work. ‘Started seeing fairies and ghosts and talking to dead people,’ he said still going on about Conan Doyle as the padlock came apart in his hands.

‘But there are fairies and ghosts,’ said Lesley. ‘I met them down the pub — you introduced me.’

‘Yeah, but he used to see them when they weren’t there,’ said Zach. ‘Which is practically the definition of bonkers.’

I bent down, grabbed the door handle and pulled the garage door up and over with a grinding screech. Rainwater splattered my face.

‘Okay,’ said Lesley. ‘This is not really clearing anything up, is it?’

The garage was completely filled with stacks of what looked like metal trays, held in wooden frames. They were so tightly packed you couldn’t even squeeze inside and I couldn’t see whether whatever had been laid under the tarmac surfaced inside the garage or carried on.

When I leant closer I got a flash of straight razor and snarling dog that made me take a step backwards.

‘You know what those remind me of?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Lesley and we all took a step backwards, except for Zach who took two.

‘We’d better get Nightingale to look at this,’ I said and closed the garage door as gently as possible.

Lesley and Zach went back upstairs because one person standing around in the rain looks less suspicious than three, and popped back down with Toby. Because one man standing in the rain with a dog is practically invisible. Nightingale arrived ten minutes later and spent half an hour staring at the things in the garage.

‘I’ve never seen anything remotely like this before,’ he said at last.

‘Any idea what they’re for?’

‘I’d have said they were demon traps,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I have no sense of the malice one gets with a true demon trap. At least not in the concentration I would expect from this many weapons all in one place.’

‘Same technology, though?’ I asked.

‘Technology? Yes, I suppose it is a technology,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was probably too much to expect our opponent to respect the fine craft tradition embodied in British wizardry.’

‘Probably,’ I said and closed the garage door.

The rain and overcast meant the evening got dark early and the abandoned blocks that surrounded the tower loomed over the garden.

‘This much is certain — having invested so much here they’re unlikely to abandon it now,’ said Nightingale.

‘County Gard keep turning up,’ I said. ‘It might be time to wind up here and go after them directly.’

‘Missing Molly already?’ said Nightingale. ‘Let’s give Bromley and Sussex another twenty-four hours to see if they find a connection, and decide then.’

That agreed, me and Toby returned to our gardenless flat in the sky and found that Zach and Lesley had already gone to bed.

Fortunately, the internal speakers on the new TV were adequately loud.

I had the dream where I was lying in bed between Beverley Brook and Lesley May which I’d been having every two to three weeks for the last year or so — and trust me it is not as erotic as it sounds — even if Beverley is wearing a wet suit. I hadn’t told anyone about the dream, not least because Lesley always appears with her beautiful face intact and that always seemed like a betrayal. The bed we’re in changes from dream to dream. Sometimes it was my bed in the Folly, sometimes the double bed that had belonged to Lucy Springfield who had rich parents and a desperate need to parade me up and down in front of them at breakfast. Occasionally it was my old bed at my parents’ flat — which was improbable since it barely fit me, let alone three fully grown adults. But mostly it was an improbably wide and soft hotel bed — the sort of bed that James Bond might share with two women. And he wouldn’t let the fact that one of them was in uniform, including her Metvest, cuffs and pepper spray slow him down either. So in my dream they lay there looking beautiful in the way only someone you love can look while sleeping, and all I could think about was that it was all right for some, because they were getting a good night’s sleep and I was lying between them and staring at the ceiling. Which, as I’m sure either of them would have hastened to point out, was stupid because of course I was asleep, having the dream.

But tonight someone started screaming outside the window.

I woke up standing in the middle of the living room, my hands clenched into fists. But the flat was silent.

If you’re police you quickly learn to recognise a real scream when you hear it and this had been a real scream — only I couldn’t tell whether it had been confined to my dream.

I pulled on my jeans and hopped out onto the balcony.

At first all I could hear was the city grumbling out beyond the empty blocks, but then I heard an engine noise much closer. Not a car, a small engine like that on a lawnmower or a power tool, and coming from the garden below.

Then I heard the scream for real. A woman. Pain, despair, fear.

Lesley sat bolt upright when I banged open the bedroom door. Zach lay sprawled next to her, naked, one leg hooked possessively around her thigh.

‘There’s an incident in the garden,’ I said. ‘Hurry.’

I grabbed the go bag, flung open the front door and ran for the lift. Unless it’s a fire, the lift is always going to beat twenty-one flights of stairs. I had my trainers on by the time the lift arrived and stuck my foot in the closing door as I wrangled my Metvest out of the bag — it felt clammy against the bare skin of my chest and back.

Lesley arrived wearing her mask, leggings and Zach’s outsized red Clash T-shirt. She followed me into the lift and I withdrew my foot. The doors closed in Zach’s face as he came running, half naked, to join us.

‘I think he wants his T-shirt back,’ I said to Lesley as she struggled into her Metvest. I pulled out my airwave and keyed in Nightingale’s number — he answered within ten seconds. I told him we were heading downstairs to investigate strange noises.

‘How strange?’ he asked.

‘Machine tool noises, possible scream,’ I said.

‘I’ll move to the perimeter at Station Road and hold there,’ he said.

Given that Nightingale was heavy artillery, we didn’t want him piling in if this turned out to be common or garden criminality. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure we should be piling in — at least not while kitted up and with The Fuzz written on our foreheads.

This is why proper undercover operations have rules and procedures for handling this kind of shit.

The lift was too old and vandalised to go ‘ding’, so the doors merely opened on to the ground floor and me and Lesley dashed out, and then slowed to creep through the foyer doors and out onto the walkway.

We heard it as soon as we were in the open air, a power tool whine over to the right and men’s voices below and to the left. Unmistakably the sound of two people who were having a knock-down, drag-out argument while trying desperately not to raise their voices.

Then I recognised the noise the power tool was making, the crunching yammer of a chainsaw cutting into wood. I felt a cold flush as I realised what was going on and what the likely consequences were.

‘They’re going after the trees,’ I hissed. ‘We have to stop them now.’

‘Peter, it’s just trees,’ she whispered back. ‘They can plant new trees.’

I didn’t try to explain because there’s no pithy way of explaining that you believe that Sky the wood nymph is likely to be symbiotically linked, certainly to her own particular tree but also I suspected, to all the trees in the garden. At least no way I could think of on the spur of the moment.

I keyed Nightingale, warned him they were going after the trees and, before Lesley could ask any questions, ran for the ramp down to the garden.

Lesley followed me.

I came off the ramp at a dead run and headed straight for the chainsaw noise. With only the walkway lights the garden was a confusion of shadows. But I’d walked Toby down there enough times to keep me from running into a tree.

Then a bright light blossomed overhead and I thought wildly that a police helicopter had stupidly turned its sungun on the wrong person, when I realised that the light was everywhere.

Ahead of me was a chunky white guy in jeans and a leather biker jacket who was using a chainsaw on one of the cherry trees by the dismantled playground. The vibration had dislodged the blossom which swirled like pink snow in the harsh white light.

‘Oi,’ I yelled as I charged him. ‘Step away from the tree.’

Startled he turned to face me and instinctively raised the chainsaw. I skidded to a halt and eyed the whirring chain warily. If you’re an old school zombie or trapped in a lift, a chainsaw is a fearsome weapon. But outside, where there’s room to manoeuvre, you end up being more worried about what the stupid gits might do to themselves with it than anything they might do to you.

‘Police,’ I shouted. ‘Put the chainsaw down before you hurt yourself with it.’

He paused and then took a hesitant step forward as if he was actually going to charge me with the thing, but then I think it dawned even on him how stupid that would be.

‘Dave,’ called a voice some distance behind him. ‘We are leaving?’

Dave vacillated for a second then slowly shrugged out of the shoulder strap.

He’s going to throw it at me, I thought, just as he threw it at me and ran.

I dodged right, stupidly because it barely travelled a metre and a half towards me, which gave Dave a lead as he hared off towards the New Kent Road. I went after him but he was utterly reckless and I was unlucky enough not to notice the felled silver birch lying across the path. Down I went, throwing up my arms to protect my face as I skidded across the grass. I rolled over, grabbed my airwave and told Nightingale that two, maybe more, suspects were on foot and heading for the New Kent Road.

‘Roger,’ said Nightingale.

I got up to follow, but suddenly I heard Lesley call my name.

‘Peter,’ she yelled. ‘Get the fuck over here.’

The tone of her voice stopped me in my tracks — I’d only heard that tone twice before — when the Coopertown child had fallen to her death in front of us and again in the minutes before she’d lost her face.

I shouted back and followed her voice to the base of a huge plane tree, starkly outlined by what I realised was a super werelight that Nightingale had fixed in the air above the garden.

Lesley was crouched over a figure stretched amongst the roots, I recognised the yellow and green dress and slim bare feet. It was Sky, her face pale, her eyes open, staring and unresponsive. I reached for her neck, but Lesley grabbed my hand.

‘She’s dead, Peter,’ she said and her voice was muffled and indistinct behind the roaring in my ears.

I tried to open my mouth to ask the right questions, but nothing happened. In my mind I saw myself standing up, stepping back from the body, making a preliminary visual sweep of the locus and then securing the scene while we waited for the Homicide Assessment Team to arrive. But all that happened was I felt my face bend out of shape.

It was established later that Sky’s plane, like all the mature trees in the garden, had had a ten centimetre deep wedge cut out of its trunk all the way around in a ring. It’s a common enough technique used by disgruntled landowners or exasperated neighbours to kill trees that they think are getting in their way.

I thought I was there for a long time, hunched over Sky’s body, trying to breathe, trying to move while silence pounded in my head and Lesley gripped my hand and stopped me from doing anything stupid. Nightingale’s magical star shell faded and the darkness closed around us.

But in the Job you don’t get to be human — not when you’re on the clock.

Nicky came through the dying trees, lit up like a triple-masted man-of-war on fire and screaming like a Stuka in its final dive. I lurched to my feet as the small figure in red-striped pirate pyjamas barrelled across the clearing and threw herself down by Sky’s body.

‘Sky!’ screamed Nicky. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’

She reached out to touch her friend’s face but stopped short.

‘Sky,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Sky?’

I put my hand on her shoulder and found it was soaking wet. Nicky screamed again and the sound was like a solid force that drove me to my knees.

‘Nicky, stop that,’ I said.

She turned to look at me, and her face was twisted out of shape by anger, grief and terrible betrayal. It was the face you see from war zones and crime scenes, from every solemn appeal for emergency aid — it was the shape my own face had made only moments before.

She drew in her breath and I felt the ground beneath my knees tremble and imagined the mains water pipes of Elephant and Castle groan and twist and shiver. Lesley felt it too — I saw her back away.

But then Oberon was there.

In the moments before he arrived I swear I heard horse’s hooves — and then he was in the woods with us. Naked except for a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts and brandishing that damn infantry sword. Heat washed off him, and sweat and the smell of blood and the cut of the lash.

‘Nicky,’ he said and his voice rolled out deep as a distant cannonade.

Nicky threw herself into his arms and he scooped her up with his left hand. She put her arms around his neck and howled.

‘Hush, child,’ said Oberon and the howling cut off.

Oberon glanced at me and Lesley, then at Sky and then quickly and efficiently he turned a full circle, checking the whole area around him. As he did, I saw a criss-cross of scars across his naked back.

Satisfied that no threat was near, he lowered his sword and strode across the gap between us.

‘Is it all the trees?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale, striding out of the darkness and putting himself between Oberon and the corpse. ‘All of them ringed or felled.’

‘This was an egregious act,’ said Oberon, looking around the garden.

Nicky squirmed out of Oberon’s grasp.

‘I want them dead,’ she said. ‘Dead, dead, dead.’

‘No,’ said Nightingale.

‘That’s the law,’ shouted Nicky, her little hands clenched into fists, her head pushed forward. ‘Life for a life.’

‘We will find them and we shall bring them to justice,’ said Nightingale. ‘That is the agreement.’

‘I am party to no such contract,’ said Oberon.

‘Then I beg your forbearance in this matter,’ said Nightingale.

‘My forbearance,’ spat Oberon. ‘Is a well your nation has drunk all but dry.’

‘There will be justice done in this matter,’ said Nightingale. ‘My oath as a soldier on it.’

Oberon hesitated and Nicky, sensing the change, turned on him.

‘No, no, no,’ she shouted and smacked him hard in the stomach with her little fists.

‘Enough,’ said Oberon and took her hands gently but firmly in his own. He looked back at Nightingale. ‘Your oath as a soldier?’

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale.

Oberon nodded, then he stooped and hoisted Nicky into the crook of his arm. She wasn’t that small a child, but it didn’t seem to cost him anything at all.

‘Nightingale,’ he said by way of farewell, and then he was gone.

We all waited a moment and then we all exhaled slowly — including Nightingale.