Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (22 page)

‘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&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
IX
tra. 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.