Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (8 page)

‘He had it wrapped up in a bin-bag for one thing,’ he said. ‘As soon as he unwrapped it, I thought “fuck me”. I mean, I may only be at the contemporary end of the market but I know the real thing when it’s plonked down in front of me. “Do you think it’s valuable?” he asks. Is it valuable? How could he be kosher and not know? Okay, I suppose he could have found it in his granddad’s attic but is that likely when it was in such good nick?’

I agreed that this was a low probability scenario and asked how he’d managed to separate the book from the gentleman in question.

‘Told him I wanted to keep it overnight, didn’t I? So that I could get someone in to make an accurate valuation.’

‘And he fell for that?’

Headley shrugged. ‘I offered him a receipt and asked for his contact details but he told me he’d just remembered that he was parked on a double yellow and he’d be right back.’

And off he went, leaving the book behind.

‘I reckon he must have realised he’d fucked up,’ said Headley. ‘And panicked.’

I asked if he could give me a description.

‘I can do better than that,’ he said and held up a USB. ‘I saved the footage.’

The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.

In a proper major investigation team there’s a DC or DS whose job it is to arrive at the crime scene, locate all the potential cameras, gather up all the footage and then scan through however many thousands of hours there is, looking for anything relevant. He or she has a team of as many as six detectives to help with the job – muggins of course had himself, Toby and the dogged determination to see justice done.

The book had been turned over to Arts and Antiques in late January and most private premises keep less than forty-eight hours’ worth of footage but I managed to scrape some up from the traffic camera and a pub which had recently installed their system and hadn’t yet figured out how to delete the old stuff. In the old days, when a gigabyte was a lot of memory, I would have been lumbered with a big bag full of VHS tapes but now it all ended up fitting on the USB that Headley had provided.

Counting a stop for refs at Gaby’s, salt beef and pickle, it took me a good three hours and I didn’t get back to the Folly until late afternoon. I wanted to head straight for the tech cave to check the footage but Nightingale insisted that both me and Lesley practise knocking a tennis ball back and forth across the atrium using only
impello
. Nightingale claimed it had been a popular rainy day sport back when he was at school and called it Indoor Tennis. Me and Lesley, much to his annoyance, called it Pocket Quidditch.

The rules were simple and about what you’d expect from a bunch of adolescents in an aggressively allmale environment. The players stood at either end of the atrium and had to stay within a two-metre-wide chalk circle drawn on the floor. The referee, in this case Nightingale, introduced a tennis ball at the mid-point of the pitch and the players attempted to use
impello
and any other related spells to propel the ball at their opponent. Points were scored for strikes to the body between neck and waist and lost for losing control of the ball in your half of the court. As soon as he got wind of the sport, Dr Walid had insisted that we wear cricket helmets and face guards when we played.

Nightingale grumbled that in his day they would never have dreamt of wearing protection – not even in the sixth form when they’d played with cricket balls – and besides it reduced the player’s incentive to maintain good form and not be struck in the first place. Lesley, who never liked wearing a helmet, objected right up to the point where she found she could get an amusing
boing
sound by bouncing the ball off mine. I’d have been more irritated except, 1) helmet, 2) Lesley would pass up easy body shots to go for my head, which made it easier to win.

Back in the days at Casterbrook the boys had placed bets on the game. They had wagered fag-days, fagging being when a younger boy acted as a servant for an older one, which tells you just about everything you need to know about posh schools. Me and Lesley, both being aspirational working class, staked rounds at the pub instead. The fact that I had a seven month head start as an apprentice on Lesley probably being the only reason she ever had to pay for her own drinks.

In the end it was a draw with one body strike to me, one
boing
to Lesley and a disqualified point caused by Toby jumping up and catching the ball in mid-air. We broke for what me and Lesley called dinner, Nightingale called supper and Molly, we’d begun to suspect, thought of as field trials for her culinary experimentation.

‘This potato tastes a bit different,’ said Lesley poking at the neat conical pile of mash that balanced one side of the plate against what Nightingale had identified as seared tuna steak.

‘That’s because it’s yam,’ said Nightingale – surprising me. It’s not like yam is big on the traditional English menu. Although if it had been, they probably
would
have mashed it and then covered it in onion gravy. My mum boils it like cassava, slices it up with butter and a soup spicy enough to cauterise the end of your tongue.

I looked over at Molly, who watched over us as we ate, and she lifted her chin and met my gaze.

‘It’s very nice,’ I said.

We heard a distant ringing noise that confused everyone until we recognised the Folly’s front door bell. We all exchanged looks until it was established that since I wasn’t intrinsically supernatural, a chief inspector or required to put on a mask before meeting the public I was nominated door opener in chief.

It turned out to be a cycle courier who handed over a package in exchange for my signature. It was an A4 envelope stiffened with cardboard and addressed to Thomas Nightingale Esq.

Nightingale used a serrated steak knife to open the envelope at the wrong end, the better, he explained, to avoid unpleasant surprises and extracted a sheet of expensive paper. He showed it to me and Lesley – it was handwritten and in Latin. Nightingale translated.

‘“The Lord and Lady of the River do give you notice that they will be holding their Spring Court together at the Garden of Bernadette of Spain”,’ he paused and reread the last bit. ‘“Bernie Spain’s Garden and that you are hereby charged as if by ancient custom to secure and police the fair against all enemies.” And it’s sealed with the Hanged Man of Tyburn and the Waterwheel of Oxley plus signatures.’

He showed us the seals.

‘Somebody’s been watching way too much
Game of Thrones
,’ said Lesley. ‘And what is the Spring Court?’ Nightingale explained that it had once been traditional for the Old Man of the Thames to hold a Spring Court upriver, usually near Lechlade, where his subjects could come and pay their respects. It generally occurred at or around the spring equinox but there hadn’t been a formal court since the Old Man abandoned the tideway in the 1850s.

‘Nor, if I remember history correctly, did the Folly play a role,’ said Nightingale. ‘Except to send an envoy and our respects.’

‘I notice it says “as if by ancient custom”,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I imagine both Tyburn and Oxley enjoyed the ambiguity of that statement.’

‘Perhaps they’re not taking it very seriously,’ I said.

‘If only that were true,’ said Nightingale.

After supper I headed for the tech cave for a beer and to see what I could find on cable. I thought Lesley might join me, but she said she was knackered and going to bed. I pulled a Red Stripe from the fridge and futilely flicked through the channels for five minutes before deciding I might as well process that afternoon’s CCTV footage.

I started with the stuff from the shop. Judging from the angle, the camera was mounted above the counter looking down the long narrow shop to the front door. I cued up and ran it from the moment our man stepped inside, clutching his black bag of swag, and briskly approached the counter.

He was white, pale faced, thin nosed, in his midforties I guessed, dark hair going grey, bags under dark blue eyes. He was dressed in a tan zip-up jacket over a light-coloured shirt and khaki chinos.

I watched the transaction going the way Headley had described, and the moment when the thief realised he’d made a mistake was well obvious. He glanced involuntarily up at the CCTV camera, realised what he’d done and was out the door less than a minute later.

Thirty-six seconds precisely in fact – by the time-code in the corner of the screen.

The CCTV from the shop was the latest kit. I rolled it back and got a capture of his face when he looked at the camera. It blew up nicely just using Paint Shop Pro – I printed a couple of copies for use later. Despite the poor angle I was pretty sure that the book thief turned right when he exited the shop – going towards St Martin’s Lane – but just to be on the safe side I checked the footage I had from the Barclays’ branch on Charing Cross Road. Banks in central London have top of the line CCTV and one of the branch’s fifteen cameras just clipped the entrance to Cecil Court. I scanned twenty minutes either side of the time of his departure and confirmed that he definitely hadn’t come out on to Charing Cross Road.

There had been a couple of good camera positions in Cecil Court itself, but the footage hadn’t been kept. So the best I had for the St Martin’s Lane side was from the Angel and Crown who hadn’t figured how to delete yet – thank god. Still, it was a low-spec system that recorded ten frames a second, and had more ghosting than a camera operating in daylight should have. Despite that, he was easy to spot, tan zip-up jumper and khaki slacks, emerging onto St Martin’s Lane, turning left and climbing into an off-white Mondeo estate – Mark 2 from what I could see.

This got my hopes up. If it was his own car, then it was just a simple matter of getting another IIP check which would include the DVLA database and I’d have his name, DOB and the registered address courtesy of the National Insurance Database. Proving that Big Brother does have his uses after all.

Shit – I couldn’t see the index. Even when it pulled out, the Mondeo was at too oblique an angle, and the image too low quality for me to identify the number plate. I ran it back and forth a couple of times but it didn’t get any clearer. I was going to have to persuade Westminster Council to release some of their traffic cam footage and see if I could pick up the Mondeo when it turned into Charing Cross Road.

And I wasn’t going to get that this side of six o’clock, because another problem with the so-called surveillance state is that it mostly works office hours.

I had another Red Stripe and went to bed.

After breakfast and Toby walking duty it was back to the tech cave and my continuing search for a clear shot of the book thief’s car number plate. I was just about to take a deep breath and start wading through the swampy hinterland of Westminster Council’s bureaucratic interface when it suddenly occurred to me to that I’d overlooked an easier option. Pulling up the footage from St Martin’s Lane, I clicked it back to watch the Mondeo being parked in the first place. My book thief wasn’t a brilliant parker and the second time he adjusted his angle I got a good view of his plate.

One IIP query later and I had his name – Patrick Mulkern. His face matched the CCTV and his police record matched the profile of a professional safe-cracker. A good and careful one too, judging by the lack of convictions in the later half his career. Tons of interest, as in ‘person of interest’ and a few arrests, but no convictions. According to the appended intelligence notes Mulkern was a specialist hired by individuals or crews to crack any troublesome safes they might come across in the course their work. He even had a legitimate locksmith business, Bromley address I noted, which made doing him for ‘going equipped’ a bit tricky since he used the same tools for both jobs. The notes also suggested that he’d recently ‘retired’ from safecracking if not from the locksmithing.

His last known home address matched both the one on his driving licence and his registered business address – I decided to give him a tug.

I
t was raining again and it took me about as long to drive across the river and down to the London Borough of Bromley as it had taken me to drive to Brighton the month before. A big chunk of the time was spent negotiating the Elephant and Castle traffic system and crawling down the Old Kent Road.

Once you’re south of Grove Park the Victorian bones of the city dwindle and you find yourself in the low-rise mock-Tudor land of London’s last big suburban expansion. Places like Bromley are not what people like me and my dad think of as London but the outer boroughs are like in-laws – like it or not, you’re stuck with them.

Patrick Mulkern’s address was a weird mutant hybrid that looked like the developer had got bored of building mock-Tudor semis and had rammed two together to create a mini-terrace of four houses. Like most of the homes on the street, its generous front garden had been paved over to provide more parking space and an increased flood risk.

An off-white Ford Mondeo was parked outside, glistening in the rain, I checked the index – it matched the ones from the CCTV. Not only was it a Mark 2 but it had the wimpy 1.6 Zetec engine as well. Whatever the wages of crime were Mulkern certainly wasn’t spending it on his wheels.

I sat outside with the engine off for five minutes and watched the house. It was a gloomy day but there were no lights visible through the windows and nobody twitched the net curtains to check me out. I stepped out of the car and walked as fast as I could into the porch shelter. At some point the house had acquired a thick coating of a vicious flint pebble dash that almost had the skin off my palm when I rested my hand on it.