Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (21 page)

‘Peter Grant,’ I said. ‘Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.’

Jake Phillips thrust a leaflet into my hand. ‘Well, I’m offering a once in a month-time opportunity to attend a Skygarden TRA meeting. Everyone welcome.’

‘I’ll see you there,’ I said.

This caused Jake to pause.

‘Really?’ he asked.

‘Yeah – why not?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Okay. I’m the chair, by the way.’

Of course you are, I thought.

We exchanged goodbyes a couple more times before Jake moved off towards the stairwell – I closed the door.

‘Man of very little fame?’ asked Lesley.

‘First thing that came into my head,’ I said.

We returned to the kitchen where we found that Toby was still sitting and staring intently into the shopping bags. I pulled out a tin and showed it to him.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Meaty chunks.’

Toby barked.

‘We did bring a tin opener, didn’t we?’ asked Lesley.

Well, the exercise probably did me and Toby good. And, like I said, the shops were nice and close.

Everyone who ever grew up on an estate and had parents who cared enough to give them a birthday party knew about the community room. A room set aside for whatever it was that idealistic young architects thought the working class might need it for – workers’ soviets is my guess. What they actually get used for is Tenant and Resident Association meetings, keep fit for the over fifties and birthday parties. Generally they’re large, low-ceilinged rooms set on the ground floor with, if you’re lucky, a kitchen area and toilets attached. They’re usually as charmless and as welcoming as a Job Centre, but I have some good memories of the one at my parents’ estate. Particularly my thirteenth birthday when I managed my first proper snog with Samantha Peel who was a year above me and strangely keen. Who knows where it might have gone if my mum hadn’t descended like the wrath of god and broken it up. Not long after her throw down with my most recent girlfriend, my mum pointedly informed me that Samantha was now a qualified dental nurse, married with two kids and living in a terrace in Palmers Green. I’m not sure what she expected me to do with that information.

The Skygarden TRA meeting was about as exciting as you’d imagine, although much better attended than I expected. At least twenty to thirty people sat on the formed plastic chairs in a big ragged circle. Betsy and Kevin were there, which surprised me, and Jake Phillips was chair, which didn’t. He was a good chair too, working briskly through the agenda. We were introduced as new tenants and were welcomed and stared at curiously – especially Lesley. A nervous Somali man reported that Southwark Housing Services had promised faithfully that the lift repair contractors would look at the broken lift in the next week. There were groans and catcalls from the audience.

‘Remember it’s important to log all these problems,’ said Jake. ‘That way you can give them chapter and verse when they try to stall you.’

A few people nodded – this was obviously familiar advice. There were some reports on rubbish collection but nothing on the central issue of preserving the tower itself. Me and Lesley listened intently and made notes of names and faces, the better to have them sent for reeducation later. During the planning phase of this operation, or more precisely what we discussed after dinner at the Folly, we had considered the possibility that the Faceless Man might have his own agents planted in the tower.

‘It’s not like me and Lesley are inconspicuous,’ I’d said.

Nightingale had winced, as he always does, at my incorrect use of the accusative pronoun but I think I’m beginning to wear him down.

‘We’re not really the ones hiding anything,’ Lesley had said. ‘If they spot us and react, then we have a better chance of spotting them back. If they don’t panic they’re still going to have to alter their plans on the fly, and that’ll also make them easier to spot. Meanwhile, we’ll be poking around in their business and they won’t be able to do anything about it.’

I couldn’t help thinking of Patrick Mulkern cooking from the inside as his bones caught fire.

‘And if they come after us?’ I’d asked.

‘Then Frank and I will deal with them,’ Nightingale had said.

If the Faceless Man
did
have people in place, then I figured they’d have to attend the TRA meetings in case the residents threatened to accidentally disrupt their plans. But they wouldn’t want to be obvious. So I concentrated my attention on people who’d managed to stay awake during the meeting but hadn’t made a contribution themselves.

I mentally earmarked several candidates, but top of my list were a pale young man with a floppy haircut who looked like an off-duty Goth and a second white guy, middle aged with short brown hair, who wore a tweed jacket with leather trim and looked like he collected stamps or built cathedrals out of matchsticks. I thought it unlikely that the off-duty Goth would attend without an ulterior motive, and that the stamp collector would sit through the meeting without giving his opinion.

The last item on the agenda was a resolution to see if we, that’s the TRA, could drum up some media interest in the fact that the Council was paying County Gard more to secure the empty flats than it would cost to refurbish them for new tenants.

This was carried unanimously and the meeting broke up.

Because we only had the one bit of comfy furniture, we both ended up on the sofa drinking Special Brew and watching TV. Well, I say TV. Actually it was our laptop propped up on a kitchen chair playing the BBC iPlayer, and it worked pretty well apart from the frequent stops for buffering caused by the fact that we were pirating WiFi from someone who’d failed to stick a password on their router and the signal was weak.

‘I may be from a small town,’ said Lesley. ‘But didn’t that seem just a little bit too sociable for the inner city?’

I knew most of the people on my estate. Although, that said, mine was a bit smaller than the Skygarden proper.

‘This is not a normal estate,’ I said. ‘The council probably offered to rehouse anyone who wanted to leave. These are the people that either liked it here or are too stubborn to change.’

‘In America I heard they come round with cake,’ said Lesley.

‘I bet they don’t in New York,’ I said.

A flurry of rain struck the window panes.

‘What do you think Jake would say if he knew we were taking down names?’

‘He’d love it,’ I said. ‘After all these years the secret police are finally taking an interest.’

Toby, who seemed to have adapted rapidly to the idea that we weren’t going home, jumped up into the gap between us and made himself comfortable.

‘So what do we do tomorrow?’ asked Lesley.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, scratching Toby’s head, ‘we have a good sniff around.’

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.