Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (23 page)

‘What’s that smell?’ asked Lesley.

‘Old urine,’ I said. ‘And bleach.’ Almost from day one people would have used the stairwell as a convenient spot for a crafty slash and every two to three years the council would have brought in high pressure hoses and scrubbed it down.

‘Animals,’ said Lesley.

‘I think the dogs did it outside,’ I said. ‘It’s odd that the doors are securely closed.’

‘They’re alarmed,’ said Lesley pointing to a set of sensors at the top of the doors.

‘This block is on the council shit list,’ I said. ‘The response to repeated abuse would be to shut the alarms off permanently. The doors should be propped open with bricks and there should be needles and condoms all over the floor.’

‘Mysterious, yes,’ said Lesley and then nodded at Toby who was yawning. ‘Magical, no. Next door.’

We found the stairs down in the next room. As far as I could tell, we’d been working our way around the circumference on the lower ground floor and were now opposite the main entrance foyer. The breezeblock walls were bare but there had been work done on the floor here too – a strip of freshly laid cement running from the interior wall to the outer. A new damp course? I wondered.

A wide staircase descended to a familiarly shiny door with a County Gard logo and not one but two serious-looking padlocks in addition to the door’s own lock. All three were resistant to the skeleton key.

‘That’s a health and safety violation,’ I said. ‘We’ve got the same key as the Fire Brigade.’

‘What’s behind the door, do you think?’ asked Lesley.

‘The base of the central shaft for one thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like to find out what the fuck Stromberg was thinking of when he built it.’

‘We could burn the locks off,’ said Lesley.

‘Subtle. I like it.’

‘Nah, you’re right,’ said Lesley. ‘We can get Frank to ask County Gard to provide keys.’

Frank Caffrey, as an official fire investigator, could just demand access. After Southwark got pasted for the six fire deaths at Lakanal House neither they nor their contractors were going to mess with the Fire Brigade. I wished I’d thought of that.

‘Let’s finish the rest of this floor,’ said Lesley, and that’s what we did. We worked our way through the southern emergency exit, as suspiciously unsoiled as the northern one, the water incomer and another room with lockers. Apart from the now familiar fresh cement on the floor they were resolutely uninteresting. Toby didn’t so much as growl which was, if anything, said Lesley, a sign of even less than background magic.

Our IVA completed, we put our kit back in the bag and let ourselves out into the foyer.

‘Well, that was rewarding,’ said Lesley as we rode up in the lift.

‘I don’t think this place was built for people,’ I said.

‘You say that about all modern architecture,’ said Lesley. ‘You want us all to live in pyramids.’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘did you know the Egyptians invented the terrace?’

‘Really?’

‘They did sleep on the roof in the summer though.’

‘That must have been nice,’ said Lesley.

‘I think Stromberg built this place as a magical experiment,’ I said.

The lift door opened and we stepped out.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘How many estates do you know that have wood nymphs living in the middle?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Peter,’ said Lesley with a sigh. ‘Maybe all of them do. Certainly everywhere we go we seem to be tripping over these supernatural buggers.’ She stopped suddenly outside our door and pointed at the door jamb – the slip of paper we’d agreed to leave wedged into it was missing. I unzipped the bag and extracted our batons and passed Lesley hers. They made comforting little
shink
sounds as we flicked them open.

Lesley turned the key in the lock as quietly as she could, and nodded down from three. On zero she flung the door open and charged in, I went in a metre behind to avoid the embarrassing police dog-pile effect you get if the officer in front trips over something – say a skateboard. It’s hard to project the full majesty and authority of the law when Lesley is sitting on your back and calling you a muppet.

Lesley went into the kitchen and yelled, ‘In here!’ And I piled in behind her.

‘I surrender,’ said Zach around a mouthful of cereal. He was sitting at our tiny kitchen table with a packet of Weetabix, an open loaf of bread, a now almost empty litre bottle of milk and open jars of raspberry jam and honey in front of him – both with knives stuck in them.

‘How did you get in?’

‘I’ve got a way with locks,’ he said. ‘It’s a family thing.’

‘This would be the thieving side of the family,’ said Lesley.

‘There’s another side to his family?’ I asked.

‘Hey, leave my family out of this,’ said Zach, fishing the last two Weetabix out of the packet and then reaching for the milk.

‘Is there a reason you came round, or did you just run out of food?’ I asked.

Lesley put the kettle on and snatched the milk from Zach before he could finish it.

‘There’s this pub up west that Lesley wanted to know about,’ said Zach. ‘I can get me and her in this afternoon.’

I looked at Lesley, who shrugged.

‘We never did get to lay out our bait for the Faceless Man,’ she said.

‘What’s so special about this pub?’ I asked.

‘Full of fairies,’ said Zach.

‘I’ve got to come with you,’ I said.

‘Better if you don’t,’ said Zach as he spread honey on his cereal. ‘You’re a little bit too closely associated with the Thames girls, if you know what I mean. Makes the gentry a tad nervous.’

‘Besides, if we go in as a pair we will look like Old Bill. If I go in with Zach it will look more natural,’ said Lesley.

‘Just another victim of my legendary charm,’ said Zach.

‘And if our Night Witch is in there getting a rum and black?’ I asked. ‘What’re you going to do then?’

‘Trust me, bro, it’s not that kind of place, is it?

‘Isn’t it?’

‘They wouldn’t let your boss through the door, and he’s respected,’ said Zach. ‘It’s all strictly fae plus one and no wizards.’

‘Except Lesley?’

‘Lesley’s the exception that proves the rule, ain’t she?’ said Zach and I couldn’t argue with that.

‘Are you going to clear it with Nightingale?’ I asked her.

‘Duh!’ said Lesley and handed me a cup of instant.

‘In that case, I’m going to take Mr Phillips up on his invitation. I bet he keeps an eye on who comes and goes,’ I said. ‘And while you’re out you can pick up some more Weetabix.’ I checked the kitchen. ‘And bread and the cheese and – did you eat the dog food?’

‘Of course not,’ said Zach. ‘I fed the dog.’

I checked Toby’s bowl and saw he was already working his way through a suitable pile.

‘Although I’ll put my hand up to having some of his biscuits,’ said Zach.

I
n Berlin, the Weimar Republic a massive workers’ estate did decree. And they handed out the job to, amongst others, Bruno Taut who built his estate in the shape of an enormous horseshoe. Once Lesley and Zach had gone, I used our fluctuating WiFi to look it up on Google Earth. As I’d remembered it, Taut’s
Hufeisensiedlung
enclosed a park with a central pond. Stromberg had admired Taut enough to have his prints on the wall of his study and I knew enough about architects’ egos to know that they don’t stick potential rivals on their walls unless they really like them. Or perhaps there’d been a professional connection that went beyond architecture – could they have been colleagues? Members of the
Weimarer Akademie der Höheren Einsichten
, the German equivalent of the Folly? Could he have been Taut’s protégé? When the Nazis had taken power, Taut had fled to Istanbul and Stromberg to London. Nightingale had told me that the German expat wizards had either enthusiastically joined the fight or had been shipped to Canada. Had Stromberg kept his skills secret to avoid the fight? Given the subsequent casualty rate, I can’t say I blamed him.

Had the Skygarden Estate been built in emulation of the
Hufeisensiedlung
only with a tower at its centre instead of a pond? And did it have some purpose beyond inefficiently housing large numbers of Londoners?

I really didn’t think the Faceless Man would be taking this much interest unless it had.

The WiFi connection dropped off and, search as I might, nobody else was offering free connections to the good people of Elephant and Castle. There were plenty of internet cafés in the immediate area, but I wasn’t that keen on doing without my TV that evening. Or at least that was the story I was planning to stick to.

Betsy Tankridge lived four floors up from us in one of the four-bedroom flats. When I rang the doorbell it was opened by Sasha, who stared at me for a good fifteen seconds before asking what I wanted.

‘Is your mum in?’ I asked.

It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for him to parse a simple question before he turned his back on me.

‘Mum,’ he yelled as he walked away. ‘Someone at the door.’

As he stomped up the internal stairs his mum peered around the kitchen door and gave me a big smile.

‘Peter, come in,’ she said and bustled me into the living room before retreating back into the kitchen to rustle up tea and biscuits. I sat down in the sort of large leather sofa that my mum would have approved of, and checked the room. The sideboards I reckoned were genuine antique oak but the cupboards, complete with decorative plates, were the new Polish furniture – although the high-end stuff made from real wood cut from an identifiable tree. The top row of plates were from Royal Weddings starting with Princess Anne and ending with Will and Kate. The shelf below was all Royal Jubilees starting with the Silver Jubilee in 1977. Old Liz II looking increasingly dyspeptic with every plate.

Mounted on the wall opposite the sofa was a 75 inch Samsung LED which neatly confirmed that I’d come to the right place.

There were at least half a dozen pictures of Kevin, twice as many of Sasha – although mostly from when he was younger and less sullen. There were older pictures of a pleasant looking white man with a square face and lank brown hair – including a couple of him in a wide-lapelled penguin suit and top hat getting married to a stunningly attractive Betsy. Mr Tankridge I presumed.

Betsy came back and caught me looking, but instead of telling me about her husband she put her tea tray down on the coffee table and asked if I took sugar. She poured from a pot-bellied teapot hidden under an obviously hand-knitted tea cosy into two mismatched but clean mugs. She dropped in two sugar lumps from a red bowl with a green Easter egg frieze around its lip and handed me the mug.

‘I’ve only just moved down here and—’ I started.

‘Oh, where were you from before?’

‘Kentish Town.’

‘That’s in Camden isn’t it?’ asked Betsy.

I said it was and this seemed to satisfy Betsy, who lifted her mug to her lips, took a big slurp and gave me a calculating look.

‘So what can we do you for?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know the area and I was just wondering if you could point me in the direction of a reliable secondhand shop,’ I said.

‘What you looking for?’ asked Betsy.

‘Just a TV for now.’

Betsy gave me a happy smile.

‘Well, it just so happens that you’ve come to the right place.’

‘You’re mad to be moving in now,’ said Kevin in the lift going down.

‘Yeah?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. Because what with the council wanting everyone out it was only a matter of time before they started cutting off the electricity, or the water, or ‘forgetting’ to send the dustbin men around. I asked him why he was still there.

‘Can’t leave Sasha and Mum on their own, can I?’ he said. ‘Christ knows what would happen to them.’

I thought it more likely that his dear old mum would happen to somebody else rather than the other way round. But I kept my mouth shut.

‘What about your brother, is he keen to move out?’

‘He lives in his own little world in his room, don’t he? Hardly ever comes out of that room,’ said Kevin. ‘And he won’t be here for much longer.’

I had Sasha pegged at about fourteen, fifteen tops – so I asked where he was going.

‘Oxford,’ said Kevin with obvious relish. ‘Cambridge, somewhere like that.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Computers?’

Kevin gave a little bark of laughter.

‘Computers?’ he said. ‘I wish. God that would have been so useful. Nah. I got him a computer, state of the art and he just uses it for his homework. Pure mathematics, that’s what Sasha does, he’s taking his A-level this year.’

God, he was proud – I didn’t blame him. I would have been too.

We came out at the garage level and Kevin led me to one of his two official garages, both of which he used for storing just about anything other than a car.

‘I’m doing up a nice semi in Thornton Heath ready for when they throw us out,’ he said. ‘Get away from this shit hole.’ He unlocked the padlock on his garage and threw it open to reveal stacks of boxes. ‘See anything you like?’

Most of the boxes were small-ticket consumer items but I found a compact flatscreen TV with built-in digital which Kevin let me have for a ton now and a ton by the end of the week – a saving on the retail of about fifty per cent, not counting VAT. I didn’t ask him where it all came from, because he would have just told me it was a mystery.

As Kevin locked up again, I noticed that there were signs that fresh tarmac had been laid down in the last couple of months. It looked like a narrow trench had been dug from the base of the tower to the garages and then filled in and resurfaced. In fact, it was trenches plural. And, although I couldn’t be certain, I was pretty sure that they matched the lines of fresh cement I’d seen inside.

‘What’s all that about?’ I asked Kevin.

‘Don’t know,’ said Kevin. ‘Something to do with electrics I think.’

Afternoon tea was not a concept much practised in my household. After school I had tended to get fed according to my mum’s schedule, not mine, although my dad, if straight, could whip up a mean cheese on toast. In the Folly, tea was available on demand to all members named Thomas Nightingale – me and Lesley had to get our own. So without any clear guidance, I turned up at Jake Phillips’ front door at seven minutes past five.