Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (27 page)

Toby sneezed. The vans finished unloading and drove away and we went up to the flat to dry off. Toby got dinner and I got back to my Pliny.

I woke up to the sound of rain driving horizontally against the window panes and no sign of Lesley. Since I was awake I got up and spent the morning accidentally running into the off-duty Goth and the man in a tweed jacket that I’d pegged as possible inside men for the Faceless Man. Goth boy was simple enough – I just stepped into the lift and struck up a conversation. It’s amazing how easy it is to get white boys to talk to you when you share a lift. By the time we hit the ground floor I knew his name, flat number and more of his life story than I really wanted; Lionel Roberts, a flat two floors down from us and a wannabe poet currently working as security in Hannibal House – the office block built on top of Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Tweed jacket man had a ten-year-old daughter who Toby quickly had eating out of his hand, or more precisely vice versa. Her name was Anthonia Beswick and his name was Anthony and he was currently unemployed, but optimistic that the recession wouldn’t last for ever. He said it was wife’s idea to name their daughter after him but I didn’t believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.

I called in an IIP check on both of them, but my instinct was that neither were minions of the Faceless Man. The rain eased off by noon, so I had lunch out at the shopping centre and then stopped off in the garden to do some of the less obtrusive bits of my practice. I thought I heard giggling in the distance but there was no other sign of Sky.

Lesley had returned while I was out, with a metric ton of neglected paperwork which we dutifully worked our way through before flopping down on the sofa bed with a microwaved lasagne and a Red Stripe each.

‘Why aren’t you fucking Beverley?’ she asked suddenly.

I spluttered around my Red Stripe.

‘Why aren’t you fucking Zach?’ I asked, finally.

‘Who says I’m not?’

‘Are you?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘A bit.’

‘How can you be fucking him a bit?’

Lesley gave this point due consideration.

‘Okay, maybe more than a bit,’ she said.

‘Since when?’ I asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

That was a good question and I didn’t really have a good answer. Still, nobody’s ever let that get in the way of a conversation.

‘You brought it up,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I asked you a question which you still haven’t answered,’ she said.

‘What makes you think that Beverley’s interested?’

‘You’re going with that? Really?’

I got up and took the dirty plates back to the kitchen and fetched another beer. I didn’t fancy sitting down again, so I leant against the doorjamb.

‘We could call Beverley and find out,’ said Lesley, ‘She’d be here fast enough – you can practically see Barnes from our balcony.’

‘I’m not in a hurry to rush into that one,’ I said.

Lesley rounded on me and pointed at her face, forcing me to look at the whole horrid mess of it. ‘This is what happens if you wait, Peter,’ she said. ‘Or some other fucked-up thing. You’ve got to get it while you can.’

And I thought that I’d like to know what I was going to get. But I kept my mouth shut because I’d had another totally unrelated thought.

‘Why don’t we call Zach now,’ I said.

Lesley gave me an exasperated look.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Because there’s one place in this whole tower where we haven’t looked yet,’ I said. ‘And that’s downstairs in the basement.’

‘And Zach?’

‘Good with locks. Remember?’

W
hich 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.