Broken Homes pg-4

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Outside the tent, the sun was bright and the air smelled of petrol. I walked up the scrubby grass slope to where Traffic had established a safe parking zone for emergency vehicles. Lesley was there, fast asleep in the passenger seat of the Asbo. I left her to it while I called Nightingale and confirmed the identification — he could pass on the bad news to DCI Duffy. He suggested we wait where we were in case they could get a lead on the van, so I climbed into the driver’s seat and tried to get comfortable. Lesley opened her eyes and took off her mask to rub her face.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘Chainsaw guy,’ I said and explained Dr Walid’s theory.

  ‘That was murder,’ said Lesley. ‘By your little friend.’

  ‘You can’t prove that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, wake up, Peter,’ she said. ‘He drowned by the side of the road. You heard her say it — “one for one” she said and Oberon didn’t have an answer to that. “One for one.”’ She pointed down the slope at the forensic tent. ‘That’s one right there.’

  ‘Okay, you want to go back and arrest her?’ I asked. ‘She’s what — nine years old?’

  ‘Is she?’ said Lesley. ‘I don’t know what she is. I know one thing — the law doesn’t seem to apply to her, or to her mum or to any of these fucking people.’ Lesley closed her eyes and sighed. ‘And if it doesn’t apply to them, then why does it apply to us?’

  ‘Because we’re the police,’ I said.

  ‘Is Nightingale police?’ she asked. ‘Because he’s not beyond the occasional human rights violation when it suits him.’

  ‘Oh well, that separates him from the herd, don’t it?’

  ‘It’s not like we’ll ever prove it’s her,’ said Lesley.

  ‘It could have been the Faceless Man,’ I said. ‘He’s got a thing for weird deaths.’

  ‘Why would the Faceless Man kill chainsaw boy?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Why did he kill Patrick Mulkern?’

  ‘Patrick Mulkern fucked up,’ said Lesley. ‘He got greedy and tried to sell a book he wasn’t supposed to. Setting his bones on fire was a deliberate statement. Fuck with me and really horrible things will happen to you, like the guys who had their dicks bitten off and the amputated head of Larry the Lark.’

  ‘That was Faceless Man senior,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but the principle’s the same,’ said Lesley. ‘And when he just wants someone out of the way he does it very quietly like with Richard Lewis. If Jaget hadn’t spotted it, then it would have been just another “person under a train” wouldn’t it? Or he uses a proxy like Robert Weil to apply a shotgun to the face.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s the killer,’ I said. ‘I think he was brought in to dispose of the body.’

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  ‘Nope.’

  There was a bottle of Evian on the back seat. I tried it, but it was warm.

  ‘Give me some of that,’ said Lesley and I handed it over.

  ‘You know we’ve left Zach alone in our flat,’ I said. ‘What do you think the chances are of there being anything left inside when we get back?’

  ‘It’s not our flat,’ said Lesley after she’d finished the last of the water.

  ‘It’s my telly,’ I said. ‘I paid two hundred quid for it.’

  ‘That just makes you a handler of stolen goods,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Not me, guv,’ I said. ‘I thought that TV was totally kosher. I genuinely believed that it fell off the back of a lorry.’

  ‘He’s not going to nick from us,’ said Lesley. ‘Besides, I told him to look after Toby. Reinforced our cover.’

  It was a good plan. If any of our neighbours suspected we were old Bill, spending five minutes with Zach would disabuse them of that notion.

  ‘Do you still have that app that finds coffee shops?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t need it,’ she said. ‘There’s a retail park on the other side of the junction.’

  I was just going to suggest that we head over there when one of the Traffic police knocked on our window.

  ‘Got something for you,’ he said and handed me a number on a scrap of paper. It was the index of the white van. The witnesses to the body dumping had given Traffic a time frame and so it was just a matter of checking the automatic cameras until something popped up. I thanked him and called in IIP on the index. While we waited for that to come back, we headed to the retail park and spent half an hour in a Sainsbury’s the size of an aircraft assembly plant stuffing the go bag with water, snacks and sandwiches.

  Then we sat in the Asbo with bucket-sized cardboard cups of coffee, just about drinkable if you put enough sugar in, and went through the results of the IIP as it relayed to us down the phone.

  Our white van was owned by a limited company with a trading address in what looked like, on Google Maps, a farm in the middle of nowhere. It had been reported stolen by its owners at nine fifteen that morning, but their statement suggested that it might have been missing for two days or more.

  ‘Convenient,’ said Lesley.

  Clever criminals steal their getaway cars before doing a big job, but it’s a bugger if you’re just popping into town for something small, say for a bit of criminal damage, so you might use your own or a mate’s. The problem there is if things get a bit out of hand and your mate, say hypothetically, starts mysteriously drowning to death in the back and you have to dump him at a road junction. Then you might need to create a bit of plausible deniability. Not with us, you understand, because we’re naturally suspicious bastards, but with magistrates, juries and other innocents. So you report it stolen and, if you’re sensible, you torch it in some remote location.

  Obviously sometimes, just for the novelty value, the vehicle really is stolen.

  We agreed it might be worth checking out the farm in Essex so we called Nightingale to let him know. He told us to be careful.

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ said Lesley but only after Nightingale had hung up.

  So, with my trusty native guide by my side, I started up the Asbo and set course for the dark heart of Essex,

  We got off the M11 at junction 7 and sat behind a caravan for about half an hour, which gave us plenty of time to weigh up the alternative joys of fresh farm produce and/or cheap warehousing space. It was enough to push even me into taking a risky overtaking opportunity that caused Lesley to clutch the handhold and swear under her breath.

  ‘What do you expect to find?’ asked Lesley once her grip had unclenched.

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘But Nightingale is right, the Faceless Man’s just a criminal. He makes mistakes. We only need to keep chipping away at this network he’s built. Sooner or later we’re going to find a crack we can exploit and then, crash, we can bring the whole thing down.’

  ‘Or some farmer’s had his van stolen,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Or that.’

  What I hate most about the country is that it’s so hard to tell what anything is before you get there. Dutifully following the satnav we headed down a series of narrowing country lanes until we suddenly came to a halt in front of a metal five-bar gate. Beyond that was a muddy yard surrounded on three sides by an old brick barn, a building that looked like a warehouse that had been redressed for a post-apocalyptic dystopia and what appeared to be a pebble-dashed council bungalow uprooted from some northern housing estate by a tornado to come crashing down in the wilds of Essex. For all I knew, it could have been anything from a pig farm to a really down at heel outdoors activity centre.

  ‘You’re rural,’ I said to Lesley. ‘Do we park here and go in, or do we open the gate and drive in?’

  ‘Park here,’ she said. ‘That way no one can escape while they think we’re not looking.’

  ‘The farmer’s not going to like it if he comes tooling up in a tractor and he can’t get in,’ I said.

  ‘He’ll get over it,’ she said. ‘Farmers are always pissed off about something.’

  I looked at the farmyard. I was still wearing my DM 1461 shoes which were not my
best, but not what I wanted to get agricultural waste products on, either. But sometimes successful policing involves making a sacrifice.

  We climbed out of the Asbo into the hot sunlight. The air had that dried shit smell that I’ve been reliably informed indicates either muck spreading or a music festival. But not at this farm, I decided. Even I could see that there didn’t seem to be enough actual livestock aftermath in the yard.

  ‘He could be a cereal farmer,’ said Lesley when I pointed this out.

  The dilapidated grey concrete barn was open to the elements at both ends. An ancient Land Rover was parked half inside, its bonnet propped open to reveal a rusted engine. Behind it there were strange concrete troughs and the spiky torture-chamber shapes of agricultural equipment. Beyond that, a rectangle of pale blue sky. The brick barn was older, sturdier and better maintained, its main front door firmly closed and padlocked.

  The bungalow was blind, with grimy net curtains. Set down by its tornado at an off angle to the yard, it was also backwards, with what was obviously the back door facing us — although Lesley said this was standard for farms. ‘Nobody uses the front door except to hang out washing,’ she said.

  I tapped on the back door and then the kitchen window.

  ‘Hello,’ I called. ‘It’s the police, is anyone home?’

  Somewhere in the distance I thought I might have heard a dog barking.

  There were two rutted tracks in the grey dust leading left and right out of the yard. We took the right one because it looked like it curled around the side of the bungalow. It did, and Lesley had been right about the washing. A rough square lawn was fenced in by knee-high metal railings and sported a rotary clothesline and a scattering of sun-faded plastic toys. A rusty green metal swing stood in another corner and would no doubt have squeaked mournfully in the wind had the seat not been missing. Probably removed by someone who got fed up with it squeaking mournfully. What was unmistakably the front door of the house was painted a mottled blue and was wedged shut when I gave it an experimental shove.

  ‘Could they be out in the fields?’ I asked.

  ‘There’d still be a car in the yard,’ said Lesley. ‘Although the farmer might be working and the wife in town.’

  ‘If there is a wife,’ I said.

  ‘No sign of the Transit van,’ she said. ‘Want to break in?’

  She didn’t sound enthusiastic. Farmers meant shotguns, legal and illegal, and a loose interpretation of the common law when it came to self-defence.

  There were what might have been fresh tyre marks leading away further up the track. I stared in that direction and thought I could see what looked like a roofline poking up from behind a rise in the ground.

  ‘Let’s check up here first,’ I said.

  We headed up the track until we topped the rise and found ourselves looking down at a pair of wooden storage sheds new enough for the pine planking to still be bright yellow and smell of Ronseal. They were windowless and had gabled roofs surfaced with black felt.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dogs,’ she said. ‘Barking.’

  I listened, but all I could hear was the wind and something making a belching squawk that I assumed was a bird.

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  We followed the track down the rise until we reached the first shed. Now, the closest I’ve ever got to DIY is arresting shoplifters in B amp;Q but even I know green wood when I’m right up close and can see where it is warping out of shape. Some of the planks in the walls here had peeled offthe frame. I looked closer and found that there were no nails. The planks had been held in place with wooden plugs. When I checked the door, I saw that the hinges were wooden and that there were no locks, only a crude wooden latch.

  Lesley reached out to open the door.

  ‘Wait,’ I told her, and she hesitated. ‘Dogs,’ I said.

  ‘Dogs?’ asked Lesley.

  I did a three-sixty and found what I was looking for behind me on the opposite side of the tracks — a bare slender tree with thin branches within arm’s reach. I crossed over and tried to break the smallest I could get — a branch the thickness and length of a pool cue. It didn’t come easy, and the cold bark scraped my hands as I yanked it off the tree, peeling a strip of bark away from the main trunk along with it.

  Nightingale had said that the younger and greener the stick the better. I brandished it at Lesley.

  ‘Dogs,’ I said.

  I walked back to the first shed and used the far end of my stick to lift the latch and a convenient fork of twigs near the top to hook the handle and pull it open.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lesley. ‘Dogs.’

  She let me enter the shed first. Without windows it should have been pitch black, but the warped planks had opened long thin gaps of daylight in the walls. Equipment racks lined the shelves, all constructed of the same green wood and arranged like bunk beds in a barracks. The shelves were empty, but judging by their depth they’d been built to store something less than half a metre deep and from their vertical spacing not more than the same in height. The units were sturdy and massively over-engineered, so whatever they had been storing, it had been heavy,

  Lesley joined me and used her penlight to indicate the floor, which I saw was also composed of thick planks of green wood. The air was heavy with the smell of pine edged with damp — it was worse than an Ikea warehouse.

  ‘Swedish dogs,’ I said.

  ‘Nightingale did say the Vikings invented it,’ said Lesley. ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.’

  ‘I might be wrong,’ I said, and fell silent. Because just then I’d found the one shelf that wasn’t empty.

  ‘Oh fuck it,’ said Lesley. ‘I hate it when you’re right.’

  A demon trap is a sort of magical landmine developed, so says Nightingale, by the Vikings to defend their long-houses from supernatural threats during the long winters. When I’d asked what kind of threats, he’d shrugged. ‘Other Vikings,’ he’d said. ‘Dire wolves, trolls.’

  ‘Moomins,’ Lesley had added, and then had to explain what those were to both me and Nightingale.

  The demon trap we’d watched Nightingale deactivating at Christmas had been a round sheet of stainless steel the size and shape of a dustbin lid, but what we’d found in the shed was different. It was composed of two stainless steel plates for a start, and they were square, sixty centimetres to a side and half a centimetre thick. The plates were held seven or eight centimetres apart by wooden columns fixed at each corner through holes cut in the sheets. The wood was green, and crudely shaped bark was still clinging to sections. They were twice as thick in the middle and put me in mind of the ceramic insulators you see on telephone wires and high tension electricity lines.

  The demon trap Nightingale had disarmed had had two circles incised near the centre — that being where the ‘payload’ was stored. Traditionally, this had been the ghost of a human being tortured slowly to death and their essence trapped at the moment of expiration. We’d found that the Faceless Man had learnt to substitute dogs instead — the effect was the same. Or rather, effects. Because the tortured ghost, the demon in the trap, could be used to power a range of results, ranging from knocking down whichever poor sod triggered it, to turning him and his mates inside out. So you can see why me and Lesley approached with a certain amount of caution.

  Then I recognised what it was we were looking at.

  ‘Remember the metal plates in the garage?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley. ‘This is the same thing. Do you think they were stored here?’

  ‘Maybe they were made here,’ I said and that’s when the Asbo’s car alarm went off. The Asbo had a good one too, a really annoying woo-woo-woo followed by the sound of a donkey being castrated with a rusty saw and then back to the woo-woo-woo. It cut off midway through the third cycle.

  ‘Somebody knows how to steal a car,’ said Lesley.

  I pulled out my mobile and saw
that we were living in the land of no bars.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Do we wait here or what?’

  Lesley laughed.

  ‘I say let’s stroll up the yard and give them a hard time for breaking into our car,’ she said.

  ‘And if they’re the guys that killed the trees?’

  ‘Then we arrest them and Bromley will be that much less pissed off with us.’

  Policing, whatever else you’ve heard, is by consent.

  Even hardened professional villains consent to be policed. This is clear from the way they complain that nonces, rapists and bankers get shorter sentences than decent ordinary criminals. It’s the same with all the other criminals, the weekend shoplifters, the drunk drivers, the overexcited protestors and executives who pop into the loo for a quick snort. When it’s their stuff that goes walkies, or their car that’s damaged, when their kids go missing and their briefcases get snatched, they all seem to be pretty consensual about the police. Everyone consents to the police. It’s just the operational priorities they argue about.

  That’s why ninety-nine per cent of the time a pair of police can expect to approach a bunch of thugs with perfect safety, protected only by the majesty of the law, the social contract and the strong implication that anyone messing with you will face unprecedented levels of grief in the very near future.

  It’s the other one per cent that buggers you every time.

  It started quite well, though, with me and Lesley non-chalantly strolling into the farmyard smiling brightly.

  ‘Hello,’ said Lesley in a cheery voice. ‘We’re the police — can anyone help us?’

  There were two of them in the yard, both white, in their late twenties, both dressed in army surplus combat trousers and khaki jackets. One of them had squinty eyes and wore a bush hat, the other had a round pink face and floppy blond hair.

  Squinty Eyes was climbing out of the Asbo, which he’d obviously just hotwired and driven into the farmyard. Pink Face was holding the gate open for an incredibly muddy Range Rover — I thought there might be more than one person inside, but the details were obscured by the glare off the windscreen.