Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I followed Lesley, who was having trouble stopping herself from laughing, up the narrow staircase.

  ‘The far off land of mind-your-own-business?’ I whispered.

  ‘I didn’t want to seem too obvious,’ she whispered back.

  ‘No, that wasn’t obvious at all,’ I said.

  We were two thirds of the way up the stairs when the door at the top opened and a woman stepped out onto the landing. She was white, middle aged, with dirty blonde hair cut into a neat business-like bob. She wore an expensive charcoal grey skirt suit of conservative cut and carried a slim burgundy attaché case. Her eyes were a faded blue.

  Recognising faces is a key cop skill, and although she was looking younger and happier than we’d last seen her I remembered her immediately – Varenka Debroslova, probably an alias – former live-in nurse to one Geoffrey Wheatcroft a.k.a. the Faceless Man version one.

  She recognised us at the same time – well, Lesley’s very distinctive – and took an automatic step back. Lesley didn’t hesitate. She lunged up the last couple of steps and I followed her.

  The normal thing to do in Varenka’s situation would be to bolt back up and out the door. But instead she lifted her attaché case in both hands and shoved it into Lesley’s face. As Lesley recoiled backwards into me, Varenka practically launched herself headfirst down the stairs towards us. Lesley was knocked back towards me and I had no choice but to catch her and try and twist us both out of the way as Varenka landed on us. She’d obviously planned to surf down the stairs on top of us, but I wasn’t playing that game. I ducked down over Lesley and let the other woman roll across my back towards a hard landing.

  Or that was the plan, anyway. Unfortunately, the staircase was too narrow and too steep, so we all bumped down it together. Stairs are a killer and we all might have ended up with sundry cracked ribs and broken legs except we were jammed in so tight we went down in slow motion. Even so, my shoulder slammed into a riser hard enough to make my teeth click, somebody’s knee slammed into my back and I definitely smacked my head on the rough plasterboard wall at one point.

  Lesley yelled in fury as we tumbled out onto the landing. In a fight, if you want to be the last man standing it’s important to be the first guy back on your feet. So I levered myself off Varenka’s back and tried to grab her arm. But she had other ideas. She sprang to her feet and used my own grip on her arm to pull me off balance and slam me against the wall. It would have gone much harder on me if Lesley hadn’t grabbed a handful of expensive suit jacket and climbed up Varenka’s back.

  ‘Oi,’ yelled the girl in the pink tracksuit. ‘None of that. It’s Pax bloody Domus here.’ I noticed that she was putting the stress on the wrong syllable. It’s pax-blud-eee DO-mus, I thought, and I might have gone on to mention this except that Varenka put an elbow in my stomach that left me disinclined to discuss the finer points of Latin pronunciation.

  I got my leg out of the way of a kick that would have broken my knee, and felt like it broke my thigh bone instead, and realised that Varenka had not said a single word since she’d met us on the stairs. There was something terrifying about the ferocity and silence with which she fought. I understood suddenly that this was a woman who had done real fighting, against people who’d been trying to kill her. We were just trying to restrain her, but she was trying to maim us – if we didn’t shut her down quick she was going to cut us to pieces.

  Varenka whipped round and sent Lesley staggering across the hallway and into the girl in the pink tracksuit who went down swearing. Then Varenka spun to face me but with Lesley clear that was my chance to summon up the impello-palma combination that I feel is my own personal contribution to specialist law enforcement.

  Varenka reacted even before I’d finished the spell, and flung up her arm to protect her face as it slammed into her like a body block from an invisible riot shield. She rocked back on her heels and I realised the implications of her early reaction just in time to feel her building a counter spell. In the confines of the landing there wasn’t anywhere to go but back up the stairs, so I faked towards the landing door and then lunged up the steps.

  I felt the bite of cold metal and caught the smell of alcohol and wet dog. Something went past me with the instant violence of an articulated lorry slipstreaming a lay-by, wood splintered, somebody screamed and a billow of choking white plaster dust filled the landing. A metre-wide section of the doorjamb and the wall beside it had smashed open. Through the hole I could see chairs and tables and startled pale faces.

  ‘That’s it,’ screamed the girl. ‘You three are barred!’

  But it was just us up there, Varenka having scarpered.

  ‘Watch it,’ I yelled as Lesley cautiously peered down the staircase towards the exit. ‘She’s a practitioner.’

  ‘No shit,’ said Lesley and vanished down the stairs

  I followed her down using both hands for balance as I took the stairs three at time. When I reached the bottom there was no sign of the boy who’d let us in and I hoped he’d been smart enough to do a runner.

  Lesley was too good a copper just to bang through the door. She paused to check that Varenka wasn’t waiting in ambush before slipping out. She veered left as she went, so I veered right. Varenka was the other side of Grafton Road yanking open the driver’s side door of a silver Audi. When she saw us, she gave an exasperated snarl and flung out her arm in my direction. I did a dive behind the nearest car and slapped the pavement just in time for something to smash into the side of the vehicle with a noise of breaking glass. The car alarm went off, but behind the endless electronic hooting I heard the Audi pulling way. I thumbed the jury-rigged battery switch on my mobile and risked a glance over the bonnet just in time to be able to read the index on the back of the Audi as it accelerated south down Grafton Road.

  The other side of the car I’d been sheltering behind, a red VW Golf, had been smashed in and was white with what looked like frost. I resisted the urge to touch it, just in case. I looked over and found that Lesley was unhurt and walking to join me.

  My phone jingled to let me know it was finally ready. I rang Metcall, gave my rank and name and asked to speak to the supervisor for EK, meaning Camden. While I waited to be put through I wrote the index number on my arm with the biro Lesley handed me. When the supervisor came on I asked for an urgent circulation on a vehicle and gave them the index.

  ‘If seen it must not be stopped without Falcon assistance, repeat Falcon assistance,’ I said. Falcon was our brand new call sign and I said it twice because it doesn’t get used much and I didn’t want some poor sod in an IRV coming to grief tackling somebody as obviously dangerous as Varenka. I invoked Nightingale’s authority to back it up, since a chief inspector goes a long way to smoothing out any bureaucratic lumps and bumps. I looked over to confirm that Lesley had Nightingale on her phone and she nodded when she saw me and signalled ‘ten minutes’. Once I was sure Metcall was going to put out the action report, I hung up and trotted over to the Asbo to grab our airwave sets.

  ‘You know, if you’d grabbed your airwave first you could have circulated the report on the local channel,’ said Lesley when I handed over her set. ‘Just saying.’

  I noticed that my hand was trembling, not shaking you understand, but definitely a reaction. Lesley glanced at my hand and then gave me a wry look. We both looked back at the red VW Golf. The driver’s side door had been stoved in as if hit by a girder end on. Slashes of silver metal showed through where the paint had been stripped away.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to be standing in front of that, would you?’ said Lesley.

  Members of the public were beginning to arrive in numbers and Lesley stepped forward to shoo them back. There were a couple of gasps and one half shriek from the crowd.

  What now? I thought and looked around to see if there was a new threat or a body or something equally unpleasant. I wondered about the boy at the door again, but saw that he was back at his post. I checked back with the crowd to see what they were s
taring at, and realised that it was Lesley.

  She’d come out of the fair without her mask. She looked at me and I could tell from her expression that she’d only just realised it too. A couple of white teenaged girls had their phones up and had them pointed at Lesley. A third girl was too transfixed by the sight to do more than clap her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Shit,’ said Lesley softly. ‘I must have left it inside.’

  ‘Oi.’ I turned to the gathering crowd. ‘Back you go. You’ve all watched enough telly to know we need to keep the area clear.’

  Behind me Lesley walked briskly back towards the Goblin Fair.

  ‘Back up,’ I shouted. ‘Nothing to see here.’

  10

  Game Relish

  Varenka abandoned the Audi five minutes’ drive away on the Chalk Farm Road and presumably ducked straight into Camden Lock where she could lose herself amongst the crowds and leave the area on no less than five modes of transport, including canal boat. We could have pulled all the surrounding CCTV but we didn’t have the manpower, budget or stamina to wade through that much tape. Besides, as Lesley pointed out, this was Camden Lock where she could have bought a complete change of clothes, had her hair dyed, sipped a fresh latte and acquired a nice handcrafted henna tattoo before leaving.

  That didn’t stop Nightingale screeching to a halt outside in true Sweeney style and striding into the Market, kicking down doors and putting the frighteners on the locals with some pithy Latin tags. At least, I’d like to think that’s what he did. But I wasn’t there because me and Lesley were under strict instructions to secure the crime scene around the Goblin Fair, and see if we couldn’t dig up any witnesses. Only everyone including the boy from the door and the girl in the pink track suit had vanished – all except Zachary Palmer.

  ‘They all went out the emergency exit,’ said Zach.

  I’d found him on the roof sitting at a round café table covered in a red-and-white checked tablecloth and laid out for dinner for two. A fluted glass vase with a single yellow rose sat in the centre and a champagne bottle in a frosted brass ice-bucket sat on a separate stand at his elbow.

  The roof was triangular in shape and littered with scraps of plastic, abandoned white polystyrene cups rolling around in the breeze and free copies of the Metro. They’d taken all their stock with them, so it couldn’t have been that much of a panic.

  ‘You know,’ said Zach, ‘until you came along I used to be the local loose cannon. Now people have started warning me about the dangers of associating with you.’

  A London Overground train growled past us. The tracks were less than a metre from the edge of the roof and the carriage windows were level with our kneecaps.

  I gestured at the waiting champagne.

  ‘We didn’t interrupt your dinner, did we?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Zach and tapped his foot against a wicker hamper with F&M stencilled on its side. ‘I’m just waiting for your colleague. It was part of the deal.’

  I went downstairs to where Lesley was searching the room at the bottom of the landing – the one Varenka had blown a hole in. It was full of overstuffed furniture, chintz and white plaster dust. I contacted Nightingale on the airwave to see if we were needed, but he said no.

  ‘She’s long gone,’ he said. ‘I’m going to arrange for her car to be towed away and then I’ll be with you in an hour. Any luck your end?’

  I told him that nobody was left except Zach.

  ‘At least getting him to talk shouldn’t be that hard,’ said Nightingale and signed off.

  ‘Isn’t that Peter O’Toole?’ asked Lesley who was pointing to a row of framed photographs on the wall. It looked like a publicity still from Lawrence of Arabia and had been signed. The other photographs were also vintage actors in black and white portraits, most of whom I recognised in the it’s-that-guy way you do with people who were famous before you were born.

  ‘If you’ve got time for refs,’ I said, ‘then your boy Zach is upstairs and waiting.’

  ‘I did promise,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Save some for me,’ I called after her as she went up the stairs and then wondered what exactly it was you got in a Fortnum and Mason hamper – beyond ‘posh stuff’, that is.

  She was still up there when Nightingale arrived so I left them to it and met him down by the VW Golf. He was sitting comfortably on his heels, staring at the stoved in side panels and stroking his chin.

  ‘It was covered in frost,’ I said when I joined him. ‘Immediately after. Like it had been frozen.’

  ‘This is a worrying development,’ he said.

  I tapped the mangled metal. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘Especially at the time. Any idea who trained her?’

  ‘Not our man in the mask, that’s for certain.’ He nodded at the car. ‘Not with that spell.’

  Lesley emerged from the house and joined us – her own mask back on. Nightingale straightened when he saw her.

  ‘Did Mr Palmer have anything useful to say?’ he asked.

  ‘Not noticeably,’ said Lesley. ‘He did tell me that he’s only seen Varenka at the fair recently and that she just seemed to be there for the same reasons as everyone else – a bit of shopping, the odd glass and gossip.’

  ‘Did she gossip with anyone in particular?’

  ‘Not that he noticed,’ she said.

  ‘I assume you asked him to keep an eye out,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Yep,’ she and held up a large jar with an old-fashioned orange label. ‘And this is for you.’

  Nightingale took the jar, read the label and smiled.

  ‘Game relish,’ he said. ‘Excellent – we’ll have to see what Molly can do to this.’

  The jar vanished into his coat pocket and his face became grim.

  ‘When she cast the spell did you get a sense of her signare?’

  ‘Weirdly yeah,’ I said. ‘Bread, grain, something yeasty.’

  ‘Hungry dog,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Dog or wolf?’ asked Nightingale.

  Lesley shrugged. ‘To be honest I don’t think I’d know the difference.’

  ‘Nochnye Koldunyi,’ said Nightingale. ‘A Night Witch.’

  ‘Is that like a person or another thing?’ asked Lesley. ‘Like Peter’s Pale Lady?’

  ‘A type of Russian practitioner,’ said Nightingale. ‘Recruited during the war, the training had a very narrow scope. It was concentrated almost entirely on combat. We heard rumours that there were whole regiments of women trained in this manner. Hence the nickname.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ I said.

  ‘We tried something very similar ourselves in 1939,’ said Nightingale. ‘Unfortunately it didn’t turn out well, and the whole project had to be abandoned.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Half of everything I try and teach you is to stop you from killing yourselves,’ said Nightingale. ‘Skimp on that aspect of the training and many more of your apprentices will die. We felt that the casualty rate with the New Training was too high – I suspect the Russians were willing to make greater sacrifices. Our war was pretty desperate but theirs was a war of annihilation – victory or death was not an empty slogan.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Lesley. ‘That was seventy years ago – she’d be an old woman.’ She paused and narrowed her eyes at Nightingale. ‘Unless she’s doing the backwards aging thing, like you.’

  ‘Or she might have been trained by her mother,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps the Russians still have a military magic programme.’

  ‘Maybe she’s an unauthorised agent,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe we should tell the Russians.’

  ‘Well, prior to that,’ said Nightingale, ‘we’d have to determine which Russians to tell. We’d better consult with the Professor about that.’

  ‘If we can pry him away from his new German grimoire,’ I said.

  ‘Nonetheless,’ said Nightingale. ‘Regardless of her provenance, the fact is we now have two confirmed fully trained practitioners at large in Lond
on. You two are going to have to be even more careful when operating without me. In fact, I don’t want either of you operating alone or without letting me know where you are – you can consider that an order.’

  ‘We should start routinely carrying tasers,’ said Lesley. ‘That would be our best bet – zap them before they know we’re there. I’d like see someone concentrate on a forma with fifty thousand volts running through them.’

  ‘No warning,’ I said. ‘I like it.’

  Lesley glared at me and I realised she was serious.

  Nightingale nodded. ‘I’ll have to clear it with the Commissioner first. And I’ll need you both to demonstrate to me that you’ll hit the target you’re aiming at.’

  ‘In the meantime?’ I asked.

  ‘In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t bowl over Varenka before she has a chance to go to ground,’ said Nightingale.

  Criminals, even professional ones, are not spies. They might be cautious but they don’t practise what professional agents call ‘tradecraft’, especially when they’re off the clock. Case in point, Varenka’s Audi which was registered to one Varvara Tamonina aged sixty-two – that got a snort of derision from Lesley – but the picture matched the face we’d seen briefly trying to kill us that morning. The licence gave us an address in Wimbledon but when Nightingale and Lesley went knocking with a warrant there was no sign that Varenka, or Varvara Tamonina, had lived there in years. Then they started a bit of door to door on her neighbours, because you never know what you might find.

  Meanwhile I got stuck compiling the intelligence report which consisted of me wading through a ton of IIP responses and seeing if Ms Varvara Tamonina’s vehicle had popped up in relation to another inquiry. This led me to DAFT, Southwark’s Drugs and Firearm Team and winner of the mostly badly thought out acronym award three years running, who’d spotted the car while running surveillance on a drug network in Elephant and Castle. I checked with them to see if they’d followed up and found that the inquiry had wound down shortly afterwards.