Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  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.’

  12

  Sky’s Garden

  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 th
at 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.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you and your partner come around to my place for tea?’ he said and gave me his flat number.

  I said I would, and we parted company – Toby was nowhere to be seen.

  I found Toby further along the vanishing path in a glade full of sunlight and shining dust motes. A wool blanket of scarlet and green had been spread upon the grass and upon it sprawled, in the approved French impressionist manner, Oberon, Effra and Beverley Brook. Disappointingly, however, Beverley was wearing all her clothes.

  Toby was sitting up at the edge of the blanket and doing his best small dog on the edge of starvation impression while Effra teased him with an M&S partysized sausage roll. When she saw me she smiled and flicked the roll at Toby, who caught it in midair.

  Oberon gestured grandly at a space on the blanket and I joined them.

  Effra offered me a glass of white wine. Her nails added at least two centimetres to the length of her fingers and were painted with intricate designs in black, gold and red. I accepted the wine, it was a bit early in the day for me but that’s not why I hesitated before drinking.

  ‘Take this as a gift freely given,’ said Effra. ‘Drink with no obligations.’

  I drank. But if it was a fine vintage, it was totally wasted on me.

  ‘So what brings you south of the river?’ asked Beverley. She was wearing a bright blue jumper with a loose enough neck to show the bare brown curve of her shoulder. ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Just work,’ I said.

  ‘Is there anything we can help with?’ asked Oberon.

  I caught a flash of green and yellow in the corner of my eye. But by the time I’d turned my head all I saw was Nicky in laughing pursuit of the vanished young woman.

  ‘You can tell me who that is,’ I said.

  ‘You could call her Sky,’ said Effra, which caused Beverley to choke on her wine.

  ‘No?’ I asked Beverley.

  ‘Sky for short,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And what is she?’ I asked. ‘And don’t give me any of that stuff about reductionism and the dangers of labelling things you don’t understand. I get enough of that from Nightingale and Dr Walid.’

  ‘I suppose you’d call her a dryad,’ said Effra and then looked at Oberon for confirmation. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Drys, in all truth refers to the oak tree,’ said Oberon which caused Beverley to roll her eyes. ‘Tree nymph would be more accurate, although I doubt the ancients had the London Plane in mind when they named them.’

  ‘Didn’t you do this at uni?’ I asked Effra, who had a history of art degree.

  ‘I avoided the Pre-Raphaelites,’ she said. ‘All those virgins in the water. It was too much like my home life.’

  ‘Can I talk to her?’ I asked.

  Effra frowned. ‘I think I’d have to ask why first.’

  So I told them that there had been suspicious activity around the tower recently and that we were just checking it. Lesley would have been pissed off, had she found out. She thinks that however polite we’re being, the police should never concede anything to anyone short of a full public inquiry. And even then we should lie like fuck on general principles, Lesley being part of the ‘you can’t handle the truth’ school of policing.

  I, being a sophisticated modern police officer – given the specialist field I was working in – preferred to actively promote police/magic community stakeholder engagement in order to facilitate intelligence gathering. Besides, I knew better than to mess Effra about.

  Effra nodded and called Nicky’s name in a tone of voice that actually caused me to flinch guiltily. Oberon noticed my reaction and raised his glass in salute.

  Nicky rushed in from the trees and flung herself on my back, little arms half strangling me, her cheek pressed against mine – I could feel her grinning. Sky, the possibly tree-nymph, despite being the size of a fully grown adult, jumped on Oberon’s back. He didn’t even grunt under the impact – the flash git. Sky leaned over his head and grabbed a bottle of Highland Spring off the picnic blanket, but the cap defeated her. Effra took the bottle from her hand, twisted the top offand handed it back.

  ‘Peter here would like to ask you a few questions,’ she said. ‘But you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Hello, Sky,’ I said.

  ‘Lo,’ said Sky, fidgeting her Highland Spring bottle from side to side.

  ‘Do you live down here all the time?’

  ‘I’ve got a tree,’ she said proudly.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Do you live with your tree?’

  Sky gave me a strange look, and then lowered her head to whisper something in Oberon’s ear.

  ‘No, he lives in a big house on the other side of the river,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the prettiest tree in the world,’ said Sky, answering my question.

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ I said and Sky beamed at me. ‘All I want to know is if you’ve seen anything strange happening near the tower.’

  ‘The tower is pretty, too,’ said Sky. ‘It’s full of lights and it makes music.’

  ‘What kind of music?’

  Sky’s face screwed up as she thought of it.

  ‘Happy music,’ she said and pointed up. ‘At the top.’

  Skygarden had once been famous as the site of Sanction FM, a pirate radio station which I used to listen to in my teens, even though the signal tended to go in and out. At least two Sanction DJs had gone on to hit the mainstream big time – one now had a two-hour prime slot on Radio IXtra. But I didn’t think Sky was listening in on her FM radio. I tried to get her to clarify the kind of music she’d heard, but what she described could have been a distant party or the wind blowing around the strange angles of th
e tower.

  Sky fell off Oberon’s shoulders and sprawled melodramatically on her back. I was losing the witness and, while I’ve never done the training, I know that interviews with children or witnesses with low mental ages can take days. Because once they’ve stopped talking to you, they’ve really stopped talking to you. I asked whether she’d seen anything happening at the bottom of the tower.

  ‘Lorries,’ she said.

  ‘You saw lorries?’

  ‘Lots of lorries,’ she said and sighed.

  ‘When did you see the lorries?’

  ‘Days ago,’ she said.

  ‘How many days ago?’ I asked.

  ‘It was cold,’ she said, which could have been any time in the last four months. ‘I’m going to go play now.’ Sky launched herself to her feet in one fluid motion, and was gone before I could open my mouth. Nicky whooped and, putting her knee between my shoulder blades, launched herself in pursuit.

  ‘Any use?’ asked Beverley.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said and got to my feet. ‘I may have to talk to her again.’

  ‘One of us,’ Effra indicated herself and Oberon, ‘would need to be on hand.’

  ‘Really, why’s that?’

  ‘She shouldn’t be questioned without a responsible adult present,’ said Effra.

  ‘These plane trees were planted in the 1970s,’ I said. ‘She’s older than I am.’

  ‘And in the spring she’s not competent to be questioned,’ said Effra.

  ‘Perhaps I should call social services,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Effra. ‘Do you think she has a birth certificate?’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Effra,’ I said. ‘You can’t have protection from the law and then pretend it doesn’t exist when it suits you.’