Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (32 page)

‘When did you meet Albert Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked – the original Faceless Man had dropped out of sight in the early 1970s so it was possible they might have met then.

‘Much later,’ she said. ‘That was in 2003.’

Varvara Sidorovna was already firmly back in the demi-monde by that time.

‘You two must know what it’s like by now,’ she said. ‘Once you know it exists it’s always there in the corner of your eye. Plus I wanted to see if it was possible to go home, to Russia.’ She knew that most of her old wartime comrades would be dead, those that hadn’t been killed by the Germans were most likely liquidated by Stalin. She was a little surprised to find that the
Nauchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Neobychnyh Yavleniy
, the Scientific Research Institute for Unusual Phenomena had been revived and that they even had agents operating in the West.

Me and Lesley nodded sagely as if we knew all about this, while I imagined Nightingale adding the fact to his rather long list of things he should have known about but didn’t.

But SRIUP being active in the Soviet Union could only mean that practitioners were still being tracked, and Varvara Sidorovna had no intention of coming under anyone’s control ever again, not even the motherland’s. So she spent the 1980s and 90s rediscovering her skills and picking up new ones. ‘Here and there,’ she said. ‘You’d be amazed.’

‘And how
did
you get involved with Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked, because I was beginning to think that Varvara Sidorovna was messing us about.

‘It was a job,’ she said. One not all that different from those she’d been doing since the late 1970s. ‘People like you and I straddle the mundane and the demi-monde. We make excellent middle men and go-betweens,’ she said, but refused to give details.

‘Client confidentiality,’ she said. ‘You understand.’

Obviously she didn’t consider the Faceless Man, mark two, as a client any more because she was quite happy to explain how he’d started employing her for various jobs, most of them dull. ‘Finding people and things in the demi-monde,’ she said and we made a note to track back later and get a list. She was adamant that she’d never met the Faceless Man in person. Everything had been arranged over the phone.

‘I was the one that found old Albert for him,’ she said proudly. ‘Took me six months – he’d been warehoused in a private care home outside Oxford.’ It had been the Faceless Man who arranged the flat in Shakespeare Tower. Varvara Sidorovna took advantage of its location to spend more time at the theatre.

‘And you did that for, what, nine years?’ asked Lesley.

‘Not full time,’ she said. ‘I had a couple of properly trained care nurses to look after the poor soul much of the time, and in the first couple of years he spent most of the day out.’

‘Out where?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘A very quiet young woman used to pick him up in the morning and return him in the afternoon.’

‘Do you know where she took him?’ asked Lesley, and as she did I wrote
Pale Lady = no driver = FM near BARBICAN?
On my pad where she could see it.

‘I was specifically being paid not to ask questions,’ said Varvara Sidorovna.

She hadn’t known about the demon-trap planted in the flat, but it didn’t surprise her in the least. She’d moved Albert out of the place as soon our visit had finished and she suspected the device had been there as much to keep him under control as it was to catch someone like Nightingale or us.

We asked her about Robert Weil and his body-dumping activities, but she denied any knowledge. Did she know why the Faceless Man might want to shoot a woman in the face with a shotgun?

‘If he wanted to delay identification,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps to cover up work he was doing on her face.’

I felt Lesley stiffen beside me.

‘What kind of work?’ she asked.

‘You’ve met some of his menagerie,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Perhaps he’s looking to create new creatures.’

Officially unofficial the interview might have been, but Varvara Sidorovna wasn’t going to incriminate herself beyond what she thought we already knew. She claimed to know nothing of County Gard and laughed out loud at the idea she might have offed Richard Dewsbury, the drug dealer, by inducing a breakfast heart attack.

‘Not my style, darling,’ she said.

Nor was she forthcoming about what exactly they’d been up to with their dogs at the Essex Farm. When we asked her what she’d been doing there, all she’d tell us was, ‘Tying up loose ends. Imagine my surprise when I found you two poking your nose in.’

I glanced at Lesley and she shrugged. It was obvious to us that the tying up of loose ends, had we not intervened, probably would have proved fatal for Barry, Max and Danny. We questioned her about that, and she asked whether the world would really be worse off without them.

‘Did you know about the wood nymph?’ I asked.

‘What wood nymph?’

‘The one that lived at the base of Skygarden Tower,’ I said.

‘I know a great many things,’ she said. ‘You’d be—’

‘Did you know about Sky?’

I felt Lesley’s hand on my arm, and I realised I’d half risen from my chair. A white Styrofoam coffee cup rolled around on the table between us – fortunately empty. Varvara Sidorovna had flinched back and was giving me a wary look.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

I took a breath and sat myself down.

‘I’m going check on that,’ I said. ‘If you do know, then it would be better to tell me now.’

Varvara Sidorovna looked to Lesley, who gazed impassively back.

‘Somehow I doubt that,’ she said, and then held up her hand. ‘I swear I did not know. But it does explain what Max and Barry were burbling about when I picked them up this morning.’

‘You seem very relaxed,’ said Lesley. ‘Considering the severity of the charges against you.’

‘I have a longer perspective on life than you do,’ she said. ‘I was held prisoner by the SS – do you really think the Met frightens me? Or even the Isaacs? I love that nickname, by the way. “The Isaacs.” So very quaint. You must know that no conventional prison could hold me if I chose to escape. You’re not about to summarily execute me. And it would be an enormous waste of your time to guard me. No, sooner or later, we shall come to an arrangement. And in any case, I may yet prove useful.’

‘But you were going to kill us,’ said Lesley. ‘Remember?’

‘If you’re afraid of wolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna, ‘don’t go to the woods.’

I
t hadn’t really sunk in at the time, but my beloved Ford Focus ST was kaput. If the half a ton of bricks falling on it hadn’t written it off, the fact that an elephant had gone for a kip on the bonnet would have. Nightingale never could figure out whether that was something he or Varvara Sidorovna had done, and she just laughed in my face.

Nightingale’s Jag had been safely parked a hundred metres further down the farm access road. He said he’d conjured the sound of his arrival to distract whoever was holding us in the barn while he sneaked around the back.

We spent the night in the Chelmsford Travelodge. I had a room with a charming view of the nearby flyover, but at least the bed was soft and the shower worked. In the morning me and Lesley had a competition to see who could pile the most food on their plate at the continental style all-you-could-eat breakfast. There were no sausages, bacon or fried slice – neither Toby nor Molly would have approved.

DCI Duffy arrived mid-morning with a car full of officers from Bromley and took over interviews with Max and Barry – criminal damage – while throwing Danny back to the Essex mob – illegal possession of a firearm, threatening behaviour and bringing rural England into disrepute.

We had to give our own statements which took most of the day, because we had to keep stopping and reworking sections that DCI Duffy and the Assistant Chief Constable overseeing the case found to be ‘problematic’ – which was pretty much everything. In the end we blamed most of the property damage on an accidental fire and Calor Gas cylinder explosions, plural.

Nightingale had to stay in close proximity to Varvara Sidorovna, so we went out to a seafood bar by the River Chelmer to fetch some fancy fish and chips. Before we hauled them back to the nick we spent a couple of minutes on a walkway by the river feeding chips to the ducks and seeing if anyone was at home. No joy.

‘Maybe not every river’s got a personality,’ said Lesley.

We spent the rest of the evening completing our notebooks and typing our reports for not one but two major inquiries, and then back to the Travelodge. We set our alarms early so we could stuff our faces at the breakfast before we had to leave.

Essex Police provided us a car and driver, the better to speed us out of their force area. We headed back to London in the back seat with our pockets stuffed full of Babybel cheese miniatures and our hearts full of doubts.

Without my beloved Asbo, the first order of business was getting some wheels. We tossed a coin, I lost, and so it was me that got dropped off at Skygarden to check on Toby while Lesley headed off to look up a friendly civilian auto worker she knew who handled fleet re-sales. My bet was that it would be a silver Astra, but you never know.

From the walkway, the garden around the tower didn’t look different. Still green in the patchy sunlight. According to the specialist Bromley had called in, it would take years for the big trees to die. So why had Sky died that night – almost instantly? And why had the Faceless Man had the trees destroyed? And so clumsily, using such incompetent cut-outs as Barry, Max, Danny and their late lamented and drowned mate – now identified as Martin Brown of Long Riding, Basildon. All of them in that category of low-level chancers whose ambitions to become professional criminals were frustrated by their inability to pass the entrance exam.

I wanted to go down to the garden, but there were still officers from Bromley MIT amongst the trees doing a last sweep before they packed away. I didn’t want to be identified while there was still mileage to be had by staying undercover.

Why had the Faceless Man wanted the trees dead? Jake Phillips had said that the trees were what kept Skygarden as a listed building. Had they been destroyed so that the tower could be delisted and the demolition begun? There was a vast amount of money involved in the redevelopment project. Was it possible that the Faceless Man’s motive was that mundane?

I glanced down at the garages, at the ones with the County Gard seals and the line of curing concrete that stretched from four of them into the base of the tower. No, this was not a real-estate scam – in the first place those kinds of scams were effectively legal, and in the second place they hardly needed magical assistance.

Had he known about Sky when he’d arranged to have the trees killed? Probably not, given the people he’d tasked with the job. But why not just get Varvara Sidorovna to do it? I was certain she could have blighted the whole garden with a killer frost had she wanted to. If she’d timed it right it could have been put down to freak weather.

But not by us, not by the Isaacs, because we would know better.

Which meant the Faceless Man either knew we were here, or at the very least was keeping a close eye on the place.

But why take the risk – even with the expendable Essex boys?

Unless he was on a time table and he couldn’t postpone regardless of our presence.

From the walkway I spotted that the doors to the lower ground floor had been wedged open, which was a sure-fire sign either that the council had workmen in, that someone was moving out, or burglars were looting a flat. I checked the car park for clues and saw only a white Citroen van with the Southwark Council logo stencilled on its side. But, because it’s good practice, I made a note of its index.

It was dark and cool inside the ground floor foyer. I hit the button for the lift and while I waited I gazed at the not-really-a-tuned-mass-damper that hung down the centre of the tower. Stromberg had designed Skygarden to soak up
vestigia
from its environment, and if it had done its job then that power had to have gone somewhere. We’d assumed that the whole grandiose scheme had failed because it hadn’t been channelled up and out of the
Stadtkrone
on the roof. But what if the power had accumulated, but hadn’t been released?

What if it was still stored in the thirty-storey length of plastic hanging over there? I ignored the lift doors as they opened behind me.

Power that could be drained off into the metal plates stacked neatly in the garages that surrounded the tower. The Faceless Man didn’t need the staff technology Nightingale was teaching us – he’d adapted the demon trap technique to create vessels for storing the power – dog batteries.

This was not a real-estate scam, I realised. It was a heist.

I turned to rush up to the flat, but the lift doors had closed now and I had to wait for it to come back down again.

When I let myself into the flat I found that the living room was full of bodies.

The curtains were drawn and the lights were off. In the gloom I could make out at least three people lying on the sofa-bed and another five or so on the floor. They all seemed to be men and, judging from the smell of spilt beer and the layer of crisp packets and takeaway cartons, they were sleeping off a serious night in. I noted the donkey jackets with the high-viz strips and made an educated guess as to who they were.

I slowly pushed open the bedroom door and peered inside. Stromberg had carefully designed the master bedroom to be too narrow for a king-size bed placed across it and, when placed lengthways, to provide a mere fifteen centimetres of clearance between bed and wall. The width of the end wall was taken up with a sliding patio door and the length precisely calculated so that you could have a wardrobe, but only if it blocked access to either the patio or the rest of the flat. It was for such attention to details that Erik Stromberg was once described by the
Guardian
architectural correspondent as
emblematic of modern British architecture at its most iconoclastic.