‘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 staring 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
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 cafe 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.