‘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 amp;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 London. 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.
‘The principal suspect dropped dead,’ said a helpful DC.
‘Suspiciously?’
‘Nope,’ said the DC. ‘Died of a heart attack.’
Aged twenty-six, most likely a congenital heart defect that had gone undetected until one day he went face down in his breakfast cereal.