‘Couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer guy,’ said the DC.
His name had been Richard Dewsbury and he’d been heavily involved in the drug trade around Elephant and Castle since his fifteenth birthday. Suspected of running most of it for at least five years before keeling over at his mum’s kitchen table.
‘And guess where his mum’s kitchen table was?’ I asked.
‘Skygarden,’ said Lesley.
I was briefing Nightingale and Lesley over coffee in the atrium — still pretty much the warmest bit of the Folly. It had actually snowed a couple of days after the Spring Court and, despite one sunny day, the weather had stayed unseasonably cold.
‘The very same,’ I said.
Lesley had taken off her mask and I saw that patches of skin on her face were so white with cold as to be almost blue. Dr Walid had warned that the reduced circulation in the damaged skin around her mouth and cheeks could make them susceptible to chilblains and/or tissue necrosis — which is exactly as horrible as it sounds.
‘If we combine that with the architect and the unfortunate planner, it would seem that all roads lead to Elephant and Castle,’ said Nightingale.
‘Circumstantially,’ said Lesley.
Molly glided over with a folded towel resting on a tray and offered it to Lesley. The towel was sky blue, fluffy and steaming gently. Lesley thanked Molly, tested the temperature with the back of her hand and then draped it over her face with a contented sigh.
Molly looked at Nightingale and tilted her head.
‘That will be all,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
Molly drifted away silently towards the back stairs.
‘God, that feels good,’ said Lesley, her voice muffled under the thickness of the towel.
‘Circumstantial but enough that I believe we should take a closer look,’ said Nightingale, getting back to Elephant and Castle.
‘We could talk to the local Safer Neighbourhood team,’ I said.
Lesley mumbled something under the towel.
‘What?’ I asked.
She lifted the towel off her mouth long enough to say, ‘That’s the East Walworth team. They work out of Walworth nick.’
‘Peter can go down and see them tomorrow,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley, you can stay in the warm and check whether our Russian friend has emerged onto the radar anywhere else. Meanwhile I’ll see if any of my contacts at the Foreign Office are still alive.’
There was a skittering sound from the back stairs and then Toby burst into the atrium and scampered towards us, his claws clicking on the marble floor. When he reached our table he snuffled around our chairs before stopping beside Lesley’s and barking twice. Then he sat on his haunches and looked up expectantly. When she offered him a biscuit, he ignored it and instead swung his snout until it pointed at where she’d put the discarded the face towel.
‘Do you want this?’ asked Lesley and dangled the towel in front of him.
Toby barked once, seized the towel in his jaws and scampered off with his stubby little tail wagging. We all watched him go.
‘Do you think Molly trained him to. .?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure that’s an alliance we want to encourage,’ said Nightingale.
‘We should get Dr Walid to look at Richard Dewsbury’s PM report,’ I said, suddenly remembering my visit to DAFT. ‘Just in case it was something other than a heart attack.’
‘Aren’t heart attacks a bit subtle for the Faceless Man?’ said Lesley.
‘There’s merit in having two forms of attack,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you’re principally known for setting your enemies on fire you could well avoid suspicion by poisoning one instead.’
‘And if Varenka-’
‘Varvara,’ said Lesley.
‘And if Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina,’ I said slowly, ‘did the deed, then maybe heart attacks are her speciality. How hard would it be to give someone a heart attack?’
‘With magic?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Yes.’
‘Not hard as such,’ he said. ‘But complex and laborious. I think I’d have to be in the same room as my target to do it as well. Much better to poison them or to use a glamour to make them poison themselves.’
‘What makes it so complicated?’ asked Lesley suddenly leaning forward — eyes fixed on Nightingale.
‘The human body resists magic,’ he said. ‘Particularly if you try to make gross physical changes.’
Lesley unconsciously lifted a hand to her face.
‘Stopping somebody’s heart with magic is a fifth- or sixth-order spell, depending on how one attempts it, and even then the results would be less certain than setting the victim’s bones on fire.’
I thought of the braised corpse of Patrick Mulkern and really wished Nightingale had used another example.
‘Abdul has a theory about why,’ said Nightingale. ‘You can ask him next time you see him.’
Lesley lowered her hand from her face and nodded slowly.
‘I think I might just do that,’ she said.
‘Richard Dewsbury,’ said Sergeant Daverc. ‘He was one in a million — thank god.’
Sergeant William Daverc was in his early fifties and had a proper London accent to go with his proper Huguenot name which was properly pronounced D’Averc. He’d been patrolling Southwark since his probation thirty years ago and was a famous pioneer of community policing from back in the days when it was just called ‘policing’.
‘Ricky when he was younger,’ said Daverc who’d met me in his team’s office at Walworth nick. ‘Mister Dewsbury as soon as he was middle management — didn’t have a “street” name and that should have been a giveaway right from the start.’
‘Violent?’ I asked.
‘Not particularly,’ said Daverc. ‘Single minded. He was a tower boy, you understand.’
Meaning born and raised in the central tower of Skygarden, not the surrounding blocks. Local folklore said that people from the tower never did anything by half, never settled for mediocrity or middle management — not even in the drug trade. The tower had produced a footballer, two pop stars, a stand up comedian, a high court judge, a semi-finalist on Britain’s Got Talent and the most ruthlessly efficient drug baron in south London.
‘When he popped his clogs you could hear the dealers giving a sigh of relief from Rotherhithe to Wimbledon,’ said Daverc. ‘Without him it was the usual story — his organisation fell apart, turf wars — the usual aggro. But your lot don’t care about drugs. Do you?’
I told him that we had reason to believe that there might be activities going on inside the tower that could lead to breaches of the peace of a more esoteric nature.
‘Like what?’ asked Daverc, who’d spent too long as an operational copper to be fobbed off with generalities. I tried honesty.
‘We have no fucking idea,’ I said. ‘We have a break-in and murder related to the original architect, we have an apparent suicide of a Southwark planning officer who was, in part, responsible for the estate and we have this link to Richard Dewsbury, local resident and pharmaceutical entrepreneur. We were sort of hoping you’d have something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Anything strange,’ I said.
‘The tower’s always been strange,’ he said. ‘Even more so now they’ve closed down the surrounding blocks.’
‘I heard about that,’ I said. ‘Are they knocking it down or not?’
‘I’ve given up trying to work out what the council’s doing at Skygarden,’ said Daverc. ‘I know they want to flatten it and turn it over to the developers in return for some new build — they had all the plans on show and we was even doing our preliminary impact studies and then it all seemed to fizzle out.’
‘Have you got any contacts in the tower?’ I asked.
‘I go up there regular,’ he said. ‘I have my community liaisons who bend my ear about kids nicking stuff and people weeing in the lifts.’ He paused and narrowed his eyes. ‘If you want to know what’s going on in the tower, guy like you, your best bet would be to move in yourself.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard flats aren’t that easy to get.’