‘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 the 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.’
‘Technically, we can,’ said Effra. ‘Human rights are not contingent upon the behaviour of the individual.’
This is not an argument you want to use with the police, but before I could counter with the traditional rebuttal centring around the competing notions of citizenship — and the fact that I had a body in the morgue that had been set on fire from the inside, and would you like to talk about my right not to have my head bashed in by a psychotic Russian witch? And in any case I didn’t see your family helping with the clean up the other day — Oberon spoke.
‘It is the spirit of the law that you should follow,’ he said. ‘In this instance she has the mind of a child and what blackguard would take advantage of her innocence to advance his cause, however noble?’
I didn’t really have a counter argument for that, although I’m fairly certain Lesley would have, so I climbed to my feet with as much dignity as I could muster. Beverley followed me up and said that I could make myself useful and walk her back to her car. As we walked towards the Walworth Road, Nicky and Sky took turns to sneak up behind us and make hilarious farting noises.
‘Is Sky always this childish?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ she said, ‘this is just spring. She goes clubbing in the summer and does evening classes in the autumn.’
‘And in the winter?’
‘In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.’
‘Where does she do that, then?’
‘There are some questions it’s not polite to ask,’ she said. ‘And some questions you shouldn’t ask unless you’re sure you want the answer.’
We reached her car, which turned out to be another two-seater Mini Roadster a bit like the one that got torched at Covent Garden, only with a honking 2-litre diesel engine and painted fire-engine red.
‘What’s with you and the Minis?’ I asked.
‘The Thames Valley,’ she said as she climbed in. ‘It’s not just cottages and universities you know. There’s still a bit of industry left.’ Then she flicked her dreads over her shoulder and drove away.