When she was safely out of sight I called Lesley.
‘I think it’s time we checked the basement,’ I said. ‘Bring the bag with you.’
Lesley met me and Toby in the lift foyer of the lower ground floor. I took a moment to tell her about Sky the wood nymph. She seemed to find Beverley’s appearance amusing.
‘And she just happened to be there, didn’t she?’ she said. ‘Total coincidence.’
We had two grey metal doors to choose from, one on either side of the entrance.
‘Which one?’ asked Lesley and she dumped the black nylon carry bag at my feet.
‘Either,’ I said. ‘It’s a circular plan — we should be able to work our way round.’
Lesley chose a door at random and used the skeleton key that Sergeant Daverc had provided to open it up. She quickly found the light switch and stepped inside, so I grabbed the bag and followed. After a moment’s hesitation, Toby followed me.
Inside, the room smelt of breezeblocks and moist cement. A row of metal lockers lined the exterior and interior walls. A door at the far end was marked with a yellow ‘Danger Electricity’ triangle. I figured the wet cement smell came from what looked like recent work on the floor, visible as a darker-coloured strip running across the room. I opened the bag and me and Lesley took a couple of minutes to tool up.
‘Feel anything?’ asked Lesley as I slipped on my Metvest, the undercover beige version without pockets that theoretically fits under your jacket.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘Do you think that’s normal?’
‘Too early to tell,’ I said.
Once we had our Metvests on under our jackets we turned off our main phones and fired up a pair of airwave handsets that, while actually more expensive than our phones, were provided out of the police budget and thus expendable. These went on our tactical belts on which we also hung extendable batons, cuffs and pepper spray — but alas no taser yet.
‘They’re probably waiting for one of us to get freeze dried,’ said Lesley, whose attitude towards taser deployment was that people with heart conditions, epilepsy and an aversion to electrocution should not embark upon breaches of the peace in the first place.
Once we were kitted up, all we were missing was a motion tracker — the kind that makes sinister pinging noises. Instead we had to make do with Toby. Given the electrocution warnings, I picked him up as Lesley used the skeleton key on the next door.
‘I want a nice clean dispersal this time,’ I said, and in we went.
The trick to spotting vestigia, or any of the other weird sensory impressions you get hanging around magic or magical folks, is separating them from all the memories, daydreams and randomly misfiring neurones that is the background noise of your brain. You start by spotting things that couldn’t possibly be related to your current situation — as when you think of a barking dog while examining a man with his head knocked off. Your teacher reinforces your perception by confirming when you’re right. The more you practise, the better you get. And it’s not long before you ask the question — is this what causes schizophrenia?
Well, if you’re me you ask that question. It never seemed to have occurred to Nightingale at all.
When I raised it with Dr Walid he said one test would be for me to take anti-psychotic drugs and see if the vestigia went away. I declined, but I’m not sure whether I was more worried that it might work than that it might not.
There’s a sort of background level of vestigia which I’ve come to expect pretty much everywhere in London. It falls away noticeably in the countryside, but you can get some very strong hot spots and what Nightingale calls lacunae — the remnants of recent magic. Because where you find high levels of vestigia, you generally also find the weird shit that the Folly is supposed to deal with. So me and Lesley have got into the habit of checking any new scene before we do anything else. This procedure, were we more integrated into the Met proper, would be called an Initial Vestigia Assessment or IVA pronounced i-VAH as in — I knew that Gandalf was a villain as soon I’d finished my IVA.
As far as I can tell, vestigia build up over time. So modern buildings like Skygarden tend to exhibit low background levels.
The next room was the building’s power incomer, its electrical substation, recently modernised judging by the clean and compact grey boxes that lined one wall. The lighting was good, all the better to see the many warning symbols — particularly the one which showed a body lying on the ground with a stylised lightning bolt in its chest.
‘Danger of death,’ read Lesley.
‘Moving on,’ I said.
The next door put us in what I recognised as the base of the northern fire exit, and unlike everything else in the estate it was well designed. Fleeing residents were neatly channelled off the bottom flight of stairs and out through a pair of double fire doors.
‘What’s that smell?’ asked Lesley.
‘Old urine,’ I said. ‘And bleach.’ Almost from day one people would have used the stairwell as a convenient spot for a crafty slash and every two to three years the council would have brought in high pressure hoses and scrubbed it down.
‘Animals,’ said Lesley.
‘I think the dogs did it outside,’ I said. ‘It’s odd that the doors are securely closed.’
‘They’re alarmed,’ said Lesley pointing to a set of sensors at the top of the doors.
‘This block is on the council shit list,’ I said. ‘The response to repeated abuse would be to shut the alarms off permanently. The doors should be propped open with bricks and there should be needles and condoms all over the floor.’
‘Mysterious, yes,’ said Lesley and then nodded at Toby who was yawning. ‘Magical, no. Next door.’
We found the stairs down in the next room. As far as I could tell, we’d been working our way around the circumference on the lower ground floor and were now opposite the main entrance foyer. The breezeblock walls were bare but there had been work done on the floor here too — a strip of freshly laid cement running from the interior wall to the outer. A new damp course? I wondered.
A wide staircase descended to a familiarly shiny door with a County Gard logo and not one but two serious-looking padlocks in addition to the door’s own lock. All three were resistant to the skeleton key.
‘That’s a health and safety violation,’ I said. ‘We’ve got the same key as the Fire Brigade.’
‘What’s behind the door, do you think?’ asked Lesley.
‘The base of the central shaft for one thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like to find out what the fuck Stromberg was thinking of when he built it.’
‘We could burn the locks off,’ said Lesley.
‘Subtle. I like it.’
‘Nah, you’re right,’ said Lesley. ‘We can get Frank to ask County Gard to provide keys.’
Frank Caffrey, as an official fire investigator, could just demand access. After Southwark got pasted for the six fire deaths at Lakanal House neither they nor their contractors were going to mess with the Fire Brigade. I wished I’d thought of that.
‘Let’s finish the rest of this floor,’ said Lesley, and that’s what we did. We worked our way through the southern emergency exit, as suspiciously unsoiled as the northern one, the water incomer and another room with lockers. Apart from the now familiar fresh cement on the floor they were resolutely uninteresting. Toby didn’t so much as growl which was, if anything, said Lesley, a sign of even less than background magic.
Our IVA completed, we put our kit back in the bag and let ourselves out into the foyer.
‘Well, that was rewarding,’ said Lesley as we rode up in the lift.
‘I don’t think this place was built for people,’ I said.
‘You say that about all modern architecture,’ said Lesley. ‘You want us all to live in pyramids.’