When I leant closer I got a flash of straight razor and snarling dog that made me take a step backwards.
‘You know what those remind me of?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Lesley and we all took a step backwards, except for Zach who took two.
‘We’d better get Nightingale to look at this,’ I said and closed the garage door as gently as possible.
Lesley and Zach went back upstairs because one person standing around in the rain looks less suspicious than three, and popped back down with Toby. Because one man standing in the rain with a dog is practically invisible. Nightingale arrived ten minutes later and spent half an hour staring at the things in the garage.
‘I’ve never seen anything remotely like this before,’ he said at last.
‘Any idea what they’re for?’
‘I’d have said they were demon traps,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I have no sense of the malice one gets with a true demon trap. At least not in the concentration I would expect from this many weapons all in one place.’
‘Same technology, though?’ I asked.
‘Technology? Yes, I suppose it is a technology,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was probably too much to expect our opponent to respect the fine craft tradition embodied in British wizardry.’
‘Probably,’ I said and closed the garage door.
The rain and overcast meant the evening got dark early and the abandoned blocks that surrounded the tower loomed over the garden.
‘This much is certain — having invested so much here they’re unlikely to abandon it now,’ said Nightingale.
‘County Gard keep turning up,’ I said. ‘It might be time to wind up here and go after them directly.’
‘Missing Molly already?’ said Nightingale. ‘Let’s give Bromley and Sussex another twenty-four hours to see if they find a connection, and decide then.’
That agreed, me and Toby returned to our gardenless flat in the sky and found that Zach and Lesley had already gone to bed.
Fortunately, the internal speakers on the new TV were adequately loud.
I had the dream where I was lying in bed between Beverley Brook and Lesley May which I’d been having every two to three weeks for the last year or so — and trust me it is not as erotic as it sounds — even if Beverley is wearing a wet suit. I hadn’t told anyone about the dream, not least because Lesley always appears with her beautiful face intact and that always seemed like a betrayal. The bed we’re in changes from dream to dream. Sometimes it was my bed in the Folly, sometimes the double bed that had belonged to Lucy Springfield who had rich parents and a desperate need to parade me up and down in front of them at breakfast. Occasionally it was my old bed at my parents’ flat — which was improbable since it barely fit me, let alone three fully grown adults. But mostly it was an improbably wide and soft hotel bed — the sort of bed that James Bond might share with two women. And he wouldn’t let the fact that one of them was in uniform, including her Metvest, cuffs and pepper spray slow him down either. So in my dream they lay there looking beautiful in the way only someone you love can look while sleeping, and all I could think about was that it was all right for some, because they were getting a good night’s sleep and I was lying between them and staring at the ceiling. Which, as I’m sure either of them would have hastened to point out, was stupid because of course I was asleep, having the dream.
But tonight someone started screaming outside the window.
I woke up standing in the middle of the living room, my hands clenched into fists. But the flat was silent.
If you’re police you quickly learn to recognise a real scream when you hear it and this had been a real scream — only I couldn’t tell whether it had been confined to my dream.
I pulled on my jeans and hopped out onto the balcony.
At first all I could hear was the city grumbling out beyond the empty blocks, but then I heard an engine noise much closer. Not a car, a small engine like that on a lawnmower or a power tool, and coming from the garden below.
Then I heard the scream for real. A woman. Pain, despair, fear.
Lesley sat bolt upright when I banged open the bedroom door. Zach lay sprawled next to her, naked, one leg hooked possessively around her thigh.
‘There’s an incident in the garden,’ I said. ‘Hurry.’
I grabbed the go bag, flung open the front door and ran for the lift. Unless it’s a fire, the lift is always going to beat twenty-one flights of stairs. I had my trainers on by the time the lift arrived and stuck my foot in the closing door as I wrangled my Metvest out of the bag — it felt clammy against the bare skin of my chest and back.
Lesley arrived wearing her mask, leggings and Zach’s outsized red Clash T-shirt. She followed me into the lift and I withdrew my foot. The doors closed in Zach’s face as he came running, half naked, to join us.
‘I think he wants his T-shirt back,’ I said to Lesley as she struggled into her Metvest. I pulled out my airwave and keyed in Nightingale’s number — he answered within ten seconds. I told him we were heading downstairs to investigate strange noises.
‘How strange?’ he asked.
‘Machine tool noises, possible scream,’ I said.
‘I’ll move to the perimeter at Station Road and hold there,’ he said.
Given that Nightingale was heavy artillery, we didn’t want him piling in if this turned out to be common or garden criminality. Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure we should be piling in — at least not while kitted up and with The Fuzz written on our foreheads.
This is why proper undercover operations have rules and procedures for handling this kind of shit.
The lift was too old and vandalised to go ‘ding’, so the doors merely opened on to the ground floor and me and Lesley dashed out, and then slowed to creep through the foyer doors and out onto the walkway.
We heard it as soon as we were in the open air, a power tool whine over to the right and men’s voices below and to the left. Unmistakably the sound of two people who were having a knock-down, drag-out argument while trying desperately not to raise their voices.
Then I recognised the noise the power tool was making, the crunching yammer of a chainsaw cutting into wood. I felt a cold flush as I realised what was going on and what the likely consequences were.
‘They’re going after the trees,’ I hissed. ‘We have to stop them now.’
‘Peter, it’s just trees,’ she whispered back. ‘They can plant new trees.’
I didn’t try to explain because there’s no pithy way of explaining that you believe that Sky the wood nymph is likely to be symbiotically linked, certainly to her own particular tree but also I suspected, to all the trees in the garden. At least no way I could think of on the spur of the moment.
I keyed Nightingale, warned him they were going after the trees and, before Lesley could ask any questions, ran for the ramp down to the garden.
Lesley followed me.
I came off the ramp at a dead run and headed straight for the chainsaw noise. With only the walkway lights the garden was a confusion of shadows. But I’d walked Toby down there enough times to keep me from running into a tree.
Then a bright light blossomed overhead and I thought wildly that a police helicopter had stupidly turned its sungun on the wrong person, when I realised that the light was everywhere.
Ahead of me was a chunky white guy in jeans and a leather biker jacket who was using a chainsaw on one of the cherry trees by the dismantled playground. The vibration had dislodged the blossom which swirled like pink snow in the harsh white light.
‘Oi,’ I yelled as I charged him. ‘Step away from the tree.’
Startled he turned to face me and instinctively raised the chainsaw. I skidded to a halt and eyed the whirring chain warily. If you’re an old school zombie or trapped in a lift, a chainsaw is a fearsome weapon. But outside, where there’s room to manoeuvre, you end up being more worried about what the stupid gits might do to themselves with it than anything they might do to you.