We spent the rest of the evening completing our notebooks and typing our reports for not one but two major inquiries, and then back to the Travelodge. We set our alarms early so we could stuff our faces at the breakfast before we had to leave.
Essex Police provided us a car and driver, the better to speed us out of their force area. We headed back to London in the back seat with our pockets stuffed full of Babybel cheese miniatures and our hearts full of doubts.
Without my beloved Asbo, the first order of business was getting some wheels. We tossed a coin, I lost, and so it was me that got dropped off at Skygarden to check on Toby while Lesley headed off to look up a friendly civilian auto worker she knew who handled fleet re-sales. My bet was that it would be a silver Astra, but you never know.
From the walkway, the garden around the tower didn’t look different. Still green in the patchy sunlight. According to the specialist Bromley had called in, it would take years for the big trees to die. So why had Sky died that night — almost instantly? And why had the Faceless Man had the trees destroyed? And so clumsily, using such incompetent cut-outs as Barry, Max, Danny and their late lamented and drowned mate — now identified as Martin Brown of Long Riding, Basildon. All of them in that category of low-level chancers whose ambitions to become professional criminals were frustrated by their inability to pass the entrance exam.
I wanted to go down to the garden, but there were still officers from Bromley MIT amongst the trees doing a last sweep before they packed away. I didn’t want to be identified while there was still mileage to be had by staying undercover.
Why had the Faceless Man wanted the trees dead? Jake Phillips had said that the trees were what kept Skygarden as a listed building. Had they been destroyed so that the tower could be delisted and the demolition begun? There was a vast amount of money involved in the redevelopment project. Was it possible that the Faceless Man’s motive was that mundane?
I glanced down at the garages, at the ones with the County Gard seals and the line of curing concrete that stretched from four of them into the base of the tower. No, this was not a real-estate scam — in the first place those kinds of scams were effectively legal, and in the second place they hardly needed magical assistance.
Had he known about Sky when he’d arranged to have the trees killed? Probably not, given the people he’d tasked with the job. But why not just get Varvara Sidorovna to do it? I was certain she could have blighted the whole garden with a killer frost had she wanted to. If she’d timed it right it could have been put down to freak weather.
But not by us, not by the Isaacs, because we would know better.
Which meant the Faceless Man either knew we were here, or at the very least was keeping a close eye on the place.
But why take the risk — even with the expendable Essex boys?
Unless he was on a time table and he couldn’t postpone regardless of our presence.
From the walkway I spotted that the doors to the lower ground floor had been wedged open, which was a sure-fire sign either that the council had workmen in, that someone was moving out, or burglars were looting a flat. I checked the car park for clues and saw only a white Citroen van with the Southwark Council logo stencilled on its side. But, because it’s good practice, I made a note of its index.
It was dark and cool inside the ground floor foyer. I hit the button for the lift and while I waited I gazed at the not-really-a-tuned-mass-damper that hung down the centre of the tower. Stromberg had designed Skygarden to soak up vestigia from its environment, and if it had done its job then that power had to have gone somewhere. We’d assumed that the whole grandiose scheme had failed because it hadn’t been channelled up and out of the Stadtkrone on the roof. But what if the power had accumulated, but hadn’t been released?
What if it was still stored in the thirty-storey length of plastic hanging over there? I ignored the lift doors as they opened behind me.
Power that could be drained off into the metal plates stacked neatly in the garages that surrounded the tower. The Faceless Man didn’t need the staff technology Nightingale was teaching us — he’d adapted the demon trap technique to create vessels for storing the power — dog batteries.
This was not a real-estate scam, I realised. It was a heist.
I turned to rush up to the flat, but the lift doors had closed now and I had to wait for it to come back down again.
When I let myself into the flat I found that the living room was full of bodies.
The curtains were drawn and the lights were off. In the gloom I could make out at least three people lying on the sofa-bed and another five or so on the floor. They all seemed to be men and, judging from the smell of spilt beer and the layer of crisp packets and takeaway cartons, they were sleeping off a serious night in. I noted the donkey jackets with the high-viz strips and made an educated guess as to who they were.
I slowly pushed open the bedroom door and peered inside. Stromberg had carefully designed the master bedroom to be too narrow for a king-size bed placed across it and, when placed lengthways, to provide a mere fifteen centimetres of clearance between bed and wall. The width of the end wall was taken up with a sliding patio door and the length precisely calculated so that you could have a wardrobe, but only if it blocked access to either the patio or the rest of the flat. It was for such attention to details that Erik Stromberg was once described by the Guardian architectural correspondent as emblematic of modern British architecture at its most iconoclastic.
Zach lay face down on the bed naked except for his bright red underpants and, despite his eating habits, I couldn’t help noticing that he was skinny enough for me to count every vertebra on his back.
Carefully, I crouched down until I could put my lips a couple of centimetres from his ear and shout, ‘Police!’
The results were instructive. Not only did he leap at least a metre upwards, but he was already twisting like a cat so that he came down on all fours with the bed between us.
‘Shit,’ he shouted, and then slapped his hand over his mouth.
‘Why have you filled my living room with Quiet People?’ I whispered.
‘Community outreach,’ whispered Zach. ‘I’m trying to get them used to interacting with the surface world.’
‘You took them on a pub crawl, didn’t you?’
And Zach claimed it had worked, too.
‘One of them ordered a souvlaki up Green Lanes,’ said Zach. We’d retired to the kitchen for coffee and conversation in something close to a normal voice. ‘Brought a tear to my eye, I was that proud.’
‘Why did you bring them here?’
‘It was late. This was the closest.’
‘You got any tea?’ asked a figure in the doorway. He was short and wiry with that bantamweight boxer aura of density and strength. His face was long and pale, his eyes were huge, grey and beautiful. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and resonant but barely louder than a murmur. He looked me up and down and stuck out a hand.
‘Stephen,’ he said. His hand was strong, the skin as rough as sandpaper.
‘Peter,’ I said. ‘We’ve already met — you buried me under a platform at Oxford Circus.’
Stephen shrugged. ‘You needed the rest,’ he said.
‘How was the pub crawl?’ I asked.
‘Mildly successful,’ he said. ‘Better if we could have slept in, but the drilling keeps waking me up.’
Me and Zach listened, but we couldn’t hear anything beyond distant traffic and the kettle coming to a boil.
‘What drilling?’ I asked — thinking about the council contractors downstairs.
Stephen put his hand against the outside wall of the kitchen and closed his eyes. ‘Downstairs, about thirty feet. Half-inch masonry drill bit going six inches into concrete. The good quality stuff,’ said Stephen and rapped the wall with his knuckle. ‘Not this crap.’