Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

This got my hopes up. If it was his own car, then it was just a simple matter of getting another IIP check which would include the DVLA database and I’d have his name, DOB and the registered address courtesy of the National Insurance Database. Proving that Big Brother does have his uses after all.

Shit — I couldn’t see the index. Even when it pulled out, the Mondeo was at too oblique an angle, and the image too low quality for me to identify the number plate. I ran it back and forth a couple of times but it didn’t get any clearer. I was going to have to persuade Westminster Council to release some of their traffic cam footage and see if I could pick up the Mondeo when it turned into Charing Cross Road.

And I wasn’t going to get that this side of six o’clock, because another problem with the so-called surveillance state is that it mostly works office hours.

I had another Red Stripe and went to bed.

After breakfast and Toby walking duty it was back to the tech cave and my continuing search for a clear shot of the book thief’s car number plate. I was just about to take a deep breath and start wading through the swampy hinterland of Westminster Council’s bureaucratic interface when it suddenly occurred to me to that I’d overlooked an easier option. Pulling up the footage from St Martin’s Lane, I clicked it back to watch the Mondeo being parked in the first place. My book thief wasn’t a brilliant parker and the second time he adjusted his angle I got a good view of his plate.

One IIP query later and I had his name — Patrick Mulkern. His face matched the CCTV and his police record matched the profile of a professional safe-cracker. A good and careful one too, judging by the lack of convictions in the later half his career. Tons of interest, as in ‘person of interest’ and a few arrests, but no convictions. According to the appended intelligence notes Mulkern was a specialist hired by individuals or crews to crack any troublesome safes they might come across in the course their work. He even had a legitimate locksmith business, Bromley address I noted, which made doing him for ‘going equipped’ a bit tricky since he used the same tools for both jobs. The notes also suggested that he’d recently ‘retired’ from safecracking if not from the locksmithing.

His last known home address matched both the one on his driving licence and his registered business address — I decided to give him a tug.

It was raining again and it took me about as long to drive across the river and down to the London Borough of Bromley as it had taken me to drive to Brighton the month before. A big chunk of the time was spent negotiating the Elephant and Castle traffic system and crawling down the Old Kent Road.

Once you’re south of Grove Park the Victorian bones of the city dwindle and you find yourself in the low-rise mock-Tudor land of London’s last big suburban expansion. Places like Bromley are not what people like me and my dad think of as London but the outer boroughs are like in-laws — like it or not, you’re stuck with them.

Patrick Mulkern’s address was a weird mutant hybrid that looked like the developer had got bored of building mock-Tudor semis and had rammed two together to create a mini-terrace of four houses. Like most of the homes on the street, its generous front garden had been paved over to provide more parking space and an increased flood risk.

An off-white Ford Mondeo was parked outside, glistening in the rain, I checked the index — it matched the ones from the CCTV. Not only was it a Mark 2 but it had the wimpy 1.6 Zetec engine as well. Whatever the wages of crime were Mulkern certainly wasn’t spending it on his wheels.

I sat outside with the engine off for five minutes and watched the house. It was a gloomy day but there were no lights visible through the windows and nobody twitched the net curtains to check me out. I stepped out of the car and walked as fast as I could into the porch shelter. At some point the house had acquired a thick coating of a vicious flint pebble dash that almost had the skin off my palm when I rested my hand on it.

I rang the doorbell and waited.

Through the frosted panes either side of the door I could see a spray of rectangular white and brown smudges on the hallway floor — neglected post. Two, maybe three days’ worth judging by the amount. I rang and kept my finger on the bell way beyond polite but still nothing.

I considered going back to my car and waiting. I had my Georgics by Virgil to plough through and a restocked stake-out bag that I was fairly certain didn’t contain any of Molly’s scary culinary surprises, but as I turned away my fingertips brushed the lock and I felt something.

Nightingale once described vestigia to me as being like the afterimage left on your eyes in the wake of a bright light. What I got off the lock was like the aftermath of a photoflash. And embedded in it, something hard and sharp and dangerous like the strop of a razor on a whetstone.

Nightingale, by virtue of his vast experience, claims to be able to identify the caster of an individual spell by their signare — that’s signature in proper English. I’d thought he was having me on, but just recently I’d started to think I could sense his. And the signare off the door zapped me back to a Soho roof top and a fucker with a posh accent, no face and a keen non-academic interest in criminal sociopathy.

I checked the living-room windows — nobody was there. Ghostly, through the net curtains, the looming furniture was old-fashioned but neatly kept and the TV looked twenty years old.

What with the book not being actually reported stolen, I wasn’t going to get a search warrant. If I broke in I’d have to rely on good old Section 17(1)(e) of the Police And Criminal Evidence Act (1984) which clearly states that an officer may enter a premises in order to save ‘life and limb’ which doesn’t even really require you to hear anything suspicious. This is because not even the most hardened member of Liberty wants the police to be dithering around outside their door while they’re being strangled inside.

And if I broke in and the Faceless Man was still in there?

I’m not as practised as Nightingale, but I was almost totally sure that the vestigia on the lock had been laid down more than twenty-four hours earlier and that the Faceless Man was long gone.

Almost totally sure.

I’d only survived our last encounter because he’d underestimated me and the cavalry had turned up in the nick of time. I didn’t think he would underestimate me again and the cavalry was currently the other side of the river.

Not that a Sprinter van full of TSG would make much difference. Nightingale had been certain that only he could take the Faceless Man in a fair fight. ‘Not that I have any intention of offering him such a thing,’ Nightingale had said.

But I couldn’t wheel out Nightingale every time I wanted to enter a suspect house, otherwise what was the point of me? And I couldn’t hang around outside until one of the neighbours got suspicious enough to dial 999.

So I decided to make a forced entry. But just to be on the safe side I’d phone Lesley to let her know where I was and what I was doing.

This is what we in the job call ‘making a risk assessment’.

Her phone went straight to voicemail so I left a message. Then I turned off my phone, checked no one was watching, and blew the Chubb out of the door with a fireball. Nightingale’s got a spell that pops out a lock much neater, but I have to go with what I’ve got.

I waited for a moment in the doorway — listening.

Ahead of me stairs went up, to the right open doors led to the living room, another door at the rear of the house and beyond the bead curtain at the far end, I assumed, the kitchen.