Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

‘You noticed,’ said Varvara Sidorovna turning her head and striking a pose.

‘Do you know why?’ asked Lesley.

Varvara Sidorovna leant forward. ‘I discovered the elixir of youth,’ she said. ‘In an Oxfam shop in Twickenham.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t Help the Aged?’ I asked, about a millisecond before Lesley could — she booted me under the table in revenge.

Varvara Sidorovna waited patiently for us to behave ourselves.

‘Was it something you did to yourself?’ asked Lesley.

‘God, no,’ she said. ‘One day I was getting older and the next day I wasn’t.’

So Nightingale wasn’t the only one, I thought.

‘Can you remember roughly what year it happened?’ I asked.

‘August Bank Holiday 1966,’ she said.

‘That’s a very precise date,’ said Lesley.

‘I have a very clear memory of it happening,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. She’d still been living in the house in Wimbledon and she’d been hanging up washing in her back garden.

‘It was as if someone had opened a door into summer,’ she said. ‘I felt suddenly filled up with’ — she waved her hands around vaguely — ‘honey, sunlight, flowers. When I went to bed I dreamt in Russian for the first time in years. I wanted to go dancing and I wanted to get laid really, really badly. The next day there were thunderstorms.’

‘So you knew you were getting younger?’ asked Lesley.

Varvara Sidorovna laughed. ‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I thought I was having the menopause.’ When it became obvious she wasn’t, she decided to take advantage.

‘I went out dancing and got laid and very, very drunk,’ she said. And then she moved to Notting Hill, experimented with LSD and listened to far too much progressive rock than was good for her. ‘Take my advice and never try casting a spell while listening to Hawkwind,’ she said. ‘Or when you’re on acid.’

‘How were you earning a living?’ asked Lesley.

‘You could drift in those days, there were squats and communes and groovy friends. People were always setting up co-operatives, bands and experimental theatre groups. I worked at Time Out magazine although that might have been later on — there’s a couple of years I’ve lost track of, 1975 in particular.’

‘When did you meet Albert Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked — the original Faceless Man had dropped out of sight in the early 1970s so it was possible they might have met then.

‘Much later,’ she said. ‘That was in 2003.’

Varvara Sidorovna was already firmly back in the demi-monde by that time.

‘You two must know what it’s like by now,’ she said. ‘Once you know it exists it’s always there in the corner of your eye. Plus I wanted to see if it was possible to go home, to Russia.’ She knew that most of her old wartime comrades would be dead, those that hadn’t been killed by the Germans were most likely liquidated by Stalin. She was a little surprised to find that the Nauchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Neobychnyh Yavleniy , the Scientific Research Institute for Unusual Phenomena had been revived and that they even had agents operating in the West.

Me and Lesley nodded sagely as if we knew all about this, while I imagined Nightingale adding the fact to his rather long list of things he should have known about but didn’t.

But SRIUP being active in the Soviet Union could only mean that practitioners were still being tracked, and Varvara Sidorovna had no intention of coming under anyone’s control ever again, not even the motherland’s. So she spent the 1980s and 90s rediscovering her skills and picking up new ones. ‘Here and there,’ she said. ‘You’d be amazed.’

‘And how did you get involved with Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked, because I was beginning to think that Varvara Sidorovna was messing us about.

‘It was a job,’ she said. One not all that different from those she’d been doing since the late 1970s. ‘People like you and I straddle the mundane and the demi-monde. We make excellent middle men and go-betweens,’ she said, but refused to give details.

‘Client confidentiality,’ she said. ‘You understand.’

Obviously she didn’t consider the Faceless Man, mark two, as a client any more because she was quite happy to explain how he’d started employing her for various jobs, most of them dull. ‘Finding people and things in the demi-monde,’ she said and we made a note to track back later and get a list. She was adamant that she’d never met the Faceless Man in person. Everything had been arranged over the phone.

‘I was the one that found old Albert for him,’ she said proudly. ‘Took me six months — he’d been warehoused in a private care home outside Oxford.’ It had been the Faceless Man who arranged the flat in Shakespeare Tower. Varvara Sidorovna took advantage of its location to spend more time at the theatre.

‘And you did that for, what, nine years?’ asked Lesley.

‘Not full time,’ she said. ‘I had a couple of properly trained care nurses to look after the poor soul much of the time, and in the first couple of years he spent most of the day out.’

‘Out where?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘A very quiet young woman used to pick him up in the morning and return him in the afternoon.’

‘Do you know where she took him?’ asked Lesley, and as she did I wrote Pale Lady = no driver = FM near BARBICAN? On my pad where she could see it.

‘I was specifically being paid not to ask questions,’ said Varvara Sidorovna.

She hadn’t known about the demon-trap planted in the flat, but it didn’t surprise her in the least. She’d moved Albert out of the place as soon our visit had finished and she suspected the device had been there as much to keep him under control as it was to catch someone like Nightingale or us.

We asked her about Robert Weil and his body-dumping activities, but she denied any knowledge. Did she know why the Faceless Man might want to shoot a woman in the face with a shotgun?

‘If he wanted to delay identification,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps to cover up work he was doing on her face.’

I felt Lesley stiffen beside me.

‘What kind of work?’ she asked.

‘You’ve met some of his menagerie,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Perhaps he’s looking to create new creatures.’

Officially unofficial the interview might have been, but Varvara Sidorovna wasn’t going to incriminate herself beyond what she thought we already knew. She claimed to know nothing of County Gard and laughed out loud at the idea she might have offed Richard Dewsbury, the drug dealer, by inducing a breakfast heart attack.

‘Not my style, darling,’ she said.

Nor was she forthcoming about what exactly they’d been up to with their dogs at the Essex Farm. When we asked her what she’d been doing there, all she’d tell us was, ‘Tying up loose ends. Imagine my surprise when I found you two poking your nose in.’

I glanced at Lesley and she shrugged. It was obvious to us that the tying up of loose ends, had we not intervened, probably would have proved fatal for Barry, Max and Danny. We questioned her about that, and she asked whether the world would really be worse off without them.

‘Did you know about the wood nymph?’ I asked.

‘What wood nymph?’

‘The one that lived at the base of Skygarden Tower,’ I said.

‘I know a great many things,’ she said. ‘You’d be-’

‘Did you know about Sky?’

I felt Lesley’s hand on my arm, and I realised I’d half risen from my chair. A white Styrofoam coffee cup rolled around on the table between us — fortunately empty. Varvara Sidorovna had flinched back and was giving me a wary look.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’