Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

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.’

Zach handed him a mug of tea.

My tea, I thought, that I bought from all the way down the road. But, given we’d left Zach in the flat for two days, I was probably lucky there was anything left at all. Which reminded me.

‘Where’s Toby?’

Toby was down in the deconstructed children’s playground frolicking amongst the fallen cherry blossom which lay everywhere like old snow. There was nobody in sight, so I floated a couple of water balls around for him to chase and thought about how it really was past time that the Faceless Man went away. Up the steps or down the mortuary, I really didn’t care which.

‘He’s just another criminal,’ Nightingale had said. ‘He doesn’t have a plan for every contingency.’

He didn’t reckon on us finding the book, I thought, or connecting it with Skygarden. Or turning up just as his plans, whatever they are, were getting under way. He panicked — hence the attack on the garden and then getting Varvara Sidorovna to clean up the evidence. If we push him again, we can keep him off balance. But where to push?

He wears a mask and he moves in the shadows, but he still has to act in the mundane world. Somebody had to load those garages with dog batteries, a somebody who then sealed them up behind shiny steel doors with a neat logo stencilled on the front — everyone’s favourite full service lackey of capitalism — County Gard.

I could have contacted Bromley MIT and seen whether they’d done an Integrated Intelligence Platform check on the company yet. But I really didn’t want to aggravate them any more than I already had, so I went to the next best thing.

‘Why do you want to know?’ asked Jake Phillips as he warily eyed Toby sniffing the base of his palm tree.

‘I thought I’d pay County Gard a visit,’ I said.

‘In what capacity?’ he asked and for a moment I thought he’d twigged I was police.

‘As a committed blogtavist,’ I said. ‘Ready to harness the might of social media in the service of a brave new world. I want to save this place.’

‘You’ve only been here a week,’ he said.

‘But what,’ I said and waved my hand at his garden in the sky, ‘if all the balconies were fixed like this, this place would be like the hanging gardens of Babylon — this could be a wonder of the world.’

A lifetime of disappointment had made him cynical, but you don’t stay an activist without a core of stubborn belief that things can get better — it’s a bit like being a Spurs supporter really.

‘You think so?’ he asked.

‘I think it’s worth fighting for,’ I said and realised even as I said it that I was telling the truth.

So, humming the Internationale under his breath, Jake led me to his spare room stroke office where he had genuine grey metal filing cabinets — saved from a skip in 1996 he said. He pulled a fat manila folder from a middle drawer and found the information. Just in time I remembered to ask him for scrap paper rather than pulling my notebook out, and wrote down the details.

I trotted down the four flights to our floor and entered the flat to find Lesley arguing with Zach. It was one of those low-key arguments where one party hasn’t twigged that the other party’s mind is completely made up.

‘You can’t stay here,’ said Lesley. Then she saw me and cruelly dragged me into it. ‘Can he, Peter?’

‘If it’s about all the food, I can totally go shopping,’ he said.

In the living room Stephen and the rest of the Quiet People were standing around with the embarrassed air of people who were more than ready to move on before the crockery started flying.

‘We’re running an operation here,’ said Lesley. ‘This is work and you’re a distraction — sorry.’

Zach looked at me for confirmation and I nodded — because you always back your partner up. He sighed and, after a bit of furtive kissing, which I went into the bathroom to avoid, Zach and his cohort of underground denizens left.

‘One less set of people to worry about,’ she said quietly and then, louder, to me, ‘Are we going to stay here or pack it in?’

‘Neither,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d go and cause a bit of trouble.’

County Gard and its sister companies County Watch, County Finance Management (‘You Can Count On Us’) and County System Co. were all located in a place off Scrutton Street in Shoreditch. They resided in rented offices in a converted nineteenth-century warehouse with blue plaster rustication around its main gate. It was the sort of place you’d expect to find a software start-up or TV production company that had fallen out of favour — not a full service property management company. Especially one that had a fleet of liveried vehicles. There was definitely no parking around Scrutton Street, as we found when we looked for somewhere to put our brand new wheels — well, not brand new, but at least not a silver Astra. Another Ford Asbo with 2010 plates and a painfully high number on the clock, but obviously loved by someone because it was still sweet to drive. Sadly, it wasn’t orange but a rather serviceable dark blue which at least meant it wouldn’t stand out so much on an obbo.