Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

In the end we wedged totally illegally onto the pavement and hoped we wouldn’t be there long enough to get a ticket.

We showed our warrant cards at the building reception desk and asked for directions. After one flight of steps and a slight mistake where we went left instead of right, we found ourselves outside a plain grey reinforced metal door with the County Gard logo printed on a piece of A4 paper which was attached to the door with Sellotape. I tried the handle — it was locked. I knocked on the door, we waited, but there was no answer.

I checked my watch. It was three o’clock in the afternoon — no office closes that early. I put my ear to the door and listened.

‘There’s nobody in there,’ I said, but even as I said it I heard a hoover starting up. I banged the door hard with the flat of my hand and yelled ‘Police — open up.’ I listened again and heard the hoover turn off. It seemed to take a long time for the door to open.

When it did, we found ourselves face to face with the tallest Somali woman I’ve ever met. Mid thirties, I thought, and a good ten centimetres taller than I was, with a grave calm face and sad brown eyes. She wore a blue polyester cleaner’s coat which fit her like a waistcoat and her hijab was an expensive purple silk one.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ Her accent was Somali but her English was smooth enough that I figured she’d learnt it as part of an expensive education back in Africa.

I showed my warrant card and explained that we were investigating County Gard.

‘That has nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘I’m employed by Fontaine Office Services.’

Lesley slipped past us to check the office.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘About eleven years,’ she said. ‘I have a passport.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘How long have you been in this particular office today?’

‘Oh,’ she brightened. ‘I just got in.’

‘Do you know where all the people are?’

‘I thought it might be a company holiday.’

‘Peter,’ called Lesley urgently. ‘Come and have a look at this.’

It was your standard open-plan office laid out with cubicles for the ants and glass box meeting-rooms for the grasshoppers. It looked like every working office I’ve ever seen, including the outside inquiry office of a Major Investigation Team — papers, coffee mugs, post-it notes, telephones, lamps, occasional human touches — photographs and the like.

‘What am I looking at?’ I asked.

‘What’s missing?’ asked Lesley.

Then I saw it. Every cubicle desk had its bog standard flat screen monitor and cheap keyboard, but the main columns were missing. Paperwork was still piled up in in-trays, desk calendars were still pinned to the beige fabric-covered partition walls and one worker seemed to be deliberately trying to create the Olympic symbol using coffee rings, but there wasn’t a single operating hard-drive in the office.

I walked back to the cleaning lady and asked whether she’d been in the day before and whether the office had been staffed.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It was very busy yesterday. It was hard to get my work done.’

I reassured her a bit, took her name, Awa Shambir, and her details and told her that she might as well move onto her next job since I didn’t think this particular office was going to re-open.

‘Friend of your mum’s?’ asked Lesley as we watched the lady neatly stow her cleaning gear and collect her personal things.

‘Don’t think so,’ I said. My mum doesn’t know every cleaner in London, just the Sierra Leoneans, most of the Nigerians and that Bulgarian contingent she’s been working with in King’s Cross. ‘Remind me to run her name when we get a moment.’

‘If you’re suspicious, we should stop her now,’ said Lesley.

She’d handled her gear like a professional, but I don’t know any cleaners who’d go to work in an expensive hijab like she’d been wearing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We need to get back to the tower. This is his legitimate front organisation. If he’s shut it down it means he either doesn’t need it any more or after today it might be a security risk.’

‘Hence all the missing computers,’ said Lesley.

‘Whatever he’s planning, I think he’s doing it today or tonight.’

I felt weirdly panicky all the way back across the river, and through the vile traffic around Elephant and Castle. But I couldn’t work out why.

‘Somebody tried to kill us a couple of days ago,’ said Lesley when I mentioned it. ‘I’m amazed we’re not on psychiatric medical leave.’

‘That which does not kill us,’ I said, ‘has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.’

Lesley said she was glad to hear it but she was putting more reliance on the fact that we’d been authorised to deploy with tasers in any Falcon operation. She’d picked them up from the Folly on her way back.

Lesley had also called Nightingale, who was still stuck in Essex guarding Varvara Sidorovna, and he said he’d talk to DCI Duffy. Bromley MIT could follow up on the office.

The council work vans were still in the car park when we got back.

‘You keep an eye on them while I get the go bag,’ I said.

‘Are you expecting trouble?’ asked Lesley.

‘Just want to be on the safe side,’ I said. I wanted my Metvest, if only for the psychological comfort. See, I thought as I waited for the lift, someone tries to kill you and suddenly you’re all cautious.

Emma Wall, looking very cheerful for once, stepped out of the lift when the doors opened — she practically jumped when she saw me.

‘Hello, Peter,’ she said. ‘I’m just going out to the shops. Do you want anything? I can pick you something up. Where’s Lesley?’

‘Outside,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ said Emma. ‘See you.’ And half ran out of the door, without waiting for a reply to her shopping offer.

Definitely drugs, I thought as I rode up in the lift. That’s what brung our fallen princess low — definitely drugs.

Toby started barking as soon as he heard the key in the lock and stayed barking as I suddenly paused before unlocking. Emma’s flat had been sealed with one of County Gard’s shiny steel doors. Could she have left or been evicted? But she’d said that she was just going out to the shops. And that was fast work for a company whose office was currently empty.

I finished opening the door and ignored Toby as he bounced eagerly around my legs. I grabbed the go bag and took it back out onto the landing where Toby did his best to climb inside. I pulled out my mobile and speed-dialled Lesley.

‘Is Emma with you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘She’s gone to the shops.’

‘If you see her, grab her and don’t let those vans leave before I get down there.’

Lesley said she thought I was becoming unhinged, but she agreed to park the new Asbo across the culvert so they couldn’t escape.

Your Metvest comes in two bits, the knife- and bullet-resistant panels and a tough fabric sheath — the vest bit. The plain sheath was for plain clothes, but this time I wanted my multi-pocketed and comforting blue uniform vest with POLICE on the back in fluorescent letters. Once I’d distributed my kit about my person, I walked over to the newly installed County Gard security door and, pausing only to turn my phone off, blew the lock out with a fireball.

Then I had to wait about two minutes for the metal to cool off, which made me wonder whether I could get Varvara Sidorovna to teach me the formae for that freeze-ray she kept flinging at me.

Finally I used the end of my baton to prise the door open and, keeping the baton extended and ready, I stepped inside the flat. If she’d really moved out or been evicted then she certainly believed in travelling light. The flat was dirty in the way I remembered from the last time I lived with a bunch of male coppers, not squalid but unkempt with dirt accumulating in the corners. My mum wouldn’t have tolerated it. In the bedroom, underwear hung halfway out of drawers, the duvet was rumpled and the pillows had fallen on the floor. The living room was nasty with a filled ashtray acting as a centrepiece for a stained coffee table — no obvious signs of paraphernalia, I noticed.