Broken Homes

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