Broken Homes

foolishly agreed to have Dr Walid do the job, she couldn’t complain that he’d dragged her all the way across the river to Westminster Mortuary on Horseferry Road. But Duffy’s loss was mine and Lesley’s gain, as this was the famous Iain West Memorial Forensic Suite which boasted state of the art facilities, including a remote viewing suite. Here your sensible junior officers could drink coffee and watch the procedure via CCTV, while their elders and betters got up close and personal with the corpse. Also, unless said junior officers were stupid enough to flip the switch on their end of the intercom, their seniors couldn’t hear them.
    ‘Why the fuck would he do that?’ asked Lesley once I’d told her my suspicion that Erik Stromberg had combined magic and architecture.
    I told her that architects in those days truly believed they could make people better through architecture.
    ‘Make people better what?’
    ‘Better people,’ I said. ‘Better citizens.’
    ‘They didn’t do a very good job did they?’ said Lesley who, like me, had lived in her fair share of council housing growing up.
    On the TV screen DCI Duffy, in green apron, face mask and eye protectors leant over the body of Patrick Mulkern to look more closely at whatever grisly detail Dr Walid thought was important.
    ‘Burnt from the inside out,’ said Duffy. Her voice sounded strangely nasal due, Lesley reckoned, to the sensible application of Vicks VapoRub underneath the nostrils. She turned to look off-screen. ‘Could you do that?’
    Nightingale stepped into view of the camera.
    ‘I can’t answer that until we know what exactly was done,’ he sounded like he was avoiding breathing through his nose altogether. ‘But probably not.’
    ‘But you don’t think it was natural?’ asked Duffy.
    ‘Duh,’ said Lesley.
    We heard Dr Walid say that he seriously doubted that it was natural. Duffy nodded. She seemed to accept things more easily from a fellow Scot than from Nightingale, so he was sensibly letting Dr Walid do most of the talking.
    ‘Keep an eye on the door,’ said Lesley and slipped her mask off.
    There were fresh suture marks on her neck where they’d worked on her throat and the skin around them looked inflamed. She fetched out a small tub of ointment from her shoulder bag and started spreading it over her neck and jaw.
    Her face was still a shock. I’d managed to teach myself not to flinch, but I was scared that I was never going to get used to it.
    ‘Patrick Mulkern steals a magic book from the house of noted mad architect Erik Stromberg whose greatest work was Skygarden Towers in Southwark,’ I said. ‘In that very borough’s planning department worked Richard Lewis. Have you watched Jaget’s edited highlights yet?’
    ‘He has way too much time on his hands,’ she said and rubbed cream into the twisted pink stub that was all that was left of her nose.
    ‘So our planner, who suddenly jumps in front of a train for no reason, turns out to be on the Little Crocodile list,’ I said. ‘And then Patrick Mulkern turns up magically barbecued.’
    ‘You don’t know it was magic,’ said Lesley and replaced her mask.
    ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Magical, brutal and a really unpleasant way to die – that’s the Faceless Man. It’s practically his signature tune.’
    ‘It’s not subtle,’ said Lesley. ‘Now that he knows we’re after him, you’d think he’d be a bit more subtle.’
    ‘He built himself a man-tiger,’ I said. ‘How subtle do you think he is? Maybe he’s not as smart as you reckon.’
    ‘That,’ said Lesley, ‘or he doesn’t really rate us a threat.’
    ‘That’s a mistake,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’
    Lesley glanced back at the screen where Dr Walid was extracting a long blackened bone from Patrick Mulkern’s thigh.
    ‘You can see from the charring,’ he said, ‘that the bone itself seems to have caught fire.’
    ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley looking back at me. ‘He’s making a big mistake.’

7
Imperial Yellow
    T here’s a manual the size of an old-fashioned telephone book about policing large public events, but Nightingale told me to put it away. He said that given the special nature of the participants, the fewer actual police on the ground the better.
    ‘You don’t need to concern yourself with breaches of the peace inside the bounds of the Court,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘You don’t think there’s going to be any trouble, then?’
    ‘Think of it as being like a