Broken Homes

asked.
    ‘We’re here to buy some stuff,’ said Lesley.
    ‘Yeah? What kind of stuff?’
    ‘Stuff from the far off land of mind-your-own-business,’ said Lesley.
    ‘Scrap metal,’ I said. ‘Stuff that’s a little bit – you know.’ I wiggled my fingers.
    Lesley gave me a theatrical glare. ‘Have you quite finished broadcasting our business to all and sundry?’ she asked.
    The girl gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Upstairs,’ she said. ‘You want to talk to the gentry.’
    ‘Thanks,’ I said and wondered who the hell the gentry were, and if they were like the Quiet People or the Pale Lady. What was it with this general lack of personal pronouns? I remembered that I’d heard Nightingale referred to as ‘The Nightingale’ and realised that I’d only assumed that was his actual name.
    I followed Lesley, who was having trouble stopping herself from laughing, up the narrow staircase.
    ‘The far off land of mind-your-own-business?’ I whispered.
    ‘I didn’t want to seem too obvious,’ she whispered back.
    ‘No, that wasn’t obvious at all,’ I said.
    We were two thirds of the way up the stairs when the door at the top opened and a woman stepped out onto the landing. She was white, middle aged, with dirty blonde hair cut into a neat business-like bob. She wore an expensive charcoal grey skirt suit of conservative cut and carried a slim burgundy attaché case. Her eyes were a faded blue.
    Recognising faces is a key cop skill, and although she was looking younger and happier than we’d last seen her I remembered her immediately – Varenka Debroslova, probably an alias – former live-in nurse to one Geoffrey Wheatcroft a.k.a. the Faceless Man version one.
    She recognised us at the same time – well, Lesley’s very distinctive – and took an automatic step back. Lesley didn’t hesitate. She lunged up the last couple of steps and I followed her.
    The normal thing to do in Varenka’s situation would be to bolt back up and out the door. But instead she lifted her attaché case in both hands and shoved it into Lesley’s face. As Lesley recoiled backwards into me, Varenka practically launched herself headfirst down the stairs towards us. Lesley was knocked back towards me and I had no choice but to catch her and try and twist us both out of the way as Varenka landed on us. She’d obviously planned to surf down the stairs on top of us, but I wasn’t playing that game. I ducked down over Lesley and let the other woman roll across my back towards a hard landing.
    Or that was the plan, anyway. Unfortunately, the staircase was too narrow and too steep, so we all bumped down it together. Stairs are a killer and we all might have ended up with sundry cracked ribs and broken legs except we were jammed in so tight we went down in slow motion. Even so, my shoulder slammed into a riser hard enough to make my teeth click, somebody’s knee slammed into my back and I definitely smacked my head on the rough plasterboard wall at one point.
    Lesley yelled in fury as we tumbled out onto the landing. In a fight, if you want to be the last man standing it’s important to be the first guy back on your feet. So I levered myself off Varenka’s back and tried to grab her arm. But she had other ideas. She sprang to her feet and used my own grip on her arm to pull me off balance and slam me against the wall. It would have gone much harder on me if Lesley hadn’t grabbed a handful of expensive suit jacket and climbed up Varenka’s back.
    ‘Oi,’ yelled the girl in the pink tracksuit. ‘None of that. It’s Pax bloody Domus here.’ I noticed that she was putting the stress on the wrong syllable. It’s pax-blud-eee DO-mus, I thought, and I might have gone on to mention this except that Varenka put an elbow in my stomach that left me disinclined to discuss the finer points of Latin pronunciation.
    I got my leg out of the way of a kick that would have broken my knee, and felt like it broke my thigh bone instead, and realised that Varenka had not said a single word since she’d met us on the stairs. There was something terrifying about the ferocity and silence with which she fought. I understood suddenly that this was a woman who had done real fighting, against people who’d been trying to kill her. We were just trying to restrain her, but she was trying to maim us – if we didn’t shut her down quick she was going to cut us to pieces.
    Varenka whipped round and sent Lesley staggering across the hallway and into