Broken Homes

asked.
    ‘In the meantime, let’s see if we can’t bowl over Varenka before she has a chance to go to ground,’ said Nightingale.
    Criminals, even professional ones, are not spies. They might be cautious but they don’t practise what professional agents call ‘tradecraft’, especially when they’re off the clock. Case in point, Varenka’s Audi which was registered to one Varvara Tamonina aged sixty-two – that got a snort of derision from Lesley – but the picture matched the face we’d seen briefly trying to kill us that morning. The licence gave us an address in Wimbledon but when Nightingale and Lesley went knocking with a warrant there was no sign that Varenka, or Varvara Tamonina, had lived there in years. Then they started a bit of door to door on her neighbours, because you never know what you might find.
    Meanwhile I got stuck compiling the intelligence report which consisted of me wading through a ton of IIP responses and seeing if Ms Varvara Tamonina’s vehicle had popped up in relation to another inquiry. This led me to DAFT, Southwark’s Drugs and Firearm Team and winner of the mostly badly thought out acronym award three years running, who’d spotted the car while running surveillance on a drug network in Elephant and Castle. I checked with them to see if they’d followed up and found that the inquiry had wound down shortly afterwards.
    ‘The principal suspect dropped dead,’ said a helpful DC.
    ‘Suspiciously?’
    ‘Nope,’ said the DC. ‘Died of a heart attack.’
    Aged twenty-six, most likely a congenital heart defect that had gone undetected until one day he went face down in his breakfast cereal.
    ‘Couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer guy,’ said the DC.
    His name had been Richard Dewsbury and he’d been heavily involved in the drug trade around Elephant and Castle since his fifteenth birthday. Suspected of running most of it for at least five years before keeling over at his mum’s kitchen table.
    ‘And guess where his mum’s kitchen table was?’ I asked.
    ‘Skygarden,’ said Lesley.
    I was briefing Nightingale and Lesley over coffee in the atrium – still pretty much the warmest bit of the Folly. It had actually snowed a couple of days after the Spring Court and, despite one sunny day, the weather had stayed unseasonably cold.
    ‘The very same,’ I said.
    Lesley had taken off her mask and I saw that patches of skin on her face were so white with cold as to be almost blue. Dr Walid had warned that the reduced circulation in the damaged skin around her mouth and cheeks could make them susceptible to chilblains and/or tissue necrosis – which is exactly as horrible as it sounds.
    ‘If we combine that with the architect and the unfortunate planner, it would seem that all roads lead to Elephant and Castle,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Circumstantially,’ said Lesley.
    Molly glided over with a folded towel resting on a tray and offered it to Lesley. The towel was sky blue, fluffy and steaming gently. Lesley thanked Molly, tested the temperature with the back of her hand and then draped it over her face with a contented sigh.
    Molly looked at Nightingale and tilted her head.
    ‘That will be all,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
    Molly drifted away silently towards the back stairs.
    ‘God, that feels good,’ said Lesley, her voice muffled under the thickness of the towel.
    ‘Circumstantial but enough that I believe we should take a closer look,’ said Nightingale, getting back to Elephant and Castle.
    ‘We could talk to the local Safer Neighbourhood team,’ I said.
    Lesley mumbled something under the towel.
    ‘What?’ I asked.
    She lifted the towel off her mouth long enough to say, ‘That’s the East Walworth team. They work out of Walworth nick.’
    ‘Peter can go down and see them tomorrow,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley, you can stay in the warm and check whether our Russian friend has emerged onto the radar anywhere else. Meanwhile I’ll see if any of my contacts at the Foreign Office are still alive.’
    There was a skittering sound from the back stairs and then Toby burst into the atrium and scampered towards us, his claws clicking on the marble floor. When he reached our table he snuffled around our chairs before stopping beside Lesley’s and barking twice. Then he sat on his haunches and looked up expectantly. When she offered him a biscuit, he ignored it and instead swung his snout until it pointed at where she’d put the discarded the face