Broken Homes

towel.
    ‘Do you want this?’ asked Lesley and dangled the towel in front of him.
    Toby barked once, seized the towel in his jaws and scampered off with his stubby little tail wagging. We all watched him go.
    ‘Do you think Molly trained him to . . .?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m not sure that’s an alliance we want to encourage,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘We should get Dr Walid to look at Richard Dewsbury’s PM report,’ I said, suddenly remembering my visit to DAFT. ‘Just in case it was something other than a heart attack.’
    ‘Aren’t heart attacks a bit subtle for the Faceless Man?’ said Lesley.
    ‘There’s merit in having two forms of attack,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you’re principally known for setting your enemies on fire you could well avoid suspicion by poisoning one instead.’
    ‘And if Varenka—’
    ‘Varvara,’ said Lesley.
    ‘And if Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina,’ I said slowly, ‘did the deed, then maybe heart attacks are her speciality. How hard would it be to give someone a heart attack?’
    ‘With magic?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Not hard as such,’ he said. ‘But complex and laborious. I think I’d have to be in the same room as my target to do it as well. Much better to poison them or to use a glamour to make them poison themselves.’
    ‘What makes it so complicated?’ asked Lesley suddenly leaning forward – eyes fixed on Nightingale.
    ‘The human body resists magic,’ he said. ‘Particularly if you try to make gross physical changes.’
    Lesley unconsciously lifted a hand to her face.
    ‘Stopping somebody’s heart with magic is a fifth- or sixth-order spell, depending on how one attempts it, and even then the results would be less certain than setting the victim’s bones on fire.’
    I thought of the braised corpse of Patrick Mulkern and really wished Nightingale had used another example.
    ‘Abdul has a theory about why,’ said Nightingale. ‘You can ask him next time you see him.’
    Lesley lowered her hand from her face and nodded slowly.
    ‘I think I might just do that,’ she said.
    ‘Richard Dewsbury,’ said Sergeant Daverc. ‘He was one in a million – thank god.’
    Sergeant William Daverc was in his early fifties and had a proper London accent to go with his proper Huguenot name which was properly pronounced D’Averc. He’d been patrolling Southwark since his probation thirty years ago and was a famous pioneer of community policing from back in the days when it was just called ‘policing’.
    ‘Ricky when he was younger,’ said Daverc who’d met me in his team’s office at Walworth nick. ‘Mister Dewsbury as soon as he was middle management – didn’t have a “street” name and that should have been a giveaway right from the start.’
    ‘Violent?’ I asked.
    ‘Not particularly,’ said Daverc. ‘Single minded. He was a tower boy, you understand.’
    Meaning born and raised in the central tower of Skygarden, not the surrounding blocks. Local folklore said that people from the tower never did anything by half, never settled for mediocrity or middle management – not even in the drug trade. The tower had produced a footballer, two pop stars, a stand up comedian, a high court judge, a semi-finalist on Britain’s Got Talent and the most ruthlessly efficient drug baron in south London.
    ‘When he popped his clogs you could hear the dealers giving a sigh of relief from Rotherhithe to Wimbledon,’ said Daverc. ‘Without him it was the usual story – his organisation fell apart, turf wars – the usual aggro. But your lot don’t care about drugs. Do you?’
    I told him that we had reason to believe that there might be activities going on inside the tower that could lead to breaches of the peace of a more esoteric nature.
    ‘Like what?’ asked Daverc, who’d spent too long as an operational copper to be fobbed off with generalities. I tried honesty.
    ‘We have no fucking idea,’ I said. ‘We have a break-in and murder related to the original architect, we have an apparent suicide of a Southwark planning officer who was, in part, responsible for the estate and we have this link to Richard Dewsbury, local resident and pharmaceutical entrepreneur. We were sort of hoping you’d have something.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Anything strange,’ I said.
    ‘The tower’s always been strange,’ he said. ‘Even more so now they’ve closed down the surrounding blocks.’
    ‘I heard about that,’ I said. ‘Are they knocking it