Broken Homes

Then she flicked her dreads over her shoulder and drove away.
    When she was safely out of sight I called Lesley.
    ‘I think it’s time we checked the basement,’ I said. ‘Bring the bag with you.’
    Lesley met me and Toby in the lift foyer of the lower ground floor. I took a moment to tell her about Sky the wood nymph. She seemed to find Beverley’s appearance amusing.
    ‘And she just happened to be there, didn’t she?’ she said. ‘Total coincidence.’
    We had two grey metal doors to choose from, one on either side of the entrance.
    ‘Which one?’ asked Lesley and she dumped the black nylon carry bag at my feet.
    ‘Either,’ I said. ‘It’s a circular plan – we should be able to work our way round.’
    Lesley chose a door at random and used the skeleton key that Sergeant Daverc had provided to open it up. She quickly found the light switch and stepped inside, so I grabbed the bag and followed. After a moment’s hesitation, Toby followed me.
    Inside, the room smelt of breezeblocks and moist cement. A row of metal lockers lined the exterior and interior walls. A door at the far end was marked with a yellow ‘Danger Electricity’ triangle. I figured the wet cement smell came from what looked like recent work on the floor, visible as a darker-coloured strip running across the room. I opened the bag and me and Lesley took a couple of minutes to tool up.
    ‘Feel anything?’ asked Lesley as I slipped on my Metvest, the undercover beige version without pockets that theoretically fits under your jacket.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said.
    ‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘Do you think that’s normal?’
    ‘Too early to tell,’ I said.
    Once we had our Metvests on under our jackets we turned off our main phones and fired up a pair of airwave handsets that, while actually more expensive than our phones, were provided out of the police budget and thus expendable. These went on our tactical belts on which we also hung extendable batons, cuffs and pepper spray – but alas no taser yet.
    ‘They’re probably waiting for one of us to get freeze dried,’ said Lesley, whose attitude towards taser deployment was that people with heart conditions, epilepsy and an aversion to electrocution should not embark upon breaches of the peace in the first place.
    Once we were kitted up, all we were missing was a motion tracker – the kind that makes sinister pinging noises. Instead we had to make do with Toby. Given the electrocution warnings, I picked him up as Lesley used the skeleton key on the next door.
    ‘I want a nice clean dispersal this time,’ I said, and in we went.
    The trick to spotting vestigia , or any of the other weird sensory impressions you get hanging around magic or magical folks, is separating them from all the memories, daydreams and randomly misfiring neurones that is the background noise of your brain. You start by spotting things that couldn’t possibly be related to your current situation – as when you think of a barking dog while examining a man with his head knocked off. Your teacher reinforces your perception by confirming when you’re right. The more you practise, the better you get. And it’s not long before you ask the question – is this what causes schizophrenia?
    Well, if you’re me you ask that question. It never seemed to have occurred to Nightingale at all.
    When I raised it with Dr Walid he said one test would be for me to take anti-psychotic drugs and see if the vestigia went away. I declined, but I’m not sure whether I was more worried that it might work than that it might not.
    There’s a sort of background level of vestigia which I’ve come to expect pretty much everywhere in London. It falls away noticeably in the countryside, but you can get some very strong hot spots and what Nightingale calls lacunae – the remnants of recent magic. Because where you find high levels of vestigia , you generally also find the weird shit that the Folly is supposed to deal with. So me and Lesley have got into the habit of checking any new scene before we do anything else. This procedure, were we more integrated into the Met proper, would be called an Initial Vestigia Assessment or IVA pronounced i-VAH as in – I knew that Gandalf was a villain as soon I’d finished my IVA.
    As far as I can tell, vestigia build up over time. So modern buildings like Skygarden tend to exhibit low background levels.
    The next room was the building’s power incomer, its electrical substation, recently