Broken Homes

modernised judging by the clean and compact grey boxes that lined one wall. The lighting was good, all the better to see the many warning symbols – particularly the one which showed a body lying on the ground with a stylised lightning bolt in its chest.
    ‘Danger of death,’ read Lesley.
    ‘Moving on,’ I said.
    The next door put us in what I recognised as the base of the northern fire exit, and unlike everything else in the estate it was well designed. Fleeing residents were neatly channelled off the bottom flight of stairs and out through a pair of double fire doors.
    ‘What’s that smell?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘Old urine,’ I said. ‘And bleach.’ Almost from day one people would have used the stairwell as a convenient spot for a crafty slash and every two to three years the council would have brought in high pressure hoses and scrubbed it down.
    ‘Animals,’ said Lesley.
    ‘I think the dogs did it outside,’ I said. ‘It’s odd that the doors are securely closed.’
    ‘They’re alarmed,’ said Lesley pointing to a set of sensors at the top of the doors.
    ‘This block is on the council shit list,’ I said. ‘The response to repeated abuse would be to shut the alarms off permanently. The doors should be propped open with bricks and there should be needles and condoms all over the floor.’
    ‘Mysterious, yes,’ said Lesley and then nodded at Toby who was yawning. ‘Magical, no. Next door.’
    We found the stairs down in the next room. As far as I could tell, we’d been working our way around the circumference on the lower ground floor and were now opposite the main entrance foyer. The breezeblock walls were bare but there had been work done on the floor here too – a strip of freshly laid cement running from the interior wall to the outer. A new damp course? I wondered.
    A wide staircase descended to a familiarly shiny door with a County Gard logo and not one but two serious-looking padlocks in addition to the door’s own lock. All three were resistant to the skeleton key.
    ‘That’s a health and safety violation,’ I said. ‘We’ve got the same key as the Fire Brigade.’
    ‘What’s behind the door, do you think?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘The base of the central shaft for one thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like to find out what the fuck Stromberg was thinking of when he built it.’
    ‘We could burn the locks off,’ said Lesley.
    ‘Subtle. I like it.’
    ‘Nah, you’re right,’ said Lesley. ‘We can get Frank to ask County Gard to provide keys.’
    Frank Caffrey, as an official fire investigator, could just demand access. After Southwark got pasted for the six fire deaths at Lakanal House neither they nor their contractors were going to mess with the Fire Brigade. I wished I’d thought of that.
    ‘Let’s finish the rest of this floor,’ said Lesley, and that’s what we did. We worked our way through the southern emergency exit, as suspiciously unsoiled as the northern one, the water incomer and another room with lockers. Apart from the now familiar fresh cement on the floor they were resolutely uninteresting. Toby didn’t so much as growl which was, if anything, said Lesley, a sign of even less than background magic.
    Our IVA completed, we put our kit back in the bag and let ourselves out into the foyer.
    ‘Well, that was rewarding,’ said Lesley as we rode up in the lift.
    ‘I don’t think this place was built for people,’ I said.
    ‘You say that about all modern architecture,’ said Lesley. ‘You want us all to live in pyramids.’
    ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘did you know the Egyptians invented the terrace?’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘They did sleep on the roof in the summer though.’
    ‘That must have been nice,’ said Lesley.
    ‘I think Stromberg built this place as a magical experiment,’ I said.
    The lift door opened and we stepped out.
    ‘Why do you think that?’
    ‘How many estates do you know that have wood nymphs living in the middle?’ I asked.
    ‘I don’t know, Peter,’ said Lesley with a sigh. ‘Maybe all of them do. Certainly everywhere we go we seem to be tripping over these supernatural buggers.’ She stopped suddenly outside our door and pointed at the door jamb – the slip of paper we’d agreed to leave wedged into it was missing. I unzipped the bag and extracted our batons and passed Lesley hers. They made comforting little shink sounds as we flicked them open.
    Lesley turned the key in the lock as quietly as she could, and nodded down