Broken Homes

there really – isn’t it?’
    ‘Funny,’ I said.
    ‘So Zach introduces me to some suitably dodgy-looking geezers, who I shall write up when I get back to the Folly.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of central London. ‘I did the spiel to them and they said they’d keep an eye out for the materials we wanted.’
    ‘Did they ask what you wanted it for?’ I said.
    ‘First lot didn’t, but then this woman sidles over and says she couldn’t help overhearing, blah blah blah. “What on earth could you want all that for?” That’s how she spoke. “You simply must tell me what you’re planning.”’
    So Lesley refused to give any details, while dropping enough hints to make it clear that we were making our own staffs.
    ‘Did you find out anything about her?’
    ‘It’s all in my notebook,’ said Lesley. ‘Said she was an artist. Made batik prints and flogged them up Camden Lock.’
    Where our Night Witch had gone to ground. Coincidence?
    ‘After that we all got hammered. And me and Zach . . .’ She frowned. ‘And some friends, crashed out in a portacabin on the Crossrail site.’
    ‘How did you get in there?’
    ‘Oh Zach’s all over Crossrail now,’ she said. ‘What with him being semi-official liaison between the project and the Quiet People.’ Without whose tunnelling expertise, I learned, Crossrail would have been behind schedule. ‘He must be making some serious money.’
    ‘Not enough to get his own place, though.’
    ‘I don’t think he can, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘I think he has something missing that means he literally can’t settle down. If you put him in a mansion, with servants and a swimming pool, he still wouldn’t be able to sleep there more than a couple of nights.’ She rubbed irritably at the ridge of skin that ran down between her eyes. ‘I think it’s part of what makes Zach Zach. I think they’re all like that you know? Not quite all there.’
    Which was when we received Nightingale’s text.
    He met us in a Colombian café tucked under one of the arches by the Elephant and Castle National Rail station. It had orange walls hung with bundles of wickerwork baskets and shelves crowded with mysterious bottles with red labels. Half the food counter was devoted to hard-to-get treats for the homesick expatriate – La Gitana Tostados and Wafers Noel . The menu was bilingual and I had the arepa con carne adada which was translated on the menu as corn bread with grilled beef. Lesley had a ham omelette on the basis that it was almost impossible to mess a ham omelette up.
    Nightingale said the coffee was good, so I ordered a double espresso with a cappuccino chaser.
    Nightingale put down his free copy of Express News as we joined him at his table.
    ‘Dr Walid has made a disturbing breakthrough in the Robert Weil case,’ he said. ‘He’s discovered evidence of chimeric cells on the body of the woman Weil dumped.’
    ‘Shit,’ said Lesley. ‘So the Faceless Man was involved in that as well.’
    ‘A chimera of what crossed with what?’ I asked. Because, having gone mano-a-mano-tiger with one of the Faceless Man’s creations, I really wanted to know what it was going to be this time.
    ‘Abdul said you would ask. But he didn’t have enough of a sample to determine that,’ said Nightingale. Despite the shotgun to the victim’s face, Dr Walid had managed to extract tissue cells that had been driven into the eye sockets by the blast. It had taken this long to get them sequenced.
    ‘It’s not like Old Faceless to make a mistake like that,’ said Lesley. ‘He’s always been very forensically aware.’
    ‘He’s just another criminal, Lesley,’ said Nightingale. ‘His training makes him personally dangerous but it doesn’t make him invincible. And he’s not Professor Moriarty – he doesn’t have a plan for every contingency. He made a mistake with Peter in Soho and almost got himself caught.’
    Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.
    ‘Robert Weil was clearly an associate of some kind,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Shouldn’t we pass that on to Sussex Major Crimes?’ I asked.
    ‘They won’t thank us,’ said Lesley. ‘They have their victim and they easily have enough to send Robert Weil up the steps for it. As far as they’re concerned it’s a result, and they’re not going to be interested in widening it out.’
    ‘I’m going to call Sussex this morning and after that Bromley,’ said