Broken Homes

Kevin’s cache of dodgy goods and wondered if this might be similar. Not everything had to do with the mystical forces of evil – totally ordinary crime could be going on at the same time.
    Toby sneezed. The vans finished unloading and drove away and we went up to the flat to dry off. Toby got dinner and I got back to my Pliny.
    I woke up to the sound of rain driving horizontally against the window panes and no sign of Lesley. Since I was awake I got up and spent the morning accidentally running into the off-duty Goth and the man in a tweed jacket that I’d pegged as possible inside men for the Faceless Man. Goth boy was simple enough – I just stepped into the lift and struck up a conversation. It’s amazing how easy it is to get white boys to talk to you when you share a lift. By the time we hit the ground floor I knew his name, flat number and more of his life story than I really wanted; Lionel Roberts, a flat two floors down from us and a wannabe poet currently working as security in Hannibal House – the office block built on top of Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Tweed jacket man had a ten-year-old daughter who Toby quickly had eating out of his hand, or more precisely vice versa. Her name was Anthonia Beswick and his name was Anthony and he was currently unemployed, but optimistic that the recession wouldn’t last for ever. He said it was wife’s idea to name their daughter after him but I didn’t believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.
    I called in an IIP check on both of them, but my instinct was that neither were minions of the Faceless Man. The rain eased off by noon, so I had lunch out at the shopping centre and then stopped off in the garden to do some of the less obtrusive bits of my practice. I thought I heard giggling in the distance but there was no other sign of Sky.
    Lesley had returned while I was out, with a metric ton of neglected paperwork which we dutifully worked our way through before flopping down on the sofa bed with a microwaved lasagne and a Red Stripe each.
    ‘Why aren’t you fucking Beverley?’ she asked suddenly.
    I spluttered around my Red Stripe.
    ‘Why aren’t you fucking Zach?’ I asked, finally.
    ‘Who says I’m not?’
    ‘Are you?’
    ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘A bit.’
    ‘How can you be fucking him a bit?’
    Lesley gave this point due consideration.
    ‘Okay, maybe more than a bit,’ she said.
    ‘Since when?’ I asked.
    ‘Why do you want to know?’
    That was a good question and I didn’t really have a good answer. Still, nobody’s ever let that get in the way of a conversation.
    ‘You brought it up,’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, I asked you a question which you still haven’t answered,’ she said.
    ‘What makes you think that Beverley’s interested?’
    ‘You’re going with that? Really?’
    I got up and took the dirty plates back to the kitchen and fetched another beer. I didn’t fancy sitting down again, so I leant against the doorjamb.
    ‘We could call Beverley and find out,’ said Lesley, ‘She’d be here fast enough – you can practically see Barnes from our balcony.’
    ‘I’m not in a hurry to rush into that one,’ I said.
    Lesley rounded on me and pointed at her face, forcing me to look at the whole horrid mess of it. ‘This is what happens if you wait, Peter,’ she said. ‘Or some other fucked-up thing. You’ve got to get it while you can.’
    And I thought that I’d like to know what I was going to get. But I kept my mouth shut because I’d had another totally unrelated thought.
    ‘Why don’t we call Zach now,’ I said.
    Lesley gave me an exasperated look.
    ‘Why?’ she asked.
    ‘Because there’s one place in this whole tower where we haven’t looked yet,’ I said. ‘And that’s downstairs in the basement.’
    ‘And Zach?’
    ‘Good with locks. Remember?’

15
Landscaping
    W hich turned out to be an understatement.
    ‘It’s just a padlock,’ said Zach as he casually tossed it to me and then checked Lesley to make sure she’d been watching.
    It had taken Zach less than thirty minutes to arrive at our front door, wearing a surprisingly clean red T-shirt with the Clash logo on the chest and trailing the smell of antiperspirant – applied, I reckoned, when he was on his way up in the lift. He held up a plastic Lidl bag containing a three-litre plastic bottle of Strongbow.
    ‘Where’s the party?’ he asked.
    ‘Downstairs,’ said Lesley.
    I examined the padlock Zach threw