Broken Homes

the path. Down I went, throwing up my arms to protect my face as I skidded across the grass. I rolled over, grabbed my airwave and told Nightingale that two, maybe more, suspects were on foot and heading for the New Kent Road.
    ‘Roger,’ said Nightingale.
    I got up to follow, but suddenly I heard Lesley call my name.
    ‘Peter,’ she yelled. ‘Get the fuck over here.’
    The tone of her voice stopped me in my tracks – I’d only heard that tone twice before – when the Coopertown child had fallen to her death in front of us and again in the minutes before she’d lost her face.
    I shouted back and followed her voice to the base of a huge plane tree, starkly outlined by what I realised was a super werelight that Nightingale had fixed in the air above the garden.
    Lesley was crouched over a figure stretched amongst the roots, I recognised the yellow and green dress and slim bare feet. It was Sky, her face pale, her eyes open, staring and unresponsive. I reached for her neck, but Lesley grabbed my hand.
    ‘She’s dead, Peter,’ she said and her voice was muffled and indistinct behind the roaring in my ears.
    I tried to open my mouth to ask the right questions, but nothing happened. In my mind I saw myself standing up, stepping back from the body, making a preliminary visual sweep of the locus and then securing the scene while we waited for the Homicide Assessment Team to arrive. But all that happened was I felt my face bend out of shape.
    It was established later that Sky’s plane, like all the mature trees in the garden, had had a ten centimetre deep wedge cut out of its trunk all the way around in a ring. It’s a common enough technique used by disgruntled landowners or exasperated neighbours to kill trees that they think are getting in their way.
    I thought I was there for a long time, hunched over Sky’s body, trying to breathe, trying to move while silence pounded in my head and Lesley gripped my hand and stopped me from doing anything stupid. Nightingale’s magical star shell faded and the darkness closed around us.
    But in the Job you don’t get to be human – not when you’re on the clock.
    Nicky came through the dying trees, lit up like a triple-masted man-of-war on fire and screaming like a Stuka in its final dive. I lurched to my feet as the small figure in red-striped pirate pyjamas barrelled across the clearing and threw herself down by Sky’s body.
    ‘Sky!’ screamed Nicky. ‘Wake up! Wake up!’
    She reached out to touch her friend’s face but stopped short.
    ‘Sky,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Sky?’
    I put my hand on her shoulder and found it was soaking wet. Nicky screamed again and the sound was like a solid force that drove me to my knees.
    ‘Nicky, stop that,’ I said.
    She turned to look at me, and her face was twisted out of shape by anger, grief and terrible betrayal. It was the face you see from war zones and crime scenes, from every solemn appeal for emergency aid – it was the shape my own face had made only moments before.
    She drew in her breath and I felt the ground beneath my knees tremble and imagined the mains water pipes of Elephant and Castle groan and twist and shiver. Lesley felt it too – I saw her back away.
    But then Oberon was there.
    In the moments before he arrived I swear I heard horse’s hooves – and then he was in the woods with us. Naked except for a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts and brandishing that damn infantry sword. Heat washed off him, and sweat and the smell of blood and the cut of the lash.
    ‘Nicky,’ he said and his voice rolled out deep as a distant cannonade.
    Nicky threw herself into his arms and he scooped her up with his left hand. She put her arms around his neck and howled.
    ‘Hush, child,’ said Oberon and the howling cut off.
    Oberon glanced at me and Lesley, then at Sky and then quickly and efficiently he turned a full circle, checking the whole area around him. As he did, I saw a criss-cross of scars across his naked back.
    Satisfied that no threat was near, he lowered his sword and strode across the gap between us.
    ‘Is it all the trees?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale, striding out of the darkness and putting himself between Oberon and the corpse. ‘All of them ringed or felled.’
    ‘This was an egregious act,’ said Oberon, looking around the garden.
    Nicky squirmed out of Oberon’s grasp.
    ‘I want them dead,’ she said. ‘Dead, dead, dead.’
    ‘No,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘That’s