Broken Homes

didn’t come easy, and the cold bark scraped my hands as I yanked it off the tree, peeling a strip of bark away from the main trunk along with it.
    Nightingale had said that the younger and greener the stick the better. I brandished it at Lesley.
    ‘Dogs,’ I said.
    I walked back to the first shed and used the far end of my stick to lift the latch and a convenient fork of twigs near the top to hook the handle and pull it open.
    ‘Oh,’ said Lesley. ‘Dogs.’
    She let me enter the shed first. Without windows it should have been pitch black, but the warped planks had opened long thin gaps of daylight in the walls. Equipment racks lined the shelves, all constructed of the same green wood and arranged like bunk beds in a barracks. The shelves were empty, but judging by their depth they’d been built to store something less than half a metre deep and from their vertical spacing not more than the same in height. The units were sturdy and massively over-engineered, so whatever they had been storing, it had been heavy,
    Lesley joined me and used her penlight to indicate the floor, which I saw was also composed of thick planks of green wood. The air was heavy with the smell of pine edged with damp – it was worse than an Ikea warehouse.
    ‘Swedish dogs,’ I said.
    ‘Nightingale did say the Vikings invented it,’ said Lesley. ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.’
    ‘I might be wrong,’ I said, and fell silent. Because just then I’d found the one shelf that wasn’t empty.
    ‘Oh fuck it,’ said Lesley. ‘I hate it when you’re right.’
    A demon trap is a sort of magical landmine developed, so says Nightingale, by the Vikings to defend their long-houses from supernatural threats during the long winters. When I’d asked what kind of threats, he’d shrugged. ‘Other Vikings,’ he’d said. ‘Dire wolves, trolls.’
    ‘Moomins,’ Lesley had added, and then had to explain what those were to both me and Nightingale.
    The demon trap we’d watched Nightingale deactivating at Christmas had been a round sheet of stainless steel the size and shape of a dustbin lid, but what we’d found in the shed was different. It was composed of two stainless steel plates for a start, and they were square, sixty centimetres to a side and half a centimetre thick. The plates were held seven or eight centimetres apart by wooden columns fixed at each corner through holes cut in the sheets. The wood was green, and crudely shaped bark was still clinging to sections. They were twice as thick in the middle and put me in mind of the ceramic insulators you see on telephone wires and high tension electricity lines.
    The demon trap Nightingale had disarmed had had two circles incised near the centre – that being where the ‘payload’ was stored. Traditionally, this had been the ghost of a human being tortured slowly to death and their essence trapped at the moment of expiration. We’d found that the Faceless Man had learnt to substitute dogs instead – the effect was the same. Or rather, effects . Because the tortured ghost, the demon in the trap, could be used to power a range of results, ranging from knocking down whichever poor sod triggered it, to turning him and his mates inside out. So you can see why me and Lesley approached with a certain amount of caution.
    Then I recognised what it was we were looking at.
    ‘Remember the metal plates in the garage?’ I said.
    ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley. ‘This is the same thing. Do you think they were stored here?’
    ‘Maybe they were made here,’ I said and that’s when the Asbo’s car alarm went off. The Asbo had a good one too, a really annoying woo-woo-woo followed by the sound of a donkey being castrated with a rusty saw and then back to the woo-woo-woo. It cut off midway through the third cycle.
    ‘Somebody knows how to steal a car,’ said Lesley.
    I pulled out my mobile and saw that we were living in the land of no bars.
    ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Do we wait here or what?’
    Lesley laughed.
    ‘I say let’s stroll up the yard and give them a hard time for breaking into our car,’ she said.
    ‘And if they’re the guys that killed the trees?’
    ‘Then we arrest them and Bromley will be that much less pissed off with us.’
    Policing, whatever else you’ve heard, is by consent.
    Even hardened professional villains consent to be policed. This is clear from the way they complain that nonces, rapists and bankers get shorter sentences than decent