Broken Homes pg-4

by Ben Aaronovitch

  We all ended up at Chelmsford nick, because not only did it have a brand new custody suite but it was also a short walk from Essex Police Headquarters. Which allowed the Local Response Team to quickly shove their problems all the way up to ACPO rank and then scarper back to Epping.

  Essex’s ACPO contingent, awed perhaps by Nightingale’s immaculate suit or, more likely, being equally desperate to punt the whole thing back to the Met, agreed to let us conduct our interviews on our own terms once the arrests had all been regularised. They gave us a windowless office to work in where me and Lesley promptly fell asleep. Nightingale woke us up with coffee, assorted fruit, cheese sandwiches and an interview strategy.

  We were going to start with Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina before she could recover her poise. And me and Lesley would do it, so we could escalate up to Nightingale if necessary.

  Nightingale eyed our less-than-enthusiastic faces.

  ‘I’ll ensure that more coffee is laid on,’ he said.

  ‘Can I have a taser as well?’ asked Lesley, but Nightingale said no.

  Varvara Sidorovna sat on the other side of the interview desk dressed in the cheap white T-shirt and grey jogging bottoms that have become the uniform of shame now that we’re no longer allowed to put our suspects in paper suits. There were no tapes in the double cassette recorder and while Essex Police might be taping the output of the CCTV camera mounted in a red perspex bubble above our heads, this was officially an unofficial interview. This had become our standard procedure, a chance for us and our interviewee to discuss issues that neither of us particularly wanted on the record.

  ‘Can you state your full name please?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina.’

  ‘And your date of birth?’

  ‘November the twenty-first 1921,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘In Kryukovo, Russia.’ Which I found, when I looked it up afterwards, was now part of the sprawling Moscow suburb of Zelenograd and, incidentally, the closest the Germans got to the capital during the Second World War.

  ‘Did you serve in the Soviet Army during the war?’ I asked.

  ‘365th Special Regiment. I was a lieutenant,’ she said, ‘not a major. Is the Nightingale going to show his face at some point?’

  ‘He’s about,’ said Lesley.

  ‘I’d heard rumours about him, but I’d always thought they were exaggerations. Man, he’s something.’ Varvara Sidorovna grinned and suddenly looked eighteen and fresh off the wheat fields. ‘I’ve never met anyone that fast with that much control before. No wonder the fascists put a price on his head.’

  It’s important when interviewing a suspect to stay focused on what’s broadly relevant to the investigation, but even so it took a great deal of self-control not to ask about that. I suspected that should we manage to bang her up in Holloway prison, Lieutenant Tamonina was going to have Professor Postmartin as a frequent visitor.

  Who would no doubt also ask for more detail about her training, her wartime operations and her capture near Brynsk in January 1943.

  ‘I didn’t tell them who I was,’ she said. ‘The fascists had orders to shoot us on sight, so I pretended to be a medic.’ Even then she barely survived the initial abuse at the hands of her captors — we didn’t ask for details and she didn’t volunteer any. She didn’t dare use magic to escape because by that point in the war the Germans had started to deploy their own practitioners to counter the Night Witches.

  ‘They had these men they called werewolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Who were said to be able to sniff out anyone using the craft.’

  ‘Were they really werewolves,’ I asked. ‘Shape-shifters?’

  ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘We had intelligence reports that their capabilities were real. But I never encountered one, so I don’t know if they were truly men who became wolves or not.’

  She was drafted as slave labour as part of Organisation Todt and found herself, much to her own surprise, in the Channel Islands. ‘They said we were on British soil,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘For the first few days I thought Britain had been invaded, but one of the other prisoners explained that these were British islands that were closer to France than England.’ There were a couple of werewolves on the Island of Alderney, where the concentration camps were, but there were none on Guernsey where she was transferred in order to be worked to death building gun emplacements. But as soon as they were clear of the harbour, she knocked down one of the guards at the end of the marching column and escaped in the confusion.

  ‘It’s not like the Great Escape or Colditz,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t hang around setting up escape committees or any of that nonsense. Any moment of the day some pig-faced guard might just shoot you in the head for the joy of it — you took your opportunities as soon as you could.’

  Varvara Sidorovna cheerfully admitted that she’d been totally prepared to off some locals to make good her escape, but fortunately for everyone concerned, except the Germans, she was spotted by an old lady and guided into the arms of the resistance.

  ‘They called me Vivien,’ she said, after the actress, and provided her with false papers. ‘And taught me to speak English with my beautiful proper English accent.’

  After Liberation in 1945 she made her way to London with her new English name and identity and parlayed that into an official identity in the general post-war confusion. She said she got married in 1952 but refused to give any details about her husband.

  ‘But in any case he died in 1963,’ she said.

  They lived in a semi off the High Street in Wimbledon. There were no children.

  ‘You’re very well preserved for a woman in her mid-nineties,’ said Lesley.

  ‘You noticed,’ said Varvara Sidorovna turning her head and striking a pose.

  ‘Do you know why?’ asked Lesley.

  Varvara Sidorovna leant forward. ‘I discovered the elixir of youth,’ she said. ‘In an Oxfam shop in Twickenham.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t Help the Aged?’ I asked, about a millisecond before Lesley could — she booted me under the table in revenge.

  Varvara Sidorovna waited patiently for us to behave ourselves.

  ‘Was it something you did to yourself?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘God, no,’ she said. ‘One day I was getting older and the next day I wasn’t.’

  So Nightingale wasn’t the only one, I thought.

  ‘Can you remember roughly what year it happened?’ I asked.

  ‘August Bank Holiday 1966,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a very precise date,’ said Lesley.

  ‘I have a very clear memory of it happening,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. She’d still been living in the house in Wimbledon and she’d been hanging up washing in her back garden.

  ‘It was as if someone had opened a door into summer,’ she said. ‘I felt suddenly filled up with’ — she waved her hands around vaguely — ‘honey, sunlight, flowers. When I went to bed I dreamt in Russian for the first time in years. I wanted to go dancing and I wanted to get laid really, really badly. The next day there were thunderstorms.’

  ‘So you knew you were getting younger?’ asked Lesley.

  Varvara Sidorovna laughed. ‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I thought I was having the menopause.’ When it became obvious she wasn’t, she decided to take advantage.

  ‘I went out dancing and got laid and very, very drunk,’ she said. And then she moved to Notting Hill, experimented with LSD and listened to far too much progressive rock than was good for her. ‘Take my advice and never try casting a spell while listening to Hawkwind,’ she said. ‘Or when you’re on acid.’

  ‘How were you earning a living?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘You could drift in those days, there were squats and communes and groovy friends. People were always setting up co-operatives, bands and experimental theatre groups. I worked at Time Out magazine although that might have been later on — there’s a couple of years I’ve lost track of, 1975 in particular.’

  ‘When d
id you meet Albert Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked — the original Faceless Man had dropped out of sight in the early 1970s so it was possible they might have met then.

  ‘Much later,’ she said. ‘That was in 2003.’

  Varvara Sidorovna was already firmly back in the demi-monde by that time.

  ‘You two must know what it’s like by now,’ she said. ‘Once you know it exists it’s always there in the corner of your eye. Plus I wanted to see if it was possible to go home, to Russia.’ She knew that most of her old wartime comrades would be dead, those that hadn’t been killed by the Germans were most likely liquidated by Stalin. She was a little surprised to find that the Nauchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Neobychnyh Yavleniy, the Scientific Research Institute for Unusual Phenomena had been revived and that they even had agents operating in the West.

  Me and Lesley nodded sagely as if we knew all about this, while I imagined Nightingale adding the fact to his rather long list of things he should have known about but didn’t.

  But SRIUP being active in the Soviet Union could only mean that practitioners were still being tracked, and Varvara Sidorovna had no intention of coming under anyone’s control ever again, not even the motherland’s. So she spent the 1980s and 90s rediscovering her skills and picking up new ones. ‘Here and there,’ she said. ‘You’d be amazed.’

  ‘And how did you get involved with Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked, because I was beginning to think that Varvara Sidorovna was messing us about.

  ‘It was a job,’ she said. One not all that different from those she’d been doing since the late 1970s. ‘People like you and I straddle the mundane and the demi-monde. We make excellent middle men and go-betweens,’ she said, but refused to give details.

  ‘Client confidentiality,’ she said. ‘You understand.’

  Obviously she didn’t consider the Faceless Man, mark two, as a client any more because she was quite happy to explain how he’d started employing her for various jobs, most of them dull. ‘Finding people and things in the demi-monde,’ she said and we made a note to track back later and get a list. She was adamant that she’d never met the Faceless Man in person. Everything had been arranged over the phone.

  ‘I was the one that found old Albert for him,’ she said proudly. ‘Took me six months — he’d been warehoused in a private care home outside Oxford.’ It had been the Faceless Man who arranged the flat in Shakespeare Tower. Varvara Sidorovna took advantage of its location to spend more time at the theatre.

  ‘And you did that for, what, nine years?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Not full time,’ she said. ‘I had a couple of properly trained care nurses to look after the poor soul much of the time, and in the first couple of years he spent most of the day out.’

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘A very quiet young woman used to pick him up in the morning and return him in the afternoon.’

  ‘Do you know where she took him?’ asked Lesley, and as she did I wrote Pale Lady = no driver = FM near BARBICAN? On my pad where she could see it.

  ‘I was specifically being paid not to ask questions,’ said Varvara Sidorovna.

  She hadn’t known about the demon-trap planted in the flat, but it didn’t surprise her in the least. She’d moved Albert out of the place as soon our visit had finished and she suspected the device had been there as much to keep him under control as it was to catch someone like Nightingale or us.

  We asked her about Robert Weil and his body-dumping activities, but she denied any knowledge. Did she know why the Faceless Man might want to shoot a woman in the face with a shotgun?

  ‘If he wanted to delay identification,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps to cover up work he was doing on her face.’

  I felt Lesley stiffen beside me.

  ‘What kind of work?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve met some of his menagerie,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Perhaps he’s looking to create new creatures.’

  Officially unofficial the interview might have been, but Varvara Sidorovna wasn’t going to incriminate herself beyond what she thought we already knew. She claimed to know nothing of County Gard and laughed out loud at the idea she might have offed Richard Dewsbury, the drug dealer, by inducing a breakfast heart attack.

  ‘Not my style, darling,’ she said.

  Nor was she forthcoming about what exactly they’d been up to with their dogs at the Essex Farm. When we asked her what she’d been doing there, all she’d tell us was, ‘Tying up loose ends. Imagine my surprise when I found you two poking your nose in.’

  I glanced at Lesley and she shrugged. It was obvious to us that the tying up of loose ends, had we not intervened, probably would have proved fatal for Barry, Max and Danny. We questioned her about that, and she asked whether the world would really be worse off without them.

  ‘Did you know about the wood nymph?’ I asked.

  ‘What wood nymph?’

  ‘The one that lived at the base of Skygarden Tower,’ I said.

  ‘I know a great many things,’ she said. ‘You’d be-’

  ‘Did you know about Sky?’

  I felt Lesley’s hand on my arm, and I realised I’d half risen from my chair. A white Styrofoam coffee cup rolled around on the table between us — fortunately empty. Varvara Sidorovna had flinched back and was giving me a wary look.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  I took a breath and sat myself down.

  ‘I’m going check on that,’ I said. ‘If you do know, then it would be better to tell me now.’

  Varvara Sidorovna looked to Lesley, who gazed impassively back.

  ‘Somehow I doubt that,’ she said, and then held up her hand. ‘I swear I did not know. But it does explain what Max and Barry were burbling about when I picked them up this morning.’

  ‘You seem very relaxed,’ said Lesley. ‘Considering the severity of the charges against you.’

  ‘I have a longer perspective on life than you do,’ she said. ‘I was held prisoner by the SS — do you really think the Met frightens me? Or even the Isaacs? I love that nickname, by the way. “The Isaacs.” So very quaint. You must know that no conventional prison could hold me if I chose to escape. You’re not about to summarily execute me. And it would be an enormous waste of your time to guard me. No, sooner or later, we shall come to an arrangement. And in any case, I may yet prove useful.’

  ‘But you were going to kill us,’ said Lesley. ‘Remember?’

  ‘If you’re afraid of wolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna, ‘don’t go to the woods.’

  18

  Space Left Over After Planning

  It hadn’t really sunk in at the time, but my beloved Ford Focus ST was kaput. If the half a ton of bricks falling on it hadn’t written it off, the fact that an elephant had gone for a kip on the bonnet would have. Nightingale never could figure out whether that was something he or Varvara Sidorovna had done, and she just laughed in my face.

  Nightingale’s Jag had been safely parked a hundred metres further down the farm access road. He said he’d conjured the sound of his arrival to distract whoever was holding us in the barn while he sneaked around the back.

  We spent the night in the Chelmsford Travelodge. I had a room with a charming view of the nearby flyover, but at least the bed was soft and the shower worked. In the morning me and Lesley had a competition to see who could pile the most food on their plate at the continental style all-you-could-eat breakfast. There were no sausages, bacon or fried slice — neither Toby nor Molly would have approved.

  DCI Duffy arrived mid-morning with a car full of officers from Bromley and took over interviews with Max and Barry — criminal damage — while throwing Danny back to the Essex mob — illegal possession of a firearm, threatening behaviour and bringing rural England into disrepute.

  We had to give our own statements which took most of the day, because we had to keep stopping and reworking sections that DCI Duffy and the Assistant Chief Const
able overseeing the case found to be ‘problematic’ — which was pretty much everything. In the end we blamed most of the property damage on an accidental fire and Calor Gas cylinder explosions, plural.

  Nightingale had to stay in close proximity to Varvara Sidorovna, so we went out to a seafood bar by the River Chelmer to fetch some fancy fish and chips. Before we hauled them back to the nick we spent a couple of minutes on a walkway by the river feeding chips to the ducks and seeing if anyone was at home. No joy.

  ‘Maybe not every river’s got a personality,’ said Lesley.

  We spent the rest of the evening completing our notebooks and typing our reports for not one but two major inquiries, and then back to the Travelodge. We set our alarms early so we could stuff our faces at the breakfast before we had to leave.

  Essex Police provided us a car and driver, the better to speed us out of their force area. We headed back to London in the back seat with our pockets stuffed full of Babybel cheese miniatures and our hearts full of doubts.

  Without my beloved Asbo, the first order of business was getting some wheels. We tossed a coin, I lost, and so it was me that got dropped off at Skygarden to check on Toby while Lesley headed off to look up a friendly civilian auto worker she knew who handled fleet re-sales. My bet was that it would be a silver Astra, but you never know.

  From the walkway, the garden around the tower didn’t look different. Still green in the patchy sunlight. According to the specialist Bromley had called in, it would take years for the big trees to die. So why had Sky died that night — almost instantly? And why had the Faceless Man had the trees destroyed? And so clumsily, using such incompetent cut-outs as Barry, Max, Danny and their late lamented and drowned mate — now identified as Martin Brown of Long Riding, Basildon. All of them in that category of low-level chancers whose ambitions to become professional criminals were frustrated by their inability to pass the entrance exam.

  I wanted to go down to the garden, but there were still officers from Bromley MIT amongst the trees doing a last sweep before they packed away. I didn’t want to be identified while there was still mileage to be had by staying undercover.