Broken Homes pg-4

by Ben Aaronovitch

  But there was nothing. Mulkern, assuming it was him who broke into the villa, had either been working alone, or with hypothetical persons unknown who hadn’t used magic. Apart from the barbecue down in Bromley we didn’t have anything to link the Faceless Man to the Die Praxis Der Magie or the burglary. That’s the trouble with evidence — either you’ve got it or you ain’t.

  In the report it mentioned the insurance company had found evidence that the door on the roof had been forced at some point in the recent past. I asked Ms Shapiro about the lock and if she’d show me up to have a look.

  ‘We don’t know when that happened for sure,’ she said as she led me back to the spiral stairs. ‘Frankly, the insurance company were just trying to impress us with how keen they were.’

  ‘Did they put your premiums up?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  There was a poster-sized photograph of the Skygarden Tower hanging on the second floor landing. It had been taken at night with the base lit by coloured floodlights and the windows ablaze. I asked whether Stromberg had hung it there himself.

  ‘No,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘But he regarded Skygarden as his best work, so we thought it would be appropriate to mark that. It was taken in 1969 just before the first tenants moved in.’

  Which explained why it didn’t look like a sink estate — it looked like the future.

  The one advantage of a flat roof is that you can walk around on it — structurally speaking it’s just about the only advantage. Or, if you’re a mad modernist architect, you can have a roof garden, far above all that messy natural dirt, where your plants can be contained in neat square tubs with sharp corners and nobody can steal your garden furniture.

  The spiral staircase wound up to a glass-fronted stair enclosure. The insurance company report had stated that there were indications the door might have been forced from outside.

  ‘Stromberg always left the key in the lock,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘So did we, but when the assessor tried to remove it from the lock they found it was stuck.’

  The key had partially fused with the lock mechanism. But whether that was due to external tampering or just old age, they couldn’t determine.

  ‘You changed the lock?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘We had it refurbished.’

  So it was worth a try, I thought, and bent down as if I was examining it.

  I felt it for certain, although it was as faint a vestigium as I’ve ever sensed — the Faceless Man had used magic on the lock. But when exactly? And why? I asked if I could step outside.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said with a broad smile.

  I found out why when I stepped out onto the roof garden and saw the view. It was stupendous. The sky was still grey overhead, but to the southwest a gap in the clouds framed the sun over the horizon so that sunlight lit the city below me.

  Highgate Hill stands 130 metres above the London floodplain. Immediately below me the mansions of the Holy Lodge Estate, built to house the respectable spinsters left surplus by the First World War, marched down the south slope of the Hill. Beyond was the grey-green swamp of North London, scored by railway tracks which converged on the redbrick and iron piles of King’s Cross and St Pancras, and beyond them Holborn, the City, St Paul’s and the Shard — a sliver of silver and gold in the dying light of the sun.

  A severely plain white enamelled garden table stood by the parapet and around it some equally severe folding chairs. I could imagine Herr Stromberg sitting up here drinking coffee, enjoying the view and thinking himself King of the City.

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t keep the telescope up here any more,’ said Ms Shapiro.

  ‘Telescope?’

  She showed me a photograph in the glossy guide to the villa, a colour snap of Stromberg, a tall thin man in a loosely hanging red shirt and tan slacks, sitting just as I had imagined him. Only, as well as coffee, he had a brass-bound telescope mounted on a tripod at a convenient height for seated viewing.

  ‘The assessor practically had a fit in front of me when I told him we normally left it out on fine days,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘We ended up taking it down and lending it to the Science Museum.’

  ‘I wonder what he was looking at?’ I tapped the photo of Stromberg in the brochure.

  ‘We wondered the exact the same thing,’ she said. ‘So, if you’d like to take a seat. .’

  I sat in the folding chair and, having forgotten it had been raining earlier, I got a wet bum. Ms Shapiro had me shift a little to the left, explaining that they’d used a number of photographs as a reference.

  ‘He always pointed it roughly southeast,’ she said. ‘Towards Southwark or perhaps Biggin Hill beyond that. We certainly don’t have any record of him using it to look at the stars.’

  ‘I wonder if you could do me an enormous favour?’ I asked.

  ‘If I can,’ said Ms Shapiro.

  ‘Have you got a list of all Stromberg’s books?’ I asked. ‘The ones he owned.’

  ‘I believe we compiled one just last month,’ she said. ‘For the insurance.’

  I figured they’d have had to.

  ‘Could you run off a hardcopy for me?’ I said. ‘I’d ask you to email it to me, but this way I won’t have to go back to the station first.’ I got up and gently hustled her towards the stairway.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘Though I do wonder what you might need it for.’

  ‘I’d like to cross check it against a couple of Interpol lists,’ I lied. ‘See if there’s any pattern.’

  As we reached the stairway I pretended to remember something and told Ms Shapiro that I wanted to have a quick look around the roof perimeter.

  ‘Possible point of access,’ I said.

  Ms Shapiro offered to wait but I told her that I would only take a couple of minutes and that I’d meet her downstairs in the office. She seemed reluctant to leave me on my own and I was grinding my teeth and trying not to push her down the stairs when she suddenly agreed and went.

  I dashed back, sat back down on the wet seat, looked back out over London and took a deep breath.

  You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe. As you learn each one you associate it with a word, in Latin because that’s what a scientific gentleman of Sir Isaac Newton’s time would write his shit down in. You make it so that the word and the forma become one in your mind. The first one you learn is Lux which makes light. The second I learnt was impello which pushes things about. You make a spell — I still smile every time I say that word — by stringing the formae together in a sequence. A spell with one forma is a first-order spell, with two formae a second-order spell, with three a third-order spell — you get the idea. It’s actually way more complicated than that, what with formae inflectentes and adjectivia and the dreaded turpis vox, but trust me, you don’t want to get into that right now.

  In January, Nightingale had taught me my first fourth-order spell, one created by Isaac Newton himself. He told me that he was only doing it because he’d already been forced to teach me an old-fashioned shield spell and two of the formae were the same. Now I ran through the components a few times and checked to make sure that Ms Shapiro was safely gone before casting.

  In the old days I expect it was all right to chant in Latin and wave your hands about but your modern, up-to-date, image-conscious magical practitioner likes to be a little bit more discreet. These days we mutter them under our breath which makes us look like nutters instead. Lesley wears a Bluetooth earpiece and pretends to be talking Italian, but Nightingale doesn’t approve — it’s a generational thing.

  Newton’s spell used the aer forma to grab hold of the air in front of your face and then craft it into two lenses that act like a telescope. The great man called it telescopium, which tells you everything you need to know about his approach to branding. Beyond the usual drawbacks — i.e., the risk of having your brain turn into a diseased cauliflower — if the lens
es are the wrong shape you get a face full of rainbows. And if you’re stupid enough to look at the sun you can make yourself permanently blind.

  This may explain why Newton went on to invent the reflecting telescope for all his routine stargazing needs.

  London jumped towards me, King’s Cross, the green rectangle of Lincoln’s Inn, the river and, beyond the river, the studied dullness of the King’s Reach Tower and, beyond that, right in the centre of my field of view — the grim brutalist finger of Skygarden Tower.

  Had Stromberg been a practitioner as well as an architect? He’d called Skygarden Tower his greatest work. .

  Clouds covered the setting sun and the city dimmed to a dirty grey.

  ‘When there’s something weird in your neighbourhood. .’ I said out loud.

  When you get yourself killed in suspicious circumstances the law requires that a Home-Office-appointed pathologist cut you open and have a good rummage round inside to determine what did you in. It’s the pathologist who decides where the post-mortem takes place and since DCI Duffy had foolishly agreed to have Dr Walid do the job, she couldn’t complain that he’d dragged her all the way across the river to Westminster Mortuary on Horseferry Road. But Duffy’s loss was mine and Lesley’s gain, as this was the famous Iain West Memorial Forensic Suite which boasted state of the art facilities, including a remote viewing suite. Here your sensible junior officers could drink coffee and watch the procedure via CCTV, while their elders and betters got up close and personal with the corpse. Also, unless said junior officers were stupid enough to flip the switch on their end of the intercom, their seniors couldn’t hear them.

  ‘Why the fuck would he do that?’ asked Lesley once I’d told her my suspicion that Erik Stromberg had combined magic and architecture.

  I told her that architects in those days truly believed they could make people better through architecture.

  ‘Make people better what?’

  ‘Better people,’ I said. ‘Better citizens.’

  ‘They didn’t do a very good job did they?’ said Lesley who, like me, had lived in her fair share of council housing growing up.

  On the TV screen DCI Duffy, in green apron, face mask and eye protectors leant over the body of Patrick Mulkern to look more closely at whatever grisly detail Dr Walid thought was important.

  ‘Burnt from the inside out,’ said Duffy. Her voice sounded strangely nasal due, Lesley reckoned, to the sensible application of Vicks VapoRub underneath the nostrils. She turned to look off-screen. ‘Could you do that?’

  Nightingale stepped into view of the camera.

  ‘I can’t answer that until we know what exactly was done,’ he sounded like he was avoiding breathing through his nose altogether. ‘But probably not.’

  ‘But you don’t think it was natural?’ asked Duffy.

  ‘Duh,’ said Lesley.

  We heard Dr Walid say that he seriously doubted that it was natural. Duffy nodded. She seemed to accept things more easily from a fellow Scot than from Nightingale, so he was sensibly letting Dr Walid do most of the talking.

  ‘Keep an eye on the door,’ said Lesley and slipped her mask off.

  There were fresh suture marks on her neck where they’d worked on her throat and the skin around them looked inflamed. She fetched out a small tub of ointment from her shoulder bag and started spreading it over her neck and jaw.

  Her face was still a shock. I’d managed to teach myself not to flinch, but I was scared that I was never going to get used to it.

  ‘Patrick Mulkern steals a magic book from the house of noted mad architect Erik Stromberg whose greatest work was Skygarden Towers in Southwark,’ I said. ‘In that very borough’s planning department worked Richard Lewis. Have you watched Jaget’s edited highlights yet?’

  ‘He has way too much time on his hands,’ she said and rubbed cream into the twisted pink stub that was all that was left of her nose.

  ‘So our planner, who suddenly jumps in front of a train for no reason, turns out to be on the Little Crocodile list,’ I said. ‘And then Patrick Mulkern turns up magically barbecued.’

  ‘You don’t know it was magic,’ said Lesley and replaced her mask.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Magical, brutal and a really unpleasant way to die — that’s the Faceless Man. It’s practically his signature tune.’

  ‘It’s not subtle,’ said Lesley. ‘Now that he knows we’re after him, you’d think he’d be a bit more subtle.’

  ‘He built himself a man-tiger,’ I said. ‘How subtle do you think he is? Maybe he’s not as smart as you reckon.’

  ‘That,’ said Lesley, ‘or he doesn’t really rate us a threat.’

  ‘That’s a mistake,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Lesley glanced back at the screen where Dr Walid was extracting a long blackened bone from Patrick Mulkern’s thigh.

  ‘You can see from the charring,’ he said, ‘that the bone itself seems to have caught fire.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley looking back at me. ‘He’s making a big mistake.’

  7

  Imperial Yellow

  There’s a manual the size of an old-fashioned telephone book about policing large public events, but Nightingale told me to put it away. He said that given the special nature of the participants, the fewer actual police on the ground the better.

  ‘You don’t need to concern yourself with breaches of the peace inside the bounds of the Court,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You don’t think there’s going to be any trouble, then?’

  ‘Think of it as being like a football match,’ he said. ‘We only need to be concerned with the crowd, not the players. What happens on the pitch is not our concern.’ Which just went to show how long it was since Nightingale had policed a football match.

  He did let me arrange for the TSG to be deployed in the area on standby even if he did balk at the chunk it took out of our operational budget.

  ‘Why is it necessary to have three whole vans’ worth?’ he asked.

  I explained that the TSG always deploys as a full serial and that’s three carriers’ worth. Anyway, that’s the thing about the Tactical Support Group, you only really need them when the wheels come off. Which means you’re going to want them in quantity or not at all — and you won’t want to be waiting around for them to arrive, neither.

  The TSG would need to be parked up nearby, as would a maddeningly vague number of trucks, caravans and, I suspected, funfair rides — preferably as far from the TSG as possible. Parking on the South Bank is a tangle of jurisdictions involving everyone from the Coin Street Community Builders to the GLA and the Borough of Southwark. Organising it would be a bloody nightmare that I wouldn’t dump on my worst enemy so, in the best traditions of policing, we passed the problem over to the Goddess of the River Tyburn.

  She wasn’t best pleased, but what could she say? As self-appointed fixer-in-chief for her mum, she had to prove her superiority.

  ‘Leave it with me, Peter,’ she said when I called her. ‘And just let me say how much I’m looking forward to hearing your father’s band.’

  ‘We knew you wouldn’t mind,’ said my mum once I’d phoned her and waited the requisite hour and a half for her to finish chatting to whoever it was in Sierra Leone she was currently still talking to — and call me back. ‘And it was beaucoup money,’

  What could I say? Of course it’s beaucoup money. It’s being paid for by the God and Goddess of the River Thames, no relation, who peddled influence and soft power the same way they breathed in and out and, presumably, regulated the waters of the river. And there was a good chance that they were just using Dad to get some traction on me.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just don’t let Abigail know where you’re going.’

  ‘Why do you not want Abigail to come?’ asked my mum in a tone of voice I remembered from such conversations as But I thought you didn’t like that jacket and Well, I’ve paid the shipping costs already. ‘I thought she was in your police club?’r />
  I added Warn Abigail to behave to my to-do list. It was a long list.

  One person I didn’t have to worry about was Molly — who refused to leave the Folly.

  ‘Why don’t you join us?’ Nightingale had asked her while she was busy brushing lint off the shoulders of his suit. ‘It would do you good to get out.’

  Molly froze and then skipped backwards as if to make sure she was safely out of his grasp.

  ‘You would be perfectly safe there,’ he said. ‘The Rivers have declared their pax deorum and no power on earth would be foolish enough to challenge them when they are all arrayed in their majesty on the banks of the Thames.’

  Molly hesitated then shook her head emphatically before vanishing off towards the back stairs. She stayed in hiding until after we’d left for the South Bank and we had to make our own coffee that morning.

  ‘What’s she so afraid of?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Nightingale.

  In 1666, following an unfortunate workplace accident, the city of London burnt down. In the immediate aftermath John Evelyn, Christopher Wren and all the rest of the King’s Men descended with cries of glee upon the ruined city. They had such high hopes, such plans to sweep away the twisted donkey tracks that constituted London’s streets and replace them with boulevards and road grids as formal and as controlled as the garden of a country estate. The city would be made a fit place for the gentlemen of the enlightenment, those tradesmen they required to sustain them, and the servants needed to minister to them. Everybody else was expected to wander off and do whatever it is unwanted poor people were expected to do in the seventeenth century — die presumably.

  But, alas, it was not to be. Because, before the ashes were cool, the inhabitants of the city moved back in and staked out the outlines of their old properties. London became a shadow city marked out in string, shanties and improvised fences. The buildings may have burnt down, but the people had survived and they weren’t going to give up their rights without a fight. Or at the very least a hefty wodge of cash. Since Charles II, despite being the king of bling, was famously short of readies and already had a war going with the Dutch, London got rebuilt with its donkey tracks intact. And Wren had to be content with the odd church dotted around the place.