Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I didn’t tell him that it was all stored as binary information on rapidly spinning shiny discs, partly because I’d have to look up the details myself, but mostly because by the time he’d understood the technology it would have been replaced by something else.

  He spent about an hour shuttling back and forth through the footage of the booking hall to see if he could spot a practitioner amongst the crowds of passengers. Nightingale’s level of concentration can be frightening, but even he couldn’t isolate anyone suspicious.

  ‘He might have been walking two steps behind him,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s not as if we know what he looks like.’

  Lesley, when we briefed her later, wanted to know why we were assuming it was the Faceless Man at all. ‘It could have been one of Peter’s watery girlfriends,’ she said. ‘Or something else equally weird that we haven’t encountered yet.’

  I pointed out that Richard Lewis had been on the list of potential Little Crocodiles, which she agreed was a possible lead and should be checked.

  ‘You need to get over to his house and have a sniff around,’ she said. ‘If you find something, then we’ll know it will be worth looking into the suicide.’

  ‘Want to come with?’ I asked but Lesley said that while the prospect of a day trip to Swindon was an attractive one, it was a pleasure she’d have to forgo.

  ‘I’ve got to finish the report on Nolfi the magnificent,’ she said. There would be two reports, one for the Folly files and a sanitised version for the wider Met. Lesley was particularly good at coming up with the latter.

  ‘I’m going to blame it on his attempt to do the lighter fluid trick but with brandy,’ she said. ‘That way his official statement – that he was doing a magic trick that went wrong – will match the evidence.’

  It went without saying that we weren’t going to charge him. Instead he was going to get what we like to call ‘the safety lecture’ from Dr Walid. Half an hour with the good doctor and his brain sections was enough to put anyone off magic for life.

  So it was that I climbed into the Asbo on my tod and headed up the M4 for the wilds of the Thames Valley.

  It rained most of the way and the radio threatened floods.

  Richard Lewis had lived in a Grade II listed thatched cottage with its own private approach lane and what looked like, through the rain, its own orchard. It was the sort of madly picturesque place that gets bought by people with rural fantasies and a shed full of cash. Looking at it, I really wished I’d had time to go over Mr Lewis’s finances – because there was no way he could afford a place like this on what he earned from Southwark Council. I wondered if he’d had his hand out under the table. Maybe he’d got greedy and asked for a bit extra from the wrong person.

  Or his registered civil partner, a Mr Phillip Orante, could have been rich.

  I parked outside next to a Sloane green Range Rover, less than a year old and never been driven off road judging by its wheel arches, and crunched up the wet gravel drive to the front door. Although it was early afternoon, the low cloud and the drizzle meant it was gloomy enough for the inhabitants to need to put the downstairs lights on. Seeing that someone was at home was a relief, since I’d decided not to call ahead.

  You don’t call ahead if you can avoid it, on account of it always being better to arrive on someone’s doorstep as a horrid surprise. Things generally go smoother if the people you’re talking to don’t have a chance to rehearse their alibis, think about what they’re going to say, hide evidence, bury body parts – that sort of thing.

  The oak front door had an authentic bell pull with what sounded like a cow-bell attached to the other end. The thatch overhanging the porch tried to drip water down my back so I stepped away while I waited. The grounds around the house – they were too large for me to call it a garden – were damp and quiet in the soft rain. Somewhere around the corner I could smell a wet rose bush.

  The door was opened by a middle-aged woman with a round brown face with black eyes and short dark hair – Filipino if I had to guess. She wore a white plastic apron over a blue polyester tunic and a pair of yellow washing-up gloves. She didn’t seem thrilled to see me.

  ‘Can I help you?’ She had an accent I didn’t recognise.

  I identified myself and asked to speak to Mr Orante.

  ‘Is this about poor Richard?’ she asked.

  I said it was, and she told me Phillip’s heart was broken.

  ‘Such a shame,’ she said and invited me in and told me to wait in the living room while she went to fetch Orante.

  The interior of the cottage was disappointingly furnished in bog standard designer bland – cream-coloured sofas, steel tube occasional furniture and the walls painted in estate-agent-friendly shades of tinted white. Only the pictures on the walls, black and white photographic prints for the most part, had any character. I was examining a vérité portrait of a couple of New Orleans jazzmen when the woman in the apron returned with Phillip Orante.

  He was a short, slight man in his late thirties. Despite the thinner face, his features were similar enough to the older woman’s to mark her as a relative. His mother, I thought, or at the very least an older sister or aunt. She seemed a bit young to be his mother.

  The beauty of being the police, though, is you can satisfy your curiosity without worrying about being socially awkward.

  ‘Are you a relative?’ I asked.

  ‘Phillip is my son,’ she said. ‘My eldest.’

  ‘She came over to, ah, help out, you know,’ said Phillip. ‘After.’

  He motioned for me to sit down, I automatically waited until he’d chosen the sofa before perching on an occasional chair – the better to maintain my height advantage. We worked our way through the normal conversational openings – I was sorry for his loss and he was sorry I was sorry and would I like some coffee.

  You always take the coffee from bereaved relatives, just as you always start with the rote expression of condolences. The banality of the exchange is what helps calm the witness down. People who’ve had their lives disrupted are looking for order and predictability – even if it’s just in the little things. That’s when being PC Plod is at its most useful – look stolid, talk slowly and, ninety per cent of the time they’ll tell you everything you want to know.

  Phillip had an accent which I thought was Canadian but which turned out, when I asked, to be Californian. San Franciscan to be precise. His mum was Filipino but had moved to California in her twenties and had met Phillip’s dad, whose parents had been Filipino but had himself been born in Seattle, while both were visiting relatives in Caloocan. So we did a bit of bonding over a discussion of the joys of growing up with the extended diaspora family and mothers who unreasonably felt that a young man’s priorities should be schoolwork, household chores and family commitments. Time enough for a social life once you’ve finished university, got married and provided grandchildren. The obvious contradiction never seems to bother them.

  ‘We were working on the grandchildren,’ said Phillip.

  Adoption or surrogacy, I wondered? It didn’t seem the time to ask.

  His mum brought us coffee on an enamelled tray with kittens painted on it. I waited until she’d bustled back out before asking how he’d come to move to the UK and meet Richard Lewis.

  ‘I was a dot.com millionaire,’ he said simply. ‘Co-founder of a company that you’ve never heard of, which was bought out by a bigger company that I signed a non-disclosure agreement with. They gave me a huge share option which I cashed in just before the market went south.’

  He gave me a thin smile. Obviously this was his standard spiel with its appropriate pauses for rueful laughs and self-deprecating chuckles – only this was the first time he’d told it with his partner dead.

  ‘I always worry when there’s too much of a good thing,’ he said.

  Having made his millions he headed to London, for the culture, the nightlife and most of all because, as far as he knew, none of his immediate relatives lived there.


  ‘I love my family,’ he said, glancing after his mother. ‘But you know how it is.’

  He’d met Richard Lewis at the Royal Opera House during a performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. He’d gone on impulse and had been in the standing-room-only section when a well-dressed stranger had turned to him and said, ‘God this is a bloody awful performance.’

  ‘He said that he could think of at least five things that he’d rather be doing,’ said Phillip. ‘I asked him what was on the top of the list and he said, “Well, a stiff drink would be a good start, don’t you think?” So off we went for a drink and that was it, cupid’s arrow right between the eyes.’

  But it hadn’t quite been love at first sight. Phillip hadn’t flown across the pond with a large fortune just to fall for the first half-decent proposition. ‘He worked at it,’ said Phillip. ‘He was methodical and patient and—’ Phillip looked away and stared at a blank piece of wall for a moment before taking a breath. ‘Really fucking funny.’

  Three months later they were married, or more precisely they entered into a Civil Partnership, with due ceremony, celebration and a suitable pre-nup.

  ‘That was Richard’s idea,’ said Phillip.

  I judged that this was about as good a time as any to wheel out the questionnaire. It had been drawn up by Dr Walid and Nightingale to uncover evidence of real magical practice – as opposed to an interest in the occult, ghost stories, fantasy novels and that old time religion. Dr Walid had thrown in some questions from established psychometric and sociological surveys to make it sound kosher. I called it the Voigt-Kampf test even though only Dr Walid got the joke – and he had to look it up on Wikipedia.

  ‘It’s to provide background about these . . . tragic incidents,’ I said. ‘To see what can be done to prevent them in the future.’

  Up till now I’d mostly given the spiel to potential Little Crocodiles who I was pretending to interview on a totally random basis. Watching Phillip’s face, I decided we were going to have to dream up a whole new strategy for dealing with bereaved relatives. Either that or Dr Walid could come and administer his own bloody tests.

  Phillip nodded as if this was all perfectly reasonable – perhaps he was just pleased we were taking an interest.

  The test started with a couple of psychological questions as warm up, and I almost skipped number five, ‘Did the subject indicate dissatisfaction with any aspect of his life?’ But Dr Walid had stressed consistency in application.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ said Phillip. ‘Not until I saw the tape of the accident.’

  ‘They let you see it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I insisted,’ said Phillip. ‘I thought there was no way that Richard would kill himself. What reason would he have? But it’s hard to argue with the evidence of your eyes.’

  I moved onto the ‘spiritual’ questions which revealed that Richard had almost been an Anglican in the same way that Phillip had almost been a Catholic. Phillip told me proudly that his mum had ceased to be a practising Catholic the day after he came out.

  ‘She says she will go back to the Church the day it apologises,’ he said.

  Lewis hadn’t had any interest in the occult beyond that needed to appreciate Wagner or the Magic Flute and he didn’t own any books about magic, or many books at all.

  ‘He gave away most of his old books when we moved here,’ said Phillip. ‘And he said his Kindle was much handier for the commute to London. Now I resent all the hours he spent on that train. But he loved his home here and he wouldn’t give up his job.’

  Not that Phillip could understand why. ‘I know he didn’t get anything in the way of job satisfaction,’ he said. Phillip could have certainly used him in his own company, which arranged finance for high-tech start-ups. ‘He hated working in London, said he hated the city and I begged him to quit for like five years, but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Did he say why?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Phillip. ‘He always changed the subject.’

  Up till then I’d been doodling, but now I started taking notes. Keeping a secret always makes the police suspicious. And while we’re willing to believe in the possibility of a totally innocent explanation, we never think that’s the way to bet.

  I asked whether there was any aspect of Richard’s work as a town planner that he’d talked about more than others, but Phillip hadn’t noticed. Nor had Richard complained about incidents of corruption or coming under any pressure to influence a planning decision one way or the other.

  ‘And whatever it was keeping him there,’ said Phillip, ‘he was obviously over it, because he told me that he was quitting.’ He looked away from me and fumbled for his tea cup to cover his tears.

  The mother bustled back in, saw the tears and gave me a poisonous look. I worked my way quickly through the last of the questionnaire, offered my condolences once more, and left.

  Something fishy and possibly supernatural had happened to Richard Lewis but since he obviously wasn’t a practitioner I couldn’t think what his connection with the excitingly terminal world of modern magic might be. When I got back to the Folly I wrote it up and filed the requisite two reports. The thinking in police work with this sort of non-lead is that either some other completely different line of inquiry will prove unexpectedly connected or you will never find out what the fuck was going on.

  My gut instinct was that we were never going to find out why Richard Lewis threw himself under a train – which just goes to show why you should never trust your gut.

  4

  Complex and Unspecific Matters

  After car-related incidents, burglary and theft are the most common crimes which MOPs, that’s members of the public to you, are subject to. It’s also the one they moan about the most, mainly because they know that the clear-up rate for burglary is low.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother writing this down,’ they say as they exaggerate the value of their goods for insurance purposes. ‘It’s not like you’re going to catch them, is it?’ To which we have no answer – because they’re right. We’re not going to catch them for that particular burglary, but we often catch them later and then get some of your stuff back – the stuff that’s now been replaced by better stuff from the insurance. Most of the recovered goods are junk but some of it attracts the eagle eye of the Arts and Antiques Squad who grab it, photograph it and put it on a database called, with the Met’s unerring ear for a euphonious acronym, LSAD – the London Stolen Art Directory.

  They keep saying that they’re going to make it searchable by the public but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It is possible for it to be searched by a police officer, if he can persuade his line manager to push for his OCU to be granted access via their terminals. Not an easy thing to do, when the line manager in question is hazy on the concept of databases, internet searches and indeed the very notion of a ‘line manager’. I’d gained access just after the New Year and now made checking new arrivals part of my morning routine. ‘Anything to avoid real work,’ was Lesley’s verdict and Nightingale gave me the same long-suffering look he gives me when I accidentally blow up fire extinguishers, fall asleep while he’s talking, or fail to conjugate my Latin verbs.

  So you can imagine how pleased I was when one cold dark morning, a fortnight after my visit to Swindon, I spotted my first find. I always start with the rare books and I almost missed it because it was in German; Über Die Grundlagen Dass Die Praxis Der Magie Zugrunde Léigen but fortunately it had been translated as About the Basics that the Practice of Magic Reference Lies probably by Google Translate. There was a picture of the frontispiece listing the author as Reinhard Maller, published in 1799 in Weimar. I checked for Maller in the mundane library’s card index but found nothing.

  I made a note of the case number, printed the description and showed it to Nightingale later that morning during practice. He translated the title as On the Fundamentals that Underlie the Practice of Magic.

  ‘Show off,’ I said.

  ‘I think you
had better secure this,’ he said. ‘And see if you can track down where it came from.’

  ‘Is it something to do with Ettersberg?’ I asked.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘Not everything German relates back to the Nazis.’

  ‘Is it a translation of the Principia Artis Magicae?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t tell without having a look.’

  ‘I’ll get onto Arts and Antiques,’ I said.

  ‘Later,’ said Nightingale. ‘After practice.’

  Arts and Antiques, definitely not known by the rest of the Met as the Arts and Crafts squad, occasionally recover an item so valuable that even the evidence storage locker in the middle of New Scotland Yard isn’t secure enough. For those items they rent space at the auction house Christie’s where they laugh at cat burglars, tweak the nose of international art thieves and have some of the most serious, and rumoured to be illegal, security measures in the world. That’s why the following morning I found myself down on King Street in St James’s where even a miserable icy rain couldn’t wash away the smell of money.

  Nor could a stick of incendiary bombs, back in April 1941, when it destroyed everything except the façade of number 8 King Street, the London home of Christie’s since 1823. They rebuilt in the 1950s, which was why the foyer was disappointingly shapeless and low ceilinged, albeit in an expensive air-conditioned and marble-floored way.

  The Folly doesn’t generate the gigabytes of paperwork that the rest of the Met does but what we do produce tends to be a bit too esoteric to be outsourced to an IT company in Inverness. Instead, we have one elderly guy in a basement in Oxford, although admittedly the basement’s under the Bodleian library and the guy is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

  I found Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil. F.R.S. B.Mon hunched over the book in a viewing room upstairs. Designed, I learnt later, to be deliberately neutral and not distract from whatever it was you were supposed to be viewing, the room was all beige carpet, white walls and aluminium and black canvas faux Bauhaus chairs. Postmartin was examining his prize on an unornamented lectern. He was wearing white gloves and using a plastic spatula to turn the pages.