Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  And for a second I felt the wind lifting me and experienced a surge of joy at my escape from the constant pull of the earth, my freedom.

  And then the ground smacked me in the gob.

  I lay face down for a while, soil and grass mixing with blood in my mouth. Two metres away Sky had collapsed in a heap and was laughing hysterically, drumming her heels on the grass and pausing only to draw breath and point.

  I spat the grass out of my mouth and sat up. I’d bitten my lip, not badly but just enough to draw blood.

  ‘It’s not that funny,’ I said but obviously Sky thought it was. Toby did a lap of honour around the playground, yapping occasionally.

  The shadow of the blocks had stretched across the gardens, except for the strip of sunlight we were sitting in. I looked up and saw that the dirty brown concrete had been shaded russet by the sun, which reflected a brilliant orange off the windows. Now I knew what to look for, I could easily spot Jake Phillips’ balcony with its palm and trails of honeysuckle and ivy.

  I looked further up to the top of the tower, but at this angle I couldn’t see anything on the roof proper.

  I called Sky, who had at least stopped laughing by then, and she wriggled over on her belly until she was by my side. I noticed that if she was getting grass stains on her dress, they were blending imperceptibly into the fabric.

  ‘Sky,’ I asked.

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Is there still music coming from the top of the tower?’

  Sky arched her back to stare up at the top of the tower, her face screwing up in concentration.

  ‘Yep,’ she said and collapsed on her face.

  I calmed my breathing and waited for Toby to shut up – then I listened carefully. There was traffic on the Walworth Road, and behind that the background thrum of the city. I think there might have been a snatch of conversation from somewhere halfway up the tower. But no music – at least nothing I could hear.

  ‘Is it coming from the very top or from the floor below?’ I asked.

  Sky gave it some thought.

  ‘Top,’ she shouted and pointed to the sky. ‘Top, top, top!’

  ‘Would you like to come and have a look with me?’ I asked as I stood up.

  Sky shuddered. ‘Nope. It’s cold – bedtime,’ she said, and I saw that the sun had set behind us and the shadow had crept all the way to the base of the tower. Sky followed me up and gave me a little wave.

  ‘Bye bye,’ she said and walked away into the gloom.

  I took Toby back to the flat where he stuck his face happily in a bowl full of biscuits while I asked myself – what could be going on at the top of the tower?

  I still had the skeleton key in my pocket, so I put on a jumper and took the lift to the top floor and used it to access the stairs to the roof. While I was travelling up I composed a text explaining where I was going and sent it to Lesley and Nightingale. Your colleagues can’t come and rescue you if they don’t know where you are.

  God, I’m seeing a lot of the city these days, I thought as I stepped out onto the roof. The sun was sinking into the folds of West London and I might have spent more time picking out landmarks if I hadn’t been losing the light and not carrying a torch. The first thing that struck me was the strange hexagonal structure at the centre which rose like a truncated gazebo roof and was surmounted by a concrete cylinder, three metres across and four tall.

  It wasn’t a water tank or pumping station, because Skygarden had four conventional tanks all mounted in an offset cruciform over four of the housing stacks. It couldn’t be the housing for the lift machinery because it was mounted dead centre right over the tower’s hollow central shaft. The only thing I could think it might be was part of the building’s tuned mass damper.

  Beyond their limitations as social housing, tall buildings have another problem – which is that they sway in the wind. If the swaying motion amplifies it can quickly exceed the structural integrity of the building and, in a system-built structure, many of the inhabitants get to be the squishy filling in a concrete sandwich. Even the most idealistic architect tries to keep fatalities to a minimum and the standard answer is a tuned mass damper. This is essentially one or more compensating heavy weights which swing left when the building swings right, and vice versa, dampening the oscillation and thus avoiding embarrassing questions like ‘Where’s the skyline gone?’

  When I say heavy weights, I mean heavy. For a building the size and height of Skygarden, a couple of tons at least.

  There was a single door set into the ridged concrete side of the mysterious cylinder. The door’s surface was metal but old, pitted and rusted at the edges – definitely not the work of County Gard. Amazingly, with a bit of artistic jiggling, the skeleton key worked, which meant that the door dated back to the original build.

  Inside, it was very dark but I am, if not exactly a master, then definitely an apprentice in the secret arts. And as such I laugh in the face of darkness.

  Now, making a werelight was the very first spell I ever learnt and I’ve spent more than a year practising it so I’m pretty confident with it. I can run you up a were-light in torrential rain or while reading the newspaper and the size and intensity of the light will be consistent every time.

  So imagine my surprise when I flicked open my palm and got a werelight the size of a football and the colour of a yellow party balloon. I closed down the spell and tried again, this time adding impello so I could move the light about. Nightingale says that spells become more stable with each increase in complexity, so I was hoping the second forma would calm things down.

  It still came out so bright I expected lens flare, and as it rose up I suddenly understood why Bruno Taut’s sketches has been on Stromberg’s wall. Inside the concrete cylinder was a scaled-down version of Taut’s glass pavilion, like a giant acorn made of interlocking panes of glass. In the brilliance of my werelight the panes reflected back in greens, blues, purples and indigos. I tried to imagine what it would be like without the concealing concrete cylinder. You’d barely see it from ground level. But from a distance, or if it were lit from within . . .

  There was even a central plinth where, if it had been a lighthouse, the lamp would have stood. A metre across, it was raised to waist height and covered in a thick layer of dust. I wiped at it with my hand and got a static electric shock. Which was a surprise, because I could have sworn the surface was plastic. I used the sleeve of my jacket to clean the top. It was plastic, smooth black PVC with a pattern incised into the surface – a complicated series of interlocking circles and intersecting lines I didn’t recognise from anything I’d read.

  It was a lighthouse, I realised, or more precisely a Stadtkrone, a city crown. But it had always been assumed that the ‘spirit’ of the city was a metaphorical concept at best and a bit of metaphysical bollocks at worst.

  Is this what Erik Stromberg had been watching for with his telescope from his roof top garden on Highgate Hill? Gazing over the city and waiting to see – what exactly? A magic lighthouse? The mystical energy of the metropolis?

  I glanced up at my unnaturally bright werelight bobbing a metre above my head.

  Magic, vestigia . . . Whatever it is that powers what we do.

  Watching for a burst of magic like the burn-off at the top of a refinery flare tower?

  Making Skygarden what? A magic refinery, a drilling rig, magic mine? And extracting the magic from where? The ground? The people? Sky’s garden?

  Now I knew what it was, I was sensing I could identify it as the greasy, static-charged sense of power in the air. If Toby had been in there with me he would have barked himself right off the yap scale.

  Wege der Industriellen Nutzung von Magié, I thought. Towards the Industrial Use of Magic – oh yeah.

  Now I knew what the Faceless Man was interested in.

  14

  Something Missing

  There have been developments. Please see me at your earliest convenience. Nightingale.

  ‘Still
hasn’t really got the hang of texting yet has he?’ said Lesley.

  She’d been in the kitchen making coffee when I woke up the next morning. I asked her what her evening had been like.

  ‘We ended up at Shepherd Market,’ she said. ‘In one of those pubs that are tucked into a side street.’

  ‘Do you want to know why that is?’

  Lesley handed me a coffee. ‘If I said “no” would there be any chance you wouldn’t tell me?’

  ‘Yes. But then it would just niggle away at you until it became unbearable,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the way you are,’ she said. ‘I’m a little bit more focused on the practical things in life.’

  ‘Like fairies?’

  ‘Do you want to know what happened or not?’

  I tasted the coffee. It was vile. It always is when Lesley makes instant.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  She sat down at the other end of the sofa-bed.

  ‘It was an ordinary pub,’ she said. ‘A bit traditional looking, Australian barman, but no TV though and no music. There was a stage area, so maybe they prefer it live. But you can feel it, like at the Spring Court – that something.’

  There was a man there so beautiful that he would have stopped a hen party in its tracks, and a woman dressed in strips of fur.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to take your mask off in front of people,’ she said. ‘And know they don’t care.’ She must have caught something in my expression, because she hastily added, ‘People that aren’t you and Nightingale. These people don’t care, in fact they don’t even notice – that includes Beverley you know. So whatever she sees in you, it ain’t your face. Lucky escape for you there really – isn’t it?’

  ‘Funny,’ I said.

  ‘So Zach introduces me to some suitably dodgy-looking geezers, who I shall write up when I get back to the Folly.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of central London. ‘I did the spiel to them and they said they’d keep an eye out for the materials we wanted.’

  ‘Did they ask what you wanted it for?’ I said.

  ‘First lot didn’t, but then this woman sidles over and says she couldn’t help overhearing, blah blah blah. “What on earth could you want all that for?” That’s how she spoke. “You simply must tell me what you’re planning.”’

  So Lesley refused to give any details, while dropping enough hints to make it clear that we were making our own staffs.

  ‘Did you find out anything about her?’

  ‘It’s all in my notebook,’ said Lesley. ‘Said she was an artist. Made batik prints and flogged them up Camden Lock.’

  Where our Night Witch had gone to ground. Coincidence?

  ‘After that we all got hammered. And me and Zach . . .’ She frowned. ‘And some friends, crashed out in a portacabin on the Crossrail site.’

  ‘How did you get in there?’

  ‘Oh Zach’s all over Crossrail now,’ she said. ‘What with him being semi-official liaison between the project and the Quiet People.’ Without whose tunnelling expertise, I learned, Crossrail would have been behind schedule. ‘He must be making some serious money.’

  ‘Not enough to get his own place, though.’

  ‘I don’t think he can, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘I think he has something missing that means he literally can’t settle down. If you put him in a mansion, with servants and a swimming pool, he still wouldn’t be able to sleep there more than a couple of nights.’ She rubbed irritably at the ridge of skin that ran down between her eyes. ‘I think it’s part of what makes Zach Zach. I think they’re all like that you know? Not quite all there.’

  Which was when we received Nightingale’s text.

  He met us in a Colombian café tucked under one of the arches by the Elephant and Castle National Rail station. It had orange walls hung with bundles of wickerwork baskets and shelves crowded with mysterious bottles with red labels. Half the food counter was devoted to hard-to-get treats for the homesick expatriate – La Gitana Tostados and Wafers Noel. The menu was bilingual and I had the arepa con carne adada which was translated on the menu as corn bread with grilled beef. Lesley had a ham omelette on the basis that it was almost impossible to mess a ham omelette up.

  Nightingale said the coffee was good, so I ordered a double espresso with a cappuccino chaser.

  Nightingale put down his free copy of Express News as we joined him at his table.

  ‘Dr Walid has made a disturbing breakthrough in the Robert Weil case,’ he said. ‘He’s discovered evidence of chimeric cells on the body of the woman Weil dumped.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Lesley. ‘So the Faceless Man was involved in that as well.’

  ‘A chimera of what crossed with what?’ I asked. Because, having gone mano-a-mano-tiger with one of the Faceless Man’s creations, I really wanted to know what it was going to be this time.

  ‘Abdul said you would ask. But he didn’t have enough of a sample to determine that,’ said Nightingale. Despite the shotgun to the victim’s face, Dr Walid had managed to extract tissue cells that had been driven into the eye sockets by the blast. It had taken this long to get them sequenced.

  ‘It’s not like Old Faceless to make a mistake like that,’ said Lesley. ‘He’s always been very forensically aware.’

  ‘He’s just another criminal, Lesley,’ said Nightingale. ‘His training makes him personally dangerous but it doesn’t make him invincible. And he’s not Professor Moriarty – he doesn’t have a plan for every contingency. He made a mistake with Peter in Soho and almost got himself caught.’

  Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

  ‘Robert Weil was clearly an associate of some kind,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Shouldn’t we pass that on to Sussex Major Crimes?’ I asked.

  ‘They won’t thank us,’ said Lesley. ‘They have their victim and they easily have enough to send Robert Weil up the steps for it. As far as they’re concerned it’s a result, and they’re not going to be interested in widening it out.’

  ‘I’m going to call Sussex this morning and after that Bromley,’ said Nightingale. ‘As I believe you have both impressed upon me often enough that the currency of modern policing is information.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But we didn’t think you were paying attention.’

  My corn bread arrived with a slab of grilled beef. I thought the corn bread was a bit dry, but according to Nightingale that was how corn bread was supposed to be. I slathered on enough chilli sauce to moisten it up, which I gathered from the waitress’s approving looks was exactly what I was supposed to do.

  ‘Can you actually taste the meat?’ asked Lesley, who was cutting her omelette into squares small enough to fit in the mouth hole of her mask.

  ‘It’s the combination,’ I said.

  ‘One thing does puzzle me,’ said Nightingale. ‘Why would Stromberg build himself a Stadtkrone and then wrap it up in concrete?’

  ‘I got that figured out,’ I said. I’d checked the enclosing cylinder before heading downstairs. ‘Everything in Skygarden is either constructed of formed concrete or breezeblocks.’ In the case of the formed concrete, with the ridges and irregularities of the mould left on the finished surface – the better to emphasise the basic honesty of the design and ensure that small children could pick up really painful grazes while playing in the corridors. ‘But the cylinder is constructed of vertical strips with a narrow rectangular cross section that have been cemented together.’

  Nightingale and Lesley gave me glazed looks.

  ‘It’s durable enough to survive the weather outside,’ I said. ‘But in the event of an overpressure event inside, I think it’s designed to flower open like a Chocolate Orange.’

  Me and Lesley then had to explain Terry’s Chocolate Orange to Nightingale.

  ‘Not unlike a practitioner’s hand opening to reveal a werelight,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Not unlike at all,’ I said. Yeah exactly like that I thoug
ht.

  ‘And then what?’ asked Lesley. ‘What did Stromberg expect to happen then?’

  ‘Inspired by the light of reason,’ said Nightingale, ‘the good people of Southwark would march arm in arm into a utopian future.’

  ‘I think he needed to get out more,’ said Lesley.

  Nightingale sipped his coffee, his brow furrowed.

  ‘In view of his discovery,’ he said, ‘Peter will go back to the Folly and have a look at this German book in case it can shed some light on what Stromberg thought he was doing.’

  ‘My German’s non-existent . . .’ I began, but Nightingale held up his hand.

  ‘What the pair of you have discovered makes me even more certain that the Faceless Man has a strong interest in this particular locale,’ he said. ‘If there’s even a chance he, or our Russian friend, might turn up in person then this is an opportunity I can’t pass over. If we can put just one of them out action we’ll be cutting the threat in half.’

  ‘So you’re leaving Lesley hanging out as bait?’

  ‘I have much more faith in Lesley’s sense of self-preservation than in yours,’ said Nightingale. ‘In any case, the Faceless Man has your measure as a practitioner, while Lesley will be an unknown. I’m counting on his caution.’

  I wasn’t sure I found that particularly reassuring, but in the event of an attack I wasn’t going to be as much use as Thomas ‘Oh sorry, was that your Tiger Tank?’ Nightingale. So after we’d finished breakfast I hopped on a 168 bus back to Russell Square.

  I went in the front and, as I’d expected, there was a courier-delivered parcel balanced on top of the pile of junk mail that constantly accumulated on the occasional table just inside the atrium. I looked around for Molly, who usually appeared to greet us when we arrived home – if only to ensure that we understood we lived here purely at her sufferance. I thought that the atrium seemed strangely quiet, which was funny when you consider the deathless hush that hung over the place when I’d first moved in.