Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  She wasn’t in the kitchen when I stepped in to raid the pantry. I made myself a cheese and pickle sandwich, tucked the parcel under my arm and headed out the back door for the coach house. When I climbed the spiral staircase to the first floor I found that the door was unlocked, so I wasn’t totally shocked when I opened up and caught Molly in the tech cave, feather duster in hand – mid dust.

  She paused and turned her head to look at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were in here.’

  She gave me a reproving look and, with a snap, the feather duster vanished up her right sleeve. I stepped aside politely as she swept past me and closed the door behind her when she’d gone.

  The master off-switch was in the off position, but when I felt the side of the PC’s tower it was still warm. I fired everything up and got the blue screen of Your Computer Failed To Shut Down Correctly, as if I needed more confirmation. I wondered what Molly had been doing – I doubted it was solitaire. While I waited for my PC to reboot I unwrapped my parcel, two layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper no less and a note that very politely informed me that I would be held responsible for any damage.

  It was easy to see how the book might have been overlooked. It was smaller than a mass market paperback, with a dull red hardback cover and high quality paper that was only now faintly browning with age. The ink quality was good, easy on the eye, and it would have been a pleasure to read if I only I read German.

  What made it truly valuable to the investigation were the initials E.S. pencilled on a corner of the first page, and the fact Eric Stromberg had gone on to mark parts of the text that interested him. It was just as well Postmartin had his own copy, because he regarded people who annotate books the way my dad looked upon people who left their fingerprints on the playing surface of their vinyl. I did wear a pair of thin latex gloves in Postmartin’s honour though – which, come to think of it, is the way Dad would like to see people handle records.

  One of the pages had a piece of card, the lid of a cigarette packet judging by the smell, as a place marker. And underlined here twice in heavy pencil was:

  So sei nun meine These, dass sich Magié, die einen begrenzten Raum ausfüllt, wie eine übersättigte Lösung verhält und dass jeder Eingriff, ob natürlichen oder artifiziellen Ursprungs, zum spontanen Auskristalliseren des magischen Effekts führen kann.

  Which according to Google translated as: So now is my thesis that magic that fills a confined space, such as a supersaturated solution behaves and that any interference, whether natural or artificial origin, can lead to the spontaneous Auskristalliseren of magical effect.

  I looked up Auskristalliseren in my dictionary and online without success, but I was willing to bet it meant ‘crystallise’. Not long after that passage was another underlined section:

  Daher sollte es durchaus möglich sein, das magische Potential in industriellem Maßstabe auskristallisieren zu lassen und zur späteren Verwendung aufzubewahren.

  Which translated as: Therefore, it should be quite possible to crystallise on an industrial scale the magical potential and save them for later use.

  I made a note of all the pages and passages underlined or otherwise marked, and emailed the details to Postmartin.

  So Skygarden really was a magic drilling rig. But that still left the problem of where the magic was being drilled from. And it would really help if we had a working definition of what magic was. I went back to the book – after all, if you were going to industrialise it, you pretty much had to know how it worked.

  I found a promising section on types of vestigium – Stromberg had thought so, too, judging from his notes in the margin. These broke it down into four main types, todesvestigium, magievestigium, naturvestigium and Vestigium menschlicher Aktivität. I didn’t even need the internet for the first three, death, magic and nature. And the fourth translated as human activity. Stromberg had pencilled nicht sinnvoll, ‘not useful’, by death and unwahrscheinlich, ‘unlikely’, by natural so probably not an old hospital site or gallows. Stromberg had obviously got as frustrated as me because beside human activity he’d written aber welche art von aktivität? ‘But what kind of activity?’ Underneath in what looked like it might be a different pencil, or just a blunter one – as if written later – were the words Handwerk nicht fließband! ‘Craft not pipelined!’

  So what had brought Stromberg to the Elephant and Castle?

  After the City of London itself, Southwark was the oldest bit of London proper, dating all the way back to the first ad hoc settlement on the south end of London Bridge. It had also always been the place that London stuck the things it didn’t want inside its walls, the tanneries, fullers, dyers and other industries that involved urine on an industrial scale. And, likewise, the other things that London needed but didn’t want too close, the bath houses and stews, the theatres and the bear pits. Carved through stinking, drunken, declaiming streets were the two Roman roads that linked the great bridge with Canterbury and the south coast. Shakespeare got pissed on a regular basis in Southwark. So did Chaucer – or at least his fictional pilgrims did.

  But where Skygarden was built? Marsh, then farmland and then housing. Not so much as a smithy or a lunatic asylum. Not even the whiff of a plague pit or a temple of Mithras.

  I had two theories. Either Stromberg had discovered something in the locality – an ancient temple, a stone circle, site of a massacre or iron age industrial site – or he’d been planning to extract magical power out of the everyday lives of council flat tenants. No wonder he was waiting up on his roof with his telescope until the day he died.

  I decided I’d exceeded any useful activity, handwerk or fließband, that I could achieve where I was, so I shut everything down in the tech cave, placed our new German acquisition in the safety of the non-magical library and headed out to catch the bus back across the river.

  Molly watched me leave, no doubt impatient for me to be gone so she could get back to the computer. The keystroke tracker I’d activated would tell me what she was up to.

  Lesley was waiting for me in the living room, sprawled on the sofa bed and twirling her mask by one of its eyeholes as she watched Dennis and Gnasher on CBBC. Toby was sitting in front of the TV, head cocked to one side as if judging Gnasher’s form as a freestyle event.

  ‘I’m going to go see Zach,’ she said without preamble.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because you never get everything out of Zach on the first go,’ she said. ‘And if I have to stay in this flat all evening I will not be held responsible. Any joy with the Germans?’

  I floated my drilling rig hypothesis, which she agreed was farfetched. ‘Unless watching telly counts as human activity. Speaking of which, I dropped in on our neighbour.’

  ‘Emma Wall?’ I asked – the fallen princess?

  ‘You know how some people work at being stupid?’ she asked. ‘If you give them a clear, common sense choice they give it a lot of thought and then choose stupid.’

  ‘I think we did probation with a couple of those,’ I said.

  ‘For some people stupid comes natural – Emma Wall is one of those,’ she said and standing started hunting out clothes from a suitcase.

  ‘So, not a mole for the Faceless Man?’

  ‘Not unless he’s got really low recruitment standards.’

  ‘Bugger,’ I said. ‘The fucker is so slippery.’

  Lesley held her two masks either side of her face. ‘Which one do you think?’ she asked. ‘Vile pink or tax envelope tan?’

  ‘Vile pink,’ I said as she disappeared into the bedroom. ‘You really think Zach’s got more to tell you?’

  ‘More to tell me, yeah,’ she shouted from inside the bedroom. ‘Useful? I don’t know.’

  Ten minutes later she was out the door in a pair of skinny jeans, a cream blouse and a leather jacket that I happened to know had been modified so she’d have somewhere to carry her baton and her cuffs.

  ‘You never know when you might need them,�
� she’d said to me pointedly when she showed me the pockets. ‘And it gives the jacket a better hang.’

  I texted Nightingale to let him know our change in disposition and then I picked up my Pliny, because nothing says stuck all alone in your flat like a Roman know-it-all.

  It had started raining when I took Toby out for his combination dog walk and snooping session. We strolled about the dismantled playground but Sky didn’t make an appearance amongst the dripping trees. As we squelched back along the elevated walkway I heard the grumbling of van-sized diesels – at least two by the sound of them. When I reached the tower I leaned over the parapet and peered through the grey falling rain. Half hidden behind the curve of the tower I saw two Transits, Mark 7s with the 2.2 diesel, backing up in front of one of the garages. One of the vans was in the white, yellow and blue County Gard livery but the other was plain dark blue with no markings. I could have used my magical abilities to get a closer look, but instead I used the zoom function on my phone. That way I could record them at the same time.

  The vans blocked my view of the garage but it was pretty clear that they were transferring stuff from the vehicles. I thought of Kevin’s cache of dodgy goods and wondered if this might be similar. Not everything had to do with the mystical forces of evil – totally ordinary crime could be going on at the same time.

  Toby sneezed. The vans finished unloading and drove away and we went up to the flat to dry off. Toby got dinner and I got back to my Pliny.

  I woke up to the sound of rain driving horizontally against the window panes and no sign of Lesley. Since I was awake I got up and spent the morning accidentally running into the off-duty Goth and the man in a tweed jacket that I’d pegged as possible inside men for the Faceless Man. Goth boy was simple enough – I just stepped into the lift and struck up a conversation. It’s amazing how easy it is to get white boys to talk to you when you share a lift. By the time we hit the ground floor I knew his name, flat number and more of his life story than I really wanted; Lionel Roberts, a flat two floors down from us and a wannabe poet currently working as security in Hannibal House – the office block built on top of Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Tweed jacket man had a ten-year-old daughter who Toby quickly had eating out of his hand, or more precisely vice versa. Her name was Anthonia Beswick and his name was Anthony and he was currently unemployed, but optimistic that the recession wouldn’t last for ever. He said it was wife’s idea to name their daughter after him but I didn’t believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.

  I called in an IIP check on both of them, but my instinct was that neither were minions of the Faceless Man. The rain eased off by noon, so I had lunch out at the shopping centre and then stopped off in the garden to do some of the less obtrusive bits of my practice. I thought I heard giggling in the distance but there was no other sign of Sky.

  Lesley had returned while I was out, with a metric ton of neglected paperwork which we dutifully worked our way through before flopping down on the sofa bed with a microwaved lasagne and a Red Stripe each.

  ‘Why aren’t you fucking Beverley?’ she asked suddenly.

  I spluttered around my Red Stripe.

  ‘Why aren’t you fucking Zach?’ I asked, finally.

  ‘Who says I’m not?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘A bit.’

  ‘How can you be fucking him a bit?’

  Lesley gave this point due consideration.

  ‘Okay, maybe more than a bit,’ she said.

  ‘Since when?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  That was a good question and I didn’t really have a good answer. Still, nobody’s ever let that get in the way of a conversation.

  ‘You brought it up,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I asked you a question which you still haven’t answered,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you think that Beverley’s interested?’

  ‘You’re going with that? Really?’

  I got up and took the dirty plates back to the kitchen and fetched another beer. I didn’t fancy sitting down again, so I leant against the doorjamb.

  ‘We could call Beverley and find out,’ said Lesley, ‘She’d be here fast enough – you can practically see Barnes from our balcony.’

  ‘I’m not in a hurry to rush into that one,’ I said.

  Lesley rounded on me and pointed at her face, forcing me to look at the whole horrid mess of it. ‘This is what happens if you wait, Peter,’ she said. ‘Or some other fucked-up thing. You’ve got to get it while you can.’

  And I thought that I’d like to know what I was going to get. But I kept my mouth shut because I’d had another totally unrelated thought.

  ‘Why don’t we call Zach now,’ I said.

  Lesley gave me an exasperated look.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because there’s one place in this whole tower where we haven’t looked yet,’ I said. ‘And that’s downstairs in the basement.’

  ‘And Zach?’

  ‘Good with locks. Remember?’

  15

  Landscaping

  Which turned out to be an understatement.

  ‘It’s just a padlock,’ said Zach as he casually tossed it to me and then checked Lesley to make sure she’d been watching.

  It had taken Zach less than thirty minutes to arrive at our front door, wearing a surprisingly clean red T-shirt with the Clash logo on the chest and trailing the smell of antiperspirant – applied, I reckoned, when he was on his way up in the lift. He held up a plastic Lidl bag containing a three-litre plastic bottle of Strongbow.

  ‘Where’s the party?’ he asked.

  ‘Downstairs,’ said Lesley.

  I examined the padlock Zach threw me and found that it was unmarked. We could put it back in place on the way out, and no one would be any the wiser.

  ‘Is this entirely legal?’ asked Zach.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley. ‘That was a clear health and safety violation.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ said Zach standing back so that me and Lesley could access the door to the basement. ‘I wouldn’t want to think that you two were leading me into anything illicit.’

  ‘We’re the law,’ said Lesley. ‘Remember?’

  ‘You’re the Isaacs,’ said Zach. ‘And that ain’t quite the same thing.’

  Without the padlock, the door to the basement opened easily and we went inside.

  We found ourselves at the bottom of Skygarden’s pointlessly wide central shaft. Two floors above us, wire mesh had been strung across the width of the shaft, presumably so people could work at the bottom without being hit by rubbish dropped from above. Over thirty years of careful housekeeping the mesh had acquired such a thick layer of old newspapers, burger boxes, empty drink cans and stuff I didn’t want to identify, that it blocked much of the light coming from above.

  ‘That’s a fire hazard,’ said Zach.

  Fortunately, enough of the strip lights mounted on the walls were still working for us to see what we were doing. I peered up through the accumulated rubbish to trace the descent of Stromberg’s so-called tuned mass damper down the centre of the shaft until it terminated in the basement where we stood. Close up I could see it was a cylinder thirty centimetres across and it terminated a metre above the ground.

  ‘What’s holding it up?’ asked Zach.

  ‘There’s cross cables at every other floor,’ I said. ‘The ones without walkways. And it’s attached at the top.’ To a PVC plinth with occult symbols, no less. And I realised that this was Stromberg’s mine shaft or drill bit or whatever – crystallising the magic out of wherever it was coming from and connecting it to the Stadtkrone.

  ‘That’s got to be supporting some of the weight,’ said Lesley, pointing up.

  A metre above our heads what looked like heating ducts emerged from four of the walls and met in the middle in a boxy girdle mounted around the fake mass damper.

  ‘L
ook how clean they are,’ I said. ‘They’re practically brand new.’ I made a mental note about where the ducts would come out on the other side of the walls. I jogged back out the door and up the stairs to the Lower Ground Floor plant room and found the darkish strip which marked where the new cement had been laid.

  Plastic, I was thinking . . . Certain plastics retain vestigia. Nightingale had been right. I was replicating work from the 1920s, only not by members of the Folly, and not by British researchers but Germans. Professor Postmartin had said they’d been more advanced than us prior to the 1930s – and that included the chemical industry. At school Mrs Lemwick had been big on German industrial superiority when we did the origins of the First World War.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ asked Zach, who had followed me up here with Lesley, and was now staring at me oddly.

  ‘He’s doing his Sherlock Holmes impression,’ said Lesley.

  I went out through the main doors into the rain and found the point where a freshly resurfaced strip of the tarmac emerged from the wall and headed for the garages.

  ‘My granddad said he was bonkers,’ said Zach.

  ‘Sherlock Homes?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Arthur Conan Doyle,’ said Zach.

  The strip vanished under the door of a garage sealed with a County Gard steel plate and another shiny padlock.

  ‘You want to get this?’ I asked Zach.

  Zach pulled a pick from his jeans pocket and went to work. ‘Started seeing fairies and ghosts and talking to dead people,’ he said still going on about Conan Doyle as the padlock came apart in his hands.

  ‘But there are fairies and ghosts,’ said Lesley. ‘I met them down the pub – you introduced me.’

  ‘Yeah, but he used to see them when they weren’t there,’ said Zach. ‘Which is practically the definition of bonkers.’

  I bent down, grabbed the door handle and pulled the garage door up and over with a grinding screech. Rainwater splattered my face.