Broken Homes

14

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 cafe 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 thought.

‘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.

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 Magie, die einen begrenzten Raum ausfullt, wie eine ubersattigte Losung verhalt und dass jeder Eingriff, ob naturlichen oder artifiziellen Ursprungs, zum spontanen Auskristalliseren des magischen Effekts fuhren 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 moglich sein, das magische Potential in industriellem Ma?stabe auskristallisieren zu lassen und zur spateren 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 Aktivitat. 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 aktivitat? ‘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 flie?band! ‘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 flie?band, 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?’