Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (11 page)

It didn’t look much like Josephine Baker to me, not with those outsized cartoon lips, flat nose and elongated head. Well, it was a quick sketch and perhaps old Corbusier had been too busy staring at her breasts. The feet were nicely done though – properly proportioned and detailed – maybe he just hadn’t been very good at faces.

‘Is it valuable?’ I asked.

‘Worth about three thousand pounds,’ she said.

Next to the Josephine Baker was a picture I recognised, a framed architectural sketch of Bruno Taut’s glass pavilion. Like all the other architects of his generation, Taut believed that you could morally uplift the masses through architecture. But unlike most of his contemporaries he didn’t want to do that by sticking them in concrete blocks. Taut’s big thing was glass, which he believed had spiritual qualities. He wanted to build
Stadtkrones
, literally ‘city crowns’, secular cathedrals that would draw the spiritual energy of the city upwards. His glass pavilion at the Cologne Exhibition in 1914 was an elongated dome constructed from glass panels with a step fountain inside – the Gherkin at St Mary Axe is a scaled-up version, but stuffed with lots of offices. As a piece of architecture, it was as pretty and non-functional as an art nouveau bicycle and an odd picture for a committed brutalist like Stromberg to have on his wall.

‘That’s by Bruno Taut,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘A contemporary of Stromberg, bit of a rebel by all accounts. Can you tell which famous London building it influenced?’

‘Is it valuable as well?’ I asked.

‘Definitely,’ she said, obviously disappointed that I didn’t want to play. ‘Most of the works in here are original if minor pieces by some pretty famous names. The insurance estimate for the art alone is upwards of two million pounds. Hence the expensive security system.’

Even more expensive after the break-in, I thought. And yet none of the art was stolen. ‘If nothing was stolen,’ I asked, ‘how did you know there was a break-in?’

‘Because we found a hole,’ she said with a note of triumph.

I actually knew all about the hole from the report, but it’s always good to get a potential witness warmed up on something you can verify. That way you can tell how bad a liar they are. It’s nothing personal, you understand – just good police work.

Ms Shapiro gracefully dipped down and pulled back an ugly black and white striped rug to reveal where a neat rectangular section of the parquet floor had been recently replaced with a plain hardwood sheet. She hooked a finger through a ring handle at one end and lifted the board away to reveal the safe.

Custom built, possibly by Chubb in the 1950s, although the National Trust hadn’t been able to verify the manufacturer yet.

‘Which makes it an interesting item in its own right,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘We’re thinking we may leave it uncovered so the public can see it.’

Mulkern had left no tool marks on the casing so it either hadn’t been locked – a possibility – or he’d cracked it the old-fashioned way.

‘Do you reckon it was part of the original build?’ I asked. The safe was shallow enough to fit into the concrete floor without protruding through the ceiling below but was definitely deep enough to hold the
Die Praxis Der Magié
plus a number of other books – maybe three or four more.

Ms Shapiro shook her head. ‘That’s an excellent question to which I wish I knew the answer.’

I lowered myself onto the floor and stuck my face in the safe. It smelt of clean metal and what might have been old paper – there were no
vestigia
that I could detect. Nightingale had advised that the grimoire wouldn’t have left a trace – ‘Books of magic,’ he’d said, ‘are not necessarily magical books.’ Still, I’d been hoping for a touch of the razor that I’d started associating with the Faceless Man.

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 Magié
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 lenses 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.