Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (26 page)

‘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 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.