Broken Homes

6

I felt a bit weird on my way north and had to pull over on the Old Kent Road and take a breather.

I sat in the car for a while listening to the rain dinging off the roof of the Asbo and glaring at the red metal doors of the fire station.

When you’re a young copper, the old sweats like to scare you with the horrors of the Job. Eviscerated motorists, bloated floaters and little old ladies who had ended their days as a protein supplement for their house cats were common themes — and so was the smell of burnt human flesh.

‘You never get the stink out of your nostrils,’ the old sweats would say and then, without fail, go on to tell you that it was worse when you hadn’t had your dinner. ‘Because then your mouth starts watering and then you remember what it is exactly that you’re smelling.’

As it happens I was feeling a bit hungry and the memory of the smell was definitely taking the edge off my appetite. Still, I don’t work well on an empty stomach so I bailed at the Bricklayers Arms and found a place that sold industrial strength vegetable samosas — the kind that are spicy enough to anaesthetise your sinuses — and had a couple of those. While I ate, I looked up the National Trust on my phone and spent a fun ten minutes bouncing around their switchboard — they wanted to be helpful but nobody was sure what do with a call from a random police officer. I told them I’d be up at West Hill House within the hour and left them to sort it out. When in doubt, make it somebody else’s problem.

Mouth full of the last of my samosa, I pulled out into the wet traffic. As I stopped and started my way through the Elephant and Castle I realised that I was actually right next to one of Erik Stromberg’s masterpieces — the Skygarden estate. A concrete spike which had dominated the area until they’d built the Strata building next door. They’d been going to tear Skygarden down in the 1980s, but it had been inexplicably listed. I’d read somewhere that Southwark Council were trying to get the decision reversed so they could finally blow the fucker up.

Skygarden had been famous for its resident pirate radio station, for being a no-go area where police only ever ventured mob-handed and qualifying as a top spot to commit suicide. It was the original sink estate back in the days before the media started slapping that label on any area with less than two artisanal cheese shops. There were all sorts of rumours about the architect — including one that he’d been driven mad by the guilt for what he’d created and thrown himself off the top. It was all bollocks, of course. Erik Stromberg had lived in luxury in a custom-built villa in the International Style at the top of Highgate Hill until the day he popped his clogs.

And at least, according to Google Earth, a kilometre from the nearest high-rise flats.

I went up the steep slope of Highgate West Hill with the houses peeking out from driveways and gated avenues and adding about a quarter of a million quid with every twenty metres of altitude. I turned right onto the summit of Highgate Hill, where most of the buildings dated back to the time when Highgate Village was a rural community that overlooked the stink and noise of London from a safe distance.

There was a terribly discreet National Trust logo marking the entrance to a drive and an open space beyond marked STRICTLY NO PARKING where I dumped the Asbo. I clambered out and got my first look at the house that Stromberg built.

It rose above the Georgian cottages like the flying bridge of the SS Corbusier and no doubt in bright Mediterranean sunlight the white stucco would have gleamed but in the cold rain it just looked dirty and grey. There were streaks of green discoloration fringing the top storey — which is what you get when you do away with such bourgeois affectations as gargoyles, decorative cornices and overhanging eves.

Like a good devotee of the International Style, Stromberg had probably wanted to raise the whole house on pillars, the better for us to appreciate its cubist simplicity. But land has never been that cheap in London, so he’d settled for lifting just the front third. The sheltered space was too shallow to make a useful garage and made me think of a bus shelter, but from the signs attached to the walls it was obvious the National Trust found it useful as a staging area for visiting parties.

Above the entrance was the compulsory Crittal-strip window so long and narrow that I almost expected a red light to start scanning from side to side while making a whumm, whumm noise.

I was met at the front door by a thin-faced white woman with short grey hair and half-moon glasses. She was dressed in shades of mauve in the tweedy hippy style adopted by many who sailed through the 1970s counterculture on the back of an expensive education and a family place in the country. She hesitated when she saw me.

‘PC Grant?’ she asked.

I identified myself and showed her my warrant card — I find it reassures some people.

She smiled with relief and shook my hand.

‘Margaret Shapiro,’ she said. ‘I’m the property manager for West Hill House. I understand that you’re interested in our break-in.’

I told her that I thought it might be connected to a related case.

‘We recovered a book we think may have been stolen from this property,’ I said. ‘I understand your records of what were stolen are incomplete.’

‘Incomplete?’ said Shapiro. ‘That’s one way of putting it. You’d better come up and have a look.’

She led me through the front door into a hallway with white plaster walls and a blond-wood floor. There were two doors to the left and right, both oddly smaller than standard — as if they’d shrunk in the wash.

‘Servants’ rooms,’ said Shapiro. ‘And what was supposed to be the main kitchen.’

But post World War Two full employment had put an end to the service culture, and the Stromberg family then had to make do with a woman who came in and ‘did’ for them three times a week. The servants’ quarters were turned into flats and Mrs Stromberg was forced to cook for herself.

Access to the main house was by a beautiful iron spiral staircase with mahogany steps.

‘It is a bit narrow, isn’t it?’ said Shapiro who’d obviously led a tour or two in her time. ‘Stromberg found that in order to get much of his wife’s furniture into the house he had to devise an ingenious pulley system on the first floor to hoist it up.’

I certainly wouldn’t want to manoeuvre a wardrobe up those stairs — not even flat packed.

Upstairs it was remarkably like stepping into a council flat, only bigger and more expensively furnished. The same low ceilings and rooms that were strangely proportioned — a dining room that was long and well lit but so narrow that there was barely enough room to put the uncomfortable looking Marcel Breuer chairs around the dining table, the tiny afterthought of a kitchen and the narrow beige coloured hallways. Stromberg’s office, I noticed, was a much better proportioned room. It had been preserved, Ms Shapiro told me, just as Stromberg had left it the morning in 1981 when he went into hospital for a routine operation and never came back.

‘Bowel cancer,’ she said. ‘Then complications, then pneumonia.’

The wall behind the large teak desk was lined with plain metal bracket and pine bookshelves. On it were racked box files labelled RIBA, photograph albums bound in leatherette, stacked copies of The Architectural Review and a surprising number of what looked like textbooks on material science. Big fat A4 sized books with blue and purple covers and academic logos on their cracked spines. I pointed them out to Ms Shapiro.

‘He was known for his innovative use of materials,’ she said.

His enamelled steel and oak drawing table had sleek 1950s lines and was positioned to catch the light from the south-facing window. A picture on the wall above it caught my eye, a water colour and pencil sketch of a nude black woman. The woman was depicted bent over, hands on knees, her heavy breasts hanging pendulously between her arms. The face was rough, outsized eyes and blubbery lips, and turned so she looked out of the picture. I thought it was a bit crude and sketchy to have pride of place opposite the desk.

‘That’s an original by Le Corbusier,’ said Mrs Shapiro. ‘Of Josephine Baker — the famous dancer.’

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 Magie 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 Magie 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.

‘Burnt from the inside out,’ said Duffy. Her voice sounded strangely nasal due, Lesley reckoned, to the sensible application of Vicks VapoRub underneath the nostrils. She turned to look off-screen. ‘Could you do that?’

Nightingale stepped into view of the camera.

‘I can’t answer that until we know what exactly was done,’ he sounded like he was avoiding breathing through his nose altogether. ‘But probably not.’

‘But you don’t think it was natural?’ asked Duffy.

‘Duh,’ said Lesley.

We heard Dr Walid say that he seriously doubted that it was natural. Duffy nodded. She seemed to accept things more easily from a fellow Scot than from Nightingale, so he was sensibly letting Dr Walid do most of the talking.

‘Keep an eye on the door,’ said Lesley and slipped her mask off.

There were fresh suture marks on her neck where they’d worked on her throat and the skin around them looked inflamed. She fetched out a small tub of ointment from her shoulder bag and started spreading it over her neck and jaw.

Her face was still a shock. I’d managed to teach myself not to flinch, but I was scared that I was never going to get used to it.

‘Patrick Mulkern steals a magic book from the house of noted mad architect Erik Stromberg whose greatest work was Skygarden Towers in Southwark,’ I said. ‘In that very borough’s planning department worked Richard Lewis. Have you watched Jaget’s edited highlights yet?’

‘He has way too much time on his hands,’ she said and rubbed cream into the twisted pink stub that was all that was left of her nose.

‘So our planner, who suddenly jumps in front of a train for no reason, turns out to be on the Little Crocodile list,’ I said. ‘And then Patrick Mulkern turns up magically barbecued.’

‘You don’t know it was magic,’ said Lesley and replaced her mask.

‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Magical, brutal and a really unpleasant way to die — that’s the Faceless Man. It’s practically his signature tune.’

‘It’s not subtle,’ said Lesley. ‘Now that he knows we’re after him, you’d think he’d be a bit more subtle.’

‘He built himself a man-tiger,’ I said. ‘How subtle do you think he is? Maybe he’s not as smart as you reckon.’

‘That,’ said Lesley, ‘or he doesn’t really rate us a threat.’

‘That’s a mistake,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’

Lesley glanced back at the screen where Dr Walid was extracting a long blackened bone from Patrick Mulkern’s thigh.

‘You can see from the charring,’ he said, ‘that the bone itself seems to have caught fire.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley looking back at me. ‘He’s making a big mistake.’