Broken Homes Read online

  ‘I think we may as well consider this case closed,’ he said. ‘At any rate, from our perspective.’

  ‘I’d like to keep monitoring it,’ I said. ‘At least until we have an ID for the victim.’

  Nightingale drummed the table with his fingertips. ‘Are you sure you have the time for that?’ he asked.

  ‘Sussex and Surrey MCT will produce a weekly summary while the case is ongoing,’ I said. ‘It’ll take me ten minutes.’

  ‘I don’t think he takes me as seriously as he should,’ Nightingale told Dr Walid. ‘He still slopes off to conduct illicit experiments whenever he thinks I’m not looking.’ He looked at me. ‘What is your latest interest?’

  ‘I’ve been looking at how long various materials retain vestigia,’ I said.

  ‘How do you measure the intensity of the vestigia?’ asked Dr Walid.

  ‘He uses the dog,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘I put Toby in a box along with the material and then I measure the loudness and frequency of his barking,’ I said. ‘It’s no different from using a sniffer dog.’

  ‘How can you be sure of consistency of results?’ asked Dr Walid.

  ‘I ran a series of control experiments to eliminate variables,’ I said. Toby on his own in a box at nine a.m. and then at hourly intervals for the volume baseline. And then Toby in a box with various guaranteed inert materials for a baseline on that. The third day Toby hid under the table in Molly’s kitchen and had to be lured out with sausages.

  Dr Walid leaned forward as I talked – he at least appreciated a bit of empiricism. I explained that I’d exposed each material sample to identical amounts of magic, by conjuring a werelight – the simplest and most controllable spell I knew – and then put it in the box with Toby to see what happened.

  ‘Were there any significant findings?’ he asked.

  ‘Toby’s not very discriminating, so we’re talking a wide margin for error,’ I said. ‘But it was about what I expected. And in line with my reading. Stone retains vestigia the best, followed by concrete. The metals were all too similar to differentiate. Wood was next and the worst was flesh.’ In the form of a leg of pork which Toby subsequently ate before I could stop him.

  ‘The only surprise,’ I said, ‘were some of the plastics, which scored almost as high on the yap-o-meter as stone.’

  ‘Plastic?’ asked Nightingale. ‘That’s most unexpected. I’d always assumed that it was natural things that retained the uncanny.’

  ‘Can you email me the results?’ asked Dr Walid.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Have you considered testing other dogs?’ asked Dr Walid. ‘Perhaps different breeds would have different sensitivities.’

  ‘Abdul, please,’ said Nightingale. ‘Don’t give him any ideas.’

  ‘He is making progress in the art,’ said Dr Walid.

  ‘Barely,’ said Nightingale. ‘And I believe he’s replicating work that’s already been done.’

  ‘By who?’ I asked.

  Nightingale sipped his tea and smiled.

  ‘I’ll make a bargain with you, Peter,’ he said. ‘If you make better progress in your formal studies I shall tell you where to find the notes of the last brain-box who filled the lab with . . . Actually it was mostly rats, but I seem to remember a couple of dogs in his menagerie.’

  ‘How much better progress?’ I asked.

  ‘Better than you’re doing now,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that data,’ said Dr Walid.

  ‘Then you should encourage Peter to study harder,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘He’s an evil man,’ I said.

  ‘And cunning,’ said Dr Walid.

  Nightingale eyed us placidly over the rim of his tea cup.

  ‘Evil and cunning,’ I said.

  The next morning I drove up to Hendon for part one of mandatory Officer Safety Training. You’re pretty much expected to do one of these courses every six months until Chief Inspector rank, but I doubt we’ll ever see Nightingale do one. We had a fun lecture on Excited Delirium, or what to do with people who are stoned out of their box. And then role-playing in the gym where we practised how to handle suspects without having them fall down the stairs. A couple of the officers had been at Hendon with me and Lesley, and we stuck together at lunch. They asked after Lesley and I gave them the official version, that she was physically assaulted during the riots in Covent Garden and that her attacker subsequently committed suicide before I could arrest him.

  In the afternoon we took it in turns to hide offensive weapons about our person while our colleagues searched us, a contest I won coming and going because I know how to hide a razor blade in the waist band of my jeans and I’m not afraid to go all the way up a suspect’s inner leg. Doing all the physical stuff left me weirdly energised, so when one of the other officers suggested we go clubbing I tagged along. We ended up in a UV saturated cattle shed in Romford where I may, or may not, have got off with the goddess of the River Rom. Not in a serious way, you understand, just a bit of clinch and some tongue. Which is what happens when you overdo the WKD. I woke up the next morning in one of the chairs in the atrium with surprisingly little hangover and Molly looming over me. She looked disapproving. I would have preferred a hangover.

  My trusty Ford Asbo was parked safely in the garage, so after a breakfast and a bucket bath I departed for Hendon once more. As I climbed into the driver’s seat a powerful vestigium rushed over me. I tasted vodka, smelt machine oil and felt the slip slide of lip balm. There was shouting and screams of excitement and illegal acceleration that pushed you back into your seat while your engine growled like something big and endangered.

  There was an open lipstick on the dashboard – shocking pink.

  I didn’t know about Goddess of the River Rom, but I’d definitely brushed up against something supernatural. Maybe it hadn’t been the vodka after all.

  That’s it, I thought. No more clubbing without a chaperone for you.

  I revved up the Asbo, but despite the tweaking I’d given the engine it did not cry like a panther.

  It did get me all the way back up to Hendon on time for the start of day two, which was officer equipment safety. The morning lecture was on stop and search with reference to spotting suspicious behaviour. The lecturer who gloried in the full name of Douglas Douglas illustrated the weird stiffening of the limbs exhibited by shoplifters known as ‘the robot’, or the exaggerated mime-like behaviour adopted by the truly guilty when they unexpectedly encounter the police. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ he said, ‘by searching anyone who engages you in conversation.’ On the basis that nobody willingly engages the police in conversation unless they’re trying to deflect attention from something. But he did warn us to make an exception for tourists, because London needed the foreign currency.

  After that we were back in the gym being reminded how to use our handcuffs properly. We use the ones with a solid middle which you can grab hold of and twist to put pressure on your suspect’s arms, and ensure what our instructor called compliance and co-operation. In the afternoon one of the instructors donned a padded suit and adopted a mad aspect and challenged us to subdue him with our extendable batons. This bit used to be called the ‘nutter’ training but now it’s officially called ‘the person with differences’. It’s useful stuff. You never know when you’re going to have to ensure compliance and co-operation from people with differences, in a state of excited delirium or not.

  When we’d finished I was invited out again but I declined and drove slowly and carefully home instead.

  Lesley got out of hospital and turned up unexpectedly while I was trying to perfect a forma called aqua which, for those of you who didn’t have a classical education, is a base forma for manipulating water. It used to form the empedoclean along with lux, aer and terra – two of which went out of fashion when the four-element theory of matter failed to survive the age of Enlightenment.

  It’s a lot like lux in that you shape the forma in your mind, open y
our palm and, hopefully, find yourself with a globe of water the size of a ping-pong ball. Nightingale claimed not to know where the water came from, but I assumed it was drawn out of the surrounding air. It was that or it was being sucked out of a parallel dimension, or hyperspace or something even weirder. I hoped it wasn’t hyperspace because I wasn’t ready for the implications of that.

  In my case, so far, I’d managed a small cloud, a frozen rain drop and a puddle. And that was after it had taken me four weeks to get anything at all. Nightingale was supervising me in the teaching lab on the first floor when the vapour haze above my palm shrank down to a wobbly globe. The trouble with this stage of mastering a forma is that it’s almost impossible to tell why what you’re currently doing is working better than what you were doing two seconds ago. That’s why you end up doing a lot of practice and why it isn’t easy maintaining a new forma – particularly when someone decides to start singing the chorus of ‘Rehab’ outside the door – loudly and a quarter tone flat.

  The globe exploded like a water balloon, splattering me, the bench and the surrounding floor. Nightingale, who had become wise to my peculiar aptitude with exploding formae had been standing well back and wearing a raincoat.

  I glared at Lesley, who struck a pose in the doorway.

  ‘Got my voice back,’ she said. ‘Sort of.’ She’d stopped wearing the mask inside the Folly and, while her face was still ruined, at least I could tell when she was smiling.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You always sang flat.’

  Nightingale waved Lesley over.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got a demonstration and I’ve been waiting until I could show both of you at the same time.’

  ‘Can I dump my stuff first?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Of course,’ said Nightingale. ‘While you do that, Peter here can clean up the lab.’

  ‘It’s a good thing it was water,’ said Lesley. ‘Even Peter can’t explode water.’

  ‘Let’s not tempt fate,’ said Nightingale.

  We reconvened half an hour later and Nightingale led us to one of the unused labs down the hall. He pulled off dust sheets to reveal scarred work benches, lathes and vices. I recognised it as a Design and Technology workshop, like the one I’d used at school, only stuck in a time warp back in the days of steam power and child labour. He pulled off a last sheet, under which was a black iron anvil of the sort I’ve only ever seen falling onto the heads of cartoon characters.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Lesley?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so, Peter,’ she said. ‘But how are we going to get the pony up here?’

  ‘Shoeing a horse is a very useful skill,’ said Nightingale. ‘And when I was a boy there used to be a smithy downstairs in the yard. This, however, is where we turn boys into men.’ He paused to look at Lesley. ‘And I suppose young women into women.’

  ‘Are we forging the one ring?’ I asked.

  Nightingale held up a walking stick. ‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked.

  I did. It was a silver-topped gentleman’s cane, the head a bit tarnished looking.

  ‘It’s your cane,’ I said.

  ‘And what else?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘It’s your wizard’s staff,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Well done,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘The cadwallopper,’ I said, and when Lesley raised what was left of her eyebrow I added, ‘A stick for walloping cads.’

  ‘And the source of a wizard’s power,’ said Nightingale.

  Using magic has a very specific limitation. If you overdo it your brain turns into Swiss cheese. Hyperthaumaturgical degradation, Dr Walid calls it, and he has some brains in a drawer which he whips out at the slightest excuse to show young apprentices. The rule of thumb with brain injuries is that by the time you feel anything, the damage is already done. So a practitioner of the arts tends to err on the side of caution. This can cause tension when, for the sake of argument, two Tiger tanks emerge suddenly from the treeline on a rainy night in 1945. In order to be the hero of Boy’s Own Weekly and still have an intact brain, a sensible wizard carries a staff in which he has personally imbued a great deal of power.

  Don’t ask me what kind of power that is, because the only thing I’ve got that can detect it is Toby the Dog. I’d love to stick some high vestigia material into a mass spectrometer, but first I’d have to get myself a mass spectrometer and then I’d have to learn enough physics to interpret the bloody results.

  Nightingale took his walking stick over to one of the workbenches, unscrewed the top and clamped the stick part in a vice. Then, taking a hammer and chisel, he cracked it along its length to reveal a dull gun-metal blue core the thickness of a pencil.

  ‘This is the heart of the staff,’ he said and fished a magnifying glass out of a nearby drawer. ‘Have a closer look.’

  We took it in turns. The surface of the core had faint but distinct ripples of shade that appeared to spiral up its length.

  ‘What’s it made of?’ asked Lesley as she looked.

  ‘Steel,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Folded steel,’ I said. ‘Like a samurai sword.’

  ‘It’s called pattern welding,’ said Nightingale. ‘Different steel alloys, forge-welded in a deliberate pattern. Done correctly it creates a matrix that retains magic so that a master can draw upon it later.’

  With a great saving on wear and tear of the brain, I thought.

  ‘How do you get the magic in?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘While you’re forging it,’ said Nightingale and mimed using a hammer. ‘You use a third-order spell to raise the forge temperature and another to keep it hot while you hammer the work.’

  ‘What about the magic?’ I asked.

  ‘It derives, or so I was taught, from the spells you use during the forging,’ he said.

  Lesley rubbed her face. ‘How long will that take?’ she asked.

  ‘This staff will take upwards of three months.’ He saw our expressions. ‘Working say an hour or two a day. One has to avoid overdoing the magic otherwise the purpose of the staff becomes moot.’

  ‘And we’re going to make a staff each?’ she asked.

  ‘Eventually, yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘But first you’re going to watch and learn.’

  Faintly we heard the phone ringing in the distance and all turned to the doorway and waited for Molly to appear. When she did she inclined her head at Nightingale indicating that the call was for him.

  We followed at a discreet distance in the hope of overhearing the conversation.

  ‘I knew I should have paid more attention in D&T,’ said Lesley.

  We were already on the landing when Nightingale called us down. We found him standing with the phone in his hand, a look of total amazement on his face.

  ‘We have a report of a rogue magician,’ he said.

  Me and the rogue magician stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. He was wondering why the hell there was a police officer sitting by his bed and I was wondering where the hell this guy had come from.

  His name was George Nolfi and he was an ordinary-looking white man in his late sixties – sixty-seven according to my notes. His hair was thinning but still mostly brown, he had blue eyes and a face that had obviously gone for a gaunt old age rather than jowls. His hands were bandaged from the wrist down so that only the tips of his fingers showed – occasionally he held them up and examined them with a look of utter surprise on his face. My notes said that he’d suffered second-degree burns to his hands during the ‘incident’, but that nobody else had been injured although several young children had been treated for shock.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’ I said.

  ‘You won’t believe me,’ he said.

  ‘You made a ball of fire appear out of thin air,’ I said. ‘See, I believe you – this sort of thing happens all the time.’

  He stared at me stupidly. We get this a lot even from people with some experience of the supernatural
– bugger that – we get this from people who are supernatural.

  He was from Wimbledon and was a retired chartered surveyor. He wasn’t on our list of Little Crocodiles. In fact he’d been educated at Leeds University, and the Nolfi name was not listed amongst the rolls of Nightingale’s old school or the Folly. And yet he’d conjured a fireball in the living room of his daughter’s house – it had all been captured on camcorder.

  ‘Have you ever done it before?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not since I was a boy.’

  I made a note. Nightingale and Lesley were even then going through his house looking for books on magic, vestigium hotspots, lacuna, household gods and malign spirits. Nightingale had made my job clear; first establish what Mr Nolfi had done, then why he had done it and, finally, how had he known how to do it.

  ‘It was Gabriella’s birthday party,’ he said. ‘She’s my granddaughter. Delightful child but, being six, a bit of a handful. Have you got any children?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘En masse a room full of six-year-old girls can be a daunting prospect, so I may have fortified myself with a tad more sherry than I meant to,’ he said. ‘There was a problem with the cake.’

  Even worse, the lights had already been switched off in anticipation of its entrance and candles lit, accompanied by a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday to You (Squashed Tomatoes and Stew)’.

  And so Mr Nolfi, granddad, was instructed to keep the children entertained while the problem was sorted out.

  ‘And I remembered this trick that I used to do when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. I got their attention, not an easy thing, mind you, rolled up my sleeves and said the magic word.’

  ‘What was the magic word?’ I asked.

  ‘Lux!’ he said. ‘It’s Latin for light.’

  But of course I knew that already. It’s also the first forma that a classically trained apprentice wizard learns. I asked Mr Nolfi what he’d expected to happen.

  ‘I used to be able to make a fairy light,’ he said. ‘It used to keep my sister amused.’