Broken Homes Read online

  A bit of prodding revealed that he only knew the one spell and that he’d stopped performing it once he was sent off to school.

  ‘Mine was a Catholic school,’ he said. ‘They took a dim view of dabbling in the occult – or even just dabbling, to be honest. The headmaster believed that if you’re going to do something you should do it all the way.’

  He gave me details of the school, but warned me that it had closed due to a scandal in the late 1960s. ‘Headmaster had his hand in the till,’ he said.

  ‘So who did you learn this magic trick from?’ I asked.

  ‘From my mother of course,’ said Mr Nolfi.

  ‘From his mother,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘So he says,’ I said.

  We were in the so-called private dining room where we were all eating— to be honest we weren’t sure what it was, Molly was experimenting again. Shanks of lamb, according to Lesley, casseroled with something fishy, possibly anchovies, possibly sardines and two scoops of mashed— I said swede but Nightingale insisted at least one of them was parsnip.

  ‘I’m not sure we should eat stuff when we don’t know what it is,’ said Lesley.

  ‘I’m not the one who bought her the Jamie Oliver book for Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Lesley. ‘You’re the one who wanted to get her Heston Blumenthal.’

  Nightingale, trained – as he pointed out – from an early age to eat what was put in front of him, tucked in with enthusiasm. Given that Molly was hovering in the doorway, me and Lesley had little choice but to follow suit.

  It tasted remarkably like lamb in sardine sauce, I thought.

  After a sufficient wait to ensure that we hadn’t been poisoned, we continued our discussion about Mr Nolfi.

  ‘It strikes me as rather unlikely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or at least it’s not something I’ve come across before.’

  ‘We didn’t find anything at his home,’ said Lesley.

  ‘There must have been female practitioners even in your day,’ I said.

  ‘There were some Hedge Witches,’ said Nightingale. ‘Especially out in the countryside, there always are. But there was nobody with formal training that I knew of.’

  ‘Hogwarts was all male,’ I said.

  ‘Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you’d like to spend the next three days cleaning the lab then by all means keep referring to my old school as Hogwarts.’

  ‘Casterbrook,’ I said.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Nightingale and polished off the last of his swede – if it was swede.

  ‘But it was boys only,’ I said.

  ‘Indubitably,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m sure I would have noticed otherwise.’

  ‘And these boys came from the old wizarding families?’

  ‘You have such a delightfully quaint notion of how things were,’ said Nightingale. ‘There were a number of families who generally sent one or more of their sons to the school. That’s all.’

  Traditionally, the landed gentry had kept the first son at home to inherit the estate, the second went for a soldier, the third to the clergy or the law. I asked Nightingale where the profession of magic stood in that list.

  ‘The Folly was never that popular amongst the aristocracy,’ said Nightingale. ‘We were all much more proudly bourgeoisie than that. It would be best to think of us as professionals – like doctors or lawyers. It was common for a son to follow in his father’s footsteps.’

  ‘But not his daughter?’

  Nightingale shrugged. ‘It was a different age,’ he said.

  ‘Was your father a wizard?’ I asked.

  ‘Good Lord no,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was my Uncle Stanley who carried on the tradition in that generation – it was he who suggested that I attend Cosgrove Hall.’

  ‘He didn’t have sons of his own?’ I asked.

  ‘He never married,’ said Nightingale. ‘I had four brothers and two sisters so I believe my father felt he could spare me. Mama always said I was a curious child, asking far too many questions at the most inopportune times. I’m sure they were relieved to have someone else take up the responsibility of answering them.’

  He caught me and Lesley exchanging looks.

  ‘I’m amazed you find this at all interesting,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve never talked about your family before,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure I must have,’ he said.

  ‘Nope,’ said Lesley.

  ‘Oh,’ said Nightingale and promptly changed the subject. ‘Tomorrow I want the pair of you to practise on the range in the morning,’ he said. ‘Then it’s Latin in the afternoon.’

  ‘Shoot me now,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t there some police work we should be doing?’ asked Lesley.

  Pudding arrived, a jam suet pudding, red and steaming. Molly put it down in front of us with way more confidence than she’d offered up the lamb shanks.

  ‘Did everyone make their own staff?’ asked Lesley.

  ‘Everyone who?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘In the old days,’ she said and gestured around the dining room. ‘Everyone who was a member of this place?’

  ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘In the first instance, very few of us needed one for everyday use. So to speak. And in the second, the making of them became something of a speciality. A group of wizards in Manchester, of all places, who styled themselves the Sons of Weyland would construct them to order. Luckily for you, I considered myself a modern day renaissance man – ready to turn my hand to every art and science.’

  Nightingale had gone to Manchester, where he had learnt the weird of the Sons of Weyland, or at least those bits of the weird that were appropriate to a gentleman. When I asked what had happened to the people who trained him, Nightingale’s face clouded and I knew the answer. Ettersberg. Everyone, the cream of British wizardry, had gone to Ettersberg. And only a few had come back.

  ‘Did Geoffrey Wheatcroft learn the weird way of the Weylands?’ asked Lesley.

  Nightingale gave her a thoughtful look. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m thinking sir,’ she said, ‘that if Geoffrey Wheatcroft didn’t learn how to make a staff then he can’t have passed that knowledge on to the Little Crocodiles or the Faceless Man.’

  ‘We know his protégés could make demon-traps,’ I said. ‘And worse.’

  ‘Lesley’s right,’ said Nightingale. ‘Anyone can make a demon-trap, providing he’s a vile specimen of the first water. But there were secrets involved in the shaping of a staff – ones I seriously doubt that old Geoffrey ever learnt. I’m not sure how that helps us.’

  I did. ‘It means we’ve got something the Faceless Man’s going to really want for himself,’ I said.

  ‘In other words, sir,’ said Lesley, ‘bait.’

  3

  The One Under

  Just before Christmas I’d assisted with a murder that took place on Baker Street Underground station. It was during that investigation that I made the acquaintance of one Sergeant Jaget Kumar, urban explorer, expert pot-holer and the British Transport Police’s answer to Mulder and Scully. Together we helped catch the murderer, discovered an entire underground civilisation, albeit a small one, and, unfortunately, destroyed one of the platforms at Oxford Circus. During that mess I ended up buried underground for a half a day, where I had a waking dream that still keeps me from sleeping. But that, as they say, is a whole different counselling session.

  Despite the fact that services had returned to normal by the end of January, I was not really Mr Popular with Transport for London, who run the Underground and the BTP who have to police it. Which might be why, when Jaget said that he had some information for me, we didn’t meet in the BTP Headquarters at Camden Town but in a café just down the road.

  We sat down for coffee and Jaget unshipped his Samsung and pulled up some files.

  ‘We had this one-under at Paddington last week,’ he said. ‘And he came up on your list.’ The Folly maintains a list of potentially
interesting people, the dwindling number of surviving practitioners from World War Two, suspected Little Crocodiles and people that consort with fairies, which raises a flag should anyone run an Integrated Intelligence Platform check on them.

  Jaget turned the tablet to show me a picture of a middle-aged white man with thinning fair hair and thin bloodless lips. Judging by his pallor and glassy stare the picture was post-mortem – the kind you did to show to relatives and potential witnesses without scaring the shit out of them. That made sense since one-under was tube slang for when a member of the public throws themselves under a train. Two hundred and forty tonnes of locomotive can mess up your whole day.

  ‘Richard Lewis,’ said Jaget. ‘Aged forty-six.’

  I looked him up in my little black book – I had all the potential Little Crocodiles listed by date of birth. Jaget smiled when he saw it.

  ‘Good to see you embracing the potential of modern technology,’ he said, but I ignored him. Richard Lewis had indeed been at Oxford between 1985 and 1987, but wasn’t on the main list of confirmed Little Crocodiles – he was on a secondary list made up of those who had been personally tutored by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, former official wizard and the man stupid enough to start teaching magic unofficially. Nightingale doesn’t swear very often, but when he talks about Geoffrey Wheatcroft you can tell he really fucking wants to.

  ‘Is it just the fact that he’s on the list?’ I asked.

  ‘There was something off about the suicide,’ he said.

  ‘He was pushed?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Jaget and cued up the CCTV footage on his tablet. Because London’s tube stations are the target for everything from casual public urination to mass murder the CCTV coverage is literally wall to wall.

  ‘Here he comes,’ said Jaget.

  Jaget had obviously spent some time editing the footage together because it told the story with quite a bit of unnecessary flair. You could have put it to music, something grim and German maybe, and sold it to an art gallery.

  ‘How bored were you when you did this?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t all have careers full of mystery and magic,’ said Jaget. ‘See, he rides the escalator all the way up but, before he reaches the ticket barrier, he turns round and heads back down again.’

  I watched as Richard Lewis shuffled patiently along a corridor with the rest of the crowd, down a flight of stairs and onto the platform. He wormed his way forward until he was standing on the yellow line that marked the edge. There he waited, staring straight ahead, for the next train. When it arrived Richard Lewis turned his head to watch its approach and then, at what Jaget said was precisely the right moment, jumped in front of it.

  I presumed there was more footage of the collision but luckily Jaget hadn’t felt it necessary to inflict it on me.

  ‘Where did he travel from?’ I asked.

  ‘London Bridge,’ said Jaget. ‘He worked for Southwark Council.’

  ‘Why would he travel from one station to another before topping himself?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s not unusual,’ said Jaget. ‘We had one woman who paused to finish her crisps before she stepped off and one guy at South Ken who wouldn’t go while there were any kids that might see him.’ Jaget described how the man, dressed respectably in a pinstripe suit and holding an umbrella, had grown visibly more agitated with each missed opportunity. Finally when he had the platform to himself, you could see him on the CCTV straightening his cuffs and adjusting his tie.

  ‘As if he wanted to make a good impression when he got there,’ said Jaget.

  Wherever ‘there’ might be.

  Then when the next train was a minute out, an entire school party, fresh from the museums, descended on the platform. Kids and harassed teachers from one end to the other.

  ‘You should have seen his face,’ said Jaget. ‘He was so frustrated.’

  ‘Did he manage it eventually?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Jaget. ‘By that time somebody in the station control room had noticed and ran down to intervene.’ And less than six hours later the man in the pinstripe suit was detained, sectioned and whisked off to a psychiatric unit for a quick chat with the duty psychologist.

  ‘I wonder if he tried again?’

  ‘Just as long as he didn’t do it on our time,’ said Jaget.

  ‘So what makes our Mr Lewis suspicious?’

  ‘It’s where he jumped from,’ said Jaget. One-underers tended to be quite predictable when it came to choosing their jumping-off point into oblivion.

  ‘If they’re just making a cry for help,’ he said, ‘then they go from the far end of the platform – so that the train has almost stopped before it gets there. If they’re serious, then they go to the other end where the driver has no chance to react and the train’s going full speed. Shit, if you do it there you don’t even have to jump – just lean out and the train will take your head right off.’

  ‘And if they jump from the middle?’

  ‘Then they’re not sure,’ said Jaget. ‘It’s a graduated thing, a bit of doubt and they go one way, if they’re pretty sure they go the other.’

  ‘Mr Lewis went from the middle,’ I said. ‘Meaning he was in two minds.’

  ‘Mr Lewis,’ said Jaget winding the footage to just before the jump, ‘went from just in front of the passenger entrance. If a train had come immediately, I’d understand. But he had to wait. It’s like his position on the platform was irrelevant.’

  I shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘Your position is never irrelevant,’ said Jaget. ‘It’s the last thing you’re ever going to do – look at him. He just glances once at the train to get the timing right and bang! He’s gone. Look at the confidence in that jump, nothing hesitant at all.’

  ‘I bow to your superior knowledge of train suicides,’ I said. ‘What exactly is it you think might have happened?’

  Jaget contemplated his coffee for a moment and then asked, ‘Is it possible to make people do things against their will?’

  ‘You mean like hypnotism?’

  ‘More than hypnotism,’ he said. ‘Like instant brainwashing.’

  I thought of the first time I’d met the Faceless Man and the casual way he’d ordered me to jump off a roof. I’d have done it, too, if I hadn’t built up a resistance to that sort of thing.

  ‘It’s called a glamour,’ I said.

  Jaget stared at me for a bit – I don’t think he’d expected me to say yes.

  ‘Can you do it?’ he asked.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. I’d asked Nightingale about glamour and he’d told me that even the easiest type was a seventh-order spell and the results were not what you’d call reliable. ‘Especially when you consider that it’s hardly a chore to defend against,’ he’d said.

  ‘What about your boss?’

  ‘He says he learnt the theory but he’s never actually done it,’ I said. ‘I got the impression he didn’t think it was a gentlemanly thing to do.’

  ‘Do you know how it works?’

  ‘You activate the forma and then you tell the target what to do,’ I said. ‘Dr Walid thinks it alters your brain chemistry, making you unusually suggestible, but that’s just a theory.’

  Not least because me and Dr Walid’s putative experimental protocol, zap some volunteers and check their blood chemistry before and after, was at the far end of a long list of other things we wanted to test. And that’s assuming we could get Nightingale and the Medical Research Council to approve.

  ‘You think our Mr Lewis was compelled into suicide?’ I asked. ‘Based on what? Where he jumped from?’

  ‘Not just that,’ said Jaget and cued up another mpeg on his tablet. ‘Watch this.’

  This one was stitched together from close-ups of Richard Lewis’s head and shoulders as he rode the escalator up to the concourse. The resolution on CCTV cameras has been rapidly improving and the London Underground, a terrorism target since before the term was invented, has some of the best kit available. Bu
t the image still suffered from the grain and sudden lighting changes that hinted at some cheap and cheerful enhancement.

  ‘What am I looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘Watch his face,’ said Jaget. So I did.

  It was your bog-standard commuter’s face, tired, resigned, with occasional flickers as he spotted something, or someone, that caught his eye. He checked his watch at least twice while riding the escalator – anxious to catch the early train to Swindon.

  ‘He lives on the outskirts,’ said Jaget and we shared a moment of mutual incomprehension at the inexplicable life choices of commuters.

  The image was good enough to capture the moment of anticipation as he stepped off the escalator at the top and the scan for the least crowded ticket gate. He checked his watch once again and set off purposefully for his chosen exit. Then he stopped and hesitated for a moment before turning on his heel. Heading for the down escalator and his date with the business end of a Mark II 1972 rolling stock.

  It looked like he’d just remembered that he’d forgotten something.

  ‘It’s too quick,’ said Jaget. ‘You forget something, you stop, you think “Oh god I have to go all the way back down the escalator, do I really need whatever it is that badly?” And then you turn.’

  He was right. Richard Lewis stopped and turned as smartly as if he was on a parade ground and had been given a command. As he rode back down his expression was abstracted and intent – as if he was thinking about something important.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s a glamour,’ I said. ‘But it’s definitely something. I think I need a second opinion.’

  But I was already thinking it was the Faceless Man.

  ‘Tricky,’ said Nightingale after I’d lured him into the tech cave and shown him the footage. ‘It’s a very limited technique and an Underground station at rush hour is hardly an ideal environment in which to practise it. Do you have any film that shows a wide view of the booking hall?’

  It took me a couple of minutes to dig out the files Jaget had sent me, not least because of his eccentric file labelling scheme. Nightingale made an impressed murmur at the ease and speed at which the ‘film’ could be manipulated. ‘Or is it called tape?’ he asked.