Broken Homes Read online

  ‘Peter,’ he said when I entered. ‘You have surpassed yourself this time. Truly surpassed yourself.’

  ‘Is it kosher?’ I asked.

  ‘I should say so,’ said Postmartin. ‘A proper German grimoire. I haven’t seen one of these since 1991.’

  ‘I thought it might be a copy of the Principia.’

  Postmartin glanced at me over the top of his reading glasses and grinned. ‘It’s certainly based on Newtonian principles but I think it’s more than a copy. My German is somewhat rusty but I believe I’m right in saying that it looks like it came out of the Weiße Bibliothek in Cologne.’

  My German’s worse than my Latin, but even I thought I could translate that.

  ‘White Library?’ I asked.

  ‘Also known as the Bibliotheca Alba and the centre of German magical practice until 1798 when the French, who owned that bit of Germany at the time, shut down the university.’

  ‘The French didn’t like magic, then?’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Postmartin. ‘They shut down all the universities. It was one of the unfortunate side effects of the French Revolution.’

  Details of what happened to the contents of the library next were sketchy but, according to Postmartin’s records, the entire Weiße Bibliothek had been smuggled out of Cologne to Weimar.

  ‘Where, buoyed no doubt by the rising tide of German nationalism,’ said Postmartin, ‘it became the Deutsche Akademie der Höheren Einsichten zu Weimar or the Weimarer Akademie der Höheren Einsichten for short.’

  ‘Because that is much shorter,’ I said.

  ‘The Weimar Academy of Higher Insights,’ said Postmartin.

  ‘Higher insights?’ I asked.

  ‘Höheren Einsichten can translate as either that or “higher understanding,”’ said Postmartin. ‘As both in fact. German really is a splendid language for discussing the esoteric.’

  It wasn’t quite the German version of the Folly. ‘Far more rigorous, much less smug,’ said Postmartin who believed that the Akademie had probably been in advance of the Folly for much of the nineteenth century.

  ‘Although one likes to think it was neck and neck by the 1920s,’ said Postmartin. In the 1930s it was swallowed up by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, an organisation dedicated to providing both an intellectual framework for Nazism and Indiana Jones with an endless supply of disposable bad guys.

  And round we come to Ettersberg once more, I thought. And whatever it was Nightingale and his doomed chums had been doing there in 1945.

  I asked whether the Germans had a modern equivalent of the Folly.

  ‘There’s a branch of the Bundeskriminalamt – that’s the Federal Police Force – based in Meckenheim called the Abteilung KDA which stands for Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten which translates as the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters.’

  Leaving aside the wonderful name, the Federal Government maintained a most un-German vagueness about what the department’s responsibilities are. ‘A stance uncannily similar to that taken by their counterparts in Whitehall with regards to the Folly,’ said Postmartin. ‘That in itself is quite distinctive, really.’

  ‘I supposed it never occurred to you to just phone them up and ask,’ I said.

  ‘That’s an operational matter, so nothing to do with me I’m afraid,’ said Postmartin. ‘And besides we didn’t think it was necessary.’

  It had been an article of faith amongst the post-war survivors of British wizardry that the magic was going out of the world. You don’t need to establish bilateral links with sister organisations if your raison d’être was melting away like the arctic icepack.

  ‘And besides, Peter,’ said Postmartin, ‘if this book did come from the White Library then there’s a good chance the Germans may want it back and I for one have no intention of letting it out of my grasp.’ He laid his white gloved hand gently on the cover as emphasis. ‘However did Arts and Antiques come by it in the first place?’

  ‘It was handed in by a reputable bookseller,’ I said.

  ‘How reputable?’

  ‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘reputable enough. Colin and Leech in Cecil Court.’

  ‘The thief must have been blissfully unaware of what he had,’ said Postmartin. ‘That’s like trying to flog,’ he rolled the word around, obviously enjoying the sound of it, ‘a Picasso down the Portobello. How did they wrest the book from him?’

  I told him that I didn’t know the details and that I was following that up as soon we were finished.

  ‘Why hasn’t that been done already?’ asked Postmartin. ‘Leaving aside its more esoteric qualities, this is still a very valuable item. Surely an investigation has already begun?’

  ‘The book hasn’t been reported stolen,’ I said. ‘As far as Arts and Antiques are concerned, there’s no crime to investigate.’ And what with the Met currently being seriously mullered by spending cuts, nobody was in a hurry to find an excuse for more work.

  ‘Curious,’ said Postmartin. ‘Perhaps the owner doesn’t realise it’s been stolen.’

  ‘Perhaps the owner is the guy who tried to sell it,’ I said. ‘He might want it back.’

  Postmartin gave me a horrified look. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I have a security van coming to whisk this book and myself away to Oxford and safety. Besides, if he is the owner, he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. To each according to his abilities and all that.’

  ‘You’ve hired a security van?’

  ‘For this?’ said Postmartin, looking fondly at the book. ‘Of course. I even considered coming out with my revolver.’ He checked to make sure I was suitably horrified. ‘Don’t worry. I was a crack shot in my day.’

  ‘What day was that?’

  ‘Korea,’ he said. ‘National Service. I still have my service revolver.’

  ‘I thought the army had switched to the Browning by then,’ I said. Clearing out the Folly’s arsenal the year before had been an education in twentieth-century anti-personnel weapons and just how many decades you could leave them to rust before they became dangerously unstable.

  Postmartin shook his head. ‘My trusty Enfield Type Two.’

  ‘You didn’t, though? Bring it.’

  ‘Not in the end. I couldn’t find my spare ammo.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I searched high and low.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘I think I must have left it in the shed somewhere,’ said Postmartin.

  Charing Cross Road was once the bookselling heart of London and disreputable enough to avoid the multinational chains in their unceasing quest to turn every street of every city into a clone of every other. Cecil Court was a pedestrianised alleyway that linked Charing Cross to St Martin’s Lane where, if you ignored the upmarket burger restaurant at one end and the Mexican franchise at the other, you could still see what it might have been like. Although, according to my old man, it’s a lot cleaner than it once was.

  Amidst the specialist bookshops and galleries was Colin and Leech, established 1897, current proprietor Gavin Headley. He turned out to be a short burly white man with the sort of smug Mediterranean tan that comes from having a second home somewhere sunny and sufficient Mediterranean genes to stop your skin going orange. The inside of the shop was warm enough to grow pomegranates, and smelt of new books.

  ‘We specialise in signed first editions,’ said Headley and explained that authors were persuaded to ‘sign and line’ their freshly published books – ‘They write a line from their book at the top of the title page,’ he said – and his customers would then buy these and lay them down like a fine wine.

  The shop was tall, narrow and lined with modern hardbacks on expensively varnished hardwood shelves.

  ‘As an investment?’ I asked. It seemed a bit dodgy to me.

  Headley found that funny. ‘You’re not going to get rich investing in new hardbacks,’ he said. ‘Your kids maybe, but not you.’

  ‘How do you make your money?’

  ‘We’re a booksh
op,’ said Headley, shrugging. ‘We sell books.’

  Postmartin had been right. The thief would have to have been unbelievably stupid to try and sell a properly valuable antique on Cecil Court, particularly in Colin and Leech. Headley hadn’t been impressed.

  ‘He had it wrapped up in a bin-bag for one thing,’ he said. ‘As soon as he unwrapped it, I thought “fuck me”. I mean, I may only be at the contemporary end of the market but I know the real thing when it’s plonked down in front of me. “Do you think it’s valuable?” he asks. Is it valuable? How could he be kosher and not know? Okay, I suppose he could have found it in his granddad’s attic but is that likely when it was in such good nick?’

  I agreed that this was a low probability scenario and asked how he’d managed to separate the book from the gentleman in question.

  ‘Told him I wanted to keep it overnight, didn’t I? So that I could get someone in to make an accurate valuation.’

  ‘And he fell for that?’

  Headley shrugged. ‘I offered him a receipt and asked for his contact details but he told me he’d just remembered that he was parked on a double yellow and he’d be right back.’

  And off he went, leaving the book behind.

  ‘I reckon he must have realised he’d fucked up,’ said Headley. ‘And panicked.’

  I asked if he could give me a description.

  ‘I can do better than that,’ he said and held up a USB. ‘I saved the footage.’

  The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.

  In a proper major investigation team there’s a DC or DS whose job it is to arrive at the crime scene, locate all the potential cameras, gather up all the footage and then scan through however many thousands of hours there is, looking for anything relevant. He or she has a team of as many as six detectives to help with the job – muggins of course had himself, Toby and the dogged determination to see justice done.

  The book had been turned over to Arts and Antiques in late January and most private premises keep less than forty-eight hours’ worth of footage but I managed to scrape some up from the traffic camera and a pub which had recently installed their system and hadn’t yet figured out how to delete the old stuff. In the old days, when a gigabyte was a lot of memory, I would have been lumbered with a big bag full of VHS tapes but now it all ended up fitting on the USB that Headley had provided.

  Counting a stop for refs at Gaby’s, salt beef and pickle, it took me a good three hours and I didn’t get back to the Folly until late afternoon. I wanted to head straight for the tech cave to check the footage but Nightingale insisted that both me and Lesley practise knocking a tennis ball back and forth across the atrium using only impello. Nightingale claimed it had been a popular rainy day sport back when he was at school and called it Indoor Tennis. Me and Lesley, much to his annoyance, called it Pocket Quidditch.

  The rules were simple and about what you’d expect from a bunch of adolescents in an aggressively allmale environment. The players stood at either end of the atrium and had to stay within a two-metre-wide chalk circle drawn on the floor. The referee, in this case Nightingale, introduced a tennis ball at the mid-point of the pitch and the players attempted to use impello and any other related spells to propel the ball at their opponent. Points were scored for strikes to the body between neck and waist and lost for losing control of the ball in your half of the court. As soon as he got wind of the sport, Dr Walid had insisted that we wear cricket helmets and face guards when we played.

  Nightingale grumbled that in his day they would never have dreamt of wearing protection – not even in the sixth form when they’d played with cricket balls – and besides it reduced the player’s incentive to maintain good form and not be struck in the first place. Lesley, who never liked wearing a helmet, objected right up to the point where she found she could get an amusing boing sound by bouncing the ball off mine. I’d have been more irritated except, 1) helmet, 2) Lesley would pass up easy body shots to go for my head, which made it easier to win.

  Back in the days at Casterbrook the boys had placed bets on the game. They had wagered fag-days, fagging being when a younger boy acted as a servant for an older one, which tells you just about everything you need to know about posh schools. Me and Lesley, both being aspirational working class, staked rounds at the pub instead. The fact that I had a seven month head start as an apprentice on Lesley probably being the only reason she ever had to pay for her own drinks.

  In the end it was a draw with one body strike to me, one boing to Lesley and a disqualified point caused by Toby jumping up and catching the ball in mid-air. We broke for what me and Lesley called dinner, Nightingale called supper and Molly, we’d begun to suspect, thought of as field trials for her culinary experimentation.

  ‘This potato tastes a bit different,’ said Lesley poking at the neat conical pile of mash that balanced one side of the plate against what Nightingale had identified as seared tuna steak.

  ‘That’s because it’s yam,’ said Nightingale – surprising me. It’s not like yam is big on the traditional English menu. Although if it had been, they probably would have mashed it and then covered it in onion gravy. My mum boils it like cassava, slices it up with butter and a soup spicy enough to cauterise the end of your tongue.

  I looked over at Molly, who watched over us as we ate, and she lifted her chin and met my gaze.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ I said.

  We heard a distant ringing noise that confused everyone until we recognised the Folly’s front door bell. We all exchanged looks until it was established that since I wasn’t intrinsically supernatural, a chief inspector or required to put on a mask before meeting the public I was nominated door opener in chief.

  It turned out to be a cycle courier who handed over a package in exchange for my signature. It was an A4 envelope stiffened with cardboard and addressed to Thomas Nightingale Esq.

  Nightingale used a serrated steak knife to open the envelope at the wrong end, the better, he explained, to avoid unpleasant surprises and extracted a sheet of expensive paper. He showed it to me and Lesley – it was handwritten and in Latin. Nightingale translated.

  ‘“The Lord and Lady of the River do give you notice that they will be holding their Spring Court together at the Garden of Bernadette of Spain”,’ he paused and reread the last bit. ‘“Bernie Spain’s Garden and that you are hereby charged as if by ancient custom to secure and police the fair against all enemies.” And it’s sealed with the Hanged Man of Tyburn and the Waterwheel of Oxley plus signatures.’

  He showed us the seals.

  ‘Somebody’s been watching way too much Game of Thrones,’ said Lesley. ‘And what is the Spring Court?’ Nightingale explained that it had once been traditional for the Old Man of the Thames to hold a Spring Court upriver, usually near Lechlade, where his subjects could come and pay their respects. It generally occurred at or around the spring equinox but there hadn’t been a formal court since the Old Man abandoned the tideway in the 1850s.

  ‘Nor, if I remember history correctly, did the Folly play a role,’ said Nightingale. ‘Except to send an envoy and our respects.’

  ‘I notice it says “as if by ancient custom”,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I imagine both Tyburn and Oxley enjoyed the ambiguity of that statement.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re not taking it very seriously,’ I said.


  ‘If only that were true,’ said Nightingale.

  After supper I headed for the tech cave for a beer and to see what I could find on cable. I thought Lesley might join me, but she said she was knackered and going to bed. I pulled a Red Stripe from the fridge and futilely flicked through the channels for five minutes before deciding I might as well process that afternoon’s CCTV footage.

  I started with the stuff from the shop. Judging from the angle, the camera was mounted above the counter looking down the long narrow shop to the front door. I cued up and ran it from the moment our man stepped inside, clutching his black bag of swag, and briskly approached the counter.

  He was white, pale faced, thin nosed, in his midforties I guessed, dark hair going grey, bags under dark blue eyes. He was dressed in a tan zip-up jacket over a light-coloured shirt and khaki chinos.

  I watched the transaction going the way Headley had described, and the moment when the thief realised he’d made a mistake was well obvious. He glanced involuntarily up at the CCTV camera, realised what he’d done and was out the door less than a minute later.

  Thirty-six seconds precisely in fact – by the time-code in the corner of the screen.

  The CCTV from the shop was the latest kit. I rolled it back and got a capture of his face when he looked at the camera. It blew up nicely just using Paint Shop Pro – I printed a couple of copies for use later. Despite the poor angle I was pretty sure that the book thief turned right when he exited the shop – going towards St Martin’s Lane – but just to be on the safe side I checked the footage I had from the Barclays’ branch on Charing Cross Road. Banks in central London have top of the line CCTV and one of the branch’s fifteen cameras just clipped the entrance to Cecil Court. I scanned twenty minutes either side of the time of his departure and confirmed that he definitely hadn’t come out on to Charing Cross Road.