Broken Homes Read online

  Lesley got him – in case you’re wondering.

  Whatever else the lately dead Peter Mulkern had been, he wasn’t a slob. Both the kitchen and living room were tidy and had been cleaned to an adequate, if non-professional, standard. This meant that when I donned my gloves and pulled the sofa away from the wall I found an assortment of pens, bits of paper, fluff, a boiled sweet and thirty-six pence in change.

  It was one of the bits of paper, but I didn’t realise the significance of it until later.

  The back room was the only part of the house that had any books, two stand-alone 1970s MFI bookshelves stuffed with what looked like technical manuals and trade magazines with names like the Independent Locksmith Journal and The Locksmith. Since joining the Folly I’ve had to study a lot of suspect bookshelves and the trick is not to glance. You methodically work your way along each shelf starting with the top one and working your way down. This netted two issues of Loaded magazine from 2010, an Argos Christmas catalogue, a paperback copy of Tintin’s Destination Moon, a folder full of invoices that dated back to the 1990s and a National Trust booklet on the wonders of West Hill House in Highgate. I left the booklet half off the shelf so it was easy to find again and popped back into the living room to check one of the scraps of paper again.

  It was still there, an old-fashioned ADMIT ONE paper ticket of the kind that gets torn off the end of a roll by, say, volunteer guides at one of the smaller National Trust properties. A property like West Hill House in Highgate. I made notes but left the ticket where I found it. The Met gets pretty fundamentalist about chain of evidence in murder cases – not only does it help prevent any anomalies that might be exploited by a defence barrister, but it also removes any temptation to ‘improve’ the case by the investigating officers. Or at least makes it much harder than it used to be.

  I took the time to check the sideboards in the work room and, with permission from DCI Duffy, checked the upstairs rooms – just in case Peter Mulkern had been an enthusiastic visitor of National Trust homes and had a pile of guidebooks stashed by his bed. Nothing. Although I did note a copy of Cloud Atlas on the bedside table.

  Once I was satisfied I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself, I persuaded one of Duffy’s mob to run an IIP search looking for crimes at National Trust properties in London. The response was pretty instantaneous – a break in at West Hill House Highgate – unusual because the custodians didn’t know what was stolen. I was just noting down the crime number when Nightingale tooled up in the Jag. I went out to meet him and as we walked back to the house I filled him in as to how I got here.

  He paused to examine the burnt hole in the front door.

  ‘Is this your handiwork Peter?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes sir,’ I said.

  ‘Well at least you didn’t set the door on fire this time,’ he said. But his smile faded as he stepped into the hall. He sniffed and I saw a flicker of memory on his face – quickly repressed.

  ‘I know that smell,’ he said and went up the stairs.

  Negotiating the interface between the Folly and the rest of the police is always tricky, especially when it’s the murder squad. You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in scepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies. Nightingale says that in the good old days, which for him is before the war, the Folly got immediate and unquestioning co-operation. No doubt with plenty of forelock tugging and doffing of trilby hats. Even post war he said there just weren’t that many cases and the senior detectives back then were still much more relaxed about paperwork, procedures or, for that matter, evidence. But in modern times, where an SIO is expected to match up specific villains to specific crimes and faces an exterior case evaluation if they don’t, you have to use a certain amount of tact and charm. A detective chief inspector is, by definition, more charming than a constable. Which is why Nightingale went up the stairs to talk to Duffy. He wasn’t gone that long – I think it’s the posh accent that does it.

  I asked him if it was definitely one of ours.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Judging from the smell I’d say he was cooked.’

  ‘Could you do that? I mean, do you know how?’

  Nightingale glanced back up the stairs. ‘I could set you on fire,’ he said. ‘But in that case his clothes would have burnt as well.’

  ‘Was it magic?’

  ‘We won’t know until Dr Walid has had a chance to examine him,’ said Nightingale. ‘I didn’t sense any vestigia on the body.’

  ‘How else could it have happened?’ I asked.

  Nightingale gave me a grim smile. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You of all people should know that it’s dangerous to reason ahead of your evidence. You say you sensed a vestigium at the door?’

  I described what I’d felt – the cutthroat razor terror of it.

  ‘And you’re sure you recognised it?’

  ‘You’re the expert,’ I said. ‘You tell me. Is that likely?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Nightingale. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to tell at your stage of apprenticeship. But I was only twelve at the time and easily distracted.’

  ‘Easily distracted by what?’

  ‘Peter!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said and told him about the break in at West Hill House in Highgate.

  ‘A somewhat slender thread,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But what if I was to tell you that West Hill House was the home of Erik Stromberg the famous architect and German expatriate.’

  Nightingale’s eyes narrowed. ‘You think the book might have belonged to Stromberg?’

  ‘He got out before Hitler came to power,’ I said. ‘What if he brought some secrets with him? What if he was a member of the Weimar Academy?’

  ‘London was full of expatriates in the run up to the war,’ said Nightingale. ‘German or otherwise. You’d be surprised how few of them turned out to be practitioners.’

  ‘That book had to come from somewhere,’ I said.

  ‘True,’ said Nightingale. ‘But Whitehall had a bee in its bonnet about German infiltration and hence much of our manpower was devoted to spotting them and rounding them up.’

  ‘They were interned?’

  ‘They were given a choice,’ said Nightingale with a shrug. ‘They could join the war effort or be shipped over to Canada for the duration. A surprising number of them stayed. Most of the Jews and the Gypsies, of course.’

  ‘But you might have missed some?’

  ‘It’s possible – if they kept quiet.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s where Mr Nolfi’s mother learnt her party tricks,’ I said. ‘She might have been an expatriate. I didn’t think of asking in the hospital.’ Tracking down the exploding granddad’s antecedents was yet another thing that was still sitting in the low priority things-to-be-done pile. It might have to be moved up.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’d like you to have a look at the house.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘If possible,’ said Nightingale which meant, yes absolutely today. ‘I’ll liaise with the Detective Chief Inspector and Dr Walid, when he arrives. Once you’ve done that you and Lesley can join us for the post-mortem – which I suspect will be instructive.’

  ‘Oh joy,’ I said.

  6

  The International Style

  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.