Broken Homes

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