Broken Homes

burglary. That’s the trouble with evidence – either you’ve got it or you ain’t.
    In the report it mentioned the insurance company had found evidence that the door on the roof had been forced at some point in the recent past. I asked Ms Shapiro about the lock and if she’d show me up to have a look.
    ‘We don’t know when that happened for sure,’ she said as she led me back to the spiral stairs. ‘Frankly, the insurance company were just trying to impress us with how keen they were.’
    ‘Did they put your premiums up?’
    ‘What do you think?’ she asked.
    There was a poster-sized photograph of the Skygarden Tower hanging on the second floor landing. It had been taken at night with the base lit by coloured floodlights and the windows ablaze. I asked whether Stromberg had hung it there himself.
    ‘No,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘But he regarded Skygarden as his best work, so we thought it would be appropriate to mark that. It was taken in 1969 just before the first tenants moved in.’
    Which explained why it didn’t look like a sink estate – it looked like the future.
    The one advantage of a flat roof is that you can walk around on it – structurally speaking it’s just about the only advantage. Or, if you’re a mad modernist architect, you can have a roof garden, far above all that messy natural dirt, where your plants can be contained in neat square tubs with sharp corners and nobody can steal your garden furniture.
    The spiral staircase wound up to a glass-fronted stair enclosure. The insurance company report had stated that there were indications the door might have been forced from outside.
    ‘Stromberg always left the key in the lock,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘So did we, but when the assessor tried to remove it from the lock they found it was stuck.’
    The key had partially fused with the lock mechanism. But whether that was due to external tampering or just old age, they couldn’t determine.
    ‘You changed the lock?’ I asked.
    ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘We had it refurbished.’
    So it was worth a try, I thought, and bent down as if I was examining it.
    I felt it for certain, although it was as faint a vestigium as I’ve ever sensed – the Faceless Man had used magic on the lock. But when exactly? And why? I asked if I could step outside.
    ‘Help yourself,’ she said with a broad smile.
    I found out why when I stepped out onto the roof garden and saw the view. It was stupendous. The sky was still grey overhead, but to the southwest a gap in the clouds framed the sun over the horizon so that sunlight lit the city below me.
    Highgate Hill stands 130 metres above the London floodplain. Immediately below me the mansions of the Holy Lodge Estate, built to house the respectable spinsters left surplus by the First World War, marched down the south slope of the Hill. Beyond was the grey-green swamp of North London, scored by railway tracks which converged on the redbrick and iron piles of King’s Cross and St Pancras, and beyond them Holborn, the City, St Paul’s and the Shard – a sliver of silver and gold in the dying light of the sun.
    A severely plain white enamelled garden table stood by the parapet and around it some equally severe folding chairs. I could imagine Herr Stromberg sitting up here drinking coffee, enjoying the view and thinking himself King of the City.
    ‘It’s a pity we can’t keep the telescope up here any more,’ said Ms Shapiro.
    ‘Telescope?’
    She showed me a photograph in the glossy guide to the villa, a colour snap of Stromberg, a tall thin man in a loosely hanging red shirt and tan slacks, sitting just as I had imagined him. Only, as well as coffee, he had a brass-bound telescope mounted on a tripod at a convenient height for seated viewing.
    ‘The assessor practically had a fit in front of me when I told him we normally left it out on fine days,’ said Ms Shapiro. ‘We ended up taking it down and lending it to the Science Museum.’
    ‘I wonder what he was looking at?’ I tapped the photo of Stromberg in the brochure.
    ‘We wondered the exact the same thing,’ she said. ‘So, if you’d like to take a seat . . .’
    I sat in the folding chair and, having forgotten it had been raining earlier, I got a wet bum. Ms Shapiro had me shift a little to the left, explaining that they’d used a number of photographs as a reference.
    ‘He always pointed it roughly southeast,’ she said. ‘Towards Southwark or perhaps Biggin Hill beyond that. We