Broken Homes

certainly don’t have any record of him using it to look at the stars.’
    ‘I wonder if you could do me an enormous favour?’ I asked.
    ‘If I can,’ said Ms Shapiro.
    ‘Have you got a list of all Stromberg’s books?’ I asked. ‘The ones he owned.’
    ‘I believe we compiled one just last month,’ she said. ‘For the insurance.’
    I figured they’d have had to.
    ‘Could you run off a hardcopy for me?’ I said. ‘I’d ask you to email it to me, but this way I won’t have to go back to the station first.’ I got up and gently hustled her towards the stairway.
    ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘Though I do wonder what you might need it for.’
    ‘I’d like to cross check it against a couple of Interpol lists,’ I lied. ‘See if there’s any pattern.’
    As we reached the stairway I pretended to remember something and told Ms Shapiro that I wanted to have a quick look around the roof perimeter.
    ‘Possible point of access,’ I said.
    Ms Shapiro offered to wait but I told her that I would only take a couple of minutes and that I’d meet her downstairs in the office. She seemed reluctant to leave me on my own and I was grinding my teeth and trying not to push her down the stairs when she suddenly agreed and went.
    I dashed back, sat back down on the wet seat, looked back out over London and took a deep breath.
    You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe. As you learn each one you associate it with a word, in Latin because that’s what a scientific gentleman of Sir Isaac Newton’s time would write his shit down in. You make it so that the word and the forma become one in your mind. The first one you learn is Lux which makes light. The second I learnt was impello which pushes things about. You make a spell – I still smile every time I say that word – by stringing the formae together in a sequence. A spell with one forma is a first-order spell, with two formae a second-order spell, with three a third-order spell – you get the idea. It’s actually way more complicated than that, what with formae inflectentes and adjectivia and the dreaded turpis vox, but trust me, you don’t want to get into that right now.
    In January, Nightingale had taught me my first fourth-order spell, one created by Isaac Newton himself. He told me that he was only doing it because he’d already been forced to teach me an old-fashioned shield spell and two of the formae were the same. Now I ran through the components a few times and checked to make sure that Ms Shapiro was safely gone before casting.
    In the old days I expect it was all right to chant in Latin and wave your hands about but your modern, up-to-date, image-conscious magical practitioner likes to be a little bit more discreet. These days we mutter them under our breath which makes us look like nutters instead. Lesley wears a Bluetooth earpiece and pretends to be talking Italian, but Nightingale doesn’t approve – it’s a generational thing.
    Newton’s spell used the aer forma to grab hold of the air in front of your face and then craft it into two lenses that act like a telescope. The great man called it telescopium , which tells you everything you need to know about his approach to branding. Beyond the usual drawbacks – i.e., the risk of having your brain turn into a diseased cauliflower – if the lenses are the wrong shape you get a face full of rainbows. And if you’re stupid enough to look at the sun you can make yourself permanently blind.
    This may explain why Newton went on to invent the reflecting telescope for all his routine stargazing needs.
    London jumped towards me, King’s Cross, the green rectangle of Lincoln’s Inn, the river and, beyond the river, the studied dullness of the King’s Reach Tower and, beyond that, right in the centre of my field of view – the grim brutalist finger of Skygarden Tower.
    Had Stromberg been a practitioner as well as an architect? He’d called Skygarden Tower his greatest work . . .
    Clouds covered the setting sun and the city dimmed to a dirty grey.
    ‘When there’s something weird in your neighbourhood . . .’ I said out loud.
    When you get yourself killed in suspicious circumstances the law requires that a Home-Office-appointed pathologist cut you open and have a good rummage round inside to determine what did you in. It’s the pathologist who decides where the post-mortem takes place and since DCI Duffy had