Broken Homes

snap, the feather duster vanished up her right sleeve. I stepped aside politely as she swept past me and closed the door behind her when she’d gone.
    The master off-switch was in the off position, but when I felt the side of the PC’s tower it was still warm. I fired everything up and got the blue screen of Your Computer Failed To Shut Down Correctly, as if I needed more confirmation. I wondered what Molly had been doing – I doubted it was solitaire. While I waited for my PC to reboot I unwrapped my parcel, two layers of bubble wrap and tissue paper no less and a note that very politely informed me that I would be held responsible for any damage.
    It was easy to see how the book might have been overlooked. It was smaller than a mass market paperback, with a dull red hardback cover and high quality paper that was only now faintly browning with age. The ink quality was good, easy on the eye, and it would have been a pleasure to read if I only I read German.
    What made it truly valuable to the investigation were the initials E.S . pencilled on a corner of the first page, and the fact Eric Stromberg had gone on to mark parts of the text that interested him. It was just as well Postmartin had his own copy, because he regarded people who annotate books the way my dad looked upon people who left their fingerprints on the playing surface of their vinyl. I did wear a pair of thin latex gloves in Postmartin’s honour though – which, come to think of it, is the way Dad would like to see people handle records.
    One of the pages had a piece of card, the lid of a cigarette packet judging by the smell, as a place marker. And underlined here twice in heavy pencil was:
    So sei nun meine These, dass sich Magié, die einen begrenzten Raum ausfüllt, wie eine übersättigte Lösung verhält und dass jeder Eingriff, ob natürlichen oder artifiziellen Ursprungs, zum spontanen Auskristalliseren des magischen Effekts führen kann.
    Which according to Google translated as: So now is my thesis that magic that fills a confined space, such as a supersaturated solution behaves and that any interference, whether natural or artificial origin, can lead to the spontaneous Auskristalliseren of magical effect.
    I looked up Auskristalliseren in my dictionary and online without success, but I was willing to bet it meant ‘crystallise’. Not long after that passage was another underlined section:
    Daher sollte es durchaus möglich sein, das magische Potential in industriellem Maßstabe auskristallisieren zu lassen und zur späteren Verwendung aufzubewahren.
    Which translated as: Therefore, it should be quite possible to crystallise on an industrial scale the magical potential and save them for later use.
    I made a note of all the pages and passages underlined or otherwise marked, and emailed the details to Postmartin.
    So Skygarden really was a magic drilling rig. But that still left the problem of where the magic was being drilled from. And it would really help if we had a working definition of what magic was. I went back to the book – after all, if you were going to industrialise it, you pretty much had to know how it worked.
    I found a promising section on types of vestigium – Stromberg had thought so, too, judging from his notes in the margin. These broke it down into four main types, todesvestigium, magievestigium, naturvestigium and Vestigium menschlicher Aktivität . I didn’t even need the internet for the first three, death, magic and nature. And the fourth translated as human activity . Stromberg had pencilled nicht sinnvoll , ‘not useful’, by death and unwahrscheinlich , ‘unlikely’, by natural so probably not an old hospital site or gallows. Stromberg had obviously got as frustrated as me because beside human activity he’d written aber welche art von aktivität? ‘But what kind of activity?’ Underneath in what looked like it might be a different pencil, or just a blunter one – as if written later – were the words Handwerk nicht fließband! ‘Craft not pipelined!’
    So what had brought Stromberg to the Elephant and Castle?
    After the City of London itself, Southwark was the oldest bit of London proper, dating all the way back to the first ad hoc settlement on the south end of London Bridge. It had also always been the place that London stuck the things it didn’t want inside its walls, the tanneries, fullers, dyers and other industries that involved urine on an industrial scale. And, likewise, the other things