Broken Homes

that London needed but didn’t want too close, the bath houses and stews, the theatres and the bear pits. Carved through stinking, drunken, declaiming streets were the two Roman roads that linked the great bridge with Canterbury and the south coast. Shakespeare got pissed on a regular basis in Southwark. So did Chaucer – or at least his fictional pilgrims did.
    But where Skygarden was built? Marsh, then farmland and then housing. Not so much as a smithy or a lunatic asylum. Not even the whiff of a plague pit or a temple of Mithras.
    I had two theories. Either Stromberg had discovered something in the locality – an ancient temple, a stone circle, site of a massacre or iron age industrial site – or he’d been planning to extract magical power out of the everyday lives of council flat tenants. No wonder he was waiting up on his roof with his telescope until the day he died.
    I decided I’d exceeded any useful activity, handwerk or fließband , that I could achieve where I was, so I shut everything down in the tech cave, placed our new German acquisition in the safety of the non-magical library and headed out to catch the bus back across the river.
    Molly watched me leave, no doubt impatient for me to be gone so she could get back to the computer. The keystroke tracker I’d activated would tell me what she was up to.
    Lesley was waiting for me in the living room, sprawled on the sofa bed and twirling her mask by one of its eyeholes as she watched Dennis and Gnasher on CBBC. Toby was sitting in front of the TV, head cocked to one side as if judging Gnasher’s form as a freestyle event.
    ‘I’m going to go see Zach,’ she said without preamble.
    ‘What for?’
    ‘Because you never get everything out of Zach on the first go,’ she said. ‘And if I have to stay in this flat all evening I will not be held responsible. Any joy with the Germans?’
    I floated my drilling rig hypothesis, which she agreed was farfetched. ‘Unless watching telly counts as human activity. Speaking of which, I dropped in on our neighbour.’
    ‘Emma Wall?’ I asked – the fallen princess?
    ‘You know how some people work at being stupid?’ she asked. ‘If you give them a clear, common sense choice they give it a lot of thought and then choose stupid.’
    ‘I think we did probation with a couple of those,’ I said.
    ‘For some people stupid comes natural – Emma Wall is one of those,’ she said and standing started hunting out clothes from a suitcase.
    ‘So, not a mole for the Faceless Man?’
    ‘Not unless he’s got really low recruitment standards.’
    ‘Bugger,’ I said. ‘The fucker is so slippery.’
    Lesley held her two masks either side of her face. ‘Which one do you think?’ she asked. ‘Vile pink or tax envelope tan?’
    ‘Vile pink,’ I said as she disappeared into the bedroom. ‘You really think Zach’s got more to tell you?’
    ‘More to tell me, yeah,’ she shouted from inside the bedroom. ‘Useful? I don’t know.’
    Ten minutes later she was out the door in a pair of skinny jeans, a cream blouse and a leather jacket that I happened to know had been modified so she’d have somewhere to carry her baton and her cuffs.
    ‘You never know when you might need them,’ she’d said to me pointedly when she showed me the pockets. ‘And it gives the jacket a better hang.’
    I texted Nightingale to let him know our change in disposition and then I picked up my Pliny, because nothing says stuck all alone in your flat like a Roman know-it-all.
    It had started raining when I took Toby out for his combination dog walk and snooping session. We strolled about the dismantled playground but Sky didn’t make an appearance amongst the dripping trees. As we squelched back along the elevated walkway I heard the grumbling of van-sized diesels – at least two by the sound of them. When I reached the tower I leaned over the parapet and peered through the grey falling rain. Half hidden behind the curve of the tower I saw two Transits, Mark 7s with the 2.2 diesel, backing up in front of one of the garages. One of the vans was in the white, yellow and blue County Gard livery but the other was plain dark blue with no markings. I could have used my magical abilities to get a closer look, but instead I used the zoom function on my phone. That way I could record them at the same time.
    The vans blocked my view of the garage but it was pretty clear that they were transferring stuff from the vehicles. I thought of