Broken Homes

me and found that it was unmarked. We could put it back in place on the way out, and no one would be any the wiser.
    ‘Is this entirely legal?’ asked Zach.
    ‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley. ‘That was a clear health and safety violation.’
    ‘That’s all right then,’ said Zach standing back so that me and Lesley could access the door to the basement. ‘I wouldn’t want to think that you two were leading me into anything illicit.’
    ‘We’re the law,’ said Lesley. ‘Remember?’
    ‘You’re the Isaacs,’ said Zach. ‘And that ain’t quite the same thing.’
    Without the padlock, the door to the basement opened easily and we went inside.
    We found ourselves at the bottom of Skygarden’s pointlessly wide central shaft. Two floors above us, wire mesh had been strung across the width of the shaft, presumably so people could work at the bottom without being hit by rubbish dropped from above. Over thirty years of careful housekeeping the mesh had acquired such a thick layer of old newspapers, burger boxes, empty drink cans and stuff I didn’t want to identify, that it blocked much of the light coming from above.
    ‘That’s a fire hazard,’ said Zach.
    Fortunately, enough of the strip lights mounted on the walls were still working for us to see what we were doing. I peered up through the accumulated rubbish to trace the descent of Stromberg’s so-called tuned mass damper down the centre of the shaft until it terminated in the basement where we stood. Close up I could see it was a cylinder thirty centimetres across and it terminated a metre above the ground.
    ‘What’s holding it up?’ asked Zach.
    ‘There’s cross cables at every other floor,’ I said. ‘The ones without walkways. And it’s attached at the top.’ To a PVC plinth with occult symbols, no less. And I realised that this was Stromberg’s mine shaft or drill bit or whatever – crystallising the magic out of wherever it was coming from and connecting it to the Stadtkrone.
    ‘That’s got to be supporting some of the weight,’ said Lesley, pointing up.
    A metre above our heads what looked like heating ducts emerged from four of the walls and met in the middle in a boxy girdle mounted around the fake mass damper.
    ‘Look how clean they are,’ I said. ‘They’re practically brand new.’ I made a mental note about where the ducts would come out on the other side of the walls. I jogged back out the door and up the stairs to the Lower Ground Floor plant room and found the darkish strip which marked where the new cement had been laid.
    Plastic, I was thinking . . . Certain plastics retain vestigia . Nightingale had been right. I was replicating work from the 1920s, only not by members of the Folly, and not by British researchers but Germans. Professor Postmartin had said they’d been more advanced than us prior to the 1930s – and that included the chemical industry. At school Mrs Lemwick had been big on German industrial superiority when we did the origins of the First World War.
    ‘What’s he up to?’ asked Zach, who had followed me up here with Lesley, and was now staring at me oddly.
    ‘He’s doing his Sherlock Holmes impression,’ said Lesley.
    I went out through the main doors into the rain and found the point where a freshly resurfaced strip of the tarmac emerged from the wall and headed for the garages.
    ‘My granddad said he was bonkers,’ said Zach.
    ‘Sherlock Homes?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘Arthur Conan Doyle,’ said Zach.
    The strip vanished under the door of a garage sealed with a County Gard steel plate and another shiny padlock.
    ‘You want to get this?’ I asked Zach.
    Zach pulled a pick from his jeans pocket and went to work. ‘Started seeing fairies and ghosts and talking to dead people,’ he said still going on about Conan Doyle as the padlock came apart in his hands.
    ‘But there are fairies and ghosts,’ said Lesley. ‘I met them down the pub – you introduced me.’
    ‘Yeah, but he used to see them when they weren’t there,’ said Zach. ‘Which is practically the definition of bonkers.’
    I bent down, grabbed the door handle and pulled the garage door up and over with a grinding screech. Rainwater splattered my face.
    ‘Okay,’ said Lesley. ‘This is not really clearing anything up, is it?’
    The garage was completely filled with stacks of what looked like metal trays, held in wooden frames. They were so tightly packed you couldn’t even squeeze inside and I couldn’t see whether