Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (7 page)

I asked whether there was any aspect of Richard’s work as a town planner that he’d talked about more than others, but Phillip hadn’t noticed. Nor had Richard complained about incidents of corruption or coming under any pressure to influence a planning decision one way or the other.

‘And whatever it was keeping him there,’ said Phillip, ‘he was obviously over it, because he told me that he was quitting.’ He looked away from me and fumbled for his tea cup to cover his tears.

The mother bustled back in, saw the tears and gave me a poisonous look. I worked my way quickly through the last of the questionnaire, offered my condolences once more, and left.

Something fishy and possibly supernatural had happened to Richard Lewis but since he obviously wasn’t a practitioner I couldn’t think what his connection with the excitingly terminal world of modern magic might be. When I got back to the Folly I wrote it up and filed the requisite two reports. The thinking in police work with this sort of non-lead is that either some other completely different line of inquiry will prove unexpectedly connected or you will never find out what the fuck was going on.

My gut instinct was that we were never going to find out why Richard Lewis threw himself under a train – which just goes to show why you should never trust your gut.

A
fter car-related incidents, burglary and theft are the most common crimes which MOPs, that’s members of the public to you, are subject to. It’s also the one they moan about the most, mainly because they know that the clear-up rate for burglary is low.

‘I don’t know why you bother writing this down,’ they say as they exaggerate the value of their goods for insurance purposes. ‘It’s not like you’re going to catch them, is it?’ To which we have no answer – because they’re right. We’re not going to catch them for that particular burglary, but we often catch them later and then get some of your stuff back – the stuff that’s now been replaced by better stuff from the insurance. Most of the recovered goods are junk but some of it attracts the eagle eye of the Arts and Antiques Squad who grab it, photograph it and put it on a database called, with the Met’s unerring ear for a euphonious acronym, LSAD – the London Stolen Art Directory.

They keep saying that they’re going to make it searchable by the public but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It
is
possible for it to be searched by a police officer, if he can persuade his line manager to push for his OCU to be granted access via their terminals. Not an easy thing to do, when the line manager in question is hazy on the concept of databases, internet searches and indeed the very notion of a ‘line manager’. I’d gained access just after the New Year and now made checking new arrivals part of my morning routine. ‘Anything to avoid real work,’ was Lesley’s verdict and Nightingale gave me the same long-suffering look he gives me when I accidentally blow up fire extinguishers, fall asleep while he’s talking, or fail to conjugate my Latin verbs.

So you can imagine how pleased I was when one cold dark morning, a fortnight after my visit to Swindon, I spotted my first find. I always start with the rare books and I almost missed it because it was in German;
Über Die Grundlagen Dass Die Praxis Der Magie Zugrunde Léigen
but fortunately it had been translated as
About the Basics that the Practice of Magic Reference Lies
probably by Google Translate. There was a picture of the frontispiece listing the author as Reinhard Maller, published in 1799 in Weimar. I checked for Maller in the mundane library’s card index but found nothing.

I made a note of the case number, printed the description and showed it to Nightingale later that morning during practice. He translated the title as
On the Fundamentals that Underlie the Practice of Magic.

‘Show off,’ I said.

‘I think you had better secure this,’ he said. ‘And see if you can track down where it came from.’

‘Is it something to do with Ettersberg?’ I asked.

‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘Not everything German relates back to the Nazis.’

‘Is it a translation of the Principia Artis Magicae?’ I asked.

‘I can’t tell without having a look.’

‘I’ll get onto Arts and Antiques,’ I said.

‘Later,’ said Nightingale. ‘After practice.’

Arts and Antiques, definitely not known by the rest of the Met as the Arts and Crafts squad, occasionally recover an item so valuable that even the evidence storage locker in the middle of New Scotland Yard isn’t secure enough. For those items they rent space at the auction house Christie’s where they laugh at cat burglars, tweak the nose of international art thieves and have some of the most serious, and rumoured to be illegal, security measures in the world. That’s why the following morning I found myself down on King Street in St James’s where even a miserable icy rain couldn’t wash away the smell of money.

Nor could a stick of incendiary bombs, back in April 1941, when it destroyed everything except the façade of number 8 King Street, the London home of Christie’s since 1823. They rebuilt in the 1950s, which was why the foyer was disappointingly shapeless and low ceilinged, albeit in an expensive air-conditioned and marble-floored way.

The Folly doesn’t generate the gigabytes of paperwork that the rest of the Met does but what we do produce tends to be a bit too esoteric to be outsourced to an IT company in Inverness. Instead, we have one elderly guy in a basement in Oxford, although admittedly the basement’s under the Bodleian library and the guy is a Doctor of Philosophy and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

I found Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil. F.R.S. B.Mon hunched over the book in a viewing room upstairs. Designed, I learnt later, to be deliberately neutral and not distract from whatever it was you were supposed to be viewing, the room was all beige carpet, white walls and aluminium and black canvas faux Bauhaus chairs. Postmartin was examining his prize on an unornamented lectern. He was wearing white gloves and using a plastic spatula to turn the pages.

‘Peter,’ he said when I entered. ‘You have surpassed yourself this time. Truly surpassed yourself.’

‘Is it kosher?’ I asked.

‘I should say so,’ said Postmartin. ‘A proper German grimoire. I haven’t seen one of these since 1991.’

‘I thought it might be a copy of the Principia.’

Postmartin glanced at me over the top of his reading glasses and grinned. ‘It’s certainly based on Newtonian principles but I think it’s more than a copy. My German is somewhat rusty but I believe I’m right in saying that it looks like it came out of the
Weiße Bibliothek
in Cologne.’

My German’s worse than my Latin, but even I thought I could translate that.

‘White Library?’ I asked.

‘Also known as the
Bibliotheca Alba
and the centre of German magical practice until 1798 when the French, who owned that bit of Germany at the time, shut down the university.’

‘The French didn’t like magic, then?’

‘Hardly,’ said Postmartin. ‘They shut down all the universities. It was one of the unfortunate side effects of the French Revolution.’

Details of what happened to the contents of the library next were sketchy but, according to Postmartin’s records, the entire
Weiße Bibliothek
had been smuggled out of Cologne to Weimar.

‘Where, buoyed no doubt by the rising tide of German nationalism,’ said Postmartin, ‘it became the
Deutsche Akademie der Höheren Einsichten zu Weimar
or the
Weimarer Akademie der Höheren Einsichten
for short.’

‘Because that is much shorter,’ I said.

‘The Weimar Academy of Higher Insights,’ said Postmartin.

‘Higher insights?’ I asked.

‘
Höheren Einsichten
can translate as either that or “higher understanding,”’ said Postmartin. ‘As both in fact. German really is a splendid language for discussing the esoteric.’

It wasn’t quite the German version of the Folly. ‘Far more rigorous, much less smug,’ said Postmartin who believed that the
Akademie
had probably been in advance of the Folly for much of the nineteenth century.

‘Although one likes to think it was neck and neck by the 1920s,’ said Postmartin. In the 1930s it was swallowed up by Himmler’s
Ahnenerbe
, an organisation dedicated to providing both an intellectual framework for Nazism and Indiana Jones with an endless supply of disposable bad guys.

And round we come to Ettersberg once more, I thought. And whatever it was Nightingale and his doomed chums had been doing there in 1945.

I asked whether the Germans had a modern equivalent of the Folly.

‘There’s a branch of the
Bundeskriminalamt
– that’s the Federal Police Force – based in Meckenheim called the
Abteilung KDA
which stands for
Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten
which translates as the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters.’

Leaving aside the wonderful name, the Federal Government maintained a most un-German vagueness about what the department’s responsibilities are. ‘A stance uncannily similar to that taken by their counterparts in Whitehall with regards to the Folly,’ said Postmartin. ‘That in itself is quite distinctive, really.’

‘I supposed it never occurred to you to just phone them up and ask,’ I said.

‘That’s an operational matter, so nothing to do with me I’m afraid,’ said Postmartin. ‘And besides we didn’t think it was necessary.’

It had been an article of faith amongst the post-war survivors of British wizardry that the magic was going out of the world. You don’t need to establish bilateral links with sister organisations if your raison d’être was melting away like the arctic icepack.

‘And besides, Peter,’ said Postmartin, ‘if this book did come from the White Library then there’s a good chance the Germans may want it back and I for one have no intention of letting it out of my grasp.’ He laid his white gloved hand gently on the cover as emphasis. ‘However did Arts and Antiques come by it in the first place?’

‘It was handed in by a reputable bookseller,’ I said.

‘How reputable?’

‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘reputable enough. Colin and Leech in Cecil Court.’

‘The thief must have been blissfully unaware of what he had,’ said Postmartin. ‘That’s like trying to
flog
,’ he rolled the word around, obviously enjoying the sound of it, ‘a Picasso down the Portobello. How did they wrest the book from him?’

I told him that I didn’t know the details and that I was following that up as soon we were finished.

‘Why hasn’t that been done already?’ asked Postmartin. ‘Leaving aside its more esoteric qualities, this is still a very valuable item. Surely an investigation has already begun?’

‘The book hasn’t been reported stolen,’ I said. ‘As far as Arts and Antiques are concerned, there’s no crime to investigate.’ And what with the Met currently being seriously mullered by spending cuts, nobody was in a hurry to find an excuse for more work.

‘Curious,’ said Postmartin. ‘Perhaps the owner doesn’t realise it’s been stolen.’

‘Perhaps the owner is the guy who tried to sell it,’ I said. ‘He might want it back.’

Postmartin gave me a horrified look. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I have a security van coming to whisk this book and myself away to Oxford and safety. Besides, if he is the owner, he doesn’t deserve what he’s got. To each according to his abilities and all that.’

‘You’ve hired a security van?’

‘For this?’ said Postmartin, looking fondly at the book. ‘Of course. I even considered coming out with my revolver.’ He checked to make sure I was suitably horrified. ‘Don’t worry. I was a crack shot in my day.’

‘What day was that?’

‘Korea,’ he said. ‘National Service. I still have my service revolver.’

‘I thought the army had switched to the Browning by then,’ I said. Clearing out the Folly’s arsenal the year before had been an education in twentieth-century anti-personnel weapons and just how many decades you could leave them to rust before they became dangerously unstable.

Postmartin shook his head. ‘My trusty Enfield Type Two.’

‘You didn’t, though? Bring it.’

‘Not in the end. I couldn’t find my spare ammo.’

‘Good.’

‘I searched high and low.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘I think I must have left it in the shed somewhere,’ said Postmartin.

Charing Cross Road was once the bookselling heart of London and disreputable enough to avoid the multinational chains in their unceasing quest to turn every street of every city into a clone of every other. Cecil Court was a pedestrianised alleyway that linked Charing Cross to St Martin’s Lane where, if you ignored the upmarket burger restaurant at one end and the Mexican franchise at the other, you could still see what it might have been like. Although, according to my old man, it’s a lot cleaner than it once was.

Amidst the specialist bookshops and galleries was Colin and Leech, established 1897, current proprietor Gavin Headley. He turned out to be a short burly white man with the sort of smug Mediterranean tan that comes from having a second home somewhere sunny and sufficient Mediterranean genes to stop your skin going orange. The inside of the shop was warm enough to grow pomegranates, and smelt of new books.

‘We specialise in signed first editions,’ said Headley and explained that authors were persuaded to ‘sign and line’ their freshly published books – ‘They write a line from their book at the top of the title page,’ he said – and his customers would then buy these and lay them down like a fine wine.

The shop was tall, narrow and lined with modern hardbacks on expensively varnished hardwood shelves.

‘As an investment?’ I asked. It seemed a bit dodgy to me.

Headley found that funny. ‘You’re not going to get rich investing in new hardbacks,’ he said. ‘Your kids maybe, but not you.’

‘How do you make your money?’

‘We’re a bookshop,’ said Headley, shrugging. ‘We sell books.’

Postmartin had been right. The thief would have to have been unbelievably stupid to try and sell a properly valuable antique on Cecil Court, particularly in Colin and Leech. Headley hadn’t been impressed.