‘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 foolishly agreed to have Dr Walid do the job, she couldn’t complain that he’d dragged her all the way across the river to Westminster Mortuary on Horseferry Road. But Duffy’s loss was mine and Lesley’s gain, as this was the famous Iain West Memorial Forensic Suite which boasted state of the art facilities, including a remote viewing suite. Here your sensible junior officers could drink coffee and watch the procedure via CCTV, while their elders and betters got up close and personal with the corpse. Also, unless said junior officers were stupid enough to flip the switch on their end of the intercom, their seniors couldn’t hear them.
‘Why the fuck would he do that?’ asked Lesley once I’d told her my suspicion that Erik Stromberg had combined magic and architecture.
I told her that architects in those days truly believed they could make people better through architecture.
‘Make people better what?’
‘Better people,’ I said. ‘Better citizens.’
‘They didn’t do a very good job did they?’ said Lesley who, like me, had lived in her fair share of council housing growing up.
On the TV screen DCI Duffy, in green apron, face mask and eye protectors leant over the body of Patrick Mulkern to look more closely at whatever grisly detail Dr Walid thought was important.
‘Burnt from the inside out,’ said Duffy. Her voice sounded strangely nasal due, Lesley reckoned, to the sensible application of Vicks VapoRub underneath the nostrils. She turned to look off-screen. ‘Could you do that?’
Nightingale stepped into view of the camera.
‘I can’t answer that until we know what exactly was done,’ he sounded like he was avoiding breathing through his nose altogether. ‘But probably not.’
‘But you don’t think it was natural?’ asked Duffy.
‘Duh,’ said Lesley.
We heard Dr Walid say that he seriously doubted that it was natural. Duffy nodded. She seemed to accept things more easily from a fellow Scot than from Nightingale, so he was sensibly letting Dr Walid do most of the talking.
‘Keep an eye on the door,’ said Lesley and slipped her mask off.
There were fresh suture marks on her neck where they’d worked on her throat and the skin around them looked inflamed. She fetched out a small tub of ointment from her shoulder bag and started spreading it over her neck and jaw.
Her face was still a shock. I’d managed to teach myself not to flinch, but I was scared that I was never going to get used to it.
‘Patrick Mulkern steals a magic book from the house of noted mad architect Erik Stromberg whose greatest work was Skygarden Towers in Southwark,’ I said. ‘In that very borough’s planning department worked Richard Lewis. Have you watched Jaget’s edited highlights yet?’
‘He has way too much time on his hands,’ she said and rubbed cream into the twisted pink stub that was all that was left of her nose.
‘So our planner, who suddenly jumps in front of a train for no reason, turns out to be on the Little Crocodile list,’ I said. ‘And then Patrick Mulkern turns up magically barbecued.’
‘You don’t know it was magic,’ said Lesley and replaced her mask.
‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Magical, brutal and a really unpleasant way to die — that’s the Faceless Man. It’s practically his signature tune.’
‘It’s not subtle,’ said Lesley. ‘Now that he knows we’re after him, you’d think he’d be a bit more subtle.’
‘He built himself a man-tiger,’ I said. ‘How subtle do you think he is? Maybe he’s not as smart as you reckon.’
‘That,’ said Lesley, ‘or he doesn’t really rate us a threat.’
‘That’s a mistake,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’
Lesley glanced back at the screen where Dr Walid was extracting a long blackened bone from Patrick Mulkern’s thigh.
‘You can see from the charring,’ he said, ‘that the bone itself seems to have caught fire.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Lesley looking back at me. ‘He’s making a big mistake.’