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 moglich sein, das magische Potential in industriellem Ma?stabe auskristallisieren zu lassen und zur spateren 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 Aktivitat. 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 aktivitat? ‘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 flie?band! ‘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 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 flie?band, 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 Kevin’s cache of dodgy goods and wondered if this might be similar. Not everything had to do with the mystical forces of evil — totally ordinary crime could be going on at the same time.
Toby sneezed. The vans finished unloading and drove away and we went up to the flat to dry off. Toby got dinner and I got back to my Pliny.
I woke up to the sound of rain driving horizontally against the window panes and no sign of Lesley. Since I was awake I got up and spent the morning accidentally running into the off-duty Goth and the man in a tweed jacket that I’d pegged as possible inside men for the Faceless Man. Goth boy was simple enough — I just stepped into the lift and struck up a conversation. It’s amazing how easy it is to get white boys to talk to you when you share a lift. By the time we hit the ground floor I knew his name, flat number and more of his life story than I really wanted; Lionel Roberts, a flat two floors down from us and a wannabe poet currently working as security in Hannibal House — the office block built on top of Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Tweed jacket man had a ten-year-old daughter who Toby quickly had eating out of his hand, or more precisely vice versa. Her name was Anthonia Beswick and his name was Anthony and he was currently unemployed, but optimistic that the recession wouldn’t last for ever. He said it was wife’s idea to name their daughter after him but I didn’t believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.