Broken Homes (PC Peter Grant) (37 page)

No, but I knew that Dr Walid had found chimeric cells on a woman who’d had her face erased by a shotgun blast. Covering evidence of experiments by the Faceless Man aimed at restoring Lesley’s face. A bait he must have reckoned she couldn’t resist – how could anyone? He’d probably planned to keep her in the Folly and get her to spy on us. Nightingale had said that the Faceless Man wasn’t Moriarty, but from my perspective he was doing a really good impression of the man.

‘That’s the only motive that makes sense,’ I hissed back.

‘It might be both,’ whispered Zach. ‘You’ve got to at least consider that possibility.’

I shook my head.

‘If she gets in touch with you, will you let me know?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’

I thought that there was not a chance in hell he would.

‘Fair enough,’ I said and went home.

THE END

A
s far as I know there was never an expatriate German architect named Erik Stromberg and none of the buildings I have attributed to him actually exist. The infamous Skygarden Estate has been placed at the location of the equally infamous but undeniably real Heygate Estate near Elephant and Castle and his modernist shrine to dysfunctional functionalism sandwiched into a non-existent gap between two real buildings in Highgate. Bruno Taut was real as were his ideas about
Stadtkrone
(city crowns). Taut is also famous for actually using colours other than white, brown and beige in his designs and for the Glass Pavilion at the Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition. If you want to know where the inspiration for the Gherkin came from, look no further.

I have described Varvara Sidorovna as
Nochnye Koldunyi
to differentiate her from the heroic women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment (later the 46th “Taman” Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment) who, flying planes made of canvas and string, so terrified the Germans that they named them
Nachthexen
(Nightwitches) or in Russian
.

I
’d like to thank John Tygier RIBA, Mike Butcher of the RSPCA and Bob Hunter and Stephen Dutton of the MPS for all their help and putting up with some very stupid questions. My mates Mandy and Christine Blum for frequent German, Chris Kendall and Cynthia Camp for remedial Latin and Elena for emergency Russian. Andrew Cartmel provided big help with spooling an’ grammar an’ stuff! As always all mistakes are mine, mine I tell you – you can’t have them . . .

Rivers of London

Moon Over Soho

Whispers Under Ground

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Ben Aaronovitch 2013

Cover illustration copyright © Stephen Walter

Cover image Courtesy of the Artist/TAG Fine Arts

Cover image taken from The Island London Series, published by TAG Fine Arts

Design by Patrick Knowles

All rights reserved.

The right of Ben Aaronovitch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 13249 8

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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