Broken Homes timeline

[sixthlight]

Imported from tumblr.

This is one of the really difficult two timeline-wise, so bear with me! The dates are approximate, not definite, in all cases (the closest I can get to a specific date is the Spring Court, which could have taken place anywhere from March 22nd to April 8th.) We begin about eight weeks after the end of Whispers Under Ground.

Day 0 (February 20th): Robert Weil crashes his car after disposing of an unidentified and faceless woman’s body.

Day 1 (February 21st): Peter gets alerted to Weil’s arrest; he and Nightingale drive down to Brighton to investigate. They interview PC Slatt, who was first on the scene, and investigate Weil’s house and the body. It’s after Christmas but Peter walks in the “thin winter drizzle”, so my guess is we’re in February (March is technically spring; January seems too close to Whispers Under Ground, which only ended in late December.) There’s been time for Peter to have his cousin come in and install the main off-switch for the tech cave.

Day 2 (February 22nd): At least a day later; Walid comes over to the Folly for tea and pathology.

Day 3 (February 23rd): The day after Walid’s visit; Peter goes to Hendon for Officer Safety Training and hooks up with the goddess of the Rom while out clubbing.

Day 4 (February 24th): Peter’s second day of training at Hendon. Nothing terribly exciting happens. He does not go out clubbing afterwards.

Day 5 (February 25th): Lesley gets out of hospital, where she’d been having another operation. She arrives when Peter is practicing aqua, a new forma, which he has been practicing for at least four weeks. Nightingale begins to demonstrate staff-making to them and is interrupted by the report of Mr Nolfi, the rogue magician. Peter goes to interview him. At dinner Peter, Lesley, and Nightingale discuss using staffs as bait for the Faceless Man.

Day 6 (February 26th): Jaget Kumar brings the suicide of Richard Lewis, “last week”, to Peter’s attention; Peter drives out to Swindon and interviews Lewis’s husband, Philip Orante. He concludes they will never know if Lewis’s death was murder.

Day 20 (March 12th): “A fortnight” after visiting Swindon, Peter gets a ping that a magically-related book has turned up stolen.

Day 21 (March 13th): “The following morning” he goes to investigate with Harold Postmartin, finds the book is indeed a grimoire, talks to the shop owner who handed it in, and gets CCTV tape of the guy who tried to sell it. Afterwards he goes through CCTV tape and he and Lesley play Pocket Quidditch Indoor Tennis. During dinner they receive an invitation to the Spring Court of the Thames. After dinner Peter works on the CCTV footage some more.

Day 21 (March 14th): Peter identifies Patrick Mulkern as the book thief and goes to visit him. His visit to Swindon is now “last month” and when he spoke with Jaget he mentioned the trains getting back to normal by “the end of January” so I think we’re in March now. He finds Mulkern dead, calls it in, and when searching the house finds evidence Mulkern visited Erik Stromberg’s house. Peter visits Stromberg’s house, uses a fourth-order spell to look at Skygarden (which he learned “in January”), and then attends Mulkern’s post-mortem.

SOME TIME PASSES HERE so Peter can organise the Spring Court.

Day 30 (March 22nd): The Spring Court of the Thames. Peter has had time to organise security and various other things so it’s some time later. Nightingale tells us sunset is at “around six thirty”, so even allowing for some variance it’s at least March 22nd (but could be anything up to April 8th, when sunset is at 6.45.) Peter tells some tourists the Court is in celebration of the equinox, so I don’t think it can be later than March 30.

Day 31 (March 23rd): The day after the Court; Lesley, Peter, and Nightingale supervise cleanup.

Days 32-39 (March 24th-30th): Peter does his detective exam reading, paperwork, and practice; Nightingale attends briefings on the Mulkern case.

Day 40 (March 31st): A Sunday; Abigail comes for tea and cadet apprentice stuff.

Day 41 (April 1st): Monday. The Mulkern case isn’t going anywhere. Nightingale, Lesley, and Peter do magical blacksmithing.

Day 42 (April 2nd): Tuesday. Lesley suggests talking about staffs at the goblin fair as bait for the Faceless Man, and contacting Zach to find out where the goblin fair will be.

Day 44 (April 4th): The fair is “the day after”, and I’m not sure if this is “the next day” or “the day after next”. I think probably the latter. Lesley and Peter go to the fair, run into Varvara Tamonina.

Day 45(April 5th): Still unseasonably cold, but should be spring. Hunting down Varvara Tamonina leads to information about the death of Richard Dewsbury, a drug dealer in Skygarden. Peter talks to Sergeant D'Averc and is offered a flat in Skygarden to do undercover ops from, then talks to one of Richard Lewis’s colleagues at the planning office and finds out he was under pressure to get Skygarden delisted. Nightingale decides to have a full dress dinner. During, they decide to go undercover in Skygarden. This may actually be over two or three days; it’s hard to tell.

Day 47 (April 7th): Peter and Lesley move into Skygarden, early one morning. They’ve had time to contact D'Averc and enlist Caffrey to help them move, so it’s got to be at least two days since the dinner. The trees at Skygarden are in “full spring leaf”. They meet various residents and in the evening attend a residents’ meeting run by Jake.

Day 48 (April 8th): Peter meets Sky and talks to Jake some more. Probably cherry blossom trees are in bloom. He runs into Effra, Oberon, and Beverley and talks to Sky. She says vans came to Skygarden “when it was cold”. He and Lesley search the basement. When they get back to their flat Zach is there; he offers to take Lesley to the fae-only pub. Peter buys a TV off Kevin and visits Jake Phillips, talks to Postmartin about the book Stromberg owned, then practices magic in the garden and dances with Sky. Late that evening he finds the Stadtkrone. (Whew, busy day!)

Day 49(April 9th): Peter and Lesley meet Nightingale for breakfast at a Colombian cafe. He tells them the woman Robert Weil murdered had chimeric cells on her. Peter visits the Folly to look at the Stromberg book and catches Molly in the tech cave. When he gets back Lesley says she’s going out with Zach; she claims to have ruled out Emma Wall as the Faceless Man’s mole.

Day 50 (April 10th): Lesley isn’t back in the morning. She arrives later with paperwork. She and Peter talk about their love lives or lack thereof and decide to call Zach to pick the basement locks for them. They find the dog batteries. Nightingale comes to look at them. Lesley and Zach are in bed by the time Peter returns to the flat.

Day 51 (April 11th): Peter is woken in the middle of the night by Sky’s murder. Nightingale calls in Bromley to deal with it. One of Sky’s murderers is found drowned on dry land. Lesley and Peter drive out to Essex to find the others and run into Varvara Tamonina again. Nightingale rescues them and Varvara surrenders. Lesley and Peter interview her.

Day 52 (April 12th): Peter and Lesley spend the day in Essex along with Nightingale.

Day 53 (April 13th): They return to their Skygarden flat to find Zach and some of the Quiet People there. Lesley picks up a new car, since the old one was destroyed in Essex, then insists on kicking them all out. Peter talks to Jake about County Gard. He and Lesley go to investigate County Gard; their offices have been abandoned. They return to Skygarden. Peter finds the bombs, confronts the Faceless Man, the tower is destroyed, and Lesley tasers him in the back. Peter returns to the Folly at Nightingale’s request to ensure the mysterious door is untouched.

Day 54(April 14th): Nightingale returns to the Folly with Varvara at three in the morning and tells Molly Varvara will be their guest.

Days 55-66 (April 15th-28th): Robert Weil pleads guilty; the Mulkern case goes unsolved.

Day 67 (April 29th): Peter and Abigail visit Mr. Nolfi, who has been released from hospital; ‘two weeks ago’ he became able to perform lux much more easily.

An unspecified day: Peter visits Zach and talks to him about Lesley and Varvara.

Notes:

I added an extra day in when I realised Peter didn’t find out about the stolen grimoire and go to check it out the same day - doesn’t change the overall timeline much, though.

Holy shit the timing is difficult for this one. It’s compounded by the fact that Varvara has been staying at the Folly for “two months” by the beginning of Foxglove Summer. Now, seven days into FS Hannah gives a statement on the 22nd of June, meaning the girls disappeared on the 15th and Peter drove to Herefordshire on the 16th. Which fits with our mid-April date for Skygarden’s destruction, yay! BUT. It’s also August. Don’t ask. So…not that helpful for dating Broken Homes.

Furthermore, the Spring Court has to happen on March 22 or later, because of the time of sunset (6.15 on that date, just barely “around six thirty” as per Nightingale). We can’t open any later than Feb 20th to have time for the month to change and for it to still be winter in the beginning. If the Spring Court is March 22nd, then Skygarden is destroyed around April 15th - we’re not missing more than a day or two. Interestingly, while the book covers 2-3 months, the majority of the action takes place over one week at the beginning and two at the end; everything in between is scenes here and there (plus the Spring Court).

And finally, note that Lesley only spends six months as an apprentice at the Folly; mid-October to mid-April. She may not even have joined until November, as Peter refers to himself as having had “nine months head start”, and he didn’t master lux until early March. Either way, it’s not long at all.