Moon Over Soho

Chapter 5 The Night Gate

BLACK MAGIC, as defined by Nightingale, was the use of magic in such a way as to cause breach of the peace. I pointed out that a definition like that was so broad as to essentially include any use of magic outside of that authorized by the Folly. Nightingale indicated that he regarded that as a feature, not a bug.

“Black magic is the use of the art to cause injury to another person,” he’d then said. “Do you like that definition better?”

“We don’t have any evidence that Jason Dunlop ever did any injury to anyone through the use of black magic,” I said. We’d laid out the case files on a table in the breakfast room along with the books I’d brought back from Dunlop’s flat and the remains of Molly’s eccentric stab in the direction of eggs Benedict.

“I’d say we have a fairly clear indication that somebody did him injury,” said Nightingale. “And strong evidence that he was a practitioner. Given the unusual nature of his assailant I think it’s a safe bet that magic was involved — don’t you?”

“In that case isn’t it possible that the Jason Dunlop murder is related to my dead jazz musicians?”

“It’s possible,” said Nightingale. “But the MOs are very different. I think it’s better to keep the two investigations distinct for the moment.” He reached out to where one of the Folly’s monogrammed Sheffield steel forks was jammed upright into a poached egg and flicked it with his finger — it barely moved. “Are you sure it’s not stuck in the muffin?”

“No,” I said. “It’s being held in place by the egg alone.”

“Is that even possible?” asked Nightingale.

“With Molly’s cooking,” I said, “who knows.”

We both looked around to make sure Molly wasn’t listening. Up until that morning Molly’s repertoire had been strictly British public school: lots of beef, potatoes, treacle, and industrial quantities of suet. Nightingale had explained once, when we were out having Chinese, that he thought Molly was drawing her inspiration from the Folly itself. “A sort of institutional memory,” he’d said. Either my arrival was beginning to change the “institutional memory” or more likely she’d noticed me and Nightingale sloping off for illicit meals with other restaurants.

The eggs Benedict was her attempt to diversify the menu.

I picked up the fork, and the egg, the muffin, and what I assumed was the hollandaise sauce lifted off the plate in one rubbery mass. I offered it to Toby who sniffed it once, whined, and then hid under the table.

There was no kedgeree that morning, or sausages, or any poached eggs not smothered in vulcanized hollandaise sauce, not even toast and marmalade. Obviously the culinary experimentation had so exhausted Molly that the rest of breakfast was off the menu. The coffee was still good, though, and when you’re going over your case files that’s the important thing.

Murder investigations start with the victim because usually in the first instance that’s all you’ve got. The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with an ology tacked on the end. To make sure that you make a proper fist of this, the police have developed the world’s most useless mnemonic: 5 x WH & H. Otherwise known as Who? What? Where? When? Why? & How? Next time you watch a real murder investigation on the TV and you see a group of serious-looking detectives standing around talking, remember that what they’re actually doing is trying to work out what sodding order the mnemonic is supposed to go in. Once they’ve sorted that out the exhausted officers will retire to the nearest watering hole for a drink and a bit of a breather.

Fortunately for us on the first question — Who is the victim? — Stephanopoulis and the Murder Team had done most of the heavy lifting. Jason Dunlop had been a successful freelance journalist, hence his membership in the Groucho Club. His late father had been a senior civil servant and had sent the young Jason to a second-tier independent school in Harrogate. He’d read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an undistinguished student before graduating with a matching undistinguished second. Despite this poor academic performance he walked straight into a job at the BBC, where he was first a researcher and then a producer on Panorama. After a stint working for, of all things, Westminster Council in the 1980s, he moved back into journalism writing articles for the Times, the Mail, and the Independent. I leafed through some of the clippings; lots of articles of the you-send-me-on-holiday-I’ll-write-you-a-good-review variety. Family holidays with wife Mariana, a PR executive, and their two golden-haired kids. As Stephanopoulis had told me, the marriage had recently collapsed, lawyers had already been engaged, and custody of the children was an issue.

“It would be nice to talk to the wife,” said Nightingale. “See if she knows anything about his hobbies.”

I checked the transcripts of the interview with the wife but there was nothing about an unwholesome interest in the occult or supernatural. I made a note to add this to the wife’s nominal file on HOLMES and suggest she be reinterviewed on that subject. I flagged it for Stephanopoulis, but she wasn’t going to let us talk to the wife unless we came up with something serious.

“Very well,” said Nightingale. “We’ll leave all the mundane connections in the capable hands of the detective sergeant. I think our first move should be to track down the source of the book.”

“I figured Dunlop stole it from the Bodleian Library,” I said.

“That’s why you shouldn’t make assumptions,” said Nightingale. “This is an old book. It could have been stolen prior to Dunlop arriving at Oxford and then come into his possession by some other route. Perhaps the person who trained him.”

“Assuming he was a practitioner,” I said.

Nightingale tapped his butter knife on the plastic-wrapped copy of the Principia Artes Magicis. “Nobody carries this book by accident,” he said. “Besides, I recognize the other library mark. It’s from my old school.”

“Hogwarts?” I asked.

“I really wish you wouldn’t call it that,” he said. “We can drive up to Oxford this morning.”

“You’re coming with me?” Dr. Walid had been very clear about the whole taking-it-easy thing.

“You won’t get access to the library without me,” he said. “And it’s time that I started introducing you to people connected to the art.”

“I thought you were the last?”

“There’s more to life than just London,” said Nightingale.

“People keep saying that,” I said. “But I’ve never actually seen any proof.”

“We can take the dog,” he said. “He’ll enjoy the fresh air.”

“We won’t,” I said. “Not if we take the dog.”

FORTUNATELY, DESPITE the overcast, the day was warm, so we could head up the A40 with the windows down to let out the smell. Truth be told the Jag isn’t that comfortable as a motorway car, but there was no way I was heading into a rival jurisdiction in the Ford Asbo — standards have to be maintained, even with Toby in the backseat.

“If Jason Dunlop was trained,” I said as we climbed on to the Great West Road, “then who was his teacher?”

We’d discussed this before. Nightingale said it was impossible to pick up organized “Newtonian” magic on your own. Without someone to teach you the difference, vestigia are hard to distinguish from the random background noise of your own brain. The same was true of the forma; Nightingale always had to demonstrate the form to me before I could learn it. To teach them to yourself you’d have to be the kind of insane monomaniac who’d deform his own eyeball to test his theories on optics — in short, someone like Isaac Newton.

“I don’t know,” said Nightingale. “After the war there weren’t that many of us left.”

“That should narrow down the suspects,” I said.

“Most of the survivors would be very old by now,” said Nightingale.

“What about other countries?” I asked.

“None of the continental powers came out of the war intact,” said Nightingale. “The Nazis rounded up any practitioners they could find in the occupied countries and killed any who refused to be co-opted. Those who didn’t die on their side mostly died fighting against them; same is true of the French and the Italians. We always believed that there was a Scandinavian tradition but they kept it very quiet.”

“What about the Americans?”

“There were volunteers right from the start of the war,” said Nightingale. “The Virtuous Men they called themselves — out of the University of Pennsylvania.” Others had arrived in the years following Pearl Harbor, and Nightingale had always had the impression that there was some deep animosity at work between them and the Virtuous Men. He thought it was doubtful that any of them could have returned to Britain after the war. “They blamed us for Ettersberg,” he said. “And there was an agreement.”

“Well of course there was,” I said. There was always an agreement.

Nightingale claimed he’d have spotted them if they’d started practicing in London. “They were hardly what you’d call subtle,” he said.

I asked about other countries — China, Russia, India, the Middle East, Africa. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t at least some kind of magic. Nightingale admitted that he didn’t really know, but had the good grace to sound embarrassed.

“The world was different before the war,” he said. “We didn’t have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place — we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.”

When all the map was red, I thought. When every boy expected his own adventure and girls had not yet been invented.

Toby barked as we overtook a juggernaut full of God knows what going God knows where.

“After the war it was as if I was waking up from a dream,” said Nightingale. “There were space rockets and computers and jumbo jets and it seemed like a ‘natural’ thing that the magic would go away.”

“You mean you didn’t bother looking,” I said.

“It was just me,” he said. “And I was responsible for the whole of London and the southeast. It never occurred to me that the old days might come back. Besides, we have Dunlop’s books so we know his teacher wasn’t from some foreign tradition — this is a home-grown black magician.”

“You can’t call them black magicians,” I said.

“You realize that we’re using black in its metaphorical sense here,” said Nightingale.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Words change what they mean, don’t they? Some people would call me a black magician.”

“You’re not a magician,” he said. “You’re barely even an apprentice.”

“You’re changing the subject,” I said.

“What should we call them?” he asked patiently.

“Ethically challenged magical practitioners,” I said.

“Just to satisfy my curiosity, you understand,” said Nightingale, “given that the only people ever likely to hear us say the words black magician are you, me, and Dr. Walid, why is changing them so important?”

“Because I don’t think the old world’s coming back anytime soon,” I said. “In fact, I think the new world might be arriving.”

OXFORD IS a strange place. As you go through the outskirts it could be any city in Britain, the same Edwardian suburban build, fading into Victorian, with the occasional mistake from the 1950s, and then you cross the Magdalen Bridge and suddenly you’re in the biggest concentration of late-medieval architecture this side of the eighteenth century. Historically it’s impressive, but from a traffic management perspective it meant it took almost as long to thread our way through the narrow streets as it did to drive up from London.

John Radcliffe, Royal physician to William and Mary, was famous in his own time for reading very little and writing almost nothing. So it stands to reason that one of the most famous libraries in Oxford was his creation. The Radcliffe Science Library is housed in a circular domed building that looks like St. Paul’s with the extraneous religious bits cut off. Inside was a lot smoothly carved stonework, old books, balconies, and the strained hush of young people being unnaturally quiet. Our contact was waiting for us by a notice board just inside the entrance.

Outside the big cities my very appearance can sometimes be enough to render certain people speechless. So it was with Harold Postmartin DPhil, FRS, curator of special collections at the Bodleian Library, who had clearly been expecting Nightingale to introduce someone “different” as the new apprentice. I could see him trying to parse the phrase but he’s colored in a way that wouldn’t cause offense and failing. I put him out of his misery by shaking his hand; my rule of thumb is if they don’t physically flinch from touching you, then eventually they’ll make the adjustment.

Postmartin was a stooped white-haired gentleman who looked much older and frailer than my father but had a surprisingly firm handshake.

“So you’re the new apprentice,” he said and managed to avoid it sounding like an accusation. I knew then we were going to be fine.

Like all modern libraries the visible bit of the Radcliffe was the tip of an iceberg; the bulk of the actual collection was submerged under Radcliffe Square in chambers filled with books and the intrusive hum of modern climate control. Postmartin led us down a series of whitewashed brick passages to a no-nonsense metal security door marked NO ADMITTANCE. Postmartin used a swipe card on the security pad and punched in a combination. The door unlocked with a solid clunk and we trooped in to find a chamber with exactly the same shelves and climate control as the rest of the collection. There was a single institutional desk with a top bare except for what looked like the product of a loveless marriage between an early Mac and an IBM PC.

“It’s an Amstrad PCW,” said Postmartin. “Before your time, I suppose.” He sat down on a purple molded plastic chair and booted up the antique. “No hardware connections, no USB ports, three-inch floppy disks that they don’t make anymore — this is security through obsolescence. Much like the Folly itself. They cannot hack, if I’m using the term correctly, what they cannot access.”

The screen was an alarming green color, monochrome I realized, like something from an old film. The three-inch disk actually clunked when the machine started to access it.

“Do you have the copy of the Principia?” asked Postmartin.

I handed it over and he started to leaf slowly through the pages. “Every copy at the library was marked in a unique way,” he said and stopped at a particular page and showed it to me. “You see there, that word has been underlined.”

I looked; it was the word regentis. “Is that significant?” I asked.

“We shall see,” he said. “Perhaps you should write it down.”

I wrote the word in my police notebook and as I did I noticed Postmartin furtively scribbling something on a pad he thought was out of my sight. When I was done he flicked through the pages until he found another mark, and again I noted down the word, pedem, and again I saw him write something else on his pad. We repeated the process three more times and then Postmartin asked me to read the words back.

“Regentis, pedem, tolleret, loco, hostium,” I said.

Postmartin regarded me over the rim of his glasses. “And what do you think that signifies?” he asked.

“I think it signifies that the page numbers were more significant than the words,” I said.

Postmartin looked crestfallen. “How did you know?”

“I can read your mind,” I said.

Postmartin looked to Nightingale. “Can he?”

“No,” said Nightingale. “He spotted you writing the numbers down.”

“You’re a cruel man, Constable Grant,” said Postmartin. “No doubt you shall go far. The actual words, as you surmised, are irrelevant, but if the page numbers are arranged as a single alphanumeric string they form a unique identification number. Which we can enter into our venerable friend here and voilà …”

The PCW’s screen displayed a page of ugly green text, title, author, publisher, shelving notation, and a short list of the people who’d borrowed the book. The last person listed was Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who’d signed it out in July 1941 and never returned it.

“Oh,” said Postmartin in surprise. “Geoffrey Wheatcroft? Hardly what I’d call a nefarious fellow. Not your criminal type at all, is he, Thomas?”

“You know him?”

“I knew him,” said Postmartin. “He died last year — we were both at the funeral, although Thomas had to come as his own son to allay suspicions.”

“It was two years ago,” said Nightingale.

“Goodness, was it?” asked Postmartin. “Not a very good turnout if I remember.”

“Was he an active practitioner?” I asked.

“No,” said Nightingale. “He got his staff in 1939, wasn’t considered a wizard of the first rank, gave it up after the war and took up a position at Magdalen.”

“Teaching theology of all things,” said Postmartin.

“Magdalen College?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Nightingale suddenly thinking.

I got there first. “The same college as Jason Dunlop.”

NIGHTINGALE WANTED to head straight for Magdalen but Postmartin suggested a spot of lunch at the Eagle and Child. I thought a sit-down was a good idea because Nightingale was favoring his left side again and looking a bit peaky, to be honest. Nightingale compromised by suggesting that we should meet at the pub after visiting the college. Postmartin suggested that I go with him so that he could fill me in on a few things on the way.

“If you think that’s really necessary,” said Nightingale before I could object.

“I believe it is,” said Postmartin.

“I see,” said Nightingale. “Well, if you feel that’s best …”

Postmartin said he thought it was capital and so we accompanied him back to the car where I introduced him to Toby, who exited the vehicle in a cloud of smell. I suggested that Nightingale take the Jag — that way we’d drive back from the pub and he, at least, wouldn’t be walking.

“So this is the famous ghost-hunting dog,” he said.

“I didn’t know he was famous,” I said.

Postmartin led me down an alleyway so authentically late medieval that it still had a stone culver running down the middle to act as a sewer. “Not that it’s used for its original function,” said Postmartin.

It was busy with students and tourists all doing their best to ignore the cyclists who tried to mow down both with gay abandon.

I asked Postmartin what role he played in the intricate network of mostly unwritten agreements that constituted English magical law enforcement.

“When you and Nightingale write reports, I’m the one who reads them,” he said. “At least those portions that are relevant.”

“So are you Nightingale’s governor?” I asked.

Postmartin chuckled. “No,” he said. “I’m the archivist. I’m in charge of the great man’s papers and the papers of all lesser beings that have stood on his shoulders since. Even Nightingale and you.”

After all that history it was quite nice to turn onto Broad Street, which at least had a few Victorian terraces and an Oxfam.

“This way,” said Postmartin.

“Newton was a Cambridge man,” I said. “Why are his papers here?”

“The same reason they didn’t want his alchemistical works there,” said Postmartin. “Once he was safely dead old Isaac became their shining star of science and reason — I doubt they wanted that picture complicated by what was, let’s face it, a complicated man at the best of times.”

Oxford continued to be solidly Tudor with sudden bursts of Georgian exuberance until we reached the Eagle and Child pub on St. Giles.

“Good,” said Postmartin as we sat down in what he called a “nook.” “Thomas isn’t here yet. One finds it so much easier to have a certain kind of conversation with a sherry in one’s hand.”

When you’re a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don’t want to know.

He had his sherry, I had a lemonade.

“I take it you understand how unprecedented it was for Thomas to take on an apprentice?” asked Postmartin.

“People have made that pretty clear,” I said.

“I think perhaps he should have taken that step earlier,” said Postmartin. “Once it was clear that reports of the death of magic had been greatly exaggerated.”

“What gave the magic away?”

“Thomas aging backward was a bit of a clue,” said Postmartin. “I archive Dr. Walid’s reports and the bits that I understand are … strange.”

“Should I be worried?” I asked. I’d only recently gotten used to the idea that my governor was born in 1900 and had, according to him, been getting young again since the early 1970s. Nightingale thought it might be linked to the general increase in magical activity since the ’60s, but didn’t really want to look a gift horse in the mouth. I didn’t blame him.

“I wish I knew,” said Postmartin. He reached into his pocket and handed me a card. It had Postmartin’s number, email, and, I was surprised to see, Twitter address. “If you have any concerns you can contact me.”

“And if I contact you,” I said. “What will you do?”

“I’ll listen to your concerns,” he said. “And I’ll be very sympathetic.”

It was at least another hour before Nightingale joined us, and I then got to watch him sink a pint of bitter while he outlined what he’d discovered — which was, as far as Nightingale could determine, that Jason Dunlop had had no contact with Geoffrey Wheatcroft while at the university.

Nightingale had at least thought to pick up a printout of every student and lecturer who’d been at Magdalen at the same time as our man Jason. Plus a list of every student who had ever attended a class by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. It added up to a stack of hardcopy of just the right size and thickness for beating a suspect without leaving a bruise — if that’s where your idea of law enforcement took you. If the data was entered into HOLMES it could be automatically crosschecked against any other names that came up during the mundane phase of the inquiry. The Murder Team under Stephanopoulis had at least three civilian workers whose only job was to do that sort of tedious, time-consuming, but totally vital kind of work. What did the Folly have? You can guess what the Folly had, and he wasn’t happy at the prospect.

Postmartin asked what Nightingale planned to do next.

Nightingale grimaced and took another pull on his pint. “I thought I’d retrieve the remainder of library cards from Ambrose House. It’s time to see where the rest of the books came from.”

NIGHTINGALE TOLD me to get off the motorway at junction 5 and we drove through Stockenchurch, which appeared to be a hospital with a rather nice village attached, before turning left onto a B-road, which quickly became a narrow lane that ran between the tall green walls of very old-fashioned hedgerows.

“A large part of the estate is rented to local farmers,” said Nightingale. “The gate is coming up on your left.”

If he hadn’t warned me I’d have overshot. The hedgerow abruptly became a high stone wall broken by a wide wrought-iron gate. I stopped the car while Nightingale got out, followed by Toby, and unlocked the gate with a big iron key. He opened the gate with a standard horror-movie creaking noise and waved me through while Toby made a point of marking the gatepost. I stopped and waited for Nightingale to get back in but he pointed to where the drive turned suddenly behind a stand of trees.

“Meet me around the corner,” he said. “It’s not far.”

He was right: I turned the corner and there was the main building of the school right in front of me. The Jag crunched to a halt on the gravel drive and I got out to have a look.

It had been fifty years since it was occupied, you could tell that. The lawn and the formal beds had reverted to brambles, stinging nettles, toadflax, and cow parsley — I learned those names later in case you’re wondering — and the house was a weathered gray color, its large sash windows boarded shut. I’d been expecting something Gothic but this was more like a Regency terrace that had escaped to the countryside and had shot out in all directions before some cruel architect could round it up and pen it back into its original narrow frontage. It was abandoned but not derelict. I could see the guttering was clear, and there were patches of the roof that had clearly been retiled.

Toby came whirring past, yapped a couple of times to get my attention, and then headed into a patch of overgrown woods to the left of the school. Clearly he was a country dog at heart. Nightingale arrived soon after.

“I expected it to have been redeveloped,” I said.

“As what?” asked Nightingale.

“I don’t know. Country hotel and conference center, health spa, celebrity rehab clinic?”

“No,” said Nightingale after I’d explained what a celebrity rehab clinic was. “The Folly still owns the whole estate, and the rents from the farms pay for the maintenance.”

“Why wasn’t it sold off?”

“There was a lot of confusion after the war,” said Nightingale. “By the time it was all sorted out, I was the only person left with any kind of official standing. Selling off the school on my own recognizance seemed … presumptuous.”

“You thought the school might reopen?”

Nightingale winced. “I was trying not to think about the school.”

“The land must be worth a packet now,” I said.

“Do you think it would be improved by becoming a celebrity rehab center?”

I had to admit that this was unlikely. I pointed to the main doors, firmly boarded up and secured with a heavy-duty padlock. “Do you have keys for that?”

Nightingale grinned. “This is where you watch and learn.”

We walked to a spot on the left of the stairs up to the main doors where, hidden by the long grass, a narrow flight of steps led down to a thick oak door that was, I noticed, free of any boarding or chains. It also lacked any visible door handles.

“Behold,” said Nightingale. “The night gate. This was originally built so that the footmen could go straight from their quarters and hop onto the back of their master’s carriage before he could get down the stairs.”

“How very eighteenth-century,” I said.

“Quite,” said Nightingale. “But in my school days we used it for something else.” He placed his palm on the door about where you’d expect the lock to be and muttered something Latin under his breath. There was a click, followed by a scraping sound. Nightingale pushed and the door swung inward.

“There used to be a curfew and we, being the dreadful young men that we were, wanted to go out drinking,” he said. “It’s not easy to beat a curfew when the masters can command the very spirits of the earth and air against you.”

“Really?” I asked. “The spirits of the earth and air?”

“So they said,” said Nightingale. “And I for one believed them.”

“So no drinking,” I said.

Nightingale made a werelight and stepped through the door. Not to be outdone I made my own light and followed him inside. I heard Toby barking from outside but he seemed reluctant to follow us in. Our werelights illuminated a short corridor of undressed brick that reminded me of the service corridors under the Folly.

“Not until you were in the sixth form,” he said. “Once you were inducted into the common room, the upper six would teach you the spell for the night gate and then you could go drinking. Unless you were Horace Greenway, who was unpopular with the prefects.”

We reached a T-junction and went right.

“What happened to him?”

“Died during the battle of Crete,” said Nightingale.

“I meant how did he get to the pub?”

“One of us would open the door for him,” said Nightingale.

“And the teachers never twigged you were sneaking out?” I asked.

We reached a flight of wooden stairs leading up. They creaked alarmingly under our weight.

“The masters knew all about it,” said Nightingale. “After all, they’d once been sixth formers themselves.”

As we reached a short, wood-paneled landing I caught a flash of vestigia, lemon drops and sherbet, wet wool and the sound of running feet. I saw there were brass coat hangers lining both walls and benches sized for adolescent boys to sit and change their shoes. I brushed my fingertips on the wood and felt instead the rough paper of old comic books.

“Plenty of memories,” said Nightingale when he saw me pause.

Ghosts, I was thinking, memories — I wasn’t sure there was a difference.

Nightingale opened a battered wooden door and we stepped out into a huge hall, the suddenly inadequate werelights revealing two massive staircases and bare stone walls that still showed faded rectangles where framed paintings had once hung. With all the windows covered, we’d have been in pitch darkness if we weren’t making our own lights.

“The great hall,” said Nightingale. “The library’s up the sinister staircase.”

I caught myself before I asked him why it was sinister when I realized that we were walking up the left-hand staircase. Sinister is Latin for “left,” making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education. Just imagine if one of their school friends had had the misfortune to be called Dexter, I thought. How they must have laughed. As we ascended I caught a glimpse of rows of names carved into the far wall but, before I could ask what they were about, Nightingale was on the landing and heading into the cool depths of the school.

The walls were mostly painted brick with more pale rectangular patches to show where paintings had hung. I’d helped my mum to clean enough offices to know that whoever Nightingale was contracting to maintain the house was using a big industrial Hoover to do the carpets — you could see the stripes and judging from the dust it was at least two weeks since they’d come around.

Without books, stacks, or furniture, the library looked like just another large room, made cavernous by the shifting illumination of our werelights. I recognized the card file cabinets by their outline under the dust sheets. The mundane library at the Folly had two just like them. The school library had eight. Fortunately Nightingale said only one of them had the cards for magical books. Nightingale provided the light while I pulled off the sheet and opened up the drawers. There was no dust and surprisingly little vestigia.

“They were books about magic,” said Nightingale when I mentioned this. “Not magical books.”

They were standard index cards with the name of the book and library number manually typed on at the top and a handwritten list of names and showing who had borrowed the book and when. We’d popped into Ryman before leaving Oxford and picked up a jumbo-sized pack of rubber bands so I could preserve the order the cards were in. It took me ages to process all the drawers and I ended up with a black garbage bag that wasn’t really that much lighter to carry than the cabinet.

“We should have just taken the whole thing with us,” I said, but Nightingale pointed out that it had been screwed into the floorboards.

I slung the bag over my shoulder and, staggering a little, followed Nightingale back to the main hall. I took the opportunity to ask who the names on the wall were.

“Those,” said Nightingale, “are the honored dead.” He led me to the dexter staircase and floated his werelight up to show the first names. “Peninsula Campaign,” he said. There were a handful of names. “Waterloo Campaign” — just one name. Half a dozen for the Crimea, two for the Indian mutiny, maybe twenty more names scattered through a list of the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, more in total than the less than twenty dead in World War I.

“There was an agreement between the Germans and us not to involve magic,” said Nightingale. “We sat that one out.”

“I bet that made you popular,” I said.

Nightingale floated his werelight along to reveal the honored dead of World War II.

“You see, there’s Horace,” said Nightingale, illuminating the inscription: HORACE GREENWAY, KASTELLI, MAY 21, 1941. “And there’s Sandy and Champers and Pascal.” The werelight darted across the serried ranks of names, listed as fallen at Tobruk and Arnhem and other places that I dimly remembered from history. But most of them were listed as having died at a place called Ettersberg on January 19, 1945.

I put the garbage bag down and made a werelight bright enough to see the whole of the room — the memorial covered two whole walls from top to bottom. There must have been thousands of names.

“There’s Donny Shanks who made it through the siege of Leningrad without a scratch and then got himself torpedoed, and Smithy at Dieppe and Rupert Dance, Lazy Arse Dance we used to call him …” Nightingale trailed off. I turned to see tears glinting on his cheeks, so I looked away.

“Some days it seems so long ago and some days …”

“How many?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Two thousand three hundred and ninety-six,” said Nightingale. “Three out of five of every British wizard of military age. Many of those who survived were wounded or in such bad shape mentally that they never practiced again.” He gestured and his werelight snapped back to hover over his hand. “I think we’ve spent enough time in the past.”

I let my light die away and hefted the garbage bag over my shoulder and followed. As we were leaving I asked him who’d carved the names.

“I did it myself,” said Nightingale. “The hospital encouraged us to take up a hobby; I chose woodcarving. I didn’t tell them why.”

“Why not?”

We ducked back into the service corridors. “The doctors were already worried that I was too morbid.”

“Why did you carve the names?”

“Oh,” he said. “Somebody had to do it and as far as I could tell I was the only one still active. I also had this ridiculous notion that it might help.”

“Did it?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

We stepped out through the night gate and blinked in the evening light. I’d forgotten that it was still daytime outside the school. Nightingale pulled the gate closed behind us and followed me up the steps. Toby had gone to sleep on the sun-warmed hood of the Jag. You could see where he’d tracked mud across the bonnet. Nightingale frowned.

“Why do we have this dog?” he asked.

“He keeps Molly amused,” I said and threw the card files into the back. Toby woke up at the sound of the door and dutifully made his own way to the backseat where he promptly fell asleep. Me and Nightingale put our seat belts on and I started the car. I had a last look at the blind windows of the old school as I turned the Jag around before I put it behind me and we headed for London.

It was dark by the time we merged with the rush-hour traffic on the M25. Big gray rain clouds were sweeping in from the east, and soon raindrops were splattering on the windshield. The Jag’s old-fashioned handling stayed rock-solid but the wipers were a disgrace.

Nightingale spent the trip back with his face turned away — staring out the window. I didn’t try to make conversation.

We were just hopping back onto the Westway when my phone rang, I put it on speaker — it was Ash.

“I can see her,” he shouted. Behind him I could hear crowd noises and a thumping beat. I put him on the car speakers.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Pulsar Club.”

“Are you sure it’s her?” I asked.

“Tall, skinny, pale, long black hair. Smells like death,” said Ash. “Who else could it be?”

I told him not to get any closer and that I was on my way. Nightingale reached out in the rain and put the spinner on the roof and I started picking up speed.

Every male in the world thinks he’s an excellent driver. Every copper who’s ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves. Driving in traffic is difficult and stressful and really sodding dangerous. Because of this the Met has a world-famous driving school at Hendon where an integrated series of advanced driving courses is designed to train officers to the point where they can do a ton down a city street and keep the body count in single figures.

As I came off the Westway and into the heavy traffic on the Harrow Road I really wished I’d taken one of them. Nightingale, as my senior officer, shouldn’t have been letting me drive. But then he probably didn’t even know there was such a thing as an advanced driving course. Or even, given that they only became compulsory in 1934, a driving test of any kind.

I turned into Edgware Road and found myself doing less then twenty even with every driver with a guilty conscience scrambling to get out of my way. I took the opportunity to call Ash again. I told him we were less than ten minutes away.

“She’s heading for the door,” said Ash.

“Is she with anyone?”

“She’s taking some feller out with her,” said Ash.

Shit, shit, shit — so much for keeping it in the family. Nightingale was way ahead of me. He pulled an airwave set out of the glove box and punched in a number — impressive, given that I’d taught him how to do that only a week ago.

“Follow her,” I said. “But stay on the phone and don’t take any risks.”

I risked waiting until Marble Arch to turn east — Oxford Street is restricted to buses and taxis only and I was counting on it being quicker to go straight down it than to plow through the weird one-way systems around Bond Street.

“Stephanopoulis is on her way,” said Nightingale.

I asked Ash where he was.

“I’m just coming out of the club,” he said. “She’s fifteen feet in front of me.”

“Heading which way?”

“Toward Piccadilly,” he said.

I worked out the location in my head. “Sherwood Street,” I told Nightingale, who relayed it to Stephanopoulis. “Going south.”

“What do I do if she starts in on her boyfriend?” asked Ash.

I swerved around a bus stalled in the road with its emergency lights flashing. My spinner blued the faces of the downstairs passengers as they watched me slide past.

“Stay away from her,” I said. “Wait for us.”

“Too late,” said Ash. “I think she saw me.”

The instructors at the advanced driving school would not have been happy with the way I put the Jag through the lights at Oxford Circus and skidded into a right turn that had me going down Regent Street with blue smoke coming from my wheels.

“Steady on,” said Nightingale.

“The good news,” said Ash, “is that she’s let the poor guy go.”

“They’re almost on Denham Street,” said Nightingale, meaning local plod. “Stephanopoulis is telling them to secure a perimeter.”

I almost screamed when an obviously deaf and blind driver in a Ford Mondeo decided to pull out in front of me. What I shouted at him was fortunately lost in the sound of my siren.

“The bad news,” said Ash, “is she’s coming toward me.”

I told him to run.

“Too late,” he said.

I heard a hiss, a yell, and the distinctive noise a mobile phone makes when it’s hurled against a hard surface and breaks.

I did half a bootleg turn into Glasshouse Street, which I swear got me applause from the pedestrians and a startled yelp from Toby as he slammed into the passenger door. There was a reason the Jaguar Mk II was the favored getaway car for blaggers and the Flying Squad, and Nightingale’s Jag had definitely been modified for pursuit. Which is why once her backside had stopped swinging I could put my foot down and be doing sixty before I was level with the Leicester Arms on the corner.

Then what I thought was the reflection of our spinner turned out to be the emergency lights on an ambulance and we all learned just how good the upgraded four-wheel disk brakes really were — the answer being good enough. If there’d been one installed I’d have been eating the air bag. Instead I had a savage bruise across my chest from the seat belt, but I didn’t even notice that until later because I was out the door and running across the junction and up Sherwood Street fast enough to keep pace with the ambulance. It stopped, I didn’t.

One side of Sherwood Street has an arcade in the rather sad 1950s ceramic-tiled fashion that, having been designed to resemble a public convenience, was perhaps justifiably used by half-cut members of the public who got caught short late at night. As far as the Murder Team could reconstruct it later, it looked like the penis eater had been planning to take her latest victim into the shadows for an impromptu snog and vasectomy.

I found Ash prostrate in the center of a circle of concerned citizens, two of whom were trying to comfort him while he writhed around on the pavement. There was blood on him, on the concerned citizens, and on half a yard of iron spike that was stuck through his shoulder.

I got myself some room by shouting “Police!” at people and tried to get him into recovery position.

“Ash,” I said. “I told you to stay away from her.”

Ash stopped thrashing long enough to get a good look at me.

“Peter,” he said. “The bitch stuck me with a railing.”