The Hanging Tree

3 Driving While Cheerful

Contrary to what you see on the TV, you don’t just waltz up to a grieving relative and start asking them difficult questions – well not unless you think they did it, and even then you’re expected to have some evidence to back you up. First you have to clear the interview with the SIO or the DI in tactical charge – which in this case was Stephanopoulos. And she wanted to know why.

‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s findings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.

Stephanopoulos sent us over to Seawoll’s office.

‘Yeah, okay,’ he said. ‘But this had better be done with some fucking tact and diplomacy.’

Martin Chorley didn’t actually live in London, but out beyond the M25 in a two million quid eighteenth century rectory near High Wycombe. Fortunately me and Guleed were saved a schlepp up the M40 because Mr Chorley, having formally identified his daughter that morning, had moved on to his place of work in the City. He’d outright refused a Family Liaison Officer – plenty do – but had already been statemented as soon as he’d made the identification. Because, for police officers, ‘close relative’ frequently rhymes with ‘prime suspect’, Mr Chorley had already accumulated quite a large section in HOLMES. From that me and Guleed got all the salient details — birth, school, degree, work history, the big family home and the complimentary chairman’s flat above the office in Little Britain.

‘What, no villa in Tuscany?’ I asked.

‘He prefers America,’ said Guleed, who was going through twenty years’ worth of travel documentation. ‘Washington, New York, Miami, couple of trips to Atlanta – most of these are going to be work related.’

As were the trips to Berlin, Paris and Geneva – in his capacity as chairman of something called the Public Policy Foundation. There’d been a helpful note from whoever had run the initial check – Influential think tank, watch it. I checked the address and me and Guleed headed off to put our sensitivity training to the test.

The wind had picked up by the afternoon and on Ludgate Hill the tea-break smokers were huddled under the inadequate awnings – designed that way on modern buildings to discourage rough sleepers – trying to get their nicotine fix before hypothermia set in.

City traffic is always grumpy in the rain, and so was Guleed when my shortcut to avoid St Paul’s put us behind an Ocado delivery van for twenty minutes. Fortunately it peeled off before we hit the Rotunda and we did a quick spin around the Museum of London and into the bit of Little Britain that runs beside Postman’s Park.

The trees in the park still had most of their leaves, and the street was narrow and shaded and smelt of wet grass rather than the busy cement smell you get in the rest of the City. The office was based in a Mid-Victorian pile whose Florentine flourishes were not fooling anyone but itself. There was a brass plaque by the door engraved with ‘Public Policy Foundation’ and beyond the doors a cool blue marble foyer and a young and strangely elongated white woman behind a reception desk. Because it’s not good policy to, we hadn’t called ahead to make an appointment. Which gave Guleed a chance to tease the receptionist by not showing her warrant card when she identified herself.

The receptionist’s expression did a classic three point turn from alarm to suspicion and finally settling on professional friendliness as she picked up the phone and informed someone at the other end that the ‘police’ had arrived to talk to Mr Chorley. We agreed later that while she’d lost points for the hesitant way she’d identified us as police, it was good effort overall.

‘Definitely in the top half of the leaderboard,’ said Guleed while we were waiting for someone to show us upstairs.

Martin Chorley’s office was carefully designed to be unpretentious with varnished floorboards, mismatched throw rugs, a John Lewis leather sofa set and a glass-topped desk which I happened to know came from Ikea because I’d considered getting it for the tech cave.

Chorley himself was my height, generally slender but with a spare tyre that was going to see him spending much more time in the gym in future. His hair was dark brown and conservatively cut, his eyes a pale grey and closely set. Judging from the rumples he was wearing yesterday’s suit trousers – no time to change – but a fresh pale blue shirt with packing creases. Mint in its wrapper, I guessed, and kept in the office for emergencies.

He offered us coffee and we declined. Generally you only accept a beverage if the subject is going to make it themselves – creating a sense of normality – or if you’re going to make it, giving you a good chance to snoop around their kitchen. He himself scooped up a bottle of Highland Spring from his desk and waved us onto the black leather sofa while he lowered himself carefully into the matching armchair. His face, I saw, was grey and there were smudges under his eyes so I started gently enough – explaining that this was a routine follow-up interview, blah blah blah, and got about half a sentence in before he cut me off.

‘I heard you made an arrest,’ he said. He spoke with that deliberately toned down posh accent that, before they allowed regional dialects on the radio, used to be known as BBC standard.

The law of the police interview is inviolable – information is only supposed to flow in one direction. But you’ve got to handle grieving parents carefully, otherwise they might write to the Telegraph. Or, in the case of someone like Martin Chorley, call the editor at home.

‘An arrest has been made,’ I said. ‘How it relates to your daughter’s death remains unclear.’

He nodded glumly at this and took a sip of water.

I waited to see if he’d ask who, exactly, had been arrested. When he didn’t, I went back to asking the routine questions that disguised the real reason I was there.

Nightingale’s definition of a rogue practitioner was essentially ‘one that is practising magic without the sanction of the Folly’. Since the only currently sanctioned practitioners were me and him, I’d pointed out that this was not a very useful definition. Besides, there were still a number of wizards of the old school who, despite having ‘rusticated’ themselves, could still practise if they had to. Not to mention all the Rivers, Russian night-witches, fae, demi-fae – and who knew what other kinds of fae – running around doing stuff that looked suspiciously like magic to me.

So we refined our definition down to ‘someone who practised magic in breach of the Queen’s Peace’, and started developing a series of sophisticated tools for determining whether someone’s nearest and dearest might have been dabbling in the metaphysical equivalent of sticking their head in a microwave for fun and profit.

‘Had you noticed any recent changes in Christina’s behaviour?’ I asked. ‘Any sudden new interests?’

‘She’s seventeen,’ he said. ‘So yes, lots of sudden interests.’

He turned his head to look out the window and took a deep breath.

‘Any of them particularly noteworthy?’ I asked.

‘Any of what?’ He turned back to face us.

‘Any of the new interests,’ said Guleed with a note of respectful curiosity – it was her party trick. According to legend she’d once got a confession out of a rapist just by looking sympathetic and nodding occasionally.

‘Me personally,’ Stephanopoulos had said, ‘I’d have nailed his testicles to the chair.’

Ah, the good old days, I’d thought.

Martin Chorley succumbed.

‘History,’ he said. ‘She started reading a great deal of history. I did find it a little bit odd because she wasn’t taking history at A-level.’ He was hazy about exactly when and where her interest had been focused, and I could see that pressing him was just going to make him angry. So I let it go. Tact and fucking diplomacy and all that.

A specialist POLSA team had already turned over Christina Chorley’s room at St Paul’s – I made a note to go over their report and see what she’d had on her shelves.

Martin Chorley said that most of his daughter’s interests had seemed to centre around her phone.

‘I never thought to ask,’ he said. ‘I was just glad—’ He stopped and his lips turned up in a humourless smile. ‘I just never thought to ask.’

‘Was it unusual for Christina to stay in town over the weekend?’ asked Guleed.

‘I believe I’ve already been asked these questions,’ said Mr Chorley.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Guleed. ‘Narrowing down the timeline is crucial and we find that people sometimes remember more once they get further away from an incident – every little detail helps.’

We also find that people tend to forget exactly what lies they told the last set of coppers they talked to. But either Mr Chorley had an exceptional memory or his earlier statement – that he thought his daughter had been staying with her friend Albertina Pryce – was true.

‘She generally stayed with Albertina when she spent the weekend in town,’ he said.

‘Did she ever stay with anyone else?’ asked Guleed.

‘Not that I know of,’ said Mr Chorley. ‘There were sleepovers, you know. Girls’ stuff. I did consider tracking her phone, but one doesn’t want to hover – do you? Since her mother died I found it quite difficult to find the right balance to be father and mother at the same time.’

Guleed nodded understandingly.

Christina’s mother had died three years previously in an RTC on the A355 just short of the junction with the M40, having lost control of her Mercedes C-Class and drifted into oncoming traffic. According to the accident report, she’d been four times over the legal alcohol limit at the time but since she’d hadn’t killed anyone else the coroner went easy on her and ruled it as death by misadventure.

‘Do you think I should have?’ said Mr Chorley. ‘Been more of a helicopter parent?’

Guleed gave a ‘what can you do’ sigh and looked sympathetic.

‘Did she ever have any trouble with her phones?’ I asked.

This got a frown.

‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked.

‘Did she seem to lose or claim to have broken her phone?’ I asked. ‘More often than you’d expect?’

‘You think she was selling them?’ asked Martin Chorley. ‘For drug money?’

Actually, I thought she might be destroying them through the power of her magic, but I felt that saying this might violate Seawoll’s rules about tact and diplomacy. Also, I was looking to see how Mr Chorley reacted – for some indication he might know why damaged phones were significant. But what he mostly was, was bewildered and sad.

There’s being thorough and there’s being cruel, so I zipped through the rest of my questions. Guleed followed my cue and didn’t ask any additional questions of her own.

‘Did you get anything useful?’ she asked as we stepped back into the rain.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Didn’t think so.’

Useful or not, it still had to be written up because a) empirically speaking a negative result is still a result, b) someone cleverer than you might make a connection you missed and c) in the event of a case review it’s sensible to at least look like you’re being competent. So back we went to our desk share at Belgravia and did just that.

‘Do you think it’s odd he only had the one?’ asked Guleed.

‘One what?’

‘One kid,’ she said. ‘These rich people usually have three or four.’

‘I don’t think it’s compulsory,’ I said and then thought of something. ‘Have we talked to the nannies yet?’

According to the whiteboard the MIT had identified five of the kids at the party, leaving two unidentified – assuming we had the count right. One of them – ‘Rod Crawfish or something’ – DC Carey had tentatively pegged as Roderick Crawford, also at Westminster and in the same year as James Murray. He was heading off to Primrose Hill to TIE him with a brand new DC called Fergus Ryan.

‘Fergus Ryan,’ I said. ‘Really? Where’s he from?’

‘Redbridge, I think.’

Three of those kids, unlike Christina, had two or more younger siblings and, consequently, the families had live-in nannies.

‘Told you,’ said Guleed. ‘Big families.’

All the nannies were already actioned to be statemented, but I was thinking that Christina Chorley probably had a nanny when she was young and that ‘the slave always knows more about the master than the master knows of the slave’ – even if I couldn’t remember who’d said that. Tracking them down without alerting Mr Chorley was going to be a bit of a bastard, so I suggested it as a further action in my report in the hope that Stephanopoulos would palm it off on someone else. Once I’d dropped the report in the Inside Inquiry Office I went looking for Nightingale. I found him downstairs in Stephanopoulos’ office reading a hardcopy that some kind soul must have printed out for him.

‘Any luck?’ he asked, looking up.

‘Not really,’ I said and briefed him on the interview, my ideas about former nannies and having a look around Christina’s bedroom at the house in High Wycombe.

‘I’ll take care of that,’ said Nightingale. ‘I believe you have a family engagement to go to.’

‘What about Tyburn?’ I asked.

‘They released Olivia on police bail over an hour ago,’ said Nightingale. ‘She’s to return here first thing tomorrow morning. I thought Cecelia took it rather well – considering. I believe we may be safe from cataclysms along the Tyburn for tonight at least.’

‘Did Olivia change her story?’

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘She still claims to have supplied the fatal drugs. Although frankly I don’t believe a word of it and more to the point neither did Miriam. Not least because she’s remarkably vague about where she obtained the drugs in the first place.’ He nodded at Stephanopoulos’ desk. ‘Miriam said she’d be back later if you need her for anything.’

It didn’t help that there wasn’t any physical evidence, beyond her presence at the party, to corroborate her confession. That had to be nagging at Stephanopoulos, but I doubted that if Olivia had been some seventeen year old off an estate somewhere we would have been spending this much time on the case. We had a confession and I suspect we would have charged her and let the Crown Prosecution Service sort it out.

‘I did have a moment to see if the parents were on any of our lists,’ said Nightingale.

Meaning, to check if any of them been members of the Little Crocodiles dining club while at Oxford University. Unlike other similar clubs this one had eschewed smashing up restaurants in favour of learning magic, courtesy of a former colleague of Nightingale’s called Geoffrey Wheatcroft. In this he broke the law and, more importantly, the social conventions of the Folly – he was probably lucky he died in bed before Nightingale found out.

We had several lists of names to work with, one of confirmed members in the early 1980s – provided by Lady Ty who’d been getting her double first at the time. And one of suspected members from the late fifties onwards – collated from various reliable sources. Then people who might have been members and/or were close associates of people we knew were members. As you can imagine, the last list was huge and pretty much covered everyone who’d gone to Oxford since the end of the Second World War. Unsurprisingly Martin Chorley and Albert Pryce were on that list. Pryce had gone to Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s old college – Magdalene – while Chorley had been at Oriel. One critical overlap was Chorley’s time with that of Robert Weil, who even now was doing life for the murder of an unidentified woman he’d been caught dumping in the woods near Crawley. We were as sure that he had a connection to the Little Crocodiles as we were that he hadn’t killed the woman, but we couldn’t prove either.

And the Little Crocodiles had spawned Albert Woodville-Gentle, otherwise known as the First Faceless Man, who’d done unspeakable things to people in Soho during the 1960s and then in turn helped another man who kept his face hidden. I’d met the new boy on a couple of occasions and he’d nearly killed me on both. And Nightingale, who I knew for a fact had gone toe to toe with a pair of Tiger tanks, was worried about which of them would come out on top in a straight fight.

Not that we had any intention of letting it come to a straight fight – us being coppers and all.

The connections so far were pretty bloody tenuous. Victim’s posh dad and victim’s best friend’s posh dad both went to a posh university – hold the press. Someone was going to have spend some time drilling into the data to see if there was a deeper connection – guess who that was going to be. But not tonight.

‘Are you sure I’ve got time for that?’ I said to Nightingale.

‘I assured your mother that if you failed to arrive it wouldn’t be my fault,’ he said.

‘You talked to my mum?’

Nightingale grinned – he has a surprisingly mischievous grin.

‘As your . . .’ he paused, he always does at this point. ‘As the one responsible for your apprenticeship, it is expected that I keep your parents informed as to your progress.’

He saw the look on my face.

‘Only in the most general terms,’ he said quickly. ‘For the purpose of reassurance.’

‘Did you talk to my dad as well?’

‘I have spoken to your father, yes,’ said Nightingale.

‘And?’

‘I never knew that Tubby Hayes was also a virtuoso on the vibraphone. In fact, he once played with Charles Mingus in that capacity.’

I was relieved – at least my father was reliably uninterested in my career.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What exactly did you talk about with my mum?’

‘She evinced a great interest in the Thames family,’ he said.

I resisted the urge to curl up and hide under Stephanopoulos’ desk.

‘I suppose some emergency overtime is out of the question?’ I asked.

‘And cross your mother?’ said Nightingale. ‘Not likely.’

If you live beside the river, Beverley says, you’re going to get flooded – that’s the cost of doing business, the price you pay for the blessing of the waters. A lot of the London Borough of Barnes sits inside a northern loop of the Thames that stretches from Putney Bridge to where the railway crosses the river. One day, says Beverley, she and her Mama are going to pinch it off at the base and make one big island. I asked her when she thought this was going to happen and she just shrugged.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said.

There’s nothing like having your girlfriend talk in geological time to make you feel insignificant.

The Bull’s Head sits safely above, and a road width back from, an artificial embankment on the south side of the river. Just around the corner from where Holst composed The Planets – I know this because there’s a blue plaque on the house and Bev once made me wait half an hour while she checked on some nearby trolls.

The pub itself is an early Victorian mansion with French windows and wrought iron balconies to give it that sexy New Orleans look. Despite being hemmed in by later buildings it retained its courtyard and coach house round the back, which is where, these days, they keep the jazz. Coleman Hawkins played at the Bull, as did the multi-talented Tubby Hayes, beloved of my dad and Nightingale, until the early 1970’s when he popped his clogs. Other visiting greats included Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank and Ben Webster. And during the jazz revival of the noughties, rising young stars like Jamie Cullum and Simon Spillett made The Bull’s Head the groovy place to be – man. My dad had played there in the past and now it was marking the start of his fourth attempt at jazz stardom – however far that went. It was also the debut of his brand new teeth, paid for by yours truly with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and what was left of my savings.

I’d been there when he’d tested his new embouchure, watched him as he lifted his trumpet to his lips, paused to nervously wet them with his tongue and then blow a single pure note. I’d watched him stop and stare at his trumpet in disbelief and then at my mum who’d pinched the bridge of her nose to hide her tears. Then he smiled at me and for that moment, and just that moment, I forgave him everything – everything – because now I knew what joy looked like and I was part of it.

It wore off fairly quickly in the days after that, but the music stayed and my mum was happy.

I was less happy with the amount of interest my dad’s gigs were getting in the demi-monde, but as Nightingale had pointed out it was my own damned fault.

‘You did rather insist on that open day at Caster-brook,’ he’d said. ‘Your father’s performance there must have caught their imagination.’

That’s the trouble with community policing – strangely, people start expecting you to be part of the community. Fortunately my dad’s brand of soul jazz wasn’t Goth enough for the wilder shores of the demimonde, so I expected the mundane to weird bollocks ratio to be quite high.

It was dark by the time I parked on the embankment and there was a cold wind racing up the Thames bringing threats of rain. The tide was turning and I could feel the Thames pushing upstream and slapping at the exposed shingle. I was early enough that Beverley was still in the main bar.

I spotted her by the window, waving at me. She was wearing a purple knit top with a neck wide enough to slip off her shoulder and had her dreads tied back with a matching purple woollen scarf. An oxblood leather jacket was draped over the back of her chair. She’d managed to score a table despite the crowd and even had a free seat waiting for me. As I slid in beside her a complete stranger put a half of lager down in front of me and walked away.

‘Do you even pay for these?’ I asked.

She leaned close to murmur in my ear. ‘This close to high tide I’m not sure I could make them stop,’ she said and then she kissed me on the lips before introducing me to the others at the table. She’d brought a couple of her white friends from Queen Mary’s where she’d started reading — you don’t study at uni, you read — Environmental Science. She’d sold this to her mum on the basis that while it wasn’t the law or medicine it was a little bit like engineering, if you squinted. And even Lady Ty couldn’t argue with Queen Mary for university snob value. Bev’s friends included Douglas, who would have been a hipster cliché had he been able to manage the beard, and Melanie, who was one of those round perky people who give the impression that it’s only a great effort of will stopping them from bouncing around the room. I’d once asked Beverley whether she told them she was a goddess of a not-so-small river in South London and she said – sure, course she did.

‘And?’ I’d asked.

‘They think I’m some kind of New Age weirdo,’ she’d said. ‘The dreads help.’

Beverley said that she found that people stuck the first vaguely appropriate label on, whether it fit the facts or not.

‘It’s too much effort to tell them otherwise, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘Besides, then you’ve got to explain stuff . . . And aren’t we supposed to be keeping a low profile?’ Then she’d done a Nightingale saying – ‘I’m keeping to the agreements and trying not to scare the horses.’

Beverley had a ton of friends at uni, but these were the only two that were interested in jazz. Not enough to know who my father was without looking him up on Wikipedia, but interested all the same.

‘And it’s in a good cause,’ said Melanie, which was news to me so I looked at Beverley.

‘Help for the Ebola crisis,’ she said.

Help for mum’s extended family, I thought. But since this seemed to constitute at least a quarter of the population of Sierra Leone, the effect was going to be much the same. It was odd, that, because for a Fula my mum didn’t half have a lot of Temne and Susu relatives.

Melanie said that she’d always wanted to work somewhere like Sierra Leone once she was qualified – somewhere she could really make a difference – what did I think?

‘The beaches around Freetown are brilliant,’ I said, which got me a blank look.

But you can only tease white people for so long before the universe punishes you for it – in this case when my mum came into the main bar, spotted me and waved me over.

She was dressed like something out of an old photograph – black long-sleeved roll neck jumper and grey slacks. Around her neck hung a couple of thick gold ropes that I was amazed had made it through the family lean patch, and a high quality wig cut in an eighties bob. All she was missing was a beret.

When I joined her she pecked me on either cheek – continental style – which was just disturbing.

‘Peter kam ya, are wan talk to you,’ she said.

I sighed and let myself be drawn to quiet corner. When I was younger she only used to lapse into Krio with me when she was angry or she wanted me to do something like fetch her a cup of tea or go to the shops. Nowadays it’s a sign that she’s about to discuss something I don’t want to talk about.

‘You en Beverley don begin for lay down wit each other en?’

‘Mum,’ I said, with an involuntary whine.

‘Are hope say u dae use protection ooh.’

‘Of course we’re using protection,’ I said. ‘And it’s none of your business.’

‘U get for take tem en be careful.’

‘We’re always careful.’

My mum looked suddenly disappointed.

‘So you want tell me say e go tay before are see me gran pekin dem?’ she said.

‘I’m not sure that we’re quite at that stage yet.’

‘But Aunty Kadie en borbor get two pekin dem already,’ said my mum.

‘I know – you made me go to the christening, remember?’

‘An you big for ram.’

‘He has more time on his hands,’ I said.

‘E bette for born pekin way you young,’ said my mum. ‘It’s scientifically proven.’

‘Yes mum.’

‘I’d look after them,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘If you born now are go mend dem,’ she said. ‘That way you could both be about your business.’

I suddenly wondered if my mum could swim and whether I dared tell Beverley about the offer. Not now, I thought, not a good idea right now.

Luckily it was time to go out through the side door and follow the black arrow painted on the white brick walls marked JAZZ ROOM. According to my dad it had just been refurbished and the acoustics were much better, though he missed the proper sized piano.

‘Joe Harriott would have loved it,’ he’d said.

Despite its role in jazz history it was a small space, with its own bar and triangular stage in the corner opposite the entrance. Bev made sure she was front and centre with her friends tagging nervously behind. She cast a look over her shoulder at me, her eyes dark and sly and her beautiful wide mouth twitching up at the corners, but I wanted to stay by the door – where I could keep an eye on who was coming in.

The wizards of the Folly, or the Society of the Wise, back when there was no chance of taking the piss out of them on Twitter, have never really got the hang of the demi-monde – that strange collection of people and things-that-are-also-people tied into the magical world. Following the predictable mania for classification that gripped them during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they spent a lot of time talking about proportions of human and good- and bad-faerie blood and then assigning names to the result. Most of it was as useful as the theory of luminiferous aether, but it did explain why calling someone a goblin in some London pubs could get you a smacking. Still, after two years and change at the Folly I knew them when I saw them – most of the time.

I knew this one as soon as he entered. A short young white man with a pointy chin and rust coloured hair slicked back with gel. He wore a tweed countryman’s jacket over a black T-shirt, a pair of zombie hunter cargo pants and hiking boots. Not DMs, I noticed, something Swiss and military. I knew instantly that he was at least part fae and a wrong-un. Partly because of my long experience as a copper, partly because of his expression of beatific innocence, but mostly because I’d last met him trying to chat up my thirteen year old cousin and as a result had run a comprehensive record check on him.

His name was Reynard Fossman and he was dismayingly pleased to see me.

He raised his walking stick in salute and I saw that it was made of hickory and its head was a knot of roots smoothed down and polished to bring out the grain. I considered having him for carrying an offensive weapon, because it doesn’t have to be offensive per se – it’s the intention to use it as such that counts in law.

‘Mr Fossman,’ I said.

‘Excellent,’ said Reynard and gave me a vulpine smile, ‘you remember me.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

‘And how is your lovely cousin?’ he asked. ‘Still gorgeous, I hope.’

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘Oh, so many things,’ said Reynard. ‘But in this instance I bear a message for your master.’

People don’t like it when you don’t react to this sort of shit. They can get frustrated and escalate out of their own comfort zone. You can end up with some useful information that way, or an excuse to arrest them for assaulting a police officer. I gave Reynard my blandest expression, but he just cocked his head and gave me a calculating look. He had a reputation for being cunning, as well other words starting with C.

‘Tell him,’ said Reynard, ‘that I can put him in touch with a certain someone who has an item he might well like to purchase.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Jonathan Wild’s final ledger,’ he said.

‘So?’ I said.

‘You do know who Jonathan Wild was?’ asked Reynard.

Jonathan Wild – self-styled Thief Taker General who cut out the criminal middle man by arranging to have your property stolen, fenced and sold back to you inhouse. It was a wonderful scam – if you wanted your stuff back, you had to deal with him. And if you were a thief and you didn’t play ball it was a long walk to a short drop at Tyburn. Of course, this was back in the eighteenth century when a gentleman might have a good meal, a little professional company and still have enough left out of a fiver to bribe a high court judge.

‘Is he part of One Direction?’ I asked.

Reynard sighed theatrically and proffered his business card.

‘Just make sure you tell the Nightingale,’ he said and then, pausing only to doff an imaginary top hat at my mum, he slipped back out the way he came.

I looked at his card. White high quality stock, a stylised fox’s head in embossed red-gold and below that a single mobile number – a disposable, I found when I checked it the next morning.

‘Ah,’ said Nightingale when I stepped outside and called him. ‘That is indeed an item we might want to acquire.’ Which was Nightingale speak for: grab it with both hands. ‘We shall have to discuss this tomorrow.’

Later that evening my dad and the Irregulars struck up ‘The Sidewinder’ and I got to spend a good thirty seconds admiring the way Beverley moved before she dragged me out and made me dance with her. When the set finished she put her arms around me and kissed me – she smelt of new mown grass and heated car wax, like old deckchairs and plastic hosepipes – like a hot summer’s day in a London garden.

These days my mum doesn’t let my dad hang around after a gig, so I stuck them in an Uber and joined the Irregulars, plus girlfriends and boyfriends, plus Beverley and her friends in the bar. The manager of The Bull’s Head had been a fan of my dad’s almost as long as my mum, so we were treated to a lock-in and drinks at cost. The band, or at least Daniel and Max, predictably took this as a challenge, as did their and Beverley’s friends – musicians and students – you’d think the manager would have known better.

‘Given he’s such a skinny lad,’ James said after watching Daniel’s boyfriend sink yet another Guinness, ‘you’ve got to ask where it’s all going.’

James was the drummer and so by tradition it was his van that the band tooled around in – this was causing some friction.

‘I don’t want to invoke national stereotypes but I’m bloody dying for a drink here,’ he said staring meaningfully at Daniel and Max. They were less than sympathetic.

‘You should have taken up the sax,’ said Max.

‘You only dare say that cause you’re pure steamin’,’ said James. ‘The world’s full of wannabe sax players, but jazz drums – that’s a vocation.’

Bev’s friends tried to match the jazzmen drink for drink, and as a result had to be poured into the back of James’ van with the rest of the band plus hangers-on. James promised faithfully to see them safely back to their digs. As the van lurched off I noticed that it was riding well low on its suspension and hoped, ironically as it turned out for me, that they didn’t get stopped.

It was breezy out by the river, the cold finding its way down the back of my jacket. It was high tide and I could practically feel Beverley’s mother slapping at the embankment, looking for cracks – nothing malicious, you understand, just doing what comes naturally – so it didn’t surprise me when Bev vaulted onto the parapet and started taking off her clothes.

She turned to look at me, wearing just her knickers and the red silk bra that I knew for a fact she’d nicked from her sister Effra and was two sizes too small.

‘Race you home,’ she shouted and, turning, dove into the river.

I gathered up her clothes and threw them onto the passenger seat of the Asbo before setting off down Barnes High Street at a swift but totally legal speed. I considered using my blues and twos but that would have been cheating. I’d have beaten her home, too, if I hadn’t been pulled over by a pair of uniforms on the Kingston Road ‘on suspicion’ and had to flash my warrant card.

‘What were you thinking?’ I asked. ‘Me in a Ford Focus – what was it? The colour?’ I’d stopped using the Orange Asbo for covert work – for obvious reasons – so it had become my off-duty transport.

‘To be honest,’ said one of the uniforms, ‘you just looked so bloody cheerful – it was suspicious.’

I stayed polite, although I did make a note of their collar numbers because you never know.

Driving while cheerful, I thought, that’s a new one.

Still, it did mean Beverley was waiting for me in bed when I arrived.