The Hanging Tree

6 On the Comparing of Watches

Nightingale is big on the whole healthy body, healthy mind thing and, given that he looks good for a man who should have got a telegram from the queen more than a decade ago, I tend to follow his advice. Which is why when I’m working out of Belgravia I sometimes leave one of the Asbos there so I can run over the next morning. It’s a good route, down St Martin’s Lane still dirty from last night’s theatre crowd, across the top of Trafalgar Square before dropping down onto the Mall and giving her majesty a quick wave if she’s at home.

That morning it was cool and despite the smell of rain the sky was clear and the predawn light turned the roadway a nice shade of pink. I’d just passed the ICA when Beverley rang me – she does most mornings if I don’t stay the night at her place.

‘I don’t want to be funny babes,’ she said without preamble, ‘but when were you going to tell me you’d run into Lesley?’

I slowed to a walk, then stopped and took a deep breath of chill air.

‘Well, for a start, I wasn’t going to do it over the phone,’ I said. ‘Where did you hear that from?’

‘Tyburn ran into me “by accident” yesterday,’ said Beverley. ‘Couldn’t wait to tell me. And what have you done to piss her off?

‘I didn’t fulfil my wool quota,’ I said.

‘And Lesley?’

‘Tried to kill me a couple of times,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think it was personal.’

‘Wait,’ said Beverley. ‘Was that Harrods?’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘So you roughed up the top shop,’ she said. ‘No wonder Ty is pissed. Did you get me a present?’

‘I was busy at the time,’ I said. ‘Was there something you wanted?’

‘Always,’ said Beverley. ‘You chasing Lesley now?’

‘Not my job,’ I said. ‘The DPS is responsible for Lesley, and they don’t want me anywhere near the case. And if you like being police – and I do – then you don’t mess with the DPS.’

‘And the real reason?’

‘She’s taunting me,’ I said. ‘What with the texts last year and popping up at Harrods like that. I think she’s trying to pull me off balance.’

The breeze down the Mall was making the sweat chill on my legs and back. I started walking again.

‘Maybe she’s trying to tell you something,’ said Beverley.

‘Then she can send me a letter,’ I said. ‘Or, better still, turn herself in.’

‘Hey,’ said Beverley. ‘Just saying.’

‘Sorry, Bev,’ I said.

‘Are you coming over tonight? I’ve got to do an essay on the atmospheric carbon cycle for tomorrow – you could help me with my chemistry.’

‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m planning to blow up some phones for science.’

Someone had left a copy of the Sun on my desk. It had a good photograph of some TSG officers milling about under the Harrods awning – the headline read HARRODS HORROR. A quick flick through indicated that they didn’t have the faintest idea what had happened, but that wasn’t going to stop them from devoting six pages to it. It turned out to be the lead with most of the papers except for the Express which went with UKIP TO ROCK WESTMINSTER.

I knew Stephanopoulos and Seawoll were shielding me from a ton of shit already, but after the mess at Trafalgar Square Seawoll had admitted that my career’s strange ability to survive its excursions into major property damage owed more to the fact that – should the Met actually get rid of me – they couldn’t guarantee my replacement wouldn’t be worse.

‘Nightingale is fucking untouchable,’ Seawoll had said. ‘And you’re the lesser of two evils.’

Still, I happened to know for a fact that the whole of Belgravia nick were running a pool on how long I would last and how I would go – the options being death, medical discharge (physical), medical discharge (psychological), indefinite disciplinary suspension, sacked for misconduct, secondment to Interpol and, with just one vote, ascension to a higher plane of existence.

I suspected the last one was a bit unlikely.

Guleed turned up a few minutes later wearing her leather jacket, the Hugo Boss she said her mum had bought her, which meant she’d been out doing some serious police work.

‘Entry codes,’ she said when she saw me. According to their statements, the kids had gained access to One Hyde Park via the underground staff tunnel that ran from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel next door. Two of them had identified James Murray, the victim’s official boyfriend, as the one who’d possessed the passkey and security codes. There had been multiple actions including one to re-interview James Murray re: where he got the codes, but it was still pending until Guleed preempted it that morning.

‘Christina Chorley gave him the codes,’ said Guleed. ‘And the passkey.’

Since James didn’t know where Christina had got them, and she was seriously dead, Guleed decided to work the other side of the problem and find out who owned the flat.

‘I thought all those things were actioned already?’ I said.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed but just about everyone else is off working that murder in Fulham,’ said Guleed. ‘It’s basically you, me and whatever time we can bully out of David.’

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said, although it did explain where everyone else was that morning.

‘Not surprising,’ said Guleed. ‘You were too busy blowing up Harrods.’

‘Are we getting leaned on?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’ asked Guleed.

I didn’t ask who by and I was pretty certain that the ‘how’ was Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom, he of the unfortunate eyebrows and midlife opera crisis. He was one of Tyburn’s circle and, while he didn’t have any direct influence over Belgravia MIT, he’d know a man who did – probably the Assistant Commissioner.

The AC would be asking whether this particular suspicious death was worth the resources, what with the current government cutting budgets and the sudden proliferation of expensive historical abuse investigations.

And you couldn’t argue, because deciding on resource allocation is what ACPO officers are all about – and, let’s face it, there’s always more crime than budget. So Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had pulled most of their team off Operation Marigold, but left Guleed. Because, while those two liked a result as much as the next copper, they preferred it when it corresponded with your actual truth – they were very modern that way.

So, actions were still being actioned and me and Guleed were actioning them, and the wheels of justice ground on. Albeit in first gear.

So the low ratio wheels had taken Guleed to a civilian employee at Serious Fraud who was a friend of her brother’s who had helped her untangle the – deliberately complex – web of fronts and shell companies that surrounded the flat at One Hyde Park.

‘And then one name tripped a flag to a certain Operation Wentworth.’ She smiled brightly. ‘Sound familiar?’

Wentworth was the investigation into the illegal demolition of Skygarden Tower, with me on it I might add, and the activities of County Gard Ltd which, along with County Finance Management and The County System Company, was a known front organisation for the Faceless Man.

‘Which ties Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman to the Faceless Man,’ I said. ‘Serious Fraud have been banging their heads against that for a year – this could be their way in.’

‘And it was at County Gard’s offices,’ said Guleed, ‘where you first met the Right Honourable Caroline Linden-Limmer.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who’s linked to Reynard Fossman, who is linked to Christina Chorley, who is linked back to County Gard.’

Unless Reynard was the link to County Gard, I thought. And we knew the Faceless Man loved his hybrids, his tiger-men and cat-girls. So why not a fox?

‘So the Right Honourable Caroline has conveniently turned up at both ends of that trail,’ said Guleed. ‘What I’m asking is, do you really think it’s a good idea to invite her into your secret hideout?’

But invited in they were, and at the appointed time I was in the entrance foyer in my second best suit, waiting for them to knock on the door. They were fifteen minutes late.

The doorbell rang and I triggered the counterweight mechanism that causes the doors to swing open impressively on their own – well, it impressed me once. They opened to reveal Lady Helena waiting with a half-smile on her lips. She’d deeply invested in the ageing bohemian look, with a quilted burgundy jacket and corduroy slacks. Her daughter was dressed in a conservative navy skirt suit that fitted her tall frame too well to be anything but bespoke.

Apart from my mum and certain senior aunts and uncles, I don’t do deference as a rule. And certainly not to inherited titles. But I also believe in making people comfortable enough to make mistakes, so I smiled and called her Lady Helena.

I noticed that she didn’t tell me to call her ‘just Helena please’.

I invited them inside and let the doors close behind them.

Lady Helena paused in front of the statue of Sir Isaac Newton and read the inscription.

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;

God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.

‘“I do not know what I may appear to the world”,’ she said and I recognised the quote, ‘“but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore”.’ She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Where would be without the “great men” of history to guide us.’ And with that she swept, unprompted, into the atrium.

I caught Caroline’s gaze and she rolled her eyes.

We use the atrium for afternoon tea because Molly won’t let us use the breakfast room for anything but breakfast, and the main dining hall is, despite having a high ceiling decorated with a fine Enlightenment mural of Newton bringing light to the world, actually a bit dingy.

Still, the green leather armchairs had been artfully rearranged so that the comfy one with the severe cracking on the armrests was not amongst those arrayed in a loose u-shape around a couple of walnut coffee tables. I noticed that both the table tops and the green leather gleamed and there was a definite lingering smell of polish.

The silver tea service, which I’d only ever seen decorating a dresser in the small dining room, was assembled upon those coffee tables. On the service were a selection of biscuits, cakes and iced delights in pink and yellow. Enough, I was to learn much later, to make a Swedish housewife proud. Molly had been baking all night and in such quantity that Toby had fallen into a diabetic coma around dawn and was currently lying in the kitchen with his legs in the air.

Nightingale had stood as the women entered and he waved them towards the chairs. I’d been hoping that Molly would suddenly materialise behind them, but instead she came gliding in from the direction of the kitchen stairs bearing a silver tray and a squarish art deco teapot in white china with gold trim.

Lady Helena watched Molly approach. She looked interested but not surprised. I wondered, what did she know about Molly? And what had she heard about the internal disposition of the Folly?

Once we were seated, and Molly had poured the tea, Nightingale gave a little formal nod in the direction of our guests and invited them to eat and drink without fear of obligation.

‘Thank you,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But I’m curious as to whether you believe that sort of thing is really necessary.’

‘Between us?’ said Nightingale. ‘Among practitioners I doubt it’s necessary. In the Court of the Rivers or amongst the High Fae I’m not sure I’d be willing to take the chance.’

Lady Helena took a sip of her tea.

‘You don’t think it’s based on an atavistic fear of the feminine realm?’ she asked and, when Nightingale looked politely blank, added ‘Food and sustenance traditionally being a woman’s responsibility.’

‘I have no idea,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I’ve always liked to err on the side of prudence.’

They fenced along these lines for a bit while I had a slice of strawberry lattice tart and Caroline ate two pink angel cakes in quick succession.

‘I gather you were taught by your mother,’ said Nightingale. ‘Was this the usual practice?’

‘I don’t think there was such a thing as a “usual practice”,’ said Lady Helena. ‘My mother was taught by her aunt, and her aunt by a friend of the family.’

‘A female friend?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Naturally,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But I think we may have exhausted that topic – shall we get down to business?’

‘By all means,’ said Nightingale. ‘What would you like to discuss?’

Lady Helena put her tea down – she’d barely touched it.

‘Jonathan Wild’s Ledger, The Third Principia, alchemy, the secret of eternal life.’ She smiled – a bright echo of the young woman in the photograph. ‘Is that enough to be going on with?’

‘We’re always interested in information leading to the recovery of stolen goods,’ said Nightingale.

‘Is that the case here?’ asked Lady Helena.

Nightingale glanced my way.

‘The Third Principia was definitely stolen in 1719,’ I said. ‘The Master of the Royal Mint at that time was one Sir Isaac Newton, who was busy sending counterfeiters and coin clippers to the gallows for crimes against the currency.’

‘Stolen by Jack Shepherd himself according to legend,’ said Nightingale. ‘So, yes, I believe it counts as stolen property.’

Lady Helena held up her hand to surrender the point.

‘We are both the true heirs of Isaac Newton,’ she said. ‘Whether you’re willing to recognise it or not. We can’t ignore each other and I’m sure you’ll agree that any conflict between us would be both pointless and counterproductive. Which leaves us where?’

Nightingale nodded slowly.

‘You think we should work together,’ he said and then he looked at me and laughed. ‘A stakeholder engagement,’ he said.

Oh, he looks like he stands still and lets the modern world flow around him, I thought. But he’s always watching and when something useful catches his eye, he merely reaches out and takes it – things, ideas, people.

The smile vanished as he looked back at Lady Helena.

‘Let’s leave the question of a common cause aside for a moment,’ he said. ‘And start by clearing the air. Have you ever heard of a wizard who conceals his identity?’

‘Does he use a glamour and mask to hide his face?’ asked Lady Helena.

‘We call him the Faceless Man,’ I said and Caroline didn’t exactly snigger, but I could tell she wanted to.

‘We believe there might have been two of them,’ said Nightingale. ‘One active during the sixties and seventies and a second, a successor if you like, active since the mid-nineties.’

‘The older one is dead,’ I said.

‘If we’re talking about Albert Woodville-Gentle,’ said Lady Helena, ‘Then I should bloody well hope so – since I killed him.’

Nightingale was so stunned he looked shocked for almost half a second before moving on to ask quite when that might have happened.

‘August Bank Holiday, 1979,’ said Lady Helena.

‘And you’re sure he was dead?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Are you saying he wasn’t?’ asked Lady Helena.

‘He turned up alive and well and living in the Barbican Centre,’ I said. ‘Under the care of a Russian woman.’

‘Wait,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Not Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina?’

‘That’s the one,’ I said.

‘That lying witch!’ said Lady Helena and turned to her daughter. ‘You said she was lying, but I didn’t want to believe you.’

‘So you know each other?’ I asked.

‘Our paths have crossed,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But fuck her. Is Albert still alive?’

Nightingale told her he wasn’t, which was an obvious relief. He gave some of the background, that he’d been disabled by brain damage, by hyperthaumaturgical degradation, but I noticed that he didn’t mention that Varvara Sidorovna had located and arranged for Albert Woodville-Gentle’s care on behalf of the second Faceless Man. Like me, he wanted to see if Lady Helena knew this already.

‘Perhaps you should start by telling us why you tried to kill him in the first place,’ said Nightingale and this, I realised, was why he had opted for tea in the Folly. In here we were all like-minded individuals of quality and learning, not police officers and suspects, and Lady Helena was about to regale us with an interesting story and not implicate herself for an attempted murder. Which was why I didn’t have my notebook out.

But I was recording the conversation on a transistorised Dictaphone I’d picked up on eBay for exactly this purpose, and taped to the bottom of the coffee table. Transistors don’t last much longer than microprocessors when exposed to magic, but magnetic audio tape does. Which meant that even in the event of a major disagreement I’d still have a record. And that, boys and girls, is why we spend so much time in the lab doing experiments.

‘I grew up on a farm in Africa,’ said Lady Helena. ‘My father had inherited a title and not much else from his father and so after he was demobbed from the RAF he sought his fortune there.’

There hadn’t been any other kids and she’d grown up ‘like a weed’ she said, the only child for a hundred miles around.

‘This was in the old days before the poachers decimated the local game,’ she said. ‘You still got animal attacks on the livestock, and once a leopard took a couple of village children.’ Her father had led the hunting party that had tracked it down and killed it. He’d sold the skin to help support the farm, but had kept the head as a trophy.

‘She still has it,’ said Caroline. ‘In a box in the attic – we used to spook ourselves by sneaking up to look at it.’

‘I wondered why things in the attic kept moving about,’ said Lady Helena. ‘I thought it might be a poltergeist. You lot are lucky I didn’t put down a trap.’

I glanced over at Nightingale, who was probably thinking the same thing I was: what kind of trap, and where did you learn how to make one?

Her mother hadn’t approved of the killing. As far as she was concerned, man was the interloper in Africa and shouldn’t be surprised when the animals merely followed their instincts.

‘If people aren’t willing to pay the price, my darling,’ her mum had said, ‘then perhaps people should live somewhere else.’

Not that she feared for her daughter, who was left to explore on her own. Although generally speaking one of the houseboys would be told to keep an eye on her.

‘She’d already taught me the snapdragon by the time I was seven,’ said Lady Helena. Nightingale asked for a demonstration; she made a flicking gesture with her hand and there was a flash and a loud crack that echoed off the walls and caused Molly to suddenly appear behind Nightingale’s chair.

It was too fast for me to read her signum but I got the same hint of burning candlewax that I’d felt in Harrods during the fight.

Nightingale asked Molly if we might have a fresh pot of tea. Caroline nodded enthusiastically at this and helped herself to a Manchester Tart – or it might have been a Liverpool Tart, I can’t always tell them apart.

‘What did the locals think about the magic?’ I asked, thinking of my mum, who has definite views about spells, witches and where they fit into a well organised society – i.e. not around her.

‘These were tribesman,’ said Lady Helena. ‘They already believed in magic. I don’t think they saw anything strange in it – even if we were wazungu.’

They were much more enthusiastic about her mother’s ability to set bones and treat injuries. Nightingale asked where she’d learnt those particular skills.

‘The basics were handed down,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But she refined the techniques working on her animals.’

‘What about the natives?’ I asked.

Lady Helena glared at me and then looked away.

‘You have to understand,’ she said, her eyes on Nightingale. ‘There were no hospitals or clinics nearby – she couldn’t turn people away.’

Nightingale nodded understandingly.

There were limitations to what her mother could do. Gross physical damage, broken bones, cuts and abrasions were easy enough. But not diseases or chronic conditions.

‘Cancer,’ said Lady Helena bitterly. ‘Obvious tumours she could excise and then promote healing at the site. But she couldn’t reach anything systemic. Including her own leukaemia.’

She hadn’t told her family either, until it was too late for chemotherapy.

‘This was after the Emergency,’ she said, ‘after we’d moved to Uganda.’

I wanted to ask what kind of formae her mother had used to knit bones and heal tissue, but Nightingale had discussed this with me in advance.

‘Please try not to be distracted by the details, Peter,’ he’d said. ‘We want to know about her connection to Fossman and what she knows about the Faceless Man. If all goes well, there’ll be plenty of time to satisfy your curiosity later.’

My curiosity? I thought, as Lady Helena talked about bones healing in days not weeks. Dr Walid’s going to break his Hippocratic oath and kill us because we didn’t invite him along. Thank god I’ll have the recording to keep him sweet.

After her mother died, her father packed her off to posh school to finish her education. But this was London in the sixties and there was no end of mischief a fearless young woman could get up to in those days. Stripping off for David Bailey was the least of it.

‘You know the list, darling,’ she said to Nightingale. ‘Sex, drugs, rock and roll. But of course I found myself drawn into what they call the demi-monde.’ She looked at me. ‘French for half-world,’ she said, obviously unaware of the existence of Google. ‘A bit more exclusive in those days, less fashionable.’ She grinned. ‘Less safe.’

She met a young man called Albert Woodville-Gentle there, who could do magic.

‘Not as well as me,’ she said. ‘He was all bash, bash, bash – no finesse.’

‘You were lovers?’ asked Nightingale.

‘On occasion,’ said Lady Helena. ‘When the mood took us.’

‘Friends with benefits,’ said Caroline.

‘Such a vulgar term,’ said Lady Helena.

Caroline caught my eye and mouthed fuck-buddies behind her mum’s back.

Magic was what drew them together. They spent the summer of ’66 breaking the bank in Monte Carlo and then wintered in Tangiers spending the proceeds. All the time teaching each other magic and refining their technique.

‘And having spectacular sex on the roof,’ said Lady Helena. ‘With Chris Farlowe and Procol Harum on the radio.’

Caroline winced.

They arrived back in London on a grey day in October ’67 and found everything had changed.

‘You could practically feel it oozing out of the stones,’ said Lady Helena. ‘And there were new faces in the old haunts. It wasn’t the London we’d known; it felt dangerous, alienating. At least that’s how I felt.’

Albert Woodville-Gentle seemed to find it more agreeable.

‘By that time I’d already set my sights on India,’ she said and off she went, although via BOAC rather than the hippy trail. ‘I studied at an ashram, got myself a guru or two.’ But she couldn’t find an indigenous magic tradition. ‘Although I got the strong sense that there was something going on under the surface. I didn’t know about the Rivers in those days, or I might have looked in somewhat different areas. They knew about your lot, though,’ she nodded at Nightingale. ‘I’m not sure you left a good impression in India.’

‘So you didn’t find what you were looking for?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Yes and no,’ said Helena. ‘I never found an Indian magical tradition, at least not one based on what we might understand as magic.’ But she did find a vocation, a sense of purpose, in the slums of Calcutta.

‘Unless you’ve been there you can’t believe what it’s like,’ she said. ‘That vast press of humanity crowding in from all sides, the noise, the colour, the chaos, the smells and the pain, the suffering. If you plan to stay you either hide behind walls or you roll up your sleeves and try to help.’

She helped set up a free clinic in a poverty stricken suburb and there she found a use for the magical techniques that her mother had developed in Africa. ‘At first I kept it simple,’ she said. ‘Broken bones and physical injuries, but in Paikpara that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You could work yourself to death just dealing with the diarrheal conditions.’ And she wanted to, because these were things that were killing the kids. But the real problem was poor sanitation and poverty.

‘There was nothing I could do about either, but I thought I might be able to do something about leprosy,’ she said and I almost dropped my second slice of Bakewell tart.

‘Did you?’ I asked, which got me a frown from Nightingale.

‘For the disease, no,’ she said. ‘For the symptoms, for the nerve damage, sometimes. But not remotely reliably. I thought I saw a way it might be done, but I needed money, for medical supplies and equipment.’ And to meet the huge need that pressed in around her every day.

So she returned to London to set up a fundraising arm for her charity, and ran straight back into the arms of Albert Woodville-Gentle who was just as charming as he’d ever been. After getting reacquainted they came to an arrangement – Albert would provide seed funding and run the London end of the charity, and in exchange Helena would share the techniques she’d developed in India.

I thought of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau where Albert Woodville-Gentle had created real cat-girls and tiger-boys and other things that Nightingale wouldn’t let me see. And I thought of the smooth new skin of Lesley May’s face, and found it suddenly hard to keep an expression of polite interest on mine.

‘You never suspected how he might use it,’ said Nightingale.

‘I received a phone call in May 1979,’ said Lady Helena. ‘The caller asked me if I knew what my “good friend” was really up to. They gave me the address of a club in Soho. I believe you know the one I’m talking about.’

‘On Brewer Street,’ said Nightingale.

‘Do you know who made the call?’ I asked.

Lady Helena did not; she’d been busy when she’d taken it and hadn’t understood the implications.

‘A woman,’ she said. ‘English certainly, or at least she didn’t have an accent.’

A woman with a posh accent, I thought. Because people always think their own accent is universal.

‘Did you visit the club?’ asked Nightingale.

‘I’d been due to visit London that summer, so instead of calling Albert to let him know I’d arrived I popped in on my way to my hotel,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Do you know what was in the foyer?’

Nightingale nodded.

I certainly remembered, the disembodied head of Larry ‘The Lark’ Piercingham, petty criminal, grass and object lesson in why you didn’t cross the Faceless Man. He’d been done up like a fortune-telling machine and, as far as Dr Walid could establish later, kept in a semi-state of aliveness for over thirty years.

Lady Helena smacked her palm on the coffee table making the china rattle.

‘I developed that technique,’ she said and her face was suddenly flushed. ‘In an emergency you can use it to stave off brain death.’ She raised her hand again, but hesitated and then dropped it into her lap.

‘Have you taught it to anyone else?’ I asked.

‘You mean, why haven’t I given it to the drug companies?’ asked Lady Helena. ‘Because it’s difficult, dangerous to the witch, and has a one-in-twenty success rate. I’d used it in extremis and tried to refine it, but the most common result is a type of terrible half-life.’

‘Zombies,’ said Caroline, which got her a glare from her mother. ‘What? I’m just saying – zombies. That’s what you get when it goes wrong.’

‘I decided I couldn’t trust anyone with the technique,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Least of all the medical establishment. God, can you imagine what the military might do with it? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

It was after her encounter with Larry the Lark that she concluded the medical knowledge she’d developed was too dangerous to be passed on.

‘I’ve decided that it has to die with me,’ she said.

‘What about Albert?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Quite,’ she said. ‘What about dear old Albert?’

She’d arranged to meet him at her hotel, but he must have heard that she’d visited the club because he turned up ready to fight.

‘It was a sort of mutual ambush,’ said Lady Caroline. ‘He had first go, but I always was faster than him. Things got rather disagreeable and I’m afraid the hotel rather bore the brunt of it. So it’s just as well I always stayed under an assumed name.’

‘Was this the Pontypool Hotel on Argyle Square?’ asked Nightingale.

‘As a matter of fact it was,’ said Lady Helena.

‘I was called in to investigate that,’ said Nightingale. And, to me, ‘They thought it was a gas explosion at first, then arson and then the IRA. Only once they’d exhausted those possibilities did they think of me, and the trail had grown somewhat cold by then.’ He looked at Lady Helena again. ‘Thank you for clearing that up.’

Not to mention thank you for adding attempted murder, gross negligence and identity fraud to your charge list, I thought, or explaining your cheerfully relaxed attitude to medical ethics.

‘You do understand what happens when you overuse magic?’ she asked.

‘We call it hyperthaumaturgical degradation,’ said Nightingale.

Lady Helena nodded.

‘Useful term,’ she said. ‘That’s what happened to dear Albert. Which I thought a fitting punishment. I didn’t have time for a coup de grace – the police were practically knocking on what was left of the front door when I made myself scarce.’

Nightingale nodded thoughtfully in a way that made me think that somebody was going to be digging out incident reports from 1979, and just for a change it wasn’t going to be me. There was a good chance it would be a big box full of papers – which would suit Nightingale much better anyway.

Without Albert, the charity funding evaporated and, in any case, she’d begun to have doubts about the ethics of her work.

‘But you must have saved lives,’ I said.

‘World ill-health is like world hunger,’ said Lady Helena. ‘We could end both tomorrow if we wanted to.’ And she’d become terrified of the potential abuse. ‘Imagine what the military industrial complex would do with animal hybrids,’ she said. ‘Better that the knowledge dies with me.’

Nightingale glanced my way and gave his head the almost imperceptible tilt that meant it was time for the children to wander off and entertain themselves. I had a number of incentives lined up to coax Caroline away, but in the end I just asked if she wanted a tour and she said yes.

We were followed by Toby, who’d shaken off his sugar induced lethargy and had obviously decided that he wanted a bit of attention.

I started with the lecture hall, where generations of practitioners had snoozed their way through demonstrations and lectures, then the smoking room with its art nouveau trimmings and into the mundane library where we could slip up the ladder to the top stacks and step through a concealed doorway onto the landing. Then up another flight of stairs to the main lab.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Caroline.

I had a pile of modified first generation smartphones at one end of the lab and a noticeably scorched sheet of metal on a bench at the other end. I’d painted distance markers on the metal and on the floor around it. The remains of a couple of cheap pocket calculators were still welded to the innermost markers – I hadn’t had a chance to scrape them off yet.

‘Remember when the lights went out at Harrods?’ I asked.

‘I remember your master knocking me off my feet,’ she said.

‘He’s not my master,’ I said.

‘Well he’s not your dad, is he?’ said Caroline and then looked at me sharply. ‘He’s not, is he?’

‘He’s my boss,’ I said. ‘My governor.’

‘I see,’ she said. She looked at the bench. ‘Magic interferes with technology – do you know why?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ she looked at the pile of smartphones. ‘But I think you know more than I do.’

So I explained that, as far as I could tell, magic had a serious degrading effect on microprocessors, and a lesser effect on transistors. ‘But not on thermionic valves,’ I said, ‘or simple circuit boards.’

‘I know about that,’ she said and held up her wrist to show off a silver stainless steel Classic Ladies Fireman from Balls – which was at least eight hundred quids’ worth of watch.

‘I’ve shown you mine,’ she said, so I held my wrist to show my black and silver Omega.

‘Damn,’ she said and grabbed my forearm and pulled it up for a closer look, ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Christmas present,’ I said.

‘What about your boss?’ asked Caroline. ‘Your guvnor? What’s he got?’

‘Depends on what he’s wearing,’ I said. ‘I think he’s got a drawer full of them alongside the cufflinks.’

‘Sharp dressed man,’ she said. ‘Bit old fashioned for my taste.’

Oh, you don’t know, I thought, but you suspect. And you can just go on suspecting.

‘It’s hard to stay current working in a place like this,’ I said. ‘What’s your mum have on her wrist?’

‘Just skin,’ said Caroline. ‘She says “clock time is an imposition of industrial capitalism and should be resisted if not ignored”. Besides, she thinks it interferes with the flow of energy around her chakra points. And you still haven’t said what all the phones are for.’

‘Somebody,’ I said, meaning Lesley May, ‘has found a way to tap directly into the energy potential of a smartphone.’

‘Does it have to be an Apple or will an Android do?’

‘Anything with a chip-set,’ I said.

‘Wait,’ said Caroline. ‘Are you saying magic doesn’t just destroy the chips – you can actually get power out of it as well? How do you know that?’

Because I’d trained myself to do a very consistent were-light for testing purposes and then measured the output while feeding calculators, phones and, once, an obsolete laptop into the spell. Then I measured it with an antique optical spectrometer that I’d found in a storeroom. It was a beautiful brass and enamel thing that looked like someone had bolted two telescopes to an early turntable. It had taken me another two weeks to find the prism which was in a different box with some notes handwritten in Latin which I hadn’t dared show Nightingale in case he confiscated them. I hadn’t translated them yet, but from the diagrams I was pretty sure the author had been conducting experiments similar to mine.

‘How do you feed a calculator to a spell?’ asked Caroline.

‘Same way you’d do a ritual animal sacrifice, except without the animal,’ I said.

This amazed Caroline, not least because she hadn’t known you could do ritual animal sacrifice – which really shouldn’t have surprised me, what with her mum being her mum.

‘Ten points to Ravenclaw,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I always fancied Gryffindor.’

‘Dream on,’ she said. ‘Definitely Ravenclaw.’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘that it might be possible to trigger a sort of magic chain reaction that feeds off the chipset without the practitioner having to do anything else.’ I nearly said it was like setting a phaser to overload, but I’ve learnt to keep that kind of joke to myself, even with people who make Harry Potter references – especially with people who make Harry Potter references.

‘To do what exactly?’ asked Caroline.

‘Magically it just makes a lot of “noise”, but the side effect is to dust every microprocessor in about twenty metres.’ I’d gone over the Harrods crime scene that morning with a laser rangefinder and a pocket microscope and found that every chip within ten metres was toast, damaged beyond repair out to twenty, and showing signs of damage out to thirty. I was hoping that further research would reveal it was following the inverse square law, because otherwise I was going to have to call CERN and tell them to take a tea break.

‘I’ve got a similar spell I use to knock out electronic ignitions,’ I said. ‘I call it the car killer.’

‘Oh, that’s a great name,’ said Caroline.

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘What do you call the smoke rope thing that you do?’

She said it had a name in Sanskrit or Bengali or one of those but she just called it the smoke trick.

‘We’ve got a firing range downstairs,’ I said. ‘Want to show me how it’s done?’

And it wasn’t as easy as she made it look. I showed her the car killer and the skinny grenade but I kept the water balloons to myself, because a man’s got to have a few secrets. We both managed to do some serious damage to the NATO standard cardboard cutouts and we might have moved on to the paintball gun but the grownups came looking for us and said it was time for Caroline to go home.

I walked them round the corner to where their car was parked. It was an honest to god early model MG MGB, a 1968 judging from the dashboard instruments, although at some point it had been re-sprayed a hideous lime-flower green, once again proving that nine out of ten classic motors are wasted on their owners. As I waved them off I made a note of the car’s index to add to their nominal file.

Nightingale said he’d come to an arrangement with Lady Helena. They would track down Fossman while I worked Operation Marigold to see if I could firm up his involvement from that direction. And, if I could discover who’d supplied the fatal drugs to Christina Chorley and get Tyburn’s daughter off the hook at the same time, so much the better.

‘Just to clarify one thing,’ I said. ‘When you find Fossman, he’s going to be cautioned and interviewed on the record – right?’

‘Do you think that’s wise?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Considering?’

‘Either we’re the law or we’re not,’ I said.

Nightingale nodded gravely and then he looked away and smiled.

‘Agreed,’ he said.

‘Right,’ I said, but the smile worried me.

I’d expected there to be some cake left over, but I’d arrived back in the Folly to find Molly packing up anything that didn’t have a bite out of it into professional looking cake boxes. She couldn’t possibly be planning to store them – we’d never finish them before they went stale – and Molly never froze anything.

‘Homeless shelters,’ said Nightingale when I thought to ask. ‘I found out when a nice young woman turned up at the gate with a van.’

‘We should find out who she’s liaising with there,’ I said.

‘Whatever for?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Basic security?’

‘But Peter,’ said Nightingale, ‘if we do that Molly might discover that we know what she’s up to.’ He picked up a forlorn slice of Liverpool Tart. ‘She’s enjoying sneaking around behind our backs far too much for us to spoil it.’