Whispers Under Ground

10 Russell Square

It was the yelling that woke me up the next morning. I rolled out of my bed, grabbed my extendable baton and was out the door before I was fully awake. All those nights being terrorised by Molly had obviously paid off. It was still early enough to be dark, so the first thing I did was hit the hallway lights.

I stood there in my boxers chilling quickly in the winter air thinking that maybe it had been a nightmare, when the next door along slammed open and Zach ran out wearing nothing but a pair of purple Y-fronts and swearing at the top of his voice. He saw me and waved something in my face.

‘Look at this,’ he said.

It was his filthy gym bag, the one that had stunk up my car, only now it was marvellously clean, the frayed seams had been stitched and reinforced with leather and the Adidas logo touched up with blue thread. Angrily he yanked it open to display the clean and neatly folded clothes inside within a waft of lemon and wildflowers. Only one person I know folds clothes to that level of precision.

‘Molly must have cleaned it,’ I said.

‘No shit,’ he said. ‘She didn’t have no right. It’s my stuff.’

‘Smells nice though,’ I said.

He opened his mouth to say something but it snapped shut when Lesley came running around the corner carrying her baton in one hand and a heavy-duty torch in the other. She’d taken the time to fasten on her mask, but nothing else, and was dressed in a pair of skimpy red and white polka dot low-rise shorts and a sleeveless thermal vest under which her breasts bounced distractingly. Me and Zach both stared like a pair of teenagers, but I managed to drag my eyes back up to her mask before she could hit me with the baton.

‘Good morning,’ said Zach brightly.

I introduced Zach to Lesley and gave her the potted history. ‘I couldn’t leave him in the snow,’ I said. She told us to stop making so much noise and that she was going back to bed.

As she walked away I realised I’d forgotten just how shapely her thighs were and how beautiful the dimples that formed in her buttocks when she walked.

Me and Zach both watched in rapt silence until she’d gone round the corner.

‘That was amazing,’ said Zach.

‘Yes she is,’ I said.

‘So,’ said Zach. ‘Are you two fucking?’

I glared at him.

‘Does that mean you’re not?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s—’

‘Sex on legs,’ said Zach and took a moment to sniff his armpit. Apparently satisfied, he squared his shoulders, twanged the elasticated waist on his Y-fronts and said, ‘Good. There’s nothing like an early start.’ He made to follow Lesley but I stopped him with a hand on the chest. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said.

‘You can’t have it both ways, bruv,’ he said. ‘Make up your mind.’

‘Did you not notice …’ I hesitated, ‘the injuries?’

‘Some of us look beyond the superficial,’ said Zach.

‘Some of us look beyond someone’s tits,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Did you see that bum?’

‘Do you want me to smack you?’

‘Hey,’ said Zach taking a step back. ‘Just say you’re interested and I won’t give her another thought. Maybe a couple of other thoughts, difficult not to, given the circumstances. Come on, even you can’t be that blind.’

‘It’s none of your business,’ I said.

‘I’m giving you a week on account of the inalienable laws of hospitality,’ he said. ‘Then I’m going to consider it an open field – okay?’

It seemed a safe bet that something else would have caught Zach’s attention by then. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’

Zach slapped his six-pack and looked around. ‘Now that we’re up,’ he said. ‘What do we do about breakfast?’

‘In this establishment,’ I said. ‘We dress for breakfast.’

Nightingale certainly did, his only concession to informality being that he left the top button of his shirt undone and draped his blazer over the back of his chair. He was addressing his toast and marmalade when I showed Zach, currently sweet-smelling and freshly laundered thanks to Molly, into the breakfast room. Nightingale gave me a quizzical look as Zach fell upon the line of silver salvers with cries of glee and started piling up his plate with kippers, scrambled egg, kedgeree, mushrooms, tomatoes, fried bread and devilled kidneys. I sat down and started pouring coffee.

‘Zachary Palmer,’ I said.

‘The late James Gallagher’s lodger,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley filled me in with the case history last night during the rugby.’

‘He has a secret or so he says,’ I said.

‘Let me guess,’ said Nightingale. ‘Demi-fae?’

‘If that means half fairy – then yeah,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

Nightingale paused for a bite of toast. ‘I think I knew his father,’ he said. ‘Or possibly his grandfather – it’s never easy to tell with fae.’

‘You haven’t taught me about fae yet,’ I said. ‘What are they exactly?’

‘They’re not anything exactly,’ said Nightingale. ‘Fae is just a term like foreigner or barbarian, it basically means people that are not entirely human.’

I glanced over at where Zach had given up trying to pile everything on one plate and had resorted to using two. Toby had sidled up to sit within easy sausage-catching range, just in case.

‘Like the Rivers?’ I asked.

‘Less powerful,’ said Nightingale. ‘But more independent. Father Thames could probably flood Oxford if he wanted to, but it would never occur to him to interfere with the natural order to that extent. Fae are capricious, mischievous but no more dangerous than a common cutpurse.’ That last sounded suspiciously like a quote. ‘They’re more frequent in the country than the city.’

Zach brought his two plates to the table and, after a brief introduction to Nightingale, began to plough through the heaps of food. To eat as much as he did and stay skinny he must burn calories like a racehorse. Was it a fairy thing or within the normal range of human metabolism? I wondered if I could persuade Zach to spend a day being tested by Dr Walid. I was willing to bet he’d never had a demi-fae to experiment on. It would be nice to know whether there was a demonstrable genetic difference, but Dr Walid said that normal human variations were wide enough that you’d need samples from hundreds of subjects to establish that. Thousands if you wanted a statistically significant answer.

Low sample size – one of the reasons why magic and science are hard to reconcile.

Zach kept his attention on his food while I told Nightingale about James Gallagher’s visit to Powis Square and the vestigium I’d sensed there.

‘Sounds like a floating market,’ said Nightingale.

‘A nazareth?’ I asked.

‘Like a nazareth only for those that live in our world, rather than your average criminal,’ said Nightingale. ‘We used to call them goblin markets.’ He turned to Zach. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘Not me, guv,’ said Zach. ‘I’m strictly persona non grata amongst them kind of people.’

‘Could you find it, though?’

‘Maybe,’ said Zach. ‘What’s it worth?’

Nightingale leaned forward and, whip-fast, grabbed Zach’s wrist and twisted it palm up so that Zach had to half rise out of his chair to avoid breaking it.

‘You’re in my house, Zachary Palmer, eating at my table, and I don’t care how modern you think you are, I know you know that’s an obligation you can’t avoid.’ He smiled and released Zach’s wrist. ‘I’m not asking you to put yourself at risk, just find us the current location. We’ll do the rest.’

‘You only had to ask,’ said Zach.

‘Can you find it by this afternoon?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Course,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to need some readies – for transport, washing some hands, that sort of thing.’

‘How much?’

‘Pony,’ said Zach, meaning £500.

Nightingale pulled a silver money clip from his jacket pocket and peeled off five fifties and handed them to Zach, who disappeared them so fast I didn’t see where they went. He didn’t protest the shortfall, either.

‘Let’s take our coffee to the library,’ said Nightingale.

‘Will you be all right here?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Zach who was already eyeing up the salvers for a return visit.

‘One does rather wonder if he will stop before he explodes,’ said Nightingale as we walked along the balcony.

‘It’s one of those paradox thingies,’ I said. ‘What happens when the unstoppable cook meets the unfillable stomach?’

The General Library is where me and Lesley do most of our studying. It’s got a couple of ornate reading desks with angular brass reading lamps and an atmosphere of quiet contemplation that is totally spoiled by the fact that we both have our headphones on when we’re studying.

Nightingale strode over to the shelves that I’d come to know as the eccentric naturalist section. He tapped his finger along a line of books before pulling one out and inspecting it. ‘Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly is probably the authority,’ he said. ‘How’s your French?’

‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘I’m barely keeping up with my Latin.’

‘Pity,’ said Nightingale and replaced the book. ‘We should get that translated one day.’ He pulled out a second, thinner, volume. ‘Charles Kingsley,’ he said and handed the book to me. It was titled On Fairies and Their Abodes.

‘Not as comprehensive as Barbey d’Aurevilly,’ said Nightingale. ‘But reasonably sound, or at least so my tutors assured me when I was at school.’ He sighed. ‘I did prefer things when we all knew what we were doing and why.’

‘Before I ran into Zach I ran into Fleet,’ I said. ‘And before I ran into Fleet I ran into a Chinese woman who I’m pretty sure was a practitioner.’

‘Did she introduce herself?’

I told him all about the mysterious Madame Teng, although I left out the fact that I’d essentially been rescued by Fleet and her Captain of Dogs.

‘Good god, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘I can’t leave the city for five minutes.’

‘Do you know who she was?’ I asked.

‘A Daoist sorceress I would imagine,’ said Nightingale.

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘The Chinese have their own traditions, including the practice of magic,’ said Nightingale. ‘As I understand it, Daoist magic is based on writing characters on paper much in the same way that we speak formae aloud. Beyond that I don’t think we ever discovered how it works. Contact was limited, we didn’t want to tell them our secrets and unsurprisingly they didn’t want to share theirs with us.’

He frowned at the bookcase and swapped two volumes around.

‘Do they operate out of Chinatown?’ I asked.

‘We have an arrangement with Chinatown,’ he said. ‘They don’t scare the horses and we don’t go in asking questions. Mao pretty much killed all the practitioners during the 1950s and any that survived on the mainland were finished off in the Cultural Revolution.’

‘She was from Taiwan,’ I said.

‘That would make sense,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ll look into it.’

Just to make Nightingale’s day I finished off with a description of Ryan Carroll’s – possibly – magical art installation.

‘And there I was hoping that we could leave that case to the Murder Squad and concentrate on the Little Crocodiles,’ said Nightingale.

‘Anything useful in Henley?’ I asked.

‘Apart from the snow?’ said Nightingale. ‘Rather pleasant couple in a converted stable. They were very proud of it and insisted on showing me around the whole thing.’

‘A little too helpful?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t take their word for it,’ said Nightingale. ‘I donned the old balaclava and had a scout round their grounds after dark.’ He hadn’t found anything, but sneaking stealthily through the snow had reminded him of an operation in Tibet in 1938. ‘Chasing German archaeologists,’ he said. ‘Complete wild goose chase for them and for us.’

Lesley stuck her head through the door, spotted us and came in. ‘Have you seen how much that man can eat?’

‘He’s a halfling,’ I said which just got me blank looks from the pair of them.

We divided up the day’s work. While Nightingale supervised Lesley’s morning practice I would file my paperwork with the Murder Team and check the action list on HOLMES to see if anything relevant, i.e.: weird, unusual or uncanny, had come up. Hopefully by the time we’d finished up Zach would have found the goblin market, which me and Lesley would go and check out.

‘I’m going to visit the Barbican and re-interview Mr Woodville-Gentle,’ said Nightingale. ‘At the very least my attention might spook him into revealing himself.’

‘Assuming he has something to reveal,’ I said.

‘Oh, he has something to reveal all right,’ said Lesley. ‘I guarantee that.’

It had stopped snowing during the night and although the sun wasn’t out, the cloud had thinned and the extra warmth had turned the drifts of snow in the courtyard brittle. I still lost skin on the iron handrail of the stairs, though. The interior of the coach house smelt of paraffin and damp paper but the heater had kept the temperature high enough to protect my electronics. The couch had been straightened and the rubbish bin emptied – I can always tell when Nightingale’s been watching the rugby because he leaves the place tidier than normal. I put the kettle on, powered up my laptop and the second-hand Dell I use to run HOLMES and got down to work.

Police work is just like every other job in that the first thing you do when you sit down in the morning is deal with your emails. Spam elimination followed by humorous cats, followed by ‘requests’ from the Case Manager that I get my arse in gear and hand in my statements. I got out my notebooks and started writing up my visits to Ryan Carroll and Kevin Nolan. I considered writing up my later encounter with Kevin Nolan and Agent Reynolds, but that might have led to questions about why I didn’t contact Kittredge straight away. In the end I informed them that I’d put Zachary Palmer up for the night and that, informally, he’d indicated that there was some kind of bad blood between him and the Nolans. I had not been assigned any further actions, so I looked up the forensics reports on HOLMES.

The techs had failed to recover anything from James Gallagher’s phone because of the ‘unusually degraded’ state of its chips, although they had hopes that they might be able to do a dump from the relatively undamaged flash memory. I knew from painful experience what had ‘degraded’ the phone. I wondered if the forensics people did too. Nightingale and the Folly bobbed along in the modern world, kept afloat by an interlocking series of arrangements and unspoken agreements many of which, I was certain, really only existed in Nightingale’s head.

The report on the murder weapon indicated that it was indeed a section from a larger plate, an image of the CGI reconstruction was attached, but that it was not made from china but was instead a type of stoneware – identifiable because of its opacity and semi-vitreous nature – whatever that meant. Chemical analysis indicated that it was seventy per cent clay mixed in with quartz, soda-lime glass, crushed flint and grog. I Googled grog and decided that they probably meant crushed fragments of previously fired china rather than cheap rum mixed with lime juice. It bore a superficial resemblance to Coade Stone but comparative analysis of a sample provided by a specialist restoration company indicated it was not the same material, not least because it was manufactured using inferior London clay rather than the finer Ball clay from Dorset. There was an additional twenty-odd pages on the history of Coade Stone which I put aside against the possibility I might develop insomnia in the near future.

The pathology report on the weapon was more interesting. Its shape matched the fatal wound track in James Gallagher’s back, a shallower wound in his shoulder, and was a probable match for three cuts to his left and right hands – probably defensive wounds. The blood covering the weapon was a DNA match for James Gallagher and splatter analysis indicated that he might have pulled the weapon out of himself while lying on the tracks. Lovely. However, there were traces of a second blood type on the edges near the ‘handle’ which should be amenable to Low Copy Number DNA testing, the downside being that that the results would take at least until January to come through. An attached note from Seawoll told us to check for hand injuries when taking statements. It takes more force than you think to stab someone to death and the human body is full of pesky obstructions – like ribs for example. Inexperienced knife fighters frequently cut themselves on their own blades when the momentum of their thrust drives their hand down the knife. That’s what a cross guard on a combat knife is there to stop and what makes it relatively easy to catch knife murderers – look for the wounds, match the DNA, it’s a fair cop guv, hello Pentonville. That’s the thing about hard evidence. It’s difficult to wriggle out of in court. No wonder Seawoll and Stephanopoulos weren’t hassling me. They probably figured it was just a matter of time before they swabbed the inside of the right mouth.

Assuming the DNA turned out to be human.

The mud on James Gallagher’s boots turned out to be an appetizing mixture of human faeces, shredded toilet paper and a combination of chemicals that placed him in a working sewer within eight hours of his death. I dug out Sergeant Kumar’s number and was routed through to his airwave. I heard crowds and a PA system in the background. He was definitely on duty. I told him about the sewer mud on the boots.

‘We’ve already been asked about that,’ said Kumar. ‘There’s a gravity sewer that runs below Baker Street and at the end there’s another which runs below Portland Place. But there’s no direct access anywhere on the stretch of track between the two. You walked it with me – there was no way for him to get onto that section.’

‘What about a secret passage?’ I asked. ‘I thought the Underground was full of them.’

‘Secret from members of the public, yes,’ said Kumar. ‘Secret from us – no.’

‘You sure about that?’ I asked and Kumar made a rude noise.

‘I did find some interesting CCTV footage from last Sunday,’ he said. ‘Very irresponsible behaviour by a man and a woman and what looked suspiciously like a child in an enormous hat. On tracks near Tufnell Park – ringing any bells?’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Were they easy to identify?’

There was a pause while a nervous female voice asked for directions to the Underground and Kumar responded. The train companies had finally put their snow countermeasures into effect and people were belatedly flooding into London to do their last-minute shopping. One of my morning emails had been a general alert to this effect, warning of the inevitable increase in theft, road traffic accidents and disgruntled northerners.

‘Only if some complete wanker makes an incident out of it,’ said Kumar.

‘How can one avoid such total wankery?’ I asked.

‘Easy,’ said Kumar. ‘By following basic safety procedures with regard to the transport infrastructure and making sure that next time you get the urge to go walkabouts on the tracks you call me first.’

‘Deal,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

‘A big one,’ said Kumar.

The Murder Team was bound to ask why I hadn’t statemented Ryan Carroll while I had him there in front of me at the Tate Modern, so I generated a memo indicating that I’d been called away to handle an aspect of a case exclusive to the Folly. Then I popped over to the training lab to get Nightingale to initial it.

When I got there Lesley had three, count them three, apples doing slow circuits in the air of the lab. Nightingale beckoned me over and, after barely glancing at the clipboard, signed the memo.

‘Excellent,’ Nightingale told Lesley, before turning to me and adding, ‘That’s what happens when you don’t allow yourself to become sidetracked and focus on the task at hand.’ Her hair was damp with sweat.

‘I see,’ I said and retreated to the open doorway before saying, ‘But can she make them explode?’ And ducked out of sight. Two of the apples slammed into the wall behind me at head height and the third actually made the right turn to whoosh past my ear and down the length of the corridor.

‘Missed,’ I called and hurried away before she reloaded. She was getting much better.

I sent off the copy of the form, duplicated everything four times and put the duplicates in a series of A4 envelopes, to stop them getting mixed up, and dumped them next to the fruit bowl ready to go back to AB. Then I went downstairs to the shooting range for my own workout.

For me, one of the weirdest things about magic was the way some formae went out of fashion. And a good example of this is aer, which strictly speaking is Latinised Greek and is pronounced ‘air’ and means – well – air. Once you’ve mastered it, and that took me six weeks, it gives you ‘purchase’ on the air in front of your body. But since there’s no actual physical way of measuring the effect, and believe me I tried, your master has to be present to tell you when you’ve got it right. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ve got a forma that’s tricky to do and has, apparently, no effect. It’s not hard to see why it went out of fashion, especially since it was clear by the eighteenth century that it was based on a completely erroneous theory of matter. Nightingale took the trouble to teach me aer because, combined with the equally tricky and out-of-fashion congolare, it creates a shield in front of my body. Both formae were developed by the Great Man, Isaac Newton, himself and have the trademark fiddliness that has led to generations of students writing variations of WTF in the margins of their primers.

‘Isn’t a shield useful?’ I’d asked.

‘There’s a much more effective fourth-order spell that creates a shield. But you’re at least two years from learning that,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m teaching you this against the chance that you may encounter the Faceless Man again. This should give you some protection from a fireball while you stage a tactical withdrawal.’

By which he meant run like fuck.

‘Will it stop a bullet?’ I had to ask.

Nightingale didn’t know the answer. So we bought an automatic paintball gun, attached it to a hopper feed and a compressor and mounted it on a tripod at the shooting end of the firing range. To start my training sessions I don my Met-Vest, my old school jockstrap and my standard issue riot helmet with face mask. Then I set the mechanical timer on the gun and walk up the range to stand at the target end. I always feel uncomfortable standing at the wrong end, which Nightingale said was just as it should be.

The timer was a relic of the fifties, a Bakelite mushroom with a dial like those on a safe except painted pink. It was old and flaky enough to add an exciting element of uncertainty to when it would ring. When it did, I cast the spell and the paintball gun would fire. Originally me and Nightingale had thought we’d have to jury-rig a mechanism to randomly vary the aim. But the gun jiggled so violently on its tripod that it produced a spread wide and random enough to satisfy the most exacting standards of the Imperial Marksmanship School.

Just as well, because the first time out the only paint-balls that didn’t hit my body were the ones that went wide to either side. I like to think I’ve made significant improvements since then, albeit from a low base, and could stop nine out of ten shots. But as Nightingale says, the tenth is the only one that counts. He also pointed out that the muzzle velocity of the paintball gun is about 300 feet per second and that of a modern pistol over a thousand, and it doesn’t sound any better when you translate it into SI units.

So just about every day I go down to the basement, take a deep breath and listen for the whir of the timer wind down to that terminal click and see if I can’t get rid of that troublesome outlier.

Whir, click, splat, splat, spat.

Thank god for my riot helmet – that’s all I’m going to say.

After lunch Zach came back with an address and an outstretched hand.

‘Get it off Nightingale,’ I said.

‘He said you had the rest,’ he said.

I pulled up my clip and gave him two fifty in twenties and tens. It was most of my clip. In return I got a piece of paper with a Brixton address and a phrase written on it.

‘I’m here to cut the grass,’ I read.

‘That’s the password,’ said Zach, counting his money.

‘Now I need a cashpoint,’ I said.

‘I’d buy you a drink,’ said Zach, waving the cash at me, ‘but all this is spoken for.’ He ran upstairs and grabbed his bag. But despite being that keen to leave the Folly, on his way back out he paused to shake my hand.

‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘But don’t take any offence if I sincerely hope that we don’t meet again. And give my regards to Lesley.’ He let go of my hand and darted out of the main entrance. I counted my fingers and then I patted myself down – just to be on the safe side.

Then I went to tell Lesley that we was up.

11 Brixton

The media response to unusual weather is as ritualised and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: ‘I can’t believe there’s so much snow.’ Then anger: ‘Why can’t I drive my car, why are the trains not running?’ Then blame: Why haven’t the local authorities gritted the roads, where are the snow ploughs, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can’t? This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling background moan, enlivened by occasional ‘Asylum Seekers Ate My Snow Plough’ headlines from the Daily Mail, that continues until the weather clears up. Luckily we were spared some of the repetition as the authorities narrowed down the source of the E. coli outbreak to a stall in Walthamstow market.

Slightly elevated temperatures and no fresh snow had turned the main roads into rivers of brown slush. I was getting the hang of winter driving, which mostly consisted of not going too fast and putting as much room between you and the average driver as humanly possible. Traffic was light enough for me to brave Vauxhall Bridge, but I went on via Oval and the Brixton Road just to be sure. We stopped short of Brixton proper and turned into Villa Road, which forms the northern boundary of Max Roach Park. The snow on the park was still almost white and littered with the half-melted remains of snowmen. We stopped on the park side and Lesley pointed to a terraced house halfway down the road.

‘That’s the one,’ she said.

It was late Victorian with a half basement, orthogonal bay windows and a narrow little front door designed to give the illusion of grand urban living to a new generation of aspirational lower middle class. The same people who would flock into the suburbs a generation or two later.

There was an arrow painted on to a piece of card that had gone curly with damp. It pointed down a set of iron stairs to the door into the half basement, what used to be the tradesmen’s entrance. The curtains in the bay windows were drawn and when we paused to listen we heard nothing from inside the house.

I rang the doorbell.

We waited for about a minute, stepping back to avoid the drips of snowmelt landing on our heads, and then the door opened to reveal a white girl in baggy trousers, braces and pink lipstick.

‘What you want?’ she asked.

I gave her the password. ‘We’ve come to cut the grass,’ I said.

‘Yeah, no motorcycle helmets, swords, spears, glamours and,’ she said, pointing at Lesley, ‘no masks – sorry.’

‘Do you want to wait in the car?’ I asked.

Lesley shook her head and unclipped her mask.

‘I’ll just bet you’re glad to get out of that,’ the girl said and led us into the flat.

It was your basic dingy basement flat. Despite the modern kitchen conversion and Habitat trim, the low ceiling and poor lighting made it seem pinched and mean. I glanced into the front room as we passed and saw that all the furniture had been neatly piled against the far wall. Heavy-duty power cables snaked out of the rooms and down the hallway. They were securely held down with gaffer tape and plastic safety bridges.

It got noticeably warmer the closer we got to the back door, so that by the time the girl held out her hand to accept our coats we were already half out of them. She took them into the back bedroom which had been filled with portable clothes racks – we even got tear-off raffle tickets as receipts.

‘You go out through the kitchen,’ said the girl.

We followed her instructions, opened the back door and stepped out into a crisp inexplicable autumn afternoon. The entire width and length of the back garden was filled with a scaffolding frame that rose until it was level with the roof of the house. Plank flooring was raised half a metre above the lawn. From there, ladders led upwards to ‘balconies’ constructed of scaffolding poles and more planking. The construct encompassed an entire tree and was enclosed in white plastic sheeting. Golden sunlight flooded down from above, from an HMI lighting balloon, I learnt later, which explained the cabling snaking up the scaffolding.

Trestle tables were ranged between the upright poles to form a line of makeshift booths along each side of the garden. I had a look at the first on the right, which sold books, antique hardbacks for the most part, individually wrapped in mylar and arranged face up in wooden trays. I picked up an eighteenth-century reprint of Méric Casaubon’s On Credulity and Incredulity in Things natural, civil and divine that looked very similar to the copy we had back at the Folly. Next to that I found another familiar book, a 1911 copy of Erasmus Wolfe’s Exotica, which was definitely hardcore ‘craft’ and judging from the stamp had been lifted from the Bodleian Library. I flicked through the book and memorised the security code to pass on to Professor Postmartin later. I replaced the book and smiled at the stallholder. He was a young man with ginger hair who appeared to be wearing a tweed suit that was twice as old as he was. He had pale blue eyes that flicked away nervously when I asked him whether he had a copy of the Principia.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of it but I’ve never even seen a copy.’

I said that was a pity and turned away – he was lying and he’d made me and Lesley as the filth.

‘Nightingale was right,’ I said to Lesley. ‘This is a nazareth.’

Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable readies. They don’t know you, you don’t know them – the only problem is where to meet. Every market needs its place and in London such illegal venues have been called nazareths since the eighteenth century. The goods on sale feed into the twilight economy of the street market, the second-hand shop and the man you met in the pub. There’s more than one, obviously, and they lurch around the city like a drunk banker on bonus day – you have to know someone who knows someone to find them. When things fall off the back of a lorry, a nazareth is where they end up.

This place, I suspected, was a nazareth for things that were a bit too odd to be travelling by lorry in the first place.

The next stall sold death masks done in the Roman style and cast in delicate porcelain so that placing a candle behind them would bring their features to flickering life.

‘Anyone famous?’ I asked the reassuringly modern goth girl who ran the stall.

‘That’s Aleister Crowley,’ she said pointing. ‘That’s Beau Brummell and that’s Marat – he got stabbed in the bath.’

I took her word for it, because they all looked the same to me. Still, I allowed my fingertips to brush the edge of the Crowley mask, but there wasn’t any vestigium. Fraudulent even in death.

‘God, listen to that,’ said Lesley.

I looked back at her. She had her head cocked to one side, a look of amusement on her face.

‘What?’

‘The music,’ she said. ‘They’re playing Selecter.’

‘Is that what this is?’ I asked. It just sounded like generic ska to me.

‘This is my dad’s music,’ she said. ‘If the next thing they play is Too Much Pressure then I’ll know they’re just working their way down his favourite play-list.’

The next song was Too Much Too Young. ‘The Specials,’ said Lesley. ‘Close enough.’

We checked the other stalls but didn’t find anything in the way of stoneware fruit bowls or statuary, though I did make note of a tarot deck imbued with enough vestigium to keep a family of ghosts in operation for a year.

‘Is it relevant to the case?’ asked Lesley.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Moving on,’ said Lesley.

‘Where to?’

Lesley pointed to the makeshift balconies above us.

I grabbed the ladder to the next level and gave it a shake. It was as securely fastened as a filing cabinet in a health and safety office. I went first. Halfway up I heard Lesley gasp. I stopped and asked what was wrong.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’

The next level up was obviously the pub. An entire section of the house’s back wall had been removed and replaced with hydraulic jacks. Between them was wedged a walnut counter top from which drinks were served by a trio of young women in black and white check dresses and Mary Quant haircuts. At the other end of the garden the lower branches of the tree had been draped with batik cloth and elaborately woven carpets to form a number of small alcoves in which cast-off garden furniture provided seating. Between the two ends were half a dozen platforms set at varying heights, each festooned with plant pots and mismatched chairs. There was only a scattering of customers, mostly white, unremarkably dressed but strangely difficult to look at – as if resisting my gaze.

I heard a whistle – loud, piercing, like someone signalling a sheep dog.

‘Somebody wants your attention,’ said Lesley.

I followed her gaze to an alcove at the far end of the garden where a woman with hair extensions of silver and electric blue was waving us over. It was Effra Thames. Tall and elongated like a wicked Jamaican girl who’d got on the wrong side of Willy Wonka, she had a narrow face, a rosebud mouth and eyes that slanted up at the corners. When she was sure that she had our attention she stopped waving, leaned back in her white plastic chair and smiled.

The platforms were connected by planks of wood laid between them. There were no safety rails and the planks bent alarmingly when you stepped on them. Needless to say, we took our time making our way across.

Next to Effra sat a large black man with a serious face and strong jaw. He stood politely as we approached and held out his hand. He wore a scarlet frock coat with tails and white facing and gold braid over a black T-shirt tucked into the belt of his winter camouflage trousers.

‘My name is Oberon,’ he said. ‘And you must be the famous Constable Grant that I have heard so much about.’ His accent was pure London but deeper, slower, older.

I shook his hand. It was large, rough-skinned, and there was just a flash of something. Gunpowder I thought, maybe pine needles, shouting, fear, exultation. He turned his attention to Lesley.

‘And the equally famous Constable May,’ said Oberon, and instead of shaking her hand lifted it to his lips. Some people can get away with stuff like that. I looked at Effra, who rolled her eyes in sympathy.

Once Oberon released Lesley’s hand I introduced her to Effra Thames, goddess of the River Effra, Brixton Market and the Peckham branch of the Black Beauticians Society.

‘Sit with us,’ said Effra. ‘Have a drink.’

My knees bent in an involuntary step towards the chair, but given that by this point just about every fricking one of the Thames sisters had tried the glamour on me at some time or other, the compulsion evaporated almost immediately. I pulled the chair out for Lesley instead, which earned me a strange look from her. Oberon smiled slyly and sipped his beer. ‘It’s a terrible habit she’s fallen into,’ he said and ignored a sharp look from Effra. ‘But it’s like that when you’re young and freshly minted.’

We took our seats opposite.

‘I shall buy this round,’ he said. ‘And on my oath as a soldier there shall be no obligation upon you and yours for this gift.’ He lifted his hand and clicked his fingers just once and a waitress turned towards us. ‘But you can get the next round in, though,’ he added.

The waitress skipped across the plank bridges to our platform without looking down, which was a neat trick for someone in white high-heeled sandals. Oberon ordered three ‘Macs’ and a Perrier.

‘Fleet says you’ve shown a sudden interest in the finer things in life,’ said Effra. ‘She was well startled to find you in the gallery last night, called me straight away and wouldn’t shut up about it.’ She laughed at my expression. ‘You’re thinking it’s south versus north London, aren’t you? That we don’t talk to each other? She’s my sister. I taught her to read.’

I love the Rivers, upstream or downstream, they like to chat and if you’re sensible you just keep your mouth shut and eventually they’ll tell you what you want to know.

‘And here you are in my ends,’ said Effra. ‘My manor.’

I shrugged.

‘It’s all our manor,’ said Lesley. ‘The whole bleeding city.’

Whatever Effra planned to say was cut short by the drinks arriving, three brown and one green bottle.

‘You’ll like this beer,’ said Oberon. ‘It’s from a micro-brewery in the States. The management brings it over a crate at a time.’ He handed the waitress a fifty. ‘Keep the change,’ he said. ‘It’s damned expensive, though.’

‘So are you king of the fairies?’ I asked Oberon.

He chuckled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My master fancied himself a man of the Enlightenment and a scholar and thus I was named Oberon. It was the practice in those days, many of my friends were called similar – Cassius, Brutus, Phoebe who truly was as beautiful as the sun, and of course Titus.’

I’d done the Middle Passage in year eight at school – I knew slave names when I heard them. I sipped the beer. It was thick and nutty and should have, I decided, been drunk at room temperature.

‘Where was this then?’ I asked.

‘New Jersey,’ said Oberon. ‘When I was a cowboy.’

‘And when was that?’ I asked.

‘Why are you here?’ asked Effra and gave Oberon such a look that even he couldn’t ignore. I winced in sympathy and his lips twitched but he didn’t dare smile.

I considered pushing it, but I was conscious of how hard Lesley was restraining herself from slapping me upside my head and yelling ‘focus’ in my ear. I showed Oberon and Effra a printed picture of the statue and another of the fruit bowl.

‘We’re trying to trace where these came from,’ I said.

Effra squinted. ‘The bowl looks handmade but the statue is a nineteenth-century knock-off of a Florentine Aphrodite by one of those gay Italians whose name escapes me. Not one of the biggies though, it’s competent but it’s not exactly inspiring. I remember I saw the full-size version in the Galleria dell’ Accademia. Still can’t remember the name of the artist.’

‘How come Fleet does the art galleries then?’ I asked.

‘Fleet is the one that goes on the radio but I’m the one with the BA in History of Art,’ said Effra.

‘Not that this is a source of bitterness, you understand,’ said Oberon.

‘I only did it because Mum insisted that we all get a degree and History of Art seemed liked the easiest,’ said Effra. ‘And you did a year in Italy.’

‘Meet any nice Italian rivers?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Effra with a sly smile. ‘But down South on the coast every other beach and inlet has a spirit sitting on a Vespa with a body like Adonis and a voice like the way you’d expect Robert De Niro to speak Italian, if he weren’t from New York. The Church never gets all the way to the toe of the boot Cristo si èfermato a Eboli and all that jazz.’ It was notable that Effra’s accent was shifting up and down the class scale at more or less random intervals.

‘Moving on,’ said Lesley.

‘The bowl looks like the stuff the Beales used to sell,’ said Oberon. ‘Empire Ware, Empire Pottery or some such name. It was supposed to be unbreakable and good for Darjeeling and darkest Africa.’

‘You want Hyacinth,’ said Effra. ‘She does the figurines.’

‘And where do we find Hyacinth?’ I asked.

Hyacinth, it turned out, was the goth girl running the stall with death masks. It was noticeable that attitudes towards us had changed while we’d been upstairs having a beer. The stallholders definitely had us pegged as Old Bill now, and the customers, of which there were many more by then, had obviously got the same memo. Not that anyone was surly and rude, instead we moved in our own little bubble of silence as the punters hurriedly shut up while we passed by. We kind of like surly and rude, by the way, because when people are busy being affronted they often forget to watch what they’re saying, which is why me and Lesley whipped out our warrant cards before asking Hyacinth about the statue.

‘You people don’t come here,’ she said.

‘Give us your official address,’ I said. ‘We’ll come visit you there.’

‘Or,’ said Lesley, ‘you could come down to the station and give a statement.’

‘You can’t make me,’ said Hyacinth.

‘Can’t we?’ I asked Lesley.

‘Trading without a licence,’ she said. ‘Criminal trespass, receiving stolen goods, wearing heavy black mascara in a built-up area.’

Hyacinth opened her mouth, but Lesley leaned forward until what was left of her nose was centimetres from Hyacinth’s.

‘Say something about my face,’ said Lesley. ‘Go on, I dare you.’

Code of the police – you always back your partner in public even when they’ve obviously gone insane – but that didn’t mean you had to be stupid about it.

‘Look, Hyacinth,’ I said in my I’m-the-reasonable-one voice. ‘The guy who bought the statue was murdered and we’re just interested in knowing whether there’s a connection or not. We’re not interested in anything else, I swear. Just tell us and we’ll get out of your face.’

Hyacinth deflated and held up her hands. ‘I got them off Kevin,’ she said.

‘Kevin who?’ asked Lesley, but I’d already started writing the capital N in my notebook when Hyacinth confirmed it.

‘Kevin Nolan,’ she said. ‘The wanker.’

‘Did he say where he got them from?’ asked Lesley.

‘Nobody ever says where they get their goods from,’ said Hyacinth. ‘And if they do say, you figure they’re lying.’

‘So what did Kevin Nolan say?’ I asked.

‘He said he got them from Mordor,’ she said.

‘Morden?’ asked Lesley. ‘What, in Merton?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Mordor as in “where the shadows lie” from Lord of the Rings.’

‘Is that the place with the volcano?’ asked Lesley.

‘Yes,’ said me and Hyacinth at the same time.

‘So probably not the source of the goods,’ said Lesley.

I was about to say something incredibly geeky when we felt the demon trap go off.

It came as a shock, a sensation like a machete being hacked into the side of a carcass, like biting an apple and tasting maggot, like the first time I’d met a dead body.

Last time I’d felt anything like this had been in the decaying grandeur of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau, when Nightingale had done his IED routine. It was so strong I could turn my head to face the direction it came from.

So could at least two thirds of the denizens of the nazareth, including Hyacinth. I couldn’t be certain, but I had a sick feeling that we were all facing across the river towards the City and Shakespeare Tower. Where Nightingale had gone to interview Woodville-Gentle.

‘Demon trap,’ I heard someone whisper. ‘Demon trap,’ it was repeated fearfully around the garden.

And then everybody turned to look expectantly at me and Lesley.

Lesley looked back with as much of a curled lip as her injuries would allow.

‘Oh, now you want the police,’ she said.

12 Barbican

when you need to get somewhere fast you go blues and twos. It’s just like TV. You turn on your siren and stick the spinner on the roof of your car so that the average driver knows to get the fuck out of the way. What they don’t show is that the spinner keeps falling off the roof and usually ends up dangling by its wire from the passenger window and that there’s always someone on the road in front of you who think the rules apply to someone else. A sheet of glass, a pile of empty boxes, an inexplicable fruit stall – I wish. I nearly rear-ended a BMW on Borough High Street and had to swerve around a Toyota with a Blind Driver on Board sticker in its rear window, but I had her up to sixty as we crossed London Bridge. There was a strange random gap in the traffic and we sailed over an iron-grey Thames in a weird bubble of peace.

Because I went via Moorgate we couldn’t see Shakespeare Tower, despite its height, until we were as close as Chiswell Street. I don’t know what I’d expected, streets littered with broken glass and fluttering paper, a gaping hole in the side of the block. We’d felt the concussion six kilometres away – surely there must be something. But we didn’t even find a police presence until we turned into the underground car park and found a City of London Police van waiting for us.

A uniformed sergeant clambered out of the van as we drew up.

‘Grant and May?’ he asked.

We showed our warrant cards and he said that we were expected and that Nightingale had said we’d know our way up to the flat.

‘He’s okay?’ I asked.

‘He looked just fine to me,’ said the sergeant.

Me and Lesley, being both English and police, managed to avoid any outward sign of the massive sense of relief we felt. Madame Teng would have been proud.

‘Be discreet on your way up,’ said the sergeant, ‘we haven’t had to evacuate yet and we don’t want to start a panic.’

We promised we’d be good and headed for the lifts. Along the way we passed a familiar fire-engine-red VW transporter with LFB livery and Fire Investigation Unit stencilled on its side.

‘That’ll be Frank Caffrey,’ I told Lesley. Ex Para, Nightingale’s contact in the Fire Brigade and, if necessary, head of the Folly’s own Armed Response Unit. Or, depending on which end of the barrel you were standing at, its very own extra-legal death squad.

He was waiting for us when the lift opened; a solid man with a broken nose, brown hair and deceptively mild blue eyes.

‘Peter,’ he said nodding. ‘Lesley. You got here fast.’

The lobby had been turned into a staging post for the forensics techs. Caffrey said they’d caught a break because the inhabitants of the other two flats on the floor were away for the Christmas holidays.

‘Cape Town,’ said Caffrey. ‘And St Gervais Mont-Blanc. All right for some, isn’t it? Good thing, too, otherwise we’d probably have to evacuate the whole tower.’ According to Frank if you evacuate one set of families from a block all the others will want to know why they weren’t evacuated too. But if you go and evacuate everyone as a precaution then a good quarter will refuse to leave their flats on principle. Plus, if you evacuate them you become responsible for finding them a safe haven and keeping them fed and watered.

‘Shouldn’t we evacuate them anyway?’ I asked as I suited up.

‘Your boss says there’s no secondary devices,’ said Frank. ‘That’s good enough for me.’

I really wished it was good enough for me.

‘Did he ever tell you what a demon trap was?’ asked Lesley.

‘I got the impression they were like a magical landmine but he never said how they worked. It’s probably more fourth-order stuff.’

‘Oh, strictly second order, I assure you,’ said Nightingale, who was standing in the doorway watching us. ‘Any fool can make a demon trap. It’s rendering them safe that takes skill.’

He beckoned; we followed.

It was even stuffier than on our first visit and there was a strong odour of spoiling fish. ‘Is that real?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Nightingale. ‘Salmon left out in the kitchen. A very bright young man estimated that it had been there since Monday evening.’

‘Which means they scarpered right after we interviewed them,’ said Lesley.

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.

I noticed something odd about the bookshelves in the hallway. ‘These are out of order,’ I said. ‘The O’Brians are mixed up with the Penguins.’ Somebody must have taken them all out and then put them all back, hurriedly and out of order. No – it was simpler than that, I saw. ‘They took out a block of Penguins and a block of the O’Brians but put them back the wrong way round.’

I lifted out the mismatched block and found nothing. Neither was there anything behind the second block of books. Well, obviously there was nothing there because whoever had moved the books had taken what was behind them. But if they’d been in a hurry? I started stripping books on either side until I found something. It was a 5 cc disposable syringe, empty but with the cap seal broken. I removed the cap and sniffed the needle to find a faint medicinal smell. Used and discarded, then. I showed it proudly to Nightingale and Lesley.

‘She was a nurse,’ said Lesley. ‘It could be legitimate?’

‘Then why is it hidden in the gap behind the books?’ I asked. ‘It’s not very secure, so it must be something she needed to access in a hurry.’

‘They’re on the higher shelves,’ said Lesley. ‘Out of reach of someone in a wheelchair. So not for him.’

I sniffed it again, to no avail. ‘I wonder if it’s a sedative?’ I said. ‘Perhaps our Russian nurse was there to do more than look after him?’

I put the syringe back where I’d found it.

Lesley pointed down the corridor behind me where a couple of men and women in noddy suits were systematically pulling books off shelves and checking carefully for voids and hiding places.

‘You do know the search team would have found it,’ said Lesley.

‘It’s not good to become reliant on specialists,’ I said.

‘Hear hear,’ said Nightingale.

‘And we’re not specialists?’ asked Lesley.

‘We’re indispensable,’ I said. ‘That’s what we are.’

We had to wait while a couple more techs finished up in the living-room area before we could go in. Nightingale, despite being vacuum-packed in an earlier era, had taken to advances in forensic science like a man who knew a magic bullet when he saw one. He might be hazy about what DNA actually was, but he understood the concept of trace evidence and took everything else on trust.

Actually I tried to explain DNA fingerprinting to him once, but found I had to look most of it up myself. The biology I could understand. It was the various probability calculations that stuffed me – they always do. I’d have been a bad scientist.

Once the techs were out, Nightingale led us inside, making us aware of the circle of blue police tape surrounding a burnt patch on the carpet and the numbered tags scattered around the room.

‘I brought you two here,’ said Nightingale, ‘because I wanted you to have experience of this while the vestigium was strong enough to be identified.’

He had us close our eyes and think about nothing, which is, of course, impossible. But it was from that jumble of random thoughts that you picked out the uncanny. In this case the vestigium was quite startling, like a shrieking voice, almost but not quite human. Like when cats fight outside your window and for a moment you can swear it’s a person screaming. Not once you’ve been police for any length of time, though – you soon learn to tell the difference.

‘Screaming,’ I said.

‘Is that a ghost?’ asked Lesley.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Nightingale.

‘A demon?’ I asked.

‘In the biblical sense of a fallen angel no,’ said Nightingale. ‘But it can be thought of as a spirit that has been driven into a state of malevolence.’

‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

‘Torture some poor soul to death,’ said Nightingale. ‘And then trap the spirit at the point of death.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Weaponised ghosts?’

‘The Germans invented this,’ said Lesley. ‘Didn’t they?’

‘Not invented,’ said Nightingale. ‘Refined perhaps. We believed that the technique is actually very old and originated in Scandinavia during the first millennia.’

‘Vikings,’ said Lesley.

‘Precisely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Bloodthirsty, but surprisingly erudite in a limited fashion.’

Well that made sense, what with those long winter nights, I thought. Once you’d exhausted the possibilities of drinking, feasting and wenching, torturing someone slowly to death probably helped break the monotony.

Nightingale handed me a stick.

‘I want you to bang gently on the carpet and find the edges of the device,’ said Nightingale. ‘Lesley can mark the outside with this.’ He handed her a piece of chalk.

The stick was thirty centimetres long, knobbly and still covered in bark. It looked like something you might pick up while walking in the woods with a small annoying dog.

‘Very high-tech,’ I said.

Nightingale frowned at me. ‘Wood is best,’ he said. ‘The greener and younger the better. Pull a branch off a sapling if you can. Much less likely to set it off.’

My mouth went dry. ‘But this one isn’t live,’ I said. ‘Is it? You disarmed it?’

‘Not disarmed,’ said Nightingale. ‘Discharged and dissipated – think of it as a controlled explosion.’

One that we’d ‘heard’ all the way across the river in Brixton.

‘But it’s inert now?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But it was common for these devices to have two separate components, one to cause the initial damage and a second to catch any rescuers or medical teams.’

‘So be careful,’ said Lesley.

I thumped the carpet a safe distance from the burn mark just to get a feel for what the normal floor surface felt like – concrete decking with a layer of hard insulator on top if I was any judge. I worked the stick back towards the centre until I felt it come down on something unmistakably metallic.

I froze.

‘Find the edge,’ said Nightingale.

I forced myself to backtrack until I was tapping concrete again. Lesley marked the spot with the chalk. I worked my way around the edge – it seemed to match the circular burn on the carpet but Nightingale said that you could never take that for granted. Once we’d established that there were no trigger pads outside the burnt area Nightingale handed Lesley a Stanley knife and we watched as she cut out a square of carpet and peeled it away.

The demon trap was a disc of metal the size of a riot shield, the kind you use for snatch arrests. The metal was a dull silver and looked like stainless steel. At the centre two circles had been incised side by side. One circle was filled with a glittering sand that reminded me of what happened to microprocessors when they were exposed to magic.

‘I’m guessing that the empty one is the first component,’ I said.

‘Top marks, Peter,’ said Nightingale.

‘So the intact circle is the second component,’ I said.

‘What we call a double-boss device,’ said Nightingale.

‘What’s this scratched into the edge?’ asked Lesley.

I looked where she was pointing and saw that there were marks etched neatly around the rim of the disc. Nightingale explained that they’d often found runic inscriptions on demon traps and the theory was that in the original Viking designs the runes had been part of the enchantment.

‘Like the Daoists?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ said Nightingale. ‘Comparative thaumatology is a discipline still in its infancy.’

This was a familiar Nightingale joke – meaning that I was the only one currently interested in it.

‘We spent a great deal of effort having the runes translated only to find it was mostly insults – “die English scum,” that sort of thing,’ said Nightingale. ‘Sometimes the messages were more ambiguous – “this is not a moral argument” was one of my favourites and of course there was the unknown craftsman who wrote “Greetings from Ettersberg”.’

‘What did that mean?’

‘Come and put me out of my misery,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or so we interpreted it. They’d conscripted a lot of practitioners from all over Europe, many couldn’t face what they were being made to do, some suicided, some suffered from a strange illness where they just stopped eating and wasted away. Others were tougher, undertook acts of sabotage or tried to contact the outside world. It must been a desperate hope that someone would hear them.’

‘And somebody did,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘We did.’

I recognised the markings and they weren’t Nordic runes.

‘This is Elvish script,’ I said.

‘I doubt that,’ said Nightingale.

‘Not real elves,’ I said, wondering if there were such a thing. ‘Elves as in Lord of the Rings elves, Tolkien. He developed his own language and alphabet for his books.’

‘This is all very interesting, boys,’ said Lesley. ‘And much as I like hanging around lethal devices, I haven’t had my dinner yet – so can we get on with the IED.’

‘IDD,’ I said. ‘Improvised Demonic Device.’

‘It doesn’t look improvised, anyway,’ said Lesley. ‘It looks custom-built.’

‘When you two are quite finished,’ said Nightingale.

Lesley looked outraged but kept her mouth shut.

Nightingale pointed at the empty boss. ‘This one was primed to go off at the first use of formal magic inside the flat,’ he said. ‘I think it was deliberately left behind to kill either of you two. Fortunately it was me that triggered it and I had time to contain and dissipate the effect.’

‘Or what would have happened?’ I asked.

‘It would have killed me certainly,’ said Nightingale. ‘And anyone in the flat with me. And probably would have shortened the life of anyone within twenty yards of here.’

I opened my mouth to ask what the deaths would have looked like, but Lesley silenced me with a glare – it’s impressive how much expression she can project out of those eye holes.

‘Luckily this is a nice modern building made of concrete,’ said Nightingale. ‘Not much in the way of vestigium in situ and concrete’s very absorbent. I’m going to channel the demon into the structure around us, much more slowly than I did with the first one. The spell I do will be far too fast for you to follow but I want you two to concentrate on the nature of the demon – that might give us a lead as to where it came from.’

Nightingale took a deep breath and in a weirdly ecclesiastical gesture brought two fingers down towards the second boss – he paused with his fingertips hovering above the metal.

‘This may be somewhat unpleasant,’ he said and pressed his fingers down.

Fucking major fucking understatement.

We didn’t throw up, pass out or burst into tears, but it was a close thing.

‘Well?’ asked Nightingale, who was obviously made of sterner stuff.

‘A dog, sir,’ said Lesley hoarsely. ‘Pitbull, Rottweiler, some ugly bastard thing like that.’

The second boss had crumbled into sand and one part of my brain was wondering whether that was the same phenomena that kept destroying my phones. And the other part of my brain was screaming that I was never going to eat meat again.

There had been blood and pain and mad exultation and concrete walls and rotting straw and then it started to drain away, exactly the way a nightmare does on waking. Leaving the memory of terror unwinding in your stomach.

‘Dog fight,’ I said.

I got to my feet a little unsteadily and helped Lesley to hers. Nightingale sprang up, his face as angry as I’ve ever seen him.

‘He used a dog,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I approve of that at all.’

‘At least it wasn’t a human being this time,’ said Lesley.

‘Is it safe to take samples?’ I asked.

Nightingale said yes, so I borrowed a couple of tamper bags from the forensics techs, who I noticed hadn’t felt a thing, and bagged samples from each of the bosses. Then I switched my phone on and took pictures of the script around the edges.

‘Did the Germans ever use dogs?’ I asked.

‘Not that we know of,’ said Nightingale. ‘But then they had an unlimited supply of people.’

‘Do you think he was connected to the Faceless Man?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I think he may have been the original,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s certainly the right age to be the man who decapitated Larry the Lark and established the place in Soho.’

‘He looked like he might be a stroke victim to me,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe he overdid the magic. That would explain why he dropped out of sight.’

The Faceless Man I’d met, the one who had effortlessly kicked me around the rooftops of Soho, had been young, I was sure of it, in his thirties at most. If Wood-ville-Gentle had gone into medical retirement in the 1970s when his successor was still in short trousers then that would explain the gap. Nightingale agreed.

‘But I do wonder what the connection between them is,’ he said.

‘The connection could be anything,’ I said. ‘Family, apprentice, someone he ran into at the bus stop.’

‘I think we can discard that last one,’ said Nightingale.

‘But now we know one end of the connection,’ said Lesley. ‘We can track him through his medical records, through that Russian nurse’s immigration status, the syringes, the money trail from this flat. Now that we have a name to work with – that could take us anywhere.’

It’s going to take us there bloody cautiously,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s obvious to me that the demon trap was left here to kill you and Peter should you have made a return visit. Follow the paper trail by all means but from now on there will be no more direct encounters with potential Little Crocodiles without me present. Is that understood?’

Strangely, neither Lesley or I rejected this change in strategy. There’s nothing like a brush with death to instil caution in a person. Nightingale, no doubt perfectly aware that he had made his point, sent us home. But I wasn’t ready for the quiet of the Folly just yet.

‘Do you want to go to the pub?’ I asked as we were going down in the lift. ‘We haven’t gone out drinking in ages.’

‘There might be a reason for that,’ said Lesley tapping the mouth hole of her mask.

‘So use a straw,’ I said.

How could she say no?

‘Where are we going?’ asked Lesley as we sped down the Embankment.

‘I thought we’d go to the AB local,’ I said.

Lesley jerked. ‘You … bastard,’ she said.

‘They want to know how you are,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to … meet them sooner or later.’

‘You were going to say “face them” weren’t you?’

‘Face them,’ I said. ‘Yes, face them. And more importantly neither of us will have to pay for our drinks all night.’

13 Sloane Square

Quite simply, to be police is to drink. Unless you’re DC Guleed of course, in which case to be police is to learn how to be sociable amongst a bunch of drunk colleagues. It starts when you’re an ordinary PC, because after twelve hours of having the general public wind you up, you need something at the end of the day to wind you down. If marijuana was legal the first thing my generation of coppers would do after knocking off would be to light up a spliff of unusual size but, since it isn’t, we go to the pub instead. It was only after I’d sunk my first pint that I realised I was going to be designated driver that night and thus it was I who was playing the role of virtuous abstainer.

The AB local was your classic Victorian corner pub that was hanging on to its traditional ambience by the skin of its teeth, and the fact that it wasn’t fronting the main road. It wasn’t totally overrun by police but it really wouldn’t have been a good place for a random member of the public to pick a pocket or start a fight. You could tell lower ranks because the suits were from D&C and Burtons while senior officers splashed out on bespoke – it wasn’t just that they could afford it, it was also because they were less likely to get random bodily fluids on it.

Seawoll was holding court at one end of the bar and putting them away in the sure and safe knowledge that his most competent DI, Stephanopoulos, was running the case. When he spotted Lesley he beckoned her over. When I moved to follow he stopped me with a raised finger. Lesley had always been his favourite. Still, he sent that first and only pint down the bar to me, so the evening at least got off to the right start.

A dark-haired DC with pale skin whose name I can’t remember sidled over with DC Carey in tow. She wanted to know whether it was true I worked for the Folly or not and, when I said yes, she wanted to know whether magic was real or not.

I told her that while there was a lot of really strange shit around, magic, doing spells and the like, didn’t really exist. I’d taken to giving this explanation to random inquiries ever since Abigail, junior ghost hunter extraordinaire, had taken my flippant confirmation and run with it.

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘I always thought that reality was overrated.’ And shortly after that she drifted off with Carey bobbing behind like a sadly neglected balloon.

She’ll miss him if she lets go and he drifts off, I thought.

I looked over to where Seawoll was making Lesley laugh. She was holding a straight glass full of multicoloured alcohol from which protruded two lemon slices, a paper parasol and a bendy straw. Since she was occupied, I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to get an update on the case. There are three basic ways to get yourself up to speed on an ongoing case. One is to log into HOLMES and work your way down the action list, reading statements, evaluating forensic reports and following the investigation tree to see where each branch leads. The primary advantage of this technique is, if you have a terminal at home, you can do it while eating pizza and drinking beer. The second involves gathering your team around a table somewhere and getting each of them to outline their progress so far. Often a white board is involved or – if you’re really unlucky – PowerPoint. The principal advantage of the meeting is that, if you happen to be the Senior Investigating Officer, you can look your subordinates in the eye and tell if they’re talking bollocks or not. The disadvantage is that, beyond about half an hour, everyone around the table below the rank Chief Superintendent will begin to slip into a coma.

The third way is to catch up with the investigation team when they’re in the pub. And the big advantage of the pub ambush, beyond the easy availability of alcohol and salted peanuts, is that nobody wants to talk about the case and in their haste to get rid of you they will boil down their role in the investigation to a sentence. Thus: ‘We did a joint evaluation of video evidence encompassing all possible access points in conjunction with BTP and CLP and despite widening the parameters of our assessment to include registered and non-registered cameras in the high-probability zones we have as yet to achieve a positive identification of James Gallagher prior to his appearance at Baker Street,’ becomes ‘We’ve checked every CCTV camera in the system and it’s as if the fucker beamed down from the Starship Enterprise.’

Accurate, concise – unhelpful. His fellow students thought he was boring, his lecturers thought he was talented but boring and those locals he interacted with thought he was pleasant, respectful and boring. The only interesting things about James Gallagher were periodic gaps in his timeline starting in late September where his movements couldn’t be accounted for.

‘But that could be him going clubbing,’ commented the DC who told me. ‘You always get gaps, and mine’s a pint if you’re getting them in.’

I got them in all night but what I got out was pretty much nothing except to find there was an upper limit to the amount of orange juice I can drink. I was just wondering whether I could risk another pint when Seawoll beckoned me over and I suddenly became very glad I was sober.

Lesley was as pissed as I’ve ever seen her.

‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I have to powder what’s left of my nose.’

Seawoll winced as he watched her stagger off in the direction of the loos then he turned his attention to me.

‘She was the best of your generation,’ he said. ‘And you broke her.’

Between growing up with my mum, for whom tact is the blue stuff you use to put posters up, and my dad, who prided himself on being your plain-speaking cockney geezer, particularly when his ‘medicine’ was late, I’m pretty immune to the hard stare. Still it wasn’t easy to meet Seawoll’s gaze – and I’ve stared down Molly.

‘But that is as it may be,’ he said, ‘We’re fucking nowhere with this case and it’s got that nasty smell that I’ve come to associate with you and that well dressed piece of shit you work for.’

I bit my lip and waited. He was pushing, I wondered why.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

Strangely, this made him smile. ‘I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment,’ he said. ‘But what I want mostly is a way of getting through this case with a minimum of paperwork, property damage and an actual suspect I can arrest and send up the fucking stairs.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ I said.

‘You know the Covent Garden beheading has never been officially cleared,’ he said. ‘That’s a dent in my clear-up rate, Peter, not yours, because you don’t have a fucking clear-up rate do you?’ He leaned forward. I leaned back. ‘I’ve got a very good clear-up rate, Peter, I’m very proud of it and so at the end of this case I expect there to be a collar – preferably one attached to a human being.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘You do know when to keep your mouth shut,’ said Seawoll. ‘I’ll give you that much. What are your actions for tomorrow?’

‘I’m going to follow Kevin Nolan and see if I can’t establish what his connection with James Gallagher was,’ I said.

‘You’re sure there’s a connection?’

They were both dealing in magic pottery, I didn’t say.

‘You don’t want to know, sir,’ I said. ‘But with luck we can connect them in a more tangible way.’

‘I want you to write up the action plan properly and file it first thing with the case manager,’ said Seawoll. ‘If you get a connection we can use, you call Stephanopoulos immediately and we ramp up the surveillance. No going off on your own – understand?’

There was a crash as a door slammed open and a high-pitched laugh.

Lesley lurched out of the loos, pulled herself up into a semblance of dignity, and looked around in vague puzzlement before fixing on me and Seawoll.

‘Oh dear,’ said Seawoll. ‘Will you look at the state of that? About time you took her home, son.’ He waved at me imperiously and I scuttled off to do his bidding.

Lesley wasn’t so drunk that she didn’t think to check my fitness to drive.

‘I’m definitely below the limit,’ I said as I poured her into the passenger seat and closed the door.

‘Why aren’t you drunk?’ she asked. It had grown cold out while we were in the pub and the inside of the Asbo was freezing – my breath steamed as I leaned over to buckle Lesley in.

‘Because I’m driving,’ I said.

‘You’re so boring,’ she said. ‘You’d think a copper who was a wizard would be more interesting. Harry Potter wasn’t this boring. I bet Gandalf could drink you under the table.’

Probably true, but I don’t remember the bit where Hermione gets so wicked drunk that Harry has to pull the broomstick over on Buckingham Palace Road just so she can be sick in the gutter. Once she wiped her mouth with the napkins I’d so boringly kept in the glove compartment against such an eventuality, she resumed by pointing out that Merlin had probably had something to teach me about the raising of the wrist.

I would have been subjected to a longer list except Lesley had grown up reading Sophie Kinsella and Helen Fielding and so she ran out of fictional wizards at Severus Snape and our journey home continued in relative quiet.

By the time I’d parked in the Folly’s garage Lesley had gone from belligerent to my best mate. She flopped against me and I felt her breasts squashing against my chest as her arm snaked around my waist. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she mumbled. I was hard enough to make me glad I wasn’t wearing jeans. It certainly didn’t make manoeuvring her through the snow to the back door any easier.

I tried to prop her against the wall while I fumbled for my keys but she kept flopping against me. ‘I could leave the mask on,’ she said. ‘Or wear a paper bag.’

Her hand found my erection and gave it a delighted squeeze. I yelped and dropped the keys. ‘Look what you made me do,’ I said.

‘Never mind that,’ said Lesley and tried to get her hand inside my fly.

I jumped back and she started to sag slowly into the snow. I had to throw both my arms around her to try to hoist her back up, but all I managed to do was half pull both her jumper and blouse off.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘I’m up for it if you are.’

The back door opened to reveal Molly, who looked at me, then at Lesley and then back at me.

‘It’s not what you think it is,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’ asked Lesley as she staggered upright. ‘Shit.’

‘Let us in, Molly I want to get her into bed,’ I said.

Molly gave me a poisonous look as I half dragged Lesley inside.

‘Well, you put her to bed then,’ I said.

So she did. Molly just reached out and plucked Lesley from my arms and slung her over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes, only with much less effort than I’d have had to use on a sack of potatoes. Then she slowly turned on the spot and went gliding off into the long shadows of the atrium.

Toby, who’d obviously been waiting until the coast was clear, bounced out of the door to see if I’d brought him a present.

I headed back to the coach house to do some police work – which is, trust me, better than a cold shower.

First thing, I took the image of the Elvish script from the demon trap and ran it through Photoshop, using contrast and edge finding to clarify the letters and more importantly disguise where they came from. Then I put it out onto the great and varied social media sea with a request for a translation. While I waited, I wrote the formal action plan for Seawoll, no doubt snoring boozily in his bed by now, and emailed it to the Inside Inquiry Team.

The Tolkien scholars were obviously slow off the mark that night so I did a preliminary search on Empire Ware and Empire Pottery and got a lot of links to the Empire Porcelain Company of the North Staffordshire potteries. It was nice enough stuff but not only was it from the wrong end of the country, it had ceased trading in the late 1960s – yet was nonetheless considered eminently collectible. It wasn’t until I got past page 36 that I caught a glimpse of what I was looking for: The Unbreakable Empire Pottery Company, established 1865. I changed my search but all I got was a paragraph from an expired Ebay auction. Further research was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way – by sending an email to the SO11 and requesting an Integrated Intelligence Platform check. I referenced OPERATION MATCHBOX and gave my warrant number, making it all slick and official. By the time I’d finished that there were three translations of the Elvish in my inbox.

Bomb disposal experts talk about the bombmaker’s signature, the telltale flourishes that distinguish one mass murderer from another. But identification is so much easier when they just write their name in crayon. I recognised the Faceless Man’s particular sense of humour. The transcription read in English:

IF YOU CAN READ THESE WORDS THEN YOU ARE NOT ONLY A NERD BUT PROBABLY DEAD.