If my profession — that’s thief catcher, not wizard — could be said to have started anywhere in London, then it started in Bow Street with Henry Fielding, magistrate, satirical author and founder of what came to be known as the Bow Street Runners. His house was right next door to the Royal Opera House, back when it was just the Theatre Royal and Macklin was supplementing his gin-running activities with a bit of acting on the side. I know all this because Channel 4 did a TV drama about it starring the bloke who played the Emperor in the Star Wars films. When Henry Fielding died, his position as magistrate was taken by his blind younger brother John, who strengthened the Bow Street Runners further but evidently not to the point where they could stop Macklin beating Henry Pyke to death practically on their doorstep. No wonder Henry was pissed off. I know I would be. It became London’s first true police station, and in the nineteenth century it moved across the road and became the Bow Street Magistrates Court — probably the most famous court in Britain after the Old Bailey. Oscar Wilde was sent down there for being a public nuisance, and William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw himself, started his short walk to the hangman’s noose from Bow Street. The Kray twins were remanded there for the murder of Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie. It was sold in 2006 to a land magnate who turned it into a hotel because while history and tradition have a fine voice in London, money has a sweet siren song all its own. The original house had been replaced by an indoor flower market with an arched iron and glass roof. Eliza Doolittle, as played by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, would have bought her violets there before moving off to display the worst cockney accent this side of Dick Van Dyke. When they rebuilt the Royal Opera House in the 1990s it swallowed up most of the surrounding block, including the flower market. Which was why we found ourselves round the backstage entrance of the Opera House where, apparently, Nightingale knew a guy who could get us in. It wasn’t so much a stage door as a heavy-goods entrance. I’ve seen warehouses with smaller loading bays, and there was an industrial-sized lift for getting enormous scenery palettes from floor to floor. Terry, a balding little man in a beige cardigan — Nightingale’s guy on the inside — said that they weighed upwards of fifteen tons, and when they weren’t being used were stored in a depot in Wales — he didn’t say why it had to be Wales. ‘We’ve come to see the Magistrate,’ said Nightingale. Terry nodded gravely and led us through a series of narrow, white-painted corridors and HSE-specified fire doors that reminded me of uncomfortably of West-minster Mortuary. We finished up in a low-ceilinged storeroom that Nightingale assured us was the ground floor of the flower market. ‘Directly where the parlour of Number Four once stood,’ he said, and turned to our guide. ‘Don’t worry, Terry, we can see ourselves out.’ Terry gave us a cheery wave and left. The room was lined with ugly steel and hardboard shelving stuffed with cardboard boxes and delivery wraps full of napkins, cocktail sticks and packs of a dozen serving trays. The centre of the room was empty, with just a few scuff marks to show where a line of shelves had once stood. I tried to feel for vestigia but all I got at first was dust and ripped plastic. Then I sensed it, right on the edge of perception: parchment, old sweat, leather and spilled port. ‘A ghost magistrate,’ I said. ‘To provide a ghost warrant?’ ‘Symbols have power over ghosts,’ said Nightingale. ‘They often have more effect than anything we can bring to bear from the physical world.’ ‘Why’s that?’ ‘To be honest, Peter,’ said Nightingale, ‘I remember the class where we studied it and I know I read the relevant passages in Bartholomew — I may even have written an essay, but I’m damned if I remember any of the why.’ ‘How are you planning to teach me this stuff if you don’t know it yourself?’ Nightingale gently tapped his cane against his chest. ‘I was going to refresh my memory before we got to that part of your education,’ he said. ‘I know at least two of my Masters who did the same thing, and back then we had specialist teachers.’ I realised suddenly that Nightingale was looking for reassurance, which I found extremely worrying. ‘Just make sure you stay ahead of me,’ I said. ‘How do we find the Magistrate?’ Nightingale smiled. ‘We just need to get his attention,’ he said. He turned and addressed the empty centre of the room. ‘Captain Nightingale to see the Colonel.’ The smell of old sweat and spilled drink grew stronger, and a figure appeared in front of us. This ghost seemed more transparent than my old friend Wall-penny, thinner and more ghostly, but his eyes glittered as they turned on us. Sir John Fielding had worn a black bandage to hide his blind eyes, and Nightingale had called on the ‘Colonel’, so my guess that this was Colonel Sir Thomas de Veil — a man so routinely corrupt that he managed to shock eighteenth-century London society, generally considered by historians to be the most corrupt in the history of the British Isles. ‘What do you want, Captain?’ asked De Veil. His voice was thin and distant, and around him I could sense rather than see the faint outlines of furniture: a desk, a chair, a bookcase. Legend had it that De Veil had a special private closet where he conducted ‘judicial examinations’ of female witnesses and suspects. ‘I’m looking for a warrant,’ said Nightingale. ‘On the usual terms?’ asked De Veil. ‘Of course,’ said Nightingale. He drew a roll of heavy paper from his jacket pocket and proffered it to De Veil. The ghost reached out a transparent hand and plucked it from Nightingale’s fingers. For all that he did it casually, I was certain that the effort of moving a physical object must be costing De Veil something. The laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject — all debts must be paid in full. ‘And which miscreant are we looking to apprehend?’ asked De Veil, and placed the paper on the transparent desk. ‘Henry Pyke, Your Honour,’ said Nightingale. ‘Who goes by the name of Punch, and also by the name of Pulcinella.’ De Veil’s eyes glittered and his lips twitched. ‘Are we arresting puppets now, Captain?’ ‘Let us say that we are arresting the puppet master, Your Worship,’ said Nightingale. ‘And the charge?’ ‘Murder of his wife and child,’ said Nightingale. De Veil tilted his head. ‘Was she a shrew?’ he asked. ‘I beg your pardon, Your Worship?’ said Nightingale. ‘Come now, Captain,’ said De Veil. ‘No man strikes his wife without provocation — was she a shrew?’ Nightingale hesitated. ‘A most terrible shrew,’ I said. ‘Begging Your Worship’s pardon. But the babe was an innocent.’ ‘A man can be driven to terrible acts by the tongue of a woman,’ said De Veil. ‘As I can testify for myself.’ He winked at me and I thought, nice, there’s an image that will never fade. ‘However, the babe was innocent and for this he must be arrested and brought before his peers.’ A quill appeared in De Veil’s ghostly hand, and with a flourish he scratched out a warrant. ‘I trust you’ve remembered the prerequisite,’ said De Veil. ‘My constable will take care of the formalities,’ said Nightingale. Which was news to me. I looked to Nightingale who made the Lux gesture with his right hand. I nodded to show that I understood. De Veil made a show of blowing the ink dry before rolling the warrant into a tube and handing it back to Nightingale. ‘Thank you, Your Worship,’ he said, and then to me: ‘In your own time, Constable.’ I created a werelight and floated it over to De Veil, who cupped it gently in his right hand. Although I was still maintaining the spell the light dimmed as, I presumed, De Veil sucked up the magic. I kept it going for a minute before Nightingale made a cutting motion with his hand and I ended the spell. De Veil sighed as the light faded and nodded his thanks to me. ‘So little,’ he said wistfully, and vanished. Nightingale handed me the roll of paper. ‘You are now duly warranted,’ he said. I unrolled the warrant and found, as I had suspected, that the paper was still blank. ‘Let’s go and arrest Henry Pyke,’ said Nightingale. Once we were well clear of the storeroom I slapped the battery back into the Airwave handset and called up Lesley. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ she said. ‘We’re quite happy to be waiting around for you to get your finger out.’ Behind her I could hear voices, glasses and Dusty Small’s latest single. I didn’t have any sympathy; she was in the pub. I suggested that it might be time for her and the rest of the back-up team to go on standby. Police work is all about systems and procedures and planning — even when you’re hunting a supernatural entity. When me, Nightingale, Seawoll, Stephanopoulos and Lesley worked out the details of the operation it took less than fifteen minutes because what we were doing was a standard identify, contain, track and arrest. It was my job to identify Henry Pyke’s latest victim. Once I’d done that, Nightingale would do his magic trick and track Henry’s spirit back to his grave. Seawoll’s people would provide containment in case things went pear-shaped, while Dr Walid stood by with a mobile trauma team to help any poor bastard who had the bad luck to have their face fall off. Meanwhile, DS Stephanopoulos was ready with a van full of builders on time and a half and, I found out later, a mini-JCB to dig up the grave wherever they might find it. She had another van full of uniformed bodies to handle crowd control in case Henry Pyke turned out to be buried under something inconveniently populated such as a pub or a cinema. Seawoll was technically in charge of the whole thing, which I’m sure put him in a wonderful mood. Everything was supposed to be in place by the time Nightingale and I emerged from the Royal Opera House’s stage door and stepped back on to Bow Street. Given that Henry Pyke was beaten to death by Charles Macklin less than ten metres up the road, we both figured that this would be the ideal spot to start our little fishing expedition. Reluctantly I opened my carryall and donned my uniform jacket and my bloody stupid helmet. For the record, we all hate the bloody helmet, which is useless in a fight and makes you look like a blue biro with the top still on. The only reason we’re still wearing it is because the alternative designs all seem to be worse. Still, if I was going to act the part of a constable, I supposed I’d better look like one. It was coming up to midnight, and the last of that evening’s opera devotees had trickled out of the House and headed for the tube station and taxi stands. Bow Street was as quiet and empty as any street in central London ever gets. ‘You’re sure you can track him?’ I asked. ‘You do your bit,’ he said, ‘and I’ll do mine.’ I tightened the strap on my helmet and checked in with the Airwave. This time I got Seawoll, who told me to stop faffing around and get on with it. I turned to ask whether I looked the part, which is how I came to be looking straight at the man in the good suit when he stepped out of the shadows by the stage door and shot Nightingale in the back.
Chapter 10
The Blind Spot
He was a middle-aged white man in a good-quality but otherwise nondescript bespoke suit. He held what looked like a semi-automatic pistol in his right hand and a Kobbé’s opera guide in his left. He wore a white carnation in his buttonhole. Nightingale fell down quickly. He just slipped to his knees and flopped forward onto his face. He let go of his cane and it rattled on the paving stones. The man in the good suit looked at me, his eyes pale and colourless in the sodium light of the streetlamps, and winked. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ he said. You can run away from a man with a handgun, especially in poor lighting conditions, provided you remember to zigzag and can open the range fast enough. I’m not saying that option wasn’t tempting, but if I ran then there was nothing to stop the gunman from stepping forward and shooting Nightingale in the head. I was trained to placate the gunman while edging backwards; talking establishes a rapport and keeps the suspect’s focus on the officer so that the civilians can get clear. Ever see The Blue Lamp with Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde? During our training at Hendon, they made us watch the scene where PC Dixon, Warner’s character, is shot dead. The film was written by an ex-copper who knew what he was talking about. Dixon dies because he’s a dinosaur who stupidly advances on an armed suspect. Our instructors were clear: don’t crowd, don’t threaten, keep talking and backing away, a suspect has to be particularly stupid, political or, in one memorable case, protected by diplomatic immunity to think that killing a police officer will in any way make their situation any better. At the very least you’re buying enough time for an armed response team to arrive and blow the silly bugger’s head off. I didn’t think that backing off was an option. This was one of Henry Pyke’s sequestrated puppets, and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me or Nightingale no matter how calmly I was talking. To be honest, I didn’t think at all. My brain went: Nightingale down — gun — spell! ‘Impello! ’ I said as calmly as I could, and levitated the man’s left foot one metre in the air. He screamed as his body was catapulted upwards and to the right. I must have lost concentration because I heard the distinct crack of a bone breaking in his ankle. The gun fell out of his hand and his arms flailed as he tumbled to the ground. I stepped forward and kicked the gun down the street, then kicked him once in the head, hard, just to make sure. I should have cuffed him, but Nightingale was lying in the road behind me making wet breathing sounds. It was what they call a ‘sucking chest wound’, and they’re not being metaphorical in their description. There was an entry wound ten centimetres below Nightingale’s right shoulder, but at least when I gently rolled him on his side I couldn’t find an exit wound. My first-aid training was unequivocal about sucking chest wounds — every second you spend faffing around is another second that the London Ambulance Service hasn’t arrived. I knew that the back-up teams couldn’t have heard the gunshot because they’d have been there already, and I’d blown my Airwave when I levitated the gunman off his feet. Then I remembered the silver whistle in the top pocket of my uniform jacket. I fumbled it out, put it in my mouth and blew as hard as I could. A police whistle on Bow Street. For a moment I felt a connection, like a vestigium, with the night, the streets, the whistle and the smell of blood and my own fear, with all the other uniforms of London down the ages who wondered what the hell they were doing out so late. Or it could just have been me panicking; it’s an easy mistake to make. Nightingale’s breath started to falter. ‘Keep breathing,’ I said. ‘It’s a habit you don’t want to break.’ I heard sirens coming closer — it was a beautiful sound.
The trouble with the old boy network is you can never really be sure whether it’s switched on or not, and whether it’s operating in your interest or some other old boy’s. I began to suspect that it wasn’t operating in my interest when they brought a cup of coffee and a biscuit to the interview room. Fellow police officers being interviewed in a friendly manner get to go to the canteen and fetch their own coffee. You only get room service when you’re a suspect. I was back in Charing Cross nick, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the way to the canteen. Inspector Nightingale was still alive, they told me that much before they sat me down on the wrong side of the interview table, and had been taken to the brand new trauma centre at UCH listed as ‘stable’, a term which covered a multitude of sins. I checked the time. It was three thirty in the morning, less than four hours after Nightingale had been shot. If you work for any time in a large institution you start to get an instinctive feel for its bureaucratic ebb and flow. I could feel the hammer coming down, and since I’d only been a copper for two years, the fact that I could feel it coming meant that it was a very big hammer indeed. I had a shrewd idea about who’d put the hammer in motion, but there was nothing I could do but stay sitting on the wrong side of the interview table with my cup of bad coffee and two chocolate biscuits. Sometimes you have to stand still and take the first blow. That way you can see what the other man has in his hand, expose his intentions and, if that sort of thing is important to you, put yourself unequivocally on the right side of the law. And if the blow is so heavy that it puts you down? That’s just a risk you have to take. The blunt instrument chosen caught me by surprise, although I made sure I kept my face neutral when Seawoll and Detective Sergeant Stephanopoulos entered the interview room and sat down opposite me. Stephanopoulos slapped a folder down on the table. It was far too thick to have been generated in the last couple of hours, so most of it must have been padding. She gave me a thin smile as she ripped the cellophane off the audio cassettes and slotted them into the dual tape machine. One of those tapes was for me, or my legal representative, to prevent me being quoted out of context; the other was for the police to prove that I had copped to the charge without them having to beat me around the back, thighs and buttocks with a sock full of ball bearings. Both of the tapes were redundant because where I sat was neatly framed in the viewfinder of a CCTV camera mounted just above the door. The live feed went to the observation room down the corridor where, judging from the theatrical way Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had made their entrance, someone of ACPO rank was watching — the Deputy Assistant Commissioner at the very least. The tape machine was turned on, Seawoll identified me, himself and Stephanopouois as being present and reminded me that I was not under arrest but merely helping police with their inquiries. Theoretically I could stand up and walk out any time I liked, provided I didn’t mind kissing my career in the police goodbye. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. Seawoll asked me, for the record, to outline the nature of the operation that Nightingale and I had been running when he was shot. ‘You really want that on the record?’ I asked. Seawoll nodded, so I gave the full account: our theory that Henry Pyke was a revenant, a vampire ghost bent on revenge who was acting out the traditional story of Punch and Judy using real people as puppets, and that together we had devised a way to put ourselves into the story so that Nightingale could track Henry Pyke’s bones and destroy them. Stephanopoulos couldn’t suppress a wince when I talked about the magical aspects of the case — Seawoll was unreadable. When we got to the shooting he asked me whether I recognised the gunman. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’ ‘His name is Christopher Pinkman,’ said Seawoll, ‘and he denies that he shot anyone. He claims he was walking home from the opera when two men attacked him in the street.’ ‘How does he explain the gun?’ I asked. ‘He claims there wasn’t a gun,’ said Seawoll. ‘He stated that the last thing he remembers was leaving the opera, and the very next thing is being kicked in the head by you.’ ‘That and the excruciating pain from the fractured bones in his lower leg,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Plus some serious bruising and contusions from when he was thrown to the ground.’ ‘Was he tested for gunshot residue?’ I asked. ‘He teaches chemistry at Westminster School,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Bugger,’ I said. The gunshot residue test was notoriously unreliable, and if the suspect handled chemicals for a living then no forensic witness on earth was going to testify in court that it was likely, let alone conclusive, that he’d fired a gun. A horrible suspicion formed in my mind. ‘You did find a gun — right?’ I asked. ‘No firearm was recovered from the scene,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘I kicked it along the pavement,’ I said. ‘No firearm was recovered,’ said Stephanopoulos slowly. ‘I saw it,’ I said. ‘It was a semi-automatic pistol of some sort.’ ‘Nothing was found.’ ‘Then how did Nightingale get shot?’ I asked. ‘That,’ said Seawoll, ‘is what we were hoping you could tell us.’ ‘Are you suggesting I shot him?’ ‘Did you?’ asked Stephanopoulos. My mouth was suddenly dry. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t shoot him, and if there’s no gun, what am I supposed to have not shot him with?’ ‘Apparently you can move things around with your mind,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Not with my mind,’ I said. ‘Then how?’ asked Stephanopoulos. ‘With magic,’ I said. ‘Okay, with magic,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘How fast can you move something?’ said Seawoll. ‘Not as fast as a bullet,’ I said. ‘Really,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘How fast is that?’ ‘Three hundred and fifty metres per second,’ I said. ‘For a modern pistol. Higher for a rifle.’ ‘What’s that in old money?’ asked Seawoll. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But if you lend me a calculator I can work it out.’ ‘We want to believe you,’ said Stephanopoulos, playing the role of most unlikely ‘good cop’ in the history of policing. I made myself pause and take a deep breath. I hadn’t done any advanced interview courses but I knew the basics, and the conduct of this interview was far too sloppy. I looked at Seawoll and he gave me the ‘at last he wakes up’ look so beloved of teachers, senior detectives and upper-middle-class mothers. ‘What do you want to believe?’ I asked. ‘That magic is real,’ Seawoll said, and gave me a knowing smile. ‘Can you give us a demonstration?’ ‘That’s not a good idea,’ I said. ‘There could be side effects.’ ‘Sounds a bit too convenient to me,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘What kind of side effects?’ ‘Probably destroy your mobile phones, palm pilot, laptop or any other electronic equipment in the room,’ I said. ‘What about the tape recorder?’ asked Seawoll. ‘That too,’ I said. ‘And the CCTV?’ ‘Same as the tape recorder,’ I said. ‘You can protect the phones by disconnecting them from their batteries.’ ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Stephanopoulos, and leaned forward aggressively, neatly masking from the camera behind her the fact that she was popping the battery from her very ladylike Nokia slimline. ‘I think we’re going to want a demonstration,’ said Seawoll. ‘How much of a demonstration?’ I asked. ‘Show us what you’re made of, son,’ said Seawoll. It had been a really long day and I was knackered, so I went for the one forma I can reliably do in a crisis — I made a werelight. It was pale and insubstantial under the fluorescent strip lighting and Seawoll wasn’t impressed, but Stephanopoulos’s heavy face broke into such a wide smile of unalloyed delight that for a moment I saw her as a young girl in a pink room full of stuffed unicorns. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. One of the tapes unspooled messily inside the tape machine while the other just stopped dead. I knew from my experiments that I needed to up the strength of the werelight to take out the camera. I was going for a brighter light when the ‘shape’ in my mind went wrong and suddenly I had a column of light hitting the ceiling. It was a bright blue colour, and focused. When I moved my hand the beam played across the walls — it was like having my own personal searchlight. ‘I was hoping for something a bit more subtle,’ said Seawoll. I shut the light down and tried to remember the ‘shape’, but it was like trying to remember a dream, slipping away even as I grabbed for it. I knew I was going to have to spend a long time in the lab trying to recapture that form, but as Nightingale had said right at the beginning, knowing the forma is there is half the battle. ‘Did that do for the camera?’ asked Seawoll. I nodded and he gave a sigh of relief. ‘We’ve got less than a fucking minute,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen this much shit rolling downhill since de Menezes got shot, so my advice to you, son, is to find the deepest hole you can crawl into and stay there until this shitfall is over and the crap lies deep and crisp and even.’ ‘What about Lesley?’ I asked. ‘I wouldn’t worry about Lesley,’ said Seawoll. ‘She’s my responsibility.’ Which meant that Seawoll had stepped in as Lesley’s patron and made it clear that anyone trying to get to her would have to go through him first. Since my patron was currently lying on a bed at UCH and breathing through a tube, Nightingale was unlikely to do the same for me. I like to think that Seawoll would have extended his protection to me if he could have, but I’ll never know for sure. He didn’t tell me that I should look out for myself — that was a given. ‘What the fuck do we do next?’ asked Seawoll. ‘You’re asking me?’ ‘No, I’m fucking asking the table,’ said Seawoll. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Sir. There’s loads of stuff I don’t know.’ ‘Then you’d better start educating yourself, Constable,’ said Seawoll. ‘Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Mr Henry Pyke is going to stop now — do you?’ I shook my head. Stephanopoulos grunted and tapped her watch. ‘I’m going to spring you,’ he said. ‘Because we need to put an end to this fucking spiritual shit before some ACPO wallah panics and decides to bring in the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said. Seawoll gave me a look that implied my best had better be fucking good enough. ‘When we start again,’ he said, ‘I need you to make sure your brain is engaged before you put your mouth into gear. Just like after the thing in Hampstead — clear?’ ‘Crystal,’ I said. The door to the interview room slammed open and a man stuck his head inside. He was middle-aged with greying hair, broad-shouldered and with extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. Even if I hadn’t recognised him from his web profile, I would have known Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Folsom was one of the big beasts of the jungle. He crooked his finger at Seawoll and said, ‘Alex, a word please.’ Seawoll looked at the ruined tape machine. ‘Interview suspended,’ he said and gave the time. Then he rose and meekly followed Folsom out of the room. Stephanopoulos gave me a half-hearted attempt at her famous evil glare, but I was wondering whether she still had her My Little Pony collection. Seawoll returned and told us that we would be continuing the interview in an adjacent room, one where the monitoring equipment was still working. There, we continued the time-honoured tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth. I told them that Nightingale and I had reason to believe, through an entirely conventional informer, that the group — because it had to be more than one person — who had perpetrated a series of senseless attacks in and around the West End would be based on Bow Street, and that we had been investigating there when we were ambushed by unknown assailants. ‘Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom is particularly worried about any threat to the Royal Opera House,’ said Seawoll. Apparently he was a bit of a connoisseur, having been introduced to Verdi soon after rising to the rank of Commander. A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages. ‘We think that the focus of activity may be on Bow Street,’ I said. ‘But as yet our investigations have discovered no tangible link to the Royal Opera House.’ By six o’clock we ended up with a statement of events that Seawoll could sell to Folsom, and I was falling asleep in my chair. I expected to be suspended, or at least warned that I was facing disciplinary action or an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, but it was just coming up to seven when they let me go. Seawoll offered me a lift, but I refused. I walked up St Martin’s Lane shaky with tension and lack of sleep. The weather had turned during the night. There was a chill wind under a dirty blue sky. The rush hour starts late on a Saturday, and the streets retained some of their early-morning quiet as I crossed New Oxford Street and headed for the Folly. I was expecting the worst, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was at least one unmarked police car that I could see parked across the street. I couldn’t see anyone inside, but I gave a little wave just in case. I went in through the front door because it’s better to face things head on and I was too knackered to walk round to the mews at the back. I was expecting police, but what I got were a pair of soldiers in battledress and carrying service rifles. They wore woodland DP jackets and maroon berets with parachute regiment badges. Two were blocking my way past the cloakroom booths, while two more were tucked away either side of the main doors, ready to catch anyone suicidal enough to attack two fully armed paras in the flank. Somebody was taking the physical security of the Folly very seriously. The paras didn’t raise their rifles to block me, but they did take on that air of menacing nonchalance that must have enlivened the streets of Belfast no end in the years before the peace agreement. One of them nodded his head towards the alcove where, in the Folly’s more elegant days, the doorman would wait until needed. Another para with sergeant’s stripes resided there with a mug of tea in one hand and a copy of the Daily Mail in the other. I recognised him. It was Frank Caffrey, Nightingale’s Fire Brigade liaison, and he gave me a friendly nod and beckoned me over. I checked the flashes on Frank’s shoulders. This was the 4th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment which I knew was part of the TA. Frank must have been a reservist, which certainly explained where he’d got the phosphorus grenades from. I suspected this was another part of the old boy network, but in this instance I was pretty sure that Frank was Nightingale’s boy. I didn’t see any officers around. I guessed they were back at the barracks turning a blind eye, while the NCOs sorted things out. ‘I can’t let you in,’ Frank said. ‘Not until your governor gets better, or they name an official replacement.’ ‘On whose authority?’ I asked. ‘Oh, this is all part of the agreement,’ said Frank. ‘Nightingale and the regiment go back a way; you might say there were some debts.’ ‘Ettersburg?’ I asked, guessing. ‘Some debts can never be repaid,’ said Frank. ‘And there are some jobs that have to be done.’ ‘I have to get in,’ I said. ‘I need to use the library.’ ‘Sorry son,’ he said. ‘The agreement is clear — no unauthorised access beyond the main perimeter.’ ‘The main perimeter,’ I said. Frank was trying to tell me something, but sleep deprivation was making me stupid. He had to repeat himself before I realised that he was hinting that the garage was outside of the perimeter. I stepped back out into the pale sunlight and made my way round to the garage and let myself in. There was a battered Renault Espace outside with such patently fraudulent plates that I knew it could only belong to the paratroopers. I took a moment to check that the Jag was locked before pulling a dust cover from under a workbench and throwing it over the vintage car. I tramped wearily up the stairs to the coach house, only to find that Tyburn had beaten me to it. She was rummaging through the trunks and other old stuff that I’d piled at the far end. The picture of Molly and the portrait of the man I’d assumed was Nightingale’s dad were propped up against the wall. I watched as she knelt down and reached under the divan to pull out another trunk. ‘They used to call this a cabin trunk,’ she said, without turning round. ‘It’s made low enough to slide under your bed. That way you could pack the things you needed for your voyage separately.’ ‘Or more likely your valet would,’ I said. ‘Or your maid.’ Tyburn lifted a carefully folded linen jacket from the cabin trunk and laid it on the divan. ‘Most people didn’t have servants,’ she said. ‘Most people made do.’ She found what she was looking for and stood up. She was wearing an elegant Italian black satin trouser suit and sensible black shoes. There was still a mark on her forehead where a marble fragment had cut her. She showed me her prize, a drab brown cardboard sleeve containing what I recognised as a 78rpm record. ‘Duke Ellington and Adelaide Hall, “Creole Love Call” on the original Black and Gold Victor label,’ she said. ‘And he has it stuffed in a trunk in the spare room.’ ‘Are you going to sell it on eBay?’ I asked. She gave me a cold look. ‘Are you here to pick up your things?’ ‘If that’s all right with you?’ She hesitated. ‘Help yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re too kind,’ I said. Most of my clothes were stuck in the Folly, but because Molly never cleaned the coach house I managed to scrounge a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that had fallen behind the sofa. My laptop was where I’d left it, perched on a pile of magazines. I had to hunt around for the case. Tyburn kept her cool gaze on me the whole time. It was like being watched in the bath by your mother. Sometimes, as Frank had pointed out, there are things you have to do no matter what the cost. I straightened and faced Tyburn. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the fountain.’ For a moment I thought it might work. I swear I saw something in her eyes, a softening, a recognition — something — but then it was gone, replaced by the same flat anger as before. ‘I’ve been investigating you,’ she said. ‘Your father’s a junkie, has been for thirty years.’ It shouldn’t hurt when people say these things to me. I’ve known my dad was an addict since I was twelve. He was quite matter-of-fact about it once I’d found out, and keen to make sure I understood what it meant — he didn’t want me following in his footsteps. He was one of the few people in the UK who still got his heroin on prescription, courtesy of a GP who was a big fan of London’s least successful jazz legend. He’s never been clean but he’s always been under control, and it shouldn’t hurt me when people call him a junkie, but of course it does. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘He’s kept that really quiet. I’m shocked.’ ‘Disappointment runs in your family, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Your chemistry teacher was so disappointed in you that he wrote a letter to the Guardian about it. You were his blue-eyed boy — figuratively speaking.’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘My dad keeps the clipping in his scrapbook.’ ‘When they sack you for gross misconduct,’ said Tyburn, ‘will he keep that clipping as well?’ ‘Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom,’ I said. ‘He’s your boy, isn’t he?’ Tyburn gave me a thin smile. ‘I like to keep track of the rising stars,’ she said. ‘Got him twisted around your little finger?’ I asked. ‘It’s amazing what people will do for a bit of slap and tickle.’ ‘Grow up, Peter,’ said Tyburn. ‘This is about power and mutual self-interest. Just because you still do most of your thinking with your genitalia doesn’t mean everyone else does.’ ‘I’m glad to hear that, because somebody has to tell him to trim those eyebrows,’ I said. ‘Did the gun come from you?’ ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said. ‘It’s your style. Get somebody else to solve your problems for you. Machiavelli would be proud.’ ‘Have you ever read any Machiavelli?’ she asked. I hesitated and she drew the correct conclusions. ‘I have,’ she said. ‘In the original Italian.’ ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘For my degree,’ she said. ‘At St Hilda’s, Oxford. History and Italian.’ ‘Double first, of course,’ I said. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘So you understand why I don’t find Nightingale’s shabby gentility impressive in any way.’ ‘So did you provide the gun?’ I asked. ‘No, I did not,’ she said. ‘I didn’t need to engineer this failure. It was only a matter of time before Nightingale screwed up. Although even I wasn’t expecting him to be stupid enough to get himself shot. Still, it’s an ill wind.’ ‘Why aren’t you inside right now?’ I asked. ‘Why are you stuck in the coach house? It’s very impressive in there, got a library you wouldn’t believe and you could make a fortune hiring it out to film companies as a period location.’ ‘All in good time,’ she said. I fumbled my keys out of my pocket. ‘Here, I can lend you my keys,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you can talk your way past the paras.’ She turned away from my outstretched hand. ‘The one good thing to come out of this,’ she said, ‘is that now we get a chance to make a rational choice about how these matters are handled.’ ‘You can’t go in,’ I said, ‘can you?’ I thought of Beverley Brook and her ‘inimical force fields.’ She gave me the Duchess look, the old money stare that footballers’ wives never get the knack of, and for a moment it rolled off her, the stink of the sewer and money and the deals done over brandy and cigars. Only, Tyburn being modern, there was a whiff of cappuccino and sun-dried tomatoes in there as well. ‘Have you got what you came for?’ she asked. ‘The TV’s mine,’ I said. She said I could pick it up whenever I liked. ‘What did he see in you?’ she asked, and shook her head. ‘What makes you the keeper of the secret flame?’ I wondered what the hell the secret flame was. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’ She didn’t dignify that with a reply. She turned her back on me and returned to rummaging in the trunks. I wondered what she was really looking for. On my way out through the coach yard I heard a muffled barking behind me and looked back. A pale, mournful face was watching me from a second-floor window — Molly, holding Toby tightly to her chest. I stood and gave them what I hoped was a reassuring wave, and then headed off to see if Nightingale was still alive.
