So I had to drive all the way across town to wonderful Wapping with Beverley too subdued to talk, which was unsettling in its own right. When I dropped her off outside the flats she paused before she got all the way out, and told me to be careful. When I asked her what I should be careful of she shrugged, and before I could stop her she kissed me on the cheek. I watched her walk away from the car, the hem of jumper clinging to her backside and thought – what the fuck was that about?

Don’t get me wrong, I fancied Beverley Brook but I was little suspicious, not least because both her and her mother seemed capable of getting an erection out of moss if the mood took them. Isis’s caution about getting into the water with somebody who wasn’t a hundred per cent human was just the icing on the cake.

Rush hour was starting to build as I drove back to the Folly. The day had clouded over and rain began to spatter the windscreen. I was fairly certain that Oxley and Beverley had made a connection. When I’d seen them standing side by side in the river, they’d looked … comfortable was the best word, or maybe familiar in the sense of cousins. Bartholomew, who could bore for England on the subject of genii locorum, was adamant that the ‘nature spirits’, as he called them, would always take some of the characteristics of the locus they represented. Father and Mama Thames were spirits of the same river – if I could edge them closer together, then their true nature should take its course.

And if that meant spending a few days watching Beverley in the river, then that was a price I was willing to pay.

I considered checking in with Lesley, but instead I locked up the garage and walked across the park to Russell Square tube station. I bought some flowers from a stall by the station and, for no apparent reason, headed in to catch a train somewhere else.

9 The Judas Goat

The Judas Goat

I’d got the tube all the way to Swiss Cottage, and was a quarter of the way up Fitzjohn’s Avenue when I started to question what I was doing. It wasn’t just that I’d abandoned my motor for public transport, it was also that I was walking up one of the steepest hills in London when I could have taken the train to Hampstead and walked down the hill instead. It was still bright, and the afternoon sunlight cut through the gaps between the trees that lined the avenue. The flowers in my hand were roses, a purple variety that were so dark as to be almost black. I wondered who they might be for.