‘From who?’ I asked.

‘Other researchers,’ he said. ‘They’re always looking to pirate my work.’ Apparently the hepatologists were the worst. ‘What do you expect from people who deal with so much bile?’ said Dr Walid, and then looked disappointed that I didn’t get the joke.

Content that work was possible, I let Dr Walid show me to the staff bathroom down the corridor where I showered in a cubicle big enough, and equipped for, a paraplegic, his wheelchair, a care assistant and her guide dog. There was soap provided, a generic lemon-smelling antibiotic cake that felt ferocious enough to strip off the upper layer of my epidermis.

While I showered, I thought about the mechanics of how Nightingale got shot. Despite the lurid fantasies of the Daily Mail, you can’t just walk into a random pub and buy a handgun, especially not a high-end semiautomatic like the one carried so inexpertly by Christopher Pinkman the night before. Which meant that there was no way that Henry Pyke had manoeuvred Pinkman into place in the time between our arrival at the Royal Opera House and our emergence from the stage door less than twenty minutes later. Henry Pyke must have known that we were planning to trap him on Bow Street, and that left three options: either he foresaw the future, he read somebody’s mind or somebody who knew about the plan was one of his sequestrated puppets.

I dismissed precognition out of hand. Not only am I a big fan of causality, but Henry Pyke had never done anything else that suggested knowledge of the future. According to my research in the mundane library at the Folly, there was no such thing as mind-reading, at least, not in the sense of hearing someone’s thoughts as if they were narrating a voice-over on television. No: somebody had told Henry Pyke, or told somebody who was sequestrated by Henry Pyke, what the plan was. Nightingale didn’t. I didn’t. Which left the Murder Team. Given that Stephanopoulos and Seawoll were reluctant to talk about magic with its official practitioners, I couldn’t see them discussing it with their people, and Lesley would have followed their lead.

I stepped out of the shower feeling pleasantly raw, and dried myself off with a towel that had been repeatedly washed to the texture of sandpaper. The clothes I’d retrieved from the coach house weren’t exactly fresh, but at least they were cleaner than what I’d been wearing. After a few missed turnings in the featureless corridors I relocated Dr Walid’s office.

‘How’re you feeling?’ he asked.

‘Human,’ I said.

‘Close enough,’ he said. After that he pointed out the location of the coffee machine and left me to get on with it.