‘Good,’ said Nightingale, and offered to coordinate the search for the cycle courier. I hung up as Beverley Brook sauntered over from the hospital, the swing of her hips dragging at my eyes. She grinned when she caught me looking and handed me a slip of paper – Dr Framline’s address.

‘What next, guv?’ she asked.

‘Where can I drop you?’ I asked.

‘No, no, no,’ Beverley said quickly. ‘Mum says I was to facilitate.’

‘You’ve facilitated,’ I said. ‘You can go home now.’

‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘Mum’s got the whole entourage round, Ty and Effra and Fleet, not to mention all the old ladies. You don’t know what it’s like.’

Actually I knew exactly what it was like, but I wasn’t going to tell Beverley that.

‘Come on, I’ll be good,’ she said, giving me the big eyes. ‘I’ll let you borrow my phone.’

I gave in before she escalated to the trembling lip. ‘But you have to do what I say.’

‘Yes guv,’ she said, and saluted.

You can’t do an obbo in a vintage Jag, so, much to Beverley’s disappointment, we drove back to the Folly to swap it for the ex-Panda. The Folly’s garage is out the back of the building and takes up the entire bottom floor of the converted coach house. From the mews you can see where the original doors, wide and high enough to accept a coach and four, had been bricked in and replaced with a more modest sliding door. The Jag and the ex-Panda rattled around inside a space big enough for four carriages.

Unlike the entrance hall, the coach house didn’t seem to bother Beverley at all. ‘What happened to the inimical magic force fields?’ I asked.

‘Not in here,’ she said. ‘Bit of protection on the garage door and that’s it.’

Nightingale had left the building, but Molly met me in the lobby with a Tesco’s carrier bag full of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied up with string. I didn’t ask what was in them but I doubted it was chicken tikka masala. Back in the coach house, I threw my bag and sandwiches in the back of the ex-Panda, made sure Beverley had her seat belt on and headed off to harass a junior doctor.

Dr Framline lived in a two-storey Victorian terrace off the Romford Road in Newham. It was further east than I like to go but not a bad neighbourhood. I found a parking space with decent sightlines of the front door and got out – I knew no force on earth was going to keep Beverley in the car, so I let her come with me on the strict understanding that she’d keep her mouth shut.