“Not everything from that far back is on the system,” the operator said. She had a Scouse accent so she managed to make it sound like this was personally my fault. She hummed something from the late 1990s chart under her breath while she checked. “I’ve got a load of nominals that fit those parameters,” she said. “Mostly prostitution and drug arrests.” But nothing that stood out. I asked her to forward the nominal list to the HOLMES case file I’d been building. She was impressed—most coppers don’t even know you can do that.

Peggy had been at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died. She’d mentioned Cherry who was probably Cherie, Mickey’s bit of posh that his sister had talked about. In the old days I would have had to schlep back down to Cheam to show a picture to the sister, but all I had to do now was call her mobile and text it to her instead. I cropped the 1941 image until it was just the face and sent that.

“She looks kind of familiar,” said Mickey’s sister. In the background I could hear voices and music muffled by a firmly closed door—the wake for her brother was continuing.

“Do you have an address for Cherie?” I asked.

“She lived up in town,” said Mickey’s sister. “I don’t know where.”

I asked if she had any pictures of Cherie, she said she thought she might and promised to text them over if she found any. I thanked her and asked how she was coping.

“Okay I guess,” she said.

I told her to hang in there—what else could I say?

Thanks to the magic of science I copied the rest of the pictures onto a flash drive, which, thanks to the science of magic, I’d tested and found they didn’t get messed up every time I did a spell. As far as I could determine, nearby use of magic only degraded chips that had power running through them at the time, but it frustrated me that I didn’t even have a theory as to how magic actually worked. A little analytical voice in my head pointed out that any working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point—the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.

I arranged for the bombing reports and the other documents to be copied and made sure to thank the librarian properly before heading for where I’d parked the Asbo that morning.

When I got back to the Folly I found Dr. Walid in the atrium talking to Molly.

“Ah good, Peter,” he said. “I’m glad you came back. Let’s have some tea, shall we?”

Molly shot me a reproachful look and went gliding off toward the kitchen. Dr. Walid led me over to a collection of overstuffed red armchairs and mahogany occasional tables that nestled under the overhang of the eastern balcony. I noticed he had his medical bag with him, a modern ballistic plastic case covered in burgundy leather whose one concession to tradition was the stethoscope wound around the handle.