Nothing more on the mysterious Peggy who, if it was the same person, would have to be pushing ninety. A year ago I would have considered that unlikely, but these days I was working with a guy who was born in 1900 and he wasn’t even the oldest person I’d met. Oxley had been a medieval monk and his “father” dated back to the foundation of the City in the first century AD.

Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and I was going to start with Peggy.

The archive has a whitewashed room with lockers, two coffeemakers, and one of those machines that dispenses chocolate bars and stale snacks. I got a coffee and a Mars bar and called in a PNC check on Peggy, female, IC1, eighteen to twenty-five. The civilian operator laughed at me down the line and said she wasn’t even going to tell me how big a set of nominals that returned. I asked her to limit the area to Soho and go back as far as 1941. To her credit she didn’t ask me why.

“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?