The music room at least had more character. There were framed posters of Miles Davis and Art Pepper on the walls and shelves stuffed with sheet music. I’d saved the music room for last because I wanted a sense of what Nightingale called the house’s sensis illic, and what I called background vestigium, before I entered what was clearly Cyrus Wilkinson’s inner sanctum. I did get a flash of “Body and Soul” and, mingled with Simone’s honeysuckle perfume, the smell of dust and cut wood again, but it was muted and elusive. Unlike the rest of the house, the music room had bookshelves holding more than photographs and amusingly expensive mementos of foreign holidays. I figured that anyone looking to become a practitioner outside official channels would have to work their way through a lot of occult rubbish before they stumbled on proper magic—if such a thing was possible. At least some of those books should have been on the shelves but Cyrus had nothing like that on his, not even Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies, which is always good for a laugh if nothing else. In fact they looked a lot like my dad’s bookshelves: mainly jazz biographies, Straight Life, Bird Lives, with a few early Dick Francis novels thrown in for variety.

“Have you found something?” Simone was in the doorway.

“Not yet,” I said. I’d been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk-dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I’d like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.

“I don’t wish to hurry you,” said Simone. “Only I’d already ordered a taxi before you came and you know how these chaps hate to be kept waiting.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Just to stay with my sisters,” she said. “Until I find my feet.”

I asked for her address and wrote it down when she told me. Surprisingly it was in Soho, on Berwick Street. “I know,” she said when she saw my expression. “They’re rather bohemian.”

“Did Cyrus have any other properties, a lockup, a garden maybe?”

“Not that I know of,” she said and then she laughed. “Cyrus digging a garden—what an extraordinary notion.”

I thanked her for her time, and she saw me to the door.

“Thank you for everything, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been most kind.”