“Muslim ninja,” she whispered.

Normally the police like to make a lot of noise going into a building because, unless you’re dealing with a psycho, it’s better to give any potential arrests a chance to carefully think through their options before they do something stupid. We were being quiet in this case, not something that came naturally, so that I could feel for any vestigia as we went down the stairs. I’d tried explaining vestigia to Stephanopoulis but I don’t think she really got it, although she seemed keen enough to let me go first.

I saw the base of the cabinet first, mahogany and brass caught in the beam of my torch, more coming into view as I descended the steps. There was a double reflection from the front and back of a glass case and I realized I was looking at a fortune-telling machine parked incongruously in the center of the entrance to the club proper. I flashed my torch around the room behind and caught glimpses of a bar, chairs stacked on tables, the dark rectangles of doorways farther in.

The vestigia gave off a vivid flash of sunlight and cigarette smoke, petrol and expensive cologne, new leather seats and the Rolling Stones singing I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. I took a couple of quick steps back and shone my torch at the cabinet.

The mannequin in the fortune machine wasn’t the usual head-and-shoulders model. Instead the head rested directly on a pole of clear glass reinforced with bands of brass. Protruding from the truncated neck were two leathery bladders looking unpleasantly like lungs. The head itself was wearing the obligatory pantomime turban but lacked the standard-issue spade-shaped beard and pencil mustache. The skin was waxy and the whole thing looked disturbingly real—because of course it was.

“Larry the Lark I presume,” I said.

Stephanopoulis joined me. “Oh my God,” she said. She pulled a mug shot out of her pocket—an artifact, I assumed, from Larry the Lark’s criminal career—and held it up for comparison.

“He looked better when he was alive,” I said.

I felt it just before it happened; it was weirdly like the sensation I got when Nightingale was demonstrating a forma or a spell. The same catching at the corner of my mind. But this was different. It whirred and clanked as if made of clockwork.

And the real clockwork started as with a dusty wheezing sound the bladders below Larry’s neck inflated and his mouth opened to reveal disconcertingly white teeth. I saw the muscles in his throat ripple and then he spoke.

“Welcome, one and all,” he said. “To the garden of unearthly delights. Where the weary pilgrim may cast off the cloak of puritanical reserve, unlace the corset of bourgeois morality, and gorge himself on all that life may offer.”

The mouth remained open as hidden machinery clanked and whirred to fill the bladders with air once more.