Don’t thank me, ma’am, I didn’t say, I’m just doing … Who knew what I was doing? I doubted I could get anything useful from her that evening so I left well enough alone.

SOMETIMES AFTER a hard day’s work nothing will satisfy but a kebab. I stopped at a random Kurdish place on my way through Vauxhall and pulled up on the Albert Embankment to eat it—no kebab in the Jag, that’s the rule. One side of the embankment had suffered from an outbreak of modernism in the 1960s but I kept my back to their dull concrete façades and instead watched the sun setting fire to the tops of Millbank Tower and the Palace of Westminster. The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward.

Officially I belong to ESC9, which stands for Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9, otherwise known as the Folly, also known as the unit that nice well-brought-up coppers don’t talk about in polite company. There’s no point trying to remember ESC9 because the Metropolitan Police has a reorganization once every four years and all the names change. That’s why the Commercial Robberies Unit of the Serious and Organized Crime Group has been called the Flying Squad since its introduction in 1920 or the Sweeney if you want to establish your cockney geezer credentials. That’s Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad in case you were wondering.

Unlike the Sweeney, the Folly is easy to overlook: partly because we do stuff nobody likes to talk about, but mostly because we have no discernible budget. No budget means no bureaucratic scrutiny and therefore no paper trail. It also helps that up until January this year it had a personnel complement of one: a certain Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Despite doubling the staffing levels when I joined and catching up on a good ten years of unprocessed paperwork, we maintain a stealthy presence within the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Metropolitan Police. Thus we pass among the other coppers in a mysterious way, our duties to perform.

One of our duties is the investigation of unsanctioned wizards and other magical practitioners, but I didn’t think that Cyrus Wilkinson had been a practitioner of anything except a superior saxophone. I also doubted he’d killed himself with the traditional jazz cocktail of drugs and drink, but confirmation would have to wait for the tox screen. Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it—at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.