“I’ve been collating mortality statistics for jazz musicians in the London area,” he said. “You’ll want to have a look as soon as you can—phone me tomorrow once you’ve done that.”

“Is there something I should know now?”

The lift doors opened and I stepped out into the tiled lobby. The evening was warm enough to allow a couple of kids to loiter by the main doors. One of them tried to give me the eye but I gave it right back and he looked away. Like I said, it’s my manor. And besides, I used to be that boy.

“From the figures I have, I believe that two to three jazz musicians have died within twenty-four hours of playing a gig in the Greater London area in the last year.”

“I take it that’s statistically significant?”

“It’s all in the email,” said Dr. Walid.

We hung up just as I reached the Asbo.

To the tech-cave, I thought.

THE FOLLY, according to Nightingale, is protected by an interlocking series of magical protections. They were last renewed in 1940 to allow the post office to run in a then-cutting-edge coaxial telephone cable to the main building and the installation of a modern switchboard. I’d found that under a dust sheet in an alcove off the main entrance lobby, a beautiful glass-and-mahogany cabinet with brass fittings kept shiny by Molly’s obsessive need to polish.

Nightingale says that these protections are vital, although he won’t say why, and adds that he, acting on his own, is not capable of renewing them. Running a broadband cable into the building was out of the question and it looked for a while like I was going to be firmly mired in the Dark Ages.

Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency-style when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house, so that the horses and the smellier servants could be housed downwind of their masters. This meant a coach house at the back, now used as a garage, and above that an attic conversion that had once housed servants and later served as a party space for the young bucks back when the Folly had young bucks. Or at least more than one. The magical “protections”—Nightingale was not happy when I called them “force fields”—used to scare the horses, so they don’t extend to the coach house. Which means I get to run in a broadband cable, and at last there is a corner of the Folly that is forever in the twenty-first century.