I ARRIVED back at the Folly to find Nightingale in the breakfast room helping himself to kedgeree from one of the silver salvers that Molly insists on laying out on the buffet table every single morning. I lifted the lids on one of the others to reveal Cumberland sausage and poached eggs—sometimes when you’ve been up all night you can substitute a good fry-up for sleep. It worked long enough for me to brief Nightingale on the body in the Groucho Club, although I steered clear of the Cumberland sausage for some reason. Toby sat on his haunches by the table and gave me the alert stare of a dog who was ready for any meaty comestible that life might throw him.

When the sadly penis-less St. John Giles came to our attention we’d drafted in a forensic dentist to confirm that teeth had done the damage rather than a knife or a miniature bear trap or something. The dentist had run up a best-guess reconstruction of the configuration of the teeth. It looked remarkably like a human mouth only shallower and with a vertical orientation. In his opinion, the canine and incisors were broadly similar to those in the human mouth but the premolars and molars were unusually thin and sharp. “More suggestive of a carnivore than an omnivore,” the dentist had said. He was a nice man and very professional but I got the distinct impression he thought we were having him on.

This had led to a bizarre debate about the process of human digestion, which wasn’t settled until I went out and bought some school biology textbooks and talked Nightingale through the stomach, the intestines, the small intestines, and what they were for. When I asked him whether they had covered this at his old school he said that they might have but he hadn’t been paying attention. When I asked him what had kept his attention he said rugby and spells.

“Spells?” I’d asked. “Are you saying you went to Hogwarts?”

Which led to me having to explain the Harry Potter books, after which he said that, yes, he had been to a school for the sons of certain families with strong magical traditions but it really hadn’t been much like the school in the books. Although he did like the idea of quidditch, they’d mostly played rugby, and using magic on the playing field was strictly outlawed.

“We did play our own version of squash,” he’d said, “using the movement forms. That could get a bit lively.”

The school itself had been requisitioned during World War II by the military and by the time it was released back to civilian use in the early 1950s there hadn’t been enough children to make it worthwhile. “Or enough teachers,” Nightingale had said and then fallen silent for a long while. I made a point of not bringing up the subject again.