It took the police at least five minutes to get there, which wasn’t bad as response times go. I was duly wrapped in a blanket and put in the back of the IRV, where I told them I’d fallen in while pursuing a suspect and had ended up on the wrong side of the river. They didn’t ask me any of the usual questions about my imaginary suspect, which I thought was odd until the Jag pulled alongside the IRV and I realized that Nightingale had already put the fix in.

As we crossed back over Waterloo Bridge he asked me whether Ash was all right.

“I think so,” I said. “Chelsea and Olympia didn’t seem worried.”

Nightingale nodded. “Good work,” he said.

“I’m not in trouble?” I asked.

“You’re in trouble,” he said. “Just not with me.”

He still made me get up the next morning and do double practice—the bastard.

AFTER PRACTICE I took the hardcopy from Oxford to the tech-cave where I plonked it on the chaise longue and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Entering that much data was going to be a pig and really probably not worth the time it would take me to do it. When I found Leslie had left me three emails expressing the unutterable boredom of a small seaside town off season I had one of those really stupid clever ideas. I emailed her back and asked whether she wanted to do some tedious data entry. She said yes and I called IPS and arranged to have them picked up and biked over. Because you can’t ask someone like Leslie, no matter how bored she is, to do something that dull without an explanation, I gave her an outline of who Jason Dunlop was and how we were looking for connections to Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

Lost books of magic, she wrote. YFKM. Data entry. I’m so sad, me.

Keep busy, I wrote back. She didn’t reply to that one.

Dr. Walid had posted me some JPEGs of what looked like thin slices of cauliflower, but the accompanying text assured me that they were thin sections of Michael “the Bone” Adjayi’s brain. When magnified they displayed the telltale neurological damage that was indicative of hyperthaumaturgical degradation—which is what kills if you do too much magic. And also, as we had learned on our last big case, what happens if some total bastard uses you to do magic by proxy. It’s a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn’t a truism because most policemen think the word empirical is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be. To drive the point home, Dr. Walid included slices from Cyrus Wilkinson’s brain for comparison—the damage was identical.