Guleed was back at St Paul’s to gather up the names of the parents or guardians of all the students. Stephanopoulos went with her to provide some senior rankage in case they faced any upper-class fuckery. While they did that, I drilled down into the reams of stuff we had on the parents of the kids who’d attended the unfortunate MDMA-and-brain-damage party. I considered disregarding the mothers, but it occurred to me that we didn’t know for certain that the Faceless Man was male. I also started going back over all the cases with suspected links to the Faceless Man to see if any of their faces fit. So to speak.

A year ago Richard Lewis, a planning officer with Southwark Borough Council, had thrown himself in front of a tube train at Paddington station. We’d always suspected that he jumped under the influence of a glamour and had pinpointed the moment we thought the glamour had gone in. Since it occurred just short of the ticket barrier in a London Underground station, it happened in one of the most CCTV saturated places in the world. And since glamour was not something you did from a distance, the Faceless Man must have been caught on camera. Along with about a thousand other people.

So I reckoned it was worth a punt and I spent some time with pictures of the parents, seeing if I could match any of them to faces in the crowd. And because magical facial recognition systems have yet to be invented, it had taken me most of the weekend. Except for the bits I spent at Bev’s and the two hours magic practise that Nightingale insisted on.

‘We need to work on your precision,’ he’d said.

I didn’t spot anyone on the CCTV but I did catalogue most of the likely targets to make it easier for whatever poor sod got lumbered with the job of checking them against the parents of the entire school.

‘Plus staff,’ said Guleed. ‘Phoebe might have confused the two – children often do.’

That search was going to stay a low priority because we had a key time frame, the collapse of the house on Friday evening, to check alibis against. Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ dad’s alibi being that he wasn’t in the country at the time, although it turned out he had gone to Magdalene College Oxford in the early nineties. Roughly the same time as the known Little Crocodile Richard Lewis, he who threw himself under a tube train, and Christina Chorley’s father Martin had been there too.

It would have been nice if just one of them had gone to Cambridge or, god forbid, Bristol, which was where, according to Guleed, posh students went when they failed to get into Oxbridge.