There was always the cheerful thought that the Faceless Man, in proper Sith Lord fashion, had trained up someone as his apprentice. But I didn’t think that was likely. If he’d had a fully trained apprentice he wouldn’t have needed Varvara, and if they weren’t trained then I could probably take them.

But if that apprentice was Lesley May?

Which one of us would hesitate the longest, I wondered.

Normally when you TIE a nominal you send the lowest ranking member of the team round to flat out ask the subject to account for their whereabouts. Then, usually, the same lowly minion does all the cross referencing with CCTV, mobile phone records and/or actual living breathing witnesses to verify the alibi. We couldn’t do that with the Faceless Man because we couldn’t predict what he might do if he was tipped off. Since his capability envelope stretched from levelling a house to causing luckless members of the public to throw themselves off tall buildings it was, as Nightingale said, like hunting big game. We needed to stay downwind and undetected until we’d lined up our elephant gun. Since the elephant gun in question was Nightingale, this meant I had to wait until he was free before we could beard any suspects in their lairs.

We started with Albert Pryce. And, because there was an off-chance that Nightingale’s mere presence might spook our quarry, he would remain hidden nearby ready to rush in and put the boot in. My role in that scenario was to race for the exit as fast as possible – taking any potential collateral with me.

Unless Lesley was there, in which case I was supposed to grab her.

As it was, when we tooled up outside Albert Pryce’s six bedroom semi in St John’s Wood he wasn’t even there – which was a bit of an intelligence failure. Fortunately Albertina answered the door and, without prompting, invited me in. I left Nightingale in the Jag contemplating the infinite, doing the crossword in the Telegraph and keeping an ear out for screams.

The house was early Victorian enough to retain some Regency class. Inside it still looked like a place where people actually lived, with framed prints on the walls and bookshelves and furniture that had its corners smoothed off with use. There were signs that money had taken hold in the kitchen, though, sprouting handleless brushed steel cabinets, randomly deformed sink units and work surfaces as cheerfully domestic as a pathology lab.

Albertina was doing her best to humanise it by spreading empty cups, jars with the tops off and knives sticking out, a dealer’s shuffle of brown bread spilling out of its packet and a recyclable plastic bottle of guaranteed organic semi-skimmed milk thoughtfully left in a patch of sunlight.