‘I really don’t think it is,’ I said.

Kimberley begged to differ.

‘After our little adventures underground I was curious,’ she said. ‘It didn’t seem likely that you Brits had a monopoly on . . .’ she hesitated.

‘Magic?’

‘It seemed unlikely,’ she shrugged. ‘That’s the trouble with being law enforcement – you can’t let things go.’

So she dug around and was probably not as subtle as she thought she was, because the next thing she knew she was sitting in her supervisor’s office with a Deputy Assistant Director who’d flown in specially from Washington that very morning just to have a conversation with her.

‘He had my London file open on the desk and looked me in the eye and said “Do you have anything else to add to this report?” And I said I may have, but that I wasn’t sure he was going to like it.’ She grinned. ‘I’m paraphrasing here you understand. He said, “Why don’t you just tell me and I’ll be the judge of that.”’

‘So what did you tell him?’

‘Well I started out small – just testing the waters. A little bit about how you seemed to be able to do some things I wasn’t sure I could explain. He just nodded at me and asked if I’d encountered other instances of magic during my investigation.’

‘And?’

‘I told him everything. About you, Nightingale, Lesley, the Folly – even the people living under the city – didn’t seem to faze him at all.’ She was offered a transfer to Washington within a week.

‘I say offered,’ said Kimberley. ‘It was more ordered.’

To the Office of Partner Engagement, which handles co-operation between the FBI, ‘partner’ agencies and local law enforcement.

‘So is that where they keep the X-Files?’

‘Yeah,’ she leant back on her chair. ‘There’s a big secret warehouse.’

Mostly she worked a regular shift engaging with the FBI’s partners.

‘Whether they wanted to be engaged with or not,’ she said.

The weird shit she was supposed to deal with in her spare time.

‘Like what?’