I said I hadn’t, nor had I heard of Lol Robinson or Laura Marling who were headlining the coming weekend.

Guleed used an apparent interest in the playbill to give the room the once over. Places like The Chestnut Tree don’t get much of a lunchtime crowd. As a rule, the demi-monde doesn’t work nine to five, and so doesn’t need to get them in before heading back to the office for a couple of hours of pretending to work.

That said, there was a bunch of young men in white shirts in a nearby booth, blue pinstripe jackets flung over the backs of their chairs – two white, one darker who might have been Turkish or somewhere equally Mediterranean. They looked like they might work in an office and I wondered if they knew where they were drinking or if they had wandered in by accident.

In another booth two middle aged women were sitting hunched over their table so that their faces almost touched. One of them was so pale as to be actually white white with platinum blonde hair swept back behind reassuringly unpointed ears. Her friend was pinker, dark haired but with an upward curve to the corner of her eyes that I recognised from some of Edward Linley Sambourne’s illustrations for Charles Kingsley’s monograph on the taxonomy of the Fae. They must have spotted us watching because they both turned to frown at us – I saw their eyes were an unsettling hazel brown. The last time I’d seen eyes that colour I’d been the wrong side of the faerie veil, where I would have stayed if Bev hadn’t turned up in a traction engine and given me a lift out.

Me and Guleed pretended to be interested in our drinks because, you know, it’s rude to stare.

We gave it ten minutes, enough time for me to finish my half, before I went back to the bar and asked after the manageress again. While I did that, Guleed went to stand in the archway that linked the saloon bar with the public bar beyond. We’d decided that was her best position to cover what we reckoned was the door to the staff area and also the steps back-up to the street. This way, should the manageress, or anyone else, make a sudden break for it, Guleed could intercept.

‘She texted me,’ said the Romanian barmaid and held up her phone for me to see. ‘She says she’ll be back soon.’