The staff area was unkempt and vaguely depressing in the way that staff areas always are. The punters get the gloss and the staff get scabby, peeling walls and lockers that looked like they’d been salvaged from a sunken U-boat. The manager’s office was just a spare bit of space randomly separated off with drywall and fitted with a long shelf down one side that served as both desk and storage space. There was a serious looking free-standing safe as far from the door as possible and the obligatory year planner taking up the free wall. Wanda sat in a battered operator’s chair and motioned us into the two grey stackable polyurethane seats that were the only other furniture.

One thing that was missing was a computer – or even a desk calculator. Instead, an old fashioned gunmetal blue mechanical adding machine stood next to a stack of cheap ledgers, the type with carbon paper interleaves for the keeping of multiple records.

I realised that we didn’t actually know who or what owned The Chestnut Tree and its prime bit of super-expensive London real estate. I put finding out on the long list that I carry around in my head, about two thirds of the way down – between rustproofing the Jag and taking Toby to the vet to get his nails clipped. Fortunately I didn’t have to fish for Wanda’s background because she volunteered it upfront.

‘My mother was a Falloy,’ she said. ‘Do you know what a Falloy is?’

‘Irish surname,’ said Guleed.

‘That too,’ said Wanda.

A Falloy, according to Joseph Malzeard in his work On the Natural Order of the Unnatural, was a creature one half human, one eighth unseelie fae and three eighths seelie fae. Malzeard described them as ‘pleasant fellows in the main albeit shiftless and prone to small mischiefs’. I didn’t mention this to Wanda because it’s good practice not to let on how much you know about a particular witness, and also because I know racist bollocks when I read it.

‘What’s a Falloy?’ asked Guleed.

‘We’re a little bit of this, a little bit of that,’ said Wanda. ‘My parents were originally from Brittany.’ Which explained the surname as well.

I said that we were looking to check whether she’d noticed certain people visiting the pub in the last six months.

‘This is purely for elimination purposes,’ added Guleed.

I took out my official police tablet and showed her some pictures.

‘That one looks familiar,’ she said when I showed her Jeremy Beaumont-Jones.

‘Has he been in here?’ asked Guleed.

Wanda shook her head.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wait, I have seen him. He was much younger. Was he a student at Oxford?’