Then Stephanopoulos arrived and glared at them until they packed up and left. Allowing me a brief respite before she came and glared at me. There was the requisite three hours of milling around as we waited for SOCO and a specialist search team to go over the house and the inevitable arguments about who was going to find an all-night takeaway in High Wycombe for refs.

Caroline’s mum roared up the drive in her MG. Me and Caroline watched from the safety of the kitchen as Lady Helena pulled up and proceeded to castigate Nightingale for putting her baby in danger. While that was going on, Caroline beckoned me over and said she’d rather her mum didn’t know about the almost-flying.

‘I don’t want her to worry,’ she said.

‘Worry about what?’ I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

She waved at me as her mum drove her away.

Martin Chorley’s utilitarian office turned out to be less interesting than his study. He had every OS Map of the British Isles ever published, going all the way back to the nineteenth century, plus a range of specialist maps and gazettes – some of which I recognised from my post-Herefordshire research. A couple of Edwardian earthwork surveys, the Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins and The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages, which confirmed that Martin Chorley was an enormous Tolkien nerd. As if the the five or six different editions of The Lord of the Rings and the signed first edition of The Hobbit wasn’t enough proof. He hadn’t neglected the other Inklings, though – C.S. Lewis had a shelf. And he didn’t have any objection to YA either, judging by the collection of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, again first editions, but these ones far too well read to be worth much, beside similarly worn copies of The Owl Service and the rest of Alan Garner’s books.

It wasn’t exactly screaming ‘power mad psychopath’, although it was possible that he was modern enough to keep all his vices on a USB stick.

Over the real fireplace, with all its original farmhouse stone trimmings, was a painting that one of the SOCOs assured me was a genuine Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of the dying king surrounded by weeping queens variety. Painted by one James Archer in the late nineteenth century.

‘A romantic,’ said Nightingale much, much later. ‘The most dangerous people on Earth.’

Finally me and Guleed caught a lift back to London while Nightingale stayed at the house on the off-chance its owner popped back for something he’d forgotten.