That was the unwritten and suspiciously voluntary code surrounding the glamour – if you took someone’s free will then you became responsible for them until it returned. Like loco parentis, Beverley said. That was assuming it did wear off and the victim didn’t start building their life around their new object of devotion. Some people seemed more susceptible than others. Some day we were probably going to have to set up a support group.

My face must have shown something, because Lady Ty told me to relax.

‘I’m not my sister,’ she said. ‘I have some self-control – they’ll be their old all-American selves in a couple of hours.’

As if the business with the fountain and the flowers had never happened.

So Guleed popped back to fetch Stephanopoulos while I crept down the stairs to the garage. You really shouldn’t split up during an operation, but sometimes you have no choice. No doubt the blonde teenagers in the slasher movies feel the same way.

It doesn’t matter if they’re speed-built brutalist tat or expensive air-conditioned stables, underground car parks always smell the same. Damp cement, paint and volatile hydrocarbons. The only variation is whether or not they also smell of wee. Unsurprisingly, the car park under One Hyde Park did not have urine stains in its dark corners – or even have any dark corners that a young man caught short after a night out on the tiles might have a quick slash in.

There were two floors of garage proper but I was heading to the lowest because that’s where the parking spaces – plural, since the bigger the flat the more spaces you got – allocated to Martin Chorley were. As was his assigned storage space. Because although POLSA had gone through it during the initial investigation, they hadn’t known what to look for.

The stairs I went down were for the delicate feet of residents and thus had black marble risers and pointless art hung at regular intervals. On the bottom landing was a solid fire door disguised by a black stained piano-finish veneer. In a proper, crappy car park there’d have been grimy vertical window slots to look through, but not here. I wondered who was on the other side.

I stopped and tried to clear my mind. The uncanny creates a disturbance in the world. Everyone feels it, the trick is to distinguish it from the all the random noise, the thoughts, memories and misfiring neurons, that fill our heads from moment to moment. It’s like everything else – the more you do it, the better you get. I used to think that Nightingale was alerted to Falcon cases by his extensive network of informants. But now I think maybe he’s just listening to the city.

Or maybe not. Because that would be freaky.