And so it ended like most Police operations do, not with a bang but with us whimpering over the paperwork. Or at least it would have for me and Guleed, if we hadn’t been whisked off to UCH where we snaffled up oxygen and tried not to listen while Dr Walid explained terms like tissue hypoxia to us in more detail than either of us would have liked. Fortunately we responded well to treatment and weren’t kept overnight. Beverley popped over to keep me company and then, typically, spent most of the time in Guleed’s cubicle gossiping – and not even about me. My mum turned up with a care package which I ate one-handed while fending off Bev, Guleed and Nightingale with the other. Once we were out, Beverley drove me back to her house in her sad little Kia and we shared a bath and then bed.

The next morning Nightingale picked me up from Bev’s in the Jag so he could brief me on the way back to Belgravia nick. I was going to take over as Falcon liaison in the hunt for Martin Chorley and Lesley May while he headed back to the Folly to catch up on his sleep.

‘He almost got me, you know,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’d prepared a number of booby traps in the flat upstairs and tried to lure me into the killing zone.’

Fortunately Nightingale still remembered the lessons he’d learnt fighting the Germans.

‘They were expert at combining conventional weapons with magical ones,’ he said. ‘You never knew if you were going to be facing a fireball or a Panzerfaust.’

Martin Chorley was clever and ruthless but his lack of combat experience told against him.

‘Set off his first device a fraction too early,’ said Nightingale. ‘Once I was tipped off it was just a matter of being careful where I stepped.’

Which explained why he’d been slow getting down to the basement. Otherwise both Martin Chorley and Lesley would now be enjoying the simple elegance of our magic-resistant cells.

That they had both managed to get away was the primary failure of the operation, the property damage to One Hyde Park being secondary. Although the fact that we could prove that one of their tenants – Martin Chorley – had instigated the fire was definitely going to help us in the upcoming legal fight.

It would have been even better if we actually had Martin Chorley in custody, or Lesley May for that matter – though we did have Reynard Fossman, who CTC were holding under anti-terrorism legislation at Paddington right across the corridor from Lady Ty’s Americans. I know Seawoll would have liked to arrest Lady Helena and Caroline as well, if only on general principles, but Nightingale argued against it even after we’d discovered that they’d run off with the manuscript of the Magni Operis Principia Chemica, ‘Chymical Principles of the Great Work’.