Now she studied her tablet. ‘Many of them show the same pattern of pinprick injury,’ she said. ‘It’s too early to reach a firm conclusion, but this pattern of organic brain damage matches the early stages of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.’

‘She was a practitioner?’ I asked.

‘Or the victim of sequestration,’ said Dr Walid.

Sequestration . . . There were some terrible things that could get inside your head and make you do stuff both physically and magically. Such things had no compunction about using you up and letting you die, as the overuse of magic turns your brain into Swiss cheese.

Mr Punch was one such thing.

Still they appeared to be quite rare, so Christina being a practitioner was more likely. There’s no such thing as magical talent – anyone can learn magic the way anyone can learn to play the guitar. It’s just that trying to tackle the opening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ isn’t going to kill you. Well, not directly anyway. You also don’t learn it spontaneously. Somebody’s got to teach you the basics, even if that’s just three chords and a vigorous strumming action.

Dr Vaughan concurred that sequestration was unlikely.

‘Self-taught?’ I asked.

‘The pathology can’t really tell us how,’ he said. ‘But according to the pre-war literature, fully trained practitioners rarely injured themselves to this degree.’

After all, not killing yourself was the point of quite a lot of the training.

‘So,’ said Guleed. ‘Does this mean she was doing magic when she died?’

‘You said the M-word,’ I said, but Guleed ignored me.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘The PMA she took could have raised her blood pressure to the point where a blood vessel, weakened by the organic damage, gave way. The seizures and other symptoms would have been incidental to the cause of death.’

A pre-existing medical condition wasn’t going to help Olivia McAllister-Thames, because supplying the drugs was in and of itself an unlawful act. So it wouldn’t serve as defence in law. Still manslaughter. Still a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for Olivia, and a lifetime in the shit for me.

‘If Christina was a trainee witch . . .’ said Guleed.

‘Wizard,’ said Dr Walid – just as I said, ‘Practitioner.’

Guleed exchanged a look with Dr Vaughan.

‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘If she was. And if she wasn’t self-taught, who taught her?’

‘Good question.’ I said. ‘Perhaps we should go ask her father.’

3 Driving While Cheerful

3

Driving While Cheerful

Contrary to what you see on the TV, you don’t just waltz up to a grieving relative and start asking them difficult questions – well not unless you think they did it, and even then you’re expected to have some evidence to back you up. First you have to clear the interview with the SIO or the DI in tactical charge – which in this case was Stephanopoulos. And she wanted to know why.