Luckily it was time to go out through the side door and follow the black arrow painted on the white brick walls marked JAZZ ROOM. According to my dad it had just been refurbished and the acoustics were much better, though he missed the proper sized piano.

‘Joe Harriott would have loved it,’ he’d said.

Despite its role in jazz history it was a small space, with its own bar and triangular stage in the corner opposite the entrance. Bev made sure she was front and centre with her friends tagging nervously behind. She cast a look over her shoulder at me, her eyes dark and sly and her beautiful wide mouth twitching up at the corners, but I wanted to stay by the door – where I could keep an eye on who was coming in.

The wizards of the Folly, or the Society of the Wise, back when there was no chance of taking the piss out of them on Twitter, have never really got the hang of the demi-monde – that strange collection of people and things-that-are-also-people tied into the magical world. Following the predictable mania for classification that gripped them during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they spent a lot of time talking about proportions of human and good- and bad-faerie blood and then assigning names to the result. Most of it was as useful as the theory of luminiferous aether, but it did explain why calling someone a goblin in some London pubs could get you a smacking. Still, after two years and change at the Folly I knew them when I saw them – most of the time.

I knew this one as soon as he entered. A short young white man with a pointy chin and rust coloured hair slicked back with gel. He wore a tweed countryman’s jacket over a black T-shirt, a pair of zombie hunter cargo pants and hiking boots. Not DMs, I noticed, something Swiss and military. I knew instantly that he was at least part fae and a wrong-un. Partly because of my long experience as a copper, partly because of his expression of beatific innocence, but mostly because I’d last met him trying to chat up my thirteen year old cousin and as a result had run a comprehensive record check on him.

His name was Reynard Fossman and he was dismayingly pleased to see me.

He raised his walking stick in salute and I saw that it was made of hickory and its head was a knot of roots smoothed down and polished to bring out the grain. I considered having him for carrying an offensive weapon, because it doesn’t have to be offensive per se – it’s the intention to use it as such that counts in law.

‘Mr Fossman,’ I said.

‘Excellent,’ said Reynard and gave me a vulpine smile, ‘you remember me.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

‘And how is your lovely cousin?’ he asked. ‘Still gorgeous, I hope.’