‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘Oh, so many things,’ said Reynard. ‘But in this instance I bear a message for your master.’

People don’t like it when you don’t react to this sort of shit. They can get frustrated and escalate out of their own comfort zone. You can end up with some useful information that way, or an excuse to arrest them for assaulting a police officer. I gave Reynard my blandest expression, but he just cocked his head and gave me a calculating look. He had a reputation for being cunning, as well other words starting with C.

‘Tell him,’ said Reynard, ‘that I can put him in touch with a certain someone who has an item he might well like to purchase.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Jonathan Wild’s final ledger,’ he said.

‘So?’ I said.

‘You do know who Jonathan Wild was?’ asked Reynard.

Jonathan Wild – self-styled Thief Taker General who cut out the criminal middle man by arranging to have your property stolen, fenced and sold back to you inhouse. It was a wonderful scam – if you wanted your stuff back, you had to deal with him. And if you were a thief and you didn’t play ball it was a long walk to a short drop at Tyburn. Of course, this was back in the eighteenth century when a gentleman might have a good meal, a little professional company and still have enough left out of a fiver to bribe a high court judge.

‘Is he part of One Direction?’ I asked.

Reynard sighed theatrically and proffered his business card.

‘Just make sure you tell the Nightingale,’ he said and then, pausing only to doff an imaginary top hat at my mum, he slipped back out the way he came.

I looked at his card. White high quality stock, a stylised fox’s head in embossed red-gold and below that a single mobile number – a disposable, I found when I checked it the next morning.

‘Ah,’ said Nightingale when I stepped outside and called him. ‘That is indeed an item we might want to acquire.’ Which was Nightingale speak for: grab it with both hands. ‘We shall have to discuss this tomorrow.’

Later that evening my dad and the Irregulars struck up ‘The Sidewinder’ and I got to spend a good thirty seconds admiring the way Beverley moved before she dragged me out and made me dance with her. When the set finished she put her arms around me and kissed me – she smelt of new mown grass and heated car wax, like old deckchairs and plastic hosepipes – like a hot summer’s day in a London garden.