Ross nodded. ‘They’re on one side, the newer side, happy to use money in transactions. A lot of the regulars at the Goat seemed against that, wanted to keep with older laws about the use of barter.’

‘Losley,’ said Quill, ‘if you remember, went apeshit when we dared to suggest she might be “employed”.’

‘Terry Keel,’ said Costain, ‘talked about a feeling that everything changed for this lot a few years back, but that the new generation have taken a while to take advantage of it.’

‘Maybe that’s about what destroyed the temple in Docklands,’ said Sefton. ‘If the Continuing Projects Team were the old law, and there’s been nothing to replace them, then this lot found themselves free to do what they liked, only they didn’t know it. I wonder why.’

‘Maybe the Continuing Projects Team worked more like under-covers than beat coppers,’ suggested Costain. ‘Perhaps you only knew they were there when they nicked you.’

‘I do wish,’ said Quill, ‘that we could find some good old-fashioned good and evil in this generational conflict, that we could say the barter people are the good guys and the money lot are bad. Because in my copper heart I have been waiting with baited breath to discover supernatural good and evil and the simple joy that would bring. But the barter people included Losley, and the money lot included your beardy waistcoat mate. So nuts to that.’

‘That would be good,’ agreed Sefton.

‘I expected one side or the other to be all about the Smiling Man,’ said Quill. ‘But from either of them I only heard references to sacrifices being made “to London”.’

They compared notes and found that was true for all of them.

‘I don’t think they know about the Smiling Man,’ said Ross. ‘Maybe he stays behind the scenes in that community too.’ She found the relevant page in one of her notebooks. ‘We still know almost nothing about him.’

‘Things we did learn,’ said Sefton, finding a page in one of his own scrawled notebooks and reading from it. ‘Losley needed a line of sight on her victims, but nobody else seems to. I kind of thought that might be unique to her after that threat against us that was written on a note when we were at the New Age fair. Whoever wrote that could “smell death” near people, which is not a line-of-sight thing.’ He obviously saw the slight smile on Quill’s face. ‘This is the sort of detail I keep track of.’

‘What about Neil Gaiman?’ asked Quill. ‘Him we can find, presumably, and he seemed in the know. We ought to get a statement.’

‘I’ve put a call in to his agent,’ said Ross. ‘Let’s hope he hasn’t flown back to the States.’

‘Yeah,’ said Costain, ‘it’d be awkward to have to bring this up on his blog.’

*   *   *