Lofthouse kept looking out of the window as the woman drove her, making sure the car was heading for north-west London. The young driver had neither confirmed nor denied that she was an officer in what the older generation of the Met called ‘the funny people’, and what the younger generation, influenced as they were by the movies, called ‘five’, when actually it should be MI5, or, more properly, the Security Service. When she was sure the car was going where she’d been told it was, she checked out what else had happened overnight: Quill was reporting that his team had encountered the man from the Soviet bar once more, and that, by using the right words in a message to Russell Vincent via his PA, his team had finally got an appointment to interview him. They were also preparing to raid the brothel. The results of the postal ballot on strike action were due to be released today. Lofthouse felt something give inside her. It went against everything she believed in for police to strike, but she understood why they would. She looked back with fondness now to the couple of weeks of the Olympics. There had been soldiers on the streets then doing happy crowd control. They might be returning soon, and bloody private security firms too, and things would not be so happy.

She wished she could share with James Quill the burden she was bearing, the reason she couldn’t tell him anything about why she believed him when he talked about the occult powers of London.

The car pulled up at Lord’s, in a parking space in what seemed to be a private members’ car park. It was the first day of a Test Match, Lofthouse gathered, and there was a mass of people in sun hats, carrying cool boxes, some in the distinctive striped blazers and ties of Marylebone Cricket Club, heading for the many entrances of the ground. No amount of riots would change that. She recalled the distraught emails of American friends during the London terrorist attacks of 2005. They been shocked by the everyday responses they’d got, how she’d ridden the tube the very next day with only a slight second thought, how she’d been polite but a little sighing with her replies. To Londoners, bombs and riots were just an extreme form of weather.