Ross listened to the woman’s account of the unsuccessful break-in and the successful burglary, asking all the things Lassiter would expect a police interviewer to ask. She let Lassiter believe that the Met in general knew a bit about the hidden world that she was part of, that they wanted to find the Bridge of Spikes as part of an investigation, not for themselves. Thankfully, Lassiter didn’t seem to pay enough attention to the modern media to have heard much about the death of Quill or to connect him to the man she’d seen at the Goat the same night they were there, otherwise she might have realized their real motive. Or what might have been their real motive; Ross still didn’t know who she would have chosen to save. Costain paced as they talked, barking the occasional question. Lassiter started looking perplexed at that, worried that she was looking at a cop and a user, but it didn’t stop her from telling her story.

Lassiter had come home yesterday, having gone out to get some items to replenish her flat’s defences following the break-in attempt, to find the Bridge of Spikes missing, with only small signs of a burglary having taken place. This must have been done, she thought, by someone with the Sight. Ross was surprised to hear that these were the first such attempts. It had been secrecy, rather than anything particularly useful in terms of defences, that had stopped Lassiter being raided before now.

‘It would make sense,’ said Costain, when she had taken him aside, ‘that it’s the same person who made both attempts.’

Lassiter had bought the Bridge at one of the underworld auctions over the phone, through a proxy. She’d used what she called ‘craft’ to conceal her identity on the other end of the phone from what she called ‘checking’, or as Sefton had it, ‘reading your bar code’. She’d trusted the auctioneers with her address, she said bitterly, because nobody had ever successfully paid to see the register before, but she didn’t want anyone else to know she’d got the Bridge. Ross had started to ask if the individual who’d been her proxy was trustworthy, but the woman had laughed bitterly at that, saying he was long dead. Yes, she had been planning to use the Bridge to save herself from death. Why else would she have held onto it?

They took all the details. It wasn’t much to go on. The burglar had left no trace of his or her passing. The raiders hardly much more. Costain and Ross took prints from likely surfaces, and Lassiter angrily let them have hers for comparison.

Before they left, Costain did something Ross admired him for. He called up a locksmith, talked and talked at him about what a good thing locksmiths were, and paid over the phone for him to come and repair the door.