There was an area right at the back with glass-fronted cases and narrow walkways between the shelves. It smelt mustier. The design of the shop identified it as the dull bit, for serious collectors only, but there were two security cameras up there, neatly covering everything. It seemed that the owners didn’t find it profitable to bring much in the way of this genuine stuff to the New Age fairs. Sefton’s target was looking into one of the display cases. Ignoring him, Sefton walked up to stand beside him, deciding to fix his eyes on something in there that shone brightly to the Sight: a brass bracelet that looked as if it had spent some time underwater, decorated with rough knotwork. There would be some serious London history to it. There was no label on it; if you were back here, you were supposed to know what this stuff was. There was a price tag, though: £1999.99. He could feel the object kind of itching at its attachment to such a value. He could feel its age. He could also feel that there was nothing scary about it; here was an item you could lean on in a crisis, an old friend that would always see you through. He’d seldom felt emotional detail like that with the Sight. Maybe that was because of the shop environment. If someone Sighted had stocked this place – and that was a conclusion he felt he could safely come to – they wouldn’t put out anything that made their customers feel like shit. That’d be in the back, the higher slopes that he felt continued past this end wall, the special stuff for special people.

Sefton had picked the bloke he’d followed in here because he looked young and was in modern dress, unlike the serious practitioners they’d encountered at the New Age fair. Today was just about making sure that the guy saw him here, so that by the third or fourth encounter he’d think of him as a regular, and then maybe start talking to him. Sefton wasn’t planning to begin a conversation himself. You didn’t initiate contact. Doing this in a subcultural context couldn’t help but remind Sefton of something he’d never done himself: cottaging. What would be just a small indicator that he and the man shared common predilections? There might well be a secret language here, but if there was an occult underworld in London, the sort of community that knew itself as a community, it stayed off the internet. With what Ross had reported about her fortune-teller’s embrace of all that was old, maybe that wasn’t surprising. What would be the obvious thing to do here?