The cafe was one of those you got on the corners of central London, unchanged in design and function since the fifties, apart from a microwave and a smoking ban. There were, now Sefton thought about it, quite a few businesses like this near the occult shop. The pub he’d been in hadn’t even had a telly. Were the proprietors aware that some of their clientele were what might be called neophobic, culturally attached to the past? Or was this just an evolutionary process caused by the flow of cash: in the squeeze, anything that had smacked of modernity had just unknowingly suffered from those customers not showing up? Maybe not. It wasn’t as if the individuals they’d met at the New Age fair were rolling in it. Exactly the opposite.

He went to join the man at a corner table, and now the bloke felt able to look up and acknowledge his presence. ‘I’m on your side. I really am.’

Sefton kept looking stern. Let him talk. His aim here was to find out as much as possible about the culture this man belonged to, and perhaps get an invitation to move further in, to meet more of them. The now-urgent need the man had to express some sort of fellow feeling might be an excellent engine to power that along.

‘But you can’t just march across all the lines. You have to tread carefully.’

What lines? Costain always liked to say that Sefton asked too many questions when undercover. But, sod him, Sefton was in his own world now. ‘Are you disrespecting me?’

From the wince on the man’s face, that had been the wrong thing to say. ‘Why do you keep doing that? Whatever the Keel brothers might want, speaking like that is going too far.’

As his training had taught him, Sefton did the opposite of what he wanted to, looking aside as if being accepted, being invited to become part of this community in some way, was nothing to him. ‘I know it’s hard, in your position—’ the man started to say. ‘You don’t know anything, mate.’

‘I’m only on the fringes myself. But when I’m in their places I do my best to talk their language. You know, to speak all old-fashioned London. All that Mary Poppins music-hall nonsense. It’s just what they’ve always done.’

He meant how Ross’ fortune-teller at the New Age fair had talked. So that was what this guy was worried about – his speech patterns. Just as well he hadn’t gone total Peckham on him.

‘I know the Keel brothers and others are trying to force changes now, that a generational thing of some kind is going on, and that suits me too…’

Sefton filed that one away for future reference.