It took me another half an hour to finish the forms and send them off, at which point Lesley called to remind me that we were supposed to be interviewing our suspected Little Crocodile, Nightingale having set out for Henley that morning when it became clear I was going to be busy. So much for getting to see Beverley this year. Lesley wondered if he was going to make it back that evening.

‘He’s too sensible to drive in this,’ I said.

We met up by the back stairs, which were tucked away at the front of the Folly, and she followed me down to the secure storage room which also served as our gun locker. After my exciting encounter with the Faceless Man on a Soho rooftop, Nightingale and our friend Caffrey the ex-Para spent a fun week clearing out weapons and ammunition that had been rotting inside for over sixty years. The bit I found particularly enjoyable was when I accidentally opened a crate of fragmentation grenades that had been sitting in a puddle since 1946 and Caffrey’s voice had shot up two octaves as he told me to back away slowly. We had to have a couple of guys from the Explosives Ordnance Disposal Unit come and take them away. An operation me and Lesley supervised from the café in the park across the road.

The equipment passed for operational by Caffrey had been cleaned and stored on brand-new racks on one side and metal shelving installed on the other for evidence storage. I signed the items in on the clipboard provided and then Lesley and I buggered off to the Barbican.

5. The Barbican

5

The Barbican

After World War Two there wasn’t much left of English wizardry except for Nightingale, the walking wounded and a number of practitioners too old or not good enough to get themselves killed in that final convulsive battle in the forests near Ettersberg. I don’t know what the fight was about for sure, but I have my theories – Nazis, concentration camps, the occult – a lot of theories. Only Nightingale and a couple of senior wizards, now long dead, had stayed active, the rest having died of the wounds, gone mad or renounced their calling and taken up a mundane life. Breaking their staffs is what Nightingale called that.

Nightingale had been content to fall into a holding pattern, retreating into the Folly and emerging only to deal with occasional supernatural difficulty for the Met and the regional police forces. It was a brand-new world of motorways and global superpowers and atomic bombs. He, like most people in the know, assumed that the magic was fading, that the light was going out of the world and that nobody was practising magic but him.