‘Well Beverley was certainly magically endowed,’ said Lesley. Definitely taking the piss, I thought. ‘Do you think it’s something we could learn to do?’ she asked. ‘It would make the job a lot easier if we could sniff them out.’

You can tell when somebody is shaping a forma in their mind. It’s like vestigium, anyone can sense it, the trick as always is to recognise the sense impression for what it was. Nightingale said that you could learn to recognise an individual practitioner by their signare, the distinctive signature of their magic. Once Lesley had joined us I did a blind taste test and found that I couldn’t tell the difference at all – although Nightingale could, ten times out of ten.

‘It’s something you learn to do with practice,’ he’d said. He also claimed that he could not only tell who cast a spell, but who had trained the caster and sometimes who had developed the spell. I wasn’t sure I believed him.

‘I’ve got a tentative experimental protocol,’ I said. ‘But it involves getting one of the Rivers to sit still while we take it in turns to listen to her head. And we’d need Nightingale to act as a control.’

‘That’s not going to happen any time soon,’ said Lesley. ‘Maybe it’s in the library – how’s your Latin?’

‘Better than yours – Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,’ I said which means, ‘I’ll either find a way or make one’ which was a favourite of Nightingale’s and attributed to Hannibal.

‘Vincit qui se vincit,’ said Lesley, who loved learning Latin almost as much as I did. She conquers who conquer themselves, another Nightingale favourite and the motto from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, which was something we hadn’t had the heart to tell him yet.

‘It’s pronounced win-kit not vincent,’ I said.

‘Bite me,’ said Lesley.

I grinned at her and she smiled back – sort of.

Tuesday

Tuesday

6. Sloane Square

6

Sloane Square

The Murder Team’s outside inquiry team lives in a big room on the first floor sandwiched between the Inside Inquiry Team and the Intelligence Unit (motto: we do the thinking so that other coppers don’t have to). It was a large room with pale blue walls and dark blue carpet crammed with a dozen desks and a variety of swivel chairs, some of which were held together with duct tape. In the old days it would have smelt of second-hand cigarettes but nowadays it had the familiar tang of police under pressure – I’m not sure it’s an improvement.