‘Old generals are the cause of military disasters,’ said Kasavian, drumming long fingers on the windowpane. ‘The elderly are weak precisely because they live in the past.’ It was his absence of humanity others found so perturbing, as if Countess Bathory and Vlad the Impaler had mated to create the perfect bureaucratic hatchet man. ‘It would be prudent to act before someone causes a criminal outrage that could have been prevented by the PCU.’

‘You sound as if you have something in mind,’ said Faraday, who preferred to allow others to put forward their ideas, so that he could appear blameless if they failed.

‘Clearly, I should have treated my last attempt to close the unit as a warning. The detectives have a few friends in senior positions, including, it seems, the Lord Chancellor, who are eager to protect the unit whenever it is threatened with closure. Therefore, we need recourse to a higher power.’

‘Higher than the Lord Chancellor?’ Faraday looked as if he could not imagine such a thing.

‘Naturally, I have someone in mind,’ said Kasavian, looming over the civil servant with threatening proximity. ‘Leave all the arrangements to me.’

‘The trouble with Arthur Bryant is that he treats us all as though we’re uninvited guests gate-crashing his private world,’ complained Raymond Land, the acting head of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, as he adjusted his navy blue golf club tie. ‘That’s what I resent most of all, the sheer lack of respect.’

Land had failed in his attempt to be transferred to another division following the unit’s success in capturing the murderer dubbed ‘the Highwayman’ in the national press. He reluctantly accepted the fact that he would probably be stationed in Mornington Crescent forever, but it didn’t stop him from vilifying the chief engineer of his fate. Land had arrived at the unit in the early 1970s, expecting to while away a single summer of lightweight criminal cases that fell below the radar and beyond the interest of his superiors. Instead, he had found himself thrust blinking and ill-prepared into the limelight of a series of sensational high-profile murder investigations. He blamed Arthur Bryant and John May, the founders of the unit, for poking him above the parapet of visibility, but managed to enjoy the national attention for a while.

However, during the Thatcher years, things began to go wrong for the PCU; a number of investigations were mishandled and the unit’s funding was cancelled. Suddenly, Raymond Land realised he was being scapegoated for a division now considered to be unreliable and unworthy of public trust. Arthur Bryant’s much-publicised willingness to hire psychics, necromancers, eco-warriors, numerologists, clairvoyants, crypto-zoologists, chakra-balancers and all manner of alternative therapists placed him in the firing line when his techniques failed. Over the years, only the gentle arbitration of his partner John May mollified the Whitehall mandarins.