Lies Sleeping

13 Probably Goat

Despite being the oldest part of London, the Square Mile has a faster architectural churn than anywhere else in the city. Occasionally it throws up something exciting, innovative and modern . . . but mostly it doesn’t. Architects like a bit of volume, and financiers like floor space. The easiest way to maximise both is to build a cube – which is why ninety-nine per cent of all office buildings are boxes with lobbies.

The New Bloomberg building on Queen Victoria Street was going to be yet another steel-framed Metsec affair but was still half built, with plastic sheeting protecting the gaping open sides. Once the cladding and windows were in, I suspected it wasn’t going to be much of an aesthetic improvement on the 1950s modernist boxes it was replacing. The site hoarding had ‘Improving the Image of Construction’ signs at regular intervals along its length.

Great, I thought, now can we do something about the construction itself?

It was obviously my month for wearing hard hats because the site safety officer insisted I put one on before pointing me at the temporary staircase that was bolted onto the front of the building. I nodded at the City of London PC on guard at the bottom and made my way up.

Waiting for us at the top was a small Vietnamese woman in a City of London Police uniform with SC tags denoting that she was a special constable. This was Geneviève Nguyễn who had attended the Sorbonne and worked in Paris before being headhunted by Citigroup and moving to London. There she had discovered that any citizen of the European Economic Area could swear an oath, don a uniform and enforce the law with the same authority as their full-time colleagues.

Most of the time she stays in her expensively tailored suit and helps with fiendishly complicated fraud cases, but the City Police allow her out on the streets once in a while. She also triples up as their liaison with the Folly, and was one of the first officers to do my patented vestigia awareness training seminar. She didn’t seem at all fazed by my wild talk of ghosts and magic – which made me really suspicious. But all she would admit to was having heard a lot of stories from her grandmother.

‘Definitely a spy,’ said Carey, who never knowingly left a stereotype unturned.

‘What gives her away?’ asked Guleed.

‘It’s the accent,’ said Carey.

Police tape marked out the entry point for the single designated approach to the crime scene, although fortunately it was booties and gloves only – not the full noddy suit.

‘What’s your opinion of animal sacrifice?’ asked Nguyễn as she led me further into the building.

‘Well, I’ve got this annoying dog,’ I said.

‘I meant from a Falcon point of view,’ said Nguyễn, who had once patiently explained to me that while she understood that the British liked a laugh, she didn’t understand why we felt it necessary to inject it into every single aspect of life, no matter how inappropriate.

‘Ritual sacrifices can have power,’ I said. ‘But usually it’s something for the RSPCA.’

We went down an unfinished corridor smelling of cement dust and cut plasterboard and out into a large internal room whose newly fitted walls were a pristine white. Except for the blood spatter on every vertical surface. With some on the ceiling as well. It was definitely blood – the reek gave it away – and some of it had been sprayed with force.

It was hard to sense anything over the smell, but I got flickers of shouting and feet stamping and a rhythmic pulse like a mad rave heard from far away.

‘Tell me this is animal blood,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nguyễn. ‘We confirmed that this morning. That is why you’re talking to me and not Major Crime.’

‘We’re not that far from Smithfield,’ I said – the market being a good source of offal, blood, and the sort of high-spirited young people who might think flinging it about was a bit of a laugh.

I noticed that the floor was devoid of any spatter, and Nguyễn noticed me noticing.

‘They put down plastic sheeting,’ she said.

But hadn’t covered the walls – had things got out of hand? I took a longer look at the spatter on the walls. I’m not an expert, but some of it looked like arterial spray – and there were voids. Or rather there were what looked like spaces outlined by an initial spray – that of blood projected out by a beating heart – which had then been partially filled in by blood spattered later. If you squinted you could see that the voids formed the outlines of people standing against the walls when they were hit by the spray.

‘Did you find anything else?’ I asked.

‘Not much.’

Nguyễn took me over to where the portable finds were spread out in separate bags on a sheet of white paper.

‘Not much’ summed it up. A couple of condom packets, a pill that had lodged in a crack at floor level and looked suspiciously like MDMA, and samples from some non-blood stains on the walls – mainly alcohol.

‘Red wine,’ said Nguyễn.

‘Do we know what kind of animal?’

‘Tentatively goat,’ said Nguyễn. ‘The lab will confirm it in a couple of days.’

The ravers had turned up for a party and had taken forensic countermeasures in the form of plastic sheeting on the floor and policing up condoms, bottles, cups and anything else that might contain useful DNA. Even vomit, pointed out Nguyễn, although uniforms were out searching the surrounding streets in case someone had thrown up on their way out or was careless enough to dump their rubbish nearby.

So they’d . . . What? Gathered together with booze and condoms and slaughtered a goat. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like they’d sprayed the poor thing’s blood around like champagne from a winner’s podium.

And then, covered with blood, they’d danced and shagged the merry night away.

Actually, it might have just been shagging since nobody had reported any loud music.

But you get vestigia at the site of any major live music festival, and even a little bit at your average gig. The Notting Hill Carnival generates enough potential magic that I know of at least one Russian witch who takes part in the parade just to bask in it. Football matches, Christmas shelters, village fêtes and light engineering works all generate magic – or at least enough to make Toby bark. Which is my current benchmark.

It was the forward planning and the forensic countermeasures that were dragging at my attention.

That and the goat.

‘This was definitely a ritual,’ I said. ‘Why here?’

‘It’s probably the temple,’ said Nguyễn. And then, off my blank look, ‘The Temple of Mithras.’

‘I thought it was over on Victoria Street?’

Contrary to what people think, I haven’t actually memorised the location of every historically significant building in London. I did know that the temple had been discovered nearby during construction work in the mid-1950s and moved to another location for preservation. There’d been talk of moving it back, but I thought that had been kiboshed by the great financial collapse five years back.

‘Bloomberg took over the project,’ said Nguyễn. ‘Reinstated the complete return.’

Back to its original location on the banks of the Walbrook.

‘I wonder if they’ll put in a labyrinth,’ I said out loud, by accident.

Ritually sacrificed goats, Roman temples, bells infused with the power of ancient stones, and dead wannabe scriptwriters.

‘Do you think this is one of yours?’ asked Nguyễn.

‘I don’t know yet. Are you going to pursue the vandalism side?’

‘I’m just a special. But the head of Bloomberg’s London office is finishing his vacation in the Seychelles early and flying back this afternoon. So I believe some investigation is likely.’

‘In that case I’ll email you some names to look out for,’ I said.

Back in the ‘good old days’ when a quarter of the map was pink and the Folly was at its height you couldn’t practise magic in the UK without their permission. Sometimes the permission was implicit – if you weren’t scaring the horses or curdling the milk they ignored or patronised you, especially if you were female.

But if you were a full-on Newtonian practitioner, a master of the forms and wisdoms, you had better be recognising the authority of the Society of the Wise or there were going to be consequences.

All that ended with the decimation of British and European wizardry during the Second World War, although personally I think their control might already have been slipping in the 1920s and ’30s. After the war all you had to do to practise magic with impunity was not come to the attention of Britain’s last official wizard.

At least until recently.

When dealing with a problem, the first thing to do is admit you have a problem. The second thing is to try and determine the scale of the problem. Now, for the last couple of years we’ve mainly been hunting Little Crocodiles. But in the process we’ve been identifying other potential practitioners and adding them to our growing database. A database that I was happy to assure the Data Protection Agency was impervious to unauthorised access on account of it being confined to old-fashioned index cards in a rather nice polished walnut filing cabinet in the upstairs magical library.

They still made me fill in my own body weight in forms.

And on one of those cards in the walnut cabinet was the name Patrick Gale – confirmed practitioner. He’d come to my attention following the death by hyperthaumaturgical necrosis of one Tony Harden – a junior colleague of his. Because neither had studied at Oxford or were on our Little Crocodiles list, or appeared as nominals in Operation Jennifer or any other Martin Chorley-related investigations, we’d kept a watching brief.

Also, Patrick Gale was a senior partner at Bock, Loupe and Stag, one of the top ten legal firms in London known collectively as ‘the magic circle’. Firms like BL&S routinely swindled developing countries for fun and profit, bullied government departments and had the personal mobile numbers of media proprietors on speed dial – you don’t mess with them unless you have to. Not if you want to wake up in the same career you went to bed in.

But the case that had drawn Patrick Gale to my attention had also involved the ritual sacrifice of a goat. So it had to be followed up. In policing you don’t want to be explaining to the case review board why you missed that vital piece of evidence because it seemed a bit obscure and you couldn’t be bothered to get off your arse. Even if in our work a case review board is pretty bloody unlikely.

So when I got back to the Folly I pulled the relevant index cards and sent the details to Nguyễn. Then I called Postmartin, who has a morbid interest in animal sacrifice.

‘My interest is entirely academic and historical,’ said Postmartin on the phone.

Behind him I could hear town traffic and student voices. Given it was a warm Sunday afternoon I guessed he was sitting outside the Eagle and Child enjoying a gin and tonic and pretending he was C. S. Lewis’s younger, atheist, brother.

‘Neither Thomas nor Abdul have ever shown any interest, beyond the practical, in ritual magic,’ he said. ‘Particularly if they predate the Newtonian synthesis.’

Postmartin always called it ‘the Newtonian synthesis’ to emphasise the fact that Newton did not so much invent magic as find the principles that underlie its practice.

‘A practice that dates back millennia,’ he said. ‘All the way back to the dawn of Man. If not older than that.’

Postmartin favoured the ‘tribal religion theory’ propagated by P. J. Wickshaven, country parson, occasional wizard and amateur anthropologist. Around 1905 he wrote a treatise in which he postulated that religious rituals gained currency with early Man because they produced actually identifiable results. Furthermore, as Postmartin explained it to me, the ancient pre-Abrahamic religions maintained their effectiveness because of their essentially local nature.

‘It’s always Isis or Hermes of such and such a place,’ he said. ‘It seems entirely reasonable to me that Isis, for example, could have been a local genius loci who either took on the guise of the goddess or even perhaps came to embody the deity in that locality.’

Prior to Newton, Wickshaven contended, the practice of magic and that of religion were essentially indistinguishable. He’d travelled to Papua New Guinea in 1907 to find some poor lost tribe to prove his theory for him and had last been seen setting out from Port Moresby, never to return. You’ve got a lot of work like this in the Folly libraries – enthusiastic theories defended to the death without much in the way of corroboration. Or, as Abigail said, ‘So, this is what people used to do before the internet.’

According to Wickshaven, the central figure – he called him a shaman – generates a forma and leads a congregation in a ritual. Even if only a couple of the attendees successfully replicate the forma then, presumably, that would increase the strength of the spell. And throw in an animal sacrifice?

‘This ritual does seem reminiscent of the bacchanalia described in Livy or perhaps, given the sacrifice of the goat, classical Greek worship,’ said Postmartin.

Sex, booze and animal sacrifice – I suppose after a hard week flogging your slaves and inventing comic theatre you needed something to do on the weekends. I asked whether Postmartin thought this was significant.

‘The London Mithraeum is thought to have been converted to the worship of Bacchus in the fourth century ad,’ he said. ‘Could be a coincidence.’

Only in a rational world, I thought.

‘Mithras lost his lustre, did he?’ I asked.

‘Mithras could have been a contender,’ said Postmartin. ‘He was one of the big three mystery cults, along with Jesus Christ and Isis.’ Then, as Postmartin had it, the Christians got the nod from Emperor Constantine and that was all she wrote for the other two gods. ‘Which was a pity, because imagine world history if Europe had turned to Isis instead,’ he said. ‘A female priesthood would have been just the start.’

Postmartin said that there was solid evidence that there had been a Temple of Isis in London but nobody knew where it was. Not like they did with Bacchus and the Mithraeum.

‘But if you do run into a candidate for it,’ he said, ‘you will let me know?’

So, to sum up – persons unknown had, probably, conducted a bacchanal on the exact site of what was probably London’s last major temple to Bacchus, and that ceremony had produced a real magical effect – possibly intentionally.

I wasn’t putting this on the whiteboard until I had some idea who the persons unknown were.

And that information was gleefully supplied the following day by Special Constable Nguyễn.

‘They were all sensible enough to leave their cars at home,’ she said. ‘We think most walked out of the area and then got night buses. A smaller number felt relaxed enough to summon an Uber to pick them outside the building, and one was picked up his wife in the family SUV.’

‘Her name was Monika Gale. Wife of Patrick Gale.

‘Boch, Loupe and Stag,’ said Nguyễn. ‘You guys really know how to pick your suspects. I’ve been asked, in my role as Folly liaison, to indicate that as far as City of London Police are concerned this is one hundred and ten per cent a Falcon case. Good luck.’

And that was that.

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you’ve got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary.

That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey.

Fortunately for us we have just the man.

So it was Nightingale who went striding into Patrick Gale’s workplace with his best black Dege & Skinner two piece suit, with me following behind in my serviceable tailored M&S looking like the loyal flunky I was.

Bock, Loupe and Stag occupy a large chunk of the building across from Broadgate Tower. Like that, this one was designed – as far as I could tell – by the same people who did the interior layout for Cybertron. Lots of angled struts, planes of glass and random spikes. It was, as architectural theorists like to say, a bold statement and the statement was: ‘Fuck truth and beauty. We’ve got money and loads of it’.

‘Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale to see Patrick Gale,’ Nightingale said, and flashed his warrant card at the receptionist without breaking step.

Ahead was a set of security gates, like posh minimalist versions of the ticket barriers at Tube stations. I was probably the only one who noticed the tiny gesture Nightingale made with his right hand. I recognised the tight little surge which followed as a complex fifth order spell that caused the gates to lock in the open position so we could walk through.

A tall, thin Sierra Leonean man in a security guard uniform stepped up to block us.

‘Step back, sir,’ I said firmly.

Which he did smartly – possibly because of my impressive command voice, but more likely because his name was Obe and he was my cousin – second or third, I forget which – on my mum’s side. I’d nudged him into his current job shortly after Patrick Gale came to my attention. It was down to Obe that we knew the make and model of the security barriers, how many guards would be on duty, and that Gale was currently up in his office.

Because we’d planned this as carefully as any raid on a crack house, with maps and timetables and Guleed and Carey out front and back with an arrest team just in case anybody tried to scarper. After all, you don’t want to be striding resolutely into someone’s office only to find they’re spending a dirty weekend in Honolulu with their son’s macramé tutor – do you?

Gale had an office on the sixth floor, so we risked the lift.

We emerged into an open-plan office crowded with the upmarket walnut veneer versions of drone cubicles, took a sharp left and headed down the clearway towards the big airy offices of the senior partners.

And the biggest and airiest belonged to Patrick Gale, one of the most powerful men you’ve never heard of.

He was a big, wide, white man with the heft that the naturally fat get when they exercise like mad in middle age. He had a good but stylistically neutral lightweight cotton suit and definitely handmade shoes. Reception had obviously had time to call up and warn him, and he’d chosen to act casual – leaning against the front of his desk with his arms folded.

He was sharp, I’ll give him that. He recognised me immediately from when I interviewed him about the late Tony Harden the year before. Then I saw him clock Nightingale and a moment of utter shock crossed his face, which I reckon was him realising exactly who was in his office.

Good, I thought, you know who he is – this should make things easier.

I’ll give him this, though – he didn’t bluster. He kept it together enough to step up and ask us, politely, what our business was.

‘Mr Gale, we’re here to talk about the ritual sacrifice you took part in on the night of the twentieth at the construction site at Queen Victoria Street.’

His face went professionally blank as he considered his options.

Now, I thought, it’s either going to be outraged dignity or Let’s Be Civilised.

‘Please,’ he said, looking to retake control of his own office. ‘Have a seat. Can I offer you a coffee? Tea?’

I wanted popcorn, but asking for it might have broken the mood.

Nightingale said thank you and sat down as if he was settling in to watch the rugby. I tried to follow his lead, but I suspect I was too tense for properly casual.

Patrick Gale sat down on what had to be three grands’ worth of reinforced stainless steel and leather executive seating.

Bluff or denial? I wondered.

‘A sacrifice?’ he said.

So denial it was.

‘A goat was ritually sacrificed at or around midnight at the Bloomberg construction site by person or persons unknown,’ said Nightingale.

‘Contrary to the Animal Welfare Act (2006),’ I said.

‘We believe you were intimately involved,’ said Nightingale.

‘And why might you think that?’ asked Gale, with just a hint of smugness.

We told him about his wife’s car, but he wasn’t impressed.

‘That’s hardly a positive identification,’ he said. ‘I’m sure there are many reasons why my wife’s car might be in the city at night. Just as there are many reasons why I might be in the vicinity. Without resorting to fanciful theories about – what was the animal you said was slaughtered?’

‘Patrick,’ said Nightingale, ‘you need to cast off the notion that this is a matter of the law and that your superior interpretation and command of the legal niceties will see you through.’

Patrick Gale opened his mouth to speak, but Nightingale tapped a forefinger once, gently, against the arm of his chair, and no words emerged. Gale opened his mouth again, but again – nothing. The expression on his face cycled rapidly through astonishment, anger and outrage. He raised his hand, but Nightingale tapped his finger twice more and Gale’s hand slapped down onto his desk top hard enough to make the keyboard jump.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I can render you immobile and stop up your voice – or stop your breath, if I choose to.’

There was real fear in Patrick Gale’s eyes now, and they turned to look at me – pleading.

‘Follow my lead in this, Peter,’ Nightingale had said when we were planning the interview. ‘And do try to trust my judgement on the ethical issues this time.’

‘And no doubt,’ Nightingale said to Gale, ‘you’re thinking that what I’m doing can’t possibly be legal. And, you know, I’m not sure.’ He glanced at me. ‘Peter?’

‘You’re restraining him against his will,’ I said. ‘It probably depends on whether you arrest him or not.’

Which was a terrible answer from a legal point of view, but in my defence I was distracted by the sheer technical difficulty of what Nightingale was doing. In many ways people, and other living creatures, are amazingly resistant to direct manipulation with magic. That’s why most magical duels quickly devolve down to both parties throwing the kitchenware at each other.

But where brute force doesn’t work, subtlety does. And in the practice of Newtonian magic subtlety doesn’t come easy.

Just on the edge of my perception there was the tick, tick, tick of a mechanical movement, a jewelled movement, that delicately bound Patrick Gale in place and stopped the action of his larynx – or whatever the fuck kept him silent. It was a twentieth order spell at least.

‘But, just as I can’t prove that you attended that merry little bacchanal,’ said Nightingale, ‘you can’t prove that I am in any way violating your rights as a suspect. The legal niceties have become irrelevant and we find ourselves making a moral choice instead.’

I felt the formae twist as Nightingale added another layer of complexity. And Gale’s hands came together, fingers entwined over his paunch as if he was relaxing after a hard day.

‘You made that choice when you took up the forms and wisdoms,’ said Nightingale. ‘And now you must take responsibility for that choice – don’t you agree?’

Gale’s face contorted and I saw his big shoulders tense as he made a desperate attempt to separate his hands. Nightingale calmly watched him for the full ten seconds or so it took for it to become clear that escape was impossible.

Gale’s shoulder’s slumped and he nodded.

Nightingale snapped his fingers, a purely theatrical gesture, and Gale’s hands separated as the spell was released. He wriggled his fingers a couple of times and then gave Nightingale an inquiring look, because nothing attracts the powerful quite like more power.

‘Shall we start at the beginning?’ said Nightingale. ‘Who trained you?’

Gale hesitated, eyes flicking between us.

‘I swore an oath,’ he said finally. ‘I was told there would be consequences if I revealed their name.’

‘Well, there’ll certainly be consequences if you don’t,’ said Nightingale.

‘There’s no evidence that breaking your oath has supernatural repercussions,’ I added.

Beyond the obvious risk that you might have pissed off someone more powerful than you, I thought, but kept that to myself. No point cluttering up the conversation with pointless trivia.

‘I learnt it from a friend of mine at Cambridge,’ said Patrick Gale.

‘His name?’ asked Nightingale.

‘John Chapman,’ he said.

It’s always tempting to show off your knowledge during a confrontation. But during an interview it’s always better to pretend ignorance – which was why Nightingale went on to ask about John Chapman, even though Gale’s answers merely confirmed the information we’d already got from the IIP.

Well, most of it anyway.

‘Where did he learn magic?’ asked Nightingale.

‘He said he learnt it from a book,’ said Gale. ‘By Sir Isaac Newton, of all people.’ He was sceptical.

‘I think he was taught by his uncle,’ he added. ‘He used to let slip and mention him from time to time.’

I made a note of the uncle and tried not to sigh out loud – yet another loose thread.

‘And Tony Harden?’ asked Nightingale.

‘John got him interested,’ said Gale. ‘I taught him most of what I know.’

‘Did you warn him of the dangers?’

Patrick Gale blinked.

‘What dangers?’

‘Practising magic can damage your health,’ I said.

Patrick Gale’s façade cracked and he gave me a horrified look.

‘You’re joking,’ he said.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘That’s what killed Tony Harden.’

Gale glared.

‘You told me he died of natural causes,’ he said.

‘He did,’ I said. ‘Caused naturally, by his overuse of magic.’

‘Surely it should have been characterised as death by misadventure?’ said Gale. ‘You withheld information from the coroner’s court.’

‘Would you rather we had pressed for “unlawful death”?’ asked Nightingale. ‘As his teacher you were surely negligent in not informing him of the risks.’

‘But I didn’t—’ Gale started, but wisely thought better of it.

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘We may return to that point later, but first there is the matter of the Dionysian ritual you officiated at last Saturday. You did officiate, didn’t you? I can’t imagine you left that honour to somebody else.’

Gale nodded to show that he had, in fact, taken the role of priest in the bacchanal and I had to stop myself from asking him to verbalise it for the recording. But of course there was no recording because, legally, this was not happening.

‘Have you been indulging in these revels long?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Since 2011,’ said Gale. ‘And they’re not just a rave.’

He flicked his eyes at me to emphasise how different it was from the drum and bass and MDMA fuelled excesses indulged in by the urban youth of today. Chance would be a fine thing, I thought.

‘We have a serious purpose,’ he said.

Nightingale ignored that thread because when the suspect – I mean interviewee – wants to talk about something it’s a good idea to frustrate them a little bit. That way you can get more later than they intended. Seawoll calls it the ‘fuck all the cows’ interview approach.

‘Would you say they have a magical effect?’ asked Nightingale.

Gale’s face lost some of its habitual caution.

‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘You could sense it lighting up the group as if it was jumping from person to person.’ He said he could feel it flowing back and forth like a wave bouncing off the edges of a swimming pool. ‘Only instead of fading away, it grows stronger with every wave. Tremendous rush.’

‘And the sex?’ I asked.

‘I’ve heard that’s extraordinary too,’ he said.

‘Heard?’

‘My wife,’ said Gale, ‘wouldn’t approve. And she doesn’t like to attend herself.’

‘She doesn’t like the goat?’ I asked.

‘She’s a vegetarian,’ he said.

‘Does the sacrifice actually make a difference?’ I said. ‘Have you tried the ceremony without it?’

‘Again,’ said Gale, ‘I have no doubt that it increases the mystical potency of the ritual.’ His initial fright was wearing off and he was getting his bottle back. ‘Have you not tried it yourselves?’

‘This ceremony . . .’ said Nightingale, before I could answer. ‘This ceremony that you claim has a serious purpose. Might we ask what that is?’

‘It keeps London from falling into riot and disorder,’ said Gale. ‘And I might add it seems a great deal more effective than the police in this regard.’

John Chapman had suggested as much after the summer riots in 2011.

‘He thought they were suspiciously sudden,’ said Gale. ‘He suggested that there might be a spiritual malaise behind the violence.’

And when Chapman said ‘spiritual malaise’ he wasn’t thinking that the youth of today should respect their elders and go to church more often. He meant a vengeful evil spirit that had plagued London since the Romans.

‘And this seemed credible to you?’ asked Nightingale.

‘That the riots were inspired by a vengeful spirit? No – quite apart from the fact that the underclass riots on a regular basis, it wouldn’t explain why the riots spread to other cities. What changed my mind was that madness in Covent Garden. I knew some of the people involved and they were not the Molotov cocktail set.’

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.

They were the sort of people who have people to do their violence for them, I managed not to say. And not without some effort, I might add.

‘And you’ve held the ritual ever since?’ asked Nightingale.

Patrick Gale confirmed that they had been holding it twice a year– at the summer and winter solstices. John Chapman had suggested these would be the most effective dates. When Nightingale asked where Chapman had acquired all this esoteric knowledge, Gale told us about the Paternoster Society.

‘A secret society,’ he said. ‘They used to meet in a house on Paternoster Row near St Paul’s, until it was knocked down.’

And suddenly annoying little alarm tweets and chirps were going off in my head.

Where the pattern-welded Anglo-Saxon Excalibur candidate had been dug up. Next to the cathedral where John Chapman’s script – and I was pretty certain that all the historical stuff in the script had been his – situated its revenant spirit.

What we desperately needed was some accurate historical sources.

I thought of Father Thames, who was old enough to remember. But when a person like Oxley cautions you about the potential cost of asking such questions it’s wise to pay attention. Especially when you’d just thought of a cheaper alternative.

‘Now, Mr Gale,’ said Nightingale. ‘We reach the question of what to do about you.’

‘I’m not sure there’s any legal action you can take,’ said Gale, with unwise smugness.

Nightingale tapped his fingers and I felt the tick, tick, swish of a subtle little surge, and Patrick Gale sat up straight in his chair and clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him.

‘Mr Gale,’ said Nightingale, ‘the practice of magic is hard and dangerous. Sooner or later you will overstep your bounds and suffer serious injury or death.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Now, I for one would be perfectly happy to let you to take the consequences of your own actions. Were it not for the fact that you have already proved yourself a danger to others.’

‘In what way—’ started Gale.

‘You were Anthony Harden’s teacher,’ said Nightingale. ‘And you were negligent in his training. Now he is dead. I’m afraid that I’ll have to require you to place yourself under my authority for remedial training until such time as I judge you both competent and responsible enough to practise magic on your own recognisance.’

Patrick Gale was doing a good impression of a stunned kipper, but I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave – a chance to be exclusive.

‘Or else?’ he asked.

Yes please, I thought, let’s have option two.

‘We take steps to prevent you practising again,’ said Nightingale.

Cake or death, I thought – three guesses as to which it will be.

‘What sort of schedule are we talking about?’ asked Patrick Gale. ‘For the training, that is.’

But me and Nightingale didn’t get a chance to follow up on the mysterious Paternoster Society, or even get preliminary intelligence on the list of revellers that Patrick Gale had been pleased to supply, once Nightingale had released his hands long enough to write it down. Because we had to prepare for Operation Strong Tower – the Met’s all-singing, all-dancing terrorist attack exercise. In this we were expected to use our ‘special’ abilities to conjure up some bangs and whistles to keep the response teams on their toes.

‘Frightened, but not too frightened,’ were our instructions.

It did mean, during a refs stop at the Café Rouge on Kingsway, that I got a chance to tackle Nightingale about his sudden bout of, to my mind, inappropriate inclusiveness.

‘So what?’ I said. ‘We keep them happy with a clubhouse and a secret handshake?’

‘Well,’ said Nightingale, ‘I hadn’t thought of a handshake, but if you think it might help . . .’

‘These people are not to be trusted,’ I said.

‘These people?’

‘People with . . .’ I looked over at the poshest person I’ve ever met and tried to think of the right word. ‘Entitlement,’ I said. ‘They’re not good at keeping promises.’

Nightingale paused with a forkful of salmon halfway to his mouth and gave me an amused look.

‘Entitlement?’ he said.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘We can always have them swear an oath,’ said Nightingale. ‘Something suitably restrictive and modern – like the attestation you fellows took to become constables.’

Historically, the constable’s attestation mainly concerned his loyalty to the monarch. But the modern version includes a promise to be diligent, honest, respect human rights and apply the law without fear and favour. The new wording has been known to provoke hilarity amongst old lags and defence lawyers.

‘Think of it as one of your community outreach programmes,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the resources to enforce our will upon them, but perhaps we can bribe them into submission with Molly’s cooking.’

‘You think that’ll work?’

‘It has with everyone so far.’

I frowned.

‘You don’t approve?’

‘I was thinking of the paperwork,’ I said. ‘Assuming that Patrick Gale is not the last stray we’re going to round up, at the very least we need to develop a safety programme to ensure they don’t melt their brains by accident.’

‘That at least we can leave to Abdul and the irrepressible Dr Vaughan,’ said Nightingale. ‘Who no doubt will be delighted to extend the boundaries of their empire of information.’

‘Their knowledge base,’ I said.

‘I believe that’s what I said.’

‘We can’t keep this up,’ I said. ‘It’s unsustainable.’

‘Which of the many unstable aspects of our professional life are you referring to now?’

‘The secrecy surrounding magic,’ I said. ‘Leaving aside our lack of statutory authority, and the fact that the public have no say whatsoever in our conduct of operations.’

‘They do in a general sense,’ said Nightingale, ‘through the office of the Commissioner and, beyond him, the Home Office.’

‘That is not accountability,’ I said.

‘Do you think the general public would make good decisions?’

‘That’s not the point. Sooner or later this stuff always comes back to bite you in the arse.’

‘You think we should make ourselves public?’ said Nightingale. ‘Step out of the cupboard and into the limelight?’

‘I think we need to be ready for when it happens,’ I said.

‘No other nation has officially acknowledged the existence of magic, Peter,’ said Nightingale. ‘It might be prudent to ask yourself why.’