He’d met Richard Lewis at the Royal Opera House during a performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. He’d gone on impulse and had been in the standing-room-only section when a well-dressed stranger had turned to him and said, ‘God this is a bloody awful performance.’
‘He said that he could think of at least five things that he’d rather be doing,’ said Phillip. ‘I asked him what was on the top of the list and he said, “Well, a stiff drink would be a good start, don’t you think?” So off we went for a drink and that was it, cupid’s arrow right between the eyes.’
But it hadn’t quite been love at first sight. Phillip hadn’t flown across the pond with a large fortune just to fall for the first half-decent proposition. ‘He worked at it,’ said Phillip. ‘He was methodical and patient and-’ Phillip looked away and stared at a blank piece of wall for a moment before taking a breath. ‘Really fucking funny.’
Three months later they were married, or more precisely they entered into a Civil Partnership, with due ceremony, celebration and a suitable pre-nup.
‘That was Richard’s idea,’ said Phillip.
I judged that this was about as good a time as any to wheel out the questionnaire. It had been drawn up by Dr Walid and Nightingale to uncover evidence of real magical practice — as opposed to an interest in the occult, ghost stories, fantasy novels and that old time religion. Dr Walid had thrown in some questions from established psychometric and sociological surveys to make it sound kosher. I called it the Voigt-Kampf test even though only Dr Walid got the joke — and he had to look it up on Wikipedia.
‘It’s to provide background about these. . tragic incidents,’ I said. ‘To see what can be done to prevent them in the future.’
Up till now I’d mostly given the spiel to potential Little Crocodiles who I was pretending to interview on a totally random basis. Watching Phillip’s face, I decided we were going to have to dream up a whole new strategy for dealing with bereaved relatives. Either that or Dr Walid could come and administer his own bloody tests.
Phillip nodded as if this was all perfectly reasonable — perhaps he was just pleased we were taking an interest.
The test started with a couple of psychological questions as warm up, and I almost skipped number five, ‘Did the subject indicate dissatisfaction with any aspect of his life?’ But Dr Walid had stressed consistency in application.
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Phillip. ‘Not until I saw the tape of the accident.’
‘They let you see it?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I insisted,’ said Phillip. ‘I thought there was no way that Richard would kill himself. What reason would he have? But it’s hard to argue with the evidence of your eyes.’
I moved onto the ‘spiritual’ questions which revealed that Richard had almost been an Anglican in the same way that Phillip had almost been a Catholic. Phillip told me proudly that his mum had ceased to be a practising Catholic the day after he came out.
‘She says she will go back to the Church the day it apologises,’ he said.
Lewis hadn’t had any interest in the occult beyond that needed to appreciate Wagner or the Magic Flute and he didn’t own any books about magic, or many books at all.
‘He gave away most of his old books when we moved here,’ said Phillip. ‘And he said his Kindle was much handier for the commute to London. Now I resent all the hours he spent on that train. But he loved his home here and he wouldn’t give up his job.’
Not that Phillip could understand why. ‘I know he didn’t get anything in the way of job satisfaction,’ he said. Phillip could have certainly used him in his own company, which arranged finance for high-tech start-ups. ‘He hated working in London, said he hated the city and I begged him to quit for like five years, but he wouldn’t.’
‘Did he say why?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Phillip. ‘He always changed the subject.’
Up till then I’d been doodling, but now I started taking notes. Keeping a secret always makes the police suspicious. And while we’re willing to believe in the possibility of a totally innocent explanation, we never think that’s the way to bet.
I asked whether there was any aspect of Richard’s work as a town planner that he’d talked about more than others, but Phillip hadn’t noticed. Nor had Richard complained about incidents of corruption or coming under any pressure to influence a planning decision one way or the other.
‘And whatever it was keeping him there,’ said Phillip, ‘he was obviously over it, because he told me that he was quitting.’ He looked away from me and fumbled for his tea cup to cover his tears.
The mother bustled back in, saw the tears and gave me a poisonous look. I worked my way quickly through the last of the questionnaire, offered my condolences once more, and left.
Something fishy and possibly supernatural had happened to Richard Lewis but since he obviously wasn’t a practitioner I couldn’t think what his connection with the excitingly terminal world of modern magic might be. When I got back to the Folly I wrote it up and filed the requisite two reports. The thinking in police work with this sort of non-lead is that either some other completely different line of inquiry will prove unexpectedly connected or you will never find out what the fuck was going on.
My gut instinct was that we were never going to find out why Richard Lewis threw himself under a train — which just goes to show why you should never trust your gut.
4
After car-related incidents, burglary and theft are the most common crimes which MOPs, that’s members of the public to you, are subject to. It’s also the one they moan about the most, mainly because they know that the clear-up rate for burglary is low.
‘I don’t know why you bother writing this down,’ they say as they exaggerate the value of their goods for insurance purposes. ‘It’s not like you’re going to catch them, is it?’ To which we have no answer — because they’re right. We’re not going to catch them for that particular burglary, but we often catch them later and then get some of your stuff back — the stuff that’s now been replaced by better stuff from the insurance. Most of the recovered goods are junk but some of it attracts the eagle eye of the Arts and Antiques Squad who grab it, photograph it and put it on a database called, with the Met’s unerring ear for a euphonious acronym, LSAD — the London Stolen Art Directory.
They keep saying that they’re going to make it searchable by the public but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It is possible for it to be searched by a police officer, if he can persuade his line manager to push for his OCU to be granted access via their terminals. Not an easy thing to do, when the line manager in question is hazy on the concept of databases, internet searches and indeed the very notion of a ‘line manager’. I’d gained access just after the New Year and now made checking new arrivals part of my morning routine. ‘Anything to avoid real work,’ was Lesley’s verdict and Nightingale gave me the same long-suffering look he gives me when I accidentally blow up fire extinguishers, fall asleep while he’s talking, or fail to conjugate my Latin verbs.
So you can imagine how pleased I was when one cold dark morning, a fortnight after my visit to Swindon, I spotted my first find. I always start with the rare books and I almost missed it because it was in German; Uber Die Grundlagen Dass Die Praxis Der Magie Zugrunde Leigen but fortunately it had been translated as About the Basics that the Practice of Magic Reference Lies probably by Google Translate. There was a picture of the frontispiece listing the author as Reinhard Maller, published in 1799 in Weimar. I checked for Maller in the mundane library’s card index but found nothing.
I made a note of the case number, printed the description and showed it to Nightingale later that morning during practice. He translated the title as On the Fundamentals that Underlie the Practice of Magic.