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.