We laid the kitchen table and called in the girls.
‘Wash your hands before you come in,’ yelled Beverley as Nicky and Abigail ran up.
Abigail was fifteen, short and skinny, and making a spirited attempt to make the puffball Afro if not fashionable again, then at least unavoidable. She was also, in a semi-official official way, my fellow apprentice – having taken a hastily rewritten oath in the presence of, and with the written consent of, her parents. Both of who were holding me personally responsible for her safety, which was totally fair and completely uncomfortable.
I watched as she stopped just short of the back door and held out her hands to Nicky.
Who being goddess of the River Neckinger, albeit nine years old, conjured a wobbly globe of water as big as my head in which both girls washed their hands. Then, with a flick of her fingers, the globe evaporated leaving their hands clean and dry.
Abigail caught me watching and winked.
The science teachers at school had noticed Abigail’s interest in Latin and history and, fearing the loss of a star pupil to the arts, had started tempting her with the prospect of after-school classes. The consensus was that, when the time came, she was going to have her pick of unis from Oxford to Edinburgh, and Manchester to Imperial.
Personally, I thought she should stay in London where I could keep an eye on her.
‘You’re worried about her going to Edinburgh?’ Beverley had said. ‘You’d better start worrying about her going to Massachusetts.’
But did Massachusetts have as many ghosts as London, I wondered as, over dinner, Abigail asked about the latest spate of ghost sightings. She was convinced there’d been an increase in activity despite a lack of empirical evidence.
‘What about Brent’s horses?’ asked Bev.
‘I couldn’t find a trace of anything,’ I said.
Brent was another of Bev’s sisters – her river ran through West London – although since she was only nine years old she mostly lived with her mum or her sister Fleet. I’ve tried asking Beverley how this growing up almost like a normal person thing works but she doesn’t appear to understand the question.
Anyway Brent had complained that there were horses in her river in the spring and, finding nothing myself, I stuck Abigail on the problem. She found nothing, apart from discovering that a minor battle from the English Civil War had taken place along the A315 from where it crossed the Brent to about where the Premier Inn is – at the end of which the Parliamentarians ran for it and the Royalists looted the then small town of Brentford. Thus revealing their general intentions as to London proper which, in the words of one historian, significantly contributed to Londoners’ determination to defend the Capital.
The Royalist cavalry had been heavily engaged and we did dig up some ghostly horsemen reports from the eighteenth century, but whatever had spooked Brent hadn’t stayed for me or Abigail.
After supper it was my job to drive Abigail back home to Kentish Town. I considered driving all the way back again to spend the night with Bev, but I needed to make an early start the next morning.
Still, there was a bit of sly snogging on Beverley’s doorstep as I left, with Nicky giggling and Abigail harrumphing in the background.
‘You’ve got a big stupid smile on your face,’ said Abigail when we got in the car.
‘That’s because I’m in love,’ I said – which had the double virtue of being both true and shutting her up for the whole drive home.
4
The Society of the Wise
At the end of the eighteenth century London was well into the mad, technology-driven expansion that would only stop with the establishment of the Metropolitan Green Belt in the 1940s. Since then, developers have gnashed their teeth and looked enviously back on a time when a man armed only with his own wits and a massive inherited estate could shape the very fabric of the capital. Times like when the fifth Duke of Bedford found his country house surrounded on three sides by Regency London, and decided there was nothing for it but to dig up the old back garden and rake in a ton of cash. He enlisted the legendary architect and developer James Burton, who had a thing for elegant squares, the newfangled long windows in the French style, and vestigial balconies with wrought iron decorative railings.
The only carbuncle on the road to progress was the weird group of gentlemen who’d taken to meeting in the faux medieval tower that an earlier duke caused to be built to add some drama to his garden. These gentlemen were in the nature of a secret society, although they seemed well favoured by certain members of court – particularly Queen Charlotte.
In return for being allowed to demolish the tower, James Burton agreed to incorporate a magnificent mansion into the terrace along the southern side of the square. It would be built after the style of White’s – the famous gentlemen’s club – and include a demonstration room, library, dining hall, reading room, and accommodation for visiting members. The central atrium was so impressive it’s thought to have inspired Sir Charles Barry in his design of the more famous Reform Club forty years later.
And so the Folly was born.
And all of this at below market cost.
So it’s not for nothing that Sir Victor Casterbrook, the first properly respectable president of the Society of the Wise, was sometimes known as the pigeon plucker – although probably never to his face.
It also explains why he’s the only other person with their bust on proud display in the Folly’s atrium – the other being Sir Isaac Newton.
I’ve got a room on the second floor with a nice view of the street, bookshelves and a gas fire retrofitted into the original fireplace. In the winter you can hear the wind whistling among the chimney tops and, if you leave all four burners on overnight, you can raise the ambient temperature to just above the triple point of water. When I started my apprenticeship I lived there full time, but these days Nightingale trusts me to tie my own shoelaces so I spend half my nights at Bev’s. Especially during the winter.
Bev calls the Folly my London club, using her posh voice when she does. But officially it’s leased to the Metropolitan Police and treated as a genuine nick – it’s got a call sign, Zulu Foxtrot, and everything. Unfortunately we don’t have a PACE compliant custody suite, otherwise we’d be able to bang suspects up and subject them to Molly’s cooking until they confessed or exploded – whichever came first.
Since Operation Jennifer got underway I’ve fallen into the routine of waking early and doing an hour in the Folly’s very own gym. True, it hasn’t been refurbished since the 1940s so it’s a bit short on cross-trainers, steps and the sort of hand weights that haven’t been carved out of lumps of pig iron. But it does have a punchbag which smells of canvas, leather and linseed oil, and I like to pound that for a bit and pretend I’m Captain America, or at least his smarter, younger half-brother.
Next door is the only real working shower in the whole building and if I give Molly twelve hours’ notice I can get ten minutes of hot water. I did suggest getting some serious Romanian redecoration done, but apparently we’re not supposed to mess with the plumbing.
‘Quite apart from anything else, Peter,’ Nightingale had said, ‘once you started who knows when you’d stop?’
After my shower I had to squeeze past the Portakabin taking up half the courtyard and up the wrought iron spiral stairs to the Tech Cave – where I keep all my technology and the last of the Star Beer. There I checked my Airwave charger and made sure that I had three burner phones on warm-up – we tended to run through them at a rate. I transferred the notes I’d made onto my stand-alone computer and printed a copy for physical collation. It was just coming up to quarter past seven as I squeezed back out past the Portakabin and in through the back door of the Folly.