Still, these internal investigations take months and I was advised to start thinking of it as a long paid sabbatical.
Because the Folly was officially a police station, I had to move out and move in with Beverley full time. Which at least, I thought, would be a respite from Latin, Greek and practical thaumaturgy. Alas, Nightingale proved perfectly capable of driving across the river and worse, had mastered the dark art of skyping. I blamed Abigail for the latter, although she denied everything.
I also had to get myself my own car, although I did suggest that I might borrow the Ferrari – which caused Nightingale to spontaneously burst out laughing. I eyed up some second-hand BMWs and a Mercedes, but I didn’t have the cash. In the end Beverley bought me a bright orange Ford Focus as an early birthday present.
‘And you have to keep this one intact,’ she said. ‘Because it’s a present.’
It could have been worse. It could have been a Kia.
Abigail went back to school, but alternated on the weekend between taking classes with Nightingale at the Folly and with me at Beverley’s. She also passed on the gossip in exchange for some of my illicit magical research.
I was, finally, invited up to have dinner up chez Stephanopoulos to meet ‘her indoors’, who turned out to be a round-faced white woman called Pam who taught Strategic Management at the University of Middlesex. There was indeed a chicken coop in the back garden and a newly furnished nursery about which they asked me for no advice whatsoever.
Stephanopoulos was walking with a stick and expected to be back at work before I was.
Strangely, despite my conspicuous absence from operational policing, London was spared a plague of headless horsemen or psychotic gnomes. Although Nightingale and Frank Caffrey dealt with a vampire nest in Neasden. Curiously, these vampires turned out to be infected rats. Which meant not only was I spared any ethical qualms, but also Dr Vaughan got some tissue samples.
‘I hope you’re taking precautions,’ I said, while undergoing my monthly physical.
‘Do you think that’s really necessary?’ asked Dr Vaughan.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ I said.
‘And there was I about to set them up as a conversation piece on my coffee table,’ she said. ‘But at least I’ll get to use some of that biohazard training that I took especially.’
‘You’re losing weight,’ said Dr Walid.
‘And missing Molly,’ I said.
Although, according to Abigail, she wasn’t missing me.
‘I think she smiled the other day,’ she said. ‘And Foxglove is painting the kitchen.’
‘What colour?’
‘Henri Rousseau,’ said Abigail. ‘And what are you planning to do about Foxglove?’
There are legal provisions that allow victims of trafficking to claim discretionary leave to remain or asylum status, but they’re bureaucratic and stressful and frankly designed to deter people from trying. Worse still, the screening centre in Croydon would be bound to ask difficult questions, like – Where exactly are you from originally? So I called in a favour from Lady Ty, who was always having her wicked way with the Home Office.
‘What favour exactly,’ said Lady Ty, ‘do you think you’re calling in?’
‘I’m not calling it in,’ I said. ‘I’m giving you a chance to pay it forward.’
‘And I’m going to do this thing . . . because?’
‘Because then I’ll owe you a favour.’
‘Because that worked out so well last time,’ she said.
‘Like it or not, Ty, you’re going to be working with me in the future,’ I said.
‘I thought you were suspended?’
‘Me or someone like me.’
‘Peter,’ said Lady Ty, ‘every morning I wake up and give thanks that there’s nobody else like you.’
‘So you’ll put the fix in, right?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘Whatever.’
There was no way that we were allowing Patrick Gale and his fellow practitioners the run of the Folly, so we agreed that their training would take place in a neutral location. I’d wanted to stick them in the community rooms at my parents’ flats but Nightingale vetoed that on security grounds.
‘There’s no point keeping them at arm’s length,’ he said, ‘if we give them your parents’ address.’
So we ended up renting space from the Talacre Community Sports Centre down the road. But before they got a sniff of training we made them swear an oath and, more importantly, sign a non-disclosure agreement three centimetres thick. This gave Patrick Gale pause, but when we made it clear that the agreement wasn’t up for negotiation he and his friends signed.
There were six of them – three were lawyers, two worked in HR, and one was Patrick’s Executive Assistant. We started by marching them over to UCH, where Dr Walid put their heads in an MRI and Dr Vaughan spent a merry twenty minutes showing them her highly educational brain collection. Once they’d been suitably apprised of the dangers Nightingale assessed them for basic magical competency.
‘As I thought likely,’ he said. ‘None of them had progressed far beyond the lux forma and its many variations.’
We’d agreed that we wanted to keep this curriculum as non-lethal as possible, so Nightingale had dredged up his own memories of his first year at Casterbrook’s school for future wizards.
‘By necessity your education has had to be somewhat martial,’ he said. ‘I found it quite satisfying to teach the beginning formae in a more relaxed fashion. I might even consider teaching full time when I retire.’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ I said.
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale.
There was a report in the Evening Standard that two figures dressed as Ninjas had been seen running across the rooftops of Soho, waving swords and doing gravity-defying leaps and bounds from building to building. Online speculation was that this was some kind of elaborate prank carried out in the Japanese style and sooner or later the result would appear on YouTube complete with badly translated subtitles.
‘Was that you?’ I asked Guleed and Michael Cheung when we were out on a double date at the Number Four Restaurant on the Hertford Road.
‘That’s an operational matter,’ she said. ‘And I am strictly forbidden to talk to you about that stuff.’
I personally was reassured to know that Guleed was out on the cobbles, showing her face and creating order out of chaos. I did make time to ask Nightingale about the ‘agreement’ with Chinatown.
‘There really is nothing mysterious about it,’ he said. ‘By the 1970s a large number of Chinese were setting up businesses around Gerrard Street. I knew from my experiences in America that this would quickly acquire what you would call a distinct ethnic identity.’
This, he surmised, would include their own structures and hierarchies because nothing says persistence like four thousand years of continuous civilisation.
‘I went and talked to some influential business people and made a bit of a demonstration.’ Nightingale made a sharp downward gesture with his hand that I’ve learnt to associate with his more showier bits of magic. ‘Said I was agreeable to a meeting to get things sorted out and let them formulate their own response. A couple of days later I received a hand-delivered invitation at the Folly.’
‘Had you told them about the Folly?’
‘No.’
‘So they . . .’ I left the implication hanging.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Precisely. So that evening I sat down for a perfectly splendid meal with some very distinguished gentlemen who introduced me to a young man called Simon Wong, who said that, should I be agreeable, he would take responsibility for maintaining the peace within Chinatown.’