with occasional supernatural difficulty for the Met and the regional police forces. It was a brand-new world of motorways and global superpowers and atomic bombs. He, like most people in the know, assumed that the magic was fading, that the light was going out of the world and that nobody was practising magic but him.
He turned out to be wrong in almost every respect, but by the time he’d figured that out it was too late – somebody else had been teaching magic since the 1950s. I don’t know why Nightingale was so surprised – I barely knew four and a half spells and you couldn’t have got me to give it up and that’s despite close brushes with death by vampire, hanging, malignant spirit, riot, tiger-man and the ever-present risk of overdoing the magic and getting a brain aneurysm.
As far as we could reconstruct it, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an undistinguished wizard by all accounts, had retired post-war to teach theology at Magdalen College, Oxford. At some point in the mid-1950s he had sponsored a student dining club called the Little Crocodiles. Dining clubs being what posh undergraduates did in the fifties and sixties when they weren’t having doomed love affairs, spying for the Russians or inventing modern satire.
To spice up their evenings, Geoffrey Wheatcroft taught a select number of his young friends the basics of Newtonian magic, which he should not have done, and trained at least one of them up to what Nightingale called ‘mastership’ – which he
He did terrible things to people, I know, I’ve seen some of it – the bodyless head of Larry the Lark and the other denizens of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau – and Nightingale has seen more but won’t talk about it.
We know from eyewitness accounts that he used magic to conceal his features. He appeared to have become inactive in the late 1970s and, as far as we could tell, his mantle was not taken up until the one we call the Faceless Man burst onto the scene some time in the last three or four years. He came
However, having an ethically challenged magician running around on our manor was not on. So we decided to adopt an intelligence-led approach to his apprehension. Intelligence-led policing being when you work out what you’re doing
Shakespeare Tower is one of three residential towers that are part of the Barbican complex in the City of London. Designed in the 1960s by adherents to the same Guernsey Gun Emplacement school of architecture as those that built my school, it was another Brutalist tower of jagged concrete that had acquired a Grade II listing because it was that or admit how fucking ugly it was. However, whatever I thought of it aesthetically, Shakespeare Tower had something that was practically unique in London, something that I was very grateful for as I cautiously skidded the Asbo through snow-covered streets – its own underground car park.
We drove in, waved our warrant cards at the guy in the glass booth and parked in the bay allocated to us. He gave us directions but we still managed to wander around in circles for five minutes until Lesley noticed a discreet sign lost amongst the pipes and concrete abutments. We were then buzzed in by the concierge and guided up to the reception area.
‘We’re here to interview Albert Woodville-Gentle,’ I said.
‘And we’d much rather you didn’t tell him we were on our way,’ said Lesley as we stepped into the lift.
‘It’s just an interview,’ I said to her as the door closed.
‘We’re the police, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s always good to arrive as a nasty surprise, makes it harder to keep secrets.’
‘Makes sense,’ I said.
Lesley sighed.
The lobby of each floor was an identical truncated triangle shape with undressed concrete walls, grey carpeting and emergency fire exits the size and shape of U-boat pressure doors. Albert Woodville-Gentle lived two- thirds up the tower on the 30th floor. It was very clean. This much institutional concrete makes me nervous when it’s clean.
I rang the doorbell.
Practically the whole point of being police is that you don’t gather information covertly. You’re supposed to turn up on people’s doorsteps, terrify them with the sheer majesty of your authority, and keep asking questions until they tell you what you want to know. Unfortunately, we at the Folly were under instructions to keep the existence of the supernatural if not exactly secret then certainly low-key – all part of the agreement apparently. This meant starting any interview with the question; Oi did you learn magic at university? was right out, and so we had developed a cunning plan instead. Or rather Lesley came up with a cunning plan instead.
The door opened immediately, which told us that the concierge had phoned up to warn the inhabitants. A middle-aged woman with a worn face, blue eyes and hair the colour of dirty straw stood in the doorway. She caught sight of Lesley’s masked face and took an involuntary step backwards – works every time.
I introduced myself and showed my warrant card. She peered at the card, then at me – her eyes were narrow and suspicious. Despite a plain brown skirt, matching blouse and cardigan I noticed she wore an analogue watch hanging upside down from her breast pocket. A live-in nurse perhaps?
‘We’ve come to see Mr Woodville-Gentle,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’
‘He’s supposed to be resting at this time,’ said the woman. She had a Slavic accent. Russian or Ukrainian, I thought.
‘We can wait,’ said Lesley. The woman stared at her and frowned.
‘May I ask who you are?’ I asked.
‘I am Varenka,’ she said. ‘I am Mr Woodville-Gentle’s nurse.’
‘May we come in?’ asked Lesley.
‘I don’t know,’ said Varenka.
I had my notebook out. ‘Can I have your surname please?’
‘This is an official investigation,’ said Lesley.
Varenka hesitated and then, reluctantly I thought, stepped back from the doorway.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Come in. I shall see if Mr Woodville-Gentle is awake yet.’
Curious, I thought, she’d rather let us in than tell us her second name.
The flat was basically a long box with living room and kitchenette to the left, bedrooms and, I assumed, bathrooms to the right. Bookshelves lined every wall and with the curtains closed the air was stuffy and carried a whiff of disinfectant and mildew. I scoped out the books as Varenka the nurse led us into the living room and asked us to wait. Most of the books looked like they’d come from charity shops, the hardbacks had damaged dustcovers and the paperbacks showed creased spines and covers faded by sunlight. Wherever they’d been bought, they’d been meticulously shelved by subject, as far as I could tell, and then by author. There were two shelves of what looked like every single Patrick O’Brian up until
My dad swears by those Penguins, he said that they were so classy that all you had to do was sit in the right cafe in Soho, pretend to read one and you’d be hip deep in impressionable young women before you ordered your second espresso.
Lesley surreptitiously jabbed me in the arm to remind me to look stern and official as Varenka led us into the living room before heading off to disturb Albert Woodville-Gentle.
‘He’s in a wheelchair,’ murmured Lesley.
Judging by the spacing between the furniture and positioning of the dining table the flat had been laid out for wheelchair use. Lesley scuffed the carpet with her shoe to show where thin wheels had worn tracks in the burgundy weave.
We heard muffled voices from the other end of the flat, Varenka raised her voice a couple of times but she obviously lost the argument because a few minutes later she emerged wheeling her patient down the hall and into the living room to greet us.
You always expect people in wheelchairs to look wasted so it was a shock when Woodville-Gentle arrived plump, pink and smiling. Or at least most of his face was smiling. There was a noticeable droop to the right-hand side. It looked like the aftermath of a stroke but I saw that he seemed to retain full movement in both his arms –
