although with a noticeable shake. His legs were concealed by a tartan blanket that fell all the way to his feet. He was clean-shaven, well scrubbed and he seemed genuinely pleased to see us which, in case you’re wondering, is another square of the suspicious behaviour bingo card.
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘It’s the fuzz.’ He noticed Lesley’s mask and did an exaggerated double take. ‘Young lady, don’t you think you’re taking the concept of undercover work just a tad too seriously? Can I offer you tea? Varenka is very reliable with tea, providing you like it with lemon.’
‘As it happens, I’d love a cuppa,’ I said. If he was going to play louche upper crust I wasn’t beyond doing cockney copper.
‘Sit, sit,’ he said and gestured us to the pair of chairs arranged by the dining table. He wheeled himself into position opposite and clasped his hands together to keep them still. ‘Now you must tell me what brings you bursting through my door?’
‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but David Faber recently went missing and we’re part of the investigation into his whereabouts,’ I said.
‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a David Faber,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘Is he famous?’
I made a show of opening my notebook and flicking back through the pages. ‘You were both at Magdalene College, Oxford at the same time, from 1956 to 1959.’
‘Not quite correct,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘I was there from 1957 and while my memory is not what it was I’m fairly certain I would have remembered a name like Faber. Do you have a photograph?’
Lesley pulled a picture from her inside pocket, an obviously modern colour print of a monochrome photograph. It showed a young man in a tweed jacket and authentically wavy period haircut standing against a nondescript brick wall with ivy. ‘Does it ring any bells?’ she asked.
Woodville-Gentle squinted at the picture.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he said.
I’d have been amazed if he had, given that me and Lesley had downloaded it off a Swedish Facebook page. David Faber was entirely fictitious and we’d chosen a Swede because it made it extremely unlikely that any of the Little Crocodiles would actually recognise him. It was just an excuse to poke our noses into their lives without alerting any practitioners, if there were any others, that we were after them.
‘It was our information that he was in the same social club at Cambridge,’ I flicked through my notebook again. ‘The Little Crocodiles.’
‘Dining club,’ said Woodville-Gentle.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘They were called dining clubs,’ he said. ‘Not social clubs. An excuse to go and eat and drink to excess although I daresay we did some charity work and the like.’
Varenka arrived with the tea, Russian style, black with lemon and served in glasses. Once she’d served us she took up a position behind me and Lesley where we couldn’t see her without turning. That’s a bit of a cop trick and we don’t like it when people do it to us.
‘Alas, I am afraid there’s no cake or biscuits in the flat,’ said Woodville-Gentle. ‘I’m not allowed them on doctor’s orders and I’m much more mobile, and ingenious at ferreting out the things that are bad for me than you might think.’
I sipped my tea while Lesley asked some routine questions. Woodville-Gentle remembered the names of some of his contemporaries who he knew had been members of the Little Crocodiles, and others who he thought might have been. Most of the names were already on our list but it’s always good to corroborate your information. He did give us the names of some female undergraduates who he described as ‘affiliate members’ – it was all grist to the mill. Five minutes in, I said that I heard there was a brilliant view from the balcony and asked if I might have a look. Woodville-Gentle told me to help myself, so I got up and, after Varenka had shown me how to open the slide door, stepped outside. I’d absently-mindedly tapped my jacket pocket when getting up. I had a box of matches in there to sell the illusion, so I was pretty certain that they assumed I was going out for a smoke. It was all part of Lesley’s cunning plan.
The view was astonishing. Leaning on the balcony parapet I looked south over the Dome of St Paul’s and across the river to Elephant and Castle where the building affectionately known as the Electric Razor vied for prominence with Stromberg’s infamous poem of concrete and deprivation, Skygarden Tower. And despite the low cloud I could see beyond them the lights of London thinning out as they washed against the North Downs. Turning, I could see right across the jumble of central London to where a trick of the perspective jumbled up the curve of the eye and the spiky gothic shape of the Houses of Parliament. Every high street was bright with Christmas decorations reflected off fresh snow. I could have stood out there for hours except that it was cold enough to freeze my bollocks off and I was supposed to be snooping around.
The balcony was L-shaped with a wide section by the living room, for afternoon tea in the sunshine I presumed, and then a much thinner long bit that ran the length of the flat. We knew from the floor plans posted by an estate agent that every single room except for the bathrooms and the kitchen had its own French window onto the balcony and we knew from being coppers that the chance of them being locked, thirty storeys up, was remote. The balcony was less than a third of a metre wide and even with a waist-high parapet I felt queasy when if I let my eyes drift too far to the left. Assuming that the nurse would be in the smaller of the two bedrooms I continued to the end of the balcony which terminated in one of the pressure-door-shaped fire exits. I pulled on my gloves and tried the French windows – they slid open with encouraging silence. I stepped inside.
The bedroom door was open, but the light in the hallway beyond was out and so the room was too dark to see anything. But I wasn’t there to use my eyes. There was a musty sickroom smell overlaid with talcum powder and, weirdly, Chanel number 5. I took a deep breath and felt for
There was nothing, or at least nothing obvious.
I wasn’t as experienced as Nightingale but I was willing to bet that nothing magical had happened in that flat since it had been constructed.
Disappointed, I carefully shifted position until I could see out the door, down the length of the hallway and into the dining room where Lesley was still asking her questions. She’d obviously caught Woodville-Gentle’s interest – the old man was leaning forward in his chair, staring at what I realised, with a shock, was Lesley’s uncovered face. Varenka too seemed fascinated, I heard her ask something and saw Lesley’s misshapen mouth frame a reply. She’d joked that as a last resort she could create a distraction by taking her mask off but I never thought she’d do it. Woodville-Gentle reached out a hand in a tentative, gentle gesture, as if to touch Lesley’s cheek but she jerked her head back and quickly fumbled her mask back on.
I suddenly noticed that Varenka, who’d been standing off to the side watching, had turned to look down the corridor and into the master bedroom. I kept absolutely still, I was in shadow and I was certain that if I didn’t move she wouldn’t see me.
She turned her head to say something to Woodville-Gentle and I took a step sideways – out of sight. Score one for the Kentish Town ninja boy.
‘The things I do to keep you out of trouble,’ said Lesley as we rode the lift down to the car park. She meant taking off her mask. ‘Was it worth it?’
‘Nothing that I could feel,’ I said.
‘I wonder what the cause of his stroke was,’ she said. A debilitating stroke being one of the many varied and exciting side effects of practising magic. ‘You know if there was a bunch of posh kids learning magic, some of them are bound to have done themselves an injury at some point. Maybe we should ask Dr Walid to look for strokes and stuff amongst our suspect pool.’
‘You must really like paperwork.’
The doors opened and we navigated our way out into the freezing car park.
‘That’s how you catch villains, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘By doing the legwork.’
I laughed and she punched me in the arm.
‘What?’ she asked,
‘I really missed you when you weren’t around,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said, and was quiet all the way back to the Folly.
We weren’t surprised to find that Nightingale hadn’t made it back from Henley or that Molly was haunting the entrance waiting for him to return. Toby bounced around my legs as I headed for the private dining room where Molly had optimistically set the table for two. For the first time since I’d moved in, a fire had been lit in the
