‘And who are you?’ I asked.
‘I’m his granddaughter,’ she said, and squared her stance in the doorway.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
If you’re a professional criminal this is where you lie smoothly and give a false name. If you’re just an amateur then you either hesitate before lying or tell me that I have no right to ask. If you’re just a bog-standard member of the public then you’ll probably tell me your name unless you’re feeling guilty, stroppy or terminally posh. I saw her thinking seriously about telling me to piss off, but in the end common sense prevailed.
‘Mellissa,’ she said. ‘Mellissa Oswald.’
‘Is Mr Oswald here?’ I asked
‘He’s resting,’ she said, and made no move to let me in.
‘I’d still better come in and see him,’ I said.
‘Have you got a warrant?’ she asked.
‘I don’t need one,’ I said. ‘Your granddad swore an oath.’
She stared at me in amazement and then her tiny mouth spread into a wide smile.
‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘You’re one of them – aren’t you?’
‘May I come in?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘Fuck me – the Folly.’
She was still shaking her head as she ushered me into a stone-paved entrance hall – dim and cool after the summer sun – then into a half-oval sitting room smelling of potpourri and warm dust and back out via the middle of three French windows.
The window opened onto a series of landscaped terraces that descended down towards more woods. The garden was informal to the point of being chaotic, with no organised beds. Instead, clumps of flowers and flowering bushes were scattered in random patches of purple and yellow across the terraces.
Mellissa led me down a flight of steps to a lower terrace where a white enamelled wrought-iron garden table supported a bedraggled mint-green parasol shading matching white chairs, one of which was occupied by a thin grey-haired man. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring out over the garden.
Anyone can do magic, just like anyone can play the violin. All it takes is patience, hard graft and somebody to teach you. The reason more people don’t practise the forms and wisdoms, as Nightingale calls them, these days is because there are damn few teachers left in the country. The reason you need a teacher, beyond helping you identify vestigium – which is a whole different thing – is because if you’re not taught well you can easily give yourself a stroke or a fatal aneurism. Dr Walid, our crypto-pathologist and unofficial chief medical officer has a couple of brains in a jar he can whip out and show you if you’re sceptical.
So, like the violin, it is possible to learn magic by trial and error. Only unlike potential fiddlers, who merely risk alienating their neighbours, potential wizards tend to drop dead before they get very far. Knowing your limits is not an aspiration in magic – it’s a survival strategy.
As Mellissa called her granddad’s name I realised that this was the first officially sanctioned wizard, apart from Nightingale, I’d ever met.
‘The police are here to see you,’ Mellissa told him.
‘The police?’ asked Hugh Oswald without taking his eyes off the view. ‘Whatever for?’
‘He’s up from London,’ she said. ‘Especially to see you.’ Stressing the especially.
‘London?’ said Hugh, twisting in his chair to look at us. ‘From the Folly?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
He climbed to his feet. He’d never been a big man, I guessed, but age had pared him down so that even his modern check shirt and slacks couldn’t disguise how thin his arms and legs were. His face was narrow, pinched around the mouth, and his eyes were sunken and a dark blue.
‘Hugh Oswald,’ he said holding out his hand.
‘PC Peter Grant.’ I shook his hand but although his grip was firm, his hand trembled. When I sat down he sank gratefully into his own chair, his breathing short. Mellissa hovered nearby, obviously concerned.
‘Nightingale’s starling,’ he said. ‘Flown all the way up from London.’
‘Starling?’ I asked.
‘You are his new apprentice?’ he asked. ‘The first in . . .’ He glanced around the garden as if looking for clues. ‘Forty, fifty years.’
‘Over seventy years,’ I said, and I was the first official apprentice since World War Two. There had been other unofficial apprentices since then – one of whom had tried to kill me quite recently.
‘Well, god help you then,’ he said and turned to his granddaughter. ‘Let’s have tea and some of those . . .’ he paused, frowning, ‘bread things with the spongy tops, you know what I mean.’ He waved her off.
I watched her heading back towards the tower – her waist was disturbingly narrow and the flare of her hips almost cartoonishly erotic.
‘Pikelets,’ said Hugh suddenly. ‘That’s what they’re called. Or are they crumpets? Never mind. I’m sure Mellissa will be able to enlighten us.’
I nodded sagely and waited.
‘How is Thomas?’ asked Hugh. ‘I heard he managed to get himself shot again.’
I wasn’t sure how much Nightingale wanted Hugh to know about what we police call ‘operational matters’, a.k.a. stuff we don’t want people to know, but I was curious about how Hugh had found out. Nothing concerning that particular incident had made it into the media – of that I was certain.
‘How did you hear about that?’ I asked. That’s the beauty of being police – you’re not getting paid for tact. Hugh gave me a thin smile.
‘Oh, there’s enough of us left to still form a workable grapevine,’ he said. ‘Even if the fruit is beginning to wither. And since Thomas is the only one of us who actually does anything of note, he’s become our principal source of gossip.’
I made a mental note to wheedle the list of old codgers out of Nightingale and get it properly sorted into a database. Hugh’s ‘grapevine’ might be a useful source of information. If I’d been about four ranks higher up the hierarchy I’d have regarded it as an opportunity to realise additional intelligence assets through enhanced stakeholder engagement. But I’m just a constable so I didn’t.
Mellissa returned with tea and things that I would certainly call crumpets. She poured from a squat round teapot that was hidden underneath a red and green crocheted tea cosy in the shape of a rooster. Her father and I got the delicate willow pattern china cups while she used an ‘I’m Proud of the BBC’ mug.
‘Help yourself to sugar,’ she said, then perched herself on one of the chairs and started spreading honey on the crumpets. The honey came from a round little pot with ‘Hunny’ written on the side.
‘Do have some,’ she said as she placed a crumpet in front of her granddad. ‘It’s from our own bees.’
I hesitated with my cup of tea halfway to my lips. I lowered the cup back into its saucer and glanced at Hugh, who looked puzzled for a moment and then smiled.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Where are my manners? Please eat and drink freely with no obligation etcetera etcetera.’
‘Thank you,’ I said and picked up my teacup again.
‘You guys really do that?’ Mellissa asked her granddad. ‘I thought you made all that stuff up.’ She turned to me. ‘What exactly are you worried would happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m not in a hurry to find out.’
I sipped the tea. It was proper builder’s tea, thank god. I’m all for delicate flavour, but after a stint on the motorway you want something with a bit more bite then Earl Grey.
‘So, tell me, Peter,’ said Hugh. ‘What brings the starling so far from the Smoke?’
I wondered just when I’d become ‘the starling’ and why everyone who was anyone in the supernatural community had such a problem with proper nouns.
‘Do you listen to the news?’ I asked.
‘Ah,’ said Hugh and nodded. ‘The missing children.’
‘What’s that got to do with us?’ asked Mellissa.
I sighed – policing would be so much easier if people didn’t have concerned relatives. The murder rate would be much lower, for one thing.
‘It’s just a routine check,’ I said.
‘On granddad?’ asked Mellissa. I could see her beginning to get angry. ‘What are you saying?’
Hugh smiled at her. ‘It’s quite flattering really – they obviously regard me as strong enough to be a public menace.’
‘But children?’ said Mellissa, and glared at me.
I shrugged. ‘It really is just routine,’ I said. Just the same way we routinely put a victim’s nearest and dearest on the suspects list or grow suspicious of relatives who get all defensive when we make our legitimate inquiries. Is it fair? No. Is it warranted? Who knows. Is it policing? Ask a stupid question.
Lesley always said that I wasn’t suspicious enough to do the job properly, and tasered me in the back to drive the point home. So, yeah, I stay suspicious these days – even when I’m having tea with likable old buffers.
I did have a crumpet, though, because you can take professional paranoia too far.
‘You didn’t notice anything unusual in the last week or so?’ I asked.
‘I can’t say I have, but I’m not as perceptive as I once was,’ said Hugh. ‘Or rather, I should say, I am not as reliably perceptive as I was in my prime.’ He looked at his granddaughter. ‘How about you, my dear?’
‘It’s been unusually hot,’ she said. ‘But that could just be global warming.’
Hugh smiled weakly.
‘There you have it, I’m afraid,’ he said, and asked Mellissa if he might be permitted to have a second crumpet.
‘Of course,’ she said and placed one in front of him. Hugh reached out with a trembling hand and, after a few false starts, seized the crumpet with a triumphant wheeze. Mellissa watched with concern as he lifted it to his mouth, took a large bite and chewed with obvious satisfaction.
I realised I was staring, so I drank my tea – concentrating on the cup.
‘Ha,’ said Hugh once he’d finished chewing. ‘That wasn’t so difficult.’
And then he fell asleep – his eyes closing and his chin dropping onto his chest. It was so fast I started out of my chair, but Mellissa waved me back down.
‘Now you’ve worn him out,’ she said and despite the heat she retrieved a tartan blanket from the back of her granddad’s chair and covered him up to his chin.
‘I think it must be obvious even to you that he didn’t have anything to do with those kids going missing,’ she said.
I stood up.
‘Do you have something to do with it?’ I asked.
She gave me a poisonous look and I got a flash of it then, sharp and incontrovertible, the click-click of legs and mandibles, the flicker of wings and the hot communal breath of the hive.
‘What would I want with children?’ she asked.
‘How should I know?’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re planning to sacrifice them at the next full moon.’
Mellissa cocked her head to one side.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ she asked.
Anyone can do magic, I thought, but not everyone is magical. There are people who have been touched by, let’s call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they’re no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that’s a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word ‘barbarian’ or the Daily Mail uses ‘Europe’. I’d found at least three different classification systems in the Folly’s library, all with elaborate Latin tags and, I figured, all the scientific rigour of phrenology. You’ve got to be careful when applying concepts like speciation to human beings, or before you know what’s happening you end up with forced sterilisations, Belsen and the Middle Passage.
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I’ve given up funny.’
‘Why don’t you search our house, just to be on the safe side?’ she said.
‘Thank you very much – I will,’ I said, proving once again that a little sarcasm is a dangerous thing.
‘What?’ Mellissa took a step backwards and stared at me. ‘I was joking.’
But I wasn’t. The first rule of policing is that you never take anyone’s word for anything – you always check for yourself. Missing children have been found hiding under beds or in garden sheds on properties where the parents have sworn they’ve searched everywhere and why are you wasting time when you should be out there looking? For god’s sake it’s a disgrace the way ordinary decent people are treated as criminals, we’re the victims here and, no, there’s nothing in there. Just the freezer, there’s no point looking in there, why would they be in the freezer, you have no right . . . oh god look I’m sorry, she just slipped, I didn’t mean to hurt her, she just slipped and I panicked.
‘Always best to be thorough,’ I said.
‘I’m fairly certain you’re violating our human rights here,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said with the absolute certainty of a man who’d taken a moment to look up the relevant legislation before leaving home. ‘Your granddad took an oath and signed a contract that allows accredited individuals, i.e. me, access on demand.’
‘But I thought he was retired?’
‘Not from this contract,’ I said. It had actually said until death release you from this oath. The Folly – putting the old-fashioned back into good policing.
‘Why don’t you show me round?’ I said. And then I’ll know you’re not off somewhere stuffing body parts into the wood-chipper.
Number one Moomin House may have looked like a Victorian folly, but was in fact that rarest of all architectural beasts – a modern building in the classical style. Designed by the famous Raymond Erith, who didn’t so much invoke the spirit of the enlightenment as nick its floor plans. Apparently he’d built it in 1968 as a favour to Hugh Oswald who was a family friend, and it was beautiful and sad at the same time.
We started with the two little wings, one of which had been extended to house an additional bedroom and a properly-sized kitchen. As an architect Erith might have been a progressive classicist, but he shared with his contemporaries the same failure to understand that you need to be able to open the oven door without having to leave the kitchen first. An additional bedroom had been added, the no-nonsense brass bedstead augmented with a handrail, the floor covered in a thick soft carpet and any sharp corners on the antique oak dresser and wardrobe fitted with rounded plastic guards. It smelt of clean linen, potpourri and Dettol.
‘Granddad moved down to this room a couple of years ago,’ said Mellissa and showed me the brand new en suite bathroom with an adapted hip bath, lever taps and hand rails. She snorted when I popped back into the bedroom to check under the bed, but her humour evaporated when she realised I really was going to check the broom cupboards and the wood store.
A circular staircase with bare timber treads twisted up to the first floor, leading me to what had obviously been Hugh’s study before he shifted to downstairs. I’d expected oak bookshelves but instead half the circumference of the room was filled with pine shelves mounted on bare metal brackets. I recognised many of the books from the Folly’s own non-magical library, including an incredibly tatty volume of Histoire Insolite et Secrète des Ponts de Paris by Barbey d’Aurevilly. There were too many books to be contained by the shelves and they had spilled out into piles on the gate-leg table that had obviously served as a desk, on the worn stuffed leather sofa, and any spare space on the floor. Many of these looked like local history, beekeeping guides and modern fiction. There were no magic books. In fact, nothing in Latin but the very old hardback editions of Virgil, Tacitus and Pliny. I recognised the Tacitus. It was the same edition Nightingale had given me.
It was all a bit short on missing children, so I had Mellissa show me up the stairs to her bedroom, which took up the whole of the top floor. There was a Victorian vanity and a Habitat bed and wardrobes and chests of drawers that were made from compressed and laminated chipboard. It was quite amaz
ingly messy; every single drawer was open and from every single open drawer hung at least two items of clothing. Just the loose knickers would have caused my mum to do her nut, although she would have had some sympathy for the drifts of shoes piling up at the end of the bed.
‘If I’d known the police were coming,’ said Mellissa, ‘I’d have had a bit of a tidy.’
Even with all the windows open it was warm enough to pop beads of sweat on my back and forehead. There was also a sickly sweet smell, not horrible, not decay, but all-pervading. I saw that there was a ladder built into the wall and a hatch above it. Mellissa saw me looking and smiled.
‘Want to have a poke in the attic?’ she asked.
I was just about to say ‘of course’ when I became aware that the deep thrumming sound that hovered on the edge of audibility throughout the rest of the house was louder here and, predictably, coming from the attic.
I told her that, yes, I would like a quick look if it was all the same to her, and she handed me a wide-brimmed hat with a veil – a beekeeper’s hat.
‘You’re kidding me,’ I said, but she shook her head so I put it on and let her secure the ribbons under my chin. After a bit of rummaging in the drawers of the vanity Mellissa found a heavy torch with a vulcanised rubber sheath – she tested it, although in the sunlight it was hard to tell whether the old-fashioned incandescent bulb came on or not.
When I climbed up, a wave of sticky heat rolled out. I waited a moment, listening to the now much louder thrumming noise, but there was no threatening roar or sinister increase in pitch – it stayed as steady as before. I asked Mellissa what was causing it.
‘Drones,’ she said. ‘They basically have two jobs – banging the queen and keeping the hive at a constant temperature. Just move slowly and you’ll be fine.’
I climbed up into the warm gloom. The occasional bee flashed through the beam of my torch, but not the swarms that I’d feared. I turned my torch on the far end of the attic and saw the hive for the first time. It was huge, a mass of fluted columns and sculpted ridges that filled half the space. It was a wonder of nature – and as creepy as shit. And I personally stuck around just long enough to ensure there weren’t any colonists cemented into the walls – or children – and ducked out of there.