Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(104)

‘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.’

‘Did he have a sword?’

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘Although he didn’t have a card identifying himself as a legendary swordsman. That seems a more modern form of whimsy. I sensed that the sword was important, though, in a mythic or symbolic sense.’

‘In what way?’

‘I was rather hoping that one day Sahra could tell us.’

‘You’re such a romantic,’ I said.

‘Merely an interested observer. And as such I need to ask you a personal question.’

‘Ask away,’ I said, but only because I couldn’t see a convenient window I could dive out of.

‘Have you talked to anyone about your experiences?’ he said.

‘I’m considering it,’ I said.

‘May I suggest you do more than that? After I came back from the war I found it very useful to talk things through.’