Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(8)

The Royalist cavalry had been heavily engaged and we did dig up some ghostly horsemen reports from the eighteenth century, but whatever had spooked Brent hadn’t stayed for me or Abigail.

After supper it was my job to drive Abigail back home to Kentish Town. I considered driving all the way back again to spend the night with Bev, but I needed to make an early start the next morning.

Still, there was a bit of sly snogging on Beverley’s doorstep as I left, with Nicky giggling and Abigail harrumphing in the background.

‘You’ve got a big stupid smile on your face,’ said Abigail when we got in the car.

‘That’s because I’m in love,’ I said – which had the double virtue of being both true and shutting her up for the whole drive home.





4

The Society of the Wise

At the end of the eighteenth century London was well into the mad, technology-driven expansion that would only stop with the establishment of the Metropolitan Green Belt in the 1940s. Since then, developers have gnashed their teeth and looked enviously back on a time when a man armed only with his own wits and a massive inherited estate could shape the very fabric of the capital. Times like when the fifth Duke of Bedford found his country house surrounded on three sides by Regency London, and decided there was nothing for it but to dig up the old back garden and rake in a ton of cash. He enlisted the legendary architect and developer James Burton, who had a thing for elegant squares, the newfangled long windows in the French style, and vestigial balconies with wrought iron decorative railings.

The only carbuncle on the road to progress was the weird group of gentlemen who’d taken to meeting in the faux medieval tower that an earlier duke caused to be built to add some drama to his garden. These gentlemen were in the nature of a secret society, although they seemed well favoured by certain members of court – particularly Queen Charlotte.

In return for being allowed to demolish the tower, James Burton agreed to incorporate a magnificent mansion into the terrace along the southern side of the square. It would be built after the style of White’s – the famous gentlemen’s club – and include a demonstration room, library, dining hall, reading room, and accommodation for visiting members. The central atrium was so impressive it’s thought to have inspired Sir Charles Barry in his design of the more famous Reform Club forty years later.

And so the Folly was born.

And all of this at below market cost.

So it’s not for nothing that Sir Victor Casterbrook, the first properly respectable president of the Society of the Wise, was sometimes known as the pigeon plucker – although probably never to his face.

It also explains why he’s the only other person with their bust on proud display in the Folly’s atrium – the other being Sir Isaac Newton.

I’ve got a room on the second floor with a nice view of the street, bookshelves and a gas fire retrofitted into the original fireplace. In the winter you can hear the wind whistling among the chimney tops and, if you leave all four burners on overnight, you can raise the ambient temperature to just above the triple point of water. When I started my apprenticeship I lived there full time, but these days Nightingale trusts me to tie my own shoelaces so I spend half my nights at Bev’s. Especially during the winter.

Bev calls the Folly my London club, using her posh voice when she does. But officially it’s leased to the Metropolitan Police and treated as a genuine nick – it’s got a call sign, Zulu Foxtrot, and everything. Unfortunately we don’t have a PACE compliant custody suite, otherwise we’d be able to bang suspects up and subject them to Molly’s cooking until they confessed or exploded – whichever came first.

Since Operation Jennifer got underway I’ve fallen into the routine of waking early and doing an hour in the Folly’s very own gym. True, it hasn’t been refurbished since the 1940s so it’s a bit short on cross-trainers, steps and the sort of hand weights that haven’t been carved out of lumps of pig iron. But it does have a punchbag which smells of canvas, leather and linseed oil, and I like to pound that for a bit and pretend I’m Captain America, or at least his smarter, younger half-brother.

Next door is the only real working shower in the whole building and if I give Molly twelve hours’ notice I can get ten minutes of hot water. I did suggest getting some serious Romanian redecoration done, but apparently we’re not supposed to mess with the plumbing.

‘Quite apart from anything else, Peter,’ Nightingale had said, ‘once you started who knows when you’d stop?’

After my shower I had to squeeze past the Portakabin taking up half the courtyard and up the wrought iron spiral stairs to the Tech Cave – where I keep all my technology and the last of the Star Beer. There I checked my Airwave charger and made sure that I had three burner phones on warm-up – we tended to run through them at a rate. I transferred the notes I’d made onto my stand-alone computer and printed a copy for physical collation. It was just coming up to quarter past seven as I squeezed back out past the Portakabin and in through the back door of the Folly.

For complicated and needlessly mystical reasons you can’t run modern telecommunication cables into the Folly proper. That’s why my Tech Cave resides on the top floor of the coach house and why, when we needed to establish a proper on-site Inside Inquiry Office, we ended up with that Portakabin in the courtyard.