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Chapter Text

Nightingale doesn't like museums.

I discovered this when the British Museum featured a special exhibit on medieval York that I thought looked interesting, and asked Nightingale if he wanted to come along. I had pegged him as the sort of person who would really enjoy looking at old relics and making intelligent comments about their history, and was therefore a little surprised when he turned me down point-blank.

When I asked why, he told me calmly that the competing vestigia from all of the artefacts gave him a headache.

I pointed out that it could serve as a good learning experience for me, what with having to sort through all that background noise to pick out which vestigium belonged to which artefact, but Nightingale refused to be moved on the subject and eventually I gave up and went by myself. It was quite an interesting exhibit.

I wish I’d remembered that conversation two months later, when Nightingale and I were called in to examine a body at the Imperial War Museum.

Architecturally, the museum looks much as its impressive name would leave you expecting: imposing and orderly with a facade of decaying institutional grandeur. Of course, the presence of two 15-inch BL Mk 1 naval guns jutting out the front lawn like tusks helps to increase the general threatening atmosphere. Walking past them and up to the doors might have been intimidating, had it not been for the fact that I was accompanied by my boss, a man who could pack more of a punch with his mind than the Mk 1 could with 900 kilograms of cold steel.

I’d done my research, thinking—not unreasonably, I’d say—that any sort of malevolent spirit at the Imperial War Museum was likely to be in some way related to, you know, war. As it would turn out, I was barking up completely the wrong tree with that one.

Elephant and Castle is a gloomy place under the best of circumstances, difficult to navigate and sadly lacking in both elephants and castles. Now, at least, it’s a mecca for aficionados of military history, but, as I learned later, its history is much darker than just the war. Up until 1930, the site was home to the Bethlem Royal Infirmary or, as suspense novels and B horror films know it, Bedlam—home to rank and file of the criminally insane and the insanely criminal. It was also the place where some of the psychiatrists who decided that it was actually all right for big boys to cry if they had been shot at and shelled for four years had worked before they went on to coin the term ‘shell shock,’ so I suppose things came full circle when it became a war museum. Or, at least, the link would jump out at me as being particularly prescient in the near future.

Back then, however, my thoughts centred on two things: the ugliness of the brutalist monstrosities flanking the museum, and getting our poor unfortunate corpse investigated in time for lunch, as my stomach was busy protesting against another missed breakfast. In retrospect, I might have noticed that Nightingale was looking particularly pale, but he was still recovering from having taken a bullet through the chest, so that was only to be expected. This was also DCI Seawoll’s first shout since I’d stuck him full of elephant tranquiliser, which couldn’t have helped Nightingale’s colour.

Seawoll had been exceptionally unpleasant when he’d radioed us in, and, if anything, his mood seemed to have worsened by the time we arrived some twenty minutes later in the Jag.

“It’s about fucking time you got here,” Seawoll greeted us at the door to the museum with his usual dulcet tones. He was already wearing a noddy suit, and I tried not to shrink back too visibly when he gave me an extra-long glare, presumably for the tranquiliser incident.

“Well, we’re here now,” Nightingale said in his calm, unruffled voice. “Where is the victim?”

Seawoll scowled again and said something under his breath about this being ‘a fucking great waste of time,’ but turned and led us into the museum all the same. We were only a few paces into the atrium when the vestigia hit me like a wall, and by the way Nightingale’s head snapped up, I could tell he’d sensed it too.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised; between the building’s own history of criminal insanity and all the vestigia still clinging to the hundreds of weapons and killing machines that called the museum home, it was like pouring a dozen household chemicals into a rubbish bin and then drinking the resultant cocktail.

The first and strongest impression I got was fear: clinging, choking fear that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach churn. Next was sweat, thick and heavy, and then stale urine and a whiff of something sharp and acrid like gun smoke. There were subtler hints mixed in, and I got a different impression with every passing second: the pang of starvation, mud so thick it clung to the soles of boots, flashes of lightning through heavy rain, the screams of the dying, the stench of spilled blood, and a complete and utter desperation that chilled me to my bones. I wanted very badly to just turn around and walk straight out, but forced myself to hold steady.

I swallowed, blinked, and kept walking, and the vestigia faded slightly as we moved further into the open space of the museum.

“The victim is Andrew Jenkins, intern. The curator found him this morning and called us in,” Seawoll announced without bothering to look at us over his looming shoulder. “Seems to have just dropped dead, though of course the worthless CCTV broke right before it happened, so that's no fucking help. No signs of injury or a struggle.”

“So you’re, er, thinking natural causes?” I asked, a bit timidly, forcing my attention away from the vestigia and to Seawoll.

“I was thinking this was an open and shut case—and not really a case at all, in fact—until your lot barged in.”

I was tempted to point out that Seawoll had called us here, not the other way around, but I did place some value on my life. I glanced at Nightingale, but he was looking the other way, towards a row of display cases lined with artefacts.

“We’re still waiting on your quack,” Seawoll growled as he continued leading us through the atrium, “not that I think his particular services are required here, of course.”

I thought his tone would have been less deriding if Walid’s ‘services’ had involved wholescale debauchery, but given Seawoll’s historically low opinion of the Folly, perhaps he thought that they did.

Seawoll took a turn and led us along the perimeter of an open plan exhibition space. The area was huge, and I tried not to gape too openly at the spitfire hanging overhead or the twisted and unrecognisable shell of a bombed-out car sitting nearby. There was a large WWII-era Russian tank given a place of prominence and, next to me, Nightingale missed a step. We headed to the left, past an exhibition space dedicated to the First World War and a sign that said AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, and through a builder’s sheet.

This area, Seawoll explained in words of as few syllables as possible, was on the tail end of a renovation. Our unfortunate intern, whose body was currently obscured from view by a knot of forensics experts in noddy suits, had arrived at work early to prepare the display space for the arrival of some new artefacts later this week. Now it was our forensic experts examining the carefully arranged plaques, stands, and temperature- and humidity-controlled cases.

The three of us stopped at the white forensics tent just outside the square of yellow police tape surrounding the body, and Seawoll waited impatiently while we pulled on our ever-fashionable noddy suits. I noticed Nightingale wince as he bent to step into his, and he had to put a hand on one of the collapsible tables for support.

Once we had donned plastic gloves and shoe coverings, we strode across the crime scene and towards where the unfortunate Andrew Jenkins lay sprawled on the hard concrete floor directly underneath a bright yellow RAF AS.10 Oxford. The room was largely empty apart from a cluster of half-installed cabinets and display cases, the plane, and an imposing-looking WWII-era camouflage tank sitting near the opposite wall. Those last two, it seemed, had been too large to be moved into place after the remodelling was complete, and I guessed the construction had gone on around them. Judging from the small mountain of polypropylene sheeting sprawled across the floor by the tank, they must have only recently been uncovered.

Next to me, I felt more than saw Nightingale stiffen suddenly. I glanced towards him, but before I could ask him what the matter was, my attention was arrested by a gaggle of forensics techs. Well, more specifically, it was arrested by the man standing next to them who, by all rights, ought not to have been there at all.

Most conspicuously, he wasn’t wearing a noddy suit, instead favouring a tweed jacket that appeared to be even more old-fashioned than most of Nightingale’s wardrobe. He looked slightly uneasy but not out of place, and I quickly identified him as the curator who had called Seawoll in.

He was standing to what I could only describe as attention, posture ramrod straight despite his advancing years. Judging by his grey hair, sunspots, and general air of having seen a lot of shit, he was pushing retirement, if not delaying it. Ex-military was my first thought, which, I supposed, explained his attachment to this place. I’d read up about him on the drive over, and the museum website had proudly boasted that he’d been the head curator for years. It didn’t specify how many, exactly, but the implication was that the period was numbered in decades.

I thought again that, as a civilian, he ought not be here at all, but I found my thoughts slipping away as quickly as I could form them.

Seawoll was ignoring the man completely, and my interest in him was waning as well, so when Nightingale fixated on him, I almost kept walking and left him behind. Nightingale frowned and seemed just on the verge of stepping over and confronting the man when a probationary constable, smothered into homogeneity by the white forensic suit, approached and informed the three of us that Mr Jenkins was ready for our tender ministrations. Nightingale blinked, shook his head, and said that we’d be right over, but his tone was unusually distracted. We started towards the body, and when I glanced over again to find that the curator had turned away, I was perfectly content not to give him another thought.

Andrew Jenkins’s eyes were open and glassy, lips slightly parted. I supposed he might have been called attractive if you happened to be into the slightly foppish, floppy haired ‘Hugh Grant, circa 1994 look.’ And corpses, of course.

Though still more graceful than most men I knew, when Nightingale lowered himself towards the floor, I could see that the movement was stiff. I guessed that his chest was bothering him, and from the sheen on his forehead he was probably running a slight fever, but I knew better than to express any concern, particularly in front of Seawoll.

I decided that Nightingale didn’t need my assistance in checking a body for vestigia and, having been up close and personal with far too many corpses since becoming Britain’s only (officially sanctioned) apprentice wizard, I was in no rush to volunteer my services unnecessarily. Instead, I found myself looking over at the group of forensics techs again. The tweed-jacketed curator was still standing near them, and when he caught my eye, he waved a little and motioned me to come over. I left Nightingale crouched in a position that Walid would certainly not have approved of, but I reassured myself with the thought that Nightingale was a big boy who presumably knew his limits, and what the good doctor didn’t know couldn’t raise his blood pressure.

As I neared the curator, he greeted me with the kind of nod that might have once been a bow. “Constable.”

He gave me an apologetic smile, and I found I liked him immediately. He introduced himself as William Briggs and confirmed his position at the museum. “Sorry for calling you out on a Saturday. It’s a horrible business, and for someone so young...”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I understand Mr Jenkins was an intern here?” I removed my notepad from my pocket, because I’d long since learned that pen and paper sometimes work the best, particularly when your jurisdiction is magic, the enemy of microprocessors everywhere. That, and the fact that it creates a certain image of old-school proficiency which members of the general public seem to find reassuring. “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm him?”

The curator—Mr Briggs, I should say, him being a bloke doing a job and not a character in Doctor Who—blinked at me. “No, sir, not that I know of.”

“But you don’t think he died of natural causes?”

Briggs huffed a mildly incredulous laugh. “That wouldn’t account for the magic, now would it, dear boy?”

It was my turn to blink at him, and not just because he’d actually called me ‘dear boy.’ I opened my mouth to ask him about eight questions at once, but before I could get a word out, I heard Seawoll saying something loudly that I knew from many presentations at Hendon that police officers are absolutely not supposed to say in front of members of the general public.

I turned slowly to see that Seawoll had squared up to my boss, and looked like he meant business. Nightingale was standing now as well, but still at a height disadvantage despite being a very respectable six feet tall. What Nightingale had done to earn Seawoll’s giant-sized dose of vitriol, I had no idea, but it didn’t necessarily take much with him. For my governor, being present in the same room as him usually did it.

Whatever they’d been arguing about, Nightingale was looking genuinely frustrated, and it wasn’t an expression I could recall seeing on his face before—generally, he preferred maddeningly calm. He must have seen a number of the police, Briggs, and myself staring at them, though, because his face quickly went blank.

Seawoll also seemed to notice that he’d drawn unwanted attention, though he looked considerably less repentant about it, probably because he outranked everyone except Nightingale and thus had no one to please but himself. I took a moment to wonder how a man like Seawoll had ever managed to climb so far up the Met’s chain of command, and came up empty.

My attention was brought back to Briggs when he said, “You are with the Folly, yes?”

Startled once again—this was becoming a nasty habit—I pushed Nightingale and his apparent, and no doubt justified, irritation with Seawoll to the back of my mind, and concentrated fully on the curator. On my checklist of suspicious things, knowledge of what sort of crimes the Folly actually investigates ranks very highly, and knowing the Folly’s proper name—and not just the unplaceable, changeable acronym given to us by the Met—sent up a whole host of red flags. I gripped my notepad more tightly and carefully kept my voice level and not over-curious. “The Folly, you say? How did you come to hear that name?”

Briggs chuckled, but I kept my expression neutral in a way that I thought would have made Nightingale proud. “I’m older than I look, dear boy. And you could say I’ve had a rather... personal relationship with the uncanny.”

He didn’t elaborate, and despite my natural tendency towards intellectual curiosity—not, as Lesley puts it, because I’m nosy and have the attention span of a goldfish (though it’s actually been proven now that we’ve been giving goldfish bad press all along)—I managed to restrain myself and ask a question more pertinent to the case in hand.

I nodded towards where the hapless Mr Jenkins was still lying motionless on the museum floor. “You think magic was involved in this?” I asked, pen poised. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t interviewing him—Seawoll would want that honour all to himself, surely—but if Briggs was going to talk, then I might as well take notes.

“I don’t know how it couldn’t have been. The vestigia was...” Briggs stared into the middle distance, his expression creased by some remembered trauma. “It wasn’t pleasant, I can tell you.” Perhaps he had been too distracted by his memory to remember that vestigia was not a term bandied about often—not in circles that most people in the Met would refer to as ‘polite,’ in any case—or perhaps it was just so ingrained that he didn’t think twice.

“And the camera footage was no help at all,” Briggs continued, sounding a little worried. “Our security system is state-of-the-art, though only one camera was in operation this morning since, as you can see, we haven’t moved any artefacts in yet, aside from the AS.10 and our new tank, of course. In any case, it was working fine right up until Andrew entered the room, and then...nothing.” He swallowed, clearly knowing at least some of the implications of this, but his bearing remained military. I suddenly found myself wondering if he’d seen combat.

“What was it, precisely, that you felt?” That was Nightingale, having arrived at my elbow while I took notes. I glanced at him, and did a double-take when I saw how pale he was. It might have been the exertion, or the early-morning start, or the argument with Seawoll, but he looked considerably worse than he had the previous evening. If he was surprised by what he’d apparently read over my shoulder, he gave no sign of it.

“I didn’t touch him for long, you understand,” Briggs said in a hesitant voice. “I was just checking for a pulse, but the vestigia was strong...very strong. There was this great sense of fear. It was...suffocating. And there was something else, like leather rubbing together, and the smell of fresh mortar and brick dust.”

I glanced at Nightingale again, and, by his nod, I assumed he’d picked up the same traces from his own inspection of the body. Over his shoulder, I saw Seawoll speaking loudly to a member of the forensics team and jabbing his finger in a way that clearly indicated that the unfortunate man was getting a dressing down he wouldn’t soon forget.

“You say the CCTV footage cut out after Mr Jenkins entered the room?” Nightingale questioned. Briggs nodded and, by the way Nightingale turned his gaze on me, I knew what my next task would be. “Might we trouble you for a look?”

“Of course—I’ll show you myself,” Briggs offered, appearing happy to help.

Contrary to what logic might dictate, keenness to oblige the police often results in another tick in the suspicious behaviour checklist—playing a part in the investigation gives wannabe criminal masterminds a sense of control in the proceedings and the impression that they will be able to misdirect the enquiry.

Of course, contrary to the Daily Mail’s perception that degenerates lie in wait on every street corner, sometimes people are, you know, just decent human beings. Briggs did seem like one of those, but still there was a niggle, and I could interpret the implications of Nightingale’s slight frown well enough by now to know that he felt it, too.

All the same, there seemed no reason to refuse the curator’s offer of help, so I thanked Briggs and he began to turn away. I took a moment to speak to Nightingale.

“Is there anything else you want me to do, sir?” I spoke as quietly as I could, it not being the done thing for a policeman, and a chief inspector at that, to appear to need assistance from a lowly constable, particularly when members of the general public might be watching. As far as they’re concerned, Hendon hatches baby policemen and women out of little departmental eggs and constables are programmed from birth to know what to do when some poor sod’s had his skull caved in. Inspectors, by this logic, ought to be practically omnipotent.

Nightingale hesitated for a fraction of a second and then shook his head. “As you were, Constable.”

That was weirdly formal, even for him, and abnormally militaristic. I didn’t think I’d imagined his pause before replying, either—there was something he wanted me to do. I made no move to follow Briggs; not yet, at least.

“The surrounding vestigia should be charted,” Nightingale announced at last. My grasp of English grammar—or Latin grammar, come to that—is, as my governor keeps reminding me, not especially firm. That being said, there is one thing that stuck with me from GCSE: the use of the passive voice. My instructor Mr Parry had been Welsh and otherwise indistinct, but he’d given us a very memorable formula—if a sentence could be completed with ‘by zombies,’ it’s passive. And so it seemed Nightingale was banking on the armies of the undead arriving and doing his note-taking for him, or, more likely, me. But he hadn’t asked me directly, and that was odd.

“Would you like me to…” I began, intending on asking if I should start on charting the vestigia after I’d looked over the CCTV footage, but he cut me off sharply.

“No!” Nightingale took a breath, deep enough to be painful with his still-healing chest wound, and it unsettled me more than I liked to admit that he was having to steady himself. “No, I’ll handle that.”

I’d seen that expression on his face before, when we’d stood in the basement of a Soho nightclub and Nightingale had told me that he didn’t want to see what was lurking in the shadows. I wondered what it was he thought I’d been offering to do, since I doubted charting vestigia was anything I couldn’t handle.

I never got to find out, though, because Nightingale told me to follow Mr Briggs, and there’s only so long a constable can stand around gawking at his superior before someone assumes he’s in need of some traffic to direct.

I gratefully stripped off my noddy suit as I left the crime scene, leaving the outfit piled in the white tent, and followed Briggs through a door marked STAFF ONLY.

The CCTV footage was much as Briggs had described: Andrew Jenkins entered the room, looked around for a few seconds, and then the camera cut out. I slowed down the video and flipped through frame by frame. There wasn’t anything untoward as far as I could see, but sending the images off to be analysed with some fine-toothed magnifying software might uncover something. I copied the file onto a memory stick I’d taken to carrying with me, since it was useful for storing data close at hand that I didn’t want vaporised in the case of someone using magic, and stowed it away in my pocket. Once I got back to the Folly, I’d upload it to HOLMES, and we’d see what the murder team could do.

I asked which camera it was that the video was from, and he told me.

“You should have someone bring it down from the wall,” I suggested. Knowing what I did about magic and electronics, I was willing to bet good money that, once we’d opened it up, we’d find a good deal of sand.

I stood and made to leave with him, but he remained seated. “I should check to make sure that none of the other cameras in the room have been damaged. This one,” he motioned to the destroyed camera, “was the only camera in the new exhibition room that was powered up, so it’s possible the others are still functional. I ought to test them, though, for my own peace of mind and that of the donors who will be delivering their pieces when the museum reopens.”

He sounded so reasonable—and it was his office, after all—that I just left him to it. It wasn’t until I had returned to the floor of the museum that I thought to wonder why I hadn’t questioned him, just as I hadn’t really questioned his presence at the crime scene. He ought to have been escorted off to a cosy little room somewhere with a constable, a statement sheet, and a cup of tea hours ago.

I frowned and cast my eyes around the crime scene. I didn’t see Nightingale anywhere and, oddly enough, Seawoll wasn’t around either. The forensics team were still photographing the body and taking measurements, but there was no one else in sight; Dr Walid apparently hadn’t arrived yet. If I didn’t have to get back in a noddy suit, I wasn’t about to, so I skirted the edge of the yellow police tape, adopting a purposeful walk and trying not to look like I had lost my governor.

I walked around an informational board and was momentarily distracted by the description of the camouflage WWII-era tank printed on it. It turned out it was German, and had been deployed in the latter half of the war. I was halfway through the section about its impressive weapons armaments when my brain suddenly parsed through what I’d just read. My eyes jumped to the top of the informational board and scanned along the technical name of the tank: Panzerbefehlswagen Tiger Ausf. B Sd.Kfz. 268. Then I read the title of the board, which I had somehow missed when my attention had been arrested by a photograph of General Eisenhower walking next to one of the overturned tanks. And then I realised what I ought to have put together the moment Nightingale had stiffened next to me as we’d entered the room: it was a Tiger tank.

It was then that I heard a distinctly muffled thump.

My head snapped up and I went on high alert. The sound had come from around the corner of the tank, out of view of the crime scene, and I was fairly certain that none of the forensics team were supposed to be back there.

I strode forward quickly, and as I did so I heard Seawoll’s voice, harsh and low. “—don’t know what your fucking problem is, but I don’t fucking care.” I could imagine the spittle flying from his mouth.

A wave of vestigia hit me like a wall as I neared the tank, and I stumbled. Before I could remind myself it was just an aftertaste of events long past, I was choking on fear and it felt like a rag was being stuffed down my throat. I forced myself to breathe, but the vestigia was still lying heavy in the air. I felt the sticky texture of dried blood beneath my Doc Martens, heard the crunch of the tank’s treads as it rolled over human bones, and caught a too-familiar scent of wet pine.

I swallowed down a sudden rise of nausea and quickened my stride.

“You don’t—don’t want—Alexander—please stop.” That was Nightingale, still out of my line of sight but sounding considerably out of breath and more than a little distressed.

“Just look at you—you’re even more fucking useless than normal, you sad bastard. And apparently this is your fucking case. Not mine, yours. So pull your finger out.”

Alarmed, I hurried forward and ducked under the barrel of the tank’s gun. My heart was pounding in my chest as I rounded the corner of the tank and finally laid eyes on my governor.

He was pushed against the side of the tank, Seawoll looming over him. One of Seawoll’s hands was planted firmly against the side of the tank next to Nightingale’s head, the other pressing against my governor’s chest very near to where the still-healing gunshot wound was. Nightingale had shrunk back against the cold metal of the tank and was very pale, breaths coming fast and shallow. I could see even from this distance that he was shaking.

Then Seawoll made the grave mistake of pulling his hand back a few inches and hitting the side of the tank again. I felt the vestigia sharpen in intensity as the metal rang with a deep thrumming noise, and Nightingale’s head jerked up. I think he must have registered that it was only Seawoll, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. He looked at him, and then I swear Nightingale just snapped.

I didn’t see him make a movement, didn’t see his lips form a word. He didn’t even have his staff. But one moment there was just Seawoll, looming over the pale Nightingale, and then there was an explosion of light like a star going supernova.

The next thing I knew, I was on my side on the hard concrete floor. I only registered this because the smooth, flat surface of the cement was cold beneath my cheek. My head was ringing, and my hair felt like it had had a close shave with a volcano. The air was stifling hot, like I had fallen into an oven, and the air smelled of vaporised circuits.

As any police officer is trained to do in even the direst of circumstances, I picked myself off the ground and turned to face the threat. I was staggering a little—my balance was all off—and it took me a few seconds to find my footing, but I made the Met proud in the end.

The blinding light had faded as quickly as it had come, but swaths of it were still swimming across my vision, and I had to blink to dislodge them. As I did so, my bleary eyes found Seawoll, sprawled on his side five metres away like a discarded child’s toy. I blinked at him dumbly, thinking I should check to see if he was all right.

Then my head swung the other way, and all thoughts of Seawoll fled my mind. Nightingale was standing near the tank, trembling violently and staring at the fallen detective chief inspector.

“Sir,” I said automatically, but my voice came out hoarse and an octave higher than I would have liked.

Nightingale’s gaze shifted from Seawoll to me without blinking, and when I saw the look of utter terror on his face, I felt my blood run cold.

“Just...calm down, sir,” I forced out, taking a couple of steps closer and raising my hands as though to calm a skittish horse. I really didn’t have a huge amount of experience with skittish horses, but I’d dealt with enough drunken brawlers to know there wasn’t much difference.

Nightingale swallowed, the motion getting briefly stuck halfway. He blinked at me, and I saw something shift behind his eyes. “P—Peter?” he whispered. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said, encouraged. I took another step forward. “It’s me. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“...Fine,” Nightingale echoed, and took a half-step backwards as his legs started to give out from under him. He bumped into the tank for support and stiffened like he’d received an electric shock. The vestigia flared up again, and I knew I had to get him away from the Tiger as soon as possible.

“Inspector,” I said quickly, worried he might do a repeat performance and not wanting to rejoin Seawoll on the floor, “it’s okay. We’re safe. We’re in a museum, that’s all. It’s just the vestigia—it’s not real. Just...come over here.”

The gaze Nightingale turned on me was completely blank and devoid of recognition, and it remains to this day one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen. His fingers clenched against the side of the tank, and I knew suddenly that he must be having a flashback.

“The war is over,” I said as reassuringly as I could, forcing myself to inch closer, ignoring the static-y, charged feeling in the air that increased the closer I got to Nightingale. I realised abruptly that he was still drawing on a lethal quantity of magic, holding it in check around him.

“Just...calm down,” I said again, a little hopelessly, getting as close as I dared. Nightingale was as white as a sheet, and he was trembling and trying to stand stock-still all at the same time. “Everything’s fine.”

I was running out of things to say, and Nightingale didn’t seem to be paying me any attention anyway. I wondered distractedly where everyone else was; hadn’t the forensics team noticed the explosion of magic?

“Inspector Nightingale, sir,” I said, a bit desperately, but he didn’t even blink. “Thomas,” I tried, a little louder.

Nightingale’s head turned, and I felt the charged cloud of magic around us falter momentarily.

“It’s me, Peter. Just—everything’s fine. You can let it go.”

Nightingale blinked at me, and I noticed for the first time the tears running down his cheeks. “Th—they—they came out of nowhere,” Nightingale stammered, voice as far from his usual collected tones as it was possible to be. “I—I tried—they were just—everywhere—and we’d lost so many al—already.”

“That’s all in the past,” I told him, trying to keep the tremor out of my own voice. “That—nothing can be done about that now. It’s over.”

Nightingale looked at me, and I saw the pain there, mixed with fear and more guilt than I’d ever seen in any convicted man’s eyes.

“Inspector,” I said, and took another step closer. This time I bumped into something that wasn’t exactly there, and was forced to take half a step back. I moved my hand forward experimentally and it slid inexorably to the side. Nightingale was maintaining a shield spell much like the one Faceless had used on the rooftop, I realised.

I looked at Nightingale again, dumbfounded, and he broke out in a fresh round of shivers as if on cue, sweat beading on his brow. I wondered how he had the energy to maintain the shield spell on top of everything else, but my question was answered when Nightingale started to slump towards the floor.

The shield flickered, but before I could break through, it was back again, and Nightingale had managed to keep his feet, no longer leaning on the tank for support. He had a hand facing me, palm out, and I guessed that was to help direct the shield spell.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, a little desperately. “Inspector, it’s me, Peter. Your apprentice. You don’t need the shield.”

Nightingale wasn’t paying attention again, but he did start swaying alarmingly.

“Inspect—Thomas!” I said quickly. “For God’s sake, stop it and let me help you.”

“Don’t need—help—” Nightingale rasped, breaking out in a fresh round of shivers. “Please—stop. Just—let me—die—” His hand shook and dipped several inches.

I stared at him. “What?” was the only thing I managed to say.

The shield spell flickered again, and then dropped completely as Nightingale collapsed. I crossed the two metres between us and caught him around the middle before he hit the floor. Walid is going to kill me, I thought.

Seawoll came to his senses—in a manner of speaking—just as I was lowering Nightingale carefully to the floor.

“Did you—did you see what that fucking lunatic did?” Seawoll said loudly, in a voice clearly gearing up for a full-blown rant. “He ought to be locked up; I’ve been saying it for years—”

From Seawoll’s tone, I figured he had suffered no lasting damage, and elected to ignore him. Seawoll knew enough about Nightingale—and about magic, as much as he was loathe to admit it—to know that what he had done was stupid at best and sadistic at worst. The way I saw it, he’d had it coming.

I awkwardly pulled off my jacket, still supporting Nightingale’s limp body with one arm so I didn’t have to rest him against the tank. When I’d freed the garment, I rolled it up, heedless of Molly’s careful ironing, and stuffed it under Nightingale’s head as an impromptu pillow. He was very still now, alarmingly so, though when I put the back of my hand an inch above his mouth, I was relieved to find he was still breathing, though the breaths were short and shallow.

That was how we were when Briggs arrived on the scene, Dr Walid in tow. I found I was incredibly glad to see both of them despite my still-present fear that Walid might harbour murderous feelings towards me for letting Nightingale get into this state while under my (admittedly extremely nominal) supervision.

Walid dropped to his knees beside Nightingale in alarm, pushing me aside roughly and unzipping the top of Nightingale’s noddy suit so he could loosen his collar. Walid felt for a pulse, and from his pinched expression that indicated he was expending a great deal of effort to keep from swearing, I guessed he didn’t like what he found.

“What the hell just happened? Constable?” Briggs’s gaze was more intense than I would have expected from someone who’d spent a fair portion of his life squinting at faded wartime letters and similarly indecipherable members of the public. I didn’t duck my eyes, because I’m a professional, but it was a close call. I also managed to refrain from pointing the finger—possibly literally—at Seawoll.

Seawoll himself, however, was showing no such restraint. He strode over to us with a bullishness that indicated he really hadn’t been hurt by whatever it was Nightingale had done to him. His bloodshot gaze zipped between us, and I sensed he was trying to decide whose head to crack in first.

He rounded on the unfortunate Walid, who had pulled my jacket out from under Nightingale’s head and was checking his breathing. “This is beyond a fucking joke, doctor, I don’t mind telling you. I knew he’d go too far one day—all of that hocus pocus and the other freaky shit—and now he has. He needs to be signed off, for his own good and the protection of the civilian population. That entire sorry excuse for a department can go to hell.” He sent an icy glance in my direction.

Walid, peeling back one of Nightingale’s eyelids to check his pupil dilation, didn’t even bother to look up at Seawoll. “You’re aware of what vestigia is, Inspector?”

From Seawoll’s pursed lips, I could tell he was.

Walid continued before he could be interrupted, fishing a penlight out his pocket, “And you know some of Inspector Nightingale’s history—his…combat experience and recent injury?”

Seawoll, man mountain that he already was, stood up straighter. “That’s not relevant unless you’re saying he ought to have been signed off years ago—that I would agree with.”

I’d seen Walid mildly pissed off before, and certainly frustrated, but I realised then that I’d never seen him properly angry until that moment. He paused in shining the light in one of Nightingale’s eyes just long enough to glare up at Seawoll with the cold fury only truly achieved by the righteously angered. “What’s relevant, Inspector, is that between what I know of your past actions and what happened here today, I won’t hesitate to report you for aggravated assault and swear in a court of law that any action taken against you by Inspector Nightingale was in self-defence.”

I think I might have been gaping; I know Seawoll was, but Briggs cut in before the inspector could work himself up to an aneurysm. “I saw the whole incident on the CCTV, as I told Walid. It’s been recorded, sir. Clear evidence of unprofessional and threatening conduct on your part which I won’t hesitate to hand over to your superiors. The incident unfortunately wasn’t recorded in its entirety—technology being fickle as it is—” I don’t think I imagined the brief sideways glance Briggs gave me (he knew, the sly old man), “but I think this current picture speaks for itself. You seem quite unharmed, which is more than can be said for your colleague.”

Seawoll blinked at him, and I could tell he was looking for some way around the wall of logic that was descending in front of him. “But—the fucker assaulted me! I could have died!”

“Oh, shut up, Inspector.” That was Walid, surprising me yet again as he pulled Nightingale half out of his noddy suit and started unbuttoning his crisp white dress shirt. “You’ve had it in for Inspector Nightingale ever since you joined the Met. If you want to avoid legal action, I suggest you call an ambulance and remove yourself from this area.”

“He tried to kill me,” Seawoll protested, but I could see the gears turning in his head. He scowled fiercely, and I gathered he had decided winning this one would be too costly. “I’ll go,” he ground out after a long moment, “but if a fucking word of this reaches anyone—” He jabbed his finger in Walid’s direction and then shifted it to me and Briggs. “I’ll have your badges.” He scowled at us all again, not seeming to realise that Briggs had no badge to revoke, and neither really did Walid, for that matter, and stomped off in the direction of the crime scene.

I watched him go.

“Peter,” Walid said, and his tone was abruptly ice cold and completely level. “Call an ambulance.”

I looked around and felt something inside of me freeze at Walid’s tone. The doctor had finished unbuttoning Nightingale’s dress shirt, revealing a vast red and purple bruise blossoming across his upper chest, growing with each passing second. Nightingale’s breathing had picked up as well, and with each inhale it sounded like he was rubbing two sheets of sandpaper together.

“Now, Peter,” Walid snapped, and his voice dragged my attention away from Nightingale. I scrambled to my feet as fast as I could and ran flat-out in the direction of the atrium. The mobile in my pocket was almost certainly dead, and after the amount of magic Nightingale had released, I wouldn’t have been surprised if every computer chip in a half mile radius had crumbled to sand.

Luckily, the radios in the cars outside seemed to still be working, and I used the first one I found to call for an ambulance.

Then I was at a loss. I turned back to the museum and sprinted inside, deciding that Walid might be able to use my help. I passed the square of yellow police tape and cluster of very confused forensics techs without even sparing them a glance and finally skidded to a halt around the front of the Tiger tank.

Briggs was standing near a sizeable dent in the tank’s side I hadn’t noticed before and was, as far as I could tell, paralysed, staring wordlessly at Nightingale.

I followed his gaze, and felt my own blood run cold. Walid was kneeling over Nightingale, and he was doing chest compressions. I knew with a sudden terrifying certainty that the only reason Walid would be doing that was if Nightingale’s heart had stopped.

We’d learned how to administer CPR as part of a first aid unit back at Hendon, though I mercifully hadn’t needed to use the knowledge yet, as someone more qualified had always stepped up. I’d seen it done numerous times, of course, but it had always been administered to total strangers. Seeing the way Nightingale’s chest deflated under Walid’s interlocked hands, and hearing the scraping noise of bone on bone and the wet, sucking sound of his breaths...I turned and retched the remains of last night’s steak and kidney pudding onto the concrete.

“Peter,” Walid said once I was done, voice tight and quick as he spoke between compressions.

As little as I wanted to see Nightingale like that again, I forced myself to turn and edge closer, trying not to look at the huge dark bruise on the inspector’s chest or the mangled way his ribs didn’t quite line up anymore.

“You’ve had training, right?” Walid asked quickly, between compressions. I noticed him counting under his breath.

I swallowed, seeing where this was going and desperate to avoid it any way I could. On the concrete, Nightingale gasped brokenly for breath, the sound impossibly desperate.

One of my first impressions of Nightingale had been how trim he was, but he’d lost a lot of weight after being shot and hadn’t made up much ground in the meantime. Seeing him now, gasping for air, trembling, and so very thin, he looked all of a sudden incredibly fragile, and not at all like the indomitable figure I’d come to think of him as.

“Yes—yes,” I forced out, unable to tear my eyes from Nightingale. “But I’ve never—”

“Take over.” Walid’s tone brooked no argument, and before I could protest, he was breathlessly rattling the procedure off to me. He had me arrange my hands in front of me, did one more compression, and shifted away.

For a breathless moment I couldn’t move, couldn’t bring myself to take Nightingale’s life into my own hands in such a direct and literal way. Then the training kicked in and I took Walid’s place kneeling beside Nightingale’s chest. My hands were trembling, but I locked my fingers together and put the heel of my hand on my governor’s sternum.

We’d practised on dummies in the CPR course, but nothing could quite prepare me for the feeling of Nightingale’s cold, sweat-slicked skin under my hands. The dark bruise I finally recognised as a sign of internal bleeding had spread further, reaching inky tendrils over Nightingale’s dangerously pale skin.

I forced myself to swallow and leaned into the first compression. Nightingale’s chest deflated under my inexpert hands, and I shivered as I felt his ribs protest the movement.

“Harder,” Walid rasped from where he was breathing heavily beside me. “And faster.”

I took a shaky breath and forced myself to speed up, jabbing the heel of my hand into Nightingale’s sternum and putting as much force behind each compression as I could. I knew the speed I should be going at was the same as the lead rhythm in the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” and, ironically, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” and I opted for the former. I played the song in my head, forcing myself to follow along with the lyrics instead of looking at the way Nightingale’s entire body rocked limply back and forth with every compression.

Nightingale wheezed weakly under my hands, and the sound hitched in his throat several times before he lapsed into silence. I tried to feel grateful for the fact that Nightingale was at least still breathing, but I was finding it increasingly difficult to feel grateful for anything.

Instead, I threw my whole back into the compressions until I was shaking from exertion and my hands throbbed.

I was panting by the time Walid raised his hand and motioned for me to stop. I sat back on my heels, gasping for breath. I was more than a little alarmed to see that Nightingale didn’t look any better; if anything, he was paler, and his gasping breaths were shallower and further apart.

Walid tilted Nightingale’s head back and eased his mouth open. I knew paramedics carried masks with inflatable bags and oxygen supplies for just this purpose, but the ambulance must have been minutes away at best, and Nightingale needed air now.

Walid listened for a moment to Nightingale’s weak gasps, and then leaned over, pinched his nose shut, and gave him a rescue breath. Nightingale’s chest rose and fell in a reassuringly normal fashion, but then Walid had to catch his own breath and Nightingale went alarmingly still.

Walid administered a second breath and then motioned at me to resume compressions. “Thirty more,” he directed, sounding winded.

It was easier this time, and I fell into the rhythm right away.

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man—

Halfway through I realised I wasn’t pressing hard enough and forced myself to put more effort into the motion, Nightingale’s body swaying back and forth with every compression.

Music loud and women warm, I’ve been kicked around since I was born—

I had forgotten to count the compressions again, but Walid must have been keeping track, because it wasn’t long before he waved at me to stop and checked Nightingale’s breathing again.

I was shaking, and my shoulders ached like I’d overexerted myself at the gym. I looked blankly down at Nightingale’s chest as Walid encouraged it to rise and fall, and I realised dimly that there was no way Seawoll, even on his worst day, could have done all this to Nightingale.

Seawoll might have roughed him up a little, and I was sure the vestigia had had a profound effect on Nightingale’s mental state, but now he was suffering some sort of massive internal bleeding that we couldn’t even do anything about until the ambulance arrived.

I remembered the explosion of light, and how Nightingale had trembled as he’d held me at bay with a shield spell in addition to keeping a grasp on enough magic to make the air snap with static. A horrifying thought occurred to me, and I reached out blindly for Walid, finding his elbow and tugging on his sleeve weakly.

“What if—it’s got to be—he used an awful lot of magic—”

Walid sat back from giving the second rescue breath and waved at me to resume compressions. I did so, and Walid, between breaths, said, “I know. Never seen—this type of injury before—but he didn’t even have—his staff with him, so—can’t know anything for sure.”

That was less than reassuring, but I knew that if Nightingale didn’t maintain proper blood flow to his brain, it wouldn’t matter if he’d overexerted himself magically or not.

My arms were cramping by the end of the third round of compressions, and I was relieved when Walid motioned for me to move aside after the rescue breaths. As he started counting under his breath, I moved around him to take his place at Nightingale’s head.

The inspector was incredibly pale, the roots of his dark hair standing out starkly against his sweat-beaded forehead. The tear tracks from earlier were still gleaming on his cheeks, smeared now. Nightingale’s throat convulsed somewhere around Walid’s twentieth compression, but apart from that, he made no visible effort to breathe.

I felt even less confident about administering rescue breaths than I had about compressions, but my arms had gone all wobbly and failed me, so I didn’t have much choice. When Walid reached thirty and sat back heavily, I tilted Nightingale’s head back like Walid had done, put my turned head above his, and listened for Nightingale making any attempt to breathe, hoping to feel the tickle of breath on my cheek. When there was nothing, I turned my head, took a deep breath, and pressed my mouth to his.

Nightingale’s lips were cold against mine, but it wasn’t quite the icy chill I associated with corpses, which I took as a good sign. I moved my hand to pinch his nose shut and, after making sure I had created as airtight of a seal as I could with my lips, breathed. I thought I caught a hint of wet pine, but I might have imagined it. I kept my eyes open and locked on Nightingale’s chest in the periphery of my vision, and was relieved to see it rise as I emptied my lungs of air.

When I had nothing left to give, I pulled away and gasped in a breath of my own. I allowed myself only a few brief seconds before leaning forward again and giving him another breath. This time, as I felt myself grow a little lightheaded, Nightingale’s lips twitched beneath mine.

Encouraged, I pulled back, sucking in air and watching as Nightingale attempted to draw a breath of his own. It was clearly a struggle, and his Adam’s apple weaved up and down a half dozen times before he managed a wheezing cough.

I felt myself break into a smile of relief, but I’d called it too soon. Nightingale coughed again, the motion convulsing his shoulders, and this time he succeeded in spitting up a mouthful of blood. I automatically turned his head before he could choke on it, but my spirits dropped so fast it felt like whiplash. I’d been at the aftermath of enough car accidents to know that coughing up blood was never a good sign.

Walid, who had been watching, swore under his breath and resumed compressions when Nightingale fell ominously still again, no longer attempting to breathe. I turned his head back to the front and carefully wiped the scarlet line of blood and saliva off his pale cheek with my shirt sleeve.

I was not looking forward to tasting Nightingale’s blood on my lips during my next rescue breath. Beside me, Walid was doing his best to keep up the compressions, but it was exhausting work and I knew he wasn’t as young as he’d used to be. So when I heard the shrill, unmistakable sound of an ambulance siren not far away, I’m not ashamed to say that I had never been more relieved to hear anything in my entire life.

I slumped against the floor, shaking and just drinking in the knowledge that fully trained paramedics would be on the scene within seconds.

Unfortunately, Walid reached his thirtieth compression before they could arrive.

“Peter,” Walid said breathlessly, dragging my attention back to him. The doctor, sweat beading on his brow and looking utterly exhausted, motioned weakly at Nightingale’s head with his hand, and I understood with a sinking feeling what he wanted me to do.

I could distantly hear the sound of the museum doors being thrown open, accompanied by far-away, urgent voices, but Walid, Nightingale, and I were trapped in a bubble in which the only thing that mattered was the rhythm of artificial heartbeats and breaths keeping Nightingale alive.

I forced myself back to my knees and, without even bothering to listen for a breath this time, because Nightingale was so still I doubted I could have missed it if he so much as twitched, pressed our mouths together.

I breathed as much air into his lungs as I dared, and when I pulled away I felt a wetness on my lips. I licked at them automatically, and was rewarded with a sharp, coppery taste flooding my mouth. I tried not to gag, failed, and wiped ineffectually at my mouth with the back of my hand.

Walid must have said something, because I drew another shaky breath and leaned over Nightingale again. I had to put my hand on the concrete on the other side of his head to steady myself this time, and tried to ignore the salty taste of blood as I gave him another breath.

Once I was done, Walid resumed compressions even though his arms were shaking and I was pretty sure it was my turn. Luckily, it was then that the paramedics arrived on the scene.

I gasped at them in relief and exhaustion, and had distracting the fluorescent-vested professionals not interfered with their attempt to save Nightingale’s life, I would have hugged one then and there, Englishness be damned.

Once they’d taken over the compressions from Walid, I expected the doctor to drop to the floor beside me, but instead he rocked to his feet, rattled off something to the paramedics, and started off in the direction of the siren.

Uncertain of what he was doing, I grudgingly forced myself to my feet as well. I was still trying to recover my breath by the time the paramedics were slapping a breathing mask over Nightingale’s face and sliding him onto a stretcher.

The amount of sterile, mass-produced equipment on the scene was incredibly reassuring, and I felt suddenly that everything was going to be all right. I’m not sure why I thought that; I knew that getting to the ambulance wasn’t the problem for most patients—it was the living long enough to be discharged from the hospital that was the hard part. But in that moment, exhausted and spent as I was, after all that Walid and I had done, and with the paramedics moving with the surety of people who had made saving lives their profession...I couldn’t help thinking that the worst was over.

I didn’t know how wrong I was.

Chapter Text

Before I knew what was happening, the paramedics had jacked up the stretcher and were rolling it quickly towards the distant sound of a siren.

I stumbled after them, feeling a sudden rush of irrational anxiety as Nightingale was swept from my sight.

I was halfway across the exhibition room, skirting the yellow police tape, when I realised where Walid had gone. Not able to keep up with the jogging pace the paramedics were setting, the doctor had made a beeline for the ambulance immediately. I tried to quicken my pace to catch up with him, but my feet refused to go at anything faster than a stagger, and Nightingale and the paramedics slowly pulled further and further ahead.

I reached inside myself for any last remaining scrap of adrenaline and managed to break into a half-sprint. I gained the front steps of the museum just in time to see Walid holding onto the door of the ambulance, about to pull himself inside. I stumbled to a halt, breathing heavily.

Glancing back, Walid saw me and pointed a finger at me before gesturing back towards the ambulance in what I knew was a question. Did I want to take his place with Nightingale? As terrified as it made me to see Nightingale this way, I definitely didn’t want to leave him, but there was nothing I could do and Walid would certainly be of more use to the paramedics than I would. Besides, given my recent history with the London Ambulance Service, I probably wouldn’t be very welcome. I shook my head; Walid nodded in response and got into the ambulance, closing the door behind him. No sooner had he pulled the door latched than the ambulance jerked into motion, tires screeching as it made for the main road, siren still blaring.

I stood there for a moment, my ears ringing in a way that I associated distantly with shock. I was still panting for breath, and when I raised a hand to wipe the moisture from my face—sweat, I thought, though tears weren’t beyond the realm of possibility—it was shaking. There was a smear of Nightingale’s blood on the back of my hand, bright red and incriminating. I dropped my hand back to my side and staggered down the steps to dry heave into some bushes.

Eventually, I straightened up and wiped my mouth with the back of my other hand. I was still in a daze when I headed back inside the museum, only really becoming aware of where I was when a young probationer whose name I couldn’t remember stepped out in front of me and called my name.

“Constable Grant, sir?” It was the ‘sir’ that did it. I blinked, took a breath, and looked around. With Seawoll having stormed off and Nightingale very much out of action, suddenly I found myself the senior officer on the scene, barely out of probation though I was myself. The forensics team was also looking to me for instruction, unable to leave without the all clear from an officer. Even our poor, dead intern couldn’t go anywhere until a medical advisor had given him the once-over, and the advisor in question was currently speeding away to hospital without him.

“Yes…er…what?” Not articulate, maybe, but I was pleased I didn’t sound as shaky as I felt. The constable—constables, in fact, the others having plucked up the courage to gather around—looked at me expectantly, like ducks awaiting bread.

I suddenly found that mental image so amusing that I had to take several deep breaths to stop myself from laughing. Tempting as it was to give in to the mounting hysteria, I had a job to do, and I knew it was what Nightingale would have expected of me. I took another breath and managed to refrain from bursting into laughter or tears. For now, that was enough.

“Right, Constable, I want you and…” I motioned to another constable whose name was a blank to me, “and you to go through the contents of Jenkins’s locker and take it all back to evidence.”

As I turned to look at the third constable, and the only non-probationer other than myself—the name Claire Bryant sprang to my mind—a sudden horrific thought occurred to me. “Has his family been informed?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir.” She was ‘sir’ing me now, as well, though I definitely wasn’t her superior. I was too relieved by the fact that at least some officers hadn’t been completely incompetent earlier this morning to care too much, though.

“Good, that’s...good.” My shoulders sagged and I wavered slightly on my feet. It couldn’t have been long past nine in the morning, but I already felt like I’d experienced several lifetimes.

Claire looked at me sympathetically. She’d been a few years above me at Hendon so our paths hadn’t crossed often, but she had a reputation for being calm in a crisis that meant she was frequently seconded from the murder squad to family liaison when there was a particularly delicate case. That made her good news for the Met, but not so much for her; no one likes being the one to tell the next of kin.

“I’ll phone Sergeant Stephanopoulos,” she said.

I nodded, reflecting that I probably should have been the one to think of that. “Yeah, good idea, thanks.”

The probationers headed off to do some actual police work, order at least nominally restored, and I was relieved to see them go. Claire had her mobile out and, after pressing a few buttons, sighed. “I was warned this might happen working with you,” she said heavily. “I’ll get an airwave from the car.” She hesitated and looked up at me before she left. “I’m sorry about your governor. I hope he’s all right.”

Not trusting myself to do anything more than nod, I didn’t, but she seemed satisfied with that and headed off to call in reinforcements.

Mr Briggs appeared at my side and I jumped slightly, though I doubted he’d arrived quite as suddenly as he appeared to have. To be honest, I’d completely forgotten that he was there at all. He was holding a bundle of fabric I recognised dimly as my jacket, which he was offering to me. “Constable, you look like you could do with a cup of tea. Or perhaps something stronger?”

I didn’t argue, because he was right and I thought this was an occasion when drinking on duty might be the lesser of several evils. I felt like sinking to the floor, curling up, and closing myself off in what future Hendon instructors would point to as a textbook example of a psychological breakdown, or, worse yet, getting in the Jag and racing to the hospital in a display of dangerous irreverence to vintage automotive engineering. In the state I was in, I’d likely hit a tree, another car, or possibly even a pedestrian, and if I knew that if I so much as scratched the Jag’s glossy paintwork, Nightingale would never forgive me.

Briggs led the way to his office and I used the adjacent loo to wash my hands, one still smeared with Nightingale’s blood, half-dried now and slightly sticky. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I also had traces of scarlet around my lips. I spat in the sink, scrubbed at my mouth, and took several breaths to get my stomach under control, but I was still a mess. No wonder my fellow constables had been wide-eyed and deferential—I looked like a madman, and no doubt Seawoll had already given them his line about what happened to little police girls and boys if they made the mistake of getting involved with the Folly’s particular brand of ‘weird bollocks.’ I’d sweated straight through my shirt, so I shrugged back into my jacket, which served to hide the worst of the stains.

I emerged from the loo several long minutes later to find Briggs sitting in a comfortable-looking chair and sipping a whiskey. He motioned to a second chair and another glass of whiskey. I sank onto the leather seat gratefully and reached for the tumbler.

“No obligation,” Briggs said, and it was a mark of just how distracted I was that I didn’t even think his words odd.

The alcohol went down sharp and strong, washing the last of the tang of blood from my mouth. The glass of the tumbler was cool against my fingers, and for a long moment I just focussed on trying to stop my hand from trembling.

We drank in silence for several minutes, and then I remembered when I’d last seen Briggs, standing next to a sizeable dent in the side of the Tiger. “About the tank…” I started. “We’ll make sure you’re able to get it repaired…if it was something we caused, that is…which I’m not saying that it was...” I realised I was digging a nice little hole for myself, but I’d never been good at knowing when to give something up for a bad job, “...overenthusiastic investigating, perhaps, accidents happen sometimes...”

Having apparently listened to my pathetic speech for long enough, the curator held up his hand with a frown. “Enough of that. I know what happened here—or at least enough of what happened to be able to deduce the rest. You’re right—the repairs will be paid for, but not out of your department’s funds; I’ll see to that myself.” His words were sharp and clipped, and when I looked up at him, there was no mistaking the anger in his posture, spine straight and stiff, glass gripped tightly in his hand. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “What that man did today is unforgivable.”

I blinked. I knew historians could get very attached to their artefacts, but this seemed like quite an extreme reaction to a fairly minor dent, even if it was in the side of a vintage vehicle known for being pretty dent-proof. Besides, I wasn’t sure which man he was referring to, given the circumstances, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to let anyone take shots at Nightingale right now.

“Mr Briggs,” I said, rather sharper than I had intended, “I don’t know exactly how the damage occurred, but I can assure you it was an accident, and Inspector Nightingale—”

Briggs silenced me with a wave of his hand and I felt a brief flash of annoyance. When he spoke again, it was in a much calmer tone and his shoulders had slumped into a more relaxed position. “No, no, dear boy. I didn’t mean your inspector. Goodness knows, his well-being is far more important than any tank, but that is precisely why such a breach of the arrangement cannot be excused or ignored. I know from the old boy network that the Folly is not in favour at present—”

I had questions. I had a lot of questions, but Briggs wasn’t done yet.

“—And I know that it might be detrimental for you to take legal action against Inspector Seawoll for his behaviour here today, but he ought to face some consequences. There’s enough evil in this world that we can’t afford to lose a man like Nightingale to some idiot inspector with a grudge. And if the only way that this can occur without threat to your department is by my seeking compensation for the damage done to the Tiger, then so be it. Heavy-handed practise, perhaps, but when has such a machine ever been involved in anything else?”

I blinked again and looked at Briggs more closely, searching for a hint of vestigia . A little to my surprise, there was a fair amount, and I realised I must have been too distracted by the vestigia produced by the artefacts to notice earlier. It smelled like fine dust and a particular type of glue, and I could almost feel the soft edges of an old book being flipped through for the first time in a century, and there was just a hint of something else…antiseptic, I thought.

Briggs noticed what I was doing and gave me a kind smile. “I’m afraid we haven’t been properly introduced, have we? William Briggs, genius loci of the Imperial War Museum.” His smile became self-deprecating, and I guessed that he had come by his magical divinity later in life like Mama Thames rather than having been born with it like her daughters.

I stared at him blankly for a moment, not, as he probably assumed, because this came as a shock to me, but because I was surprised by how unsurprised I was. Either I’d assimilated the workings of this brave new world of magic more easily than I’d thought I had, or it had just been that sort of day. Both, most likely.

Briggs topped up my whiskey and I swallowed it down gratefully, though it was so strong that I choked. I reflected that I must have been going soft in my post-Hendon existence, especially since, after all the things I’d seen and been a part of in the past few months, I don’t think anyone would have blamed me if I’d become an alcoholic.

“I was a physician here,” Briggs said, motioning around himself, “back when it was the Bethlem Royal Infirmary, though of course it’s unrecognisable as that nowadays. I spent the last years of my life campaigning against what would become the Great War, and lived just long enough to see my efforts fail. I met the end of my days in 1914—or, at least, I thought I did.”

I set my glass down and sat back in the chair, feeling exhausted. There were dozens of questions spinning around in my head, but my tired brain could only latch onto one. “You used a glamour, didn’t you?” I asked. “After your statement was taken—that’s why you weren’t sent away after the investigation began.”

Briggs’s smile was bashful now. It might have been my mind playing tricks, but that smile seemed to have a vestigia of its own: a warm fire, hot tea, and the scent of brandy. “Just a little one,” he admitted. “Inspector Seawoll was none too keen on the idea of involving the Folly, you see, but I’m afraid I insisted upon it once I realised that poor Andrew had been killed by magical means. Your Inspector Nightingale is quite the legendary figure in the community, though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him before today.”

No , I thought, I don’t imagine you would have . I remembered Nightingale’s aversion to museums, and his complaint that the vestigia gave him a headache. Yet, beyond the initial surge of emotion and memory we’d felt when we walked in, I hadn’t been terribly bothered by it. I felt I might be developing a headache now, but that was almost certainly an unrelated phenomenon. And that made me wonder if maybe Nightingale had another reason entirely for disliking museums.

It really should have been obvious, all along. I knew that Nightingale had lived through more than his fair share of history, and I guessed a great deal of it had been far from pleasant. I might have thought that maybe he just disliked being reminded of a past he had already lived through once, except that, even with Seawoll’s unpleasantness added in, it couldn’t account for Nightingale snapping like he had. I remembered the Tiger tank, and the military bearing Nightingale had adopted during our investigation, and I knew that putting Nightingale and that tank in the same room would never have been a good idea, even if Seawoll had been miles away.

I’d spent a lot of time around Nightingale these past months, and I knew it was nigh on impossible to even ruffle the man. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I didn’t think I’d have even believed Nightingale capable of losing control. What must he have been remembering, when he stared at me with those haunted eyes and pulled vast reserves of magic, so it seemed, directly from thin air? It was a chilling thought.

I swallowed and turned my attention back to Briggs and his unexpected confession of quasi-godhood. I wanted to ask more, but before I could organise my thoughts into anything approaching coherency, my mind now pleasantly warm and fuzzy thanks to the alcohol rather than just stunned, there came a knock on the office door.

Briggs raised his eyebrows at me and went to open the door. I had the presence of mind to slide my tumbler out of sight behind a stack of papers on Briggs’s desk before the door opened to reveal Sergeant Stephanopoulos herself.

I moved to stand—she did outrank me, after all—but my legs were wobbly and I had to grab onto the back of the chair for support.

Stephanopoulos looked me up and down, and I found myself suddenly wondering if she could detect the alcohol on my breath, even from this distance. Luckily, she seemed to interpret my shakiness as shock, and, to my intense surprise, her expression softened.

“Grant,” she said, and motioned me out into the hallway. I went, being careful not to exhale too heavily in case her leniency was contingent upon my having suffered through shock sober.

She turned to have a word with Briggs, but the curator simply gave her a reassuring grin and told her that it was perfectly all right for him to be there.

Stephanopoulos frowned, and for a moment I thought she was going to break through the glamour, but then she simply turned and marched down the hallway. I followed meekly.

“I heard what happened to the Inspector,” she said, and I gathered she was talking about Nightingale. I still didn’t know where Seawoll had gone. “In light of that, I think it’s best for you to take a day to recover before returning to the case.”

I blinked at her, startled, but she simply kept walking, pushing through the STAFF ONLY door and striding back out into the museum proper.

“Sir?” I asked; I’d heard a story once about a probationer who called Stephanopoulos “ma’am,” and wasn’t about to follow in his unfortunate footsteps anytime soon.

Stephanopoulos sighed and came to a stop not far from the square of yellow police tape. She turned to me. “Go home, Peter. You’re no good to us looking like that, and if Nightingale’s going to be...indisposed, then you’ll be the only person on the case with experience in...special matters.”

The way she hesitated before saying ‘indisposed’ didn’t sound good to me at all, and I wondered suddenly how Nightingale was doing. Then I realised I didn’t even know which hospital they’d taken him to, though nearby St Thomas’ was a good bet, and I wasn’t sure if I could even phone Walid to find out, because there was a fair chance his mobile had been knocked out by Nightingale’s magic.

I also didn’t know what she meant when she said I was looking ‘like that,’ but I guessed I must still be a mess. The back of my hand went automatically to my lips, and I imagined I could still taste Nightingale’s blood there. I shivered.

“Do you understand me, Grant?”

I blinked and looked up at Stephanopoulos, who was wearing an expression far too close to sympathy for my comfort. “Yes, sir,” I said.

Stephanopoulos nodded in a satisfied manner, turned, and beckoned one of the constables over with a sharp finger. The unfortunate constable—Claire Bryant, I noticed—walked over and looked questioningly between us.

“Bryant, take Constable Grant back to his headquarters at Russell Square. He’s in no fit state to drive.”

“I want to go to the hospital,” I protested, but Stephanopoulos silenced me with a look.

“You are to take him straight to his nick,” Stephanopoulos said to Claire, and she nodded in understanding.

“ Now, if you like,” Stephanopoulos barked when neither of us moved, and Claire started past me. When I didn’t make to follow her, she doubled back, grabbed me by the arm, and started hauling me in the direction of the museum entrance.

After a few steps I allowed myself to fall into a stumbling walk next to her, and she let go of my arm. We passed under a row of hanging planes that cast complicated shadows on the glossy floor, and then she pushed open a door and I stepped into the too-bright sunlight.

Claire made a beeline for one of the pandas and I trailed after her, casting a glance in the direction of where Nightingale had parked the Jag.

She all but shoved me into the passenger’s seat, and no sooner had she pulled away from the curb than I said, “Take me to the hospital.”

Claire glanced at me. “You heard the Sergeant,” she said. “She’d kill me.”

I knew she was probably right, but I was less considered with Claire’s metaphorical life than Nightingale’s literal one. I was finally remembering that most patients died in the ambulance or at the hospital, and Nightingale had most definitely not been in a good way when I last saw him.

“Please,” I said, in case that helped.

Claire’s mouth twisted, but when she turned towards Waterloo Road I knew she was going to take me back to the Folly.

I sank back into the leather seat, too tired to argue. As we inched our way across the Thames, I remembered I wasn’t sure which hospital they’d taken Nightingale to, or where he’d even be if I got there, so I reached for the airwave, but Claire pulled it out of my hand.

“He’s at St Thomas’,” she said, and replaced the airwave.

I looked at her, but her face was completely calm.

“Dr Walid radioed in right after Stephanopoulos arrived,” she said. “He said they’d taken Nightingale in for emergency surgery.” She hesitated. “It sounded serious.”

I swallowed and my head turned forward as Claire turned onto Southampton Row.

Before long, we were skirting Russell Square, and I made up my mind to get to St Thomas’ on my own as soon as Claire left, if I had to walk to do it.

“Which one’s yours?” she asked, looking out at the rows of Georgian terraces.

I pointed, and she turned the car onto the appropriate street.

“Are you sure you don’t—” I began, but broke off when Claire drove right past the Folly. “Hang on, that was it just there—”

“Do you want to go to the hospital or not?” Claire asked, and I looked over at her in surprise. “It’s practically on the way,” she said, though she sounded a little nervous. “And if Stephanopoulos asks, just tell her you caught a cab there after I dropped you off.”

I blinked at her. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

She shrugged and turned back onto Southampton Row. “She told me to take you straight here, and, well, I did that, didn’t I?”

I smiled a little in relief and it wasn’t long before we were fighting our way back through the congestion on Waterloo Bridge.

Guys’ and St Thomas’ Hospital was a large glass and white metal box that sat on the bank of the Thames directly opposite the Palace of Westminster. Usually I would have grimaced at the unfortunate architecture, but my thoughts had focussed so completely on getting news of Nightingale’s condition that I barely even noticed. Claire hesitated as I got out of the car, and then turned the ignition off, pulled the key out, and came with me.

I walked into what looked promisingly like the main reception, and was just about to go up to the desk and demand to know where Nightingale was and how he was doing when I spotted Walid sitting on one of the metal benches lining the left wall. It must have been hideously uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to care. The doctor was sitting with his head in his hands, and suddenly I didn’t want to know how Nightingale was doing anymore.

I didn’t register when I’d stopped moving, but I did notice when Claire stopped beside me. “Do you want me to go and talk to him?” she asked in a carefully neutral tone that I appreciated. If her voice had been kind, I think it might have been too much for me to handle right at that moment. I nodded silently.

Claire approached Walid cautiously and said his name. It took several tries before he seemed to hear and, blinking, looked up at her.

Though I don’t know the story of how Dr Walid and Nightingale met, I knew that it had happened several decades ago, when the doctor had been young and Nightingale had, by a mysterious quirk of magic, been considerably older than he was now. They were still good friends, and I knew they saw each other as often as they could in circumstances that didn’t involve a corpse or an MRI machine.

I was thinking about that when Walid looked up and I saw the devastation on his face. My blood ran cold, and I felt suddenly, frighteningly certain that I knew exactly how Nightingale was doing. My stomach clenched, and the ringing returned to my ears with a vengeance. Lesley often mocked me for having once missed a marching band, but an entire carnival could have passed through the reception right then and I wouldn’t have noticed a thing aside from the wetness on Walid’s cheeks.

When he saw me, his eyes widened fractionally and he scrubbed at his face. “Peter. He’s all—” He stopped and cleared his throat. I noticed a large smear of blood on his jacket, and remembered that he hadn’t been wearing a noddy suit. “No, he’s not all right—but he’s alive, last I heard. He’s in theatre now.” He looked at Claire and then back to me. “But I suppose you already knew that?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak and willing my heart to stop thumping loudly somewhere in the region of my windpipe. I must have looked as rough as I felt, because Walid ordered me onto the bench and, though it was an effort to get my legs moving again, I obeyed.

I’m not sure how long we sat there, staring blankly ahead like two stone monuments to the crap day it had been, but Claire stood patiently in front of us, arms crossed, shielding us from any curious gazes we might attract. There were very few, however—this being a hospital, everyone was too busy with their own problems to worry much about ours.

Walid was the one to break the silence, announcing with the kind of excessive casualness that often seems to come with shock, “They were going to pronounce him DOA, you know.”

I swallowed and felt something in my gut twist painfully.

“We couldn’t—couldn’t get his heart beating again,” Walid continued in that quiet, understated voice that told me he was putting it as plainly as he could. “The defibrillator didn’t do a...a damn thing. The internal bleeding had spread so far, and we couldn’t figure out what had caused it.” Walid swallowed. “He only tried to breathe once, and he just—just—it was all blood.”

I was finding breathing difficult myself, and beside me Walid leaned forward and cradled his forehead with the heel of one of his hands. “He—he—I swear he was dead, Peter. No pulse, no breath, temperature plummeting—by Allah, Peter, he looked like one of my corpses.”

My jaw locked uncomfortably and I could only stare straight ahead, unable to process how fortunate I’d been to not be in that ambulance.

Some part of me thought abstractly that I ought to comfort Walid, pat him on the shoulder or something, or tell him that everything was going to be okay, but it wasn’t and both of us knew it.

I fixed my eyes on one of the floor tiles and wondered bleakly if anything was ever going to be okay again. I remembered the coppery taste of Nightingale’s lips, cold against mine, and wondered if that had been the last time I would ever see him.

I thought about the Folly, dark and dusty, and Molly, and Stephanopoulos implying that I might be the only wizard left on the force. I thought about Nightingale conjuring a werelight over his palm as though it was the simplest thing in the world, and knew suddenly that I would never know anyone like him again.

I stared at my hands and recognised for the first time that this was really, honest-to-God happening, and Nightingale wasn’t going to make it.

And then I put my head in my hands and did that one thing that, above all else, a good police officer is never supposed to do in public: I cried.

This seemed to be the cue Walid needed to recover some of his composure, and I didn’t hold it against him. Policemen and medical professionals share a love of control, and I was a patient he could treat.

Walid sniffed loudly and looked up, blinking at me like a man surfacing from deep water. “Peter,” he said, and his voice rasped loudly in his throat. He paused to clear it and then continued, voice growing stronger as he went. “How about we get somewhere more comfortable, hm? I give lectures here, sometimes, and I bet we could sneak into the staff room and no one would bat an eye. It’s almost lunchtime, so they’ll be too hungry to mind us, anyway. And you should get something in you; what would—what would Thomas think of me if I let you starve?”

I huffed, an embarrassingly wet-sounding huff, which almost came out like a sob but didn’t, so I considered that a small victory. When I looked over at Walid, I saw that he was pale, his eyes red and face blotchy. I didn’t need a mirror to know that of the two of us I looked the more composed, and I thanked my mother silently for a complexion that hid a multitude of emotions.

Claire stepped over to us and pushed a cup of tea into each my and Walid’s hands. I blinked up at her, realising she must have left at some point, fetched the tea, and returned, but I had no memory of any of it. Behind her I could see a table manned by volunteers selling tea, and I assumed with no real interest that was where the brew had come from.

When I took a tentative sip of the tea, I found that Claire had dumped enough sugar in it to be sacrilegious to our national beverage. I thought that the drink should have, by all rights, been absolutely disgusting, but instead it was one of the best things I’d ever tasted. I wrapped my hands around the mug and the warmth was almost shamefully comforting.

Afterwards, feeling much better—I could tell from a glance that Walid was, too—I thanked Claire for the tea, and for taking me to the hospital. She smiled, but it was a little worried. “Not a problem. I’m sure you’d do the same for me if…you know.” She glanced nervously at her watch, and I wondered suddenly how long she’d kept Stephanopoulos waiting. “I really need to be heading back now, though, if you’ll be all right from here? Dr Walid? Anything more I can do for you?”

Walid shook his head. “This has been grand.” He raised his empty cup in thanks. “Quite the tonic. My regards to your Sergeant.”

Claire nodded, said goodbye to us both, and was off. The Met was very lucky to have her, I thought.

Feeling considerably calmer and able to contemplate a course of action that didn’t involve having an emotional breakdown, I followed Walid when he stood and headed off in the direction of the promised staff room. It was well past noon, but when we got there a smattering of home-baked cakes and sandwiches was still sitting on the tables. They looked to be of a much nicer quality than what any of the nicks usually had lying around; these weren’t hard enough to use as offensive weapons, for one thing.

As Walid had promised, no one asked questions about his appearance or batted an eyelid about my presence there, though it quickly became flatteringly evident that they thought I was his colleague. I tried to make intelligent comments, but I really wasn’t in the mood for talking, and Walid managed to fend most of them off.

We stayed there long after the lunch break numbers dwindled, nibbling half-heartedly at sandwiches and cake and trying to ignore the reason why the doctor’s biceps were aching enough for him to have to surreptitiously rub them every few minutes.

Some time later—I’m not sure how long, exactly, as time seemed to have both elongated and contracted as we sat there—a tired-looking man in blue scrubs entered. At first I thought he was just another staffer going on break, but then he made a beeline for us and Walid rose to meet him. I stood as well, and I suddenly realised who the man must be. My heart jumped into my throat, and my stomach unhappily turned over what little food I’d managed to force down.

“Charles—what happened?” Walid asked without preamble.

The man in blue—Charles—looked at Walid steadily, and I felt my whole future hanging on his next words. “He made it through surgery.”

Walid nodded and exhaled, and I felt my legs go wobbly in relief. I played the doctor’s words back over in my head to make sure I’d heard them properly, but I’d made no mistake: Nightingale was still alive. My legs shook harder, and I sat back down before they could abandon me completely.

“I don’t need to tell you how touch and go it was, Abdul,” Charles continued, but he could have been singing “God Save the Queen” for all I was listening to him. Nightingale was still alive .

“He’s in ICU right now. All the standard bumf—the first twenty-four hours are crucial, it’s a great sign he came through the operation at all, etc.…But, from me to you, it’s a miracle he’s made it this far. His heart was bleeding from the inside; I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He suffered a heart attack as well, but we think the bleeding brought that on, and not the other way around. And on top of that, it looked like he had SCAD.”

I had started paying attention again despite myself, and I looked between the two doctors, unable to parse the acronym, but Walid didn’t seem familiar with it either. “SCAD?”

“Spontaneous coronary artery dissection,” Charles translated. “It was like his artery had just torn in half. That’s what was causing all the internal bleeding.” The doctor’s mouth twisted. “We’ve patched him up as best we can, and we’re working on stabilising him right now. If that goes well, we’ll put him under heavy sedation for a few days and get you that MRI Tim said you were very keen on. His pupil dilation was fine, despite everything else going on, but, frankly, after what I saw in there...I wouldn’t like to rule anything out.”

Walid nodded and thanked the doctor for everything he had done. I focussed on keeping my breathing steady, but before Charles could leave, I looked up quickly.

“When can we see him?” I asked, feeling suddenly that I needed to see Nightingale with my own eyes before I could believe that he was really going to be okay.

Walid and Charles exchanged glances, and it was several long moments before I realised that they weren’t sure if that would be possible. I fought down a wave of panic and stood up, ignoring the way my legs trembled before deciding to support me.

“I thought you said he’d made it through the operation,” I said. I knew there was still a sizeable chance of complications after any major surgery, but just hours ago I’d thought Nightingale was gone for sure; today seemed like a day for miracles.

Charles glanced at Walid again before fixing me with a level look. “You do understand that Inspector Nightingale just underwent open heart surgery?”

I didn’t like where this was going one bit, but I nodded all the same.

“He may have made it this far, but he’s not out of the woods yet. The best thing you can do for him is to let us do our jobs without distraction. Let him have his rest and complete his transfusions and we’ll go from there, Mr...?”

“ PC … Peter Grant,” I said, and though I wasn’t too far gone to see the sense in what the doctor was saying, I wasn’t above the pettiness of letting him know I was job. I saw Walid raising his eyebrow at me out of the corner of my eye and chose to ignore him.

Instead of being stunned or awed to be in the presence of a representative of the mighty forces of law and order, the surgeon only looked mildly amused. “Constable Grant, I don’t mind telling you, your boss gave us a few tough moments back there, but he’s quite the fighter.” He glanced at Walid again and then back to me. “In all my time as a surgeon, I’ve never seen internal bleeding that severe—if you’d asked me before today if this was the kind of scenario that was survivable, all of my medical training would have said no. Now, though…well, if he’s managed to come this far, I can’t see him giving up anytime soon.”

While he spoke, Charles gave me a sympathetic look that told me that, fearsome purveyor of justice though I was, I must have looked as shaky as I felt. “The next few hours are the most critical, but we’ve repaired the damage as much as possible. The aim tonight is to grow his strength and give him some help so he doesn’t have to fight so hard. If everything goes well, you’ll be able to see him in the morning.”

I latched onto that promise and forced myself to nod. I comforted myself with the knowledge that this was by no means the first medical miracle Nightingale had managed to pull off, and was unlikely to be his last.

“In the meantime…” Charles looked back at Walid. “You should both really head home and get some sleep. Abdul, I have your number, and I’ll phone you if anything develops.”

“Actually, my mobile may not be the most reliable at the moment…” Walid gave the surgeon the Folly’s number, thanked him again, and indicated that I should come with him.

I wouldn’t have minded staying at the hospital—I doubted I’d get any sleep at the Folly as it was, not in the state I was in—but I didn’t feel like arguing and I knew there was nothing to be gained by staying.

Since both of us had been dropped off at the hospital and neither of us were in the mood for a walk, even if it was only to the nearest Tube station, Walid flagged down a black cab and instructed the driver to take us to Russell Square.

It was late evening as we headed back across Waterloo Bridge, and I found myself wondering where the day had gone. Walid had almost fallen asleep by the time we reached the Folly, and I had to shake him awake to remind him to get out. He paid the cabbie and motioned for me to go first.

I climbed the row of steps to the elegant doors and pushed one open. Walid followed me, and we were soon skirting the marble statue of Newton. I was halfway across the silent, empty atrium, intending on showing Walid to what I knew was the cleanest of the spare rooms, when there was a flash of black and white in the corner of my eye.

Molly appeared at my elbow a heartbeat later, making Walid jump a little though I was pretty much immune by now.

I ground to a halt as Molly moved in front of me, giving me a highly suspicious look. She moved her eyes significantly from the front door to the door of the garage.

“The Jag’s still there,” I said, not bothering to specify where ‘there’ was. “We took a cab.”

Molly frowned, and then her eyes slid past me and riveted on Walid. Feeling very tired and not up to this, I turned lethargically and followed her gaze. Walid looked, as I imagined I did too, rather dishevelled, and it took me several long seconds to realise that she’d spotted the smear of dried blood on his jacket.

For a moment Molly just looked between us, taking in our exhausted appearances and, presumably, the fact that Walid had returned with me instead of Nightingale.

“Molly—” I began at last, but I never got to finish.

She moved towards me with lightning speed and, before I had a good grasp on what was happening, I was pinned against a nearby pillar, shoulder blades smarting. Molly was snarling at me from only a few inches away, and she sniffed at me suspiciously, as though she could smell Nightingale’s blood on my skin. Maybe she could.

After the day’s shock of almost losing Nightingale and then the protracted suspense of his emergency surgery, I was in no state for handling anything else just then, and I couldn’t bring myself to respond in any way that I knew Molly would understand. Instead, I just stood there and felt myself start shaking with exhaustion and overexertion. I was utterly spent, physically and emotionally, and the last thing I wanted to do right now was explain myself to Molly.

Luckily, Walid came to my rescue, pulling her away and holding her at arm’s length when she rounded on him. “He’s not dead,” he said quickly. “Thomas. He’s alive. He’s in hospital, that’s all.”

I sensed more than saw Molly narrow her eyes at Walid, and the doctor continued, in a slightly less calm tone, “He was...hurt. We’re not—not quite sure what happened.”

Walid glanced in my direction and I gathered he’d also figured out that Seawoll couldn’t have caused all that damage single-handedly.

Molly glowered at him, but she was no longer struggling to escape Walid’s grip, and the doctor let her go. “We’ll be going to see him in the morning,” he said, and I knew it was true, regardless of whether or not Nightingale lived that long. “He’ll be up and about before you know it, I’m sure.”

Molly frowned but allowed herself to be calmed. I realised bleakly that, if Nightingale really did die now, after so many years of pointedly not doing so, I wouldn’t be the only one left feeling very alone.

“Now, I don’t suppose there’s somewhere I could spend the night?” Walid asked. “If it’s not too much bother.”

Molly gave him another suspicious look, but, with a final fierce glance at me, turned and led the doctor up the main flight of steps. I trailed after them and tried to stop shaking.

While Molly was getting Walid settled, I went to my room and slipped inside. It was dark and reassuringly familiar, though I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to sleep tonight, despite my intense, bone-deep exhaustion.

I sank onto the edge of my bed and had only got as far as pulling off my Doc Martens when the door creaked open. I glanced up to see Molly hovering near the threshold, holding what looked reassuringly like a tea tray.

I motioned that it was okay for her to come in, and she glided over and set the tray on one of the highly polished tables I rarely used.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, because I felt that, somehow, Nightingale had been in my care, and not the other way around. I blinked away a sudden wetness in my eyes and looked up at Molly’s still form. “I—I tried to save him. Walid and I did.” I remembered the crunch of Nightingale’s ribs under my inexpert hands, and couldn’t suppress a shiver. “I—we did our best.” I dropped my eyes to the floor, feeling suddenly that there must have been something else I could have done, some further step I could have taken that would have helped Nightingale’s chances.

I saw Molly move back over to the tea tray, and a moment later she gently shoved a cup of tea into my hands. I supposed this must be what passed as an apology for Molly, and accepted it gratefully. It tasted even better than the hospital tea, though that probably wasn’t difficult.

Then she was gone, closing the door behind her with a soft click. I sighed, set the tea aside for now, and focussed on tugging off my jacket. As I did so, I saw the smudges of Nightingale’s blood still on my shirt sleeve. Molly would manage to wash it out, I thought vaguely; she had the last time.

I felt like I needed a shower, but getting up off the bed seemed impossibly difficult, so I settled for sipping the tea instead. It was gone all too soon, but I found it had calmed my nerves considerably. I didn’t feel like standing up, even to pour myself another cup, so I just let myself fall on my back onto the bed, almost fully clothed.

I hadn’t expected to sleep—I was too worried about Nightingale for that—but my exhausted, overwrought body won in the end, and I was out before the sun had fully dipped below the horizon.

Chapter Text

I slept in short, uncomfortable bursts punctuated by nightmarish visions that didn’t even have the benefit of being imagined. I recalled the image of Nightingale’s pale face as he slumped against me and sank to the floor, remembered the ghoulish taste of his blood on my lips. I could hardly close my eyes without being haunted by the sounds of his agonised breathing and the remembered sensation of his ribs straining unnaturally under my hands.

At around six in the morning I gave up and forced myself to my feet. I limped towards the loo and took a cold shower, grateful to peel off my sweat-soaked, blood-stained shirt, and headed down to breakfast. Walid was already seated at the table, a half-empty cup of coffee in front of him. He gave me a wry smile which I returned; I gathered that it hadn’t been a good night for either of us.

Toby met me at the breakfast room door, yapping as he escorted me to my usual chair. I made a point of facing away from Nightingale’s conspicuously empty spot; I think Walid noticed, but he didn’t comment.

We sat in silence, both of us lost in our own thoughts, which I suspected were centred on the same thing, what with Walid checking his watch just as frequently as I did. At one point we checked at the same time and the farce of it eased the tension a little. I poked at my kedgeree with my fork, thinking I ought to eat it but unable to force anything past the knot in my stomach. Eventually I gave up after just pushing it around on my plate and taking a few half-hearted bites.

Usually Molly would have given me a disapproving frown for playing with my food, but today she just silently brought Walid another cup of coffee.

Walid accepted it gratefully and sank further into his chair. “You know, Thomas would never believe this.” He motioned between the three of us—me, him, and Molly, each keeping our own kind of vigil.

I knew he was right, but the thought ignited a spark of anger deep in my chest. “Well, he should,” I snapped, my tone fiercer than I had expected. “There’s us and Caffrey and...and Postmartin…” I stalled there, unable to think of anyone else who might genuinely care about Nightingale’s condition for his own sake rather than that of some magical or judicial agreement. Even the ties that bound the people I had listed could be seen as being founded on a sense of shared duty alone rather than any fondness for Nightingale as a person. I exhaled shakily and stared miserably down at my kedgeree.

Molly seemed to have approved of my outburst, however, regardless of its less-than-pleasant conclusion, as she poured me some more coffee and slid several slices of bacon onto my plate. I made an effort to eat one, and though it went down like sawdust I appreciated the sentiment—as did Toby, I’m sure, when I slipped him the rest.

When we’d eaten all we could stomach—admittedly, not much for either of us—and stalled for as long as we could stand, I fetched my spare mobile from the tech cave and gave Walid my emergency backup since it was our fault his old one had been fried. I made a mental note to buy one for Nightingale to use when he got out of ICU—not that he’d want one, of course, but it would be good for him to have the option should he have the sudden urge to explore the wonders of the World Wide Web.

Since we were still in no fit state for public transportation, I booked us a cab while Walid pulled on his miraculously (or, rather, magically) blood-stain-free jacket. Toby yapped, tilted his head up at Walid, and cast him a hopeful look. I felt a sudden flash of guilt that I hadn’t taken him out for his walk the day before, but I would have to make it up to him—and Molly—later.

Walid joined me in pacing while we waited for the cab, both of us trying not to make it obvious that that was what we were doing. When the doorbell rang, we practically tripped over ourselves to answer it.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, I saw Molly’s pale face at one of the windows, watching us leave.

Now that we were on our way to the hospital, I felt my anxiety increase. No one had phoned the Folly all night—I’d been listening paranoidly for even the hint of a ring—which could only mean that Nightingale had made it through the night, but in this case I wasn’t prepared to bet that no news was good news. It was possible Walid’s friend Charles had forgotten to phone, or had been too busy to, or maybe the call hadn’t reached the Folly properly.

I knew these situations were unlikely, but that didn’t stop me from flipping through them in my head, worrying over every little thing that could possibly have gone wrong in the last nine hours.

Walid was sitting very still in the other seat, but he was looking through the window, so I couldn’t read his expression. I twisted my mouth and tried to calm myself down.

I was feeling a little ill by the time we finally reached St Thomas’, and I suddenly realised the irony of the hospital’s name.

Walid walked purposefully into the main reception and I forced my feet to follow him. He didn’t bother stopping at the desk, instead turning in what I guessed was the direction of ICU. My palms started sweating halfway there, and I found myself wondering nervously what condition Nightingale would be in.

Luckily, my imagination didn’t have much time to torment me, because we reached the smaller reception desk outside of ICU, and Walid asked after Nightingale. I hovered uncertainly at the doctor’s side.

The receptionist checked the computer, and when she told us the bay number with no stipulations other than we make our visit brief, I felt I could have fainted in relief.

Walid moved down the hallway and I hurried after him, watching the doors flash by. It wasn’t long before we reached Nightingale’s bay—he was in no. 24., bed C.

Walid only hesitated for a second before pushing open the door. The bay was a long rectangular room with a line of a dozen beds separated by plastic curtains of that dull turquoise colour only utilised by hospitals. More curtains were pulled over the front of some of the beds for the patients’ privacy, and judging by the number of curtains not drawn, I guessed the bay was only half full. The beds must have been assigned letters, but I was too busy trying to fight the unexpected urge to run back outside of the bay to notice which one ‘C’ might be.

When Walid stopped outside of one of the curtains and moved to draw it back, my courage faltered and I almost turned away. But then Walid slipped through the gap in the curtains and my feet followed of their volition.

A figure was resting on its back on the hospital bed in that unnaturally symmetrical way that nurses always arrange patients, and it took me several long, terrified seconds to recognise it was Nightingale.

He was still very pale and, as I edged closer, I saw that there was a shadowed, hollowed look to his cheeks and around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, but he had more colour than when Walid and I had last seen him.

Three thick tubes emerged from a swath of white cloth covering Nightingale’s chest and snaked their way up to a mess of machinery next to his bed. Several IVs ran from both his arms to a number of hanging drip bags, and an oxygen mask obscured most of his face, but despite all of it he looked strangely, paradoxically, reassuringly... alive . His chest rose and fell gently, and a monitor nearby showed that his heart was keeping perfect time: minor miracles in and of themselves.

My knees felt weak, so I pulled up the visitor’s chair and sank into it gratefully. Walid began looking Nightingale over with a critical eye and examining the readouts in a way that implied he understood what all of the blinking lights and numbers meant. After a few minutes, he seemed satisfied and told me he was going to try to find a nurse with more information. I didn’t bother to follow him, instead just sitting and listening to the soft, regular beeps of the heart monitor and watching the movement of Nightingale’s chest.

I had seen him in a similar state before, of course, after he’d been shot, but that didn’t mean it was a sight I wanted to get used to anytime soon. After a few minutes, when Walid still hadn’t returned, I stood up and crossed the distance to Nightingale’s side.

I knew that sometimes unconscious patients could still hear voices, so I rested my hand on the bedrail and said quietly, “It’s...it’s Peter.” I tried for a smile but it came out a little strained. “You’re going to be just fine, you hear me? The docs are going to get you patched up straightaway, and then Molly’s going to give you a piece of her mind.” I gave a choked laugh, and fought back the wetness pricking at my eyes. “And then Walid’s going to give me a piece of his.”

I sniffed and, after a long moment moment of just listening to the beeping of the heart monitor, moved my hand the two inches from the bedrail to Nightingale’s wrist. He was a little cold, but I was reassured by how solid he felt. Just as I had when he’d been shot, I gave his hand a gentle squeeze. I felt the same trace of vestigia I had that day—canvas, wood smoke, and wet pine—but there was something else as well: the feeling of well-worked, supple leather and the scent of something that might have been lime.

I heard footsteps approaching from somewhere beyond the curtains and quickly snatched my hand back and acted like I was looking at the heart monitor readouts. I thought I felt Nightingale’s fingers twitch weakly towards my palm as I pulled away, but I probably imagined it. I remembered Charles saying that he’d be heavily sedated for days.

Walid swept into the room a moment later, gave Nightingale a slightly worried glance, and told me our time was up. I didn’t want to leave, not yet, anyway, but some of the tightness had eased from my chest now that I’d seen for myself that Nightingale was alive and better than he had been.

I stepped away from Nightingale’s bedside and, noticing the way Walid was hovering, opted for a tactical retreat. I’d read through the visiting times and unappealing list of the week’s menu options posted outside the curtains by the time Walid rejoined me.

If his eyes were a little red, I didn’t mention it, and he returned the favour.

*          *          *

It had started drizzling, but we were both feeling too relieved to give it much notice. We walked to Waterloo Station and ordered coffees, taking them outside to drink despite the cold breeze that had picked up to join the drizzle. We sat in fairly comfortable wind-swept silence on a hard metal bench for a few minutes until Walid asked me to fill him in on the details of the case.

After I had, we headed for the Tube, and I felt considerably refreshed by relief, the caffeine, and the impromptu cold shower. Walid promised he would phone me with his findings once he’d examined our corpse, and that he’d also phone if he heard anything from St Thomas’ about Nightingale. I knew it was making him twitchy, Nightingale not being at UCH, but we both knew that he wasn’t stable enough to be moved right now, and the last thing either of us wanted was a repeat of the day before.

When I left the Tube at Russell Square, I found I had a missed call from an unknown number. I returned the call as soon as I reached the Folly.

“Hello, this is PC Peter Grant. I have a missed call from this number.”

The voice that responded was familiar, cheerful, and Geordie. “Peter—it’s Claire. How are you doing? How’s Inspector Nightingale?”

I leaned against the plinth bearing the statue of Isaac Newton and caught sight of Molly standing not far away. She was watching me, arms crossed over her chest and eyebrows raised in expectation. I almost flinched, and hoped the look I was giving her was appropriately guilt-ridden as I held the mobile slightly away from my ear and told them both, “he’s pulled through. He’s not—it’s going to be a long recovery, but he’s through the worst, I think.”

Molly’s shoulders visibly sagged in relief, though her arms remained crossed, and I gave her a tentative, reassuring smile. She arched an eyebrow at me and switched her gaze pointedly to Toby, who was trotting around her ankles in excited circles.

I remembered my resolution to walk Toby, but it would have to wait for now.

“That’s a relief,” Claire said on the other end of the line. “I’m glad. Do they know what caused it?”

I shook my head, forgetting for a moment that she couldn’t see me. Meanwhile, Molly was still looking at me, expression increasingly exasperated, and I shifted around to the other side of Isaac Newton to evade her. “No, not yet—how’s the case going?”

The rest of the phone call went smoother, and I was glad the conversation had moved onto safer ground. I’ve always found talking about work to be one hundred percent easier than talking about anything I’m emotionally invested in. Just ask Lesley.

Claire had spoken to Andrew Jenkins’s family and had been told that he’d been suffering from depression after a series of events that had culminated in his girlfriend dumping him just two evenings before he died. According to his sister, who was also his confidant, everything had started to go downhill when he ran into a series of dead ends on his master’s dissertation. Despondent and coming under pressure from his girlfriend to give up on his internship and get a paying job to help with the bills, he had started drinking heavily. I had a feeling that none of this had led directly to his death, unless he had somehow magically murdered himself, but you never knew what information might crack a case. With police work, there’s really no such thing as ‘less is more.’

I thanked Claire and promised I’d check in with her boss asap, though judging by the glare Molly was giving me—she’d followed me around the statue in order to keep at it—that would have to wait until after I had walked Toby. I gave Newton a look I hope properly conveyed my sense of betrayal, and took the lead Molly held out to me.

It was still raining outside, and though I wouldn’t have minded feeling the rain on my face—I was still plenty wet from earlier, anyway—Molly shoved an umbrella into my hands before I could make the door.

It was a little chillier than I remembered it being, and the wind had picked up. Toby didn’t seem to mind, trotting along next to me with a delighted air and yapping at anything that moved.

I phoned Stephanopoulos as I walked down one of the paths cutting through Russell Square. Claire must have told her that Nightingale had survived the night, because she didn’t ask and kept the conversation strictly on the case. Since Claire had already filled me in on most of the details, Stephanopoulos was mostly interested in if I was available to return to the crime scene and look it over for “special matters,” because Nightingale hadn’t had the chance to tell anyone what he’d discerned before Seawoll got ahold of him.

I could tell she was trying to be tactful about it, but there were only so many ways to ask if I was all right returning to work so soon after my governor’s brush with death. I didn’t think I was, but someone had to do it, and the vestigia was growing steadily fainter every minute I delayed. I told Stephanopoulos I’d be there in an hour or so. She sounded satisfied with this answer, and when she hung up on me, I wondered if she’d actually grown to like me. It was an unsettling thought.

I’d already walked Toby around the square twice by now, and his gleefulness was beginning to wear off. He’d relieved himself beside a tree, and I’d dutifully deposited the solids in a rubbish bin, and now it looked like the rain and cold was getting to him.

Toby dropped into a slow walk only a foot or so in front of me, and whined whenever a particularly strong gust of wind cut through his fur. I slowed as well; I was grateful for Molly’s umbrella, but I hadn’t bothered to put on a coat, and my jacket provided precious little protection.

That being said, my mind was still whirling with the events of the previous day and I needed to clear my head. I walked Toby around the square again, and picked him up when he started trailing unhappily behind me, ignoring the feeling of his soaking wet fur against my chest. Toby’s paws scrambled against my arm and he tucked his nose under the lapel of my jacket.

Holding both him and the umbrella proved a little difficult, so I found a bench and sat down, putting Toby on my lap and leaning the umbrella against my shoulder as best I could. I was soon even colder and wetter than I had been before, but the chilly air helped me sort through my thoughts.

After several long minutes, during which Toby curled up next to my stomach, soaking me and smelling of wet dog, I felt considerably calmer and able to face Stephanopoulos and the others at the crime scene.

Toby protested when I stood up, and I carried him back to the Folly like a particularly furry bag of groceries.

I shook out the umbrella as best I could before I walked into the antechamber of the Folly, but I still dripped water all over the gleaming floor as I entered. I looked down guiltily and tried to hug my rain-streaked clothes closer to me, but Toby recognised that we’d returned home and jumped out of my arms before I could stop him.

I tried to grab him before he shook the rain off him, but I was too slow. Molly appeared on the other side of the atrium and glared daggers at me.

I protested and apologised, and eventually she just waved at me to be getting on with whatever I was doing with the air of the long-suffering. I apologised again and then tramped up the stairs to my room, dripping water all the way.

I felt like I needed another shower, but I also needed to be heading over to the crime scene, so I settled for a change of clothes instead. When I walked back downstairs, the puddles of water had been mysteriously wiped away and Toby was nowhere to be seen.

Molly wasn’t around either, so I called for another cab and waited by myself. The drive to the museum was slow, but at least I got to spend it warm and dry.

We were almost there when my mobile buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, glanced at the cabbie, who looked utterly uninterested in anything I was doing, and answered it. It was Walid.

“I’ve got a cause of death for Andrew Jenkins,” the doctor said without preamble. “It’s...like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

When Walid hesitated, I asked, “Care to elaborate?”

“It’s like...strictly speaking, he had an aneurysm, but it’s more like he had a hundred aneurysms, all at once. His brain just...disintegrated. The hemispheres fell apart.”

“That’s...unusual,” I said vaguely, in case the cabbie was sharper than he looked. “The usual suspects?”

“It’s not natural, if that’s what you’re saying,” Walid said. “And he’s still got a fair bit of vestigia clinging to him —brick dust, and something sharper I can’t quite place.”

I said I’d be over to check for myself once I’d finished with Stephanopoulos, and he told me St Thomas’ was putting Nightingale through an MRI machine.

The cab pulled up outside the Imperial War Museum and I hastily paid the driver as I asked Walid if that was good news.

“It’s good that they’ve stabilised him enough to risk it,” Walid said as I strode through the rain up to the museum doors, passing the Jag on the way, still parked outside. “If what happened to him was a result of overdrawing his magic, the scans should be able to tell us something.”

I asked Walid when he thought the results from the scan would be in, and he said in a few hours. I arranged to meet him at UCH to take a look at Jenkins later that afternoon, and then head over to St Thomas’ to check on Nightingale.

I ducked under the builder’s sheet into the museum’s new exhibit area, and when I saw Stephanopoulos had spotted me, I said good-bye and hung up.

“It’s about time you got here, Constable,” Stephanopoulos said when I reached her, but there was no real ire in her tone.

Since I’d last been there, the crime scene had been largely dismantled, and a handful of constables were still there finishing up the job, packing up the white forensics tent and taking down the yellow tape.

“We’ve pulled down the CCTV camera that was malfunctioning,” Stephanopoulos said, pointing to the wall above the swath of builder’s sheeting, where there were a few dark holes in the brick. “The curator said you’d wanted to see it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Since it failed right before Jenkins went down, it’s likely it was hit by the influence of magic right before he was.” I explained how magic turned chips into sand, and Stephanopoulos watched me with a raised eyebrow. I noticed she didn’t even tell me off for using the ‘m’ word — I was definitely growing on her.

I also relayed Walid’s findings to her, and then we headed over to Briggs’s office, where he had apparently obtained permission to remain while the case was ongoing.

The CCTV camera was lying on the corner of his desk, and when he saw us come in he smiled and gestured for us to sit.

Briggs passed me a screwdriver and gestured to the camera. I grimaced a little —my knowledge of dismantling electronics would be improving further, I saw— and started working on getting the camera open while Briggs poured drinks. “Tea, Sergeant? Constable? You’re under no obligation; please drink freely.” If Stephanopoulos found his words odd, she didn’t show it, instead looking at Briggs with a level gaze which I remembered from being on the wrong side of an interview table.

Briggs pushed two teacups over to us. I took a sip of mine, but Stephanopoulos left hers untouched. I glanced at her and saw the she was looking at Briggs with narrowed eyes.

“We’ve met before,” Stephanopoulos announced unexpectedly, “except I was twelve then, and you haven’t changed a bit.”

I looked up from the camera long enough to see Briggs’s eyes gleaming over the rim of his own tea cup. “Oh? And what makes you so sure that it was me?” He sipped his tea as, beneath my hands, I felt the camera’s casing pop open.

Stephanopoulos huffed a laugh, picked up her teacup, and sat back in her chair; I noted the fact that she hadn’t refused the drink. She pursed her lips and tapped the side of the teacup with one finger. “Oh, it was you all right. You gave a talk on peaceful alternatives to military authority — it stuck with me.” I’d taken a poorly timed sip of tea and choked.

Stephanopoulos gave me a look that would have curdled milk, but continued, “And it just goes to show just how…varied…this job can be that that doesn’t seem all that unusual anymore. What is unusual, however…” Stephanopoulos leaned forward again, putting the teacup back on the desk and fixing Briggs with an iron-clad stare, “is for a young man’s brain to implode.”

I remembered I was supposed to looking at the camera and quietly pried off the casing. The electrical components had turned to sand, as I’d predicted, but I felt like this would be an inopportune moment to interrupt Stephanopoulos, not if I wanted to keep my job — and possibly some other parts I was quite attached to.

Briggs’s expression was serious now, and his face dropped. “That poor boy…I never…” He glanced at me. “He wasn’t a practitioner, correct?”

“We are exploring all possibilities,” I said, keeping my answer vague, partly because we’re not supposed to give information away to members of the public and possible suspects, partly because I hadn’t given the possibility a thought until that moment, and partly because Stephanopoulos was sitting right there, and I didn’t want her to know that I hadn’t considered it.

Stephanopoulos was carefully not looking at me, because another thing we definitely aren’t supposed to do is let on that there might be some areas where constables know more than their betters.

This seemed as good a time as any to show Stephanopoulos the physical evidence that magic had been used. She glanced at the sand and pursed her lips. “And this couldn’t have been caused by...the Inspector?”

“The camera stopped working after Jenkins’ death,” I said, “so it wouldn’t have been on, and magic only fries components that are functioning at the time.”

Stephanopoulos nodded. “Good job, Grant.”

I tried not to look too surprised. Nor too pleased, for that matter.

She turned her attention back to Briggs and tilted the camera to show him the disintegrated interior. “Could you cause this? With your...skillset?”

Briggs spread his hands. “In theory, I imagine any magic used in close proximity could cause that. But I am no practitioner, and I would not risk damaging the technology that keeps this museum safe. I am a — a guardian, if you like. It’s my job to keep the artefacts here safe from harm.”

“And I’m sure that’s very noble of you...and Mr Jenkins shared your dedication, I presume?” Stephanopoulos kept her tone mild, but Briggs narrowed his eyes. There was a subtle shift, as though the air in the room had suddenly become charged. I slowly placed the camera’s casing back in place.

“I assure you, Sergeant, that is not a line of enquiry worth pursuing. Andrew was a hard-working intern and a fine young man.”

Stephanopoulos looked at Briggs for a long moment, and I sensed she was sizing him up. Satisfied by whatever conclusions she had come to, she nodded and stood up. Some of the tension dissipated at once. “I’m sure he was, Mr Briggs. We’ll be in touch.” She offered Briggs her hand and they shook. I followed suit — his hand was warm and I smelt dust and books and antiseptic.

Stephanopoulos turned to leave and I made to follow her but Briggs stalled me with a hand on my elbow. “Constable Grant, I heard about your inspector. I hope he makes a full recovery, very soon. If you’ll pass on my regards to him?”

I nodded and managed a smile. “Thank you. I will.”

As Stephanopoulos headed away from Briggs's office, I fell into place beside and a half step behind her . “So, you've come across...this sort of thing...before?” I was aiming for casual and almost managed.

Stephanopoulos stopped so abruptly that I almost collided with her. She gave me a level look and I managed not to duck my gaze. Eventually she sighed and shook her head.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, etc...I might wish that wasn't true — God knows this job's complicated enough without ghouls and goblins and whatever else there is out there — but ignoring them's not going to make them go away, and getting pissed off about them won't make a damned bit of difference to anything except my prospects of surviving to retirement.”

There was a long pause. I didn't know what to say to that, so I just stayed silent. I had a rule to not underestimate people with the authority to boot me off the force, but I felt I had rather undersold Stephanopoulos all the same.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and it was so out of the blue that at first I thought I'd misheard her. “About your boss,” she continued. “He's posh and infuriating, and God knows that someone's got to teach that man to use HOLMES, but he gets the job done. I'm just glad he's still around so that this sort of thing — ” she motioned vaguely around her at the room in general and to Briggs's office “ — will never be my shit to deal with.”

I didn't really know what to say to that either, so I kept my silence. I was still feeling off-kilter enough that even that backhanded way of saying she was happy Nightingale was still alive was enough to make my eyes sting.

“I know how Inspector Nightingale ended up in hospital,” she continued, and I wondered distractedly if this surge of good-naturedness was indicative of some terminal illness she had contracted overnight. “DCI Seawoll has been placed on leave pending an investigation and has been removed from this case. What he...what he is alleged to have done is in no way excusable, and I want to assure you that this matter will not be brushed under the carpet.”

I glanced at her in surprise, but she looked perfectly serious.

“There will be a full enquiry,” she continued. “Even if I have to see to it myself.”

I found myself nodding. “Er...thanks,” I said. I hadn’t even considered that Seawoll would have to face charges for assaulting Nightingale; I was so used to my governor brushing Seawoll’s general irritableness off. The thought of Seawoll facing some consequences at last was strangely satisfying.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Stephanopoulos snapped, and I gathered that she’d exhausted her pleasantness allotment for the year.

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly, and started away. Then I stopped, bit my lip, and turned back. “I really do appreciate it,” I said, and she waved at me irritably to be gone already.

I walked back outside and into the drizzle, feeling a little lighter. When my eyes found the Jag, though, I felt the smug smile on my face falter. As I dropped into the driver’s seat of the vintage car, I thought, a little ashamedly, that Nightingale certainly wouldn’t have approved of my celebrating the misfortune of someone else, even if that someone was Seawoll. I was also remembering that Nightingale had banned me from driving the Jag after the ambulance incident, so I took extra care to keep her accident-free.

I was feeling thoroughly repentant about Seawoll by the time I parked the Jag outside of UCH. The rain had lightened slightly, and I didn’t get too wet as I crossed the car park and gained the doors. I’d been to the mortuary enough times already to be confident in my navigation, and it wasn’t long before I was being buzzed through.

I found Walid without too much trouble, and he led me over to a table covered with a sheet; beneath it, I assumed, were the remains of the unfortunate Jenkins. I noticed the doctor was looking a little tired, but he greeted me readily enough.

“Last I heard from Charles, Thomas was still doing well and they’d finished the MRI,” Walid told me before I could ask.

I nodded and gestured at the table, trying to focus on the matter at hand. “Find anything else?”

“Nothing useful, I’m afraid,” Walid said, moving to one end of the sheet. His fingers brushed the edge of the cloth and then he glanced up at me. “It’s a bit unpleasant,” he warned.

I remembered what he’d said about Jenkins’ brain disintegrating, and nodded stiffly.

Walid pulled back the cloth and I tried very hard not to retch.

The top half of Jenkins’s skull had been neatly separated from the rest of him by what I assumed had been a saw of some kind, and I almost retched again when I saw it sitting upside down in a silver pan next to him, like a grotesque bowl. There were flaps of skin hanging off Jenkins’ head where his skull had been severed, and one particularly large stretch lay over his face, obscuring everything up to his mouth.

As thoroughly disgusting as this was, it wasn’t what Walid wanted to show me. No, what he was pointing to was the mess of slop inside Jenkins’ skull.

I edged around the table so I could have a better view, as little as I wanted one. Where Jenkins’s brain ought to have been, there were two large, brown and pink masses lying in some sort of chunky red soup I didn’t care to investigate further.

“Usually I’d have removed the brain and looked it over from there,” Walid said, in a completely unbothered voice I had no idea how he managed to maintain. “But, as you can see, removing it would have been especially tricky, and I didn’t want to risk losing the original placement.” He pointed to the two masses that I assumed were the largest remaining chunks of the brain’s hemispheres. “As you can see, the brain fell apart, the hemispheres separating and moving to the sides of the skull, instead of remaining together and shrinking or shrivelling as happens in most diseases affecting the brain.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, or something like it. I was trying very hard not to bring up the only food I’d eaten in over a day.

“It’s most peculiar,” Walid said, sounding perfectly cheerful, the iron-stomached bastard. “But you don’t need me to tell you that.” He pulled the cloth further down Jenkins’ body, revealing more of his pale, almost blue skin. There was the familiar Y-shaped incision down his chest, though at least Walid had had the good manners to sew him back up when he was done.

“I couldn’t find much of anything wrong with the rest of him,” Walid told me. “Traces of alcohol, and an antidepressant that matches his prescription, but not in large enough quantities to have been deadly. So I checked his brain on a hunch. You could say it paid off.”

I wondered distractedly what Walid would consider hitting the jackpot.

“He’s been on ice for a while, now, but there’s still a hint of vestigia , if you care to check for yourself.”

As little as I did, I at least had the option of putting myself a little further from the pink and black mess that used to be Jenkins’ head, and I took it. Craning my head down near his chest, I tried to ignore the sight of Walid’s neat stitches puckering his skin, closed my eyes, and felt for vestigia .

The first thing I got was fear, and if I hadn’t been trained to differentiate between my own emotions and vestigia , I might have thought it was coming from me. But, despite how much I disliked being close to a corpse with porridge brains, I wasn’t afraid of it.

After I’d convinced myself of this, I sensed around for other aspects of the vestigia . There was the smell of something like brick dust that I remembered Walid having mentioned, and the feeling of leather, supple and smooth, under my fingers. I took another breath, and this time picked up something sharper. I’d been around enough cleaning products my mum had used over the years to recognise the chalky smell as that of lime.

I stood up slowly, holding onto the memory of the scent. It took me a moment to place it, and then I remembered the last time I’d smelled it.

“Nightingale,” I said, and turned to look at Walid. “Nightingale had this too.”

Walid stared at me, and I realised I wasn’t being clear enough.

“This vestigia ,” I clarified, gesturing to the corpse. “It smells like lime.”

“Lime?” Walid asked. He looked baffled for a moment and then he snapped his fingers. “I knew I’d smelled it before. It’s used to reduce the smell of corpses.”

“Er,” I said, not quite sure what to do with that bit of information. “It’s used in all-purpose cleaning, too,” I said. “But that’s not important. When we were at the hospital, there was a trace of it on Nightingale as well.”

“On him as in you smelled it?”

“No, in his vestigia ,” I said, feeling a little impatient Walid was taking so long to follow. I thought back. “And there might have been something else, too, leather, maybe?”

“Wait, you’re saying you could sense Thomas’s vestigia ?” Walid asked, giving me another baffled look. “At the hospital?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, waving away his words. “But the point is, if whatever killed Jenkins left that signature, it must have gone after Nightingale as well —that would explain why he was so badly hurt, even after Seawoll was long gone.”

“And Thomas was still alive?”

I blinked at Walid, but he was just looking rather surprised. It took me a long moment to realise he was still working through Nightingale’s vestigia . “Well, he didn’t die in those ten minutes we were visiting, did he?” I asked, a tad exasperated.

Walid looked taken aback. “No, I just—” He stopped and seemed to think something through. “Never mind,” he said at last. “You said you thought whatever killed Jenkins might have gone after Thomas?”

I nodded. “The vestigia match,” I said.

Walid’s gaze shifted to Jenkins and he looked suddenly worried. “Even if whatever it was didn’t succeed in killing Thomas…” His eyes wandered significantly to where Jenkins’s head lay split open like a grapefruit, and he frowned. “I’d like a look at those MRI scans right away.”

Chapter Text

I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t inordinately worried the entire drive to St Thomas’. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way, and, perhaps luckily, my nerves had been so shot over the past forty-eight hours that after five minutes it just settled into a dull ache in the pit of my stomach.

I parked the Jag in the closest spot to the doors we could find that wasn’t reserved for emergencies and followed Walid into the hospital through the faint drizzle.

Walid made a beeline for the stairs and we climbed to the second floor. I recognised where we were —the ICU— and soon Walid was introducing himself to the middle-aged receptionist and telling her who it was we were here to see. Walid said he wanted to see Nightingale’s specialist as soon as possible, and told her that he was expecting results from an MRI scan he had authorised. She took note of his name and made a call. Once she was done, Walid spoke to her a little more and then beckoned me to follow him down the hallway.

We went to bay 24, and this time I was considerably more prepared when we reached Nightingale’s bed and Walid held the curtain back for me.

There were fewer tubes snaking out of Nightingale’s chest and arms this time, and when I moved closer I was relieved to see that he had regained even more of his colour, his cheeks touched with just a hint of red. I looked automatically at the heart monitor, but it indicated that all was well —or, at least, I assumed it did. I really had to learn how to read one of those.

Walid came up next to me and looked Nightingale over as well, and evidently didn’t trust the machinery, because he took Nightingale’s pulse himself. He seemed satisfied, though, so I decided there was no immediate need for worry. I walked over to the visitor’s chair and flopped down in it.

We didn’t have to wait long before the curtain was pulled back and a slender Indian woman wearing a lab coat over a suit entered. She introduced herself as Punam Shah, the doctor assigned to looking after Nightingale’s well-being. She had a manila folder in her hand, and, from the jet black corners of plastic pages sticking out from it, I guessed it was the results of the MRI.

Walid’s eyes fixed on them immediately, and I saw his fingers actually twitch. Dr Shah asked us to follow her, and she led us out of the bay, down the hall, and into one of a handful of small rooms crammed into the corner of the floor. It was an office and, from the lack of personal effects, I guessed it didn’t belong to anyone in particular.

Shah went to a large white light box on the wall, opened the folder, and started pulling out the plastic x-ray pages. She clipped them to the light box, and she’d barely put up the first one when Walid was at her shoulder, staring at it with trepidation.

I wasn’t sure what a healthy brain was supposed to look like, but I moved closer anyway, because I guessed Walid’s face would be a good indicator of Nightingale’s condition.

Shah put up five pages and slid the manila folder onto the corner of the unnaturally empty desk. “Dr Walid, are you familiar with MRI readouts?”

Walid nodded, eyes tracking across the pages. I thought they looked pretty normal—well, as normal as cross sections of a person’s brain could. I glanced at Walid, but he was still looking over each one with a neutral expression.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, heart attacks and strokes often result in hypoxia or anoxia of the brain,” Shah continued. “Luckily, Mr Nightingale seems to have maintained sufficient levels of oxygen between the heart attack and his arrival at the hospital, and he’s suffered only a mild case of hypoxia.”

I was no doctor myself, but I gathered that meant Nightingale was going to be okay. I glanced at Walid for confirmation; he’d finished his preliminary examination of the scans and was looking a little relieved.

I felt myself smile, a great deal of the tension of the last days leaking out of me at last. I sank down onto one of the comfortable-looking chairs.

“That’s those areas here, yes?” Walid asked confirmation, pointing to a darker mark on the lighter background of Nightingale’s brain.

Shah nodded. “We have him on a ventilator right now, so the damage should be limited to what you see here.”

Walid asked a few more technical questions I didn’t pretend to understand, and Shah must have answered to his satisfaction, because he was looking considerably less worried by the time they were finished.

“I ought to warn you that he may exhibit some...changes that are the result of the hypoxia,” Shah said, and she glanced at me. “Amnesia, insomnia, hallucinations, confusion, that sort of thing. Those...the level of permanency of those symptoms will vary. I don’t think he lost enough oxygen to lose areas of his personality, but it is a distinct possibility that often happens with cases like this.”

I didn’t like the sound of that one bit, and by the looks of things, Walid didn’t either.

“We’ll be moving him out of ICU tonight if he continues to improve,” Shah said, “and then we’ll pull him out of sedation and see if he can breathe on his own. If there are no complications, he should regain consciousness in a few days, and then we’ll be able to know for sure.”

Walid nodded, though he glanced back at the MRI scans with a distinctly worried expression. He thanked Shah, she wrote something down authorising him to get a second set of printouts of the MRI for his own records, and Walid motioned for me to come with him.

We left the office, heading back down the hall towards bay 24.

“Were there any signs of...magical overexertion?” I asked in an undertone, the technical term momentarily escaping me.

Walid shook his head. “Thank Allah, no. He must have lost consciousness before he could go too far, probably due to whatever it was that caused the heart attack.” He glanced at me. “You may be right about whatever killed Jenkins going after Thomas. But the modus operandi aren’t similar at all.”

We reached the bay and Walid pushed through the door, still sounding a bit puzzled. He lowered his voice as we passed the curtained-off beds. “Jenkins’s brain disintegrated, and Thomas—I don’t even properly know—had some sort of massive heart attack? His coronary artery broke, we know that much, but that hardly seems related to brain disintegration.”

“And what happened to the Inspector couldn’t have been natural?” I didn’t think it was, but I wanted to cover all the bases.

Walid shook his head and then shrugged. “Well, I suppose it could have been, but the odds are incredibly slim. Spontaneous coronary artery dissection is very rare, and Thomas never had any heart problems before. Besides, you said you felt the same vestigia , and nothing else could account for that.”

I nodded and fell silent as we passed through the curtain around bed C.

“I just...I don’t know what the connection is,” Walid said, sounding a tad cross with himself as he took the visitor’s seat.

I looked down at Nightingale as he rested silently in the hospital bed, equipment beeping softly and regularly around him. I couldn’t come up with any connection either.

“And why lime?” I asked after a moment, thinking through my impressions from the vestigia . “Leather, brick dust, and...lime?”

“Like I said, I know they use it to prevent corpses from smelling as they decompose, but…” Walid shrugged helplessly. “That hardly seems related to leather or brick dust.”

I frowned and suddenly remembered that, back at the museum, Briggs had said something about how the vestigia felt to him, and his impression would have been the freshest. I reached for my notepad automatically, but my hand met only fabric, and I remembered it was in my other jacket, the one I’d left at the Folly. I resolved to check once I’d returned.

Walid didn’t seem to have any other thoughts on the matter, and we both lapsed into silence, watching the gentle rise and fall of Nightingale’s chest and pretending we weren’t. After about ten minutes, Walid stood and announced he ought to be getting back to UCH.

I nodded, and when he left I took his place in the visitor’s chair. A nurse came in every hour or so and checked the bags of fluids, but otherwise left us alone. I started to wish I’d brought a book, and ended up scrolling through websites talking about lime on my mobile. I didn’t get very far before I started feeling quite tired, and I remembered how poorly I’d slept the night before.

I didn’t quite notice when I fell asleep, but the next thing I knew, someone was gently shaking my shoulder and calling me ‘sir.’

It was the nurse, but when I glanced quickly over at Nightingale, he didn’t seem any worse. “We’re going to be taking him for an echocardiogram,” she told me kindly. “It’ll take about an hour, but I just thought I’d let you know.”

I blinked at her, and it took a couple of seconds for me to process her words. Once I had, I thanked her and glanced at my watch; I’d been asleep for several hours and it was nearing dinner time. She gave me a sympathetic look and left to fetch something.

I stood, stretched, and found myself looking down at Nightingale again. I reached out and gave him a light touch on the shoulder. “Take it easy, okay, boss?” I said, and imagined Nightingale rolling his eyes at my concern.

I smiled a little despite myself, and left him to hunt down some dinner. I decided Molly would probably have something more palatable than anything the hospital canteen could offer, so I headed back to the Jag. It had stopped raining, and the fresh, crisp breeze felt good on my face.

I drove back to the Folly and made a point of seeking Molly out and telling her Nightingale was doing fine, to make up for my previous forgetfulness. While she worked on dinner, I phoned Claire to see if there were any new developments on the case.

There weren’t, and she told me that they’d sent the CCTV video of Jenkins to be analysed, but that they hadn’t found anything unusual. I remembered guiltily the memory stick sitting upstairs, and the copy of the file I’d intended to upload to HOLMES yesterday. I asked Claire to phone me if there were any further developments.

After dinner—a particularly tasty beef stew—I headed upstairs and retrieved my notepad from where Molly had left it and the memory stick on one of the tables in my room next to my freshly laundered clothes. I sat on the bed and flipped through my notepad to the section where I’d briefly interviewed Briggs.

When I got to the part about the vestigia , I frowned. Briggs had described, in addition to fear, leather, and brick dust, the smell of fresh mortar. I wasn’t rightly sure what fresh mortar smelled like, but, two quick Google searches on my mobile later, I’d found out that mortar was composed of cement, sand, water, and—tellingly—lime.

Which really didn’t help a whole lot, except to tell me that lime was definitely a component—the vestigia had smelled like cleaning product to me, corpse-deodoriser to Walid, and mortar to Briggs, but lime was the common denominator.

I frowned down at my notepad and pushed it back onto the table. I stood and headed downstairs, deciding to see what the Folly’s mundane library might have on sudden brain disintegration or heart problems.

I didn’t find anything promising, and it wasn’t very long before I dozed off in front of a pile of imposing medical tomes.

*          *          *

I spent the next three days combing through the Folly’s mundane and magical libraries, the Met’s files on sudden deaths, the HOLMES data on the case, and what I could get my hands on related to the Imperial War Museum. I wasn’t sure if I should be focussing on researching a link between Jenkins and Nightingale, trying to figure out the significance of the lime vestigia , or searching for a spirit or spell capable of taking down someone like Nightingale with apparent ease.

I ended up looking at all three, paging through all the information I could find and hoping a connection would jump out at me.

I started with what was on HOLMES, but even with Stephanopoulos and the murder team on the case, nothing looked significant. Jenkins was, as far as I could tell, a perfectly unremarkable person, with a flat, friends, and two goldfish. He’d certainly been having a rough time of it lately, what with the loss of his relationship and academic missteps, but Briggs was on the record saying Jenkins had been committed to the museum and his internship. There was a list some poor sod had uploaded to the database of the contents of Jenkins’s locker, which I scrolled through during breakfast one morning. It was fairly routine: a notebook, a handful of spare pencils and pens, a half-eaten sandwich, deodorant, his antidepressants, and a day-old newspaper. There wasn’t anything illicit —no alcohol or illegal drugs, which were more common in cases like this than you’d think.

My attempts to find a link between Jenkins’s cause of death and Nightingale’s heart attack were fruitless, and the only connection I could make was that they were both unusual, very quick to act, and related to organs one really needed to survive. This didn’t seem particularly enlightening, but I was running out of leads.

There was no good way to go about tracking down what sort of person, creature, or spirit had done the deed —since practically everything that fell under the Folly’s jurisdiction was capable of lashing out and potentially murdering individuals—so I turned to the vestigia for clues. I wasn’t sure what connected fear, leather, brick dust, and lime, but I was determined to find out.

Given that the only two artefacts that had been in the new exhibit area where both Jenkins and Nightingale were affected were the RAF AS.10 Oxford and the Tiger tank, I did some research into both of them to see if maybe their vestigia had been involved somehow. I’d felt the Tiger’s vestigia up close, though, when I’d found Nightingale and Seawoll, and though it had been strong, it wasn’t anything like the signature left by the unknown assailant. Since the AS.10 was suspended from the ceiling, I doubted its vestigia would have been able to reach the floor, and, as far as I could tell, brick dust and lime had had no part in the plane’s history.

Which left me wondering if maybe it was the building itself that was involved in the vestigia . I remembered that the Imperial War Museum had been built on the old site of the Bethlem Royal Infirmary, and wondered with a flash of excitement if this was the breakthrough I’d been waiting for.

Some rudimentary online research revealed that Bedlam had been just as horrible as all those B horror films would have me believe. I was quickly distracted from my search for lime and brick dust by the stories unfolding in front of me in the matter-of-fact voice of historians who’ve made the study of insanity their whole life.

Though it had been founded back in 1247 as a charitable hospice, Bethlem had already risen to notoriety by the time it moved from the City to its new premises in Southwark in the early 1800s. Patients were problems to be solved, and were often seen as more valuable dead than alive. All in all, my research into the ‘treatments’ used turned my stomach to the extent that I began to regret the tripe and onions Molly had prepared for lunch.

The hospital’s move to Southwark in the early nineteenth century was in part a step to improve its image. Surgeons were now actual medical professionals rather than former butchers, and members of the general public were not so openly admitted to gawk at the ‘lunatics’ in their unnatural habitat. Inspectors also began doing the rounds in the hopes of raising the standards of care to the level of, well, a standard of care . Despite this, many of the practises remained far from humane for many years, and I found some early photographs of patients which I wasn’t going to be getting out of my head in a hurry.

All this left me no closer to figuring out what was going on with Jenkins and Nightingale, though, and eventually I grudgingly turned my attention back to searching for mentions of lime.

I made a point to visit Nightingale at least once a day, even though I usually ended up just sitting next to him flipping through a handful of the Folly’s more promising books. Nightingale had been moved out of ICU as Dr Shah had predicted and, after a few hiccups, they had pulled him successfully off the ventilator.

Which meant that, apart from the drips and his general air of unwellness, he looked almost comfortable. They’d been taking him off the sedatives slowly, and today he would be on his own enough to potentially regain consciousness, so Walid and I had been taking turns keeping him company, so he’d have a friendly face around in case he woke up.

I’d taken the afternoon shift, exchanging a few words with Walid as he left, heading out into the drizzle. I was planning on working; I had several books from the Folly and my laptop with me, along with a dreadfully dull-looking, heavy volume I’d checked out from the library entitled Lime and Limestone: Chemistry and Technology, Production and Uses . As little as I wanted to lay my hands on it, I imagined it was probably one of the foremost experts on lime, though that didn’t stop me from grimacing as I cracked it open.

I had my pen and notepad poised to take notes if anything seemed relevant to the case, but the contents of the book were just as boring as its title had suggested. I was skimming through a section discussing lime’s many uses in agriculture, and considering stabbing myself in the eye with the end of my pen, just for a bit of variety, when I noticed Nightingale was watching me.

I did a double take and almost dropped Lime and Limestone , I sat up so quickly.

“Inspector?” I said, stuffing my notepad and pen into the book and hastily shoving it onto a nearby table. I stood up and moved closer to the bed, so he wouldn’t have to turn his head to look at me. “How —er, how are you feeling?” I asked.

For a long moment Nightingale just looked at me, and if his pale grey irises hadn’t followed my movement, I’d have wondered if he was really awake at all. Then his lips parted, and he said, in a hoarse voice barely above a whisper, “Who — are you?”

I blinked at him and felt my heart drop like a stone. “Peter,” I supplied automatically. I moved a little closer in case that would help him recognise me. “PC Peter Grant. I’m your apprentice, sir.”

Nightingale gave me a look that, even through the exhaustion on his face, was clearly suspicious. “I don’t —don’t have an apprentice,” he croaked.

I fought the hopeless feeling rising in my chest. “Yes you do, sir, and you have for about a year now. I helped with the Punch and Judy case.”

Nightingale shook his head, and even the slight movement seemed painful. “You’re...mistaken,” he managed.

“You might have forgotten,” I tried, a little desperately. “But that’s okay. Do you remember Dr Walid? Molly? The Folly?”

Nightingale’s eyes jumped to mine and I saw a flare of alarm there. “What do you know about the Folly?” he demanded, or, at least, he would have if his voice had been stronger. He made a visible effort to sit up and blanched quicker than I thought possible.

“Hey, hey, take it slow,” I said quickly, but he’d already sunk back into the pillows. I glanced nervously at the heart monitor, and though the beeping had sped up, nothing was flashing that hadn’t been before.

Nightingale took a fortifying breath, and this time when his eyes cracked open, he seemed to take in more of the room. He looked back and forth in a distinctly suspicious fashion and then locked his gaze back on me. “You say you’re with the Folly?” he wheezed. “Then...prove it.”

I put my palm out automatically, intending on conjuring a werelight, but then hesitated. I glanced at the heart monitor and wondered worriedly if even a small spell might blow a circuit or something. Unwilling to risk it, I folded my hand away. Nightingale’s eyes narrowed and he opened his mouth to say something, but something else was occurring to me.

“Hang on, sir,” I said, and went back to the visitor’s chair, pulling out one of the books I’d brought with me from the Folly. It was on genii locorum , because, as friendly and helpful as Briggs was being, I wasn’t about to rule him out as a suspect, since both attacks had happened in his museum and he had access to the CCTV footage.

I showed the book to Nightingale and his expression relaxed slightly. He closed his eyes briefly, and I put the volume next to Lime and Limestone on the small table.

When I turned back to Nightingale, he looked exhausted but no longer suspicious. “What happened?” he asked, voice a little hoarse. “Where—where am I?”

“There was a—an incident,” I said, not wanting to worry him with the details any more than I had to. “But everything’s going to be fine now. You’re in hospital.” I reached to touch his hand, in case physical contact might help.

My fingertips had barely brushed Nightingale’s wrist when he jerked his hand away from mine. I snatched my own hand back like I’d been burned.

“No,” Nightingale said, and I was alarmed to hear the fear in his voice. My eyes jumped to his face, and found that he had blanched again. “No, please.”

Nightingale’s breathing had sped up, and I looked quickly at the heart monitor, which indicated his heart was keeping pace—or trying to. Something flashed red in the corner of the screen. I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned back to see Nightingale had grabbed ahold of me.

“Get me out of here,” he gasped, and made another effort to sit up.

“Whoa, hey, hang on,” I said quickly, and put my hand on his shoulder to push him back down. Nightingale had gone completely white, and something was beeping insistently on the heart monitor.

“You don’t understand—please—” Nightingale begged, and I realised with a flash of panic that that was exactly what he was doing: begging. He moved his hand to the wrist of the arm I was keeping him pinned to the bed with, and clung on for dear life. “I can’t do it again,” Nightingale gasped, and, to my alarm, tears started rolling down his cheeks. “If you’re really with the Folly—please, oh God—get me out of here. P—Peter.” He said my name like it was unfamiliar in his mouth, but the desperation was clear in his eyes. “Don’t let them take me, please .”

I stared at Nightingale in horror. There were quick footsteps in the distance, and I knew the nurses would arrive any second. “You’re—you’re safe here,” I tried. “You aren’t well enough to leave.”

Nightingale gasped out a sob and fell back against the bed, looking hopeless and more abandoned than anyone I’d ever seen. “No,” he moaned, and turned his head away, as though he couldn’t bear to look at me. His grip on my sleeve loosened.

“I’ll be right with you the whole time,” I said quickly, even though I knew it was a lie. “Nothing bad’s going to happen, I promise. You’ll be okay.” I took his hand and squeezed it, trying to reassure him.

Nightingale closed his eyes and a shudder ran through him, though what had caused it was anyone’s guess. “Pl—please,” he gasped weakly, and then ran out of breath.

The door behind me banged open and three nurses rushed in. The first one wasted no time slapping an oxygen mask over Nightingale’s face, and the second shoved me out of the way.

I reluctantly let go of Nightingale’s hand and stood back as my governor was enveloped in a blur of scrubs.

I sat down heavily in the visitor’s chair, and only left when the third nurse made a motion at me that I assumed meant I ought to make myself scarce if I knew what was good for me.

I walked down the hallway until I found a bench, and sat down on it heavily. I looked down at my hands, and though Nightingale’s blood wasn’t literally on them this time, I couldn’t shake the betrayed look in his eyes when he’d clung to me and I’d refused to do as he asked.

A few minutes later there was a screech of wheels, and I looked up just in time to see the nurses hurtling down the hallway towards me, Nightingale on the bed between them. They must have given him a sedative, because he didn’t stir when I jumped to my feet as they flashed past.

I just stood there for a moment, heart in my throat, and then walked slowly back to Nightingale’s room. I put the books back in my bag and that was when I thought to phone Walid.

My hands were trembling, but I managed to get the right number on the first try.

“Peter? What’s happened?” Walid asked as soon as he picked up.

It took me a couple of seconds to find my voice, and I could almost heard Walid’s spirits crashing like the Hindenburg on the other end of the line. “He—he woke up,” I said at last, and my voice was more of a croak than I would have liked.

“What happened?” Walid demanded again.

I swallowed and related the sequence of events, including Nightingale’s failure to recognise me, and felt my shoulders start shaking halfway through. “And then they just—they took him away,” I finished, with a sudden sinking feeling that nurses didn’t usually race patients down hallways in their beds unless something had gone seriously wrong. “I don’t—I don’t know where—” My voice failed me.

“I’ll be there in ten,” Walid said, voice tight, and from the background noise behind him, I guessed he was already on his way. “Just...sit tight, Peter.”

I nodded, remembered I was on the phone, and forced out something affirmative.

Walid told me to stay where I was, and that he’d find me as soon as he knew anything.

He hung up, and the room felt suddenly very quiet. The soft, regular beeping of the heart monitor had ceased, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine Nightingale stretched out as still and cold as ice in front of me, resting on one of Walid’s gleaming silver tables.

I sank into the chair, tipped my head back onto the hard cushion, and tried to calm myself down. It didn’t work very well, but I was a little more composed when there was a light tap on the door and Walid walked in.

He looked exhausted and worried, and I lurched to my feet as he entered. For a moment Walid just looked at me, and I thought for certain his next words would be that Nightingale hadn’t made it.

But then he just exhaled shakily and said, “They took him into emergency surgery again. They think something might have ruptured.”

I blanched and sat down heavily. I didn’t bother asking if Walid thought he was going to be all right; I knew there was no way of telling.

There was a second, foldable chair leaning against the wall in the corner of the room, which Walid retrieved and then sank onto. For a long moment we just sat there, both of us processing.

“You said he didn’t recognise you at all?” Walid asked at last, voice sounding a little hoarse.

I sniffed and forced myself to nod. “He didn’t—didn’t seem to know me at all. Remembered the Folly, but then he just —just wanted me to get him out of hospital.” If my voice broke, it was only a little.

Walid nodded, and when I glanced at him, his mouth was a thin line. For a moment he looked like he was about to tell me something, lips parted, but then he shook himself a little and remained silent.

I expected him to quiz me further, but no other questions were forthcoming, and I wasn’t about to talk about it if I didn’t have to.

We sat there in an uncomfortable, miserable silence for a while longer, which was finally broken when my mobile buzzed in my pocket.

I jumped a little and reached for it automatically, wanting nothing more than to turn the thing off, but hesitated when I saw it was, of all people, Sergeant Stephanopoulos.

Walid looked at me askance, and I accepted the call and put the mobile to my ear. “Sir?” I said, trying to keep my voice as level and professional as possible.

“Grant,” she said without preamble. “I need you at the museum, now.”

“What is it?” I asked, already standing up. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful or not for the distraction from Nightingale.

There was a slight pause from the other end of the line, and then Stephanopoulos said, grimly, “There’s been another one.”

Chapter Text

Her name was Alex Hagan, and she looked like she’d walked off the set of an expensive American TV show.

My first impression was that it was the type of TV show with powerful women running politics, but as I got closer, I thought it was maybe the type where zombies flood the country and kill most of the population.

Her clothes were perfect. She was wearing a fashionable, impeccably-fitted dress that came to her knees. It was the type of paradoxically modest dress that didn’t show too much skin while simultaneously making it perfectly clear that this woman had a body that would make supermodels envious. It was a colour that I might have called orange, or off-pink, and which a certain type of person would have probably described as coral. She was wearing matching three-inch heels studded with what was probably crystal, and there was a white purse lying on the floor beside her.

For all her spotless, and no doubt incredibly expensive, clothes, my eyes were drawn immediately to her face. Her head was turned to the side, a ring-studded hand curled against the floor in front of it. But that wasn’t what had sent my mind back to television commercials for The Walking Dead .

Where the curve of her cheek should have been full and flush, the skin sagged inwards, as though it had been stretched too tight and then relaxed. She was very pale, and her skin was almost grey in places, wrinkled, and slightly waxy. She looked sunken and gaunt, like all the moisture had been sucked out of her. Her bare arms and legs weren’t much better, little more than discoloured skin pulled tight over her bones, any fat or muscle stripped away.

I edged a little closer, and Stephanopoulos glanced at me. “Do you have any leads on what’s causing this?” she asked, and though her tone was strictly professional, I knew it must be frustrating when the usual means of investigation failed so spectacularly.

“A couple,” I said evasively. “Nothing very concrete, though.” I squatted down next to the corpse and tried not to look at the sunken way her eyes stuck out of their sockets.

Walid, who’d decided to come with after a long debating process, knelt next to me and felt her wrist with a gloved hand.

I leaned forward and felt for vestigia . I was rewarded with that chalky smell of lime again, and the sound of two pieces of leather being rubbed together, and a chill of fear that raced up my spine.

I shook off the sensation and sat back, glancing at Walid. “It’s the same,” I said.

“Do you have any idea how she died?” Stephanopoulos asked from above us. “According to Mr Briggs and her assistant, she was arguing with Briggs and then just...collapsed. She was fine one moment and then... this the next.”

Walid was looking baffled as he inspected the corpse, and motioned for me to shuffle over. I stood up and stepped back, and he eased open her jaw.

“CCTV footage?” I asked.

Stephanopoulos shook her head. “Cuts out right before she collapses.”

On the floor, Walid looked up at us. “It looks like…” He frowned and stood up slowly. He turned to Stephanopoulos. “It looks like she starved to death.”

My mouth twisted in distaste, but Stephanopoulos looked incredulous. “In under thirty seconds?”

Walid shrugged helplessly. “I’m just saying that’s what it looks like. She’s got all the symptoms. Intense dehydration, as well. I can carry out a more thorough examination once I get her back to UCH, but that’s certainly what it looks like.”

Stephanopoulos frowned and turned to me. “You’d better start getting some concrete leads, soon, Constable,” she said. “I don’t want anyone else dying on this case.”

I nodded, though I had no idea how I was going to do that. Luckily, one of the other constables came up and wanted a word with Stephanopoulos, so I took the opportunity to make a tactical retreat. I saw Briggs loitering near the wall, and headed for him.

I stripped off my noddy suit as I left the crime scene, which was in an adjacent room to the newly constructed exhibition area when Jenkins and Nightingale had been attacked.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Briggs said once I’d reached him, without preamble. “I really —one moment we were just talking, and the next—” He gestured helplessly in the direction of where Alex Hagan lay motionless on the floor.

“I heard it was more of an argument,” I said, pulling out my notepad and pen.

Briggs looked strained. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that,” he said, a tad nervously. “It’s all on the CCTV footage, if you want it word for word. But the gist of it is that Mrs Hagan was upset that the new exhibit wasn’t ready for her pieces yet.” He cast me a slightly anxious glance. “Not that I blame you chaps at all—I understand proper investigatory work takes time. But between that and the fact that I’ve had to double-check my entire security system, and find new cameras to cover the ones that were affected—and I’ll have to do it all again, I suppose—and with the board of directors breathing down my neck—it was all just taking a little longer than normal, and Mrs Hagan is a woman who likes to be on schedule.” Briggs swallowed. “Liked.”

I finished my scribbling and went back to something I wanted clarification on. “You said the exhibit wasn’t ready for her pieces?” I queried.

“Yes. Mrs Hagan is—was—one of the benefactors of this museum. She had a number of valuable pieces going on loan for the new exhibit.”

I made a mental note to figure out where Hagan’s wealth came from. “Have you had trouble with her before?”

Briggs smiled briefly, and then it faded. “Mrs Hagan has always been, shall we say, a bit of a difficult person? She’s quite used to things being her own way.”

I took notes. “And you didn’t notice anything...magical involved?” I asked.

Briggs swallowed and shook his head. “There was a sudden flare of vestigia —fear, mortar, brick dust, the same as with Jenkins. And then...she just turned into that .”

“Did you try to stop it?”

Briggs gave me a slightly incredulous look. “It had no form,” he protested. “And I’m not a true practitioner. Glamours are about the extent of my abilities. But...do try your best to figure out what’s behind this.” Briggs looked genuinely upset. “I do not like people getting hurt in my house.”

I nodded. “We’re working on it.”

“How’s Inspector Nightingale?” Briggs asked hopefully, looking like he was fishing for good news.

“In surgery,” I told him plainly.

Briggs must have noticed my curt tone, because he only nodded and hesitantly patted my elbow. “I’m sorry, dear boy.”

I told him he should restrict access to this area of the museum in case whatever it was struck again, and he agreed. I left him looking worried, and as I walked away, I saw two constables escorting a young man in a sharp blue suit away from one of the STAFF ONLY doors.

I redirected my feet to intercept them, and noticed that one of the constables was Claire. I caught her eye and motioned that I wanted to talk to her. She turned back to her partner, said something, and then headed over to meet me. Behind her, the other constable and the man in the blue suit ground to a halt.

“How’s the inspector?” Claire asked once she reached me, and, since I really didn’t know and being reminded of it wasn’t helping me concentrate, I did my best not to snap at her.

“Not great,” I said. “That man—is he the assistant?” I remembered Stephanopoulos saying Briggs and Hagan’s assistant had both been with her when she died.

Claire nodded, and from the worried look she gave me, I assumed she didn’t think it was a great sign I was avoiding talking about Nightingale. “Yes. Matthew Bishop. We’ve taken his statement.”

“Can I have a few minutes with him?” I asked.

Claire frowned at me, and then must have remembered that it was technically Nightingale’s case and not Stephanopoulos’, because she nodded and we walked back over to Matthew and the other constable.

“Constable Grant has a few more questions for you,” Claire told the assistant, and he nodded, a little shakily. She motioned at the other constable that he could go, and he headed back towards the crime scene.

I took out my notepad again and flipped to a new page. In addition to keeping my notes nice and orderly, this also has the effect of making a suspect think you already know most everything about the case, because I was pretty far through that notepad.

I didn’t bother asking him the basics, like how long he’d worked for Hagan or where he was from, because I knew Claire would have already asked and would put his responses up on HOLMES, where I could pursue them later at my leisure. “Tell me about your trip to the museum this morning,” I told him. I was thinking that if I could trace the recent activities of Hagan, Jenkins, and Nightingale, there might be a common thread.

Matthew took a moment to piece together his answer. I noticed that he was about my age, though a little shorter, and he had the sort of full, dark, soft-looking hair I knew my mother had wished for me. He was plenty handsome, though right now he just looked overwrought and miserable, not least of all because he was probably out of a job. His suit fit him perfectly, and he was wearing a dark silk tie I imagined cost more than my entire constable’s uniform.

“We had breakfast at the hotel,” Matthew began, in a New York accent that made him sound a little like a gangster from an Al Pacino film; I would later learn that the hotel in question was the Ritz, “and then Mrs Hagan wanted to do a bit of light shopping.” That, of course, I’d also learn later, had been at Harrods. “After that, she wanted to pay Mr Briggs a visit, since we’d heard that the new exhibit had been delayed.”

“Did anything unusual happen at breakfast?” I asked, thinking about Walid’s preliminary conclusion that Hagan had starved to death.

Matthew looked a bit surprised by the question. “Not really. Though there were two men being very loud at the next table, talking about dolphins and apples. It was quite rude, and Mrs Hagan didn’t appreciate it one bit.”

I wasn’t sure if that was relevant at all, but I made note of it anyway. “Did she eat her breakfast? Comment on its taste?”

Matthew blinked at me. “Do you think she was poisoned?”

“We’re examining all avenues,” I told him.

He swallowed and nodded nervously. “She had smoked salmon. It came with eggs. I can get you the receipt if you need it…?” I shook my head, and he continued, “She didn’t like the chives, but she’s never liked chives.”

I nodded and wrote this down as though I thought it was incredibly important. The more things you write down, the more members of the public think you’re being thorough, and assume that you’re trying to solve the case by using the tiniest clues, à la Sherlock Holmes. I’ve noticed that the more like Sherlock Holmes you act, the more members of the public seem to trust you to solve the case. And you have to wear a stupid hat either way, so you might as well.

“Has she ever...had any food-related issues in the past?” I asked, trying to come up with a roundabout way of asking him why he thought his boss had starved to death. I was expecting something completely useless, like a list of times she’d had food poisoning, but, surprisingly, Matthew seemed to catch onto what I wanted to know right away.

“She had anorexia years ago,” he said. “When I was first working for her. She was under a lot of pressure to maintain her figure. She went to therapy twice a week. But that was all worked out years ago.”

I schooled my face into an expression of polite interest as I wrote this down as legibly as I could. Lesley would have been proud of me.

I found a few other questions to ask, so it didn’t sound like I’d learned what I wanted, thanked him, and allowed Claire to usher him outside.

Feeling that I might finally have a connection I could work with, I walked back towards the crime scene. I saw Walid facing away from me, still in his noddy suit and talking on the phone, and made a beeline for him.

He heard me coming and turned, and I felt my pace slow as I saw the look of relief on his face.

Walid thanked whoever was on the other end and hung up. “That was Charles,” he told me as I approached, and let out a breath. “They managed to get the rupture patched up.” He raised a hand to his forehead, looking suddenly very tired, and I was reminded forcibly of his age. “Thomas pulled through for us again, thank goodness. They’re going to keep him overnight in ICU.”

I let out a breath of my own. “What about—” I hesitated. “Do you think he’ll get his memory back?”

Walid’s face twisted. “It’s hard to say. It’s possible the amnesia was just a short-term effect, perhaps caused by the sedation, or general confusion, and he’ll recover the rest of it without any trouble.” He paused, the silence heavy. “Or it’s possible the hypoxia played with his mind more than the MRI showed.”

I swallowed, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it. “I might have found out why Hagan died of starvation,” I changed the subject.

Walid looked up in surprise. “Really? Why?”

“According to her assistant,” I said, “she had anorexia a couple of years ago.”

Walid considered. “It is a strange coincidence,” he admitted. “She practically starves herself, and then dies of starvation?”

I nodded. “So maybe there’s a link between some past medical condition and how the victims were affected this time,” I said. “I’m going to try to get Jenkins’s medical records. Could you…?”

Walid understood what I was saying and nodded, looking troubled. “I’ll go back through Thomas’s, though I don’t remember him having had any heart troubles in the past.”

“Well, maybe something will jump out at you,” I suggested, knowing full well how rarely that actually happened.

Walid grunted agreement. “I’m going to take Mrs Hagan back to UCH, and then go and try to get some better details from Charles at St Thomas’.”

I nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”

“You should get some rest,” Walid countered. I looked up at him sharply, but he raised a placating hand. “I can keep an eye on Thomas,” he said. “They’ll have him under sedation again, so there’s no reason for both of us to be there. Besides, you should keep working on the case.”

I frowned at him. “And you should be giving Hagan an autopsy,” I pointed out. “And I can work at the case while I’m at the hospital.”

Walid scowled at me. “As a doctor, Peter, I’m telling you you need to go home, eat something, and go to sleep.”

“Then you should too,” I said. I felt exhausted and I knew Walid was right, but he looked just as tired as I felt, and I didn’t want to be the only one sent home.

We argued a little more, and then Walid finally gave in and said he’d catch some sleep at the hospital. I was still not satisfied with this, and dragged a promise out of him to come back to the Folly when he was done at UCH so he could eat something that wasn’t takeout. Walid still insisted on checking in on Nightingale after he’d dropped Hagan off, but I like to think the idea of a warm dinner was starting to win him over.

Once we had that settled—after a conversation long enough that I felt certain some of the other constables thought we’d single-handedly solved the case—I went off to find Claire, and Walid to collect Hagan.

I asked Claire very politely if she minded putting in for a court order for Hagan and Jenkins’ medical files, and I must have looked even more exhausted than I felt, because she agreed without my having to beg or barter, even a little.

I checked in with Stephanopoulos again, told her I had a lead I was following up on, and that I would keep her up-to-date. She told me to be snappy about it, so I figured I had a little bit of leeway.

I drove back to the Folly, filled Molly in on the short version of how Nightingale was doing —he’d woken up, been confused, and then taken into surgery again due to complications—told her to expect two for dinner, and set myself up on the sofa in the tech cave with my laptop. I brought HOLMES up and started paging through the information some unfortunate constable had already uploaded.

Alex Hagan, it turned out, was the wife of millionaire software developer Kyle Hagan. He’d come by his money in the last ten years, and since then had moved to California and married Alex, who’d been searching for work as a model or actress. They’d lived what had apparently passed for a fairly normal life for millionaires, and Alex had taken up collecting historical artefacts.

It sounded like she had little knowledge of their actual significance, however, which was why she had hired the promising young Matthew Bishop fresh out of the museum studies program at Cooperstown. Matthew, it seemed, did all of the buying, selling, and general management of her collection, which she enjoyed loaning out to museums and other private collectors out of what I guessed was a desire to both own priceless things and show them off.

Hagan had flown into London late last night, planning on overseeing the installation of her collection into the new exhibit area at the Imperial War Museum. Matthew had come along, naturally, because he was the only one who actually understood the collection and its needs. And thus had she met her untimely demise.

I was watching the footage from the CCTV camera, which showed an over-dramatic Hagan, a long-suffering Matthew, and a soothing Briggs, when I heard the Folly’s front door open.

I yawned, flipped the laptop closed, and went to greet Walid. He was later than he ought to have been, and I didn’t buy his excuse of being stuck in traffic one bit.

If he disliked being maneuvered into getting some rest, though, he certainly looked grateful enough when Molly deposited a large bowl of braised carrots on the table in front of him.

I had more than my fair share, but it was the first time I’d manage to stomach anything substantial, and I was starving. I filled Walid in on what I’d learned about Hagan, and he told me Nightingale seemed to be doing okay, though they were going to do another echocardiogram first thing in the morning to get a good idea of what was really going on.

Molly seemed to sense that we were both exhausted, and cleared away our plates as soon as we had finished in a subtle suggestion for us not to dawdle.

I took the hint, and shuffled off soon after I’d finished. Walid went too, and by the time I’d gained my room, I found that Molly had already left me a tray of warm tea.

As I readied for bed, my thoughts strayed unbidden to Nightingale and I wondered suddenly what would happen if he didn’t regain the rest of his memories. Would he agree to keep me on as his apprentice? Would he continue as an inspector? Would he remember Walid, or Molly, or even the Jag?

I didn’t know how far back Nightingale had forgotten, since the only thing he’d latched onto during our brief exchange was the Folly, and I was pretty sure that had been around since the stone age. But even the thought of a version of Nightingale that didn’t drive the Jag, quietly enjoy Toby’s company, or use the flat screen solely to watch rugby was too painful to contemplate, so I pushed it out of my head as best as I could.

When I finally crawled under the covers, I pressed the side of my face into the pillow and wished that, when we’d first arrived at the Imperial War Museum, I’d never left Nightingale’s side.

*          *          *

Walid was looking much better the next morning, and I knew I felt better as well. Molly watched us critically from across the table until we’d both eaten our entire serving of cheese turnovers and egg fritters. I made the usual effort to not look at Nightingale’s empty chair, and it was a little easier this time.

Walid had phoned the hospital first thing in the morning, and had been assured that Nightingale was doing well and had been moved back out of ICU again. They were in the middle of the echocardiogram, so Walid and I dawdled at the Folly to give them some time to finish.

I took my laptop and several books from the Folly with me again, intending on piecing together what I could of the case while keeping Nightingale company.

The drive to St Thomas’ was uneventful though typically slow, and when we reached Nightingale’s room I was relieved to see that he only looked a little paler than he had the last time I’d joined him. We were told he was under heavy sedation, and Walid went to have a word with the doctors while I settled into the visitor’s chair.

For a few moments I just bit my lip and studied his profile, and wondered if he thought that I and, by extension, the Folly, had abandoned him.

Then I told myself I had more pressing things to worry about, like another person potentially dropping dead at the museum, and cracked open my laptop.

I read through what HOLMES had on the case again, and was flipping through a list of Hagan’s personal effects when Walid walked in. He told me Nightingale ought to be doing well, and then left to go to UCH and see if Hagan’s corpse could tell us anything new.

I was still waiting on Claire to pull through with Jenkins’s medical files, and I knew Walid hadn’t had any time to look over Nightingale’s yet, so around noon I found myself going back to the vestigia .

Leather, brick dust, lime, and fear…

Leather was terribly common, and if whatever was leaving the traces of vestigia was anything over fifty years old, which was likely, brick dust wouldn’t help much at all. London was constantly being built and rebuilt, and there were too many instances in the Blitz alone to be able to narrow anything down.

Lime, I’d found in my readings, was extremely common in all sorts of industrial settings, but I had no idea how any of those could be connected to the museum.

So I turned my mind to fear. I hadn’t given that part of the vestigia much thought before, because I’d assumed that whatever it was that turned people into ghosts or malevolent spirits probably involved something terrible happening, and people usually got a bit frightened when terrible things happened.

My mind wandered back to Briggs, and his description of the fear as “suffocating.” From what I remembered of sensing the vestigia on Jenkins and Hagan, the fear and the lime had been the strongest components. So why would someone be afraid in a museum?

And then it all slotted into place.

It was so blindingly obvious I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen it before; I glanced guiltily at Nightingale, thinking that he certainly would have figured it out ages ago.

I switched from HOLMES on my laptop to a new browser tab, and went back to the website I’d found telling me about the history of the Bethlem Royal Infirmary—Bedlam. The building of which the Imperial War Museum had moved right into in the thirties, even keeping the original architecture. I scrolled down the webpage to one of the grisly engravings of a patient, and my eyes went straight to the leather bindings strapping the unfortunate man’s wrists to a table. Fear. Leather.

I still wasn’t sure where the brick dust or lime came in, but it was possible the hospital had added or demolished part of its architecture. Or maybe lime had been used in the disposal of the patients’ bodies, as Walid had suggested.

I found a website discussing the architectural history of the hospital and set to reading it, scanning the lines of text for something that might help me fit together the last few pieces.

Walid arrived shortly thereafter, a professional leather satchel slung over his shoulder, and I quickly filled him in on what I’d discovered.

The doctor sat down pensively in the other visitor’s chair, sliding his bag onto the floor and glancing at Nightingale as he did so. “Bedlam...it is an interesting supposition.”

I nodded. “I’m just trying to place the brick dust and the lime from the vestigia , and we may have a solid lead.”

Walid made a noise of agreement. “I couldn’t find anything else out from the autopsy,” he said. “Hagan appears to have starved to death. Nothing in her stomach or digestive tract to speak of, and severely dehydrated.”

“The case of the magically disappearing smoked salmon,” I commented.

Walid gave a small laugh. “You could call it that,” he said, sounding a little distracted. “Did you get Jenkins and Hagan’s medical records?”

I realised I’d forgotten to check in a while, and when I went to my email I found that Claire had sent me a message saying they’d been uploaded to HOLMES. I logged on and downloaded the files. It was a lot to sift through, though neither one was very long. I skimmed them.

Jenkins had lived a fairly healthy life: typical adolescent vaccines and check-ups, a broken ankle playing football, and a minor collision with a cyclist. The last month had the most records; he’d been prescribed antidepressants to cope with the pressure from his floundering master’s dissertation and his girlfriend leaving him.

Hagan’s records, on the other hand, were quite a bit longer. She’d had her own spate of adolescent troubles, growing up in a mid-size city in Kansas before her records shifted abruptly to those out of an office in California. Her anorexia looked like it had started when she was seventeen, and it was only after she was placed in therapy years later, as Matthew had said, that it ceased being noted on her records. During that span, she’d had a host of other ailments, usually the flu and, somewhat to my amusement, food poisoning. Since one of them was a record from a doctor in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I figured she’d been well-looked after. After she’d exited therapy, her health had picked up, and her periodic check-ups indicated nothing was amiss.

I handed my laptop to Walid. “If Hagan died of starvation because she used to be anorexic, then maybe Jenkins’ brain melted because he was...er...depressed?” I asked. “Did you find anything in the inspector’s records? Heart disease, or something? You know, from when he was…older?” I glanced a little guiltily at Nightingale as I said it; it seemed somehow rude to be discussing his private medical records in front of him, even if he was unconscious.

Walid seemed to be having similar thoughts, and when he opened his bag to retrieve a manila folder, he kept it firmly propped against his chest and closed. It was a very thick folder, and I doubted he padded it with extra pages like the Met did.

Walid frowned at my laptop screen and scrolled through the records with one hand on the trackpad. With the other, he rifled through Nightingale’s file, plucking out a sheet of paper and glancing between it and the screen. He did this for several long minutes, and I began to regret not having printed out Jenkins and Hagan’s records, so I could have my laptop back. I had just pulled out Lime and Limestone again, wondering absently what the poor sod who’d written it had done to deserve that kind of torture, when Walid said, very quietly, “Oh.”

I looked up at him, mind still half on what editing Lime and Limestone would have been like.

Walid looked up at me, a page from Nightingale’s folder lax in his hand. “Bedlam.”

I blinked at him. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what the vestigia was, I think.”

Walid looked down at my laptop again and then back at me. “I know what connects the victims.”

I sat up straighter, grateful to have a reason not to open Lime and Limestone .

“It’s not just that they died of a previous related affliction,” Walid said slowly, “because Jenkins didn’t have a degenerative brain disease, and Thomas has never had heart problems. What it is… ” He hesitated.

“What?” I asked.

Walid glanced at Nightingale and shifted uncomfortably. “It really is confidential,” he said. “And Thomas hasn’t given me leave to discuss it with you.”

I blinked at him again. I could appreciate that Walid was trying to follow his conscience, not to mention the law, but I felt we had bigger fish to fry. “More people could die if we don’t put a stop to this,” I pointed out. “You know he would want you to help save them if you could.”

Walid let out a nervous breath, and I knew I had him.

The doctor stood, deposited Nightingale’s file and my laptop on the chair, and motioned for me to come with him. Walid stepped out into the hallway and I followed. He pulled the door shut after me, and I realised he didn’t want to tell me in front of Nightingale, even if the inspector was heavily sedated.

Walid sighed again, glanced around as though suspicious of passersby, lowered his voice, and said, “They all have had psychiatric or psychological treatment.”

I blinked at him; that wasn’t what I’d been expecting.

“That’s your Bedlam link,” Walid told me, already sounding guilty about betraying Nightingale’s trust. “It was a psychiatric hospital. Whatever ghost or spirit has been attacking people, it’s going after those who’ve had treatment for mental disorders.”

That made perfect sense, and I pieced it together in my mind. “Hagan went to therapy for her anorexia,” I said. “And Jenkins...was on antidepressants. And Nightingale…”

Walid shifted uncertainly, and I was about to tell him that he didn’t have to give me the details if he didn’t want to, when he said, “He had PTSD. After the war. Allah knows we can’t blame him, after what he went through, but shell shock was really very poorly understood at the time, so they...they patched up his bullet wound and put him in a mental institution.” Walid looked miserable even as he said it, and I could only stare at him in shock.

“I thought I ought to tell you,” Walid continued, sounding bleak, “after —after what you said.” He shifted on his feet, and it took me a few moments to parse out what he was referring to. “If he wakes up again and thinks he’s back—if he doesn’t remember either of us—you said you’d told him he was in hospital—” Walid broke off and I didn’t need him to finish the thought.

I remembered Nightingale begging me to get him out of the hospital, and the way he had clung to my sleeve and told me he couldn’t do it again. I shivered, and when I looked at Walid, his expression was grim.

“We should—I should phone Stephanopoulos,” I said at last. “Tell her we found the connection between the victims.”

Walid nodded and went back into Nightingale’s room. I waited in the hallway for Stephanopoulos to pick up, but the phone kept ringing. I frowned, hung up, and tried phoning Claire instead.

She picked up on the second ring. “Now’s not a good time, Peter,” she said without preamble.

“But —I found out what connects the victims,” I protested, and then processed what she’d said. “Wait, what’s happening?”

There was the sound of shouting the background. “Inspector Seawoll showed up,” she told me, in a slightly muffled voice.

Distantly, I picked up Seawoll’s voice, loud and abrasive.

“What’s he saying?” I asked. “And wasn’t he taken off the case? Why’s he there?”

“He came to talk to Stephanopoulos,” Claire said in an undertone that told me she was closer to the action than she wanted to be, and trying not to attract undue attention to herself. “And by ‘talk to’ I mean ‘shout at.’” She paused and there was an especially loud bellow in the background. “He found out that Stephanopoulos has been pushing to make sure he doesn’t get off too lightly.” I gathered she was talking about Seawoll’s assault on Nightingale. “Stephanopoulos is going right back at him, though,” Claire said after a moment, and there was a hint of awe in her voice. “She’s saying...saying Seawoll ought to face charges, after —after almost murdering another officer.”

I blinked in surprise; I hadn’t thought about it that way before. On the other end of the line, I heard Seawoll swearing very loudly.

“Oh, geez,” Claire said after a long moment. “No wonder he’s all in a fit. Stephanopoulos recommended to the commissioner that he be enrolled in an anger management program.” I could almost feel Claire flinching on the other end of the line as Seawoll bellowed something else, and then I heard Stephanopoulos shouting something back about the responsibility of his office. “Sounds like he just got back from a session, and he’s none too pleased about it.” Claire paused again. “Blimey.”

Something was occurring to me, in the slow, creeping way unpleasant realisations sink in. Anger management program. “Claire, where are you?”

“In the next room over. They’re quite loud.”

“No, no, I mean, are you at the museum?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Stephanopoulos was looking over some —”

“Get Seawoll out of there, now ,” I told her, turning and pushing my way back into Nightingale’s room. I gestured wildly at Walid, who was busy tucking Nightingale’s frighteningly thick medical record back in his bag, until I had his attention. “We figured out what connects the victims, and I think Seawoll’s next.”

Chapter Text

I stayed on the phone with Claire as Walid and I sprinted out of St Thomas’. The museum was only half a mile as the crow flies, and Walid was already phoning the hospital we’d just left to get an ambulance there as soon as possible; it was better safe than sorry.

I hauled open the door of the Jag and fell into the seat, tossing the spinner onto the roof and throwing her into reverse as I pulled out of the parking spot. I spun the Jag down Royal Street and under the broad cement bridge that held the Tube tracks coming out of Waterloo Station. We bumped down some smaller roads, zigzagging cross-country until I saw the outline of the Imperial War Museum looming ahead.

From what Claire was saying as I half-listened and tried to avoid hitting anything—I really needed to take that advanced driving course—her attempt to pass my warning on to Seawoll had gone less than smashingly.

I swerved the Jag around a red double-decker and slammed to a stop in front of the museum in one of the spots reserved for taxis. I jumped out and Walid and I were through the gates and halfway up the drive when Claire said, “Oh, shi—” and the line went dead.

I sprinted the remaining distance, shoving my mobile back into my pocket and easily outstripping Walid.

I gained the doors first and tore them open. I skidded into the atrium, shoes slipping dangerously on the gleaming floor. I managed to keep my balance and sprinted past the imposing Russian tank and towards the sound of chaos.

My lungs were burning as I ducked around a display and found myself in the room adjacent to the new exhibit—the same place Hagan had met her end.

I spotted Briggs first, standing about ten metres away and looking horrified. There were three constables in various states of shock and action nearby, one of which was Claire, still holding her mobile to her ear, presumably not having realised yet that it had gone dead. I followed their gazes to the centre of the room, where Stephanopoulos was moving towards Seawoll with a surprising amount of concern on her face as the inspector dropped to his knees in front of her.

I ran forward just as Seawoll fell forward onto his hands and knees and vomited all over the polished floor. A wall of vestigia washed over me as I neared, all fear and lime and brick dust.

“Out of the way!” I shouted as I flashed past Claire and skidded to a halt next to Seawoll. I grabbed him unceremoniously by the arm and made to haul him upright. The problem was, he was so large that I could barely get a proper grip on him, and he felt like he weighed a hundred tonnes. “Help me with him,” I gasped to Stephanopoulos, and she grabbed Seawoll’s other arm without protest.

“Where are we going? What’s happening to him?” Stephanopoulos asked, tone sharp and somewhat alarmed as I started dragging the semi-conscious Seawoll in the direction of the museum atrium. Behind me, I heard one of the constables phoning 999, and Claire saying my name in surprise.

“The ambulance will be here any second,” I told Stephanopoulos quickly as we started dragging Seawoll across the floor, one of us on either side, “and if we can get him away from the new exhibit area…” I was hoping that if we could get Seawoll far enough away, and soon enough, he might not get the full effect of the magic, which, from my estimation of how long it had been since Claire’s mobile had gone dead, had started less than thirty seconds ago.

Seawoll convulsed and retched again, and groaned pathetically as Stephanopoulos and I kept dragging him forward, smearing him through his own vomit.

We gained the atrium, and Walid stumbled to a halt in front of us, panting.

I dropped Seawoll’s arm as we reached him, leaving it to Stephanopoulos to roll him over onto his side. “He’s been vomiting, but that’s all I know,” I told Walid breathlessly. “The vestigia was the same.”

Walid dropped to the floor and tilted Seawoll’s head back. The inspector was flush, though around the red blotches on his cheeks and forehead his skin was taking on a yellow hue.

“He —he grabbed here,” Stephanopoulos supplied, sounding a little winded herself as she gestured to her upper right abdomen.

Walid glanced up and then looked down at Seawoll, who groaned miserably and dribbled some more vomit from the corner of his mouth. “Wha’s —wha’re you fuckers doin’ now,” he growled, in a distinctly slurred voice that managed to sound both very cross and very pained at the same time.

“Help is on its way, Inspector,” Walid told him, taking his pulse and craning his head so that he could get a good look at his eyes, the whites of which were looking a little yellow.

“It’d better be…” Seawoll mumbled irritably.

The sound of sirens echoed outside as if on cue, and Walid fished his penlight out of his pocket and shone it in Seawoll’s eyes. “Try to breathe evenly,” the doctor advised.

Seawoll growled something but did as he was asked, though I saw his eyelids keep trying to slink shut as Walid shone the light in them.

The paramedics arrived seconds later and Seawoll was quickly transferred to a stretcher and rolled through the museum doors. Walid had a quick word with one of the paramedics and then they were gone, the sound of sirens fading as quickly as it had come. Stephanopoulos stared after them, looking a little pale herself.

She swallowed and then rounded on Walid. “What happened? Is he going to be okay?”

Walid stowed away his penlight. “From the jaundice and what you said, it’s probably liver-related,” he said. “Burst something, most likely.”

The look on Stephanopoulos’s face told me she had no idea if that was fatal or not, and Walid added a reassuring, “He ought to be fine. The hospital’s very close, and his breathing seemed okay.”

Stephanopoulos nodded, looking a little relieved.

I saw Briggs had inched into the atrium, followed by Claire, who cast me a curious glance and then made a beeline for Stephanopoulos. I left the Sergeant and Walid to take control of the situation and went to talk to Briggs.

“I’m terribly sorry about what happened,” Briggs said as soon as I was within earshot, looking distraught. “As horrible as that man was to Inspector Nightingale —”

I waved his words away. “I know. But I think I may have figured out what’s causing all of this—you said you were a doctor here, back in the day? At Bedlam?”

Briggs looked surprised. “Bethlem, actually. But yes. Do you think it’s related?”

I started away from the atrium and Briggs followed me. “The vestigia seems to indicate that it does,” I said. “And all of the victims—Seawoll included—had treatment for a psychological problem at some point. I’m wondering if it’s possible that what’s been attacking people is the ghost of one of the patients? Or one of the staff?”

Briggs looked surprised, and then speculative.

“The one thing I can’t place,” I said as I walked past the pile of vomit and handful of constables still standing near the Hagan crime scene, “is the brick dust and the lime. But one of the things lime is used for is mortar.” I pushed through the builder’s sheet and into the new exhibition area, where the Tiger tank and AS.10 Oxford were still the only true museum pieces. I turned to Briggs. “And this part of the hospital was added in 1816.”

“Yes, it—” Briggs stopped.

“And it hasn’t been renovated since the museum moved in,” I said. “Until now.”

Briggs looked at me.

“The fear and the leather are consistent with the hospital in general,” I continued, walking over to one of the walls and tapping on it gently, “but the brick dust and lime stood out to me. Why would the vestigia of a former patient or doctor hold brick dust and the smell of fresh mortar to the same degree of importance as it did the leather bindings and fear that it lived with day-to-day?”

“I don’t—” Briggs stopped again. “Oh.” He blanched, and then his eyes met mine. I was prepared to wheedle the information out of him, but the curator didn’t keep me waiting. “I know who it is.”

Briggs recounted to me the story of one Richard Pendleton, a young man from a well-to-do family who had fallen into a fit of depression after his betrothed had died in a riding accident. He had been admitted to the hospital, but none of the treatments had had any positive effect, and some of the doctors and nurses had taken a particular dislike to him, being upper-class and not particularly subtle about it. Briggs had worked in a different area of the hospital at the time, and hadn’t heard much about it until, one day, Pendleton was nowhere to be found. There was an investigation into the disappearance, but, once it had been determined he hadn’t escaped, the matter was brushed neatly under the rug and forgotten about.

“I always thought it was strange…” Briggs said, looking very pale as he cast his eyes around the room. “But none of the other doctors seemed concerned, and it wasn’t my area of oversight anyway. But this room...I remember it was being built at the time. Masons everywhere, putting the new walls in…” His voice trailed off and he swallowed.

“Did you disturb any of the walls while getting the new exhibit area ready?” I asked.

Briggs looked at me and nodded gravely. He pointed with a hand that trembled a little to the base of the wall that was shared with the room where Hagan and Seawoll had been attacked. “We didn’t want to alter the walls too much, since we didn’t want to compromise the integrity of the building, but when they put in the new lighting, they had to wire it into the rest of the system...they bored a hole right there, near the floor.”

We walked over, and I saw a square silver panel placed over a section of the wall, right next to the floor, as Briggs had said. A bundle of cords emerged from a circular hole cut in the panel and skirted the baseboard, running along the wall and to the corner of the room. I tugged on the wires experimentally and then tried to pry the silver panel forward. It wasn’t attached with screws, and a little light tugging I convinced it to come free.

I pulled it away and a wave of vestigia rushed over me, the smell of lime and leather and fear. I glanced at Briggs; he’d noticed it too.

I looked at the dark hole, which was about six inches in diameter and bored straight through the wall. I shifted the bundle of wires to the side and slowly slid my hand into the recess. It felt dusty and dry, but as I prodded around, I noticed that the wall was hollow, and thicker than it looked. I got down closer to the floor and stuck my arm in up to the elbow; I saw Briggs looking at me with trepidation. I gave him a tight smile.

My fingers quested over the interior of the wall, brushing over what I prayed was just dirt, dust, and crumbled bits of brick and mortar. Then I felt something thin and fibrous and, though it disintegrated under my fingertips, I had a sinking feeling it had once been cloth.

I grimaced and reached in further, trying to picture I was merely searching for lost pencils under my desk. My fingers found something solid and slightly rough, and when I tugged on it, it flexed and came free with a snap. I retracted my arm, sat up, and opened my fist.

Lying on my dust-covered hand was something white and smooth that was unmistakably part of a human bone. I looked up at Briggs.

“I think we found Mr Pendleton,” I said.

*          *          *

My first thought was that we ought to remove the bones and go about salting and throwing them into the sea like Nightingale always said was the best way to get rid of ghosts.

My second was that I wasn’t sure how the ghost of Richard Pendleton would feel about that.

A few more questions aimed at Briggs informed me that the wiring had been one of the last things put in, and that the hole had been bored the night before Andrew Jenkins had walked into the museum for what would be his last time. I decided this must have “awoken” Pendleton’s sleeping ghost, and, for some reason, it had decided to go on a killing spree. Given that that was what had happened when a hole had been bored into the nearby wall, I wasn’t too keen on what might happen if we tried to tear open the rest of the wall to exhume the body.

Besides, though I distantly recalled Nightingale telling me about the proper way to salt and dispose of the bones of ghosts, I hadn’t actually done it yet, and wasn’t confident in my ability to do it unsupervised without error. I also really did not want a pissed off ghost following me all the way to the coast.

So when Stephanopoulos walked over and asked us what we’d discovered, I told her I’d located the source of all the trouble, and needed a piece of chalk, five non-electric lights of some kind, and five battery-powered electronics.

Suffice it to say she thought I had gone a bit barmy, but the fragment of bone and Briggs’s white complexion must have done something for her, because twenty minutes later, between her and Briggs, I had a stumpy bit of chalk, five improvised candles made out of ceramic bowls and bits of flaming newspaper, two battery-powered laser pointers, two wall clocks, and an electric pencil sharpener.

As I drew out a circle and pentagram on the cement floor of the new exhibit room, I asked Stephanopoulos to clear everyone from the museum. She left, presumably to do as I asked, but when she returned, Walid was following her.

“You really ought to get clear,” I told the two of them. I wasn’t completely sure how this would go and, though Henry Pyke’s ghost had been reasonable enough, I didn’t want to stake anyone’s life on this going well besides my own.

“I am the ranking officer here,” Stephanopoulos reminded me in a voice that brooked no argument.

“And I’m not leaving until we get this all sorted out,” Walid added.

Stephanopoulos looked pointedly at Briggs, who had yet to evacuate, but he just shook his head. “I’m perfectly all right here, Sergeant, and it is my museum, after all.”

She frowned at him, but then the glamour seemed to take effect and she simply nodded.

“You should stay back,” I told them, and when only Walid shuffled back half a pace, I added, “Really. And whatever you do, don’t step in the circle. And I mean, don’t step in the circle.”

That seemed to persuade Briggs at least, and he moved around to stand next to Walid. Stephanopoulos reluctantly took a step back and crossed her arms.

“And take the batteries out of your mobiles,” I said. “If you ever want them to work again.” I popped the battery out of my own to show them I was serious.

I double-checked my arrangement of the items around the circle’s perimeter and took up a spot as near to the pentagram as I dared. I took a steadying breath, held out my palm, and conjured a werelight. There was an appreciative noise from somewhere behind me, but I wasn’t sure which one of my three audience members had made it. I floated the werelight gently into the centre of the pentagram and held it there.

“Richard Pendleton,” I said, remembering the words from when I’d summoned what I’d thought was the ghost of Nicholas Wallpenny, back in Covent Garden. “Hear my voice, accept my gifts, rise, and converse.”

There was no theatrical flicker, no swirl of wind or dramatic rustle of tree branches. There was just a gaunt man standing in the centre of the circle.

Behind me, I heard Stephanopoulos mutter something that might have been a prayer.

Richard Pendleton looked spent. He was wearing a shapeless tan shirt and loose trousers, and a faded blue jacket that was several sizes too large hung off his lanky frame. His hair was long and uneven, and he had a general air of being unwashed. He looked at me, and I fancy he was quite surprised.

“Richard Pendleton?” I asked.

The ghost blinked at me, and then his mouth opened. “Y —yes?”

“I’m PC Peter Grant,” I told him, and gestured behind me. “And these are some friends of mine. We’ve noticed you’ve been...affecting the living recently.” I didn’t want to beat around the bush, but I also saw no point in accusing him of murder flat out.

Pendleton cocked his head, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore. “Dr—Dr Briggs? Is that you?”

I turned slowly and watched as Briggs hesitated for a moment and then walked over. He didn’t look afraid, but he made sure to come to a stop next to me, sufficiently far from the edge of the pentagram.

Briggs gave Pendleton a sad smile. “Hello, Richard. It’s me.”

Pendleton just stared at him.

“I’m sorry you were murdered,” Briggs said, rather plainly, and I could hear the honesty in his voice. “You know how Monro was—and then the Parliamentary Inquiry started—I tried to make a fuss, but it all got lost in the shuffle.”

Pendleton took this in and nodded. “I...understand,” he said. A muscle in his jaw twitched. “It was not your fault.”

Briggs gave him a sad smile and then glanced at me. “Richard, we’re here about the attacks,” he said.

Pendleton didn’t seem to understand, so I clarified, “You’ve been attacking people. Andrew Jenkins, Inspector Nightingale, Alex Hagan—”

Pendleton turned to look at me and his expression was chilling. “Do you mean the patients?” he asked. “There was the young man whose mind was disturbed. And the man whose anger consumed him.” The ghost tilted his head, and his voice grew even colder. “I did not like him at all.”

“Why were you attacking them?” I asked, trying not to feel too satisfied about the fact that Seawoll apparently didn’t make much of an impression on anyone, even the dead. “Two of them have died.”

When Pendleton looked at me, his gaze was so predatory that I swear my heart skipped a beat. “I had hoped to kill them all,” he said in a calm, detached voice. “If you bring the other two back, I will try again.”

“No,” I said, louder than I probably should have, and I heard Stephanopoulos and Walid shift behind me. I brought my voice back to a more conservative volume. “They were good people. They didn’t deserve to die.”

“I showed them mercy,” Pendleton said, and there was a hint of anger in his voice now. “I did not murder them; I saved them.”

I heard Briggs shift uneasily beside me. “Saved them from what?” I asked.

Pendleton bared his teeth, and I saw they were yellowed and rotten. “From the doctors.”

“Those you attacked had previously been treated for psychological illnesses,” I confirmed in as even of a voice as I could manage, “but they weren’t in any danger from their doctors.”

The look Pendleton gave me was scorching. “And I suppose you know that with certainty, do you?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “I came into this hospital distraught, mind wracked with grief, and I left it starved, beaten, and buried in a wall.” He took a sharp breath. “You cannot tell me that I was not in danger at Bethlem.”

“Do you know what year it is?” I asked, changing tack.

Pendleton frowned at me, and for a moment his anger seemed to have dissipated. “The year? 1855, is it not?”

I gave him a small smile. “Closer to 2011, I’m afraid.”

Pendleton smirked at me, and then seemed to realise I wasn’t joking.

“He’s telling the truth,” Briggs said. “I’m afraid I’m not a good example, but things really have been moving along.”

I would have taken my mobile out and shown him, but I was still maintaining the werelight in the centre of the pentagram, and I knew anything electronic was out of the question.

“A lot’s happened in the last hundred and fifty years,” Briggs said. He gestured at the Tiger tank and the AS.10. “A bit more advanced than our day, yes? And museum pieces at that.”

Pendleton looked uncertain, but accepted Briggs’s words.

“And medicine has come a lot in that time,” I picked up. “Psychiatric and psychological treatments have changed dramatically.” I gestured over my shoulder for Walid to come back me up. “Hospitals are places where people go to be healed, not to die, and most illnesses are treatable. Do you remember Alex Hagan —the woman you—er—starved to death?”

Pendleton tilted his head. “I took her disease and used it to spare her further harm,” he said, but the surety in his tone wasn’t as strong.

“She’d been cured,” Walid said as he arrived on my other side. I heard Stephanopoulos follow him, presumably because she didn’t want to be the last one standing a safe distance from the circle. “Years ago. She was living a normal, happy life. I’m not saying our methods are perfect, but they’re a hell of a lot better than anything they had in your day. I’m sorry about what happened to you, but things don’t work that way anymore. We’ve got better, and the law is incredibly strict about this sort of thing, to make sure nothing like what happened to you ever happens again.”

Pendleton was looking uncertain, and I thought we might have had him, but then he turned back to me. “You say these people were helped by their doctors,” he said, “but the man tortured by his memories was not helped by his.”

It took me a few seconds to realise he was talking about Nightingale.

“I saw what they did to him,” Pendleton said. “It was all there, in his head. They gave him injections, and when he was haunted by visions of his dead comrades, they said he was suffering morbid delusions. They told him he was a coward who had failed to serve his country, and bound him when he tried to take his own life. And they used pain — such pain as you cannot begin to imagine — to try to cure him of his degenerate desires. Yet you would stand there and tell me it was not kinder for me to grant him that release which he already so desperately sought?”

I was staring at Pendleton, who was looking satisfied at my stupefaction. Nightingale had —had— what?

“Thomas is...unusual,” Walid said, coming to my rescue. I was still turning over ‘degenerate desires’ in my head, and I had a tight, sinking feeling that I knew exactly what Pendleton meant by that. “He’s similar to Briggs, in a way; he’s not from this time. His experiences are from seventy years ago.”

I knew I would have been suspicious if two out of the four people claiming to be from the future conveniently turned out to be impossibly old for unspecified reasons, but Pendleton accepted it with an air that made me wonder if he just assumed we’d invented time travel sometime in the ’70s.

“Death is rarely the kinder option anymore,” Walid continued. “You’re killing innocent, healthy people.”

Pendleton frowned.

“He’s right,” Briggs said. “Will you stop?”

For a long time Pendleton just looked at Briggs, and I could see him deflating a little, like a child who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“We can give you a Christian burial,” I added, trying to shake Pendleton’s words about Nightingale from my mind. “Put you properly to rest.”

Pendleton’s head swung around to look at me, and then back at Briggs. He thought for a moment more, and then nodded. “If I am truly doing more harm than good...I trust you, doctor.” He addressed this last to Briggs, who dipped his head gratefully.

“Just hold onto this light,” I said, and conjured a second werelight. Maintaining two was difficult, but I needed the first one to hold the portal open. “And be at peace.”

I wasn’t quite as confident in how this part worked, but Pendleton reached out for my werelight, and when he closed his eyes his shoulders slumped.

“I am sorry I have caused further trouble,” Pendleton said, “but please know I was only trying to spare them further pain.”

And then he vanished.

Remembering what had happened the last time I’d used a pentagram to summon a spirit, I immediately shut down the werelights and took a large step back. Luckily, nothing reached out and tried to drag me in this time, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I turned back to Briggs, Walid, and Stephanopoulos, who were looking mournful, relieved, and stunned, respectively.

I gave them a tight smile and pushed the troubling thoughts of Nightingale from my mind as best I could. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I said, and rubbed my hands together. “I suppose we ought to be getting on with it now.”

That afternoon, with Briggs’s help, we opened up the wall to reveal the remains of Richard Pendleton. From Walid’s cursory examination, it appeared that the likely cause of death was a crack in his skull. The best we could guess, someone at the hospital had thrown Pendleton around a little too hard, panicked when he failed to revive, and, in a hurry to dispose of the body, dumped him in the freshly built wall of the new expansion. Whoever it was likely knew one of the masons, or else had bribed them to turn a blind eye. In any case, his body had been drenched in mortar, and the lime component of the material—whether by design or accident—had kept his corpse from smelling too much and alerting anyone to its presence. And then the expansion had been finished, and Pendleton sealed from the world.

Stephanopoulos assigned some of the less fortunate constables the task of completing the correct paperwork, and Walid assured me he’d make sure Pendleton got a proper burial at last.

The official story, which I’d learn later, was that a series of completely natural events had just happened to occur within days of each other in an incredible but largely uninteresting coincidence. Jenkins, so recently under a great deal of social pressure, died from a sudden brain haemorrhage. After a disagreement with a fellow officer, Nightingale suffered a heart attack, not at all unusual for someone of his position or (assumed) age. Hagan had picked up a very rare strain of virus on her recent trip to the Bahamas, and if anyone thought this still didn’t explain her abrupt death, Walid had a series of very long, very dense medical reports available to convince nosy reporters otherwise. And with all of these recent incidents on his conscience, it was therefore only natural that Seawoll too would crack under the mounting pressure, resulting in a long-overdue rupture of his liver.

Once it was clear that everything was going to wrap up nicely, Briggs came over to see Walid and myself off; we were going back to the hospital to check on Nightingale, and Walid admitted he ought to see how Seawoll was doing as well.

“I can’t thank you enough,” Briggs said, the honesty ringing in his voice. “This place was a dreadful hospital, and I was hoping it would be a better museum. Remembering history is the only way to prevent it from repeating itself, after all.”

“Happy to help,” I told him, and shook his hand.

“And I am terribly sorry about what happened to the inspector,” Briggs continued. “Will you keep me updated? He would be so sorely missed.”

I told him that I would, and reflected that Nightingale might be surprised to hear that.

I drove Walid and myself back to St Thomas’, and on the way plucked up my courage to ask him if what Pendleton had said about Nightingale was true.

Walid sighed, and he suddenly looked very tired. “You have to understand that hospitals weren’t the same then as they are now.”

“I know,” I said. “I was just —” I recalled Pendleton’s words with more than a little trepidation. “Did he really go through...all of that?”

Walid looked uncomfortable, and I remembered the thick manila folder and Walid’s reluctance to break doctor-patient confidentiality even to prevent further loss of life. Finally, he said, “I’m afraid Thomas has been through more than ten men’s fair share of trouble,” which I took to mean yes.

We spent the rest of the trip in silence, and when I pulled into the car park at St Thomas’ I found myself hoping ardently that most of the papers in Nightingale’s medical file were copies of a hundred years’ worth of annual check-ups.

Nightingale was looking a little pale when we arrived, but the heart monitor seemed to indicate he was no worse for wear. I found myself thinking of everything he’d gone through—the war, the mental institution, all of it—and how incredibly unlikely it was that he’d have made it long enough for me to meet him. As Walid had a word with the doctors, I reflected with some surprise that I was very grateful that he had.

Walid walked back into the room and sank into the visitor’s chair; I remained by the wall and leaned back against its hard, off-white surface.

For a long moment we just watched Nightingale in silence, and then I asked something that had been nagging at me for a while. “So if Hagan died of starvation because she used to have anorexia,” I said, “did Jenkins’ brain just...melt because he was being treated for depression?”

Walid cast me a glance and shifted in the chair, scratching absently behind an ear. “I was thinking about that myself,” he admitted. “The fact that the hemispheres of his brain divided, and how unusual that is...maybe he...fell apart at the seams?”

I huffed a laugh. “What, you think Pendleton had a sense of humour?”

Walid shrugged. “It could be a coincidence, but Seawoll’s liver failing like it did flooded his system with bile , which has traditionally been associated with anger. Very fitting, given the circumstances.”

“Have you got a clever joke for him, too?” I asked, thinking that Walid’s theory should have sounded a lot more outlandish than it did.

Walid shrugged. “Blew a gasket?”

“Hmph,” I said. Then my mind turned to the fourth of Pendleton’s victims, and any humour in the situation evaporated. “And Nightingale…” I trailed off and glanced at Walid. I had an idea about this but wanted the doctor’s opinion before I voiced mine.

Walid’s eyes shifted to Nightingale, motionless on the bed except for the slight rise and fall of his chest. “Bleeding heart?” the doctor suggested after a long moment. “He’s always—you know.”

I nodded. I’d been thinking of SCAD myself, the spontaneous coronary artery dissection Charles had explained to us. Nightingale’s coronary artery had simply split in two. I reminded Walid of this. “Or...a broken heart?”

I waited for Walid to tell me that wasn’t it, but he only cast Nightingale a worried glance. “Perhaps that as well.”

Chapter Text

It was three days after Nightingale’s second emergency surgery, and he still hadn’t woken up. They’d been pulling him off the sedative gradually, and Walid and I were taking turns keeping an eye on him again. Since the Folly was between cases and I could hardly learn more spells without Nightingale to show me the appropriate formae , I spent my time at the Folly practising the spells I did know, and that at St Thomas’ reading through some of the less-boring-looking books the mundane library had to offer.

Seawoll, not to anyone’s satisfaction but his own and maybe Stephanopoulos’s, had suffered no long-term damage. He’d gone through the first few phases of acute liver failure, but had arrived at the hospital early enough that he hadn't needed a transplant. He was recovering two floors above us; I’d made sure he wasn’t placed too close to Nightingale’s room. Apparently he was swearing up a storm and frightening the nurses, so I supposed he was going to be just fine.

Stephanopoulos had assured me that, despite Seawoll’s injury, he was still very much going to face charges for assaulting Nightingale. I’d managed to explain to her that Seawoll wasn’t to blame for the entirety of Nightingale’s injuries, since he had been targeted by Pendleton as well, but that hadn’t seemed to sway her much.

There had been no further incidents at the museum, and Briggs had informed me that the new exhibit was going in without any hitches. Even though the murders had finally hit the newsstands, it sounded like any PR was good PR, because the museum was expecting an uptick in visitors.

In fact, it seemed like everyone was doing well—everyone except for Nightingale, that was. My governor had yet to so much as stir, and it was anyone’s bet which version of him it would be that finally woke up.

It was a cloudy Monday morning, and I was reading about some sort of shadow spectre that killed people in their sleep from a magical bestiary I’d nicked from the Folly. It wasn’t exactly riveting literature, and I really couldn’t tell how much of it was complete tommyrot, but if we happened to run into one on a case, I sure would be glad I’d read it.

I had flipped the page and was reading about the spectre’s signature modus operandi when it came to ending the lives of hapless medieval peasants—it created a nightmare and basically frightened its prey to death—when I heard Nightingale say my name.

It was little more than a whispered rasp, and I’d been imagining him waking up all day, so at first I just assumed it was my mind playing tricks on me. I glanced up anyway, and was more than a little surprised to see Nightingale with his head tilted ever so slightly towards me, eyes half closed.

“P—Peter?” he said again, in that quiet, rasping voice. “Is—is that you?”

I stood up so quickly I got a little lightheaded, hastily marking my place in the bestiary and dropping it back onto my chair. “Yes, sir,” I said, coming to the side of the bed. Nightingale seemed to have trouble looking at me—I think the sedatives were making his eyelids heavy—so I tentatively reached out and touched his hand, so he knew where I was.

The corner of Nightingale’s mouth twitched upwards and, much to my surprise, he turned his hand and gave mine a little squeeze. I caught a flash of his vestigia , but the lime and brick dust had faded. He gave me a relieved little smile.

I hesitated before speaking again, painfully aware of how this conversation had gone the last time. I thought it was a great sign that he recognised me, but it wasn’t out of the question that the only memory he had of me was from the last time he’d woken up. “Do you—remember anything?” I asked tentatively.

The smile faltered and then faded from Nightingale’s face. His mouth opened, and for a long couple of seconds he just looked confused. Then he blinked, the motion slow but strangely urgent.

“Is—did I—is Inspector Seawoll all right?”

For a moment I just looked at him, and then I could have gasped in relief. I think I might have a little. This just seemed to alarm Nightingale further, so I forced out a, “He’s—he’s fine, boss. He’s upstairs; I think Stephanopoulos visits him every day.”

Nightingale wheezed in horror, and I realised suddenly what that must sound like. “No, no, it wasn’t you,” I clarified quickly. “He was fine. This was something else.”

Nightingale calmed down a little, though something chirped on the heart monitor and I cast it a nervous glance. “I didn’t—didn’t hurt him?” Nightingale asked once he’d got his breath back, sounding genuinely worried.

I smiled a little, despite myself. “Not at all. He’s being just as unpleasant as usual.”

Nightingale huffed what might have been a laugh, and then grimaced.

“Take it easy,” I told him.

“I must...apologise,” Nightingale said, and looked like he wanted to make an effort to get out of the bed, but hadn’t the strength. “Alexander—that was terribly unprofessional of me—”

I stared at him, but I was still too relieved to be too upset with him. “Inspector,” I said. “Respectfully, sir, you’re not apologising to anyone.”

Nightingale cast me a look that probably would have been more pointed had he been able to focus on me properly. “Nonsense,” he ground out.

“Seawoll’s facing charges,” I said. “He assaulted a fellow officer. Stephanopoulos has him taking anger management classes.”

Nightingale blanched, but when I glanced at the heart monitor in alarm, nothing seemed to have changed. “I certainly...shall not be pressing charges,” Nightingale rasped, and I reflected that I really shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Stephanopoulos might be going ahead with it whether you want her to or not,” I said. “She’s concerned about the image he gives the Met and the junior officers.”

One of Nightingale’s eyebrows raised half a centimetre in what I assumed was an expression of pensive approval. Or at least I hoped it was.

“But hang on, let me phone Dr Walid,” I said, remembering that I’d promised to phone him right away if there was any change. “He’d kill me if I didn’t tell him you’d woken up.”

I made the call and told Walid that Nightingale was coherent, by which I meant he remembered everything. Walid sounded relieved when I told him, so I guessed he must have received the message. I put him on speaker so he could ask Nightingale how he was doing.

“Splendid,” was all Nightingale had to say on the subject, though the hoarseness in his voice betrayed him.

Walid told him to get some rest and said he’d be over right away, though Nightingale needn’t keep himself awake that long if he was feeling tired.

Nightingale told him not to worry, and Walid hung up.

“So what...happened to...Inspector Seawoll?” Nightingale asked after I’d stowed my mobile away in my pocket. His voice still sounded raspy, but it seemed to be gaining strength the more he spoke.

“Acute liver failure,” I said. “The—there was a ghost, at the museum, and that’s what killed Andrew Jenkins,” I explained. “It went after you and Seawoll, and killed one of the museum’s benefactors, but we got it all taken care of in the end.”

That seemed to stump Nightingale for a moment. “The...ghost...attacked me?”

I shifted uncomfortably and nodded, not really wanting to remind Nightingale of the specifics of what had happened any more than I had to. “After Seawoll—er—did his piece,” I said.

Nightingale frowned. “And what—what happened to me?”

“Heart attack,” I told him, a tad nervously. “Two bruised ribs, one cracked, and one broken. Burst coronary artery.” There was more, but I couldn’t remember. “Walid can rattle off the complete list once he gets here, if you like.”

Nightingale grimaced in a way that made me think he’d rather not.

“Mr Briggs sends his regards,” I said, and then added, “the curator,” in case he was having trouble remembering.

Nightingale nodded, the movement tiny. “He was using glamours, did you notice?”

“Genius loci,” I confirmed. “He helped us on the case.”

Nightingale hummed approval. “You said you banished the ghost?”

“Summoned him, actually,” I said, and when Nightingale gave me as sharp of a glance as he could, I held up a calming hand. “He was just mistaken, that’s all.” I didn’t mention why he’d gone after Nightingale. “We talked some sense into him, and he took my werelight and moved on.”

Nightingale made a disgruntled noise and his eyelids slunk further closed, the conversation looking to have exhausted him. “You’re going to...get yourself killed doing that one day,” he said, but his tone was mild.

“You’d better save your strength,” I told him, imagining the tongue-lashing Walid would give me if he arrived to find I’d worn Nightingale out.

Nightingale seemed happy to accept my words, and his eyes slid shut. I gave his hand another squeeze and sat back down in the visitor’s chair, first moving the bestiary to a precarious position balanced on top of my bag.

“Molly’s been quite upset,” I told him. “She’ll be very happy to hear you’re doing better.”

“I’ll be...up and about...before you know it,” Nightingale rasped with his eyes still closed, and I thought I detected a hint of humour in his voice.

“I’m sure you will, sir,” I said, knowing Walid would be along soon enough to provide a far more accurate timeline that Nightingale would undoubtedly halve on principle.

I was not disappointed, and the doctor arrived minutes later in a flurry of tweed jacket and ginger beard.

“Thomas?” Walid asked, taking my place at Nightingale’s bedside.

Nightingale smiled a little and made a visible effort to wake up further. “Abdul,” he rasped. “Peter tells me I’ve had a run-in with a ghost.”

Walid gave him a tight smile. “More like the ghost ran into you. Now, what’s the last thing you remember?”

Nightingale thought. “Alexander was...upset,” he said at last. “I remember...the vestigia from the Tiger was very strong—” Nightingale broke off and, on the heart monitor, I watched his pulse speed up.

Walid noticed too, and laid a calming hand on Nightingale’s elbow. “Forget I asked,” he said. “What’s important is how you’re doing now. Are you feeling any tightness around your chest?”

Walid continued quizzing Nightingale, though when he started taking longer to reply, the doctor laid off. “You should get some rest,” he said. “Peter and I will be keeping you company in case you need anything, and I’ll see about having you moved to UCH as soon as possible.”

Nightingale gave him the ghost of a smile. “Whatever...helps you sleep at night, Abdul. Though Peter…” His head turned slightly towards me. “Ought to be practising.”

It was such a Nightingale thing to say, I felt myself grin in relief, and I knew he was really going to be okay. “I’m doing some reading now, sir,” I said, hefting the bestiary.

Nightingale made a noise that sounded halfway between a suspicious scoff and a grunt of approval.

“We’ll let you get some rest,” Walid said, and motioned for me to come out into the hall with him.

Nightingale mumbled something affirmative, and Walid ushered me out of the room. The doctor closed the door softly behind us and, after a couple of seconds with his hand still on the knob, dropped onto one of the benches lining the wall with a relieved smile. “He’ll be all right,” Walid said, though I wasn’t sure whose benefit his words were for.

I sat down next to him, feeling a little lighter myself. “I ought to head back to the Folly and tell Molly,” I said after a moment. “And take Toby for his walk.”

Walid nodded absently. “I can stay with him for a while,” he said, and I knew he was talking about Nightingale.

“You’re welcome to drop by for dinner,” I offered. “Molly will certainly make more than enough, and will probably want you to smuggle a feast’s worth into UCH for the inspector.”

Walid gave a short laugh and sat back on the bench. “I just might take you up on that,” he said. “And I think Thomas would appreciate the sentiment, as little as I’m sure he’ll be interested in eating for days.”

Then Walid gave a wet-sounding chuckle, and I looked over to see him smiling, eyes a little damp. “By Allah, he’s actually going to pull through, isn’t he?”

I couldn’t resist a little smile myself. “I think he just might.”

*          *          *

Nightingale slept through most of the next week, though with enough stretches of consciousness to tell me off for not practising and to protest Walid’s ministrations.

On one of the days Nightingale was feeling a little better, I arrived at the hospital to find a very relieved-looking Walid.

Since the last I’d heard, Nightingale had been increasing steadily, my anxiety shot through the roof. “What happened?” I asked quickly, wondering what it was I should have been worrying about.

But Walid only waved away my concern. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It—he’s fine.”

When this did not mollify me in the slightest, Walid added, a bit reluctantly, “I just—I told him about what happened.” I still didn’t understand, so Walid spelled it out for me. “Why Pendleton went after the people he did, and...er...my having to go through his medical file without his permission.”

“Oh,” I said. I knew how guilty Walid felt about having broken doctor-patient confidentiality. “How’d he take it?”

Walid took a deep breath. “Really well, actually.” He glanced at me. “He knows you know, too.”

“Ah.”

Walid patted me reassuringly on the shoulder. “I don’t think he minds too much. But I wouldn’t be spreading it around if I were you.”

I agreed readily; I certainly hadn’t planned on telling anyone else.

Walid gave me a smile and wished me luck on my shift keeping Nightingale company. A bit to my relief, the inspector didn’t bring the subject up, though I thought he brightened a little when he saw me.

Nightingale continued to improve and, after a brief stay at UCH, was discharged. They put him back into a wheelchair like they had after he’d been shot, which Nightingale accepted with a grimace and a long-suffering sigh. It had taken him months to recover from the gunshot wound, and I imagined it must be extremely frustrating to be put back at the beginning of that journey again.

A week after Nightingale had returned to the Folly, under the intense supervision of both Walid and Molly, I received a very strange phone call first thing in the morning from Stephanopoulos.

She said they’d be over in half an hour, wanting to talk to Nightingale, and then hung up before I could ask who “they” were.

So I told Nightingale that Stephanopoulos was coming over and helped him out of his bed.

I led him to the loo and pretended not to look too relieved when he said he could manage on his own. I hovered uncertainly outside the door and, a long fifteen minutes later, he emerged, hair neatly combed and morning stubble scraped away.

Usually Molly helped him dress, but I hadn’t been able to find her on my quick circuit of the Folly’s main floor, so I awkwardly took her place. Nightingale made an effort to change silently, but I could tell by his shortness of breath that it must have hurt an awful lot. I politely averted my eyes as much as possible, but I couldn't help noticing how incredibly thin he was, pale skin pulled taut over his ribs. There was a long, thin, red scar running straight down his sternum where they'd opened him up for the emergency surgeries, and every time he bent to the side or shifted his shoulders I heard his breath catch.

Once I had helped him into his suit jacket—he insisted on being as impeccably dressed as ever—and eased him into his wheelchair as gently as I could, it was almost time for Stephanopoulos to arrive. I handed Nightingale a blanket and wheeled him out of his room. He tried handing it back to me, but Molly had given me a piece of her mind the last time I’d accepted it, so I insisted on it.

Nightingale scowled, but draped it over his knees nonetheless.

We had just made the atrium when there was a sharp knock at the door.

As I reached it, I saw that Molly had appeared at one of the stairwells; I waved at her that I’d get it. She gave me an indecipherable look and moved back up the stairs.

I turned back to the door and hauled it open.

I’d been expecting Stephanopoulos; Seawoll, on the other hand, was a surprise. He looked sour and distinctly displeased, though his colour had returned and he was standing on two feet, so I guessed his recovery had gone well.

“Grant,” Stephanopoulos greeted me without inflection. “Inspector Seawoll and I would like a word with Inspector Nightingale.”

“Er...sure,” I said, uncertain what they wanted to talk about but deciding it was best not to ask.

I stood back and held the door open, and the two officers marched in. Seawoll gave me a distinctly unpleasant look as he passed me, which I did my best to ignore.

I closed the door and followed them uncertainly. I’d left Nightingale in the atrium, and when I stepped past the statue of Isaac Newton I saw that he’d wheeled himself a little closer. My governor was sitting perfectly straight and, with his spotless suit and neatly combed hair, he didn’t look at all like he’d almost died only a few weeks ago, even with the wheelchair and blanket.

“Sergeant Stephanopoulos,” Nightingale greeted her. His eyes moved to Seawoll next, but if his presence was disconcerting, Nightingale didn’t show it in the slightest. “Inspector Seawoll.”

Stephanopoulos greeted Nightingale just as politely, and Seawoll ground out something that might have been Nightingale’s name. Stephanopoulos asked after Nightingale’s health, and he said he was doing very well, thank you. He asked how things were going with the Murder Team; she said it was business as usual, and nothing requiring his department had come up.

The pleasantries were starting to seriously freak me out—no way had Stephanopoulos and Seawoll dropped by in person to make small talk.

After a couple more minutes of discussing how everyone was doing, Stephanopoulos turned to Seawoll. “The inspector has something he would like to say.”

Seawoll scowled, and I realised with a sudden surprised jolt exactly why they were here.

It looked physically painful for Seawoll—his face certainly turned red enough—but he finally ground out, in an extremely displeased tone, “I...would like to apologise for my behaviour on the Jenkins case.”

Nightingale, if it were possible, looked even more surprised by this declaration than I was.

“It was...unprofessional of me,” Seawoll added when Stephanopoulos continued looking at him. He glanced at her, his scowl deepened, and then he forced out, “It won’t happen again.”

The corner of Nightingale’s mouth twitched up into a slightly bemused smile. “That is very kind of you, Alexander,” he said, and I watched Seawoll’s face grow even redder. “Though I’m afraid the ghost and vestigia must certainly bear some of the blame.”

Seawoll gave Stephanopoulos a scathing look that clearly said he had made this point to her before, but she just looked a little cross. “That will be sorted out in court,” she said, and moved her gaze pointedly from Seawoll to the door.

The inspector narrowed his eyes at her, but turned on his heel and marched right past me and out of the Folly.

“I really am sorry about all this,” Stephanopoulos told Nightingale, in a voice a few notches kinder than her regular straightlaced tone, and then turned and followed Seawoll.

“Grant,” she said again as she passed me, and I nodded automatically.

I found myself staring at the door in wonderment as she left, marvelling that I had just seen Seawoll paraded into the Folly and made to apologise like a disobedient child. My esteem of Stephanopoulos was shooting through the roof. I knew that no one, not even Lesley, would ever believe me about this.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” I said after a long moment of silence, turning back to Nightingale.

He still looked a little surprised himself, but then his face settled into a neutral expression a little too close to dismayed for my liking. “I know,” he said. “I ought to have been the one to apologise to him.”

“What? No,” I said, maybe a little harsher than I’d intended, because Nightingale fixed me with a disapproving frown. “Er,” I tried to save myself. “You really didn’t hurt him at all; he was just fine, I saw that myself. Not a scratch on him. But even without the vestigia, he shouldn’t have—er—you know.”

Nightingale continued frowning at me. “Regardless,” he said, “a wizard needs to be in full control of himself and his powers at all times. It is inexcusable and grossly irresponsible to do anything less.”

I gaped at him. Part of me knew he spoke sense—great power, great responsibility, etc.—but I hardly thought that applied in this situation. “You can’t be serious?” I asked. “After—after almost dying —you think—what? That this was all somehow your fault?”

Nightingale took a deep, steadying breath, and I sensed he was about to try to explain something very complicated to me. “Peter,” he said delicately, “once you’re fully trained, you’ll understand better. A wizard wields an immense amount of power and cannot afford to be lax in making sure that that power is only used in the right and proper manner.”

I thought ‘right and proper’ sounded extremely subjective, and wanted to object on principle, but Nightingale wasn’t done yet.

“In my...moment of weakness, not only could I have caused Inspector Seawoll grievous harm, but I left myself open to external magical attacks. Thus, the ghost was able to overcome me and, in the time I was out of action, Alex Hagan was killed and Inspector Seawoll injured.” I didn’t remember telling Nightingale Hagan’s name, so I knew he must have looked it up himself. “Had I exercised proper restraint, Mrs Hagan would still be alive. My lack of control had serious consequences, to which I can only be grateful that you put to a stop before Mr Pendleton attacked anyone else.”

I stared at him. “You can’t—can’t possibly blame yourself for what happened to Hagan and Seawoll,” I said incredulously. “You can’t blame yourself for being unable to stop something from happening.”

Nightingale took another breath and closed his eyes. When he spoke, it was like he was repeating something he’d learned by heart. “Failure to act is as criminal as acting criminally. And as the only officially sanctioned wizard in this city, it is my duty to protect her and her people. Any magical attack that succeeds is therefore due, logically, to an oversight or error on my part.”

I felt a flash of anger. “That’s ridiculous,” I snapped, and Nightingale blinked and looked up at me sharply. “You can’t be expected to foresee every magical event in this city. There’re eight million people!”

“Eight point two,” Nightingale corrected.

I continued right on over him, not wanting to know how he knew that. “The Folly used to have loads of wizards, right? Hundreds? You can’t possibly be expected to do what hundreds once did! Like back in Soho—there was no way you could have known what was going on there.”

Nightingale’s look soured. “I have a responsibility—” he began sharply, but I kept ploughing over him.

“The Metropolitan Police Service employs forty-eight thousand people,” I said—that was one statistic I did know. “Almost fifty thousand people dedicated to stopping crime in this city, and every day someone’s stabbed in broad daylight. Granted, there’re fewer nutcases with access to magic, but not so few as to require a one-man, or even a two-man, police force. It simply can’t be done, and no one expects you to do it.” I took a deep breath, feeling marginally better.

Nightingale blinked at me. “Inspector Seawoll does.”

“Seawoll’s an arse,” I said automatically. Then, remembering who I was talking to, added quickly, “Respectfully.”

Nightingale’s mouth twitched up into a half smile, and I thought maybe I had him. Then his smile faltered.

“As kind as all this is, it still does not excuse my lack of control, or return Mrs Hagan to her family.”

I sighed. “Inspector, you’re only human. Sometimes things just...happen. To err is human.” I knew some famous dead guy had said that, but I couldn’t recall who just then, and didn’t want to guess incorrectly, since I had a feeling Nightingale knew. “And, frankly, no one could have expected you to be totally fine in a World War II museum. With the vestigia rolling off that Tiger—no one blames you, sir, not in the slightest.”

Nightingale tensed at the memory, fingers gripping the arms of the wheelchair with a great deal more strength than necessary. He took a shallow breath and I watched as he forced himself to relax, closing his eyes briefly and exhaling deeply. “That...was an unfortunate set of circumstances, certainly, but one I should have been able to handle. It has been almost seventy years, after all.”

Nightingale gave a short, nervous laugh, and I stared at him in mounting concern. I’d done some research on PTSD after Walid had mentioned Nightingale had suffered from it back in the forties, but I found myself wondering now if he’d ever actually come to terms with it.

“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was,” I found myself saying. “It never really goes away.”

Nightingale glanced at me and then looked away. “What’s that?”

“PTSD.”

Nightingale frowned. “I think Abdul has mentioned that acronym before…?”

I swallowed. “It stands for post-traumatic stress disorder. It means you’re—er—having trouble shaking something really horrible that happened to you.”

“Ah, yes. Combat fatigue was what we called it.” Nightingale’s voice was perfectly level and reasonable, though I noticed his knuckles were white where he was still gripping the arms of the wheelchair. “But that’s in the past.”

I could tell it clearly wasn’t, but I was realising with a dismal feeling that this was one thing I was certainly not capable of fixing in a morning. I didn’t want to try and argue Nightingale into a corner on such a delicate matter, so I reluctantly let it drop, resolving to have a word with Walid as soon as I could.

“Just...don’t sell yourself short,” I said after a long moment. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Nightingale frowned at me, but I really didn’t want to hear him try and convince me that it was, so I moved quickly around to the back of his chair. “How about some breakfast?” I said.

Nightingale sighed, and I watched his shoulders slope, fingers slowly relaxing their death grip on the wheelchair. “That sounds grand.”

I started pushing him towards the breakfast room, but the words of Pendleton’s ghost were stirring in my head. “What—whatever they said it was,” I said uncertainly after a moment. “Morbidity, or cowardice, or whatever other rubbish—forget about it. They’re all wrong.”

Nightingale didn’t reply, but I wasn’t about to bring it up again, so I bit my tongue and finished wheeling him into the breakfast room in silence. Molly had already set the table and, since Nightingale would have had to reach uncomfortably far for things, I filled up his plate for him. I’d eaten breakfast with him enough times to know what he liked, and took care to give him larger portions than he usually ate, since he was recovering. I did all this in silence, and finished by depositing his plate in front of him without a word, studiously avoiding his gaze the entire time.

I was therefore a little surprised when Nightingale had some words for me. “Thank you, Peter.”

I glanced at him and then quickly found something to study in the butter dish, because he was looking at me with an expression alarmingly akin to gratitude. I knew he was thanking me for more than just the meal delivery.

“Yeah, well, you’d better eat your bacon this time or Molly will kill me,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, busying myself with filling my own plate.

I saw Nightingale smile faintly in my periphery, something I hadn’t seen enough of since his recent brush with death.

“I’m serious,” I added as I ladled some beans onto my plate. “I don’t want to cross her. You want to thank me, just focus on getting better, all right?” It wasn’t until after I’d said it that I realised how incredibly cheesy that sounded, but I meant it, and it was too late to take it back anyway. “I’m telling you, she just stands in my doorway and waits for me to wake up. She could kill me in my sleep. Or just poison me, since I’m the only one who eats the Connaught pudding. It would be incredibly easy, really.”

I knew I was babbling, and managed to cut myself off with only a small stutter as I sat down and shovelled a spoonful of beans into my mouth.

After I’d swallowed, I realised Nightingale wasn’t eating and cast him a quick, nervous glance. He was looking at me with a slightly amused expression, and I don’t think I could have imagined the fondness in his eyes. I quickly averted my gaze back to my beans.

When Nightingale spoke again, I cringed in anticipation of something unbearably sappy, but instead it was only, “You need to practise more.”

I coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, I suppose I do.”

I thought Nightingale might have smiled at me again, and was relieved when I finally heard him cutting up his bacon.

We spent the remainder of the meal in a silence that wasn’t as uncomfortable as it could have been, and I noted Nightingale managed to finish everything on his plate, even though he’d slowed down considerably halfway through.

Molly arrived to take our dishes, giving Nightingale an approving look as she did so. He left for the library, and I went to put in some practise hours working on perfecting impello . It was a reassuringly familiar routine.

I made sure to phone Walid once I was alone, and filled him in on what Nightingale had said. The doctor sounded a little worried and told me he’d look into it. Treating PTSD after so many years, and with no other veterans around with similar experiences, wouldn’t be easy, but Walid agreed that Nightingale’s policy of ignoring and trivialising the issue wasn’t helping.

“He’s been on his own for too long,” Walid said on the other end of the line. “I don’t think he’s ever really had anyone to talk to about it, and I’m sure the psychiatrists convinced him the best thing to do was bury it.”

I made a sound of agreement.

“If it had been properly addressed at the time, he’d probably be far better off now,” Walid continued in a slightly worried tone. “I tried to talk to him about it when I first saw his file, but he...wasn’t very forthcoming. I decided maybe it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, but that might not have been the best course, especially if it’s just sat there and festered in the meantime.”

“Even if we’re not worrying about him...you know, having another episode,” I said, “it can’t possibly be good for him to just bottle it all up like that.”

Walid sighed on the other end of the line, the noise coming through with a faint hiss of static. “You’re right about that. He doesn’t want to bother anyone with it, though, just like he wouldn’t tell me if his gunshot wound was acting up.” Walid sighed again. “Just keep an eye on him for me, will you? He might talk to you before he talks to me, so just let him know you’re open to it. If you act like you don’t want to hear about it, he won’t tell you.”

“Of course,” I said, a little offended that Walid would think so little of me. I softened my tone. “I’m just...you know, a little worried about him. He’s been having a rough time of it lately.”

“Don’t I know it? Just...let him know you’re there for him, and I’ll have a word with him in the meantime, see if I can find some way to get him to talk about it. I’m sure there’s a therapist out there I can trust with him.”

I smiled a little, picturing Walid working through a list of which therapists would be open to a hundred-year-old patient who looked like he was in his forties. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it. I knew I wasn’t at all qualified to handle something like this, and was grateful Walid and his professional expertise would be on the case as well.

“Don’t mention it, Peter,” Walid said. “How’s he been eating?”

We discussed Nightingale’s physical health for a while, and when he finally hung up, I had a list of things to look out for, and another list of foods to pass onto Molly.

By the time I got down to the shooting range and around to practising impello , I was feeling so much better that I managed to send a werelight flying down the range at a very respectable sprinting pace instead of the usual crawl. Naturally, I was delighted with myself, but my second attempt returned it to sloth-like speeds.

I sighed and got back to work.

*          *          *

Nightingale’s recovery was slow but steady, and, thanks to Molly’s cooking, he looked to be finally putting on some weight. Though Nightingale didn’t mention anything else to me about his past, Walid informed me that he’d agreed to see a therapist, if only to prevent further relapses and loss of life. I thought this was a rubbish reason, but if it was going to encourage Nightingale to look after himself, I wasn’t about to argue.

It was over lunch some days later that I asked Nightingale curiously what the real reason was he didn’t like museums.

I hadn’t developed even a small headache from all the vestigia, as Nightingale had said he did; on the contrary, I’d found it actually very easy to ignore after a few minutes. And even if Nightingale had legitimate reasons for avoiding museums of modern history, I remembered he had turned down my offer to visit the British Museum’s exhibit on medieval York, and I severely doubted Nightingale had had a personal traumatic experience with that .

Nightingale looked a little surprised at my question, and then his eyes dropped to his baked haddock. At first, I wasn’t even sure if he was going to answer, but then he smiled a little and looked up at me.

“If you must know,” he said, in that matter-of-fact voice of his, “it’s because David never much liked the places. Said they were never very accurate, and, because we could pinpoint the sources of vestigia, picking out which artefacts were forgeries was incredibly easy, but the curators never believed us.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but this certainly wasn’t it.

Nightingale gave me a sad smile and turned back to picking at his haddock.

I was too surprised and a little embarrassed to ask anything further.

About a month later, I was on my way out to see another special exhibit at the British Museum—this one featuring the Egyptian Book of the Dead—when Nightingale strolled into the atrium, saw me, and asked curiously where I was going.

I told him as I continued pulling on my coat.

Nightingale nodded and looked at the floor. I opened my mouth to tell him I was totally fine going alone, but he spoke over me.

“I...would like to accompany you, if you don’t mind.” His tone was mild and even, and it didn’t sound at all like he was changing his mind on a policy he’d adhered to for decades.

I fumbled with my coat zipper and finally managed to get ahold of it. “Er...sure,” I said, trying to hide my surprise.

Nightingale nodded curtly and moved past me to fetch his own coat (a handsome black wool-and-cashmere Armani, I noticed).

It was an interesting exhibit and, after the first ten minutes, the awkwardness started to dissipate. Nightingale appeared as genuinely interested in the material as I was, and he occasionally made a comment to me about Egypt in the twenties, where I gathered he’d spent some time.

All in all, it was a pleasant enough trip, and as we walked back to the Folly through the crisp late autumn air, I told him I was glad he’d changed his mind and come along.

“It’d been a long enough time since I’d been to a proper museum,” Nightingale remarked. “I thought I ought to give them another try.”

“What did you think?” I asked.

Nightingale cast me an oblique glance. “They’ve come quite a way,” he commented. “They do a...a good job of honouring the past while keeping it distinct from the present.”

I nodded at this unusual yet still perfectly valid observation as we made our way through the layer of crisp, orange leaves scattered across Russell Square.

“I think,” Nightingale continued after a moment, in a slightly more tentative voice, “that there are a great many things I could learn from museums.”

I glanced at him, but he was looking straight ahead. I knew he was talking about his past, but he’d also kept his words vague enough that I could easily avoid the subject if I wanted. I remembered what Walid had said about being open to discussing what had happened to him.

I couldn’t figure out how to fit that idea into a sentence without saying it outright, so I just said, “Yeah.” Then I thought that maybe that was a little dismissive, so I added quickly, “Er, if you, um, think that’s best.”

I fixed my gaze on the leaf-strewn ground and tried to ignore the warmth colouring my cheeks. “And we could, er, go to some more museums, if you think that would help. But only...er, if you want to.” I forced my mouth shut before I could say anything else embarrassing, staring at the ground with almost painful single-mindedness.

Beside me, Nightingale’s perfectly polished shoes rustled through the crisp autumn leaves. I could feel him studying me, but firmly refused to acknowledge his gaze. We’d almost reached the Folly, and the safety in professionalism that it afforded.

“I’d like that very much,” Nightingale said quietly as we reached the steps.

“I’ll see what other exhibits are around,” I said, trying to hide my desperation to reach the door as I all but tripped up the steps.

“Unless you’d rather...not?” Nightingale sounded a little uncertain, and I forced myself to pause with my hand on the doorknob. I realised I was giving out very mixed signals between what I was saying—that I was there for him—and what I was doing—fleeing.

“No,” I said, forcing myself to turn and face him.

Nightingale had always appeared to be in his early forties, and sometimes he got a look in his eyes that reminded me just how incredibly old he was, but right now he looked younger than I’d ever seen him. He was standing a few steps below me, so he was looking up at me, a couple strands of his neatly combed hair blown astray by the wind. His light grey eyes were filled with a fragile mixture of hope and uncertainty, and I wondered why I was trying to run away.

“I’d love to,” I said. “And...anything you need. Really.” I met his gaze with mine, to let him know that I meant it.

Nightingale’s shoulders relaxed slightly, and he gave me a tentative smile.

I felt myself smiling back and finally allowed myself to push open the door to the Folly.

“Thank you,” Nightingale said as he followed me inside.

“Don’t mention it,” I said, holding the door open for him.

For a moment we both just stood there, directly past the threshold, uncertain of where to go or what to do next.

Then Nightingale laughed a little, and I felt some of the awkward tension in the air dissipate. “Abdul will be exceptionally pleased with us,” he said, and I huffed out a little laugh of my own.

“But enough of this,” Nightingale said, rubbing his palms together. “Don’t you have practising to do, apprentice?” He said it with a hint of a tease in his voice, and I allowed myself a smile.

“You know I do, boss,” I said, pulling my coat off with exaggerated motions of exhaustion as I moved towards the row of coat hooks Molly had installed so we wouldn’t be dripping all over the atrium. “Always with the practising, day and night…”

Nightingale smiled at me, and it was one of those rare, proper smiles. “Back in my day,” he said as he started unbuttoning his own coat, “apprentices practised three times a day and never went around disrespecting their masters…”

We were arguing good-naturedly over the proper role of apprentices in the twenty-first century, including the duty of keeping the tech cave up-to-date and well-maintained, when Molly arrived and surveyed all this good humour with a particularly suspicious gaze.

She started herding Nightingale off in the direction of something that smelled reassuringly like tea, and he protested the entire way. “I’m telling you, Molly, a little fresh air won’t kill me…”

I chuckled to myself as I finished hanging up my coat and saw that we’d left the front door open slightly.

I walked over and stood for a moment on the threshold, one hand on the door and the other on its frame. I took a breath of the brisk autumn air and found myself incredibly grateful to be where I was. I could still hear Nightingale politely berating Molly somewhere behind me, and I thought to myself that I ought to go and rescue him, or at least keep him company.

I smiled and closed the door.