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Chapter Text

To give Molly her due, it was at least daylight when she rang me, and she wasn’t to know that I’d had a late night. A very pleasant late night it had been too, having been spent exclusively in the company of Beverley Brook, who was still snuggled up beside me where we had ended in her bed. Molly probably did know it was officially my day off, but the silence on the phone told me all I needed to know.

“I’ll be right over.”

Bev tried to protest as I got dressed, but she relented when I pointed out that Nightingale definitely knew it was my day off, and if it had just been to do with work he’d have rung me himself.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” I said. Which was to say, not very, although I didn’t know that at the time. “Molly’s obviously worried about something.”

“All right,” agreed Beverley. “Go and see what it is, or you’ll only be wondering anyway.”

She was right, of course, but I’d have been wondering a long time before I’d have come up with what was bothering Molly on this occasion. I’d barely set foot in the Folly before she appeared out of nowhere, a look on her face I’d never quite seen before. It wasn’t simply fear, although she was clearly afraid of something.

“I came as fast as I could,” I told her, as she gestured impatiently at the stairs. “What’s happened?” She beckoned me upwards, in a way which indicated she thought some sort of urgency was required. “Where’s Nightingale?” She looked almost wild at that. Something had obviously gone wrong, presumably involving my boss, but before I could ask any more questions, she had opened the door of Nightingale’s room and given me a little shove through it when I hesitated. I didn’t get very far before I stopped dead in my tracks. Weird stuff abounds in my line of work, but I’d never seen anything like this before. There, perched on the edge of a brass bed similar to the one that was in my room at the Folly, was a wide-eyed little white boy with brown hair sticking up in all directions, and wearing exactly the sort of pyjamas you’d have expected him to wear if he’d been six foot, forty-odd, and in possession of impeccable but conservative dress sense.

“Hello, Peter,” said this horrifying vision in a very youthful RP accent. “I’m awfully afraid we’ve got a problem.”

I’d like to say I didn’t answer immediately, but I think I did, with a sort of strangulated squeak. In my defence, it’s difficult to think of an adequate response to your boss having lost three decades off his age overnight, especially on the spur of the moment. I knew Nightingale had some sort of backwards ageing thing going on, but this was taking it to extremes.

“Yeah, looks like it, doesn’t it?” I managed eventually. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, looking at me rather helplessly. “I was grown up when I went to bed.”

“Right.” I looked back at Molly, who was still watching as if she expected me to fix the problem immediately. “Did you call Dr Walid?” She hung her head in answer. “All right; I’ll do it. Maybe he’ll have an idea.” Hopefully, I thought, because I didn’t have a clue. “Do you feel all right?” I asked Nightingale. “I mean, apart from…” I gestured at his current appearance.

“Yes,” he assured me, rolling his cuffs back another turn so his hands remained visible. “I’m a bit thirsty, but Molly wouldn’t leave me until you got here.” He glanced over at where she still stood, hovering. “I’m all right, really,” he said earnestly. “Honestly.” She looked between the two of us, apparently unconvinced, but glided from the room, presumably to go and fetch her unexpectedly young charge a nice glass of milk.

“You’re sure you’re OK?”

Nightingale nodded, but he had that expression that little kids get when they’re about to share something outrageous in the most deadly serious manner. I waited.

“I wasn’t very well last night,” he admitted, “But I’m all right now.” He frowned up at me, his feet swinging over the edge of the bed. “Do you want to sit down?”

I sat next to him, trying to ignore the weirdness of the situation and concentrate on how it had arisen. Even then, I could look over Nightingale’s head without even trying, which was fairly disconcerting.

“You remember last night?” I asked, making an effort to look down. He nodded again. “So tell me what happened, then.”

“Well, nothing happened, really. Not happened.”

This is one of the reasons we have to have an appropriate adult present when we’re interviewing minors. Quite apart from all the safeguarding implications you get, it’s often useful to have someone who knows them well enough to interpret such cryptic utterances. I wondered wildly at that point whether Nightingale ought to have had one; for lack of any better idea, I asked him.

“I don’t think so,” he said seriously, after giving it some thought. “I don’t think it counts, because I’m still quite old, you know. And anyway, if I did have to have one, it would be you, wouldn’t it?” Strangely enough, that didn’t reassure me as I think he meant it to. “I can still remember everything about being grown up, anyway.”

“Everything?” I couldn’t help myself. This time, when he nodded, he wouldn’t look at me. He drew his knees up in front of him, an unconsciously childish movement.

“I wish I couldn’t,” he whispered.

Well, that was understandable. I doubted he’d even gone off to Casterbrook the last time he was the size he was now, although given that was some time before the First World War, maybe he was just smaller than you’d expect for his age nowadays. From the way he was talking and behaving, though, he hadn’t just physically aged backwards, so God knows what his mind was making of trying to process what he’d seen at Ettersburg, for one thing. Not being a qualified child psychologist, I decided it was best not to go into it.

“How about we concentrate on what you remember from last night?” I suggested. The nod he gave me this time was tentative, but I took it as a good sign. “No unusual magical occurrences? You weren’t suddenly struck with the urge to carry out weird experiments in the lab, and had something go wrong?”

He looked at me then. “No, Peter,” he said, with the exact intonation that you’d have expected from a little boy faced with the grown-ups asking stupid questions again. “If I wanted to do experiments, I’d make sure they didn’t go wrong.” That was me told. At least he had temporarily forgotten whatever horrors he was looking at inside his head. I carried on with the questions.

“Can you still remember how to do magic?”

Nightingale frowned again, but held his hand out and opened it uncertainly, then gave me a delighted grin as a werelight appeared.

“Yes!” He shut it off and tried again; this time it blazed up more confidently. It was a simple test, but it would do for now; he hadn’t entirely lost the ability, at any rate. It seemed to reassure him, too. He shuffled round to face me, his head cocked slightly as he waited for me to ask the next question.

“So you’re absolutely sure nothing unusual happened that might have caused…” I waved a hand in his direction again, “This?” While he was gravely considering his answer, I went on, “You said you felt ill last night; could that have had anything to do with it?”

“I think that was the sandwiches.”

Which sounded like a no, although given Nightingale’s public school education had clearly included being conditioned to eat whatever was put in front of him, they must have been spectacularly bad sandwiches.

“Has Molly been experimenting again?” I asked.

“Oh, no. It was the constable who was showing me the haunted flat.”

Apparently the junior edition of my boss was going to be as frustratingly vague as his previous incarnation could be.

“Tell me about the haunted flat,” I said, as patiently as I could. “They must have called that in after I’d left last night?”

“That’s why I went. It wasn’t haunted really. At least, there weren’t any ghosts when I got there. But the chap who’d called me in brought coffee and sandwiches while I was making sure there wasn’t anything else there, either, only they’d got those yellow stickers on them,” Nightingale glanced at me to check that I had recognised his description of the supermarket’s end-of-day leftovers, “And they’d gone sort of warm.”

“I think we can rule out food poisoning as a method of speeding you into your second childhood,” I said. “Although giving yourself it might well be a sign of impaired judgement.”

“I wasn’t sick,” he objected, then hesitated. “I don’t think I was. I didn’t feel very well… I had a headache, too.” He still looked pale to me; I suspected his use of the past tense was less accurate than he wanted me to think, and given the strength of the magic that must have been required for whatever had happened to him, I hoped it wasn’t the first signs of brain damage. Hyperthaumaturgical degradation, if you want the proper name for it - damage caused by over-use or exposure to too much magic. There was no way of finding out without an MRI scanner, so I reached for my phone to call Dr Walid and ask him to check for any signs of Nightingale’s brain having turned into a diseased cauliflower as a matter of extreme urgency.

“It couldn’t have been anything in the flat making you feel ill?” I pressed him.

“There wasn’t anything in the flat,” he answered, which later I realised should have been a clue. At the time, though, I was still pretty distracted by having to try and extract some sort of witness statement from an odd little boy who just happened to be my boss. “And afterwards I just came home and went to bed.” I was pretty sure nothing could have got through the Folly’s defences, but I asked the question anyway.

“Could anything have happened to you here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you just woke up this morning like that?”

“Yes,” Nightingale agreed, but he had that hesitant look again. “I woke up in the night, too, but I don’t know how old I was then. I… I was dreaming.” He stopped, and looked away.

“Bad dreams?” I tried to sound sympathetic, but only managed awkward. I couldn’t quite get over who I was talking to, even if he did just look like a miserable little kid who wished his mum would turn up. He didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself. “You didn’t try to put the light on, or anything, then?”

“I couldn’t find it.” There was a lamp on the bedside table which looked as if it hadn’t moved in decades, but I supposed it might well have felt as if it had done, if he’d woken up scared and disorientated and half a metre shorter than usual. “It was too hot, and the room kept moving.”

“What do you mean, it kept moving?” I’d seen my boss rip walls apart before, but making one room in a building move was a new one.

“When I tried to sit up. It kept going round and round, and I really didn’t feel well then,” elaborated Nightingale, who was clearly trying to provide any details that might help, or he would never have admitted to that, I was sure, even in his current state.

And you didn’t think to, I dunno, call Molly or something at that point?” I suggested.

“Molly fusses,” he said, with definite small-boy scorn for the idea that I might even think it had been necessary. Personally, I thought she might have had some justification for fussing in those particular circumstances, but I decided not to argue about it, especially as Molly herself chose that moment to appear silently in the doorway. I jumped; Nightingale giggled. There was no other word for it. Molly hissed, too, but she was clearly too worried about Nightingale for her amusement to last long. She had brought him not just a drink but a whole tray of breakfast, and she glared at me warningly when I moved my hand very slightly in the direction of the toast. I’d had nothing myself yet, but it was enough to put me off the idea of helping out with the mountain she had produced.

“Well, I’m phoning Dr Walid, now,” I warned Nightingale instead. “He’ll have a better idea of whether you’re all right than either of us.”

“I’m fine,” he said crossly.

“And think how thrilled he’ll be to have you for research,” I added.

“I don’t need to go to hospital.” I gave him a look which I hoped indicated I could pick him up and carry him there if need be; he ignored it. “And even if I did, I can’t go like this, can I?” He flapped an overly long sleeve at me pointedly. “I’ll think about it,” he said, “If you find me some clothes.”

In the end, I found myself down the King’s Road while Molly hovered over Nightingale, waiting for Dr Walid to come round to the Folly. There had been one awful moment where, considering my boss’s dress sense, I had wondered where the hell I was going to dig up the sort of thing he’d have been used to wearing as a child - if there’d been anything small enough in the Folly’s attics I’m sure Molly would have got it out before I’d even thought about it - but luckily I remembered the existence of shops catering to the modern-day posh weirdos who still want to dress their offspring like they’re off for tea at the Palace, just before I set off to hunt through the National Theatre’s costume stores. They weren’t quite up to Edwardian standards of itchy tweed and starched collars, but it was a step closer than M&S. The assistants were all well enough trained to ignore the fact that I wasn’t their usual clientele, although you couldn’t say the same about a lot of their customers. I had a list of measurements, since Molly had produced a tape measure before I left, so I approached the sale rails hopefully - I didn’t hold out much hope of being able to put this particular shopping trip on expenses, even through the Folly’s budget. Most of it looked a bit casual for Nightingale, to be honest, but he was going to have to make do. I wasn’t brave enough to buy him a tie on elastic, though. I could imagine his response if I did.

Shopping trip over, I returned to the Folly, only to find that Dr Walid had somehow persuaded Nightingale to accompany him to UCH. ‘Persuaded’ might have been the wrong word, going by Molly’s explanation, but whatever he had pulled, it had worked. Following them over there, I found Nightingale first; he was in a side room of his own, weirdly engrossed in a Lego set someone must have jacked from the children’s ward for him. He waved a brick to get my attention.

“Look, it sticks without even using a treaclefoot!” He was clearly delighted by the idea. He put it to one side at the sight of my bags, though, eyeing the prospect of exchanging his hospital gown for proper clothes with undisguised enthusiasm. I wandered out into the corridor to wait while he got dressed, which was when Dr Walid joined us.

“Peter, you’re here. Good.” He glanced at the side room, noticing the curtains had been drawn round the bed.

“I brought him some clothes,” I explained.

“He’ll be pleased about that. He was not impressed when I wouldn’t let him wait for you before I brought him over here,” said Dr Walid seriously. “I wanted to get him checked over sooner rather than later.”

“And?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

“Well, there’s no sign of hyperthaumaturgical damage, for a start. In fact, there’s no sign of anything unusual at all. Physically, he’s a perfectly normal child. Psychologically…” He frowned. “Who can say, at this point.”

Which meant he shared the same reservations I had, but before I could ask him any more about that, we were interrupted by an outraged shout from behind the curtain.

“Peter!” Nightingale emerged with such an expression of injured dignity that at any other time it would have been funny. “I can tie my shoelaces!” I sighed; I had half expected it, but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried. Everyone assumes kids want the easy option these days, especially when they’ve got feet the size Nightingale’s were.

“I could have got you sweet red sandals with buckles instead,” I offered. He stared at me as if he was trying to work out if I was joking or not. “Seriously, it was Velcro or nothing.”

He still looked annoyed, but he put them on, flexing his feet experimentally and then giving a vigorous bounce for good measure. What with the new shoes, a navy linen suit I had been assured was washable, and a Liberty print shirt, he looked more like a page boy at a wedding than the Folly’s only DCI and the last remaining representative of the Society of the Wise, but it was the best I could do at short notice.

“Can we go home now?” he asked. I looked at Dr Walid, who first told Nightingale he needed to wait, and then beckoned me back outside.

“We don’t know what’s caused this,” he said to me. “At least, I can’t find any medical reason. We know ageing doesn’t quite seem to work in the usual way where Thomas is concerned, but there was nothing to suggest this would happen, and neither of us can think of any magical exposure that might be to blame, either.”

“Neither can I.”

“So if I let him go, someone will have to keep a close eye on him.” That someone being me, I could tell. “And even if we assume nothing further untoward will happen as far as the ageing process goes, he’s going to need help when the full implications of this sink in. At the minute, he’s hardly thought about it; when he does, he’ll probably have trouble processing it anyway.”

“He’s not the only one,” I remarked.

“I mean it, Peter. And it’s not just that. Think of what that man can remember, and then think of showing that to a child the age he is now.”

I had already thought of that, and I didn’t like it any better thinking about it again, so I asked instead,

“How old do you think he is?”

“Ten or so? And intelligent with it. You’ll have your hands full once the shock wears off, I don’t doubt,” said Dr Walid.

I could imagine that, somehow. Nightingale had once said himself that his parents had probably been glad to have a rest from his incessant questioning when he went off to school. I can’t say the prospect thrilled me, but as a two-man operation, the Folly was distinctly short on options for appointing a guardian when one of those two suddenly shrank. My planned day off with Beverley was going to have to wait, I realised, and explaining why wasn’t going to be easy. I wasn’t sure letting Mama Thames - or worse, Lady Ty - in on the fact that Nightingale was due for a return to primary school was a great idea.

“I’m sure I’ll cope,” I said. Dr Walid didn’t look entirely convinced, but as the only other option was keeping Nightingale at the hospital with him, he let it go.

“I suppose there’s no reason I can find that he shouldn’t be allowed home; but if there’s any change, I expect you to notify me immediately.”

Well, I wasn’t going to argue with that. We went back in. Nightingale had returned to his Lego, but he dropped it again as soon as he saw us.

“Now can we go home?”

“If you promise to tell Peter at once if you feel any different, yes,” agreed Dr Walid. Nightingale nodded vigorously. “I mean it, Thomas. No telling everyone you’re fine and hoping it goes away, do you understand?” Another nod, although he had the grace to look a bit embarrassed this time. Dr Walid handed me a bottle of Calpol from the bedside cabinet. At least it was the six-plus version, so things could have been worse, although that instantly made me think that there was still time for them to get worse. I mentally blocked that thought in a hurry. “He had a slight fever when I brought him in. The next dose is due in a couple of hours, whether he tells you he doesn’t need it or not.” I nodded, and carefully didn’t ask for any further details. Judging by Nightingale’s suspiciously guilty expression, there was an explanation behind the warning that he would prefer I didn’t hear. I could always find out later. I gathered together the carrier bags I had brought in, reflecting that there was at least a bit less to carry now, and inquired whether he was ready to go. Dr Walid walked us to the door, which was unusual, so I think he was still a bit worried about letting us go. Nightingale waved at him as we left, an oddly little-boy gesture.

We walked back to the Folly. Nightingale didn’t have a Zip card yet. He was silent for almost the whole way, and bearing in mind the talk I’d had with Dr Walid, I didn’t try pressing him. When we were nearly there, though, he suddenly said my name, tugging at my sleeve as if he had an urgent question.

“What is it?” I turned to look.

He indicated a boy about the same size as himself, who was kicking a ball about in the Square gardens.

“Why don’t my shoes light up like his do?”

As far as questions went, I had expected to have to field worse. Having explained the concept of light-up trainers to him, I shepherded him back into the Folly, and once Molly had been assured he wasn’t in imminent danger, did what my mum would have done with me when I was a kid home sick from school, namely dumped him on the sofa in front of the telly while I got on with some work. This meant both of us hanging out in the Tech Cave over in the coach house. I knew he sometimes sneaked in to watch the rugby when I wasn’t around, but I wasn’t used to having company. I left him fiddling with the remote and went outside to call Beverley and warn her I wouldn’t be back any time soon.

“Nightingale’s ill,” I told her, “So I’m on duty after all.” It had the advantage of being the truth, if not a very detailed version of it. She sounded disappointed, but she couldn’t really argue.

“Will you be back tonight, at least?” she asked me.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to come over for a bit,” I hedged. To be honest, I hadn’t got past thinking about the present moment, but somehow it didn’t seem likely that I’d be able to leave my boss unsupervised any time soon. Although no doubt Molly would be happy to keep an eye on him during the day. Whether he would stand for it was another matter.

“What’s the matter with him?” I really wished she hadn’t asked that. “It can’t be that bad, surely?”

“Maybe I’m just being pessimistic,” I answered evasively. “I can’t come today, though. Sorry.” I wondered if Nightingale would really mind if I told her, but it only seemed fair to ask him first. It was bound to get out sooner or later, though. There’s only so much you can do to disguise the fact that your boss has turned into a ten-year-old. What we would do then, I didn’t even want to consider. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and I could guess who would be expected to fill in most of the paperwork. Beverley sounded a bit put out, as if she could tell I wasn’t being entirely straight with her, so I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods when I went back in. Nightingale looked pretty miserable, as well. He hadn’t been able to find any rugby on the telly, so he had the cricket on instead, but I’m not sure he was really watching it. “You all right there?” I asked. He nodded, so I let him get on with not watching the cricket and turned the HOLMES2 terminal on. There had been a spate of burglaries recently that we suspected had been carried out by someone using spells for breaking and entering, and I was trying to link the evidence together in the hope of narrowing down the likely culprit. Since my day off was obviously cancelled, I might as well get on with it.

Molly appeared before we’d got too settled, thoughtfully bringing hot chocolate and biscuits. I suspected the thought hadn’t really been on my behalf, but I thanked her anyway, as did Nightingale. She looked from me to him and back again.

“He’s all right,” I said. “I’m keeping an eye on him.” She didn’t look convinced. Nightingale didn't exactly leap to my defence, either, but then he was currently engaged in sharing a biscuit with Toby, who had trotted in behind Molly and was doing his usual impression of a starved and neglected dog. His stubby tail wagged frantically at this sign of favour; Molly didn’t look entirely impressed by such cavalier treatment of her baking, but she left us to it. Toby stayed. There were still more biscuits. I took a couple myself and went back to the files on the computer; Toby basely ignored me in favour of Nightingale, who I noticed was apparently quite acceptable in his new form. No magic that Toby could sense on him, then, or at least none that was disturbing enough to override the possibility of food.

We sat essentially in silence, apart from the cricket commentary, for quite a while, but I didn’t get much work done. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but I kept having to look round to check on Nightingale, and every time I saw him it threw me. I’d occasionally thought I had an idea of what he must have been like when he was younger, but it was still weird seeing it for real - or close enough. I doubted he’d been as subdued, somehow, but maybe that was the fact that he was trying to retain some sort of dignity in the current circumstances, or simply that he was feeling pretty rough. It was difficult to tell. It was fairly obvious when the Calpol began to wear off, though; he went worryingly pale and droopy, and then waited long enough to tell me he was going to be sick that I only just managed to put the bin in front of him in time.

“I see you’re still fine, then,” I said as I handed him the box of tissues.

“Don’t tell Molly,” he said anxiously, as if he hadn’t heard me.

“I wouldn’t dare.” Toby, who had retreated from the danger zone when I came flying across the room with the bin, watched us suspiciously from a safe distance. “Don’t you tell her, either,” I warned him, which at least raised a smile from Nightingale before he was sick again. He looked even paler and droopier when he’d finished, and there was no hint of protest when I got the Calpol bottle out. I called Dr Walid to be on the safe side, but he shared my boss’s opinion that the problem in this case was the declining standard of sandwiches on late night ghost-hunting trips, rather than anything magical, and said he’d come over later to check in on the patient. In the meantime, I was to carry on watching him carefully. Given he was a gastroenterologist when he wasn’t doing work for us, I decided to trust his judgement.

“I didn’t even finish it,” said Nightingale, as if he somehow thought that should have made a difference. Possibly he did. His scientific knowledge could be astounding at times, and not in a good way. He didn’t argue, though, when I offered him another dose of the sticky colourless liquid from the bottle. He slumped dejectedly against the arm of the sofa once he’d taken it, shivering a little and definitely not watching the cricket.

“You could just go to bed, you know,” I suggested. He ignored that. He was, after all, still Nightingale.

“Do you think Varvara Sidorovna suddenly got younger last night too?” he asked me drowsily.

“What, you mean…” I wasn’t sure I could handle the image of the last of the Night Witches in a smocked dress and pigtails, although to be fair to her she probably wouldn’t go shopping for clothes in the same places I’d ended up in that morning. “You’ve got a track on her, haven’t you?” It would be one indication that the magic, whatever it was, had gone haywire. “We could find out.”

“I can do it.”

“Not right now,” I said. I didn’t know exactly what my boss had set up, but it was probably complicated, and given the state he was in it seemed safer not to risk triggering anything untoward. “It can wait.” Especially given the sudden suspicion I had forming, I thought. “And if she has gone backwards, I hope you’re not expecting me to babysit her too.”

Nightingale was clearly feeling terrible, but not so terrible that he didn’t pick up on what I’d just said, unfortunately. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut before the look had finished forming in his eye.

“You are not babysitting me,” he stated firmly, bristling in that way that only little kids can manage. “I’m not that small, and even if I was, I’m still not.” He really wasn’t helping his cause, phrasing it like that, but I had the sense not to say so.

“I didn’t mean…”

“Yes, you did.” He looked hurt rather than offended, which made me feel even worse. I tried to apologise, but he just wriggled off the sofa without even looking at me, and walked out of the coach house. It would have only made it worse again if I’d chased after him, so I collected the plate and mugs Molly had brought over - Nightingale’s still mostly full of hot chocolate, I noticed - and used returning them as my excuse to go back over to the Folly. There was no sign of Nightingale, or of Molly, either. Toby trotted along at my heels, just in case he’d missed any crumbs on the plate, but abandoned me when he realised he hadn’t. It looked like I was on my own with this particular mystery, quite literally.

Chapter Text

I could have gone and got on with the burglary cases to distract myself, but it wouldn’t have worked anyway, so instead I rang DS Sahra Guleed of the Belgravia MIT, who at least wouldn’t think I’d lost my mind when she heard my question, and asked her if she’d heard anything about any haunted flats lately.

“Isn’t that more in your line?” she asked me.

“I just wondered who’d called it in,” I told her. I didn’t want to have to explain the whole story just yet. Nightingale was upset with me as it was. He’d be even less impressed if I introduced Guleed to the finer points of working at the Folly by explaining the disaster that had occurred. “I, er, the details weren’t very clear when it was passed on to me.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” said Guleed. “But I’ll ask if anyone knows anything about it.”

I left it with her; there wasn’t much else I could do. If anything had happened to Nightingale, it must have happened there. He didn’t seem to think it had, but if he’d already been feeling ill by that point, there was a chance there was something he’d missed, and I couldn’t imagine he wanted to stay ten years old any more than I wanted to spend the rest of my career reporting in to him once he’d got in from school. If I could find a clue of any sort that might help point to whether it was reversible, I was going to. I’d have asked Nightingale where the flat was myself, if he’d been around; but he quite obviously didn’t want to talk to me at the moment, and I can’t say I blamed him after I’d put my foot in it so spectacularly. If Guleed couldn’t find out for me, it would just have to wait, like checking up on Varvara Sidorovna. It would have been useful if there had at least been something I could have followed up in the meantime, but Nightingale, being Nightingale, had failed to file anything at all on either point, so this time I did go back to the burglary files.

I wasn’t completely surprised that it took Guleed a while to phone me back. I was a bit surprised, though, when it turned out to be nothing to do with Nightingale’s haunted flat.

“Definitely one of yours,” she told me. “Breaking and entering, except this guy didn’t get much further than the back door.”

Maybe it was the string of burglaries she was calling about instead. “You want me to come and have a look?”

“I think my governor was hoping for yours, actually, but he’s not answering his phone.”

There had definitely been some weird shit going on if Stephanopoulos, or, God forbid, Seawoll, wanted Nightingale on site, but they weren’t going to get him.

“He’s off sick,” I said, trying to sound normal about it. “Food poisoning.” Stick to the facts, as far as you can. That’s where most of them come unstuck in an interview, when they start stretching the bounds of credibility with a made-up alibi. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake. “You’ll have to make do with me.”

“Bad luck,” said Guleed. Whether she was sympathising with Nightingale being sick, or lamenting me as his replacement, I couldn’t say. I got the details from her anyway, and hopped in the Asbo to go and take a look at the body the Belgravia mob were so worried about.

The address Guleed had given me turned out to be a pretty ordinary terraced house in a pretty ordinary street, apart from the fact that it was fenced off behind a reel of police tape and still had the forensics people crawling all over it. Guleed met me at the perimeter and waited for me to get into a noddy suit like the one she was already wearing, then took me through the house to where Detective Inspector Stephanopoulos was waiting in the kitchen.

“Peter,” Stephanopoulos greeted me. “I hear your governor’s unavailable.”

“Dodgy sandwich,” I told her, hoping my expression wouldn’t give things away. I nodded at the back door - or what remained of it - in a hurry, trying to change the subject. “What happened there?”

“I was hoping you could tell us that.”

It was difficult to tell, really, without getting closer, but that wasn’t an appealing prospect. I could tell it was definitely a Falcon case, because I could feel the traces of vestigia even at this distance, but they were overlaid by a strong smell of charred flesh which I didn’t really want to think about. Stephanopoulos had obviously been on the scene long enough to have developed some sort of immunity to the stench, because she led me outside to the victim without batting an eyelid. I held my breath, took a look, and then backed off a few steps to try and get some fresh air. I glanced across at the door again. The bit that was left was blackened and burned, but, weirdly, not as much as the guy who had evidently been trying to get in through it.

“One of yours?” said Stephanopoulos. It wasn’t really a question. Nothing normal could have done that. I nodded.

“Is it one of yours, though?” I asked. “Could have been accidental.”

She gave me a pitying look. “You didn’t look very hard, did you?”

I’d been trying not to, to be honest, but I reluctantly took a step closer to the body again. Whoever he was, his own mother wouldn’t have recognised him. He was spreadeagled on his back, as if he’d fallen like that and just never got back up again. The flames must have spread up his right arm, then engulfed his head and neck. For some reason the rest of him was oddly untouched, despite the cheap polyester tracksuit that ought to have gone up in seconds. Stephanopoulos beckoned to one of the hovering figures in noddy suits, and he very carefully came and lifted what had been the guy’s head to let me have a look at the back of it. Or where the back of it should have been, I should say.

“Oh.” I said. “Yeah. He didn’t do that to himself, did he?”

“We don’t usually get people blowing their own heads off from behind, no.”

Who had done it for him was the Murder Team’s problem. Mine was working out what he’d been doing there in the first place, apart from apparently setting himself on fire. Common sense told me he’d been using some variation on lux to try and open the door, and it had gone wrong somehow; how, or why, I couldn’t yet work out. I wondered what he had been after. If he was responsible for the other burglaries I’d been looking into, there hadn’t been anything in particular. Householders had reported various small, unimportant items missing, admittedly along with the odd telly or PC. I was beginning to wonder if the small items really were as unimportant as they seemed. Certainly nothing he’d gone for up until now had suggested there’d be someone angry enough to remove the back of his skull for him.

“Who found him?” I asked Guleed, who had wandered over to see what I was doing with the door.

“Next door neighbour. Apparently the couple who live here are away in Spain for the week.”

They’d be pleased when they got back. They were going to need a new back door, at the very least, although perhaps not having had to witness the body in their back garden would make up for it.

“Did they see anything before that?”

“Not according to their statements.”

I knew what that meant, even before Stephanopoulos confirmed it. The job most beloved of junior police officers, the door-to-door in search of any other witnesses. Unfortunately for us, that meant me and Guleed in this instance. She went one way while I went the other, and when we drew blanks all the way along, we tried the next street, whose gardens backed on to the ones we had already tried. The guy must have been fence-hopping, because there was no way into the back gardens from the street, so there was just a chance someone might have noticed him. Even more unfortunately for us, though, the majority of householders in the area were in gainful employment somewhere, so they weren’t home either to have noticed or to tell us about it. The closest I got to a witness was a retiree by the name of Brian who told me, over the yowling of the cat he’d shut in the front room, that there’d been a dodgy workman going round the doors a few days earlier.

“Thought you might be him back again,” he told me.

“Do I look like him?”

“When you knocked. Not looking at you. He had red hair. And he was, you know?”

I didn’t, but it turned out he meant white, and was afraid I’d be offended if he let on he’d noticed I wasn’t. Honestly, it wasn’t the strangest attitude I’d ever had to deal with, so I kept my initial reply to myself and instead just asked if he could give me any more details.

“He said my ridge tiles needed replacing,” said Brian, who seemed to feel roofing problems were safer ground. “But I knew that was bollocks, because I had a man up there last month. I think he was just checking who’s in during the day round here.”

That was possible, but it didn’t prove he was now lying fried in a nearby back garden. I made a note anyway, so someone could check whether the ginger salesman belonged to us or Trading Standards, then let Brian go to pacify his increasingly furious cat. The next few houses I tried were even less helpful. There was only one where anyone was at home, and she was clearly oblivious to anything other than the new baby over her shoulder. I carried on anyway, but I was definitely losing the will by the time me and Guleed met up again. She looked about as fed up as I was.

“Woman at number 20 says she heard screaming, but she isn’t sure it wasn’t the telly. Apparently Mr Richards at 24 refuses to wear his hearing aids, no matter how much the neighbours complain.” The resigned look she gave me told me she’d heard considerably more about the noise complaint than she had about anything that might have related to our charred corpse.

“Do you reckon it’s time for coffee?” I asked her.

“Definitely.”

We didn’t have to walk too far to find a little parade of shops with a cafe. Not one of the big chains, and not a greasy spoon, either. It wasn’t quite bone china and lace doilies, but it had that air about it. It was that sort of area. There was a fancy greengrocer on one side of it and a dog grooming parlour on the other. A poodle with a woman prancing round it with a hair dryer looked out of the window at us as we passed, its expression indicating it was disgusted with humanity in general. It probably wouldn’t have been much more impressed with the cafe. The coffee wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t the sort of establishment to serve up sausage, egg and chips unless possibly they were rare breed, free range and thrice-cooked. I made do with a chicken and avocado wrap, since it was well past time for lunch, and Guleed stuck to the cheese salad, because the girl serving us didn’t seem entirely sure when we asked her whether the chicken was halal.

“Well, that got us a long way,” I said, once we’d had a chance to put the coffee to the test.

“It wasn’t natural, was it?” observed Guleed. “Whatever did that to his head. There should have been blood all over the place.”

She was right, of course. It was just another clue to the fact that the case definitely belonged in Falcon territory, at the moment, but I would have to find out if it was also a clue to what had actually taken place in an otherwise completely ordinary suburban garden. Nightingale might have known the answer, but he wasn’t exactly in a state to take over. Guleed asked me about that, too.

“What happens when your boss is off, then? Is it really just you?”

“You think I can’t handle it?”

“I never said that!” She looked at me curiously. “I don’t even know what you’re handling, to be honest. Just that that was definitely weird.”

“You know about as much as I do at the minute, then,” I admitted. “I’ll have to do a bit of research. And see what the forensic report says.” I knew the body would have been sent to UCH as soon as I confirmed it was a Falcon case; another job for Dr Walid. Presumably he would shortly be investigating what the hell had happened to our unsuccessful house-breaker, unless he was too busy investigating what the hell had happened to my boss instead. I was more interested in the latter, to be honest. I didn’t tell Guleed that bit, but I didn’t hang around after we’d finished, either. I’d been away long enough to start worrying about what was happening back at the Folly. I went back and let Stephanopoulos know I was going to go and look up a few details that might make things a bit clearer, which at least sounded like I was handling things competently, and then made a run for it.

There didn’t seem to be any signs of impending disaster at the Folly when I got back. Dr Walid was there, though, complete with his medical bag. Molly was offering him tea in the atrium. Pointedly, she didn’t offer me any; I just got a fierce glare sent in my direction before she turned her back on me and walked out. I winced. Presumably I was getting the blame for Nightingale being both ill and considerably smaller than usual, or perhaps she’d found out what I’d said to him earlier.

“Ah, Peter, you’re back!” Dr Walid either hadn’t noticed Molly’s reaction, or was diplomatically not mentioning it. I sat down with him at the table.

“Case came up,” I explained. “It wasn’t really me they wanted, but I told them he’s off sick. I don’t know what we’re going to say later on.”

“Well, we can invoke the 48-hour rule, for the moment,” said Dr Walid. He meant the rule in place in most sensible workplaces, where they won’t let you come back until it’s been two days since you stopped throwing up, mainly because nobody else wants to catch whatever bug you had in the first place. At least Nightingale wasn’t actually infectious - I hoped.

“How is he?” I asked. “He didn’t exactly look great when I rang you.”

“Asleep, hopefully,” Dr Walid answered. “It isn’t serious, just unpleasant, and at his age he’s feeling it a bit more, probably not helped by the shock of suddenly being his age. That I still can’t tell you about. I’ve run a few more tests from the samples I took earlier, but I’ve still no more idea of what’s happened than you have.”

I had expected as much, but it was still disappointing. It would have been nice to know whether there was a chance the whole thing would wear off in a day or two, and we could proceed to never speak of it again. I was about to say as much, when a movement on the balcony above caught my eye. A forlorn little figure peered over at us.

“I thought I told you to stay in bed?” called Dr Walid, when I drew his attention to our watcher. Nightingale disappeared, but only temporarily. He came down the stairs almost as silently as Molly, padding barefoot across the tiles. At least I’d included pyjamas the right size in my morning shopping trip, although I’m sure it must have been the only time in living memory he’d been seen downstairs in the Folly without getting dressed first. He still looked definitely peaky, I thought, not to mention very young and oddly unsure of himself. “Bed,” said Dr Walid, “Is upstairs.” Nightingale looked down at the floor and curled his toes up, as if he’d only just realised he had nothing on his feet. I tried to help him out; he looked as if he needed it.

“Couldn’t sleep?” He shook his head. “At least you got out of having to go and confirm our latest Falcon incident. Stephanopoulos wants our input on the latest body to turn up on her patch.” That was probably optimistic; nobody ever wanted Falcon involvement, but the better officers accepted it. “If you’re feeling up to it, I could use your thoughts.” I’ll be honest, I was hoping I might be able to make up for my thoughtless babysitting comment as well as provide some sort of distraction from his obvious misery. Dr Walid didn’t look too impressed, but Nightingale climbed up into one of the red leather armchairs and sat huddled there as if he didn’t really feel up to it at all, looking at me inquiringly.

“What sort of body?” he asked, eagerly clutching at the pretence of a return to normal Folly operations.

“A dead one,” I said. “Very dead.” I explained about the corpse that had been found. We still didn’t know who he was, but presumably by now he was in Dr Walid’s lab waiting for further investigation, which might or might not help us trace him. If he was part of the demi-monde, that at least was likely to show up.

“Set on fire by a spell that went wrong?” My boss gave this some consideration, then looked very solemnly at me. “Peter…” He sounded as if he might have an answer to the problem, so I nodded encouragingly. “Was it you?”

I considered telling him to fuck off, but it didn’t seem appropriate.

“I haven’t set anything on fire for ages,” I protested. You burn a hole through one lab bench, and somehow that’s all anyone ever remembers. Well, that and the various other disasters. I hadn’t expected Nightingale to take the piss, though, at least not right then. If we were talking about disasters, he wasn’t doing too badly himself for once. I didn’t go as far as reminding him, but he must have seen the look in my eye.

“He can’t have known very much if he was trying to burn a lock out,” he went on hurriedly. “It would take too long, and someone might see, and it would probably be noisy. I wouldn’t do it like that.”

I had seen Nightingale take a lock out before, so I didn’t need to ask him for details. I hadn’t learned to do it as neatly as he could yet, but I could do a lot better than our headless housebreaker. Either he had been doing a very amateur job, or something had gone horribly wrong - or both, considering his other injuries.

“Someone knew enough to take the back of his head off,” I said. “At least, there isn’t any way he could have done it himself, is there? By accident, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” admitted Nightingale. “I’ve never seen anyone get a spell that wrong, but I suppose they could.”

That didn’t get us much further, but it sounded as if it would be safer to assume there was someone out there who had murdered our corpse. I said as much. The other two nodded agreement.

“I take it he’ll be waiting for me to have a look when I get back?” asked Dr Walid.

“They were taking him to UCH, so I’d guess he’s there by now.”

“I’ll be able to give you an opinion once I’ve seen him, then. If he was messing about with magic without knowing what he was doing, he’d probably have ended up coming to my attention sooner or later, anyway, but we’ll find out.” He looked at Nightingale, who was sagging in his chair as if the effort of joining in the conversation had exhausted him completely. “You, go back to bed before you make yourself feel any worse, or I’ll take you back with me and keep you in for observation.” Then he transferred his gaze to me. “Peter, make sure he does as he’s told.”

I wasn’t sure I was going to be entirely successful there, especially given my boss’s objections to any suggestion that he wasn’t quite his usual self, but I nodded anyway. Dr Walid waited to make sure he’d seen him go back upstairs, then went off to start on his latest autopsy. I retreated to the magical library. There was clearly no chance of so much as a cup of tea until I was back in Molly’s good books, and that was unlikely to happen without a concerted effort on my part to find out why I was now apprenticed to a ten-year-old. Someone else would already be doing the background checks on the address where our corpse had been found, and there wasn’t much I could do about my part of the case until Dr Walid sent his report through, so it seemed as good a time as any to do a bit of research. It was arguably more important, anyway; I wasn’t sure I wanted to go up against whatever had caved a man’s skull in mid-spell without reliable back-up. I knew without even asking that Nightingale would consider his current size, or age, or whatever it counted as - completely irrelevant if he thought his help was required, but I didn’t. Call it a more modern attitude to child welfare. He had his doubts about whether he could take the Faceless Man in a straight fight when he was his usual adult self. Unless he was thinking of biting him in the ankles, I didn’t think his chances had just increased. I hoped that wasn’t going to matter.

Chapter Text

Understandably, it took Dr Walid’s report a while to come through, so I had plenty of time to search the library for any references to mysterious de-ageing processes. Possibly also understandably, I didn’t find any. There were plenty of reports of changelings in the old records, but it was pretty obvious Nightingale was still Nightingale and not some replacement drafted in by the fae, so that wasn’t much help. I hadn’t really expected to find anything useful, to be honest, so I wasn’t as disappointed as I might have been, but it was still worrying. If whatever had caused my boss to start ageing backwards in the first place had now speeded up, I couldn’t help wondering how long we had before I was pushing a pram around. A furious baby Nightingale throwing his toys at passers-by with impello was not a thing I wanted to contemplate for very long. Or at all, frankly.

I had spent longer in the magical library than I’d intended to by then, so I gave up on the eighteenth-century report I was currently reading about “faerie children” and went in search of something to eat. I found Molly in the kitchen, but she was scrubbing out an old-fashioned enamel basin - I could imagine the use it had been put to, given the way Nightingale had looked earlier - and glared at me over it, with the sort of look that implied the only thing likely to be on the menu was me, if I didn’t get out.

I could take a hint, so I got out, taking Toby with me. We ended up in a nearby pub, where the food was edible but not spectacular. They did sell sausages for dogs, though, so Toby was happy. He curled up under the table once he realised no more were forthcoming, and let me mull over my beer. That didn’t get me any further, with either case, so I finished up, refused the suggestion of a refill and walked the dog home the long way round.

Molly didn’t turn out to greet us on our return. Toby scampered off to find her, in case he, at least, had a chance of persuading her to come up with some food. I headed upstairs. I wouldn’t normally have checked in on my boss if he’d gone to bed ill, but then he wasn’t normally a small child, either.

Nightingale didn’t exactly answer when I knocked on his door, but he made a noise that seemed to indicate I could come in if I wanted to. I stuck my head round the door rather than go marching in, all the same. He was curled up under the bedclothes, but he lifted his head and started to sit up when he saw me.

“You don’t need to get up. I only came to see how you were.” He didn’t argue, just let his head drop back on to the pillow and curled up again.

“I’ll be fine in the morning,” he said firmly. I had to give him points for trying to sound convincing, but to be honest it was more like he was trying to convince himself and sound grown up about it, so I just said casually,

“You’ll probably feel better once you’ve had some sleep.”

The grown-up pose definitely cracked then. He looked over at me with a hollow-eyed expression that had no business appearing on his little-boy features.

“I don’t want to go to sleep.”

I didn’t need to ask him why. It’s not as if we don’t all have bad dreams, but Nightingale’s must have been something else entirely. Not something you’d wish on a ten-year-old who was already feeling pretty awful, certainly. Not something you’d ask him about, either, so I only said gently,

“You can’t stay awake for ever.”

Nightingale shook his head. I couldn’t tell whether he was agreeing with me or not, but I didn’t get the chance to ask him, because he suddenly asked,

“Was it a demon trap?”

“What?” I didn’t know what he was getting at to begin with, the question had been so unexpected. He wriggled a bit, and sat up before he elaborated.

“Your dead body. Could it have been a demon trap that did it?”

If that was what he was thinking about to keep himself awake, the nightmares must have been worse than I’d thought.

“I hope not.” There was only one person I could think of who would have used one, and I was very definitely hoping he had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this case. Things were complicated enough without evidence that the Faceless Man was involved. I wondered if I would hear from Lesley again, if he was.

“Didn’t you look?” said Nightingale. He sounded almost exasperated, although I couldn’t tell if my answer was the problem, or the fact that he was stuck trying to ask me about it with the communication skills of his much younger self. Since I’ve seen him - as an adult - forget the words to caution a suspect before now, I suspected little Nightingale might struggle with “initial vestigium assessment”.

“Of course I did! And no, I didn’t find any evidence of one.”

“Did you look properly?” he insisted.

I was a bit irritated by that, but I tried not to let it show. I don’t think Nightingale was really worried that I was totally incompetent, more that he wasn’t really in a position to help out.

“I did a full check of the area, the way you taught me,” I told him. That seemed to satisfy him on that point, at least, but he wasn’t finished.

“Do you know whose house it was yet?”

“Couple named Smith. Barbara and Alan. Late forties, probably, he’s an engineer, she works in an office somewhere.” Guleed had given me the details over lunch. “They’re away in Spain.” I could see Nightingale was determined to carry on indefinitely with the question-and-answer session, but he was looking even worse than he had done earlier, so I tried to bring it to a close. “I’m working on it, don’t worry.” For a moment I thought I’d succeeded, because he nodded and lay back down as if even that was an effort, but then he asked sleepily,

“Where did he learn to be an engineer?”

“I haven’t found out yet,” I admitted. I knew why he was asking; if it had been Oxford, Alan Smith might be more interesting than we thought. He’d probably be about the right age to have been a member of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s Little Crocodiles, and therefore potentially a person of interest. Nightingale obviously thought it was worth investigating, because he gave me that look again - the one small kids give to particularly disappointing adults.

“What have you been doing?” he demanded.

“Trying to find out what’s happened to you!” I didn’t hide my irritation this time. It wasn’t as if I’d been sitting doing nothing all afternoon, and to be honest, I’d had more than enough of reading dubious ancient reports of children changed by the fae, especially when they turned out to be useless. Nightingale flinched, although whether at my tone or the reminder, I wasn’t quite sure.

“Rotten sandwiches,” he said unhappily.

“I’ll tell the Food Standards Agency to keep an eye out for an epidemic of accidental ten-year-olds, shall I?”

“It’s not funny!” He sat up again, glaring so furiously I almost wanted to laugh. When he calmed down a bit, though, he just looked miserable. “Varvara Sidorovna’s still grown up.”

“Must have better taste in refs,” I said. Nightingale gave me a reproachful look. “How did you find that out?”

“I do know how to use a telephone.”

Presumably he’d sneaked downstairs to use the Folly’s Bakelite relic while none of us were watching, unless he’d actually brought the mobile phone I’d given him up to bed and bothered to turn it on. I doubted that, somehow. He might have been the right age to be glued to one now, but he still definitely wasn’t the right era.

“So it’s just you, then.” He nodded again. “Something must have caused it. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, it was something you ran into last night. Where was this flat you went out to? And how did you get there?”

“Camberwell,” he said unexpectedly. I wondered if there was just something about that side of the river that we should avoid. My last major expedition over there wasn’t exactly one I wanted to remember. “I took the car…”

“The Jag?”

“Of course, what else?” Given the Jag’s stable-mate probably qualified as the Most Haunted Car in Britain, if he’d taken that it might have explained a bit more.

“You didn’t stop anywhere on the way?”

He shook his head this time. “I don’t think anything happened, really, Peter. How could it?”

Nightingale might not have thought so, but I wasn’t so sure - or, at least, I wanted to make sure. “Camberwell?”

“You’re going to go and look, aren’t you?” He watched me guardedly. “Is it because you think I’m too little to know what I’m talking about?”

“No,” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to get annoyed again if I insisted on doing my own investigating. “I’d just like to see for myself, that’s all. Research.” He accepted that, thankfully.

“Take Toby,” he suggested.

“What, to see if he turns into a puppy?”

“Molly wouldn’t like that. He wouldn’t be house trained any more,” pointed out Nightingale solemnly.

“All right, maybe not.” Toby was unlikely to agree to getting within range of anything that magical, but if he did, I wasn’t taking bets on who would be expected to clear up after the new puppy. I was still definitely out of favour with Molly, although how exactly she thought I was responsible for Nightingale’s current predicament, I couldn’t quite tell. I wasn’t going to ask, either. My interest in research doesn’t go as far as finding out what Molly would do to me if I really annoyed her. “Where in Camberwell?”

“Stanley Street,” answered Nightingale. He was beginning to wriggle uncomfortably, I noticed, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when he followed it with, “Please may I tell you about it later?” He couldn’t quite hide his relief when I started nodding; he’d disappeared back under the sheets before I’d finished.

“I still think you should try and get some sleep,” I told him. It was difficult to tell what his reaction was, since all I could now see was the top of his head, but I obviously wasn’t going to get anything more out of him right then. I probably shouldn’t have been questioning him at all, although considering he’d started the discussion himself, I didn’t feel too guilty. “You know where I am if you want anything.”

“Thank you.” His voice was muffled a bit, since he’d buried his head under the bedclothes, but I heard the next bit clearly enough. “Peter? If you go and look and I’m wrong, promise you won’t get shrunk too?”

I hadn’t even thought of that. I suppose it should have occurred to me, really, but I’d been focused on trying to fix things for Nightingale, rather than the potential for getting caught up by whatever had happened to him myself. Now that he’d put the thought in my head, though, I couldn’t get rid of it.

It didn’t stop me getting in touch to find out who’d had the evening shift at Camberwell police station the day before. As it turned out, he was there when I rang, so they put him on the phone to speak to me. PC Steve Harris sounded young, and eager, and utterly terrified when I casually dropped into conversation that he’d probably given Nightingale food poisoning.

“Shit,” he groaned. “Why do I always manage to fuck everything up?”

“Not necessarily everything,” I said. “You called us when you thought there was something weird going on. Not everybody does.”

“There wasn’t anything, though, was there?” I could almost feel his embarrassment over the wires. “Your boss went over the whole place and he didn’t find anything, and mine thinks I dragged a DCI out on a wild goose chase, and now… oh, god, I’m going to end up doing security in some supermarket doorway, aren’t I?”

PC Harris was obviously not having a good day. I managed to reassure him - from the Folly end of things, anyway, since I couldn’t do anything about his own governor thinking he was an idiot - and asked him if he’d mind going over what had happened the previous night.

“We still need to file a report,” I explained, “And I’ve just got to check a few of the details, because my boss isn’t sure if he’s got everything down correctly after he started feeling rough.”

“Yeah! Yeah, sure.” He was obviously desperate to redeem himself, poor sod. “I thought he looked a bit off. I did ask, you know, but he said he was all right… oh, god. Do you want… should I tell you now, or do I have to come in to the station, or…”

“You’re on duty, aren’t you? I’ll come over.” That was probably easiest all round. I could hardly tell Harris to come to the Folly. Apart from anything else, I didn’t trust Molly not to frighten him to death. Especially not if she found out he was responsible for the sandwiches.

We met in a greasy spoon just off the Walworth Road. I tried not to notice the conspicuous absence of Skygarden Tower as I came through Elephant and Castle, but it was difficult not to. Once I’d met up with PC Harris, though, I had other things to think about. He looked like I’d expected him to from the way he’d sounded; floppy blond fringe, puppy dog expression, and only his uniform standing between him and being IDd every time he went into a pub.

“Hi,” he said sheepishly once I’d introduced myself. “Do you want anything?”

“Will you take it personally if I get this?”

He buried his face in his hands. “I honestly didn’t think… am I in trouble?”

“Not with me,” I told him. “I just want to know what you found that Nightingale came out to have a look at.” We both got coffee, which came in those styrofoam cups that you can gouge patterns in with your fingernails, and sat down. “What made you think something weird was going on?” And what made you call us, I wondered, because Harris didn’t seem the type to have enough experience to know about the Folly.

“We thought it was a break-in at first,” he told me. “It was going to make a nice change from a routine patrol, that’s what I thought. So I went out - I mean me and Perez, but he said I was being stupid... maybe I was, really, but the woman who called us out, she seemed scared, and I thought…”

I hoped Harris was better at interviewing witnesses than he was at being one. We’d barely started, and I was already beginning to feel as if I was being tied in knots by the effort to unravel his explanation.

“Scared of what?”

“Something that wasn’t there,” said Harris. He looked as if he was confused by his own answer, but he could see I wasn’t laughing at him, so he carried on. “The building’s a conversion, and they haven’t sold all the flats yet. There’s an empty one. That’s where she thought someone had got in; there were noises like there was someone moving around inside.”

“But there was nobody there?” I guessed.

“I heard them too,” he assured me, “But yeah, there wasn’t anyone. The whole flat was empty, apart from some kids’ toys. I dunno, they didn’t seem the sort of thing for the builders to leave behind. Perez thought they’d probably found them when they were renovating and forgot to move them, but…” He hesitated, probably aware of how thin the story sounded. “They looked like someone had been playing with them.”

“Are you trying to tell me you think this place is haunted?”

He didn’t answer that directly - well, you wouldn’t, would you, unless you were absolutely sure of who you were talking to, and Harris probably felt like he’d put his foot in it more than enough already. He just looked uncomfortable and said,

“She did.”

“On the basis of some toys left in an empty flat?”

“It wasn’t just that. We had to show her there was nothing there, like, after we’d looked ourselves, obviously, and then when she went back in her flat there’d been stuff moved. And there wasn’t anyone there, either. She lives on her own.”

“You’re sure about this? She hadn’t just moved it herself and forgotten?” I asked. It has been known. People think they’ve got a poltergeist, and actually it’s a memory problem or next door’s cat. Not that anyone ever wants to admit to that. If you’ve sworn blind there’s a ghost in your house, it’s difficult to regain your dignity when it’s proven there wasn’t.

“She was absolutely terrified,” insisted Harris. “And… well… it seemed a bit weird.”

It did, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was a Falcon case. “Did you have any sort of evidence?”

“Of something that wasn’t there?” He had a point, of sorts, although there’s usually something if you know what you’re looking for. “I couldn’t prove we didn’t see anything. They do have security cameras, but they’re forever on the blink, apparently. Every time they send an engineer out they go wrong again.”

That did sound more like a Falcon case. I took a swig of coffee before I answered, and then regretted it. It had been bad before it went cold; now it was definitely terrible.

“Who told you to call us?”

“Nobody told me to.” Harris looked embarrassed again. “Just… can I level with you?” I nodded. “Perez was pissing himself at me taking ghosts seriously, and I’d had enough, because he’s always going on like he’s better than me - and then I remembered my guv’nor muttering about some unit that deals with…well…”

“Weird shit?” I suggested.

“Yeah. That. So I called in and asked about it, and then he started wetting himself too, so I thought, sod it, nobody ever takes me seriously anyway.” It was fairly easy to see why, when he was glaring defiantly from beneath his fringe in a way that made him look nearly as young as Nightingale currently was, but then again, he was the one who had noticed there was something a bit off about the supposed crime scene. “I only meant to ask if there was something I could do,” he went on. “She was so scared, and Perez was being a dick.” Which was just the sort of explanation that was likely to have got my boss out of the Folly to come and take a look at an otherwise not-particularly-urgent matter, because not only can you not have magical stuff terrifying the public, but it’s definitely unthinkable to have someone laugh in their face when they ask for help.

“What happened when Inspector Nightingale got there?”

“Well, he asked us for a report, and then he told Perez to go back to the station and tell them he was on the scene, and then once Perez went he asked me to tell him the bits I’d missed out… is he usually like that?”

“Sometimes,” I said neutrally, without asking ‘like what’. I could imagine how impressed Nightingale would have been by Harris’s partner - who was nowhere to be seen again tonight, I noticed. “Where’s Perez now?”

“It’s his night off. Did you want to speak to him too?”

“Is he likely to tell me anything except that he thinks my job’s a waste of time?”

Harris grimaced. “Probably not.”

“I’ll pass, then, thanks. But go on.”

“Your guv’nor didn’t laugh at me. He looked a bit surprised when he came in, I remember, but he didn’t say why. And he looked all over the place, not just in the empty flat. It took ages.”

The more he told me, the more I was convinced there was something magical going on in those flats that Nightingale hadn’t noticed - or, for some reason, wasn’t telling me about. I was about to ask if Harris could take me along for a look, but I was interrupted by a crackle from the Airwave at his belt. He glanced nervously at me.

“You’d better answer.”

He did, and it turned out he was wanted up Denmark Hill to help deal with some drunks having an argument. Standard fare at his stage of career. I let him go. The flats weren’t going anywhere, and I had my other case to worry about, too. He promised to show me round the following morning; that would have to do.

Molly met me at the door when I got back to the Folly, but only to glare fiercely at me and warn me to be quiet, which I assumed meant Nightingale was finally asleep. I avoided any argument by retreating to the Tech Cave, opening a beer, and firing the computer up again. Dr Walid’s full report still hadn’t come through, but he had emailed me a preliminary one. It didn’t add much to what I already knew, although it did clear up one thing me and Guleed had both noticed. It appeared the flames had cauterised the head wound, which explained the lack of blood and also suggested the house-breaker had been hit before he’d managed to set himself on fire. It might even have been the reason his spell had gone wrong. It would have been difficult to hold the formae in his head when his brains were oozing out of the back of it, after all.

With that delightful thought to dwell on, I decided to call it a night. Not that going to bed made much difference to my chances of actually going to sleep. Having your boss turned into a ten-year-old, unidentified ghosts or similar running riot in a publicly accessible building, and a particularly horrible magically-affected corpse to deal with isn’t a recipe for a nice restful night. I stared at the ceiling for a long time, but I must have dropped off eventually, because the loud thump that echoed through the darkness in the small hours definitely woke me up. I sat up and listened; there was something making faint shuffling noises in the corridor, trying not to be heard. The Folly has extensive magical defences - against what, I’m not entirely sure, but they’re probably proof against the worst sort of thumping, shuffling thing, so I pulled my trousers on and went to investigate. It turned out the thud was easily explained. Nightingale had measured his length on the floor, although he had managed to get as far as sitting up again by the time I got there. He looked up at me guiltily as I approached.

“What happened?”

“Fell over,” he said faintly.

“I got that far,” I answered. “I meant, did you trip, or what?” Not to mention what was he doing creeping round the Folly in the middle of the night, but no doubt we could get to that in due course.

“No.” He was shivering noticeably; I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to carry on the conversation in the corridor. It wasn’t cold by Folly standards, but that didn’t mean it was warm, either. Nightingale, however, didn’t seem in any hurry to get back to his feet. I wasn’t sure if he wanted help, but I didn’t want to stand there all night, so I held out a hand.

“Up you get,” I prompted him. He tried to manage by himself, but in the end he let me help, and leant against my side to stop himself swaying on his feet. His head was uncomfortably hot on my elbow.

“I don’t feel well,” he said. I could have worked that out without him telling me, but if he was admitting to it it must have been bad. He didn’t make any objection when I put a hand on his shoulder to keep him upright and steered him back to his room, although he assured me feverishly several times that he hadn’t meant to wake me up.

“I wasn’t asleep,” I lied. I wasn’t likely to get back to sleep any time soon, either, I suspected. It wasn’t that I’d never had to handle a case myself before, but at least I’d known my boss was around to supervise if need be. At the moment, I was all too clear I was having to supervise him, which wasn’t a reassuring thought. At least he managed to put himself back to bed. I don’t think either of us would ever have recovered if I’d had to tuck him up and read him a story, although I did have to get the lid off the Calpol for him. Someone, presumably Molly, had helpfully put the bottle on the bedside table, so at least I didn’t have to go looking for it.

“Thank you,” murmured Nightingale.

“Are you going to be okay?” He didn’t look as if he was, lying there limply and looking blearily up at me, but he nodded, so I turned to go back to my own bed. I might as well not have bothered. I hadn’t even got as far as the door by the time he was sick again.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

It wasn’t any worse than some of the things I’d had to clean up on a Saturday night in Covent Garden. The difference was that I could usually drop the perpetrators off in a cell, rather than have to perch at the foot of their bed for the next few hours while they alternated between throwing up and trying not to make any sort of noise that might possibly be interpreted as making a fuss about it. I’d half-expected Molly to show up, but she was obviously sound asleep somewhere in the Folly’s depths - lucky for her, I thought, after yet another round of mopping up after Nightingale - so it was down to me to sit there. I can’t say I didn’t feel awkward about it, but he was only little, even if he was still my boss. It would have been just as bad if I’d gone off and left him to deal with it on his own.

Nightingale fell asleep eventually; at least, I was pretty sure he had, from the way he had stopped trying to stifle the occasional whimper when he shifted. I crept out then, and he didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t think he was going to be in a fit state to pay much attention to things even when he woke up again, which might make it easier to dissuade him from taking an active part in an ongoing murder investigation, but wasn’t going to help me get any more detail out of him about what he’d found at the Camberwell flat. There wasn’t any point in worrying about that at the moment, though. I did anyway.

Chapter Text

Nightingale didn’t appear for breakfast in the morning, which didn’t surprise me. Molly did appear, and actually provided breakfast, which did. Admittedly she still didn’t look too impressed with me, but she’d gone to her usual lengths with the cooking, so there were plenty of sausages left over for Toby.

“I have to go out this morning,” I told Molly when she reappeared to clear the plates. “Can you keep an eye on Nightingale?” She gave me a look as if to indicate she would do that anyway, and she’d do a better job of it than I would. “He had me up half the night, you know, it’s not as if I haven’t taken a turn.” Her expression didn’t change. “I’m not going to be long. I’m just going to see if I can work out what’s happened to him.” She almost looked approving at that, but remembered I wasn’t to be forgiven yet in time to turn it into a glare before she took the plates away.

Having covered the arrangements at the Folly, I got the Asbo out of the coach house and crossed the river again. I’d picked the wrong time of day, really. It would probably have been quicker to walk, but I reached Camberwell police station eventually. PC Harris was waiting for me as promised - his mate Perez was still keeping out of the way, which didn’t exactly disappoint me. Harris was still desperate to try and atone for his mere existence, judging by the eager way he greeted me, but he calmed down a bit once we were away from the station. He obviously viewed me as a sympathetic ear. At any rate, his directions were a lot more lucid than his explanation of the previous night had been.

What he’d failed to mention was what exactly the flats had been converted from. It was, architecturally, unmistakable, even before we’d reached the end of the street where it was sited. There were buildings just like it all over London - large, imposing, Victorian yellow and red brick, with enormous sash windows to let the light in. A fair number of them were still in use for their original purpose, which only went to show that the London School Board had known what they were doing when they’d chosen their design. The carved stonework on one wall proudly proclaimed that Stanley Street School had opened in 1886. Presumably its closure had been considerably more recent than that. The brass plate at the door of ‘Stanley House’ didn’t bother to tell us, only instructed us to press the bell of whichever flat we were visiting, so I asked Harris instead.

“I think it was a few years ago now?” he told me uncertainly. “They were still converting the flats when I first started here, I remember, because things kept going missing and the builders complained. I got sent out to have a look.” He stopped, as if he had been hit by a sudden realisation. “I think that’s when I first heard someone mention your unit. Because the stuff all reappeared eventually, just in really weird places.”

That figured. Ghosts are generally a bit on the ethereal side for moving things about, but it’s surprising the number of people who assume they can. No doubt Harris’s superior officer had been a bit terse when he came back to report the existence of the Stanley Street poltergeist. I could see why he might have been goaded into calling us when it seemed like it had done a reappearing act.

“You know it’s probably not a poltergeist?” I told him, just to make sure that was what he was thinking about. He went red immediately, so I’d definitely hit the nail on the head. “They aren’t as common as people think. It could be any number of other…” I hesitated; there was no point having him think that I was taking the piss too. “Other weird things.”

“You mean I’m not just a gullible prick?” he asked hopefully.

“Almost definitely not,” I assured him, and rang the doorbell of no. 5.

“Hello?” said a tinny voice through the entry speakerphone. This was Louise Polmont, who’d called the police the other night and sounded as if she was still scared of every unexpected noise. Harris had told me he’d let her know we’d be coming, so I just said,

“Police?”

“Oh! I’ll let you in.”

I let Harris push the door open as it buzzed, and followed him inside. The vestigia was unmistakeable as soon as we entered, but I’d hardly made it across the hall before the smell of fear and brick dust and burning got so strong I involuntarily recoiled. If Nightingale hadn’t noticed that, there was something seriously wrong. Harris seemed blithely unaware of it, but he had seen my reaction.

“Am I missing something?” he asked me. “You did it too.”

“Did what?”

“Looked like someone slapped you in the face as soon as you reached that spot there,” he said. “Your boss did the same thing.”

I didn’t know whether to be more relieved that Nightingale had noticed the vestigia after all, or worried that there was something so bad about it that he had visibly reacted at the time and then completely forgotten to mention it to me. I didn’t have time to say anything about it to Harris, though, because Louise appeared on the stairs then. She visibly relaxed when she saw Harris, although she still looked a bit warily at me. I concentrated on ignoring the max strength vestigia, with difficulty, and introduced myself.

“My name’s Peter Grant. I think you might have spoken to my boss a couple of nights ago?”

“Oh. Yes. Mr… I mean Inspector Nightingale?” I nodded, and the doubtful look left her face. “Oh, that’s all right, then. Sorry. It’s just… I wasn’t sure if you were going to be like that other one.”

“I’m sorry about him,” said Harris awkwardly, seeing she obviously meant the usefully absent Perez. I wondered vaguely how they had been paired up. Harris seemed as relieved to be minus his partner as Louise was.

She blushed. “It doesn’t matter. Do you want a cup of tea? Is there something else… have you found who it was yet?”

Harris looked at me for guidance.

“Tea would be great, thanks,” I said. Always accept a cup of tea if you’re trying to show you’re friendly. Especially if you’re thirsty anyway, and the alternative is likely to be obtained somewhere catering to the horrible standards of Harris’s ref haunts. We followed Louise upstairs to her flat, and sat down on the sofa while she put the kettle on. The builders hadn’t done a bad job of the conversion. The lounge and kitchen were open-plan, so we could talk while she was making the tea, and I could have a look round to see if there was any way someone could have got in without being obvious about it. The rubble and screams had died away up here, I noticed. There was nothing except for a faint smell of chalk and the rustle of dusty textbooks.

“Have you found out anything?” asked Louise, while she fiddled round with teabags and milk. She didn’t look the sort you’d have expected to be afraid of ghosts. She was short and practical-looking, with mousy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, glasses, and wearing Wallace and Gromit slippers which gave the strong impression that she’d have been quite up for the ridiculous if it had just been a little less disturbing. “It’s the not knowing that I mind.”

“We are looking into it,” I assured her as she brought over a couple of mugs. She went back for her own, and brought a plate of custard creams while she was at it. Harris accepted one enthusiastically, while I carried on. “I just need to check a few details with you to make sure we’re following all the leads we can.”

She nodded, and sat down. “Go on.”

“Do you know anything about the history of this building?”

She looked faintly surprised, but shook her head. “Not really. I keep meaning to look it up. Obviously I know it was a school, but apart from that… I just liked the big windows. I hate living in dark poky holes. You know what renting can be like. I was determined to get somewhere that let the daylight in when I bought my own place, but now I’m wondering what else it lets in, too.”

That put paid to the hope that she might be able to explain the vestigia in the hallway, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Something that had left traces that strong must be recorded somewhere.

“You thought someone had broken in next door?”

“I did at first. I wouldn’t have minded that so much. I mean, you can do something about actual people you can see, can’t you.”

I wasn’t sure things were always as simple as that, but I nodded anyway, and gradually encouraged her to go over what she had told Nightingale the other night. She had heard odd noises before, she said, but nothing like that night. Knowing that the next door flat was empty, and that there were sometimes problems with the entryphone, she had immediately been suspicious when she heard someone moving about. She was quite definite that that was what she had heard.

“They couldn’t exactly have been being quiet, either, because that’s one of the original walls. That’s the other thing I liked about this place. It has some pretensions to sound insulation.”

I got the impression Louise Polmont had quite a bit of experience of the rental market, and was pleased to be out of it.

“I wouldn’t have called the police if I hadn’t been sure there was someone in there,” she went on. “Do you think I enjoy setting myself up as the silly paranoid little woman?” Harris went red at that point, so I assumed she was making a dig at the initial response of him and Perez - or Perez, at any rate. “But we couldn’t find anyone. Then I came back in here - I’d left the door unlocked, which was stupid, I know, but I thought with two policemen in the building… anyway, there’d been stuff moved about.”

“Nothing taken?”

She shook her head. “It was more as if someone had been fiddling about with ornaments that took their fancy. Those,” she pointed at a couple of model Ferraris on a shelf, “were lined up on the floor for a race, for one thing.” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “My money would be on the 750.”

“But no sign of anyone still here?”

“It was as if whoever it was had vanished into thin air.”

Perhaps they had, I thought but didn’t say. There was definitely something odd about the former school building. It was unlikely to be a ghost as such - they don’t tend to come and play with your toy cars - but something had obviously been there. “Was this the first time you’d noticed anything like that?”

Louise looked thoughtful. “Like that, yes.”

“And not like that?” I asked, sensing something left unspoken. Louise laughed again, with definite nervousness this time. Harris was surprised enough by my question that he stopped longingly eyeing the custard creams for a moment and sat up straight to listen to the answer.

“Footsteps, sometimes. Running in the corridor. I mean, it’s a shared building, you expect to hear other people, but they didn’t sound right somehow. The fire alarm’s gone off at odd times once or twice, and none of us knew why. That sort of thing.” She looked at us with a touch of defiance. “I told your boss that, too, and he didn’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” I pointed out. Harris hurriedly shoved another custard cream in his mouth to stop it gaping open at Louise’s candid explanation.

“No. Sorry, I know. I just… it’s not the sort of thing you tell people. It makes them think you’re a bit odd.”

“Welcome to my world,” I said.

“Do you believe in ghosts, then?” Harris asked, somehow managing not to spray crumbs everywhere.

“Can you prove they don’t exist?”

“I don’t mind one way or the other,” said Louise, “as long as they leave my stuff alone. I’d rather have a friendly ghost than an unfriendly intruder.” Thereby proving that she was probably more sensible about the weirder side of life than most people. I still didn’t conjure a werelight in front of her to see if her ghost appeared. I was supposed to be discreet about that sort of thing in public. “Your boss said he’d check for anything unusual. Is that what he meant?”

“Probably,” I agreed, because that meant I didn’t have to tell her there were worse things he could have found. I was more convinced than ever that he had found something here. I still had no idea what it was, though. “Was he all right when you spoke to him?” I asked cautiously.

“Oh, yes. It was that other one, the first one with you,” she glanced apologetically at Harris, “that I wouldn’t give house room.” That wasn’t quite what I had meant, but presumably she hadn’t noticed anything unusual about Nightingale. Unusual for him, that is.

“He didn’t tell you what he’d found?”

“He said he hadn’t found anything to worry about, but he’d send someone to have another look in daylight. I thought that’s why you’d come.”

“That’s right,” I agreed hurriedly.

“I got an awful fright while he was looking round.” She looked at Harris again. “I think you’d gone to help, and I was on my own. And suddenly about half the car alarms outside went off. I couldn’t think what it was at first.”

I could. Magic. Which Nightingale also hadn’t mentioned. Either it had been him who had caused it, or, more likely, whatever he had tripped over.

“The fire alarm went off just after you’d left, too,” Louise told Harris. “It’s done that before, though, like I said. I don’t know who they used as electrical contractors when they did this place up. A man came out yesterday to look at it, and he said the whole circuitboard needed replacing.”

Almost definitely magic, then. I could imagine what it had looked like, although if it had already been replaced, there was no way of confirming my suspicions. “Had my boss left as well?” I asked.

“I think so. Only just. Oh, but he must have done, because he didn’t appear when we all had to go and stand in the car park until the fire brigade arrived. I almost didn’t mind that. At least I was with other people for a bit.” She finished her tea and stood to take her mug to the sink; I decided it was a good point to go and have a poke around the rest of the building for myself. Harris caught my eye, so I gave a faint nod, and we both stood up too, thanked her for the tea and the information, and excused ourselves to go and look round.

We must have looked at least as thoroughly as Nightingale had done, but neither of us found anything. I left Harris to search for any more mundane clues, and went hunting for signs of magic myself. Nothing matched the vestigia in the hallway, though. The empty flat, where things had apparently started, was strangely free of even the faintest trace. The toys Harris had mentioned had gone. He hadn’t moved them, he confirmed, when I asked him, but no doubt the estate agent or whoever was responsible for dealing with potential buyers didn’t want any old junk cluttering the place up. That was another thing to find out about, but Harris could check out the seller when he got back to the station. I knocked on the doors of the other occupied flats, but came up against the same problem that me and Guleed had had going door-to-door on the other case the day before. The people who lived here were all of working age, and it was a Thursday morning. I did risk casting a werelight when I was sure no one was looking, but no ghosts appeared. Altogether, Stanley House was remarkably still and peaceful, if you discounted that patch at the foot of the stairs. It was a deeply unsatisfactory search. I was certain I was missing something, but how, I couldn’t work out.

I had to call it a day eventually, because Harris had to get back to his regular duty, and I needed to check in at the Folly myself. Partly to see if Dr Walid’s full report on our burned burglar had come through, and partly to see if Nightingale was up to explaining what he could remember from the other night.

The traffic wasn’t much better on the way back, which is to say, it was fairly standard for London. Toby came snuffling up to greet me on my return, in case I happened to have been shopping for sausages, but lost interest when he realised I hadn’t. From Molly I gathered that Nightingale was awake, but not up, so I went upstairs and knocked on his door.

“Who is it?” It was still strange hearing him sounding so young.

“It’s Peter. Can I come in?”

“Yes,” said Nightingale, so I opened the door to find him sitting up in bed and looking hopefully at me. “Molly said you’d gone out. Have you been at work?”

“Sort of,” I told him.

“Are you going to tell me about it?”

“I thought we could compare notes. How are you feeling?”

“I’m nearly better now,” he said. I thought he was probably being optimistic - he still looked pale and worn out to me - but at least it was an improvement on when I’d last seen him. “But Molly won’t let me get up.” Considering I’d mentioned the previous night to Molly and told her to make sure he was all right, that didn’t entirely surprise me. I was fairly sure that Nightingale was still perfectly capable of ignoring her, too, so he couldn’t have minded that much.

“Don’t look at me,” I told him. “I’m not crossing Molly. Anyway, you don’t look as if it’ll do you any harm to stay put for a bit.” He didn’t argue, so I knew I had him. “How nearly is nearly?”

“Almost nearly,” said Nightingale, a bit guiltily.

“You don’t think Molly’s got a point, then?”

“But I can’t stay asleep all the time and there isn’t anything to do.”

I don’t know what I’d expected as a response, but it hadn’t been a startlingly child-like complaint that he was, basically, bored stiff. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me, really - grown-up Nightingale was hardly one for enforced inactivity, so I should have expected the younger version to be even worse - but I hadn’t a clue how to entertain him. I doubted the Telegraph crossword would appeal to a fidgety little boy, but I suggested it anyway. Nightingale pulled a face.

“Books?” I tried, but I knew as I said it that most of the contents of the Folly’s libraries would probably interest Nightingale about as much as a school textbook at the moment. In fact, some of them definitely were textbooks from his old school. Not really the sort of thing to give a small kid who was clearly still out of sorts. As I’d half expected, he just sighed expressively. “What do you want to do, then?”

“I don’t know!” he answered, frustrated. “Something!” He kicked irritably at the bedclothes. “It’s too hot, and I want to get up, and you’re all making a fuss…”

I decided the most sensible thing to do was ignore the fact that my boss was on the edge of a temper tantrum, because the critical thinking skills of a stroppy convalescent ten-year-old mixed with the ability to perform complicated magic seemed a potentially terrible combination, and I didn’t want to provoke any more disasters.

“Did you notice the vestigia in those flats the other night?” I interrupted instead. Nightingale gaped at me, so it at least served to distract him from getting any more annoyed. “In the hallway, near the stairs.”

“I… I think so,” he said uncertainly, after a pause. “Yes. Something happened there, didn’t it? Something horrible.”

“You don’t have any idea what it was?”

“No. It was old. Old like me,” said Nightingale, quite definitely. “I wouldn’t have been at the Folly then.”

If he hadn’t been at the Folly… “You’d have been at school.”

“Not that one, though. Mine wasn’t a bit like that.”

I was sure of that, but it didn’t stop me wondering if there was something in Stanley Street that had recognised someone belonging to its own era and reached out with disastrous effect. I couldn’t work out how or what or any useful details like that, though, so I just asked,

“You said there weren’t any ghosts. Did you find anything else?”

Nightingale wrinkled his face up in thought. “Don’t think so,” he said eventually.

“You don’t think so? Don’t you know?”

“I wasn’t feeling very well,” he admitted, looking a little shamefaced. “I might not have been concentrating.” This from someone who frequently reminded me that if I developed a bit more concentration I might make fewer mistakes.

“You could have asked me to come and help,” I pointed out.

“You were busy.”

“Not that busy.” Bev might have disagreed with that. She was probably still wondering what exactly I’d abandoned her for; not that I was in a desperate hurry to tell her. I wondered how the various agreements - whatever they were - would stand when we finally had to admit that Nightingale was now a small boy who was currently trying very hard not to look as if he was waiting to be told off about his sudden return to childhood. “I’m busy now, though, because you’re not going to be turning up for work like that, are you?”

“But I’m not really ill. You could just let me get up…”

I wasn’t quite sure how to tell him I’d actually meant I couldn’t take a literal child to work with me, however not-ill, because he’d almost certainly have been annoyed however I’d put it. Stalling him seemed to be the best option.

“If you get up Molly’ll think you want lunch.”

Nightingale hesitated at that. It obviously hadn’t occurred to him as a possibility. From the expression on his face, he wished I hadn’t thought of it either.

“I don’t think I do,” he said, sounding absolutely certain that he didn’t. “But…”

“I can manage,” I assured him. “Honestly.”

“…but you’ve just spent all morning looking for ghosts when we’ve got a real body,” he protested. “You need to concentrate on the important bit, and you’re not.”

“I think having the only senior officer qualified to deal with said body now under the legal age of responsibility is a bit of a problem, too,” I pointed out. Nightingale frowned, as if he was going to argue. “I’d rather not be single-handedly responsible for the whole of London’s magical population.”

“It’s not just London,” Nightingale reminded me, which frankly wasn’t reassuring in the slightest. “And you’re not. I’m not dead. I’m just a bit shorter than usual.”

I didn’t feel up to explaining to him that it was a bit more complicated than that, not least because I wasn’t sure he’d believe me. I could imagine his childhood reading tastes extending to the sort of thing that presented boys carrying out a full police investigation as completely rational behaviour, with absolutely no career consequences for the police officer who’d let them and definitely no questions being asked by the IPCC. The girls, on the other hand, presumably stayed at home and did the washing up.

“You’re off sick,” I told him. “Dr Walid said so.”

“That was yesterday,” said Nightingale obstinately. I don’t think it was just that he was bored. He was clearly still aware that there are some things even a DCI has to get out of bed for, one of those being a full-blown murder investigation.

“He said forty-eight hours.” That had the advantage of being true, as well as easier to explain than you’re not old enough, even though you are. “I’ll be in trouble if I ask you for help before then.” Nightingale wriggled, in a way that suggested he wasn’t going to manage to pretend he was basically fine for very much longer. “It’s not as if I’m going head on to tackle our killer today. It’ll all be paperwork, won’t it? I can do that.”

“Why aren’t you doing it, then?”

I wasn’t doing it because I was standing arguing with my boss instead, but I didn’t think he’d have appreciated me saying so, either as an adult or as his current grumpy little incarnation.

“I’ve checked the initial cryptopathology report,” I said. “Don’t you think you’d better go back to sleep for a bit?”

Nightingale glared at me for a moment, but then he wriggled again, and sighed.

“All right,” he agreed. “But only if you promise to stop worrying about why I’m not grown up now, and concentrate on some proper work. What if somebody else gets killed in the meantime?”

Chapter Text

He was right, of course, but when I got hold of Guleed to ask how things were going at her end she hadn’t made any more progress than I had.

“The Smiths decided to fly home early when they heard what happened,” she told me. “I’m going over to speak to them in a couple of hours, if you want to join me.”

I accepted the offer, which left me just enough time for a quick trip to Hamleys. Nightingale had seemed quite taken with his Lego set the day before, I remembered. If he wanted something to keep him occupied, he could hardly complain about me buying him toys when most of the boxes stated in large print that even he was more or less in the intended age range. I didn’t think Star Wars would really be his thing, though, so I ended up buying an enormous Tower Bridge set that I could only ever have dreamt of owning as a kid, and dropped it off with Molly to give to him later. Then I headed over to the suburban street where the Smiths were waiting. So was Guleed. Her car was parked in front of the spot I pulled into, so she got out and stood waiting while I finished parking.

“Been here long?” I asked.

“Not really. How’s your boss?”

“He’ll live,” I said vaguely. Sooner or later, I knew, we were going to have to come up with a story to explain Nightingale’s continued non-appearance - although persuading him that it was necessary might be the hardest part. I wasn’t sure he’d quite grasped the fact that remembering being an adult and actually being one were two different things. “How are we doing this?”

“The weird stuff’s yours,” she said. “I’m strictly interested in the everyday.”

“The weird stuff is my everyday,” I pointed out.

“You shouldn’t mind handling it, then,” she answered cheerfully. With that, we went up to the door and knocked. The Smiths had obviously been expecting us, because they both came to let us in, although it was Barbara who led the way. She was pale underneath her Spanish holiday tan, presumably affected by the news of what had happened in the back garden. Her husband hovered in the background, warily keeping an eye on us for any signs we were about to upset his wife any more. There were the usual introductions, and then Barbara, still visibly nervous, offered,

“I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?”

“That would be lovely, thanks,” said Guleed. “Shall I come and help?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just headed for the kitchen, which left me with Alan Smith, aged fifty-two, engineer at Brakedales and potential Little Crocodile.

“You’d better come and sit down,” he told me grudgingly, leading me into the living room. “We weren’t expecting nothing like this when we went away. I thought it’d be nice for Barbara to get a bit of a break.” The look he gave me indicated he was more than ready to hold me responsible for his wife’s break having been so suddenly interrupted. I couldn’t exactly blame him. Having someone turn up to question you about the dead body in your back garden isn’t at the top of anyone’s post-holiday relaxation list.

“It must have been a shock for you,” I agreed.

“You can say that again. We’d been saving up for this holiday.” He obviously wasn’t going to be pacified easily, but I managed to move him on.

“Nice to get away sometimes. What is it you do?”

“Me? It’s factory work, really. We make motor components. Been there since I left school.” That ruled out any Oxford connection, presumably, which meant I could breathe a little easier. “Barbara’s a receptionist. We’re not exactly rolling in it. I dunno what anyone would think we had worth nicking.”

I looked round the room. A TV and stereo, old but good enough quality to still be working, and a cheap DVD player plugged in. The furniture was the same, a mixture of stuff they’d obviously had for years and a few newer bits that were definitely flat-pack specials. I couldn’t see any serious thief being particularly enthused by any of it, and if the guy Dr Walid now had on his table had had any idea about what he was doing, I didn’t think he’d have been using magic to jack electricals. Not unless he had an objection to them actually working afterwards.

“No computer?” I asked, just because it was the sort of thing people expected you to ask.

“It’s upstairs. Not that it’s any use. Nobody’d want that.” Alan looked at me warily, as if he was trying to work out whether it was safe to carry on. That almost certainly meant there was something interesting about the computer, which surprised me, but I waited, trying to look inviting. “I bought it second hand just before we went away. Ours conked out, and I couldn’t afford new, with the holiday and that. I shouldn’t have bothered. Bloody thing doesn’t work. Got it home and there was a load of gritty stuff coming out the vents - like sand or something.”

“Can I have a look at it?”

“Why?” He was on the defensive straight away, so I suspected ‘second hand’ was more likely ‘off the back of a lorry outside the pub’.

“I think I might have seen something like that before. I might be able to get it working for you.” If it was like what I’d seen before, I definitely couldn’t get it working, but there was no point in telling him that.

He shrugged. “If you want, then. But I don’t see that it’s anything to do with what you’re here for.” He heaved himself off the chintz cushions and took me upstairs to a boxroom that obviously housed the computer and whatever other junk didn’t have a proper home. We both fitted in between the piles, just. He stood back while I looked at the computer. Sure enough, there was a trace of silvery dust smeared around the vents. I was pretty certain what it would look like inside, but just to be sure, I asked,

“Have you got a screwdriver?”

“Yeah. Give me a sec.” He shuffled deeper into the piles of boxes, and rummaged for a minute. “This do?”

“Thanks.” It was a decent one, but then he was an engineer. We got the casing off, Alan peering over my shoulder, interested despite himself.

“I’m not really into electronics,” he said as he saw the innards of his bargain computer, “But I’d say it’s buggered.”

He wasn’t wrong. Every component was sanded. Whoever had been responsible had been using some pretty strong magic - or had been standing practically on top of it. It didn’t prove anything much, but it had to be more than a coincidence that a week after buying a computer that had clearly been a bit too close to magical activity, the Smiths had had someone trying to open their back door with a spell.

“Looks like it,” I agreed. “Sorry. Where did you say you got it again?”

“Bought it off a guy,” said Alan evasively.

I was going to need more than that. Persuading him that I wasn’t looking for a reason to arrest him was obviously going to be difficult, though. It didn’t necessarily mean he’d done anything wrong; plenty of people instantly start feeling guilty the instant they see the police approaching.

“Whereabouts?” He still hesitated. “Look, if he’s selling people stuff that’s obviously knackered we should probably have a word with him, that’s all.”

“Down the Carpenter’s Arms. I don’t know if he goes there much, I’ve only seen him about once or twice. One of the other guys said he’d bought a telly off him and it seemed legit.”

“What does he look like?”

“Ginger, skinny, about my height?”

Again, not a lot to go on, but it was a start. And I knew someone who might have an idea who the dodgy salesman was, if I could find him and he would deign to tell me. I couldn’t help noticing it was the second time someone had mentioned a red haired male, and wondered what colour hair the failed thief had had. It had been a bit difficult to tell when I’d seen what was left of him.

“But I still don’t see what it’s got to do with someone trying to break in while we were away,” said Alan.

“Maybe he realised he’d sold you the wrong thing.”

He didn’t look convinced by that, but he couldn’t tell me anything else he thought might have been worth nicking. Barbara hadn’t managed to come up with anything particularly useful while she was with Guleed, either, so we left them with instructions to let us know if they thought of anything else, and headed back to our respective cars.

“Are you coming back to the station?” asked Guleed. I shook my head.

“Stuff to do,” I excused myself. “It’s only me, remember?” She didn’t ask any awkward questions, thankfully, because I still had no idea how we were going to explain Nightingale.

I drove back to the Folly with more questions than I’d started with, but there was no way of answering them immediately. It didn’t look as if our old adversary was involved, which was a relief, but I wasn’t any closer to working out who was, either. I parked the Asbo, still wondering whether it was worth trying to track Zach Palmer, expert on dodgy-possibly-magical-goods sold in pubs, and went inside.

Nightingale appeared from the dining room while I was still wiping my shoes on the doormat. I was surprised to see him up and dressed, although Molly was clearly taking care to make sure he didn’t catch cold. Either she’d been knitting non-stop since yesterday, or she’d turned out the Folly’s attics in search of anything that might fit - possibly the latter, since his cream woolly jumper looked as if it had last been fashionable as sportswear before the war, not to mention rather generously sized.

“I’m allowed,” he said, before I could get a word in. “Abdul came. He said I could get up. Come and help!” He practically dragged me after him, then stood looking up at me eagerly as I spotted what was spread out on the enormous dining table. Molly was at the other end of it, carefully sorting Lego bricks into piles. Toby, who had obviously worked out that whatever was going on wasn’t edible, was asleep under a chair. Considering it was evidently a project involving the whole household, Tower Bridge wasn’t quite as far advanced as you might have expected.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. Clearly, work-related matters were going to have to wait.

Nightingale just handed me the instruction book, which was enough of an answer. He caught on to how it worked pretty quickly once I started explaining, but he was clearly still having to think about it. Molly, on the other hand, was scarily good at picking out the next brick before either of us had worked out the instructions. I caught her rolling her eyes at us more than once - well, at me, anyway - while she held out what we were looking for. After a while, though, she stopped and slipped out to the kitchen.

“Dinner time,” I said. Toby looked up with interest.

“I don’t want any dinner,” said Nightingale. He was looking a bit peaky again, I noticed, but that might just have been the excitement of building Tower Bridge.

“You can come back and finish this later,” I reminded him. He looked at me as if he was about to say something, but in the end he just followed me into the atrium and sat down silently at the table. Molly had obviously been playing it safe this time, because she came in with a boiled egg and soldiers for Nightingale instead of the solidly traditional meat and two veg she gave me. He dipped one of the soldiers half-heartedly in the egg, but after about two bites he gave up and just sat watching me.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I thought you said you were feeling better.”

“Yes, but I want to stay better,” said Nightingale reasonably.

“You’ve got to eat something sooner or later.” I tried not to sound as if I thought I was coaxing a small child, but Nightingale only nodded placidly.

“Later,” he agreed. “Are you going to tell me about your case?”

I told him what Alan Smith had told me about the computer and its acquisition, and the state it had been in when I looked at it.

“So at least there’s no sign of the Faceless Man being involved,” I finished up. Or Lesley, I thought, but I didn’t say that, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about what she’d have had to say about things. She’d probably have found the idea of my boss in his current state utterly ridiculous. Nightingale looked visibly relieved.

“Good. I don’t think I really want to fight him at the moment,” he admitted. “I think he might win.”

“You could always send a few fireballs at his kneecaps,” I suggested.

“It’s not funny!” Nightingale glared at me so fiercely it was difficult not to laugh. I made the effort, though, because he looked almost annoyed enough to start practicing his aim on me if I so much as smiled, and moved on to what I hoped was safer ground.

“Well, it’s not him, so you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“Who is it, then?”

“Give me a chance!” I protested. “I haven’t exactly had long to work on it.” Nightingale didn’t stop glaring, so I asked him, “Aren’t you at least going to try and eat that?” He looked at the egg and then back at me, and shook his head. “Are you trying to get me into trouble with Dr Walid?”

“He was cross with me too,” said Nightingale. “I don’t think we should annoy him again.”

Considering I was only likely to annoy him if I couldn’t persuade my boss to do as he was told, that seemed like the responsibility was Nightingale’s. I said as much to him.

“But I’m nearly better,” he objected. “I don’t know why you’re worrying so much.”

I didn’t bother arguing, but it was pretty obvious what Molly thought about it when she came in to clear the plates. She paused and looked at Nightingale’s barely touched plate disapprovingly, then slowly turned her head to look at me.

“I know,” I said. “You try.”

Molly stared silently at Nightingale, who attempted to look as if he didn’t know what she meant for at least two minutes before giving in.

“You’re not supposed to be on his side,” he complained. Molly remained impassive. “I don’t need to go back to bed, and we haven’t finished Tower Bridge.” If he hadn’t immediately had to try and hide the fact that he was yawning, he might have got away with it, but as it was, Molly only narrowed her eyes at him.

“Me and Molly promise not to do it without you. That’s right, isn’t it?” I chipped in.

Molly nodded, without taking her eyes off Nightingale. He tried to resist, but he clearly wasn’t up to it.

“If I have to,” he said grumpily, heading for the stairs with the greatest of reluctance. I waited for a while in case he reappeared, but apparently he was following instructions this time. Toby was starting to give me pointed looks, as well, so I got up and fetched his lead.

The walk wasn’t as much help for thinking as I’d hoped it might be, but Toby seemed happy. He trotted back in happily enough afterwards, though, probably because his nose told him Molly was cooking something. He sniffed the air expectantly and dragged me in the direction of the kitchen before I could get his lead off. I let go, rather than end up flat on my face. By the time I caught him up, he was sitting on the tiles wagging his tail hopefully at Molly, who was demurely scraping the partly-cooked filling into a pie as if neither of us existed.

“Is that for tomorrow?” I asked as I bent to unclip Toby’s lead. Molly nodded. I was about to tell Toby he was out of luck, but he scampered back to the kitchen door as soon as he was free, which was surprising until I turned round and saw him wagging even more vigorously at Nightingale, who was hesitating in the doorway. Presumably Toby thought he was more likely to play with him now.

“I woke up,” said Nightingale, when he saw me looking. Since neither me or Molly immediately chased him, he came into the kitchen. “Could I have some water, please?” Molly put the pie to one side and went to fetch a glass, but I was less convinced that was all he had come for. The Folly might have been old fashioned, but it still had full indoor plumbing. He could have got himself a glass of water in the bathroom if he had wanted to. It would have been cold, too. It usually was even when you were trying to wash in it.

Nightingale perched himself carefully on the edge of one of the kitchen chairs to wait. I pulled out another one and sat down beside him, which made him look up just long enough to inadvertently catch my eye. He looked away again quickly, but he didn’t quite manage to hide the uncomfortable way he was hunched over.

“Does it hurt?” I asked, since I was still supposed to be responsible for making sure he didn’t need to be dragged back to UCH. He looked at me again, reluctantly.

“I can’t sleep.”

“You must have been asleep if you woke up,” I pointed out. “Have you been dreaming again?” He shook his head, but I wasn’t sure if he meant it, or if he just wanted me to talk about something else. That was easy enough. Someone had got him some slippers from somewhere. Bright blue with dinosaurs wasn’t his usual style, so of course I commented on it.

“Nice slippers.”

Nightingale looked down at his feet. “Dinosaurs,” he observed. “They don’t look a bit like the ones at the Crystal Palace, do they?” I suppose I shouldn’t really have been surprised that was his reference point. “This one’s a triceratops,” he added, pointing at his left foot, “and I thought this one was a brontosaurus, but Abdul said it was a diplodocus.”

If he wanted me to give the casting vote, he was out of luck. I couldn’t quite tell, but I got the definite impression he was being deadly serious, and discussing precisely which smiley cartoon dinosaur was currently adorning my boss’s right foot wasn’t something I’d been prepared for in basic training. I did ask him if he’d seen Jurassic Park, and then had to explain the plot of the film when he inevitably hadn’t. He still looked a bit bewildered when I’d finished, but he nodded politely.

“So what did you actually get up for?” I asked. “I’m assuming you didn’t just come to ask me about dinosaurs?” I didn’t get an immediate answer, mainly because Molly chose that moment to put a glass of murky-looking liquid on the table in front of us.

“No,” said Nightingale firmly. He didn’t mean the dinosaurs, either. Molly folded her arms and glowered at him, but he just sat and glared back. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to intervene in a stand-off.

“What is it?” I asked tentatively.

“Revolting,” answered Nightingale. Molly showed me a packet, which turned out to be rehydration salts.

“Is that from Dr Walid?” She nodded. Nightingale could apparently see what I was going to say next, because he sighed, took a deep breath, and sank the stuff as if it was a welcome pint on a hot day, which turned out to be a mistake. He’d hardly finished pulling a face about it before he went racing for the sink. Toby chased him, barking excitedly until he realised it wasn’t a game, at which point he came slinking back to me and sat watching warily as Nightingale made a shaky attempt to compose himself.

“That wasn’t very clever, was it?” I said. Molly instantly glared at me, then went back to looking concerned about Nightingale, who was admittedly looking a bit droopy. He didn’t seem to notice her anxiously checking his temperature with a hand on his forehead, just stood there with a bewildered expression, as if he couldn’t quite work out what had just happened.

“I think I’d better go back to bed now,” he said uncertainly.

“Good idea,” I agreed. “What are you waiting for?” Molly obviously knew the answer to that one, because she produced a cloth from somewhere and started to run the tap. “I don’t think Molly’s expecting you to scrub the sink out yourself.” Nightingale looked a bit guilty about that. “I’ll give her a hand, if you’re worried.” Molly gave me a look that clearly meant no thank you, you’d be no help whatsoever, which suited me fine, but Nightingale still hesitated.

“Can you help me first?”

“Depends what with,” I said cautiously.

“I can’t get the lid off,” was his unexpected explanation. I was puzzled for a moment until I remembered the Calpol, which was presumably what he meant. He looked as if he could do with some.

“I think I can probably manage that,” I agreed, then realised what his explanation meant. “But I thought you were supposed to tell me if there was anything wrong, not try and fix it yourself. Remember?”

Nightingale obviously did remember, because he hung his head exactly like he had never been anything other than a child who’d just been caught out doing something naughty.

“Abdul said if there was anything different,” he said. “And it wasn’t different, because I wasn’t feeling very well when he said so, either.”

It was logical up to a point, I had to admit. I could hardly blame him for having the reasoning skills of a little kid when he was one, but it didn’t make things any easier. I didn’t stop to argue about it, though. For one thing, Molly was giving me the sort of pointed look that meant she thought I should be getting on with taking Nightingale back to bed rather than still standing there.

He didn’t object when I shepherded him out of the kitchen and back upstairs, but when I went to open the bottle like he’d asked me to I noticed he was holding his hand out almost straight away to do the rest himself.

“I could do it when I was grown up,” he told me as I handed it over, flexing his fingers and looking at them in puzzlement. “Thank you.” He looked a bit wary about swallowing the stuff, which wasn’t surprising after his performance downstairs, but thankfully it didn’t cause the same reaction.

“Feeling better now?”

“No.” There was a definite note of pure not-at-all-grown-up resentment when he answered. “I was nearly better until you made me drink that awful stuff.”

“Nobody made you down it like you were on an overdue night out,” I pointed out.

“I was trying not to taste it. I wouldn’t have done that if I’d been grown up, would I?” he observed. He looked worried, as if he’d just realised that he really was a lot younger than usual. “Will you tell me if you think I’m going to do something very stupid again?”

“Only if Molly’s not listening,” I said. Nightingale managed a faint grin at that.

“I think she’s worried about me getting smaller,” he said thoughtfully.

“You can’t exactly blame her for finding it a bit unsettling,” I pointed out. “Even by magical standards it’s weird. Although I think she’d be worried about you throwing up in her sink even if you were full sized.”

“She doesn’t need to fuss. And neither do you. I don’t feel nearly as bad as I did yesterday. Nobody minded the night before, when I was grown up, and I wasn’t very well then, either.”

“That could be because you didn’t tell anyone,” I reminded him.

“That’s not the point,” said Nightingale, with childish exasperation. “It’s awfully difficult to talk to people when you’re concentrating on not being ill, anyway. I wanted to tell that boy so when he kept talking at me, but I couldn’t.”

“You never mentioned a boy. At the flat?” I wondered what else he hadn’t mentioned that might, in fact, be relevant to whatever had happened to him.

“He didn’t seem important,” Nightingale said. I don’t think I quite managed to hide my look of disbelief, because he added guiltily, “I can’t remember what he was talking about. I don’t think it was important, really. I did wish he’d shut up and go away, because I felt awful. I remember that.”

“Very enlightening,” I said. “There wasn’t any sign of him when I went round there. I don’t suppose he was… like you?”

Nightingale shook his head. “He was quite annoying.”

I couldn’t think of an answer to that, or at least not one that I could say out loud, so I just said,

“If anything else comes back to you, do you think you could actually tell me?”

Nightingale nodded this time. “But you’ve got your murder,” he told me firmly. “Can you manage on your own? Just in case,” he added, not meeting my eye. “If I’m still not very well tomorrow.”

I guessed he was feeling worse than he was letting on if he was asking me that. “I’ve done it before, haven’t I,” I reassured him.

“That was different.” He wriggled uncomfortably, and looked up at me. “I’m still responsible for you, even if you are sort of older than me now.”

I can’t say I found having a ten-year-old declare he was responsible for me particularly flattering, but it didn’t seem the time to argue.

“I’ll be fine.”