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I don’t often have cause to go to Mayfair. While much of it was built in a style which the more vulgar might refer to as a wannabe architect’s wet dream – it’s me, I’m the more vulgar – it’s also fuck-off posh and full of people who look at me with the sort of offensive sideeye which I get my regular fill of by trying to get service in a nice restaurant once or twice a year.
On this occasion however Nightingale had requested that I head out to the toffiest part of London to check in on one of his unspoken arrangements. This one had apparently been in place since at least the fifties, which surprised me.
“And you’ve waited until now to mention it?” I asked, trying not to sound too upset about it. It would do real damage to my cool and suave exterior.
Nightingale raised an eyebrow at me. This is a move which has been known to send wet behind the ears PCSOs at Falcon crime scenes sprinting for the nearest hiding place in fear, knees shaking. I, being used to it by now, rolled my eyes. “As I have said many times, Peter, if I attempted to tell you everything you need to learn at once you would be stuck in the classroom for at least the next decade. Piecemeal is what we have.”
The result of this conversation was both that I accidentally implied I would be doing my Latin homework that night instead of watching the rugby – a rookie mistake on my part I admit – and also that I agreed to head over to the Mount Street address he handed me. It was just down the street from a pub I’d been to once with an old friend from school who’d just got a job at one of the big law firms in the city.
From what I remembered, the street was rebuilt almost from the ground up in the late 1800s, around the time Victoria was starting to make gestures in the direction of popping her clogs. Most of the facades were in the Queen Anne style, which is weirdly controversial and doesn’t have much to do with that film about her with all the lesbianism. I passed by the pub, which was about half full at that time on a Saturday afternoon, then several shops at which the prices are discreetly removed from anything on display so you can look like an absolute munter when you ask how much a pair of socks is. To give a non-specific example about a handsome young police officer shopping for his dad’s birthday, you understand.
The door to the flat I was meant to visit was tucked between another residential building on one side and a luxury watchseller on the other. I wondered, as all Londoners do, who exactly you’d have to kill to afford a place like this.
I rang the bell for the second floor flat and waited until the speaker crackled. A voice which was only a fraction less posh than Nightingale’s said, “Who is it?”
“Peter Grant,” I said. “I’m here from the Folly.”
“Oh, Christ,” said the voice. “You’d best come up.”
There was an old-fashioned lift in the stairwell, of the sort where you have to close the folding gate yourself and enter into a pact with whatever god you choose to believe in. I haven’t been keen on small spaces since half an underground station fell on me, so I decided to get some of my steps in and took the stairs.
The decor inside the main part of the building was your standard twenty-first century greige walls and neutral carpet. It’s the sort of place that some people on the internet will insist is liminal. As it was, I made it to the second floor in a respectable time and found the door slightly ajar, with a man waiting for me outside it.
He was a few inches shorter than me, just enough that I worried he was going to think I was actually looking down my nose at him. He had sandy blond hair and was handsome in a delicate sort of way and, if I had to guess, was in his late thirties or early forties. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean very much amongst the London demi-monde, where I’ve met people who’ve been in their mid-forties since the Reformation.
“Afternoon,” I said. “I’m Peter. Not here in an official capacity, so you’re welcome to tell me to bugger off if you want.”
“Good afternoon,” said the man. He offered his hand. It was slim, smaller than I would have expected, but his grip was strong when I shook it. “I’m James Bigglesworth. You’d better come in, the tea’ll be ready soon enough.”
I noticed that he’d avoided my implication with some skill. When he spoke you wanted to listen, although I didn’t think it was in the same way that hearing Mama Thames speak makes you want to climb into her lap and start drooling. He was just naturally magnetic.
“Thanks,” I said, and followed him through the door. Once inside I was struck by the contrast the interior made to the dull atmosphere of the stairwell. It was decorated in a mid-century style, with colourful prints covering most of the walls of the corridor that Bigglesworth led me down towards the sitting room. Once there, I was met with several more people, none of whom I recognised and all of whom were sitting with the studied ease of men who knew an interloper was about to arrive.
“This is Grant, from the Folly,” said Bigglesworth. “Come to make sure we haven’t started planning world domination, I imagine.”
“If any of us were ever going to,” replied one of the men, a blond who looked like he might be a relative. “Dear old Erich would have done it decades ago.”
Bigglesworth looked to the ceiling as if begging for patience. It was an expression I’d seen on Nightingale’s face more than once. “Thank you, Algy,” he said. He turned to me and shook his head. “That’s Algy – my cousin and thorn in my side since the first war. In the armchair across from him is Bertie, who used to be a Lord, then on the hearthrug is Ginger. Erich is in the study.”
Ginger waved at me jauntily. I could see where he’d got the nickname.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said to the room. Bertie, a tall man with dark hair and – of all things – a monocle in one eye, came over and shook my hand in both of his.
“Quite so, old thing,” he said. There was the posh voice I was expecting. “It’s damned good to see some new blood at the Folly, they were getting past it before I ever met this lot and that’s going on – what is it now, Algy?”
“Eighty years,” said Algy, with the air of a man who has counted every minute of it.
This was more up front information that I had expected going in. Nightingale had told me that the Mount Street residence was made up of a group of men similar to himself – weird ageing which Walid had not yet managed to explain – but I had sort of imagined that they would be less willing to admit that much to a comparative stranger.
Maybe I just have one of those faces.
Bigglesworth sat me down on a spare armchair and went off somewhere, possibly to collect the tea he’d said was brewing. I sank down into the cushion and wondered whether there would be any obligation attached to it.
Algy frowned in my direction. I bore up under it. There’s a variety of frowns you get exposed to as a police officer, so it’s always good to get some practice in ignoring them.
“Casterbrook’s been closed since the second war,” he said. “How did you get involved in all this nonsense?”
I refrained from pointing out that I would definitely include him and his friends in the broad category of ‘nonsense’. “I met a ghost in Covent Garden.”
Ginger made a delighted noise. He was a little younger than the others, I thought, although not so much that the difference was notable at first glance. “I don’t think we’ve done ghosts, have we, Algy? I mean, you’d think after the mammoth…”
I made a mental note to come back to that comment, then underlined it twice and added a few exclamation points.
“No,” said Algy. “I admit we’ve been shortchanged, ghost-wise. Are they much like the stories?”
“This one turned out to be something else pretending to be a ghost,” I replied. “But the others I’ve come across have been a bit like it, yeah.”
“The benefits of staying connected with the demi-monde, one supposes,” put in Bertie. He lit a cigarette. I leaned away slightly. My cerebral tissue has enough to worry about without taking up smoking again.
“My governor went, though,” I said. “I assume you’ve met him.”
“Oh, Nightingale’s been around longer than we have,” said Ginger. “He was making trouble before I met Algy and Biggles, even, although of course we weren’t involved with all this back then.”
“Of course,” I said, as if I had been told anything about them beyond the fact of their existence. It’s a skill most of us pick up as a police officer but I learned it as a teenager when trying to figure out what I did to piss off my mum.
“We ran into each other once or twice between the wars,” offered Algy. “It’s an occupational hazard.”
“Sounds like you’ve led interesting lives,” I said. I had to wonder what career could possibly have had them meeting with Nightingale more than once. My impression of his work between the First and Second World Wars was of a sort of magical Indiana Jones, which didn’t really fit with this group. Although I had to be fair and admit that I didn’t know very much about them at all. The decor was carefully chosen not to show exactly how old they all were. There were no sepia photos, no knick-knacks you couldn’t pick up at any of a dozen vintage shops within three miles of the flat.
I wondered where they kept the ephemera of what had to be several hundred years of collective experience. I also wondered, in my more cunning and scholarly guise, if I would be able to get photos from military records or if they’d already been scrubbed.
If I had to assume their work based on their current appearance, I would have guessed that they worked mid-level admin at an office block – based on the fact they were all wearing button down shirts and smart trousers while at home. That wouldn’t be it, though, because for all that office workers are a vital part of the backbone and neural network of our society, I don’t exactly run into many people in the demi-monde that did data entry so well the universe made them functionally immortal as a reward.
“You could say that,” said Ginger. He glanced up at Algy, who made a face. “Oh, come on. If he was going to kill us he’d have done it already.”
“I might just be a timid murderer,” I put in. It seemed Algy agreed with me, although he wasn’t pleased about it.
Bigglesworth chose that moment to enter with the tea tray. It was on wheels, the sort of thing that wouldn’t be out of place in Downton Abbey. “Who’s murdering who?” He asked with mild interest as he poured out six cups.
From behind him there came a quiet huff of laughter. Another man stood in the doorway, tall and slim and with ink stains on his hands. Algy sighed deeply. “Don’t get him started, we’ll be here all afternoon.”
This must be the elusive Erich, then. I did my best to study them all as the tea was handed out, milk and two sugars for me, milk and one for everyone else. Erich sat beside Bigglesworth on the sofa, a chintz monstrosity that was barely contained beneath a covering of crocheted eiderdowns and lace. He was about as tall as I was, his hair greyer and face more severe than the others in the group. There was a lightness to him when he looked at Bigglesworth which vanished when he noticed I was watching him. I glanced at the other man, who had pressed the tea into Erich’s hands with some force, and found that he was watching me with steady eyes.
I didn’t squirm, much as I wanted to. “Good afternoon,” I said. “I hope I haven’t taken you away from anything vital.”
“Good afternoon,” he replied. His accent was faintly German, which surprised me. “And no, you did not. I was only working on a long term project. I take it the Folly has some interest in our activities?”
It was the most direct question I’d been asked since I arrived. I appreciated it, as much as his suspicious tone had me on the back foot. I shrugged. “I asked Nightingale to tell me more about the arrangements that he’s made since the forties. He’s taken that to mean that he can send me out visiting and bring back gossip since he’s too distinguished to ask for it.”
Erich did not look convinced. Bigglesworth patted his knee briefly. “We’ve mostly been up and down to the airfield these past few decades,” he said. “There’s a crew restoring some older models there and they appreciate an expert hand. Or,” he added, looking at Erich with a slight smile. “An expert hand and their hanger on.”
“So you’re pilots?” I did some quick mental arithmetic. Algy had mentioned that he and Bigglesworth fought in the first war together, so they must have started out on the sort of planes which looked like they’d fall apart in a strong breeze. “Things must have changed a lot in the time you’ve been around.”
“Technology does march on rather,” said Bertie. “I don’t hold with all these newfangled things. Drones and such. Stupid way of carrying on.”
There was a murmur of agreement.
“We think,” said Algy, after a moment. “That whatever it is that’s keeping us alive is to do with that. That we haven’t changed very much, even as we keep on flying. It’s not much of a theory, I admit.”
I nodded in sympathy. “Magic is total bullshit,” I said. Thankfully no one seemed particularly shocked; I remembered reading somewhere that the trenches were the sort of place where sentences were half English and half profanity. “Maybe it’s that. Maybe you’ve flown so many planes the universe decided you could be their deity. Maybe you’ve all got a painting hidden in an attic somewhere. When we’ve figured out why there are gods of the river, we can figure out how you lot became whatever it is you are. Until then, I think you may as well just keep on keeping on.”
They would be the first people to manage to become the genius loci of a mode of transport. It seemed unlikely on the face of it. And Bigglesworth had implied that Erich wasn’t much of a pilot, which put more holes in a theory which could already do a decent sideline as a colander.
And yet I do think there’s something to the idea of stubbornly remaining the same as times change around you. In some ways that’s what Nightingale did, until I turned up and got to teach him about microaggressions, takeaway apps and internationally broadcast televised rugby.
It is in these situations in which I fall back on a quote from that great philosopher Lord Grant, my father and moderately famous saxophonist. Who knows why the fuck anything happens?