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– bugger that – we get this from people who are supernatural.
    He was from Wimbledon and was a retired chartered surveyor. He wasn’t on our list of Little Crocodiles. In fact he’d been educated at Leeds University, and the Nolfi name was not listed amongst the rolls of Nightingale’s old school or the Folly. And yet he’d conjured a fireball in the living room of his daughter’s house – it had all been captured on camcorder.
    ‘Have you ever done it before?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not since I was a boy.’
    I made a note. Nightingale and Lesley were even then going through his house looking for books on magic, vestigium hotspots, lacuna , household gods and malign spirits. Nightingale had made my job clear; first establish what Mr Nolfi had done, then why he had done it and, finally, how had he known how to do it.
    ‘It was Gabriella’s birthday party,’ he said. ‘She’s my granddaughter. Delightful child but, being six, a bit of a handful. Have you got any children?’
    ‘Not yet,’ I said.
    ‘En masse a room full of six-year-old girls can be a daunting prospect, so I may have fortified myself with a tad more sherry than I meant to,’ he said. ‘There was a problem with the cake.’
    Even worse, the lights had already been switched off in anticipation of its entrance and candles lit, accompanied by a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday to You (Squashed Tomatoes and Stew)’.
    And so Mr Nolfi, granddad, was instructed to keep the children entertained while the problem was sorted out.
    ‘And I remembered this trick that I used to do when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. I got their attention, not an easy thing, mind you, rolled up my sleeves and said the magic word.’
    ‘What was the magic word?’ I asked.
    ‘ Lux !’ he said. ‘It’s Latin for light.’
    But of course I knew that already. It’s also the first forma that a classically trained apprentice wizard learns. I asked Mr Nolfi what he’d expected to happen.
    ‘I used to be able to make a fairy light,’ he said. ‘It used to keep my sister amused.’
    A bit of prodding revealed that he only knew the one spell and that he’d stopped performing it once he was sent off to school.
    ‘Mine was a Catholic school,’ he said. ‘They took a dim view of dabbling in the occult – or even just dabbling, to be honest. The headmaster believed that if you’re going to do something you should do it all the way.’
    He gave me details of the school, but warned me that it had closed due to a scandal in the late 1960s. ‘Headmaster had his hand in the till,’ he said.
    ‘So who did you learn this magic trick from?’ I asked.
    ‘From my mother of course,’ said Mr Nolfi.
    ‘From his mother,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘So he says,’ I said.
    We were in the so-called private dining room where we were all eating— to be honest we weren’t sure what it was, Molly was experimenting again. Shanks of lamb, according to Lesley, casseroled with something fishy, possibly anchovies, possibly sardines and two scoops of mashed— I said swede but Nightingale insisted at least one of them was parsnip.
    ‘I’m not sure we should eat stuff when we don’t know what it is,’ said Lesley.
    ‘I’m not the one who bought her the Jamie Oliver book for Christmas,’ I said.
    ‘No,’ said Lesley. ‘You’re the one who wanted to get her Heston Blumenthal.’
    Nightingale, trained – as he pointed out – from an early age to eat what was put in front of him, tucked in with enthusiasm. Given that Molly was hovering in the doorway, me and Lesley had little choice but to follow suit.
    It tasted remarkably like lamb in sardine sauce, I thought.
    After a sufficient wait to ensure that we hadn’t been poisoned, we continued our discussion about Mr Nolfi.
    ‘It strikes me as rather unlikely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or at least it’s not something I’ve come across before.’
    ‘We didn’t find anything at his