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thoughtful look. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m thinking sir,’ she said, ‘that if Geoffrey Wheatcroft didn’t learn how to make a staff then he can’t have passed that knowledge on to the Little Crocodiles or the Faceless Man.’
    ‘We know his protégés could make demon-traps,’ I said. ‘And worse.’
    ‘Lesley’s right,’ said Nightingale. ‘Anyone can make a demon-trap, providing he’s a vile specimen of the first water. But there were secrets involved in the shaping of a staff – ones I seriously doubt that old Geoffrey ever learnt. I’m not sure how that helps us.’
    I did. ‘It means we’ve got something the Faceless Man’s going to really want for himself,’ I said.
    ‘In other words, sir,’ said Lesley, ‘bait.’

3
The One Under
    J ust before Christmas I’d assisted with a murder that took place on Baker Street Underground station. It was during that investigation that I made the acquaintance of one Sergeant Jaget Kumar, urban explorer, expert pot-holer and the British Transport Police’s answer to Mulder and Scully. Together we helped catch the murderer, discovered an entire underground civilisation, albeit a small one, and, unfortunately, destroyed one of the platforms at Oxford Circus. During that mess I ended up buried underground for a half a day, where I had a waking dream that still keeps me from sleeping. But that, as they say, is a whole different counselling session.
    Despite the fact that services had returned to normal by the end of January, I was not really Mr Popular with Transport for London, who run the Underground and the BTP who have to police it. Which might be why, when Jaget said that he had some information for me, we didn’t meet in the BTP Headquarters at Camden Town but in a café just down the road.
    We sat down for coffee and Jaget unshipped his Samsung and pulled up some files.
    ‘We had this one-under at Paddington last week,’ he said. ‘And he came up on your list.’ The Folly maintains a list of potentially interesting people, the dwindling number of surviving practitioners from World War Two, suspected Little Crocodiles and people that consort with fairies, which raises a flag should anyone run an Integrated Intelligence Platform check on them.
    Jaget turned the tablet to show me a picture of a middle-aged white man with thinning fair hair and thin bloodless lips. Judging by his pallor and glassy stare the picture was post-mortem – the kind you did to show to relatives and potential witnesses without scaring the shit out of them. That made sense since one-under was tube slang for when a member of the public throws themselves under a train. Two hundred and forty tonnes of locomotive can mess up your whole day.
    ‘Richard Lewis,’ said Jaget. ‘Aged forty-six.’
    I looked him up in my little black book – I had all the potential Little Crocodiles listed by date of birth. Jaget smiled when he saw it.
    ‘Good to see you embracing the potential of modern technology,’ he said, but I ignored him. Richard Lewis had indeed been at Oxford between 1985 and 1987, but wasn’t on the main list of confirmed Little Crocodiles – he was on a secondary list made up of those who had been personally tutored by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, former official wizard and the man stupid enough to start teaching magic unofficially. Nightingale doesn’t swear very often, but when he talks about Geoffrey Wheatcroft you can tell he really fucking wants to.
    ‘Is it just the fact that he’s on the list?’ I asked.
    ‘There was something off about the suicide,’ he said.
    ‘He was pushed?’
    ‘See for yourself,’ said Jaget and cued up the CCTV footage on his tablet. Because London’s tube stations are the target for everything from casual public urination to mass murder the CCTV coverage is literally wall to wall.
    ‘Here he comes,’ said Jaget.
    Jaget had obviously spent some time editing the footage together because it told the story with quite a