I couldn’t tell whether the coach house had originally been built with a first floor, to house footmen or whatever, which had then been knocked through in 1920s, or whether the flood had been added by sticking a new ceiling on the garage when they bricked up the main gate. At some point someone had bolted a rather beautiful wrought-iron spiral staircase to the courtyard wall. When I’d first ventured up, I was surprised to find that a good third of the sloping roof on the south-facing side had been glazed. The glass was dirty on the outside and some of the panes were cracked, but it let in enough daylight to reveal a jumble of shapes shrouded by dust sheets. Unlike those in the rest of the Folly, these sheets were furry with dust – I don’t think Molly had every cleaned in there. If the chaise lounge, Chinese screen, mismatched side tables and collection of ceramic fruit bowls that I found under the sheets weren’t enough of a clue, I also found an easel and a box full of squirrel-hair paint brushes gone rigid with disuse. Somebody had used the rooms as a studio, judging from the empty beer bottles neatly lined up against the south wall. Probably apprentices like me – that, or a wizard with a serious alcohol problem. Stacked in the corner and carefully wrapped in brown paper and string were a series of canvases, painted in oils. These included a number of still lives, a rather amateurish portrait of a young woman whose discomfort was palpable, despite the sloppy execution. The next was much more professional – an Edwardian gentleman reclining in the same wickerwork chair I’d found under a dust sheet earlier. The man was holding a silver-topped cane and for a moment I thought he might be Nightingale, but the man was older and his eyes were an intense blue. Nightingale senior, perhaps? The next, probably by the same painter, was a nude with a subject that so shocked me I took it to the skylight to get a better look. I hadn’t made a mistake. There was Molly, reclining pale and naked on the chaise lounge, staring out of the canvas with heavy-lidded eyes, one hand dipping into a bowl of cherries placed on a table by her side. At least, I hope they were cherries. The painting was in the impressionist style so the brush strokes were bold, making it hard to tell: they were definitely small and red, the same colour as Molly’s lips. I carefully rewrapped the paintings and put them back where I’d found them. I did a cursory check of the room for damp, dry rot and whatever it is that makes wooden beams crumbly and dangerous. I found that there was still a shuttered loading door at the courtyard end of the room and mounted above it, a hoisting beam. Presumably to serve a hayloft for the coach horses. […] This, I thought, will do nicely. At one time or other most of my mum’s relatives had cleaned offices for a living. For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal. My mum had done a stint herself and had often taken me with her to save on babysitting. When an African mum takes her son to work she expects her son to work so I quickly learnt how to handle a broom and a window cloth. So the next day after practice, I returned to the coach house with a packet of Marigold gloves and my Uncle Tito’s Numatic vacuum cleaner. Let me tell you, 1,000 watts of suckage makes a big difference when cleaning a room. The only thing I had to worry about was causing a rift in the space-time fabric of the universe. I found the window cleaners online and a pair of bickering Romanians scrubbed up the skylight while I rigged up a pulley to the hoisting beam, just in time for the TV to be delivered along with the fridge. […] To inaugurate my re-entry into the twenty-first century I ordered some pizza and invited Lesley round to see my etchings. I had a long soak in the claw-footed porcelain tub that dominated the communal bathroom on my floor and swore, not for the first time, that I was definitely going to install a shower. I’m not a peacock but on occasion I like to dress to impress, although like most coppers I don’t wear much in the way of bling, the rule being never wear something round your neck that you don’t want to be strangled with. […] Among the many other modern innovations that I’d introduced to the coach house was an entryphone installed on the garage’s side door, so that when Lesley arrived all I had to do was buzz her in. I opened the door and met her at the top of the spiral staircase – she’d brought company. […]
---
The cupboards in the lab were full of the scent of sandalwood and the most amazing range of antique equipment, including the Charles Perry microscope, all put away with such precision and tidiness that I knew no student had been involved.
---
The Folly has three libraries: one, I didn’t know about back then, number two was a magical library where the direct treatise on spells, forma and alchemy were kept, all of them written in Latin and so all Greek to me, and number three was the general library on the first flood next to the reading room. The division of labour was clear from the start: Nightingale checked the magic library, and I hit the books in the Queen’s English. The general library was lined with enough mahogany to reforest the Amazon basin. On one wall the stacks went all the way to the ceiling, and you reached the top shelves by using a ladder that slid along on shining brass rails. A row of beautiful walnut cabinets held the index cards, which were the closest thing the library had to a search engine. I caught a whiff of old cardboard and mildew when I opened the drawers, and it comforted me to think that Molly didn’t fo so far as to open them up regularly and clean inside. The cards were arranged by subject, with a master index arranged by title. […]
---
Just because I had an active case didn’t mean I was excused practice. I’d persuaded Nightingale to show me the fireball spell, which was, not surprisingly, a variation on Lux, with Iactus to move it about. Once Nightingale was convinced I could do the first part without burning my hand off, we went down to the firing range in the basement to practice. Not that I had known we had a firing range until then. At the bottom of the back stairs you turned left instead of right, through a set of reinforced doors that I’d always assumed was a coal store, and into a room fifty metres long with a wall of sandbags at one end and a line of metal lockers at the other. A row of vintage Brodie helmets hung from pegs above a line of khaki gasmask cases. There was a poster, white lettering on a blood-red background, that said: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, which I thought was good advice. There was a stack of cardboard silhouettes at the target end, brittle with age but still discernable as German soldiers with coal-scuttle helmets and fixed bayonets.
---
It was as if the solid black and white tiles had been rendered transparent, and through them I could glimpse a terrible abyss – dark, bottomless and cold. I tried to move faster but it was like walking into a violent headwind. I had to lean forward and push hard to make progress. It wasn’t until I’d carefully steered myself through the narrow servants’ quarters under the east stairs that I wondered whether, this being the realm of ghosts, after all, I might just walk through the walls.
---
The Folly, according to Nightingale, is secured by an interlocking series of magical protections. They were last renewed in 1940, to allow the Post Office to run in a then cutting-edge coaxial telephone cable to the main building, and the installation of a modern switchboard. I’d found that under a dust sheet in an alcove off the main entrance lobby, a beautiful glass and mahogany cabinet with brass fittings kept shiny by Molly’s obsessive need to polish. Nightingale says that these protections are vital, although he won’t say why, and that he, acting on his own, is not capable of renewing them. Running a broadband cable into the building was out of the question, and it looked for a while like I was going to be firmly mired in the dark ages. Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency style, when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house so that the horses and the smellier servants could be housed down-wind of their masters. This meant a coach house at the back, now used as a garage, and above that an attic conversion that had once accommodated servants and then served as a party space for the young bucks, back when the Folly had young bucks. Or at least, more than one. The magical ‘protections’ – Nightingale was not happy when I called them ‘forcefields’ – used to scare the horses, so they don’t extend to the coach house. Which means I get to run in a broadband cable, and at last there is a corner of the Folly that is forever in the twenty-first century. The coach house attic has a studio skylight at one end, an ottoman couch, a chaise lounge, a plasma TV and an Ikea kitchen table that once took me and Molly three bloody hours to assemble. I’d used the Folly’s status as an Operational Command Unit to get the Directorate of Information to cough up half a dozen Airwave handsets with charging rack, and a dedicated HOLMES2 terminal. I also had my laptop and my back-up laptop and my PlayStation – which I hadn’t had a chance to get out of the box yet. Because of this, there is a big sign on the front door that says NO MAGIC ON PAIN OF PAIN. This is what I call the tech cave.
---
Molly shot me a reproachful look and went gliding off towards the kitchen. Dr Walid led me over to a collection of overstuffed red armchairs and mahogany occasional tables that nestled under the overhand of the eastern balcony. […]
---
We were eating dinner in the so-called Private Dining Room, which adjoined the English library on the first floor. Since the main dining room could sit sixty, we never used it in case Molly got it into her head to lay all the tables. Nevertheless me and Nightingale had dressed for dinner – we both have standards, and one of us had been exerting himself that afternoon.
---
The Folly sits on the south side of Russel Square, the centre of which is occupied by a park with fixed gravel paths, big trees which I didn’t know the names of, a fountain that was specifically designed to get children and small dogs soaking wet and on the north side, a café which does a decent double sausage, bacon, black pudding, egg and chips. It was actually quite sunny, so I sat on the terrace outside the café and mechanically shovelled the food into my face. It really didn’t taste of anything, and in the end I put my plate on the floor and let Toby finish it off. I walked back to the Folly and in through the main door, where there was a drift of junk mail. I scooped it up. It was mostly flyers for local pizza joints and kebab houses, although there was one crudely designed leaflet from a Ghanian fortune-teller who felt we could only benefit from his insight into future events. I dropped the lot into the magazine rack that Molly leaves in the atrium for that purpose. […]
no subject
If the chaise lounge, Chinese screen, mismatched side tables and collection of ceramic fruit bowls that I found under the sheets weren’t enough of a clue, I also found an easel and a box full of squirrel-hair paint brushes gone rigid with disuse. Somebody had used the rooms as a studio, judging from the empty beer bottles neatly lined up against the south wall. Probably apprentices like me – that, or a wizard with a serious alcohol problem.
Stacked in the corner and carefully wrapped in brown paper and string were a series of canvases, painted in oils. These included a number of still lives, a rather amateurish portrait of a young woman whose discomfort was palpable, despite the sloppy execution. The next was much more professional – an Edwardian gentleman reclining in the same wickerwork chair I’d found under a dust sheet earlier. The man was holding a silver-topped cane and for a moment I thought he might be Nightingale, but the man was older and his eyes were an intense blue. Nightingale senior, perhaps? The next, probably by the same painter, was a nude with a subject that so shocked me I took it to the skylight to get a better look. I hadn’t made a mistake. There was Molly, reclining pale and naked on the chaise lounge, staring out of the canvas with heavy-lidded eyes, one hand dipping into a bowl of cherries placed on a table by her side. At least, I hope they were cherries. The painting was in the impressionist style so the brush strokes were bold, making it hard to tell: they were definitely small and red, the same colour as Molly’s lips.
I carefully rewrapped the paintings and put them back where I’d found them. I did a cursory check of the room for damp, dry rot and whatever it is that makes wooden beams crumbly and dangerous. I found that there was still a shuttered loading door at the courtyard end of the room and mounted above it, a hoisting beam. Presumably to serve a hayloft for the coach horses.
[…]
This, I thought, will do nicely.
At one time or other most of my mum’s relatives had cleaned offices for a living. For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal. My mum had done a stint herself and had often taken me with her to save on babysitting. When an African mum takes her son to work she expects her son to work so I quickly learnt how to handle a broom and a window cloth. So the next day after practice, I returned to the coach house with a packet of Marigold gloves and my Uncle Tito’s Numatic vacuum cleaner. Let me tell you, 1,000 watts of suckage makes a big difference when cleaning a room. The only thing I had to worry about was causing a rift in the space-time fabric of the universe. I found the window cleaners online and a pair of bickering Romanians scrubbed up the skylight while I rigged up a pulley to the hoisting beam, just in time for the TV to be delivered along with the fridge.
[…]
To inaugurate my re-entry into the twenty-first century I ordered some pizza and invited Lesley round to see my etchings. I had a long soak in the claw-footed porcelain tub that dominated the communal bathroom on my floor and swore, not for the first time, that I was definitely going to install a shower. I’m not a peacock but on occasion I like to dress to impress, although like most coppers I don’t wear much in the way of bling, the rule being never wear something round your neck that you don’t want to be strangled with.
[…]
Among the many other modern innovations that I’d introduced to the coach house was an entryphone installed on the garage’s side door, so that when Lesley arrived all I had to do was buzz her in.
I opened the door and met her at the top of the spiral staircase – she’d brought company.
[…]
---
The cupboards in the lab were full of the scent of sandalwood and the most amazing range of antique equipment, including the Charles Perry microscope, all put away with such precision and tidiness that I knew no student had been involved.
---
The Folly has three libraries: one, I didn’t know about back then, number two was a magical library where the direct treatise on spells, forma and alchemy were kept, all of them written in Latin and so all Greek to me, and number three was the general library on the first flood next to the reading room. The division of labour was clear from the start: Nightingale checked the magic library, and I hit the books in the Queen’s English.
The general library was lined with enough mahogany to reforest the Amazon basin. On one wall the stacks went all the way to the ceiling, and you reached the top shelves by using a ladder that slid along on shining brass rails. A row of beautiful walnut cabinets held the index cards, which were the closest thing the library had to a search engine. I caught a whiff of old cardboard and mildew when I opened the drawers, and it comforted me to think that Molly didn’t fo so far as to open them up regularly and clean inside. The cards were arranged by subject, with a master index arranged by title.
[…]
---
Just because I had an active case didn’t mean I was excused practice. I’d persuaded Nightingale to show me the fireball spell, which was, not surprisingly, a variation on Lux, with Iactus to move it about. Once Nightingale was convinced I could do the first part without burning my hand off, we went down to the firing range in the basement to practice. Not that I had known we had a firing range until then. At the bottom of the back stairs you turned left instead of right, through a set of reinforced doors that I’d always assumed was a coal store, and into a room fifty metres long with a wall of sandbags at one end and a line of metal lockers at the other. A row of vintage Brodie helmets hung from pegs above a line of khaki gasmask cases. There was a poster, white lettering on a blood-red background, that said: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, which I thought was good advice. There was a stack of cardboard silhouettes at the target end, brittle with age but still discernable as German soldiers with coal-scuttle helmets and fixed bayonets.
---
It was as if the solid black and white tiles had been rendered transparent, and through them I could glimpse a terrible abyss – dark, bottomless and cold. I tried to move faster but it was like walking into a violent headwind. I had to lean forward and push hard to make progress. It wasn’t until I’d carefully steered myself through the narrow servants’ quarters under the east stairs that I wondered whether, this being the realm of ghosts, after all, I might just walk through the walls.
---
The Folly, according to Nightingale, is secured by an interlocking series of magical protections. They were last renewed in 1940, to allow the Post Office to run in a then cutting-edge coaxial telephone cable to the main building, and the installation of a modern switchboard. I’d found that under a dust sheet in an alcove off the main entrance lobby, a beautiful glass and mahogany cabinet with brass fittings kept shiny by Molly’s obsessive need to polish.
Nightingale says that these protections are vital, although he won’t say why, and that he, acting on his own, is not capable of renewing them. Running a broadband cable into the building was out of the question, and it looked for a while like I was going to be firmly mired in the dark ages.
Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency style, when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house so that the horses and the smellier servants could be housed down-wind of their masters. This meant a coach house at the back, now used as a garage, and above that an attic conversion that had once accommodated servants and then served as a party space for the young bucks, back when the Folly had young bucks. Or at least, more than one. The magical ‘protections’ – Nightingale was not happy when I called them ‘forcefields’ – used to scare the horses, so they don’t extend to the coach house. Which means I get to run in a broadband cable, and at last there is a corner of the Folly that is forever in the twenty-first century.
The coach house attic has a studio skylight at one end, an ottoman couch, a chaise lounge, a plasma TV and an Ikea kitchen table that once took me and Molly three bloody hours to assemble. I’d used the Folly’s status as an Operational Command Unit to get the Directorate of Information to cough up half a dozen Airwave handsets with charging rack, and a dedicated HOLMES2 terminal. I also had my laptop and my back-up laptop and my PlayStation – which I hadn’t had a chance to get out of the box yet. Because of this, there is a big sign on the front door that says NO MAGIC ON PAIN OF PAIN. This is what I call the tech cave.
---
Molly shot me a reproachful look and went gliding off towards the kitchen. Dr Walid led me over to a collection of overstuffed red armchairs and mahogany occasional tables that nestled under the overhand of the eastern balcony.
[…]
---
We were eating dinner in the so-called Private Dining Room, which adjoined the English library on the first floor. Since the main dining room could sit sixty, we never used it in case Molly got it into her head to lay all the tables. Nevertheless me and Nightingale had dressed for dinner – we both have standards, and one of us had been exerting himself that afternoon.
---
The Folly sits on the south side of Russel Square, the centre of which is occupied by a park with fixed gravel paths, big trees which I didn’t know the names of, a fountain that was specifically designed to get children and small dogs soaking wet and on the north side, a café which does a decent double sausage, bacon, black pudding, egg and chips. It was actually quite sunny, so I sat on the terrace outside the café and mechanically shovelled the food into my face. It really didn’t taste of anything, and in the end I put my plate on the floor and let Toby finish it off.
I walked back to the Folly and in through the main door, where there was a drift of junk mail. I scooped it up. It was mostly flyers for local pizza joints and kebab houses, although there was one crudely designed leaflet from a Ghanian fortune-teller who felt we could only benefit from his insight into future events. I dropped the lot into the magazine rack that Molly leaves in the atrium for that purpose.
[…]