Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, senior officer (in fact, only officer) of Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9 of the Metropolitan Police, also known as The Folly after its base of operations, was making one of his regular trips to University College Hospital to see Dr Walid.
Dr Abdul Walid was one of the few people to know that DCI Nightingale was, in fact, born in 1900 and a wizard. Both of these facts made Nightingale somewhat... unusual, and on the face of it, it would be difficult for a man over a hundred years of age with the possibility of permanent neurological damage hanging over him to pass a police medical. It was good to have friends in low places. So he came here for his medical, forms were fudged and all was well.
Nightingale had fought in World War II but looked about forty, and the implications of this were starting to bother the normally sanguine Chief Inspector. He brought it up with one of the only people in the world he could confide in.
"I thought the magic was going out of the world, Abdul, and all the time I was getting visibly younger and younger. The evidence that magic was still quite definitely alive and kicking was staring me in the mirror every morning. I suppose you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but I have been a bit remiss."
Dr Walid agreed. "On examination, you look like a hale and hearty forty-odd to me."
"Why did it plateau? I got up to my late sixties in the late Sixties, then started back down again. I should be nearly a teenager by now, if it had carried on. Just as well, though. I don't relish being in nappies again. Why stop at my second forties?", Nightingale asked.
Walid shrugged. "You tell me. Any theories?"
Nightingale thought for a moment, then smiled wryly. "Ideal age for a policeman to be. Young enough to kick doors down, old enough to command a bit of respect. Perhaps I just ended up at the age I wanted to be and stayed that way."
"Aye. Perhaps. Not enough data." The good doctor's inbuilt timer of the length of an average NHS consultation kicked in. "Here's your paperwork. What shall we put this time - 1973?"
"Make it 1970. Nice round number, easy to remember."
"As you wish. It's your age we're talking about, not mine."
"Life begins at 40, doesn't it Abdul?"
Nightingale sighed as he left UCH. So many things he had to lie about, these days. People don't just take things at face value any more. There have to be Forms.
At least there were enough people "in the know" like Dr Walid to smooth things out. Nightingale would have been happy enough continuing his hermitage at the Folly, but in this day and age, keeping his beloved Jag on the road and organising all the things like driving licences and council tax required one to actually have an identity that made sense to a computer, and that meant buttering up the powers that be and faking a few key forms of identification. Fortunately, being a senior police officer made this a little easier than it might have been, which was partly why he did it.
So he'd come to an arrangement that he would nominally be part of the Met, and they would only bother him if it was really, really important, and in return for sorting out their more "unusual" issues, he would be provided with the ability to functionally exist in the 21st century. The 20th was so much simpler...
The trouble was that more and more things had been really, really important lately. Important and eldritch. He'd been in enough scraps, wartime and peacetime, to know that trouble was coming, and he was the vanguard.
He realised that Molly had sensed he was out of sorts, that night, as there were extra helpings of swede. She was trying to feed him up again. He sighed, and pushed vegetables around his plate like a nine-year-old. The "arrangement" with the Met was getting onerous. Forms, forms and more forms. He liked old fashioned technology because he was old fashioned technology himself, but there was another reason for it - he knew that if he used magic too close to modern gadgets they inexplicably failed to work again. So he had decided that the safest thing to do was avoid modern things altogether, and as a result, The Folly looked like a museum. Old books, old furniture, old Bakelite phone, old spring-loaded doorbell. They worked, though, and that's what counted. The few people who came to visit and saw Molly's almost Dickensian maid attire probably thought her some kind of tour guide, at first anyway. Some of them noted that she never seemed to smile; she did, from time to time, but never in front of strangers. She looked pale but human enough, apart from the teeth. She liked The Folly – Nightingale was kind, and it was a safe place to live when you were not as human as you looked.
The upshot of this Luddite lifestyle was that he still had to do a lot of actual "paper" paperwork while the rest of the force was on HOLMES and other such computer systems, and now that he was having to put the spinner on the Jag more and more, filling the forms in was eating into the time he could spend in the pub watching the rugby.
Some kind of aide-de-camp was necessary, but he knew better than to ask up front, as the Commissioner didn't approve of Nightingale much at the best of times. The Commissioner was the kind of man who thought that ESC9 was there for all the African immigrants and hippies who actually believed in "mumbo jumbo", as he called it, and he was beginning to think that Nightingale had gone a bit "native", as it were. The Commissioner didn't believe in it, or didn't want to, anyway.
The last time they had met hadn't gone well, and he knew that if he could present a fait accompli then the Commissioner would be more than happy to get the pair of them out of his office as soon as possible, before they infected him with their silly talk. Nightingale worried that if the fact he was looking for subordinates was bruited about in advance, it might be taken badly and forbidden out of hand, but if the boss believed that a PC was already halfway to Folly, quite literally, he'd fall over himself to transfer them out of his way and good riddance, which suited Nightingale down to the ground. He just had to handle it carefully.
The Commissioner saw The Folly as something that was useful and necessary but not something you talked about in front of people. Like drains, or embarrassing medical tests. But he'd see the sense in a Chief Inspector not having to do his own forms, at least.
Nightingale needed a solid copper who was expendable to the rest of the Met, but pragmatic and broad-minded enough to be of use to the Folly. A tall order. He'd have to keep his eyes and ears open.
His ears won. A few weeks later, the radio crackled into life and as the situation was described he listened intently. Radio was sufficiently old to be familiar to him; he'd seen enough evidence during the Second World War to know that radio communication was very useful for logistics and he would use tech that demonstrably worked. The operators knew that if there was suspicion of some kind of voodoo-style ritual or cannibals or any of that "X-Files kinda stuff" as one witness (who had turned out to be stoned rather than possessed) had described it to him, then Zulu One was who they asked for, and DCI Nightingale would come and deal with it.
He had been listening in to the radio chatter, seeing if an officer with a taste for the less than mundane might present themselves. A murder near Covent Garden. Available officers to attend to help with crowd control. One of the perks of the job was that, even if there was no suspicion of the supernatural he was still a senior detective and therefore able to invite himself along to crime scenes to see if they warranted his expert opinion.
He made his way to the Coach House, thought about calling in to Control that Zulu One was en route and then thought better of it, and then started the drive from Russell Square to Covent Garden.
St Paul's, The Actor's Church not the cathedral, was a hive of coppery activity. Nightingale was spotted by one of the perimeter Constables who had taken a breath ready to tell him to move along, nothing to see here, but she was reassured by his warrant card.
"Shall I tell the SIO you're here, Inspector?"
"No, just observing. Just thinking of having a bit of a reshuffle of my own section, getting ideas from other units, that kind of thing. Seeing how you do things here."
"Right you are, sir".
Nightingale got a takeaway coffee and leaned up against a wall to watch the goings-on.
His reverie was interrupted by the constable beckoning him back over. "Boss wants to see you, sir." Nightingale smiled at her and went in - the price of fame. The arrival of an unfamiliar and, to be frank, relatively flamboyant DCI had obviously been gossiped to the ears of someone who knew the implications of it. They were usually keen to show him everything he wanted to look at in the hope that he would then go away and stop giving them the creeps.
Once in the perimeter, a senior officer came up to him.
"You Inspector Nightingale? ESC9?" He nodded. "This one of yours then?"
"I don't know. Perhaps. Why do you ask? Anything unusual?"
"Well, his head's come clean off, that's pretty unusual. "
He duly inspected the crime scene. A whiff of a vestigium by the corpse - well, it was a dead body at an old church in an old part of London. Lots of history. But worth keeping informed about.
"I don't see anything obviously ESC9 here, but let me know if you find anything of interest." The other detective looked reassured that this meant that the unwelcome interruption would be leaving soon, and got back to work.
Nightingale took the opportunity to have a look round, but everyone was very busy being very professional and sceptical - as it should be, but not what he was looking for, so he went back to the Folly to finish the dinner he had left half-eaten. Only a copper, soldier or healthcare worker can sit down to reheated steak and kidney pud after examining a man with no head late at night, but he welcomed Molly's usual stodge with his usual stoicism.
A day or so later he was settling down to the crossword when the phone rang. It was one of the officers from Covent Garden - Ellis. They'd crossed paths before. Good beat bobby, totally lacking in imagination. Couldn't think out of the box at all. A bit too fond of policy and protocol to be transferred to The Folly, and as it turned out, that's what he was ringing about - a burning urge to tell teacher that someone was being naughty.
"I've got something for you, sir. We got a couple of rookies in from Charing Cross to guard the crime scene. One of them's back, mufti, snooping about, looks like he's settling down for an overnight stakeout. I told my guv'nor but he says I'm paranoid. So I thought I'd let you know."
"Excellent work, Constable. I'll check it out."
Salt of the earth copper, Ellis was - fine for the Met in general, but not for the Folly; whereas a late-night secret snooper... Nightingale hopped into his car and set off for Covent Garden.
He parked reasonably near and walked the rest of the way. Staking out a stakeout. Wheels within wheels. Nightingale whispered under his breath something based on the aer forma - just to muddy the air around him a bit. Thus indistinct, he lurked in the shadows and watched his mark.
Male, IC2 or 3 from a distance, 20s, reasonably fit and healthy. That must be the Probationary Constable, trying not to look shifty. It's very difficult not to look shifty when you're a young man lurking alone in Covent Garden late at night. He looked like he was waiting for someone, and Nightingale hoped it wouldn't take long as he was certainly not prepared for a long night, and Molly would start to worry. Our shifty PC must have learned something and was checking it out. So why not take it to his boss?
Nightingale smiled to himself - probably meant it was of interest to The Folly. The kind of things that young, idealistic coppers can't leave uninvestigated, but don't want to have to explain to the line of command. Perfect.
Just need confirmation of that fact, his name, and where to send the obligatory form to get him transferred for a trial period, and then back in the warm. It was January, after all. Young bucks can stay outdoors all night, but he was over 100, after all... might as well just go and ask him what he was doing. Saves a lot of time. Nightingale waited for a passing hen night to finish making sarcastic comments and then, once the coast was clear, made his move.
He walked up to the lad. "Hello. What are you up to?"
Shifty looked like he was trying to think of something clever to say, then said "I'm ghost-hunting."
"Interesting." said Nightingale, because it was. A good line. Sufficiently wacky to sound like the kind of thing you'd say while drunk, but not so wacky that it would get you carted off to the funny farm. Time to ramp up the questions, see how quickly he answered, whether he'd prepared a story. "Any particular ghost?"
"Nicholas Wallpenny."
Interesting again. Not many people ghost-hunting actually have a name in mind. Which meant that he was either completely barmy, or was actually looking for a ghost, and a specific one at that. Nightingale privately mused to himself that any Constable suitable for the Folly would probably have to at least appear barmy to the untrained eye, and a willingness to look for ghosts implied the right kind of enquiring mind. Things were looking up. So, what were the name and contact details of this psychic Plod?
"What's your name and address?"
"I beg your pardon?"
Excellent. Wary, therefore not a complete idiot. Time to see if he is indeed Constable Shifty rather than just Mr Shifty. Nightingale pulled out his warrant card, and introduced himself. Shifty replied that he was Constable Peter Grant. Was he one of the Charing Cross rookies that Ellis had mentioned?
"Out of Charing Cross nick?"
"Yes sir."
Nightingale smiled. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
"Carry on, Constable".
Nightingale walked away, thinking to himself. He would telephone the Commissioner's secretary in the morning with a transfer request. A likely candidate had been found, even if he would only be fetching cups of coffee, filling in the damned forms and taking notes about ghoulies, ghosties and long-leggedy beasties while able to keep a straight face.