Ben Aaronovitch

“Somebody’s lying,” I said, which got me a look of amused indulgence from Stephanopoulos and a snort from Seawoll. Of course somebody was lying—we were the police—somebody was always lying to us.

Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built.

You see, the trouble with detectives is that they’re detectives and are literally trained not to believe anything they haven’t verified themselves.

Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that’s what we want for our town.

Nightingale has always been reluctant to let me loose on the library and I must have frowned or something because he went on, “My worry with you, Peter, is not what you would learn but that, should you go into the library, you might never emerge again.”

“Nice,” said Abigail. “Very plausible.”

“Yeah, but just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.”

I’ve always believed that my dad is right about one thing—your life is your solo and whatever song you choose to sing you only get to do it once.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I said. “I was gathering intelligence.”

Guleed went home because she has, she says, a deep and mystical understanding of the work-life balance. A concept I once tried explaining to Nightingale with the aid of the big whiteboard in the visitors' lounge. I think he grasped it in the end, and said he was all in favour as long as I understood that this in no way applied to apprentices.

“They’re all so ridiculously young,” said Nightingale.

“They” were mostly Police Staff, what we’re not supposed to call civilian workers any more—analysts and data entry specialists—who’d got the boot when the government decided that in the light of an increased security threat what London needed was a smaller police force.

After a slow start the police have taken to mobile technology in a big way—mainly because it means you can pretend to work anywhere: at home, the canteen, the local boozer.