Ben Aaronovitch

The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to.

“When you say shades, what do you mean?” I asked. “Do you mean Fae?”

“I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin.

“Like New Jersey,” said Stephen.

The perennial problem for retailers the world over are the customers. Not only do they clutter up the shop, but they also demand to be reminded of the title of a book they read a review about in the Telegraph, given directions to The Lion King, helped to find a book their mum will like and, occasionally, purchase some actual merchandise. All of this customer-facing activity gets in the way of the shelving, merchandising, sticking, destickering, table pyramiding and stock returning that is necessary for the smooth operation of a modern bookshop.

“I’m a magician, I am,” he said. “I can see things that are really there.”

It’s a police rule of thumb that anything involving members of the public takes twice as long as you think it will.

Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

Inside he had the soul of an accountant, but alas none of the facility with numbers.

I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.

Lulu gave me a crooked smile.

“High Fae?” She asked.

“You know,” I said. “The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.”

“You mean them what step between worlds?”

“Could be.”

“Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?”

“Them sort of people,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Not in here, squire,” she said. “I run a respectable pub.”

“Anything else to report?” he asked.

“A creeping sense of existential dread,” I said. “Apart from that I’m good.”

Nightingale ignored that thread because when the suspect - I mean interviewee - wants to talk about something it's a good idea to frustrate them a little bit. That way you can get more later than they intended. Seawoll calls it the 'fuck all the cows' interview approach.

Gaston did betray an abstracted quality that might have been the result of magic. But was more likely down to consuming, I suspected, a tremendous amount of recreational chemicals.

The more power something has, the less the actual facts matter.