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“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.

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

“Anything else to report?” he asked.

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

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

“A romantic,” said Nightingale. “The most dangerous people on earth.”

Upstairs, MOLA’s offices had the same open-plan cubicle based workspace that has been the delight of code monkeys and low-level paper pushers since one time and motion consultant said to another, “Hey, you know, I don’t think we’ve really dehumanized these white collar drones enough.”

Old Street roundabout is a diamond-shaped circulatory system designed in the late 1960s to thin out the number of cyclists heading in and out of the City. In line with the then-current planning conventions they added a series of mugger-friendly underpasses, an insufficiently wide entrance to Old Street Underground station, and a small shopping arcade lined with urine-attracting beige tile.…

You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.

I pointed out that, according to Bev, half the ecological disasters in the world occurred when people removed “pests” or predators without thinking through the consequences.

I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave—a chance to be exclusive.

Despite being the oldest part of London, the Square Mile has a faster architectural churn than anywhere else in the city. Occasionally it throws up something exciting, innovative and modern…but mostly it doesn’t. Architects like a bit of volume, and financiers like floor space. The easiest way to maximize both is to build a cube—which is why ninety-nine per cent of all office buildings are boxes with lobbies.

“There’s paperwork for magic? asked Vanessa.

“Not so glamorous now, eh?” I said.