#result of last Klausurenphase we were going through it that month

[corainne]

@bumblebee-and-tea this is unfinished, and will never be finished, but the gay lil Zauberboys are alive, do with it what you will

Over the course of my time as Nightingale’s apprentice I had fallen for the stories he had told me about his friend, David Mellenby, on the very rare occasions he had spoken about him at all. Brilliant man, perhaps the smartest member the Folly had ever ensnared, tragic end, etc, ad nauseam. And I'd even felt sorry for the bastard, fool that I was. For both of them, because Nightingale always got that sad expression when he talked about him, reserved for the people he’d loved and tragically lost.

But dead people normally don’t knock you around a courtyard at three fucking thirty in the morning on a bloody Wednesday. 

Of course I didn’t know it was Mellenby at first, how could I have. A Physics professor at UCL had been disemboweled in his office, and me and Nightingale had settled for the tried and true method of keeping watch at night in case the perp returned for something. Truth be told, we had even less leads than normally, and in the wake of Skygarden Nightingale had redoubled his efforts to avoid DCI Seawoll as best as possible. I would have too, in his place. 

I’d only wanted to see if the coffee machine in the Nanobiology building worked. We’d already finished the large thermos Molly had presented us with on our way out and were beginning to get a bit bored and very tired. Nightingale might think it riveting to shit on Plato, but I can’t say I care too much about the opinions of a man who’s been dead for two millennia, especially in the early hours of the morning, on far too little sleep. I knew he was desperately trying to avoid anything that might bring up memories of Lesley, but that was where my mind had drifted off to as soon as he had begun his soliloquy. 

The fresh air was a nice change after sitting in a stuffy office for several hours, still smelling of bleach and disinfectant after someone had done their best to get the blood off the floor, walls, and ceiling. And furniture.

The wall of sheer force blasted against my chest wasn’t so nice, all things considered. It knocked me backwards and I had my shield up as soon as I could gather my wits about me - Nightingale had been positively impressed with the effort I had put into learning that particular forma - and I am happy to report that I only looked a bit pathetic as I dove for cover behind some stone construct I couldn’t quite make out in the darkness.

I managed about two hurried breaths before having to jump out of the way of some spell that had curved around my hiding place and was coming straight at me. It wasn’t a fireball, but something similar, not that I particularly cared to find out at that moment.

Since becoming an apprentice I’ve become rather good at running - both towards and from danger, and I dashed across the courtyard, praying to whoever might be inclined to listen that it was dark enough for me to go unnoticed.

Which it wasn’t of course, and I went sprawling on the ground as another spell slammed into me. Whoever it was didn’t seem to want to kill me, at least not yet, and I briefly contemplated what I could do to alert Nightingale to my - ahem - predicament. The explosion ripping over the asphalt where I’d been just twenty seconds before worked quite nicely, not that I can take credit for it. I shot a few fireballs in the direction of my attacker and ran like a group of lower middle class mothers when Aldi has children's clothes in stock. 

Just that my plan didn’t work out quite as I hoped, when I ran against a wall that hadn’t been there a second ago, which left me in a bit of a kerfuffle, with nowhere left to run, and nothing to hide behind. In short, I was fucked. 

My shield was holding up nicely, but I didn’t have any delusion as to how much longer it would stay that way. So I did the only sensible thing. I cowered on the ground, and made the shield around me as small as I could, while formae continued to rain down around me. They were all unfamiliar to me, and with most I couldn’t even tell what spell they’d been bastardized from, so either Nightingale had been holding back on me, or my attacker had been developing his own spells.

I was getting a splitting headache and my hands were beginning to tremble, which is as good a sign as any that you should definitely stop using magic, unless you were prepared to face the consequences. Which I wasn’t, to be completely honest.

Nightingale came sprinting out of the building just seconds before my shield broke down, and thank fucking god for that, because the bubble of magic surrounding me immediately afterwards was so familiar I wanted to cry with joy.

Now, Nightingale usually doesn’t take too kindly to people trying to kill me, or abduct me, or taser me in the back - it's how he shows that he does care about me - and while I didn’t know the forma he threw at my attacker it was brimming with power and designed to kill. We were hunting a killer after all, and while I've mostly gotten to Nightingale in regards of modern policing, in some situations he just doesn't give a fuck, not that I was complaining in that instance.

But halfway between us and our suspect the spell fucking shattered, falling to pieces like I had never seen before.

"Thomas?"

"David" There was more than surprise and recognition in Nightingale's voice. There was genuine pain as well.

"While I am happy that you have finally mastered that forma, I would appreciate it if you refrained from beheading me"

"Avaler," said Nightingale, and I faintly recognised the name from a list of colleagues of our victim, "I should have guessed. Honestly, David, of all the names you could have chosen. Is your French even good enough for that disguise?"

"Luckily enough I do come from a part of Germany that was French once upon a time, and my German is still impeccable. Brings up a different sort of question, but nothing I’m not prepared to answer. That is, if they give me the chance to answer before trying to kill me"

"I didn’t know it was you"

"And here I was thinking we had something special and you didn’t even recognise me. Or would you have used one of my own spells if you’d known? I guess I should count myself lucky"

“Despite your little show, I don’t want to kill you, David. Unless you insist on using my apprentice as target practice again”

“I thought you were someone else”

“What exactly is happening right now?” I asked, still sitting flat on my arse on the ground, like a helpless child caught in a fight between the grown ups.

Nightingale obliged me by illuminating the courtyard, looking a bit worse for wear, and our new friend, slowly advancing in our direction from wherever he’d been hiding, as he did so his appearance changed, dark hair fading to a paler colour, his clothes filling out and changing shape, until what was left was distinctly unlike I had imagined my attacker to look. In slacks and a nice coat he might as well just have been out for a stroll, just that it was the middle of the night, and it is generally advisable not to do that in London. The only thing not affected by his illusion was his cane, just like the one Nightingale had, which he genuinely seemed to require for more than style and magic. “Peter, this is David Mellenby, an old friend”

Which explained fuck all.

#

It turned out that Mellenby was rather willing to cooperate with the Police once it had been established that we weren’t going to kill him - and that he wasn’t going to kill me, thank you very much - and our merry band set out to Belgravia, though the silence in the Jag was far from comfortable as Nightingale drove there, where DI Stephanopoulos, who was in charge of the case, arrived a few minutes later, looking about as pissed as I’d ever seen her. 

“I hope you have a fucking good explanation why I had to get here at four fucking am,” she grumbled, and shot a death glare at Nightingale, who look far too chipper for this time of night, I had to admit.

“We have encountered a witness who might be able to shed some light on our case. He and I have a previous acquaintance, and I think it would be most beneficial if I were to ask the questions. Alone” As if that even remotely explained the situation Nightingale swished out of the room, to go fetch some tea.

The death of a Professor, while tragic, hadn’t been important enough to get Seawoll involved just yet, and even if it had been, I don’t think he’d drive down to the nick for anything short of an active shooting situation at this time of night, so me and Stephanopoulos settled in to watch the interview, without waiting for anyone else to arrive. 

While Nightingale was performing his best culinary effort I used the time, and decent light, to get a better look at Mellenby. Any theory that Nightingale had gone back to the physical state he had been in when he’d skipped off to Ettersberg could be thrown out of the window, because there was no way someone in 1945 had been as well fed as Mellenby appeared to be, who was more than a little bit chubby. His round face sported a scar on its left cheek, and when he ran a hand through his messy blonde curls I saw that he was missing several fingers. War wounds, I guessed. He wasn’t going to be hired for any trousering advertisements, I’d wager, but might just have an invitation to tea from the Duke of Denver stashed away somewhere. 

“How do they know each other?” Stephanopoulos asked, and joined me in staring at our witness.

“I think they went to school together. He’s a wizard” Which was vague enough that Stephanopoulos, who only maybe knows about Nightingale being born when Queen Victoria had still been on the throne, didn’t call bullshit and, as far as I knew, true. 

“Wonderful,” she grumbled, “another one”

I tried to reconcile the man in front of me with the image I had conjured up whenever Nightingale had brought him up. To be honest I had expected something else - I wasn’t sure what exactly, but it wasn’t this.

Nightingale didn’t take too long in the kitchen, bustling into the interview room a mug in each hand. He pushed a tea mug over the metal table, one of the nice ones no one ever uses because Stephanopoulos spits fire whenever anyone even looks at them,

Mellenby took a sip of his tea, only to promptly spit it back into the mug, in the way Nightingale always does when something offends his taste buds enough that even his upbringing and decade of rationing faded in comparison. “That tea tastes horrid”

“What did you expect, David?” Nightingale asked, “You should try the coffee, it’s nearly edible” Nightingale sat, and sipped on his own tea, before speaking again. “I hope you realise this is highly irregular. Normally we don’t treat practitioners who tried to kill Peter this kindly”

“You mean the night witch”

“How do you know about her?”

“Thomas, you can’t arrest a Russian practitioner from the war and expect no one to find out. People talk”

“What do you think people are going to say when I arrest you for attempted murder?”

Mellenby had the decency to look abashed. “Thomas, I assure you, had I known that it was your apprentice I would have not attacked him. At the same time we both know I was not trying to kill him. Had I wanted to do so I would have succeeded long before you noticed my presence. I have reason to think that my life is in danger, and when I ran into a wizard on my campus in the middle of the night I naturally assumed that was his intention”

“Why would someone want to kill you?”

“For the same reason someone killed Brandon”

“He was a practitioner?”

“Yes. I took him on as my apprentice a few months ago”

"There are agreements, David. You can’t just pick random people off the streets and make them your apprentice" Which was exactly what he’d done with me, the hypocrite. 

"You will find that I can make anyone my apprentice. I'm a Master of Newtonian Magic and can pass that on, whether or not the Folly is in favour. It is not illegal to be a practotioner. The only agreement I am a part of was to keep away from the Folly. Which I did"

"What is going on here, Grant?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"I have no fucking clue"

"And yet here you are in London"

"You got the house, Thomas, and now you want the city as well? UCL is one of the best Universities in Britain, and where I don’t have to pretend to be my own son. Not all of us have the privilege you have with the Folly"

"It was your decision to leave"

"And yours to break off contact entirely"

"And I suppose I imagined the Christmas cards?"

"I didn’t send those. The wedding invitation came from me though; not that you ever replied"

"There was no reason for me to attend"

"I would have liked you to"

Nightingale cleared his throat. "How's the wife, then?"

"Dead," said Mellenby drily, "As most people who were born in 1915 tend to be"

"My sympathies" He said it in a way that made it very clear that he wasn’t particularly sorry.

“They’ve fucked, haven’t they,” Stephanopoulos observed.

“Your guess is as good as mine”

"Are we finished here?" asked Mellenby. “Now that we have established I read the fine print on our oaths; unlike you, apparently”

"No, we are not finished. Why did you choose Briggs as an apprentice?"

"Because he was a bright young man determined to expand his horizons. He noticed that I didn’t appear to age, and confronted me about it. Asked if I was a vampire of all things"

"Were you in an intimate relationship with him?"

Mellenby looked amused. "No. Are you asking if I'm single?"

Nightingale ignored that. “Who do you think killed Dr. Briggs and might be interested in ending your life as well?”

“I thought that would have been obvious”

“If you’d care to elaborate, David”

“Last week a young woman approached me, whom I believe you know rather well, one Lesley May. She offered me a partnership with her Master, and after I refused she went to Brandon and extended the same offer, which he declined as well. I suspect his death was meant as an encouragement for me to rethink my response”

"Are you likely to do so?"

"I'd rather die than be an instrument to death and suffering again, especially concerning that man’s area of interest"

“And when Peter met you in the courtnight tonight you thought he was there to kill you?”

“As I said before. I recognised your touch on his signare, of course, but the same was the case with Miss May, so I couldn’t be sure he hadn’t turned on you as well”

“Peter can be trusted,” Nightingale said, which was glowing praise coming for him. “Can you be sure that it was the Faceless Man who killed Briggs?”

“It might have been one of his accomplices, but the order would have come from him, I’m sure. It wasn’t me, I trust you know that”

“I still recognise your signare, yes. It was neither you, nor anyone you trained. And it wasn’t really your style, was it”

“Oh no, not at all” Whatever that was supposed to mean.

#

"I thought you said David Mellenby died?" I asked in the Jag on our way back to the Folly.

Nightingale kept looking straight ahead as he answered, gripping the steering wheel tightly.. "That was the version of events he circulated, and I doubted it would make any difference to you whether or not he was dead. I haven’t seen him since the sixties, and didn’t expect to do so again"

I wanted to ask more, but thought better of it.

#

I went to see Mellenby one more time, a few days after we had laid the case to rest with all the others involving the Faceless Man, to ask if he wanted protection; or something of the sort. Nightingale would be pissed, I suspected, if he ever found out, but it was our responsibility to take care of the demi-monde. 

Conveniently enough UCLs Physics and Astronomy Department is situated just across the streets from UCH, so I dropped by Dr Walid for a quick check up, which gave me a convenient excuse in case Mellenby didn’t need my help and Nightingale asked where I'd been. Lying by omission is easier, after all. 

I asked around until I found someone who was not only willing to show me the way to David Mellenby’s office, but also offered to buy me a drink after I was finished.

“Sorry,” I told him as nicely as I could, but I had no way of knowing how long this was going to take, and I wasn’t really in the market for a relationship anyway.

He was a good sport about it, and walked me to the office anyway.

“He’s a bit weird,” I was informed, “but a nice enough dude once you get talking. Half the students are into him” With a clap on the shoulder he left me alone, and I knocked.

Mellenby’s office was a mess, to put it nicely, the dark oak shelves overflowing with books and journals, notebooks and papers stacked high on every available surface. A small bi pride flag had been stuck in an old mug filled with pens and pencils balanced precariously on top of a German dictionary on his desk. There was a macbook on his table, so he was at least a decade ahead of Nightingale when it came to modern technology. Maybe he even used his phone once in a while, unlike someone else I knew. On my way to one of the armchairs in front of his desk I stumbled over two bags and nearly knocked another stack of books to the ground, but he didn’t seem to mind.

The cleaners probably hated his guts though.

“I apologize for the manner of our first meeting. You have to understand, PC Grant, I was under the impression that you were intending to kill me, and despite everything I’m in no hurry to die”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, “I get it” After all, I’d been tasered in the back by my best friend only a few weeks ago. You can’t trust anyone these days. I briefly wondered when that had become a normal part of my life, but thought better of it.

“From one wizard to another I do have to commend your shield charm. Minimising its size was quite good thinking. There are some variations to the forma you could use to weaken the shield in some places and strengthen them in key areas, though Thomas was never overly fond of doing so, in case your opponent is quick enough to get past your reflexes. Not that it is likely to happen in his case, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was quite as quick as he is”

"You seemed to hold your own the other day. How did you shatter that spell?"

"There are ways to manipulate a forma after it was cast, though it requires intimate knowledge and extensive training. It rather helps to be familiar with the way someone casts their spells, we all have our quirks"

"What was that spell?"

"A French witch of our mutual acquaintance taught Thomas and me" Thomas and I, a voice in my head that sounds very much like Nightingale said, "after she developed it during the war. She wasn’t allowed to fight, you see, and I believe she was going rather spare. La guillotine, she called it. But that is rather beside the point, I’m afraid. What would you like to talk about, Mr. Grant? Did Thomas send you?"

"No," I admitted, "he actually doesn’t even know I'm here. I wanted to offer you our help if you think you need our protection" Nightingale’s protection, honestly, I wasn’t able to do much protecting just yet.

"Well, that is very kind of you, but quite unnecessary. Unless the Faceless Man decides to come after me himself I am quite sure I will be able to look after myself, and if he should he will find that he is not the only one who knows how to explode a building. I have faced worse enemies in my time, and I wouldn’t want to inconvenience Thomas. As you might have noticed, he isn't terribly fond of me at the moment"

"Why?" I asked, because I couldn’t help myself.

"In the past I made some mistakes, disastrous mistakes, and Thomas hasn’t been able to forgive me for the consequences. Neither have I"

And that was that, I thought. I was never going to see David Mellenby again. 

#

Until I found out why Nightingale had been acting a bit, shall we say, strange.

Or stranger than usual, because, let's face it, the bloke's weird at the best of times and takes a perverse joy in being a fucking paradox.

I do like to think that I'm at least a halfway decent copper and would have figured it out myself under normal circumstances, but my trip to Herefordshire wasn’t particularly helpful in regards to keeping tabs on my boss, and after I’d come back I had been busy with work, and whatever I had with Beverley, and moping about Lesley, so I think no one can blame me, really.

But he went out more, I noticed that. Sometimes in the evening, sometimes he was gone throughout the day, and when I asked he gave me one of his cryptic non-answers. I didn’t press - he was an adult, after all, and didn’t seem to require my assistance - and mostly got on with my life. Until Nightingale cornered me in the Tech Cave one evening, when I'd just settled in for a Star Trek marathon he didn’t seem particularly interested in when I offered.

The term date, in the context of two people exploring the possibilities of a romantic and/or sexual relationship, first was used in the 1890s, in working-class slang, but by the mid 1910s it had found its way into the respectable middle-class’ vernacular, and as such onto the Folly’s doorstep, proud Bourgeoisie institution that it was. 

Now, I did not know this when Nightingale informed me, in the roundabout way that only someone whose life peaked in the 30s can, that he was, and I quote, “seeing” David Mellenby, but got curious about when the word was first used like that, because, to be honest, I was proud he hadn’t said courting or something equally antiquated. I would advise you not to google it, unless you want the exciting opportunity of having casual sex with singles in your neighbourhood. 

“I understand,” Nightingale continued, rooted in his spot in the tech cave as if he was about to face the firing squad, “that this might be a bit of a shock to you,” It wasn’t. “And I hope this will not cloud your judgement of me” It wouldn’t. "If you wish to terminate your apprenticeship over this I am sure it can be arranged to transfer you to another unit"

“You think I want to stop working with you because you're into blokes?"

"It would not be the most outlandish -"

"I don’t care about that," I interrupted him, "and everyone who thinks differently can shove that opinion up their arse. If he makes you happy I'm happy for you"

Nightingale blinked, and I think I might have broken him a little. “Thank you, Peter, I appreciate it. David and I would like to invite you to dinner on Saturday. Davey is cooking” The face he made at that suggested that he wasn’t sure how well this was going to go either.

That told me several things.

Nightingale had not been sure how I was going to react to his stilted coming out

Stephanopoulos had presumably been correct in her assumption that Nightingale and Mellenby had boned in the past, and they were probably doing so again now

My boss seemed to be absolutely smitten, in his own weird, slightly repressed way

Davey.

I was going to have a very interesting evening on Saturday

Said evening would most likely occur outside of the Folly 

We might all end up at the hospital with food poisening

Da-fucking-vey.

“I would love to, sir” I said, and smiled the smile of the damned.

#

I did some snooping later that night, because Nightingale would have - and probably has, come to think of it - done the same for me, and if Mellenby was anything like his paramour it was going to be easier, and kinder, to go behind his back than to ask. And, to be honest, I'd been itching to dig up information on Mellenby for a while now.

The Folly kept extensive records of their practitioners back in the day, and I'd stumbled upon them while looking for something on leprechauns, which is how I know Nightingale’s birthday, that his middle name is Stanley, and that three of what I assumed where his nephews followed him to the Folly in the 30s and had all been killed during the war. Not that I would ever admit to know any of those things except the first, which I could just as easily have wheedled out of Dr Walid. He seemed happy enough when I gave him his presents and a cake that I had paid for with my own hard earned money.

David Horace Mellenby had been born in October of 1899, in Aberdeen, as the second son of another Folly practitioner, who had, twenty years later, gone on to father more children with a new wife. His mother had been German, as a note added later remarked, but it had been deemed improbable that Mellenby was colluding with the enemy - and, I assumed, he had been just too useful to lock up for the rest of the war - although been kept under watch until the end of the war and out of active duty as best as possible. Both sons had been sent off to Casterbrook, which either was the only school for magic in Britain at the time or simply far superior to anything in Scotland, where the elder had graduated in 1916 and merrily gone off to France, where he had died not a week later. David had remained at Casterbrook for another two years, graduating as one of the two top students of his year - three guesses as to who the other was - after which he had gone up to Cambridge to read Physics. From what I could tell he’d stayed there until the war, except for a stint to Weimar in the late 20s to early thirties for his PhD, after which he’d worked as a Don in Cambridge, mostly removed from the rest of the Folly. From what I could tell he’d mostly been involved in research during the war, and had been vocally in favour of Operation Spatchcock, and hadn’t that been a disaster. He'd never officially broken his staff, the only wizard beside Nightingale who did, and had simply drifted away from the Folly. There was no mention of Nightingale in his records, but I hadn’t expected there to be. 

I turned to HOLMES, trusty friend of every paranoid copper, then, which was a bit more complicated, because I knew he had changed his name at least once during the last seven decades, and had probably not gone the legal route to do so. A David Mellenby, still aging in the right direction presumably, resident of Cambridge, had married Agnes Brayer in the early fifties, and the pair had gone on to have two sons, one who had died in the nineties, while the other now lived here in London, divorced with three children my age, and worked as a dentist. There were no new entries on Mellenby ince the seventies, when he must have realised he was getting younger again, but Agnes had passed away in ‘97, aged 82. The name we had brought him in for had appeared in ‘07, allegedly born in the late sixties, and had been teaching at UCL since then. I stopped my sleuthing there, because Nightingale wanted to watch the rugby, and some things really shouldn’t be done in his presence. Which definitely included stalking his boyfriend.

Saturday approached, and if Nightingale was nervous about said boyfriend and his first and now only - again - apprentice meeting he didn’t show it. I was, a little bit, even though I would have never admitted it out loud.

I got my best shirt out of the very back of my closet, the one I had only worn once before, to a dinner with Tyburn that Beverley had dragged me to, and was ready at seven pm sharp, waiting for Nightingale in the Foyer, who had taken his sweet time getting ready, after reminding me we weren’t "going on a pub crawl, Peter, please dress accordingly”

Nightingale had insisted we drive there, because he catergorically refused to use the tube on a weekend night, and made, as per usual, several death defying manouvers that took years off my life on the way to Highgate, which meant Physics professor are getting paid a lot more that I thought, or Mellenby was fucking loaded and probablydidn’t need to work. Considering that he had once been part of the Folly I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

He lived in a nice house, a late Victorian red brick that had cost more than I was going to earn in my entire life, with flowers in the windows and a well kept garden. I stared at it for a solid minute or two, until Nightingale pointedly cleared his throat, and reminded me that I wasn’t here to appreciate the architecture. 

Mellenby opened the door seconds after Nightingale had pressed the bell, as if he’d been waiting for us in the hallway. He looked posher than he had done the last time I’d seen him, in a three-piece suit of his own, though not quite as much as Nightingale, who had whipped out a grey pinstripe I had never seen before and the lilac shirt that made a return every few months or so.

They didn’t kiss, which frankly I hadn’t expected, but they both looked as if they weren’t really sure how to greet each other with another person in the room, and it struck me that I was probably the first person they had ever introduced each other as partners to and that this was a bigger deal than I had thought at first. It can’t have been easy to finally come out of the closet, after growing up in a time when the Buggery Act of 1533 was still being in parts enforced, even if it had gotten a rebranding since then.

Eventually they simply settled on a slightly awkward conferment of the wine bottle Nightingale had insisted on bringing, and called it a day. 

I shook his hand, and gave him the flowers I had brought, after Nightingale had assured me that he would “most certainly appreciate the gesture”. 

He did seem delighted at the sight of them. “One never gets flowers these days,” he told me, “It’s such a shame, I quite enjoy them. Can’t keep them alive for the sake of me, but I do try” He was one of those people who talk with their hands when they are nervous, which he definitely was, and he nearly chucked the wine across the room, before Nightingale extracted it from his grasp, clearly used to this. 

There is a certain atmosphere to the homes of people who’re past retirement, and Mellenby’s house certainly had it as well. It’s a certain feeling of history, different to that of the Folly, of a life that had been lived and had the accumulation of memories to show for it. As he led us into the sitting room we passed dark furniture and assortments of old memorabilia he couldn’t part with. It all felt old, older than I was, at the very least, but was well cared for.

Mellenby left for the kitchen, and Nightingale quickly abandoned me to go and help - or, more likely, for a proper greeting - and I used the opportunity to do some snooping. I didn’t open any doors or drawers, I’m not that nosy, but there was a good number of photographs displayed on an ancient chest of drawers, most of them from before the war, or even older. I spotted Nightingale in some of them, at varying ages, either alone with Mellenby or in groups of what were, probably, other practitioners. A wedding picture with Mellenby as the groom, even if he looked older and more miserable. Pictures of two blond children, some old enough that I guessed it must have been him as a young boy, and another of them in their teenage years. The other must have been his brother I guessed, judging from the chin and intelligent eyes. As well as some that must be of his own children, the wife featuring in some of them, along with a very ugly cat. One of him with a younger man he was definitely related to, from before the war, a Christmas tree in the background. The portrait of an old woman, probably his wife, and a picture of him and Nightingale that definitely had been taken in the last few weeks, because I’d gotten Nightingale that tie for his birthday. 

When Nightingale came back to fetch me for dinner I was sprawled out on one of the armchairs, as if I’d been there the entire time, typing away on my phone, reassured by the expensive television in the corner that it wasn’t going to be fried any time soon. 

Dinner went smoother than I had expected, some fancy beef stew with a side of vegetables that, at first glance at least, seemed safe to consume. Me and Nightingale shared the bottle of wine after Mellenby had revealed that, alas, he didn’t drink, but wouldn’t mind if we did. 

It was obvious that the situation was awkward, to them because they knew I knew they were doing it, and to me because Nightingale is still my dinosaur of a boss, despite how friendly his partner appeared to be, upon closer inspection.

Nightingale kept the conversation safely away from magic, work and everything that had happened between 1918 and 1945, but I did learn that they had begun what would be a thirty year long relationship when they were sixteen and it was highly illegal to do so, after being close friends since starting Casterbrook, and had drifted apart after the war until their explosive reunion seventy years later.

I couldn’t quite imagine them as friends at school, Nightingale, who was as unscientifically minded as one could be, and Mellenby, who'd probably empirically determined his preferred tea to water ratio by the time he was five.

He conspiratorially leaned forward and whispered “Don’t tell Thomas, but I didn’t actually cook this on my own. I botched the first attempt and asked my neighbour for help, Tom would have had a field day if I’d had served another failed attempt”

I’m not exactly the next Gordon Ramsay, so I could hardly fault him. “I didn’t know he can cook”

“That might be an exaggeration, but he was better at it than I was when we were younger, and he never let me forget it. I used to live of off chocolate and biscuits during my student years, much to Thomas’ exasperation, and I only properly learned how to in the seventies, mostly just the basics, you understand, this might have been too much of a reach”

Me and Nightingale - well, mostly just me - finished off the wine, and I offered to take the tube back to the Folly so he could stay the night, to which they both looked a bit scandalised. 

I thought about thanking him for inviting me, and trusting me with that part of his life, but he looked as if he might crash the car if I brought up anything sentimental like that."I like him a lot better now that he isn't trying to kill me," I told him instead.

"I was afraid you'd say that. Peter, one day you will ask David about his research, and while I will not forbid you to do so, there are some things that would better remain in the past, for all of our sakes"

“Oh, and Peter?”

“Yes, sir?”

“If a word of this gets to Seawoll or Stephanopoulos I will make your life a living hell. Is that clear?”

“Crystal”

“Jolly good”