It became London’s first true police station, and in the nineteenth century it moved across the road and became the Bow Street Magistrates Court – probably the most famous court in Britain after the Old Bailey. Oscar Wilde was sent down there for being a public nuisance, and William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw himself, started his short walk to the hangman’s noose from Bow Street. The Kray twins were remanded there for the murder of Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie. It was sold in 2006 to a land magnate who turned it into a hotel because while history and tradition have a fine voice in London, money has a sweet siren song all its own.
The original house had been replaced by an indoor flower market with an arched iron and glass roof. Eliza Doolittle, as played by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, would have bought her violets there before moving off to display the worst cockney accent this side of Dick Van Dyke. When they rebuilt the Royal Opera House in the 1990s it swallowed up most of the surrounding block, including the flower market. Which was why we found ourselves round the backstage entrance of the Opera House where, apparently, Nightingale knew a guy who could get us in.
It wasn’t so much a stage door as a heavy-goods entrance. I’ve seen warehouses with smaller loading bays, and there was an industrial-sized lift for getting enormous scenery palettes from floor to floor. Terry, a balding little man in a beige cardigan – Nightingale’s guy on the inside – said that they weighed upwards of fifteen tons, and when they weren’t being used were stored in a depot in Wales – he didn’t say why it had to be Wales.
‘We’ve come to see the Magistrate,’ said Nightingale.
Terry nodded gravely and led us through a series of narrow, white-painted corridors and HSE-specified fire doors that reminded me of uncomfortably of Westminster Mortuary. We finished up in a low-ceilinged storeroom that Nightingale assured us was the ground floor of the flower market.
‘Directly where the parlour of Number Four once stood,’ he said, and turned to our guide. ‘Don’t worry, Terry, we can see ourselves out.’
Terry gave us a cheery wave and left. The room was lined with ugly steel and hardboard shelving stuffed with cardboard boxes and delivery wraps full of napkins, cocktail sticks and packs of a dozen serving trays. The centre of the room was empty, with just a few scuff marks to show where a line of shelves had once stood. I tried to feel for vestigia but all I got at first was dust and ripped plastic. Then I sensed it, right on the edge of perception: parchment, old sweat, leather and spilled port.
‘A ghost magistrate,’ I said. ‘To provide a ghost warrant?’
‘Symbols have power over ghosts,’ said Nightingale. ‘They often have more effect than anything we can bring to bear from the physical world.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘To be honest, Peter,’ said Nightingale, ‘I remember the class where we studied it and I know I read the relevant passages in Bartholomew – I may even have written an essay, but I’m damned if I remember any of the why.’
‘How are you planning to teach me this stuff if you don’t know it yourself?’
Nightingale gently tapped his cane against his chest. ‘I was going to refresh my memory before we got to that part of your education,’ he said. ‘I know at least two of my Masters who did the same thing, and back then we had specialist teachers.’
I realised suddenly that Nightingale was looking for reassurance, which I found extremely worrying. ‘Just make sure you stay ahead of me,’ I said. ‘How do we find the Magistrate?’
Nightingale smiled. ‘We just need to get his attention,’ he said. He turned and addressed the empty centre of the room. ‘Captain Nightingale to see the Colonel.’
The smell of old sweat and spilled drink grew stronger, and a figure appeared in front of us. This ghost seemed more transparent than my old friend Wallpenny, thinner and more ghostly, but his eyes glittered as they turned on us. Sir John Fielding had worn a black bandage to hide his blind eyes, and Nightingale had called on the ‘Colonel’， so my guess that this was Colonel Sir Thomas de Veil – a man so routinely corrupt that he managed to shock eighteenth-century London society, generally considered by historians to be the most corrupt in the history of the British Isles.
‘What do you want, Captain?’ asked De Veil. His voice was thin and distant, and around him I could sense rather than see the faint outlines of furniture: a desk, a chair, a bookcase. Legend had it that De Veil had a special private closet where he conducted ‘judicial examinations’ of female witnesses and suspects.