Archive of Our Own

DS Peter Grant

I came to lying face-up on the floor in the main atrium of the Folly, which is not something that happens as often as you might think. I could count all the occurrences on the fingers of one hand and that was including the times I’d fallen asleep in an armchair. Annie was hovering over me, looking both confused and anxious.

“Sir?” she said. “Are you okay?”

I thought about this, wriggled my fingers and toes. Bit of a headache, but again – I’d had worse. “I’ll cope. Give us a hand up.”

She obliged, although this being Annie I had to be careful not to pull her over. If we still had a minimum height requirement she’d never have been a copper. “Sir, what happened –– I swear you didn’t have a beard when you walked in here, and you weren’t...”

Her eyes flickered over me and she cut off, but I was pretty sure she’d been about to say something about my clothes. And, okay, these were not my best jeans and my t-shirt had seen better days, but it was the weekend and I hadn’t been planning on leaving the Folly; she’d seen me in worse. Like the time Molly had set off a smoke alarm at three am. I’d almost regretted installing them.

I rubbed my face. “Annie, I’ve been working on this for a month and you’ve all given me your opinion about it. Can we let it go, maybe?”

The idea had been that facial hair made me look very slightly less like I was still in my late twenties, which is, while perhaps not something to complain about when you’re on the wrong side of forty, somewhat awkward when your unit includes a herd of constables not that much younger than that. On the other hand, it had been Bev’s suggestion, and she didn’t have to live with it, as it were, so I was still tossing up whether it was worth the hassle. Who knew, my grey hairs might come in all at once. Besides, Nightingale was a bit dubious about it, and he did have to live with it. As it were. I think this was mostly because he associated facial hair with his parents’ generation, even if it had since gone in and out of fashion at least four or five times. The apprentices had varying opinions, but Annie had generally come down in favour, if I recalled correctly, which I might not because I hadn’t been supposed to overhear that conversation.

“I,” said Annie. “Sir?”

“Okay,” I said, looking around for somebody whose presence would demand that sort of formality, “what’s going on?” Usually I was lucky to get sirred that much in a week; sarge was the preferred form of address, or Peter from Abigail, because she couldn’t break the habit. After nearly four years with the apprentices, living in the Folly with them as well as teaching them magic and the police work, we didn’t have a lot of room for formality. Not past what was needed to keep the job running smoothly.

“I think I’d better go get my guv,” Annie said hastily, and fled the scene. Yep; weirdness levels climbing. Why hadn’t she just said Nightingale?

I turned in a slow circle, taking more in; the Folly looked much as it always did. Tidier than normal, maybe. There was a dusty feel in the air, not real dust – Molly would never allow that – but…disuse, which was also strange. In the winter we used this space quite a lot, due to the quirks of the Folly’s heating system, a term I use semi-sarcastically. The armchairs were missing, too. Something was…not right.

“Commander Grant,” said someone behind me. “I was expecting you a little later. Constable Sterling said you’d taken a fall?”

I turned, and it was Nightingale; at least, it looked like him, and it sounded like him, and he was wearing a grey pinstripe suit and lavender shirt I recognised. But he’d said something that didn’t make any sense whatsoever and it was in English, and that wasn’t like him. He generally said things that didn’t make sense in Greek, or occasionally Aramaic just to be contrary. I know it’s to be contrary because he’d stopped doing it in Latin around the time I’d started understanding everything he said in that language.

“What?” I said eloquently. “What did you just call me?”

“Sir?” said Nightingale, frowning and taking a step forward. I nearly undid all Annie’s good work and fell over again because that was a very weird feeling, Nightingale addressing me that way. Very weird. Weird. That was what it was.

“Seriously,” I said. “Thomas. Not funny. What’s going on, and why did you call me Commander?”

Nightingale – if it was Nightingale, because something was wrong here – blinked at me in perfect confusion. “What were you expecting to be called?”

“My name? Which you’ve been perfectly capable of using for the last fifteen years, give or take?”

I was mentally compiling a list of possibilities; I had amnesia, he had amnesia, wait, he and Annie had amnesia, we were all under some kind of very strong enchantment, it was a sadly long list.

“I haven’t known you for fifteen years,” he said. “I’ve barely known you for six months. And, now I come to think of it, you haven’t had time to grow that beard since the last time I saw you.”

“You haven’t even known me for -” I added nightmare and hallucination to the list of possibilities, just to be thorough. “Who, exactly, do you think I am?”

“You’re Commander Peter Grant,” said – someone who looked like Nightingale, “you’re responsible for community engagement for the Metropolitan Police Service, and ever since you learned about the Folly you’ve taken a somewhat worrying degree of interest in it.”

I gaped at him. “Ever since I’ve learned about – I’ve been here for fifteen years, of course I -” A horrible thought occurred. “Oh, fuck, this better be not some sort of mirror universe thing.”

“Mirror universe?” Nightingale frowned, even though we’d watched that episode when it had been on a re-run somewhere deep in the bowels of our cable selection once, and I know his memory’s good.

“Alternate universe,” I said, trying to figure out how that could possibly, possibly, be an option – nightmare and hallucination still seemed more promising, in my experience. “You know, like the real one, but without shrimp.” He looked very blank at this. Well, I don’t think I’d ever exposed him to Buffy. “Or where something went different in history, or…a universe that isn’t the same. Because I’m definitely not a Commander. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would promote me that far, if we’re being honest. The only thing I’m responsible for is four constables.”

Nightingale frowned at me. “No, that’s – all right. Tell me what you think you do.”

“I don’t think, I know. I know I’m a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Service, I know I’ve known you for a very long time, and I know I take an interest in the Folly because I’m part of it. I’m a wizard.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Nightingale, which was his way of saying what the fuck.

There was an easy way to end this discussion, so I took it; I held out my hand and cast a werelight. It was hard to remember now what it had felt like to struggle for it all those years ago. I could have done it in my sleep. (You can’t actually do magic in your sleep, thank God. Your brain patterns aren’t focused enough, or something like that. Dr Walid explains it better than I do.)

I made it bright, emphatic, and it lit up the lobby in actinic white, drowning out all the lamps, LED bulbs these days but softened by old glass shades. To someone as experienced as Nightingale my signare had to be obvious. I held it a few seconds, enough time to see Nightingale actually physically start and then collect himself, and then shut it down. It left a glow behind my eyelids. Maybe a bit too emphatic.

“You are a wizard,” he said, stunned. “You –– I taught you that. Or somebody I taught did.”

“Just you,” I said. “Wasn’t anybody else active, really. Or do you think that’s different, too?”

“The question being,” said Nightingale, “if you’re really a sergeant, and a wizard, and part of the Folly – where’s Commander Grant? Because I assure you; I know him, he’s exactly what I told you he was, and he’s certainly not a practitioner of any sort.”

“Fucked if I know,” I said, still not really convinced that there was a Commander Grant. “All I did was walk in my own back door.” 

Commander Peter Grant

I woke up blinking on my back; I thought I recognized the ceiling, far above. It was the Folly.

It should be; the last thing I remembered was walking in the front door, having called DCI Nightingale and told him I wanted a chat. I needed to know more about these Little Crocodiles I’d heard about from Cecelia and the Berwick Street report. He wasn’t going to like talking about it, but after dinner two weeks ago I was hoping he might be slightly easier to get on with. It had gone well. Actually, and I was trying not to think about this, maybe slightly too well. He was several ranks below me even if not in my direct chain of command, functionally immortal, and showing every sign of being a giant headache if mishandled.

If only he’d had the grace to be worse company. Or less easy on the eyes.

PC Malini Choudhury leaning over me, looking anxious, pretty much proved me right about where I was.

“You okay?” she asked. “Did you slip?”

“I’m not sure what just happened,” I said, “but fine, otherwise, thank you, Constable. Where’s Inspector Nightingale?”

“Right here, Peter,” he said, and I was so surprised that he was choosing now to finally use my first name that I stumbled a bit getting up. He put an arm around me to help, like we touched each other every day. “What on earth happened to your beard? Not that I’m complaining.”

Choudhury made a quiet noise that might be a suppressed giggle; I gave her a look, and she stopped, blinking in confusion.

Nightingale was taking his time letting go of me. It wasn’t bad, okay, but it was a level of physical intimacy we absolutely weren’t at, and I started to stiffen. He hurried it up then, stepping away and frowning at me. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I haven’t had a beard since that really unfortunate undercover operation when I was twenty-seven with that idiot from the SFO,” I said. “And I’m fairly certain you have no reason to know about that.”

“What undercover operation?”

“When I was with Fraud?”

Nightingale frowned. “When you were – that would have been – Peter, we never worked any cases with Fraud until you’d been here four years, and that one wasn’t undercover; Skygarden was the first and last time you really did undercover.”

I tried adding up that sentence every way I could and none of the sums came out right. And he was still calling me Peter. “Inspector, I’ve never worked for your unit, or for you. You have no reason to know what I was or wasn’t doing when I was a constable.”

He just sort of stood there, blinking at me, like I’d said the sky is green or no, pigs definitely have wings or I’m so glad DPS decided to take an interest in this case.

Choudhury was staring, too, her mouth slightly open.

“Peter,” Nightingale said, for a third time, voice intent. “What’s the first thing I said to you this morning?”

“I didn’t get here until this afternoon, I was at New Scotland Yard this morning,” I said. “The last time we talked was on the phone a week and a half ago, and the last thing you said to me then was, let me think. Have a good afternoon, Commander.”

I’d been trying to stay a bit more hands-off now I’d finally gotten him to agree to take on Abigail and the rest, not get in touch more than once every two weeks or so. If there was any chance of it working, of reactivating the Folly as a real unit and not just one strange immortal outlier and his probably-not-human housekeeper, he needed to see them as his apprentices. It was harder than I’d expected it to be – I had an endless list of questions about magic, the Folly, DCI Nightingale, all of it, and I wanted them answered yesterday – but I’d been trying. When we’d had dinner, two weeks back, we hadn’t really talked about magic at all. Although that might still have been better than me blurting out all that stuff about my father. Of all the things I didn’t want to talk about.

Nightingale digested this, and then said, very carefully, “Commander?”

I got out my warrant card, because that seemed like the explanation that would involve the least argument; pity I wasn’t in uniform today. He took it, examined it carefully, and handed it back to me. “Sir.”

“Thank you, Inspector,” I said.

Choudhury, I swear to god, squeaked. She’s a tall girl as these things go, and broad across the shoulders as well. It was an entirely incongruous sound for her to make.

“Mal,” said Nightingale, “if you wouldn’t mind, go and give Beverley a call. I think we’re going to need her assistance.”

I tried to figure out who that would be, and couldn’t right away; Choudhury looked from me to her governor, shifting her weight. “Sir, are you sure…”

“I’ll be quite alright, Mal,” he said, sounding amused, but I realised there was something off about his posture, a sort of relaxed tension almost like –– like he was prepared for a fight.

Choudhury nodded, and left the room at a brisk pace, presumably to fetch reinforcements.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded as soon as she was gone. Once you reach a certain rank it pays to minimise the swearing in front of constables; they tend to get the impression that everything’s out of control, otherwise, or that you’re out of control of yourself, which in their world amounts to much the same thing.

“Well,” Nightingale drawled, and oh yes, that was someone ready for a fight, as if I was going to – what – physically assault him? “There are a few options. Either you’ve lost your memory, or you’re somebody pretending to be Peter, or you used to be Peter, or you’re – not our Peter. Two and three are, obviously, of the greatest concern. But in any case, Commander Grant, you’re something of an intruder on the premises until we sort out which it is.”

“I’m a Commander in the Metropolitan Police Service and this is, if I’m not mistaken, a station housing officers of the Metropolitan Police Service,” I said. “By definition, I’m not intruding.”

“I believe you believe that,” said DCI Nightingale. “But Peter Grant isn’t a Commander in the Metropolitan Police Service, and you’re claiming to be Peter Grant, so – it does leave us at something of an impasse.”

“If you think I, or – the Peter Grant you know,” I wasn’t going to say your Peter Grant, it sounded too…something, “don’t have the job I actually have – then what am I?”

“You’re a DS with the Special Assessment Unit, that is to say the Folly,” said Nightingale. “You’re my sergeant, in point of fact, and you’re a wizard.”

“Fuck me,” I said.

I found out that even if this Nightingale thought I was an NPCC-rank officer and not a wizard, he still had the apprentices, our apprentices, so that was something. They only made the terrifying alternate universe theory look more and more probable, though. Annie and maybe Nightingale as well being – possessed, or losing their memories, or something, that was a possibility. But Mal and Matt too, calling me sir every third word and looking at me like I could crush them underfoot if they stepped wrong, which was a reasonable response to that sort of senior officer but not to me, that was something else. Even Molly looked at me hesitantly, as much as Molly ever looks at anybody hesitantly; she shook her head firmly when I said I’d known her for years. And Abigail –– well, Abigail was Abigail, but when she trailed me up the stairs she did it cautiously, and that wasn’t right at all.

“Where are you going, sir?”

“Just checking something,” I said. “Confirming a theory.”

The fastest thing to do would be to check Nightingale’s room and see if my e-reader was on the bedside table or my pyjamas tossed across the chest at the foot of the bed, both of which had been true this morning, but if this really wasn’t my Nightingale the explaining would be horrific, so I didn’t. I checked my own room instead.

“What do you want in there?” Abigail said behind me, baffled, as I opened the door onto the dim light of closed curtains falling over dustcovers. This room was dreaming away the years as it had done ever since its occupant had failed to come home from the war. I walked back out into the corridor to check, the world spinning around me; yep, right door. My room. What should be my room. I said as much aloud.

“That’s just,” Abigail said. “You? A wizard?”

I cast a werelight; it had worked the first time. Her jaw dropped. “Fuck me.”

“I’ve taught you magic,” I said. “Or at least the Abigail I know. You conned me into promising I would when you were thirteen and my mum had just finished telling everybody she knew I was a witch-finder now.”

It wasn’t a bad memory, and I half-smiled when I said it, but this Abigail just looked nervous. And suspicious. I guess she and Commander Grant weren’t that close. If he existed. If this was really – Christ. What had happened to me?

“What are you doing here, then?” she said, voicing my thought.

“I think that’s exactly what Nightingale is trying very hard to figure out,” I said. “Guess we should go give him a hand. I’d like to be home in time for dinner.”

Alternate universe, or hallucination; without any evidence of the latter, I needed to proceed like it was the former. Even if that was nothing I’d ever experienced with magic.

Just when I’d started to think I knew most of what was possible.

I didn’t know what else to do with myself, once DCI Nightingale had asked me to stay put, so I sat down in one of the armchairs in the lobby. Still seemed a weird place for armchairs. I pulled out my phone, but for some reason it wasn’t getting a signal; or it was, but it wasn’t connecting. Of course this place didn’t have wi-fi. That would be way too modern. I was sometimes surprised there was electricity.

I looked up when I heard voices; it was Nightingale and Beverley Brook Thames. She’d changed her hair since I’d seen her last – it was much shorter, and natural. A good look for her, but everything was a good look for her.

“Well of course that’s not Peter,” she said as soon as she laid eyes on me. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t tell that!”

“I know it’s not Peter,” said Nightingale, sounding somewhat exasperated, “I just need to know if he’s a practitioner or not. Then maybe we can start figuring out where our Peter has got to.”

“This is exactly the kind of thing he’d do, isn’t it,” sighed Beverley Brook. I stood up to greet her; she ignored my hand and actually sniffed at me. I took a step back. “Nope, you’re fine. Not a practitioner and no strong magic on him. Not a changeling either, although he’s a bit old for that. There’s just something…I don’t know. Something wrong. He doesn’t belong here.”

“Excuse me,” I said.

“You’re excused.” She smiled at me, and I felt immediately bad for pulling back, and then, hang on, that wasn’t right; it was that glamour thing Nightingale had talked about. It was the first time I’d noticed it strongly. It made me wonder about all the times I maybe hadn’t noticed it.

“And that’s Peter’s suspicious face,” she went on. “Well, if it’s not Peter, it’s somebody doing an amazing impression.” 

“Quite,” murmured Nightingale. “I don’t suppose…?”

“Nope, don’t have a clue,” she said. “Molly might?”

“Hmmmm,” said Nightingale, and they exchanged a glance I didn’t have the first hope of interpreting.

“You should probably take care of this one, though,” she said. “Seems like the kind of thing where you’d have to swap them back.”

“It would be impolite to let something happen to a Peter Grant, all things considered,” Nightingale replied.

“You just like that this one’s going clean-shaven,” Beverley Brook said, laughing, and Nightingale just shook his head with a flicker of a smile, and I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten foot fucking pole. He’d said I – his Peter – wait, no, this world’s Peter, that was better – was his sergeant! For Christ’s sake.

The important thing, though, was that they were talking to each other and not to me, so before either of them noticed to stop me I turned around and walked out the front door. If I was really in another universe, if this was yet another thing magic was capable of that Nightingale had somehow failed to mention, it was time to do my own research about it.

*

There was a café right across the square with wifi; if this was another universe I didn’t like the odds of my cards working, but I had some cash on me, so I got a coffee and settled in. The results weren’t promising. I didn’t exist on the Internet, at least in my current position and rank. No Twitter, nothing on the Met website. In fact, I couldn’t find anything on the me that should exist at all, although my name’s common enough that if my counterpart here didn’t have a high web profile that wouldn’t be surprising. Nothing on Nightingale, of course. Lesley didn’t come up either, not the way she should have as a DCI for a high-profile Murder Squad. Cecelia’s Wikipedia page checked out much the same, that was a relief. But I couldn’t find Dad’s obituary. It was the first thing I’d thought of, when I thought about differences.

Nobody had come out to drag me back into that mausoleum of a building yet, which was good. I thought about going to New Scotland Yard, but all evidence – i.e. the main Met website - pointed to me not existing there. It was a weird feeling, like having the floor fall out from under me. There’s this thing called impostor syndrome, which means that even if you are, like me, a NPCC-rank officer in the Metropolitan Police Service, capable of politics and terrorising the lower ranks by your mere existence in their presence, you still don’t quite believe that everybody else believes that. Or maybe that’s just me. I hear that’s part of impostor syndrome, too. Anyway, not being on the org chart, not seeming to exist, knowing that if I went to my office it wouldn’t be there and my staff, if they were there, wouldn’t know or answer to me: that was like every morbid fear I’d ever had come to life. I didn’t much like it.

So I did what any self-respecting person lost in an alternate universe does: I went to visit my Mum. Stood to reason that if a Peter Grant existed here, she did too.

*

My Oyster card still worked, and when I got to Peckwater Estate Mum answered the door, which was a good start. She was on the phone – well, no surprises there.

“Peter!” she exclaimed. “You got rid of – yes, he’s here. No, I just opened the door. Are you sure? Very well. I’ll see what I can do. If you’re sure you don’t want to – okay, okay. Goodbye for now.”

“Mum,” I said, obscurely relieved she recognised me at all, and then – “Wait. Who was that you were talking to?”

“Your Inspector Nightingale, of course,” she said calmly. “And he says you’re not my Peter at all; you’re from some sort of alternate universe Doctor Who nonsense, is what he thinks. Is that true?”

“Uh,” I said.

“Peter,” she said warningly.

“Not sure,” I said. “Trying to find out.”

“Well, come inside then. But be quiet; your father is asleep, you know how he is these days. You can make tea and we’ll go out on the balcony.”

But I hadn’t really heard anything after your father is asleep. I grabbed at the doorframe. I’m not saying my knees buckled, but.

“What is it?” Mum wanted to know.

“Dad’s dead,” I blurted out. “He –– it was two years ago, he – he can’t be asleep. He died.”

Her face softened. “Oh, no. You’re really not my Peter, are you?”

“He’s dead,” I said again.

“Dead to the world, maybe,” said Mum. “Go on and make the tea, there’s a good boy, and we’ll talk. I promised your Inspector I’d set you right.”

“He’s not my inspector, Mum,” I said, obscurely affronted. “Stop saying that.”

“Oh, really?” She looked sceptical. “Maybe there’s another Thomas Nightingale who isn’t, but I’ve sat down to Christmas dinner with this one five times now, and you brought him with you, or my Peter did, so I don’t know what else you want me to call him. Now – I hope you still know where the tea things are.”

I’m a good son, I like to think, even to a mother who isn’t quite mine. So I went.

The first stop for a magical problem is always the mundane library, but the apprentices would be taking care of that, so I hit the magical one. I’d expected to find Nightingale in there, but he wasn’t; maybe in this universe he had some different ideas about who might understand what the hell was going on. Who knew. I found it impossible to imagine a Nightingale who’d spent the past fifteen years – what – alone except for Molly? Not even Toby? If he’d never taken me as an apprentice, I doubted he’d taken Toby in. That had been almost entirely my idea, even if Nightingale had gotten quite fond of him eventually.

I wondered what had happened to Punch. And – Lesley.

The whole thing was just too depressing to be worth thinking about, so I focused on the books instead. I wouldn’t have expected it, but I could tell just from this room I hadn’t been around the Folly. This really was somewhere else, not my home. I’d moved stuff, re-organised things, added in signs so I could find what I was looking for; this was the original, vintage, bloody annoying magical library. I would have thought the apprentices would be far enough along with the Latin and so on that they’d have started to get into it, but apparently not.

Due to this, I’d only accumulated a pile of about five books when Annie poked her head in. “Sir?”

I debated telling her to drop it, but it didn’t seem worth it. “Yeah?”

“You, um, there’s someone to see you,” she said. I put down the text I’d been debating on the pile and followed her out. (It was in Aramaic, which I still don’t read, but I recognised it from another bout of research, and I knew Nightingale could.) I was surprised Nightingale hadn’t put one of the apprentices on to follow me around the place. It’s what I’d have done, if the same thing had happened with him. Maybe two of them. Just in case.

“What the fuck have you done with Peter?” came a strangely familiar voice from the lobby as I walked down the main stairs. I recognised it, but I hadn’t heard it like that for years. A lot of years. “No offence, Thomas, but you weren’t making a lot of sense on the phone.” She was coming closer, into the atrium.

“You went to Hendon with him,” Nightingale said. “Something’s very wrong, and I think you’ve the best chance of telling what.”

“What did you do to him? Is it, you know, the m-word?”

“I wish I knew.”

I wanted to keep going and see if it was really her, but I couldn’t move. Annie was eyeing me with concern. There were footsteps, and then she appeared at the foot of the stairs, looking up at me.

“Peter,” said Lesley May. “Oh my god. What’s that on your face?”

She’d had a haircut, a neat pageboy bob; it suited her. There were one or two paler streaks in her blonde hair, the beginnings of grey, maybe. That suited her, too. Her face was wrinkled up in confusion and distaste – not a fan of beards, our Lesley, never had been –– but it was her face, her old face, her beautiful face, with lines around her eyes and mouth she’d never had the chance to get. She was wearing a beautifully cut tan trenchcoat and some very expensive boots. Probably handmade.

“Lesley,” I said. I thought of a lot of other things. None of them were right, so I didn’t say them. “You’re – you’re okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked blankly. “And why are you dressed like you’re taking a weekend to paint your flat?” That was, to be fair, probably the kindest assessment of what I was wearing. The t-shirt was a size too small; I’d borrowed it off Beverley at least a decade ago and never given it back.

“Wasn’t planning on leaving the house today,” I said. I’d just come in from the tech cave when whatever had happened, had happened. “But apparently I had a trip to another universe scheduled. Well, that or I’ve lost my memory, or I’m hallucinating, but I don’t think I’d hallucinate…” Fuck; I was out of words again. “Everybody’s telling a consistent story so far.”

Lesley jumped on the house thing, of course. “If you weren’t planning to leave the house why are you here?”

“Never mind about me,” I said, walking down to meet her. “I want to know about you.”

“Why are you here?” was the first thing Mum wanted to know, once we were on the balcony. She’d said Dad was asleep in the bedroom, but there was no ashtray on the table; god, I hoped she wasn’t getting early-onset dementia or something.

“Here, like, not in my own universe, or here as in talking to you?”

She smacked my hand. “Both of those things. Answer the question.”

“First one, I dunno,” I said. “Woke up in that big old ridiculous building DCI Nightingale has for a nick with one of his PCs bending over me all concerned. I don’t know anything about magic, really. I mean, I’ve been trying to get him to tell me, but he’s not very helpful. I just know this isn’t my world; that or my memory’s all wrong, but all my emails are still in my phone, so I don’t think so. Second one – I needed to talk to somebody I knew, and everybody I know at work, if I’m not, they wouldn’t…”

“Are you not a police officer?”

“’Course I’m a police officer,” I said. “I’m Commander for Community Engagement, in point of fact. Office at New Scotland Yard and everything. But I looked it up online and here it’s some bloke called-”

“A Commander?” Mum raised her eyebrows. “Is that so. And are you married? Children?”

Mum always did have her priorities. “Nope. Couple of times that might have turned into – but nope. Sorry, Mum.”

She waved a hand. “Ah, well, I’m used to it. You could have married Beverley Brook and then you didn’t. Her mother and I were very disappointed about that, not that either of you cared.”

“Her mother – you mean like the goddess of the River Thames?”

“Mama Thames,” agreed my mother, nodding. “A very nice woman. We have tea, now and again.”

I tried to contemplate my mother regularly socialising with the goddess of the River Thames, who must be even more intimidating than Cecelia Tyburn, and Cecelia had me on guard every time we talked even if I was pretty sure she liked me. This was more terrifying than everything else I’d been told put together.

“So you know,” I said. “About this Peter – about him being, a, a wizard.”

“He’s a witch-finder,” said my Mum. “It’s a good job. Very respectable. I’m proud of him. I still would have liked grandchildren, but I suppose you can’t have everything.”

I heard the creak of the door sliding open behind us, and I turned around, and – it was Dad. Everything felt very light, suddenly, the cup in my hand, the chair, my body, like it could all just float away, like none of it was real.

He had a lot more wrinkles than he’d had when he was laid out. More spots, too. But there was still life in his eyes, and he smiled when he saw me.

“Afternoon,” he said. “What’re you doing here? Bit dressed up for a visit to your parents, aren’t you?”

I supposed my suit was overshooting Peckwater Estate a bit; I hadn’t even thought about that until now, too caught up in what was going on.

Mum was glaring at me. She didn’t want me to tell him who I was. That was okay. I wouldn’t have known where to start.

“I,” I said. “I was in the neighbourhood. Just thought I’d drop in. But actually I’ve got to – I can’t stay.”

“All that magic business to attend to,” my Dad agreed. It was utterly surreal. “Well, say hello to the rest of your lot for me.”

At least he didn’t say anything about my beard, or lack thereof. I’m not saying I ran away. But I didn’t stick around.

It didn’t seem like a good idea. That was all.

I didn’t really know what to do next. I supposed the only thing to do was go back to Russell Square. I could have tried my flat, but Mum had seemed utterly convinced about this story about me being a sergeant; odds-on I didn’t live there, and it was in a nice enough building that someone might call the police if they didn’t know me.

I caught the Tube back, but got off early to walk. I needed the thinking time. Which was why, just outside King’s Cross, I ran into Lesley May.

Of course, I didn’t know it was her at first; I didn’t know about any of what had happened to her. All I knew was that a short blonde white woman saw me, froze, and then turned to walk the other way. Sometimes it happens, although not usually on a crowded street in London in the middle of the day, so I wasn’t going to do or say anything about it until she stopped, turned back, and marched up to me.

I stopped. I could only assume this was someone this Peter Grant knew and I didn’t, but apart from that I was lost.

“I don’t feel like making a break for it today,” she said conversationally, “and I know you saw me. Where are you off to, in your good suit? Had court?”

“No,” I said, and scrabbled for conversation. “Meetings.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Peter, what’s going on?”

“Nothing?”

She looked even more suspicious at that. “Not even a ‘none of your business?’”

“Well, obviously.” I hoped I sounded like I knew what I was talking about.

“Peter,” she said again, slowly. “You don’t know who I am.”

I thought, and thought, but I didn’t recognise her face or her voice, and she wasn’t wearing anything distinctive – jeans, a leather jacket, a blue blouse. Nobody I worked with, nobody on any of the committees or groups I attended, nobody I’d arrested, even, though it had been a long time since I’d made an arrest personally.

“You don’t.” She stepped in close, jabbed a finger into my chest. “Are you even Peter?”

“Alright, that’s enough,” a voice said loudly, and we both looked up to see PC Matthew Blake standing there. I hadn’t even spotted him following me – he must have been there the whole time, to my parents’ place and back. I should be ashamed of myself. It had been a long time since I’d done proper undercover but not that long since I’d done surveillance. And half of that is knowing when you’re being watched.

“Oh, it’s one of your ducklings,” said the woman, sounding amused. “God, have you lost your memory or something? It’d be just another day at the office, wouldn’t it.”

“Ducklings?” I repeated. It sounded like a code word. Something to do with Folly cases being code-named Falcon?

“He’s not DS Grant,” said Blake. “He’s just…I’ve got to get him back to the Folly, and he’s nothing to do with you, so go away.”

“Or what?” asked the woman, even more amused now. 

“Or…” Blake trailed off.

“It’s alright,” said the woman. “I’m not looking for a fight. But I do want to know what’s happened to Peter, if this isn’t him.”

“Okay, who is she?” I asked Blake. “And what’s got your back up about her?”

“Or is it his memory?” the woman asked him at the same time. “Has he lost it?”

“Er,” said Blake.

“No!” I said. “My memory’s fine, and I am Peter Grant, I’m just experiencing some…universe dislocation. I think.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re Peter from another universe?”

“We think so,” said Blake grudgingly.

“Well, I haven’t been a sergeant for a long time,” I said. “And you still haven’t said who you are.”

She looked up at me for a long moment, and then said, abruptly, “I’m Lesley, Peter. If you even -”

“Wait. What?”

“Lesley May,” she said again.

I looked her up and down. The height was right. I supposed the body was too, it’s not like bodies tend to be that distinctive when they’re dressed to the level appropriate for a British spring. And the eyes, maybe…but not the face, not at all.

“I know what Lesley May looks like, and you’re not her.”

“Oh, Peter,” she said. “I promise you, I am.”

*

“So,” said the woman who claimed to be Lesley May. “What did they say about me? By ‘they’ I mostly mean Nightingale.”

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to ask. I didn’t realise there was anything to ask about.”

 We’d gotten coffee and sat in a corner at the nearest café, at a table you couldn’t possibly fit more than two chairs around. Matthew Blake was sitting at the next table, glowering at each of us in turn. I’d offered to buy him a coffee. He’d declined. I think it made him feel like he was doing a better job.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I suppose you wouldn’t. I can imagine how many questions you’ve got now, though.”

“I’d like to know why you decided to change your face, for starters,” I said. “Assuming you really are Lesley. What is that, deep magical witness protection?”

Blake dropped the phone he’d not-very-surreptitiously been digging out of his pocket. Lesley paused, cup halfway to her mouth, staring at me.

“God,” she said. “You’re really not our Peter, are you.”

“What? Did I say something wrong?”

“It’s just,” she said. “He would never. He would -” she buried her words in her coffee, swallowed. “Fine, all right. My old face fell off because I got possessed by an evil ghost and I had to get a new one. Nightingale was all ‘blah blah black magic’ about the way I did it. Long story short.”

“Black magic? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Well, he definitely doesn’t call it that in front of you,” she said. “I think you set him straight on it practically your first month out.”

I couldn’t imagine DCI Nightingale allowing himself to be ‘set straight’ by some wet-behind-the-ears PC, like I’d been fifteen years ago.

“I’ve never heard him say anything of the sort,” glowered Blake from the table over.

“Was it,” I said. “Did it hurt?”

“My face fell off, Peter,” she said. “Yeah, it fucking hurt.”

“Did I. The other me. Did he try and help?”

Her expression softened a little. “He tried. He couldn’t really – he would have done anything he was capable of.”

“Couldn’t learn magic fast enough to help you, was that it?”

She shook her head. “The help I needed, it wasn’t anything Peter would ever be capable of.”

Well. That didn’t sound good.

“So,” I said to Lesley. God, she looked beautiful; I could stare at her all day. Might give the wrong impression, though. “Th- Inspector Nightingale told you, right? About me being from another universe. My Lesley, I mean the Lesley I know, she’s not, she didn’t – tell me all about how you got to be a DCI. Did you still go to the Murder Team first off? Did you work for Seawoll?”

“Tell me what the me you know is doing instead of being a police officer, first,” she said. “Unless I’m still stuck as a sergeant or something like that.”

I knew being a criminal mastermind was not the right answer. I scrambled for something else. “I, uh. Consulting work. She had to go on long-term medical leave pretty shortly after she started with the Murder Team, it never really worked out for her to come back, but……I think she’s happy where she is.”

“What sort of medical leave?” Lesley immediately demanded.

“I,” I said. “Lesley. Please. It’s not something……” I remembered what Nightingale had said, all those years ago. “There’s nothing I can tell you about that it would profit you to know.” I was vaguely aware Nightingale and Annie had left, or at least moved away; Lesley and I had sat down on the staircase.

She narrowed her eyes. “That sounds like a quote.”

“It sort of is. It’s also true.”

“Jesus,” she says. “You are Peter, aren’t you? Even if you’re not the one I know.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, baffled.

“Never mind,” she said decisively. “Not much to tell, really. I stayed with the Murder Squad through DS, worked with Alexander Seawoll a few years, switched boroughs when he retired, made Inspector, came back to Belgravia as DCI. I’ve put a lot of cases to bed and a lot of people up the steps, because I’m bloody good at my job. You keep nagging me to go for Superintendent, and I might one day, but not while I’m still enjoying the hunt.”

“Married, kids?”

“No and no, but don’t think that means anything,” she said. “That was always the sort of thing you wanted more than me. What about you, on that score?”

“Uh,” I said. “It’s complicated?”

“I didn’t ask for a Facebook status.”

“Seeing someone,” I said. “Been three or four years now, but we’re not married.” DPS really would have a collective heart attack. “No kids, but apprentices are enough work, thanks.”

“Apprentices? Like – wizard apprentices?”

“Well, I am a wizard,” I said. “Wait. Did I not mention that?”

It was Lesley’s turn to stare. “No,” she said. “No, Peter, you fucking well did not.”

“Oh,” I said. “Buried the lede there, didn’t I.”

“Yeah,” she said. “No shit. Why are you a wizard?”

Blake’s phone rang and he didn’t even pretend to be subtle about answering it. “Hi. No, I haven’t lost him. I’m about two and a half feet away. No, everything’s…mostly under control.” Pause. “He’s having coffee with Lesley May?”

“Hey,” I said sharply. “Stop that.”

Blake pulled the phone away from his mouth and said “No offence, you’re not our real sergeant, I don’t have to listen to you,” and then put it back. “Sorry, sir. No, I’ll – yeah, okay. Bye.”

I decided to ignore that one.

“So tell me,” said probably-Lesley. “If you’re Peter from another universe, why are you even here?”

“Search me,” I said. “I still don’t know very much about magic. I keep asking about references but apparently they’re all in Latin.”

She laughed softly. “And you don’t know Latin, do you, no reason for it.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “Hard to find the time, though.”

She sighed. “Of course you are.” She looked at Blake. “Are we about to have extra company?”

Blake just looked back at her and didn’t say anything, although he needed to work on his impassive police face. I wondered if the Blake in my universe was any better at it. Hadn’t really had an opportunity to find out.

“For what it’s worth,” Lesley said, “it’s nothing to do with me. I’d rather have the Peter I know.” She turned back to me. “No offence meant.”

“I’d rather have the Lesley I know,” I said. One I could be sure was Lesley. Not knowing your best mate’s face, that’s not on. “No offence meant.”

She drummed her fingers on the tabletop thoughtfully. “No, you know what, I’m not going to offer to help, there’ll be way too many dramatics and suspicious glares.” She stood up. “If you see Peter – my Peter, I mean – tell him I’m sorry about the arm. Well, not really. He’ll know what I mean.”

“Wait – what?”

She shook her head. “Peter will sort it out, wherever he is. Or Nightingale might be useful for once. Or worst case Bev might.”

I wondered who Bev was. Beverley Brook? Mum had said we’d dated. Maybe for a long while. Nightingale had asked her to check me out for – for being a wizard, or whatever. I hadn’t known she could do that. I wondered how well I really knew her. Or her sister. Cecelia worried me a lot more.

“You don’t even know who Bev is, do you,” Lesley accused me.

“Beverley Brook,” I said. “Right? Goddess of a small river in south London?”

“Oooooh,” said Lesley, just before she left. “Now I really know you’re the wrong one. It’s medium-sized.”

*

Blake escorted me back to the Folly, not relaxing until we got through the door, and not much even then.

“I don’t see what you’re so worried about,” I said to him. “Lesley’s my mate, I don’t reckon that’s different here.” I wondered what sorry about the arm meant, though. “What did you think was going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Blake, and left me standing in the lobby. I followed him after a minute because I didn’t have anything better to do; through a set of double doors and into a library. I’d never been in here.

Inspector Nightingale was there, and Annie Sterling too. They were murmuring over a pile of books. I wandered over to look at the titles.

“I’m going to have to learn Latin just to keep track of what you lot are doing, I can tell,” I said moodily. “Or my version of you lot, anyway.”

Nightingale cocked his head, looking up. “Ah. You’re back. Why does it matter so much that you do keep track? We’re not related to your area, not directly. Or only as much as any department that interacts with the public directly is.”

“You have a community, you engage with them,” I said. “Pretty directly a lot of the time. How would that not relate to me? Although good luck getting the you I know to admit even that much – about having some responsibility for community engagement. About having a community at all.”

“I generally find senior officers avoid us,” he said. “We make their world much less orderly and more confusing than they like. They’re senior enough to know the world isn’t orderly, so the extra chaos is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

“I deal with the world that exists,” I told him. “Not the world I’d like to exist. We’re not paid to police the world we’d like to exist. And it happens that the world that exists includes you, and magic, and all the rest of it.”

“So it does,” said Nightingale. He handed me a book. “I’m afraid I don’t think anything that’s likely to be helpful with our current predicament will make much sense to you, if you’ve no training in the art, but you might find this an interesting read while you wait.”

“This is in English!” I said.

“Quite a lot of our reference library is; it’s only the magical texts that aren’t, really.”

“Except for the French and the German and the rest of it,” said Blake, from where he’d joined Sterling.

“At least half of it is English,” Sterling argued. 

I gave their boss a dirty look, even though that wasn’t really fair – this wasn’t the Nightingale who’d been misleading me. “The other you keeps telling me everything’s in Latin when I ask for references.”

This Nightingale just smiled, a mere flicker of his mouth. “Well, between you and me, our Peter was rather hard to keep up with. I can understand any urge another version of myself might have to handicap you where possible.” What he didn’t say, but I took as understood, was that intelligent subordinates are one thing; intelligent superiors are a terror.

“How did you manage it with me as a constable, then?” I had to ask, because, quite frankly, it was hard to imagine how that had worked. I’d spent too much time thinking about DCI Nightingale as a problem to be managed down to imagine how I’d have tried to manage up.

“I made Peter earn answers to questions through progress with magic,” he said. “It was very effective. He didn’t figure out I was going to run out of things to teach him before he ran out of questions for, oh, three or four years at least.”

“You’re evil, Inspector,” I said. “Evil and cunning.”

He actually grinned. “I’ve heard that one before.”

I think Sterling made a quiet noise of amusement, but I didn’t look at her to check. I retreated to a spare table, and turned my attention to the book. It was less likely to confuse me.

“I can’t believe you let sodding Thomas Nightingale pick you up in Covent Garden at one in the morning,” said Lesley. “Oh my god, Peter. Of course you’re a wizard. It’s just the sort of idiot thing you would have done if somebody had been stupid enough to give you the opportunity. I’m surprised London survived it.”

I made a rapid list of things that were not going to get mentioned to this Lesley, which included Oxford Circus, Covent Garden (for multiple reasons), Skygarden (for every reason), and the thing at Kew, which was still not my fault.

“Could you make that sound a bit worse,” I said.

“Oh my god, did he actually?” said Lesley.

“No!” I retorted indignantly. “In no way, shape, or form.”

Lesley narrowed her eyes, which mean I needed to change the topic very quickly. 

“You’re just annoyed you didn’t get to be a wizard,” I said.

“Does that mean I am in your universe?”

“Well,” I said. “Yeah. Basically.”

“Huh,” said Lesley. “That sounds like a poor life choice on my part.”

I was so not going there. “You would think that.”

“Are you happy, though?” she asked.

“What?”

“Stuck in this mouldy old place,” she said. “Dealing with Nightingale – don’t look at me like that, I’ve worked with him for years, he’s aggravating on a good day and dangerous on a bad one.”

I shook my head, looked at the floor. “You two never did agree about anything.” Well, one or two things – I think they’d actually put hostilities on hold to vent when Bev and I had broken up – but only one or two.

“Seriously.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’m a wizard, Lesley.”

It was her turn to shake her head. “I think you’re wasted there, but fine, you seem convinced.”

I had to laugh at that. “I promise you, nobody I know in my universe would agree with you.”

“I bet the other me would,” she said. “She’s got to have some sense.”

For whatever reason, that made my throat tighten.

“Yeah,” I said roughly. “Maybe she would.”

*

Lesley - DCI May, I mean - told Nightingale that she was satisfied I was a Peter Grant, even if a deeply confused one. “But he does get confused about things on occasion.”

“I’ve never been that lucky,” said Nightingale dryly; I tried to imagine him having to answer my questions, on account of being junior to me, and was surprised he wasn’t more openly aggravated.

“You’ll get the right one back, though,” Lesley pushed him. “You’re not getting rid of Peter that easily, even if he is breathing down your neck to get your act together.”

“I have no intention of any such thing,” he assured her, with a glance at me.

“I have no intention of staying here if I can get home,” I assured her. “And I know almost as much about magic as he does.”

Nightingale did not look convinced by this assertion, even though it was true, but Lesley looked thoughtful.

“If you say so,” was all she said. “Look - do you…”

“What?”

“Oh, forget it, you’d never admit it,” she said, and put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me down so she could kiss me on the cheek. “Look after yourself, Peter. Get home safe.”

I wanted very badly to hug her, and maybe not let go, but she wasn’t my Lesley, so I just brushed my lips across her cheek in return. She smelled like damp wool and the kind of moisturiser you get in department stores. I already missed the person Lesley had never been.

“What happened to her?” asked Nightingale quietly, once she’d gone.

I looked at his familiar face, all unknowing. I didn’t have the heart to lay it on him, either. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.” No matter what had happened to Punch, Lesley wasn’t a constable any more, would never be his Pretty Polly. She had lines around her eyes, she was a DCI and she wore handmade boots. She was okay. “I bet she hates cases you get involved in, doesn’t she? Worse than Seawoll.”

He raised an eyebrow. “She’s never thrilled by magical aspects to a case, no.”

After that it was just research until dinner, trying to find examples of a similar problem. Dinner itself was weird and quiet, the apprentices glancing nervously at me. Molly’s cooking in this universe was either still firmly stuck in the glories of the English boarding school era or she’d reverted to type under pressure, so there was enough mashed potato to construct a model castle with. That was very depressing. Nobody even laughed when I made a joke about being the evil twin because of the beard, so either they had no familiarity with Star Trek - well, that covered Nightingale and probably Mal, who was not a connoisseur of science fiction - or they were that intimidated. Although Abigail did smirk a bit.

I made a good attempt to talk to her, ask questions about family and that sort of thing, but she was obviously guarding her words and that hurt. Our Abigail had never bothered with that, not around me. And then I found out Dad was dead here.

“Oh,” was all I could manage to that. “Let me guess. Lung cancer?”

“I dunno exactly,” she said. “Something like that.”

“He quit smoking,” I said. I didn’t want to mention the other in front of all these people who looked like my colleagues and - weren’t. “Ages ago. He’s still in his eighties but…he’s okay. I think playing music keeps him young, you know?”

“I’ve never heard him play,” said Abigail, shrugging.

I changed the topic.

Molly made up one of the Folly’s many spare rooms for me that evening, and found me some spare pyjamas, but I couldn’t get to sleep. After an hour or so I got up, detoured to the library for one of the texts I was working through, and went to the Reading Room; the armchairs there are way more comfortable than the library seats and if I fell asleep in one, my back wouldn’t hate me quite as much. I considered the lobby for old times’ sake, but I can’t sleep in a space that big unless I pass out for other reasons.

Of course, because it was that sort of day, Nightingale was there, and I was in pyjamas and bare feet – nice flannel pyjamas which had probably belonged to somebody long dead, but still, pyjamas – so that went about as you’d expect.

“Trouble sleeping?” asked Nightingale, eyeing me dubiously.

“Not really,” I said, which was a lie, but I wasn’t going to tell him I missed the sound of his breathing next to me, because that wouldn’t be fair to him, as well as being hideously awkward for me. He wasn’t my Nightingale; I knew that. “Just wanted to finish up going through this.”

“Hmmm,” he said. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, like he daren’t stare. It was the way you looked at a senior officer and it made me nervous.

I sat down anyway. I didn’t ask why Nightingale was still up, or in here. He has these nights sometimes. It’s one of the only things he’s kept from when he was old. Mostly if it’s a real problem he attacks paperwork.

“Not bad enough to do paperwork?” I asked, without thinking.

There was a pause. I didn’t look up; it would only make it worse. “No,” he said eventually. “Not that bad.”

“That’s – good,” I said, for lack of a better response.

“How do you – never mind,” he said.

“You recommended it to me as a cure for insomnia once. And I have lived in the same house as you a while now.” Getting on for half my life to date; I didn’t often think of it that way, but it was true.

“Oh,” said Nightingale, and nothing else.

I fell asleep in the armchair to the quiet rustling noises of Nightingale turning pages. When I woke up, he was gone and there was a cushion under my head that hadn’t been there before. I stumbled back to the room Molly had made up for me, and drifted off again. I go to sleep by myself often enough; it wasn’t new. I didn’t wake up again until the morning.

We didn’t talk about it over breakfast. It didn’t seem fair.

I read until it was time for dinner. Nightingale was right, it was a fascinating book, by John Polidori, who’d hung around with Byron and Mary Shelley and that crowd, all about what the wizards of the eighteenth century had thought about vampires. It matched up pretty well with what Sterling had told me about her encounter with one, and made the report from Berwick Street make more sense. If this was at all accurate and Nightingale - the one I knew - had thought those women were vampires of any sort…

I wondered what had happened to them here. Probably much the same thing. What a depressing thought.

They gave me a spare room for the night, not my counterpart’s. I wondered what was in there and if I could sneak in and have a look at some later point. I was given some of his pyjamas by Molly. My Mum had definitely bought them for me, I could tell at once. It doesn’t matter how old you are, your Mum will always find a way to buy you pyjamas. I was glad that was a constant across universes.

Once I’d gone to bed I tossed and turned, but it was no good: I couldn’t sleep. They’ve shown that it always takes longer to fall asleep the first time in a new place. Your brain is programmed to scan your surroundings for threats when they’re unfamiliar. This was more than that, though. It was knowing that somewhere not very far away was a bedroom that belonged to me, but not me, this Sergeant Grant, a me who’d stepped sideways off the beaten track of policing sometime shortly after his probation ended and never looked back. Someone who DCI Nightingale smiled fondly over, someone who the constables I’d rounded up – or their counterparts – bristled over insults to, somebody who owned a dog and had nearly married a river goddess and was a wizard.

None of those things sounded like me. Some of them sounded like things I could want. That was the scary part.

Sleep really wasn’t happening, so I decided to get up and see if I could get a glass of water or something; it was just an excuse to not be lying in bed. I’d been to the Folly enough that I was pretty sure Molly wouldn’t mind me slipping into her kitchen, even a Molly I didn’t know. I hadn’t looked her up on Twitter earlier. I should have.

It would have been a good plan, too, if Nightingale – not DCI Nightingale, this universe’s Nightingale, I know he was also a DCI but it was how I was keeping them straight in my head – hadn’t also clearly had trouble sleeping. He was standing in the kitchen, staring at nothing, holding half a newspaper.

It wasn’t just that he was there, though; it was what he was wearing. Flannel pyjama bottoms, that wasn’t unexpected, but it being March and this building being decidedly Georgian in its approach to heating as well as its general architecture, it was a bit chilly. He’d clearly pulled on the nearest thing to hand when he’d gotten up, and apparently the nearest thing to hand had been a Star Wars hoodie, so old it was more dark grey than black, the cord from the hood missing. I was familiar with it because I had that hoodie in my bedroom at home, relegated to, well – pretty much this sort of usage.

“Just, uh, getting a glass of water,” I said, hoping he hadn’t noticed me staring.

“Ah. Very good. Looking for the crossword,” Nightingale replied, holding up the newspaper. “Couldn’t sleep witho- anyway. The glasses are in that cupboard.”

“Right,” I said, after another frozen pause. “Thanks.”

He left. I was glad, because, okay, contrary to popular opinion, increasing rank does not correlate with decreasing IQ. I’m perfectly capable of putting two and two together, when one two is somebody wearing an old and much-loved piece of my clothing, or my counterpart’s clothing, whatever, and the other two is that same somebody having trouble sleeping the same day I, or my counterpart, whatever, have vanished into – presumably – another universe. Especially when I’ve been pointedly not given the use of said counterpart’s bedroom.

I just. Really didn’t want to think about four. I didn’t want to think about it so hard I was only distracted when the glass I’d been filling overflowed very cold water onto my hand, and I yelped.

I got up early the next morning and, for lack of anything better to do, went down to the firing range. You have to keep the old skills up, and it was the best way I could think of to stop my mind churning.

There was nobody else there getting before-breakfast practice in, and it looked like there hadn’t been for…well, since before the Second World War, actually. All the old coal-scuttle helmet targets were still up, the paper so fragile even the smallest fireball shredded them. I wondered if anybody had cleaned out the weapons locker, and decided that was really not my problem. If anything was going to spontaneously explode it probably would have in the last fifteen years. Probably.

Molly somehow found the time off from setting up breakfast to watch me.

“Doesn’t anybody else ever come down here?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

When I got to breakfast everybody was properly dressed, too, which was also its own sort of sign; it meant they were all still trying to be on their best behaviour, or that an extra decade or so of working on his own had rendered Nightingale even more picky on the subject of correct dress. All I had was my jeans and t-shirt from yesterday, making me a bit underdressed, but fuck it: this was my home.

“I didn’t think to ask yesterday,” I said conversationally to Abigail. “How long have all of you been here?”

“Three months,” she said. “Give or take.”

“That’s all?”

“Were you expecting it to be longer?” Nightingale raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, actually,” I said. “We’ve had our apprentices for years. I mean, apart from Abigail having been hanging round the place since she was barely old enough to catch the Tube here on her own.”

This Nightingale did not look like he thought this was a state of affairs he would have tolerated. Abigail looked startled. “Why was I doing that?”

“You found a ghost and then it was easier to keep an eye on you than have you running off to look for more,” I said. “After you conned me into making you that promise I told you about.”

“Huh,” said Abigail. “How annoying was I?”

“Excessively,” I told her. I was expecting a grin, but I got a tentative smile.

“Does that mean we’re all really good at magic, if we - I mean the other us - if we’ve been training for years?” asked Mal.

“You haven’t killed yourselves or anybody else yet,” I said. “Bit of a ways to go, though.”

“This is all rather beside the point,” said Nightingale. “We still need to figure out how you got here, and we still need a cover story for Commander Grant. His disappearance has probably been noticed, or soon will be.”

“I can call in sick,” I said. “Food poisoning or something. Doubt anybody will notice the difference over the phone.”

“You should do it from his flat,” said Nightingale. “And stay there, in case somebody comes to check up on him. We can continue to research your problem here.”

“What, you’re just going to try and stash me somewhere?” I said indignantly. “I need to keep helping. Do you not trust your own teaching?”

“The question,” Nightingale said, ignoring everything I’d just said, “is how to get you in there.”

Well. Apparently he’d accepted I wasn’t Commander Grant, and decided that meant he could tell me what to do.

“You’re probably not wrong about needing a cover story,” I said. “And I don’t have his phone, which makes calling in sick from here suspicious. But at minimum you’re going to drop me off with the books I’m still looking at, and if you don’t want them taken out of the Folly, we’re just going to have to come up with another option. I’m not sitting around waiting for you to come up with a way to send me home when I could be figuring it out myself.”

I wouldn’t have had to say any of that to the Nightingale I knew; he’d have known. The apprentices were silent in that diligent way junior officers know how to be silent when their seniors are disagreeing in front of them, and Nightingale’s mouth was very thin.

“Sergeant Grant,” he said.

“Yes?” I replied.

We stared each other down across a rack of toast. I didn’t like it.

“I can get Commander Grant’s home address from the HR system, probably,” said Annie in a very small voice that rose upwards as she reached the end of the sentence.

We both turned to look at her, and she gripped her teacup very tightly.

“Well, I have no idea what it is,” I said. “Sounds like a good plan.”

“You’ve still got to get in there,” said Abigail prosaically. “You don’t have his keys, either.”

“If you’ve got lockpicks around the place, I can take care of it,” I said. “Or I’ve got my driver’s licence on me; call a locksmith, I can prove I’m the legal occupant. Left my keys inside, lost them somewhere, easy enough. On second thoughts that won’t work with the food poisoning story, though.”

“Where did you learn to pick locks?” Abigail wanted to know, sounding extremely sceptical.

“Zach Palmer,” I said. “You’ll probably run into him at some point if you haven’t already. He’s demi-fae, does a lot of odd jobs around the demi-monde. Dated Lesley for a while. I’m guessing that didn’t happen here.”

“And he’s a…”

“Occasionally useful source of information.” Kind of a massive pain in the backside; kind of a friend. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to find Zach less than monumentally exasperating, but he just sort of…existed. “Including information on how to pick locks, which I’m still not very good at, but I’m not terrible.”

“There’s a lot of things lurking in odd corners here, but as far as I know lockpicks aren’t one of them,” Nightingale offered in what I think was an attempt at conciliation. “We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“I’m pretty sure lockpicks are the old-fashioned way,” I said.

“The other old-fashioned way,” he corrected, and that was more like the Nightingale I was used to, so I smiled at that, but that just made him look suspicious.

*

Commander Grant had a very nice second-storey flat in a remodelled late Victorian townhouse not too far from my old home patch; a bit of an upgrade from your average council estate flat. Exactly the sort of thing, if you’d asked me to imagine where I might live if I had the salary to live in central London and I wasn’t in the Folly, that I would have imagined.

Not that that should have been a surprise.

I’d borrowed a jacket from Matt – a little short in the sleeves but not noticeably too small – which just about upgraded me to not suspicious to the neighbours; it was still a fairly mixed neighborhood, which helped, but I think only Nightingale’s presence really saved me. Normally when I showed up at this sort of place I was on police business and wearing a suit. First rule of trying to commit a crime: don’t look out of place while you’re doing it.

Look, we were breaking and entering. I wasn’t under any illusions about that. Fortunately, both of us had had some practice at this sort of thing. It’s just that usually we’re doing it in the course of our job, which makes it somewhat more legal.

Any lock is breakable with enough force, and we had more than enough of that at our disposal, but of course the point was to not make it obvious we’d broken in. Commander Grant had a good solid unit lock in his door, no easy way to get at the cylinder without damaging the door. I’d been crossing my fingers for a fingerprint-sensor keypad, since I had a few good guesses about the codes another me would use and our fingerprints were probably the same, but electronics are incredibly vulnerable to targeted attack. My counterpart either knew that or hadn’t been bothered to change the lock when he moved in or was renting and couldn’t; didn’t really matter which.

What he couldn’t do anything about, though, was the door and doorframe. Both were wood, and wood is - to some extent, with enough of the right kind of force - pliable. Because of this, there’s a technique criminals use to break through doors when they’ve got the time and space for it. You get a car jack and you just wedge the doorframe apart; the bolt slips out of the lock. A car jack is good up to the better part of a metric ton, which is more than enough force. Of course, it’s slow and it’s bloody obvious you’re up to no good. I, on the other hand, was an experienced wizard, which meant I could do it with magic. A little dust floated down, but the bolt came free, I pushed the door inwards and released the pressure. There was some minor creaking but nothing suspicious for a building of this age. It took less than fifteen seconds.

I did a quick scan once we were in and the door pushed to behind us but there was no sign of a burglar alarm, or a camera on the door. You never know. Some people have them just to watch what their pets do when they’re out.

“Very nicely done,” said Nightingale, sounding almost impressed. My Nightingale wouldn’t have bothered saying anything because he knew perfectly well what I was capable of. I think that was why it made me want to bristle.

“Not much to it,” I said. “Let’s see if he’s got a landline. Here we are - just over there.”

Commander Grant was senior enough within the Met that he would need to be contactable even if cellphone networks went down, and landlines – which run underground for the most part – don’t require electricity, if you have the right sort of phone. Any of the ones around the Folly, for instance, although his was just a bit newer. It’s still utterly antiquated and I doubt he used it more than once a year, but it’s the sort of thing that – if you need it – you really need it. My first order of business was going to be using it to ring up his office – my office, sort of – and tell them I had a terrible case of food poisoning and wasn’t coming in.

Nightingale stayed long enough to flick a quick eye over the bookshelves in the lounge – job hazard of being a wizard, you check out everybody’s books just in case – and then left me alone with the flat. I was surprised he trusted me to provide Commander Grant’s alibi but I supposed he was more concerned about figuring out how to get rid of me and get Commander Grant back.

Luckily for me, there was already a message on the landline.  I guessed Commander Grant had not shown up somewhere he was supposed to be the day before, or maybe it was just that they couldn’t get him on his cellphone; of course I had a different number, and mine wouldn’t even connect to the network, since it didn’t exist here.

The message, from Grant’s PA, wasn’t at the ‘I think you’ve died’ stage of worry but it was concerned. When I called back, he sounded even more worried. I tried to roughen my voice, like I’d spent all night hovering over the toilet bowl. I haven’t had food poisoning for a while now but that was how it went the last time (dodgy chicken sandwich in Milton Keynes – it was really tricky for a few hours there to tell the difference between vestigia and mild hallucinations. Or maybe that was just the effect of Milton Keynes.)

“Sorry I’ve been so hard to get hold of,” I said, hoping I was striking the right tone. At that level a PA filters pretty much everybody you see and arranges all your meetings. I couldn’t imagine not being friendly with mine if I had one. I stared at the small-footprint espresso machine on Grant’s kitchen bench and tried to sound like an NPCC-rank officer. “I came down yesterday afternoon with a really nasty bout of food poisoning – at least I hope that’s what it is.”

Dean, the PA – I didn’t know his last name because obviously he hadn't left it in the message – sounded immediately relieved. “Oh, good – sorry, not good, but it’s not like you to drop off the radar like this.”

“I was dead to the world when I wasn’t throwing up,” I said. “Probably just a twenty-four-hour thing, fluids and rest, but there’s no way I’m leaving the flat today unless I decide it really is worth medical attention. You'll need to reschedule -”

“Don’t even worry about it, I’ll take care of it,” he interrupted me. Thank god for efficient staff. I mentally blessed my other self’s hiring skills. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Eventually,” I said. “See you tomorrow, I hope.”

“No meetings anyone’s going to have to cover for you today, even,” he said, sounding more cheerful. The thudding of my heart was easing and I was starting to feel bad for deceiving him. “Good time for it, if there is one. Just let me know when you’ll be back and I’ll put in your apologies for everything else.”

“Of course,” I said. “Thanks, Dean.”

“No problem,” he said, and we said goodbye. One problem down. I really didn’t want to have to pretend to be Commander Grant. I wouldn’t know where to start.

What I needed to do was start in on research again, since I’d won the battle on bringing books with me, but I wasn’t in the right mindset for it. Instead I poked around the flat. The eerie bit was that it was definitely mine. It made sense, where stuff was, what stuff there was, the way it was laid out. I liked everything in it; the stuff I didn’t like on sight was obviously older and must have some emotional baggage attached to it I didn’t carry. I could see myself living here. I did live here, in a way. I’d never really thought about living anywhere that wasn’t the Folly, not permanently – I’d had stuff at Bev’s, of course, still felt comfortable there even now, but we’d never talked about me moving in back then. But I’d clearly lived in this place a while, and I supposed there’d been other places, too. This was much too nice for a junior officer’s salary.

I picked through this other me’s hardcopy book collection – he must have a lot more stuff as ebooks, judging by what was missing, unless it hadn’t been written here, that was a confusing thought – and then sloped down the hall to the one bedroom and looked in his wardrobe, too. A couple of spare uniforms; right, he was back in Territorial. With the crossed tipstaves and wreath on the shoulder flashes, right enough. I was half-tempted to try on the jacket and see what it looked like, but - no, it wasn’t mine. A lot of suits. Much nicer suits than I owned. Much nicer shoes, too. There’s a different dress code for that sort of senior officer. There were cufflinks on the dresser. I only own one set of cufflinks and that’s Nightingale’s fault. I suspected it wasn’t his fault here.

At least my old Star Wars hoodie was still draped over a corner of the bed. I’d had that for twenty years. It was nice to see something I recognised. I left my nosing around in the bedroom at that, because there was a limit to how weird I wanted it to get.

The bathroom only had one set of toiletries apart from a travel kit and a hopeful spare toothbrush, and I hadn’t spotted any clothes that didn’t look like mine, so that ruled out one potential complication. Or, if he was seeing somebody, it wasn’t at the staying-over stage yet. I stared at the electric razor a bit, sighed, and got on with it. If I did have to see someone who thought I was Commander Grant, even over video chat or something, they’d better see Commander Grant.

Beverley had been right, though. I did look younger without the beard. Or older with it. One of those.

While I was shaving I stared at the laundry basket and had a sudden horrible thought – what about a cleaning service – but there was a calendar on the fridge which told me they came by on Tuesdays. Today was Thursday. I tried to imagine being the kind of person who had a cleaning service. Molly wasn’t exactly the same thing. She was Molly.

Anything else was going to need information I’d be likely to keep electronically, so I hunted around for devices and came up with a tablet. I wondered what the odds were I’d use the same passwords – probably low, because I used randomly-generated ones even if I was slack about changing them – but no need to worry: thank god for biometrically-secured devices. Took me a couple of tries to get the right finger, but then I was in. Which just brought home how close me and Commander Grant were. Even identical twins don’t have identical fingerprints. I’d wondered, but still.

I had a quick browse through his email, rubbing my newly tender chin, surprised to see a few from Beverley. And Ty, too, that was much more worrying. It made sense, that was the most worrying bit - he was the sort of person she’d want to know. He had a fairly active Twitter account as well, public-facing job of course, but that wasn’t something I really had the luxury of.

I wasn’t going near Tyburn, but I thought about calling Beverley, asking whether she had any idea what was happening. Bev knew a lot of people. I was willing to be that wasn’t different here. She and Commander Grant seemed to have been talking. Maybe they were friends; maybe more than that, who knew. I trusted her. It was worth a shot.

On the other hand, it might cause more trouble than it was worth. And I didn’t think I could stand having her look at me like I was a near-stranger. Bad enough with Nightingale and Abigail and the other apprentices, already. At least this Lesley had known me, liked me. Beverley – no. I didn’t want to see that. Not in Bev’s eyes.

I was hovering indecisively over her contact details when there was a knock on the door. I fumbled the tablet and managed to not quite drop it. I looked around quickly and decided to hole up in the bedroom. Fresh shave or not, I didn’t know who it was or how I was supposed to react to them.

There was another knock. “I know you’re in there, and I know something’s up,” came an irritated voice. “Answer the door, Peter.”

It was – of everybody in London it could have been – Lady Ty.

I answered the door, because there’s only one thing worse than an irritated river goddess and that’s an angry river goddess. I don’t antagonise Ty on purpose. Not anymore. Well, not more than merely existing tends to do anyhow.

She narrowed her eyes the instant she saw me. “You’re not Commander Grant.”

“I’m Peter Grant,” I asserted easily, because I was. “Look, you’ve probably heard already, I got food poisoning and -”

“You’re a wizard,” she said. Right. No hiding that from a River, shave or no shave. Shouldn’t have opened the door in the first place; then again, it might not have mattered. “Who are you?”

“I’m Peter Grant,” I said again. “That’s the only person I’ve ever been. On my mother’s life.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds. Ty was wearing her serious-business Chanel suit, or one of them, anyway.

“There’s something wrong with you,” she said. “Not the stench of wizardry –– something else.”

“If I told you I was stuck in an alternate universe and trying to figure out a way to get home, which is probably where Commander Grant is…?” I tried.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Tyburn. “Let me in.”

Again, because I’m not stupid, I did.

*

“If you’re not Commander Grant,” she wanted to know, “who are you?”

“Detective Sergeant Grant,” I said. “Not nearly as interesting, I know.”

“And a wizard.” She regarded me thoughtfully. “Who taught you – Nightingale, that Night Witch who lurks around the place, somebody else? You don’t seem like an apprentice for Nightingale.”

My stomach dropped at somebody else. “What do you mean, somebody else?”

Tyburn just raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you can’t tell me you’ve bought Nightingale’s last wizard in England story, come now. There are other options.”

Every hair on the back of my neck stood up. “Some of whom come without faces, is that it?”

“That’s an odd way to -”

“Is it, Ty?” I said, stepping closer to her, and that was a bad idea but if the Faceless Man was still around, I had to know about, it I had to know about it right now, this Nightingale or Abigail or any of the apprentices could just walk right into him and he’d be smarter and older and –

Ty smiled at me, more like a baring of her teeth. “I know who you mean, and no, Inspector Nightingale took care of him a decade and a half ago, in Berwick Street. But there were others at Oxford. No, it’s not that, though, is it. You’re Nightingale’s pupil.”

“Yes,” I said, taking a careful step back again. No point denying it. I decided not to address the issue of Varvara; it would only confuse things. I wasn’t going to ask about Berwick Street, either. I had an idea what it might mean and it wasn’t anything I wanted to know. Not when I had to worry about getting home. “I’m part of the Folly, I’m a wizard, and yesterday afternoon I came to and everybody was calling me Commander and it was all a bit confusing. I’m stashed here for the moment so that if anybody comes looking for the other me, I can pretend to be sick. But all I want is to get home. Do you know how that could have happened? If not – go away, it’ll be sorted sooner or later.”

“I might,” said Ty. “It feels itchy, having you here. It’s all wrong; you’re all wrong. And Commander Grant is quite a useful contact, if it comes down to it. The question is - what’s it worth to you?”

I thought about home, less than a day gone. By tomorrow I was going to be able to taste how badly I wanted it. “Depends on the asking price.”

Ty smiled, and we settled in to negotiate.

I started making tea without asking her if she wanted any – I know how she likes it because I’ve known her a long time – and she almost drank it without question, but at the last minute she put the mug down. “Oh, no. You’re not getting me that easily, Detective Sergeant.”

“Not my house, technically,” I pointed out. “Does it even count?”

Ty just looked at me. I sighed; it hadn’t really been a plan, at least not one I’d consciously thought about. “Okay: drink and eat, free of obligation.”

“I get the feeling you and I – not me, you understand, the Tyburn you know – have had…some disagreements.”

“That’s certainly one way to put it,” I said. “I stood a decent chance of being her brother-in-law at one point and I don’t think she’s ever quite forgiven me.” Maybe best not to mention the fountain, way back when, or the time I humiliated her in front of her mother, or – anything else. Beverley always says she would have come around to the brother-in-law thing, if it had been a thing, given time. She probably knows what she’s talking about.

Ty spluttered into her tea, which she definitely wasn’t going to forgive me for seeing, but it was totally worth it.

“Let’s get on with it,” she said, putting the cup down. “I suppose that antiquated idiot at the Folly hasn’t the foggiest idea what’s happened to you – oh, but you probably don’t like me calling him that, do you Detective Sergeant, he’s your master.”

Fantastic: alternate universe or not, Tyburn still knew how to push my buttons. Thirteen years ago I might have started to lose my temper at that. Ten, even. “He was my teacher, he is my colleague,” I said. “And a friend.” Really best not to get into further detail there. “This one didn’t have my help, so he’s a bit behind on some things. I’ve known a version of him for fifteen years. He’s more than capable of catching up. But yeah, I reckon this is outside his experience – he’s never claimed to know everything about magic, not to me and not to anybody else.”

“But he lets them think he does by keeping his mouth closed,” said Tyburn. “The Nightingale never met a sin of omission he didn’t fail to commit.”

She wasn’t right but she wasn’t totally wrong, as is so often the case with Ty, so I didn’t bother arguing.

“What I do know is this,” I said instead. “I walked into the Folly and I woke up in a Folly, but not the right one. Assuming some sort of multiverse, which I think I have fair evidence for under the circumstances, I don’t think this universe is very far away from mine – I exist, lots of things are almost the same, it’s just that I never joined the Folly and maybe other things as well -”

“How do you know multiple universes do exist at the same time?” asked Ty. “What if the one you came from just doesn’t exist anymore, and -”

Wasn't that a lovely thought. “If so you’re never getting your useful Commander Grant back,” I pointed out, “so let’s proceed on the assumption it does. That being said, the only way I know to travel between worlds is via fairy roads – if you know a better name for them tell me, no need to make that face.”

“I don’t,” Ty sighed. “I suppose it will do. But the Folly is warded, as well as in the center of London – our power flows here, but theirs doesn’t, not with all this cold iron. And I’ve never heard of anyone switching possible universes that way.”

“Then what way have you heard of?” I asked. “You have, haven’t you.”

“There’s – a story Lea told me once,” Ty said carefully. “She’s almost as old as Baba Thames, or I suppose you know that. That sometimes, in places with a great deal of - power, usually associated with - those folk, people became other than themselves. Insisted things about themselves that weren’t true, told stories of things that had never happened. And when I say people, I mean wizards, or other practitioners of the art. As you might put it.”

“Well, that’s delightfully vague,” I said.

“There have been wizards at the Folly for three centuries,” she said. “There’s power there, certainly. And your housekeeper…”

“And what in that gives me guidance on how to get back?” There were any number of science-fiction stories where people essentially wished themselves into alternate universes; this wasn’t much more specific and about as useful. 

“It was the place,” she said. “The same person, in the same place. I’m the goddess of this Tyburn, the one that flows here. But sometimes I get echoes from – let’s call it one river over. You feel like an echo, Sergeant Grant.”

“Come back to the Folly with me,” I said, mouth working ahead of my brain. “If you can feel echoes, maybe you can feel where Commander Grant is; I bet he hasn’t left the place in my universe, Nightingale wouldn’t want to lose track of him. And then -”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Nightingale’s never going to let me in there even if I did want to put up with those protections of yours. Which I don’t. No, you need somebody else. Figure it out.”

Molly, I thought but didn’t say; she could send you into that weird half-world, she wasn’t from our world to start with. The Folly was her space. In fact, now I thought about it…

“Okay, that’s something,” I said. “Not much, but something. I’ve still got one question, though.”

“Fine, what is it?” she said testily.

 “Why do you like this me?” I asked. “I seem to put your back up as much as ever. How come Commander Grant doesn’t? Is he just that useful?”

Ty took a long drink of tea, as if to avoid the question, but answered anyway. “He understands how things work – why he keeps giving Nightingale the benefit of the doubt I don’t know, he’s outrun it long since. But he knows the Folly can’t go on as it is, understands that other people have a stake in magic, in our world, and it deserves to be recognised.”

No new agreements here, I reckoned. No meetings at Casterbrook. No Beverley being deputized or Varvara giving us a hand or Abigail and her friends or any of it. Just Nightingale, all these years later. I wondered Ty hadn’t stabbed him, or had him stabbed. Far too unsubtle for her, of course, but she must be at her wits’ end. Even when I don’t like Ty I do respect why she tries to do what she does. It’s not just about power for her.

“How did Nightingale get apprentices, then?” I asked her. “I know them, all of them. I know how they came to the Folly in my universe and it can’t have been the same way.”

“It was your idea,” said Ty. “Commander Grant, that is - he found them for him. A trial run, he said, to see if things could be sorted out without resorting to any of the other options.” She frowns, snapping her mouth shut. “And now you’ll tell him that.”

“He’s not my Nightingale,” I said, which probably wasn’t the best way to phrase it but I didn’t care. “I’m just worried about getting home.”

“Then,” said Lady Ty, “I strongly suggest you set about doing that. I hope to not have to speak with you again, Sergeant Grant.”

“Finally,” I said. “Something we agree on.”

She didn’t respond to that, just rolled her eyes and left. Nice to know I hadn’t lost my touch with any version of Tyburn.

I leaned back in the rather uncomfortable chair; Commander Grant didn’t have good taste in dining chairs, apparently, although I reckoned he’d liked the look and forgotten to sit in them before he bought them. My heart was pounding like I’d just run a marathon. The clock on Commander Grant’s disappearance going unnoticed was, I was pretty sure, ticking.

If I could just make what Tyburn had told me make sense.

It became obvious the next day that Nightingale - and his apprentices - didn’t really know what to do with me; they had a magical problem, and usually the Peter Grant they knew would have been in the thick of solving it. I didn’t know where to start. I hate feeling like an idiot, even when I know it’s just a lack of education on the subject.

After the day before, though, they were happy as long as I didn’t leave the Folly, and to be honest I didn’t really want to any more. The world out there wasn’t mine; if I stayed in here I could pretend that it was, and I was just waiting for it to be safe to go out again.

I wondered, suddenly, if that was how DCI Nightingale had felt, all those years in here while the world changed around him. They died, he’d said to me once, and from what I could put together he meant nearly everybody he’d known before the Second World War. No going back for him.

To pass the time I did some exploring. I found a second library, this one full of books in languages I didn’t read - I recognised Latin and Greek and Arabic script, some German and French, and what I thought was Hebrew. I was willing to bet this was the magical library. I wondered if the books themselves were magical, like at the Unseen University. That was an ominous thought. On the other hand, none of them were either chained up or rattling the chains they didn’t have. So probably not. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed.

Molly showed up to shadow me when I got to the bedrooms.

“Look,” I said to her. “I don’t want to pry, I just want to see where I live. I mean the other me. I don’t think he’d mind. I wouldn’t.” This was mostly true. “So if you show me where it is…?”

Molly stared at me very intently in a way that triggered all sorts of primal instincts - you know, the ones from a couple of hundred million years ago when our ancestors were small rodents hiding from Deinonychus and its relatives. The thing is I know Molly is a reasonable person and even a witty one if you talk to her in a medium she’s willing to reply in, but it’s hard to remember when she’s staring at you. I tried to look inoffensive, and, possibly, inedible.

Apparently I passed the test, because she beckoned me to follow her and took me to a room. Then she folded her arms and stood outside it; apparently this was to be an escorted visit.

DS Grant had an eclectic collection of books next to his bed, including a stack clearly borrowed from the Folly library. Some of them were in those languages I didn’t read or speak. There were a lot of bookmarks. Some of them had notes scribbled on them, in my handwriting. I could read them, even though they were scrawled, but I didn’t understand any of them - they were notes to himself, referencing things I knew nothing about. That was an odd feeling.

The wardrobe held about what I would have expected. He was still wearing Marks & Spencer suits. He seemed to own multiple pairs of steel-toed Doc Martens, which I didn’t find particularly useful in my day-to-day routine, but I suppose being a working wizard - whatever that entails - was a bit different from a job which, let’s be perfectly honest, is more than fifty percent committee meetings and paperwork for most of the rest. I only regret it occasionally.

Nothing incongruous, really, aside from a watch on the bedside table, a lovely antique stainless-steel Omega, which was probably worth the better part of two months’ salary for DS Grant. It looked like an heirloom but there definitely wasn’t anybody in my family I’d have inherited it from. I wondered what the story was there.

The only other thing that caught my attention was a tie draped over the back of a chair. It was silk, a subtly patterned steel blue-grey. I recognised it because DCI Nightingale had been wearing it when we’d gone for dinner and I’d thought: that’s nice, goes well with his eyes, I wonder where he got it, before remembering it could be practically an antique, given Nightingale’s own age. Nightingale’s tie, but this wasn’t Nightingale’s room, was it.

It was just dangling there like somebody had undressed and forgotten about it, no other clothes around, and I decided I’d had enough of sifting through the detritus of a life I didn’t live.

Molly shut the door behind me as soon as I came out. I think she wanted to make a point.

I found Choudhury and Sterling in the atrium, or, rather, they found me when a tennis ball hit me so hard in the right shoulder I actually stumbled back a step.

“Oh!” exclaimed Sterling. “Sorry! Didn’t see you there.”

“He’s fine, it was just his shoulder,” said Choudhury. They were both wearing cricket pads and their riot helmets.

“What, exactly, are you two doing?” I had to ask.

“Taking a break from the books,” Sterling said, pushing up her visor. “You’ve never seen any of us play Pocket Quidditch?”

“No,” I said. “Last I heard you were still having trouble getting apples to move, not trying to kill each other with tennis balls.”

“Seriously?” asked Choudhury. “We’ve been doing this for ages. They used to get twelve-year-olds to play this. We’re better at magic than twelve-year-olds.”

“Although sometimes apparently not much, depending on how grumpy Nightingale’s feeling,” said Sterling in the tones of one who did not appreciate that particular comparison.

Something wasn’t adding up for me. “How long have you two been with the Folly? Or all of you, whichever.”

“Getting on for four years,” said Choudhury.

“On average,” added Sterling. “We didn’t all arrive at once; Abigail’s been here the longest.”

“Not that much longer officially, but yeah, forever really.” Choudhury agreed.

So in this world Nightingale had gotten apprentices much sooner; well, of course he had, he’d had me and apparently Lesley for a while as well.

“And this is…what, training?”

They explained the game to me; the rules seemed fairly simple.

“We’re not supposed to call it Pocket Quidditch, actually,” said Sterling. “Guess whose rule that is.”

“At least not out loud,” said Choudhury. “But then nobody wore proper safety gear for Quidditch and we have to wear all this so it’s not the same. Apparently back in the day they used to use cricket balls.”

I rubbed my shoulder. “Count me as being very glad you don’t, thanks.”

“I really am sorry,” said Sterling. “Normally we don’t lose the ball like that. But I suppose that’s why you – why our sarge won’t let us use cricket balls. Think of all the potential property damage.”

“And why he insists on the riot helmets.” Choudhury tapped hers. “There’s enough risk of brain injury in this job as it is.”

“Well, he’s a very sensible man,” I said; I’d have done exactly the same thing. “Obviously.”

They laughed, and I felt like we might actually be getting somewhere.

Then Nightingale showed up.

“Ah, Commander Grant, there you are,” he said, and I was ushered away. I let him; it was his nick, his subordinates, and I was technically distracting them from training. I always used to hate it when we had some higher-up through the office and everything ground to a halt when I was a DCI. I tried not to create the same problems for other people now.  Sometimes you couldn’t help it.

“Did you really use to whack cricket balls at each other with magic and no helmets?” I had to ask.

“It gives proper incentive to improve your form,” he said. “But if it makes you feel better, Peter and I have had this conversation rather often.”

“This is like how whacking protestors with our batons gives them proper incentive to maintain public order, right?”

Nightingale gave me a very sardonic look, and I smiled innocently. “No, that comparison’s never come up.” He changed the topic. “You seem to be at something of a loose end.”

“Worried I’m going to take off again?”

“I know you’re probably desperate for something to do,” he said – well, we both knew I didn’t really have anywhere to go – “but I’m afraid there just isn’t much. I don’t know how modernized the Folly's gotten without you around to insist upon it, but we do at least have modern communication equipment out in the coach house.”

“I am not sitting on the couch trying to find something on daytime television while I’m stuck in an alternate universe,” I said. “Seriously. Anything I can do.” 

“I suppose you could help with shelving?”

“Sure,” I said. “As long as it’s a logical system.” That would also give me the chance to really look around the library, which was very attractive, as I’m sure he knew. Because he knew me. Except not me.

“There’s a degree of alphabetisation,” Nightingale allowed.

By now there was a pile of notes and suggestions on a whiteboard – I didn’t think they had a whiteboard yet in the Folly I knew – and an air of thought. I started working on the stack of books they’d already discarded, getting them back where they were supposed to go. There was a card index, of all the nineteenth-century things; when she and Mal Choudhury got back from trying to kill each other with tennis balls, Annie Sterling caught me making a face at it.

“I know,” she said. “We’re working on it. They’ve got a proper computer at the Bodleian.”

I wasn’t very fast, because I kept getting distracted by the titles of the books and sometimes their contents, but nobody said anything. We all broke for lunch in the middle of the day; a hot lunch, I suppose since everybody was here. Or maybe Molly thought it was the most helpful thing she could do. Lunch actually had some heat to it, as well as being hot. That was a real surprise. It’s not that I don’t like Molly – the one I know – but judging by what Abigail had told me about life in the Folly, the once or twice I’d asked, her cooking has never moved much past the nineteenth century. Apparently this one had gotten hold of some better cookbooks. I wondered if I should offer our Molly some, or if she’d be offended. Maybe best to pass that suggestion along to Abigail.

Even though I wasn’t the right Peter Grant, and all of us knew it, it was weirdly comfortable; this was obviously a tight-knit unit, and if they weren’t thinking about it too hard they forgot I only looked like I was part of it. I didn’t get the in-jokes, but they weren’t directed at me for the most part. There was a warm sense of efficiency.

I wondered if the Folly I knew was ever going to work like that; if it was too late, or my Inspector Nightingale too defensive. I hoped not. This was the sort of thing he needed. People he could trust, with everything he did.

I wandered off for a few minutes to find a bathroom – the nearest one to the library had been designated as the ladies’, as I learned when I tried to use it and Molly showed up to defend gender segregation – and when I got back nothing much had changed. All the apprentices but Matt Blake were still at the table, Abigail was holding forth on something or other to the other two, and Nightingale was fetching something down from a high shelf, standing on one of those small ladders you use in this sort of space.

“Having any luck?” I asked him, coming up next to the ladder.

Nightingale, who was frowning at the shelves, said “Yes, just a moment” and pushed me gently away with a hand on my shoulder. It was a casual touch that would have been too much even if his thumb hadn’t grazed warmly along the curve of my neck.  I didn’t move for a second, and then gave him the space he’d asked for. At three steps back I realised he was looking down at me, face very still, his free hand curled into a fist and held tightly back against his body.

“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”

I could still feel the ghost of his hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t his fault. He’d forgotten. I wasn’t the person he’d thought I was. He wasn’t the person I thought he was. Abigail had gone quiet. I didn’t look to see if the others were staring.

I went to find somewhere else in this damned building to be. Maybe there was something on the telly after all.

Once Ty was gone, of all the mundane things, I realised I was hungry. It felt like even more of an imposition to eat Commander Grant’s food, but I supposed we didn’t want the neighbours seeing me out and about and healthy when I was supposed to be home sick. I rummaged through his fridge and freezer; a lot of pre-prepared meals. That wasn’t surprising but was depressing. Although I couldn’t really talk, having more or less had fifteen years of catering. I found some jollof rice in the fridge that, frankly, was begging to be eaten before it went off, and decided to do a good deed. It tasted like Mum’s, which meant it either was hers or Commander Grant had had more opportunity to improve his cooking skills than I had. (Molly doesn’t like to share her kitchen, let’s just say.)

After that I settled in to go through the books Nightingale had deigned to let me bring. I checked in on Commander Grant’s social media feeds now and then to make sure there weren’t any worried questions, but the phone didn’t ring and apparently nobody else was suspicious. Thank God. I’d been prepared to try and pretend to be him if I absolutely had to, but after Ty I knew it wouldn’t work for more than a few minutes, if that.

Unfortunately, what Ty had told me didn’t line up with what I was reading, but I was ninety percent sure that was because what I was reading was bollocks. I needed to talk to Molly and I needed to consult Kingsley, which I hadn’t brought with me, and maybe Al-Masudi’s geography; something I’d thought I’d read last year was ringing a bell. I considered just packing up and heading back to the Folly, but I wasn’t quite yet ready to start an outright fight with Nightingale – even the wrong Nightingale.

About four o’clock, he knocked on my door. I’d gotten bored with the books and was messing around with the espresso machine. I know the basics, and it was something to do. I’d just gotten the milk out of the fridge when Nightingale showed up.

“Thought I’d check in,” he said. “Everything alright?”

“You need to let me come back and help with research,” I said. “Not right now maybe but after work hours – you still have no idea how this happened, I know you don’t, and I have a lot of motivation to get home.”

“How do you know that?”

“We’ve talked about the alternate universe thing, I mean my – I mean the Thomas Nightingale I know and me. And Abdul, and Abigail, and Beverley actually, and –– the point is I took an unscheduled trip to Faerie a few years ago and it brought the topic up. I’m betting you know what he knew then, because our universes aren’t that different. So yeah – you don’t have any idea.”

“To Faerie,” said Nightingale incredulously, and then “They seem quite different to me.”

“Nah,” I said. “I exist, the apprentices exist, they all became coppers; you’d think the butterfly effect would have taken care of that. A real difference would be…I don’t know, the Space Race not having died in the cradle, the Berlin Wall still standing, people never having been born.” All your friends not dying in a German forest in 1945, I thought but didn’t say. “I’ve just spent two hours poking around this place. Your Peter and me, we’re not that different.”

“I wouldn’t claim ownership of him,” said Nightingale, a little warily.

“Turn of phrase,” I said. “That’s all.”

“I hope you haven’t been too bored.” Hah; apparently he did know something about me.

“Did some reading, took a break, been trying to figure out his espresso machine,” I said, pointing to the manual on the bench. “I’ve been thinking about getting one for the Folly for ages but I still haven’t persuaded Molly about it, and you know how she is about things in her kitchen.”

He smiled, but like he was surprised to be doing it. “I do know.”

“Want to try the experimental results?”

“No, thank you,” he said politely, and I wondered if he was worried about the coffee or the hospitality. Probably both.

“Probably a good call,” I said, and went to put the milk away.

I nudged him out of the way of the fridge with a hand on his upper arm, not thinking about it, and he immediately went stiff; I snatched my hand back, but he’d moved. I don’t know if he would have looked uncomfortable to a casual glance but he might as well have been shouting it to me. I thought about apologising and then decided that would make it worse.

“How did I get involved with the Folly?” I asked, by way of making conversation. “Not me, I mean – Commander Grant.”

“You – Commander Grant hadn’t intersected with any of my cases until he got promoted to Commander, and then he pretty well had to be told about what the Folly really did,” he said. “How did you come to be an apprentice?”

Apparently he hadn’t been eavesdropping on my conversation with Lesley. Probably for the best, considering what she’d said.

“I interviewed a ghost,” I said. “And then I went back to find him again, because I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it, and you found me ghost-hunting, and decided you needed some help on the current case, and…it sort of went from there.”

“I see,” he said, and he almost sounded like he did. Had he gone looking for an apprentice, fifteen years ago? I wondered. “Has your research today been helpful?”

“A couple of things keep coming up,” I said. “But I need to go and look at some other references to be sure.” I wasn’t going to tell him about Tyburn’s visit, not yet. Not my Nightingale. “Yours?”

“Unfortunately you weren’t wrong,” he admitted. “I’m still at a loss as to what could have happened. Magic isn’t usually quite this capricious.”

“Not without an actor behind it,” I agreed. “But this doesn’t feel like an attack from another practitioner.”

“You’ve had problems with that?”

Nightingale looked at me thoughtfully, and I realised with the kind of biting shock that starts in your stomach and works outwards that he wasn’t looking at me as a colleague or former apprentice or even a might-have-been –– he was considering me as a potential opponent. I know who you mean, said Tyburn’s voice in my head. The Nightingale took care of him, in Berwick Street.

I thought again about questions I wasn’t going to ask, because I wanted to be able to look my Nightingale in the face when I got back.

“I don’t think that’s really relevant right now,” I said, as smoothly as I could. “There’s definitely nobody who comes to mind who’d want to do this, or have the sort of skillset for it. In fact I don’t think this is Newtonian magic at all. It’s fae. If you haven’t hunted it down already, which you really should have, I remember the Monmouth translation talks about a similar problem, and al-Masudi but you’ll have to check that for us; my Arabic’s not that good and I don’t think we want to rely on the de Maynard translation. I also have a hunch we need to look at David Mellenby’s notes from ’38, I think there’s something relevant in there; he was working on the whole ley-lines thing at the time. It doesn’t really apply to London but-”

“You…”

“I’ve been through them,” I said. I could tell that hit him harder than anything else. My Nightingale was very cagey about some of David’s notes, and I know all the reasons why, now. “Look: I’m good at this. It’s my job. I’m probably better than you are when it comes to theory and experiment. Let me help. All I want is to get home.”

He was still looking at me warily. “I don’t know what you’ve been taught.”

“Everything you know,” I said. “And a few things you might not because I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to learn them here. Nobody’s going to be getting in touch this late in the day, I don’t need to hang around this place. Let’s go fix this, sir.” I hadn’t called Nightingale sir in a private conversation since before I’d been buried at Oxford Circus, a lifetime ago. It helped me remember this one wasn’t mine.

Nightingale has very good control, but I could see him start at that, the faintest halting of motion. It was recognisable because it was the same sort of start I’d given when he’d addressed me that way, yesterday.

“Quite,” he said. “Shall we, then.”

Okay: maybe not such a helpful idea after all.

*

I found the reference I was looking for in David Mellenby’s notes, like I’d thought. I’m not going to bore you with the details but the gist of it was this: what had probably happened was that me and Commander Grant had, by pure coincidence, been in the same physical space at the same time, across two different universes, and the universe – or the multiverse – had gotten confused about which of us belonged where. Kind of like the thing about being able to know the speed or the position of an electron but not both, except not the same thing at all. It was something to do with the Folly, which, while it hadn’t started out as inherently magical itself, had been surrounded my magical protections for a couple of centuries, inhabited by hundreds if not thousands of wizards, and was currently the home of Molly, who was…Molly, and inherently not as tied to this particular physical universe as some of us.

The trouble was switching us back. I had no way to communicate with Commander Grant and tell him to come to the same spot as me and even then it probably wouldn’t just happen in reverse, within the Folly or not. On the other hand, like Ty had told me, I didn’t belong here. I needed someone who could step through worlds – they could give me a boost, and I could get home, and then do the same for Commander Grant.

Like I said: this is the gist of it, not the details. We don’t have time for the details.

The person, of course, had to be Molly. The trouble was going to be persuading her.

I found her in the kitchen; it was getting on for dinner-time.

“I need your help,” I said. “Getting home.”

Molly gave me a very dubious look, and didn’t stop stirring. I tried to explain it to her, but I think I mucked it up, because she continued to look dubious.

“Look,” I said. “If it doesn’t work probably nothing will happen. And if it does you’ll get Commander Grant back, and it’s entirely possible he’s a bit of a tosser -” she frowned at that, so I changed tack “- or not, I’m sure he’s wonderful, but he’s probably pretty worried by now, and I know Nightingale is, and I am, and even you probably are, I mean the other you I know. You don’t actually hate me.”

Molly laughed, hiding it behind her hand like the other her never bothered to do any more, but still a genuine laugh. I wondered what it meant.

“So,” I said. “After dinner? Maybe?”

She frowned, tapped her spoon thoughtfully, and then shook her head. I guessed the moon wasn’t in the right phase. I’m not entirely joking about that. Sometimes magic is scientific and sometimes I haven’t figured out what’s going on yet.

“Tomorrow?”

She nodded.

“Great!” I said. “Thank you. Very much.”

She made a shooing gesture which I took to indicate meant I was getting in the way of dinner, so I took myself off. Molly’s kitchen belongs to Molly. The rest of us just enter it on sufferance.

“But are you sure it’s going to work?” asked Nightingale when I found him.

“More or less,” I said. “Enough to try it. I trust Molly. I’d feel more comfortable with Bev but I don’t think she really knows me, here. Beverley Brook, I mean.”

“I believe she and Commander Grant are in some sort of communication,” said Nightingale. “What I don’t understand is where you found out about this happening before.”

“Lady Ty,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. His eyebrows rose. “She dropped by while I was at Commander Grant’s flat. Which puts a time-limit on me getting home without her causing trouble for you, I’m pretty sure.”

Nightingale did not look pleased by this. “Tyburn doesn’t have the Folly’s best interests at heart.”

“It’s not her job to,” I said. “But I know what you mean. She’d never have given you that, even if she does want Commander Grant back on the job.”

I was going to tell him what she’d said about other options, but: not yet. That was a discussion he needed to have with Commander Grant, not me, and I didn’t fancy being a stand-in for it.

“I can’t say I have that much direct interaction with the Rivers,” he said. “Unless they want me to do something.”

“Well, of course not, you didn’t have me,” I said.

“And what, precisely, am I supposed to have needed you for?” asked Nightingale, his eyebrows conveying a certain degree of scepticism in my pronouncement. He hardly knew me, I had to keep reminding myself. He knew someone like me, that was all, and maybe not well.

You needed me to talk to people you didn’t know how to talk to, I thought but didn’t say. You needed me to go where you couldn’t go and be who you couldn’t be. You needed me to remind you what you were doing the job for in the first place. Yell it at you, once or twice. You needed me to stop living in the past, and start finding out who you were in the future.

“Reading scientific papers, fixing the television, and running after suspects,” I said, instead. “The last being below the dignity of Detective Chief Inspectors.”

“I’ve managed,” Nightingale said.

“Well, you’ve got apprentices now, don’t you, you’ll be fine. Mal’s got a pretty good turn of speed, I recommend her for the running. You’re better off asking Abigail to fix the television, though.”

“Any other good advice?” he asked, but mostly in good humour.

“I’ll make a list of things you need to fix,” I said. “Number one: get a dog.”

“A dog.”

“Definitely,” I said. “And if the other me is giving you a hard time about community policing and all the rest of it, he’s got a point; pay some attention to it. He’s probably trying to help.” I would be. Well. Mostly.

“Perhaps,” said Nightingale. “I don’t think he actually likes me that much, to tell you the truth.”

That was unexpected, and I responded without thinking hard enough.

“Of course he likes you; he’s me.” I said. Nightingale looked slightly panicked at that; oh well, too late. “But he doesn’t know if he can trust you and he’s got a whole city to worry about. You’ve got to earn that.”

“How did I earn it, then,” he said. “My other self – with you.”

“Well, I was a lot younger and a lot dumber when I met you,” I said. “So you had an advantage there.”

“In seriousness,” he said, his mouth tightening. “This might be funny to you, but they’re my apprentices and I -”

“No, I don’t want anything to happen to them. In seriousness – I told you that you were wrong and you listened.”

“Is that all?”

“I was a PC,” I said. “I was barely out of probation. I’d worked for you for a few months, not even half a year. You took me seriously when I stood my ground. That matters.”

“I have no choice but to take Commander Grant seriously,” said Inspector Nightingale, shrugging. “Under the circumstances.”

“No, I know,” I said. “That won’t work for you; water under the bridge now. But it’ll work for them – Abigail and the others. And for me, this me, I mean…I don’t know. It might be better advice than you think. There’s senior officers and senior officers, you know?”

“I do know,” said Nightingale. “Very well. I’ll take that into account.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and he almost smiled, and for a moment we were in agreement.

That was, quite possibly, the weirdest point of the whole weird thing.

*

I woke up really early the next morning, but it was almost a surprise I’d slept at all. For a second, on the edge between sleep and waking, I felt normal - I could feel the Folly around me, knew I was home. Then I woke up all the way and remembered. Not my Folly, not my home.

I did a round of practice and then washed and dressed, with the minor snag that while I was in the process of washing - nobody had installed a shower yet, must suggest that to one of the apprentices - Molly had nicked my clothes, the jeans and t-shirt, and left me the spares I’d picked up at Commander Grant’s flat. I knew it was Molly because it was exactly the sort of thing Molly did.

She’d taken my pyjamas too. Just in case I got ideas.

I was tempted to just wrap a towel around myself and go complain to her - odds were I could avoid seeing anybody else - but any argument you have with somebody while they’re fully dressed and you’re relying on a towel to defend your modesty is an argument you’re destined to lose, so I got dressed first.

“I’m going home,” I told her. “I need my own clothes back.”

Molly didn’t even shake her head; she just gave me a look, one that said those old things? I burned them.

Well. I probably exaggerate. Molly can always find a use for rags.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “And speaking of, we could just try this before breakfast…?”

She shooed me out of the kitchen. Oh well. Might be better off doing this on a full stomach. At least I was dressed for breakfast this time.

We reconvened after breakfast, in the atrium again. It seemed appropriate. It was just me, Molly, and Nightingale. I asked him where the apprentices were and he said he’d found them things to do. “I thought this might be best without an audience.”

“Probably,” I said. I’d wanted to say goodbye, but I hadn’t known how, anyway. “Listen, there’s something I need to tell you before we try this.”

Nightingale looked at me warily. “Which is…?”

“Tyburn’s got something going,” I said, “and I don’t know what exactly, but it means that you having apprentices is a test, not a solution, and I think somehow - do you know what I mean if I say the Little Crocodiles?”

“Wheatcroft’s lot,” he said at once. “At Oxford.” Beside him, Molly’s face darkened. Of course she was never going to think well of them. I wondered, suddenly, what had happened here to the Pale Lady. If she’d survived, without me around to fuck up arresting her.

“The Faceless Man and all the rest,” I agreed. “Anyway. Something to do with them. And I think Commander Grant…he knows something about what she wants.”

“Faceless Man.” Nightingale laughed, but not in humour. “I suppose that’s an appropriate nickname.”

“He’s dead,” I said. “The one in our world.”

“Yes,” he said, and so he wasn’t going to tell me; that was fine. I wasn’t much interested in talking about what had happened on our end of things, either. I waited a second, for him to ask me about Commander Grant, but he didn’t do that either.

Oh, well; they were going to have to sort that out. Not my problem, or I hoped it was going to not be, very soon.

“Okay,” I said. “Molly, are you ready? Let’s see if we can make this work.”

“Do you think I could learn magic?” I asked Abigail the next morning. I’m not saying I’d given up hope, because it had been less than two days, but this was the second morning I’d woken up in the Folly and I was starting to wonder if I was ever going to see my own flat - and office, and life - again.

I was watching her and Matthew Blake blow the hell out of targets, with fireballs she was conjuring out of thin air, on a firing range. The Folly had an underground firing range, apparently. And the people who lived there could use it. I wondered if Inspector Nightingale was teaching his apprentices to deliberately blow shit up. I wondered what the biggest thing was he could blow up. I was guessing it was something fairly large, if this was what somebody half-trained could do.

No wonder everybody walked carefully around him. No wonder he thought he didn’t need the rest of the Met to keep the peace.

“Probably,” Abigail said. “Peter’s really good at magic. He pretends he’s not but he is. He invents things with it. You’re Peter, aren’t you? So you’d be good at it too.” She detonated another target. It was the way she did it in silence that was the most unnerving thing. “Why do you ask?”

“Not that I want to be stuck here,” I said, “but if I was I suppose I’d have to find something to do.”

“You couldn’t be our sergeant,” said Blake at once, responding to a suggestion I hadn’t even made. “It’s not just knowing magic. He knows everybody, he’s got all sorts of friends in weird places. You wouldn’t have any of that.”

“I know,” I said. I didn’t underestimate that sort of on-the-ground knowledge; it was exactly the sort of thing Inspector Nightingale needed and only seemed to have intermittently. In a weird way I felt quite proud that apparently this other me had taken care of that. “You’ve all been here a while, haven’t you? Mal and Annie told me so yesterday. A few years.”

“Why, how long’ve we been apprentices in your world?” asked Abigail.

“I only recruited you all a few months ago.”

“You recruited us?” asked Blake incredulously. “But you’re not even part of the Folly!”

“That’s right,” I told them. It was sort of refreshing, the way all of them spoke to me, I have to say; they knew about my rank intellectually but it wasn’t real to them, so they said what they were thinking. I didn’t think I knew any constables who’d do that. “Inspector Nightingale was dragging his heels a bit about expanding, so I offered him some options. He took me up on it.”

“That’s hard to imagine,” said Abigail. “Or maybe not. Peter always knows how to talk him round.”

“If you think you have a good answer,” I said, “what’s the main difference between me and your sergeant?”

“Everything,” said Blake.

“Not much, honestly,” said Abigail. “He’s not used to being in charge. I mean he still gets people to do what he wants but he has to be cleverer about it. You expect people to just do as they’re told sometimes. Our Peter only expects us to do that about half the time, and he’s our sergeant.”

“He’s been where we’re going,” Blake said. “He’s a wizard, you’re not.”

I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant by that, but I was stopped from asking for clarification by a weird wave of dizziness that had me clutching at the doorframe.

“What is it?” asked Abigail, stepping towards me.

“I don’t,” I said. “I’ve got to go upstairs.”

*

I walked out into the lobby, Abigail and Blake on my heels, to see Nightingale facing me. Sterling and Choudhury were coming up behind him. Molly was lurking there too, looking vaguely put out.

“Thomas,” I said urgently.

But I hadn’t opened my mouth - by me I don’t mean actually me, but another me, another Peter Grant, dressed in one of my suits, though, I recognized it.

“Peter!” exclaimed Nightingale.

“Please tell me this is the right universe,” said not-me urgently. “I’m a sergeant and I’m a wizard and two mornings ago we were talking over breakfast about who was due for safety re-training at Hendon and then that afternoon I vanished and – I’m guessing at this bit – you got Commander Peter Grant in exchange. Right?”

“Right,” Nightingale said. “Yes, that’s right, you’re home.”

“Oh thank God,” said not-me.

For a horrified moment I thought there was going to be a full-on mediocre rom-com style kiss, but I think I was spared this by the presence of their junior officers, who looked like they were similarly anticipating the worst. They just grabbed each other by the shoulders, and not even for very long. But there was some intense staring at each other that was almost as bad. I looked at the wall until I was sure it was done. It might have been as long as a couple of seconds.

“We’re not finished yet, though,” said not-me, stepping back and shoving his hands in his pockets like he could pretend he hadn’t been touching anybody with them. I know because I would have done the same thing. He looked at me, and it was – not like looking in a mirror. A mirror is you, horror movies aside. Like looking at a twin, or a sibling, I guess. Or -  no. An old photo. For all the fuss everybody here had made about my lack of facial hair, this Peter Grant was clean-shaven; maybe he’d had to pretend to be me? God, I hoped not. I could only imagine what he might have fucked up. He was wearing one of my suits, definitely, but I had lines around my eyes he didn’t have, a couple of grey hairs I couldn’t spot anywhere on him. I was looking at a face I’d had once, not the face I had now. But his eyes, they were the same. This wasn’t a younger me in any way except outward appearance.

Me, but not me. Me, but a wizard. Me, but – starting to be changed by magic. Nightingale – not this strange fond one, my Inspector Nightingale, the prickly one who thought I was the worst thing to happen to him since World War II, thanks Molly for passing that one on – he’d said once, you’d be a practitioner if you could, and he wasn’t wrong, even if I hadn’t told him he was right. Here was what I could have been.

I wasn’t sure I liked it. I wasn’t sure I didn’t.

“You’re going grey,” he said.

“You’ve had a shave,” I said. “From what I hear.”

He frowned, and rubbed his jaw. “No choice. I was supposed to be you, home sick. It seemed like a better idea than pretending to be you, but in case somebody came by…”

Thank god for that; then again, if he was me, he’d understand the risks that sort of charade would have involved. I could imagine all of them in technicolour. Wouldn’t he? This was very confusing.

“You got into my wardrobe, too,” I said instead.

“Oh, yeah, sorry. I meant to change back before we tried the transfer thing but…”

“…I got distracted,” I said at the same time as him, and he grinned a little and shrugged, and, okay, maximum weirdness had been achieved.

“Well, you’re going to inherit my second-worst pair of jeans and an old t-shirt, which doesn’t seem like much of an exchange,” he went on. “If Molly hasn’t just tossed them. She gets picky about anything with holes in it, it’s such a pain for stuff you just loaf around in. Let me run upstairs and -”

“You know what,” I said. “Never mind. I’d rather just get back as soon as I can.”

Anyway, I knew for a fact that this me was still getting his suits from Marks and Spencer, because there’s stuff you can’t wear on the job when you’re at that rank even if you’d like to or could afford to splash out on it. Only partially due to the risk of getting it dirty. So I had no idea where he’d wear this one, but if it was me I’d like having it anyway.

Look. He was me. I don’t hate myself.

“Let’s get you back home, then,” said not-me.

“You’re sure you know what to do?” asked Nightingale, but not-me just gave him a look, and he shrugged wordlessly.

“I don’t want to get splinched or something,” I said, frowning at not-me.

“Fuck you, I know what I’m doing,” but he said it the same way Lesley might have. I had the eerie experience of realising that Lesley and I echo each other sometimes, which isn’t a surprise because we’ve been friends for nearly twenty years, but – it’s weirder coming out of your doppelganger’s mouth.

“Get on with it, then.” I was really ready to not be here.

“I see you had fun, too.” Not-me smirked, then grew serious. “Before you go: look after Lesley, okay?” Like Lesley needed looking after in any universe. “And Bev’s great, you can trust Bev. Take her out for dinner if she’ll let you, you’ll have fun. And tell Nightingale he should get a dog.”

“What?”

“Or just get him one, it worked for me,” said not-me, and then he reached forward and grabbed my hand and the world went dark.

I held my breath after Commander Grant – who seemed more obnoxious than I’d thought I was capable of being, which probably explained the grey hairs – vanished, but he stayed gone. That was good. Molly shook her head, glared at me, and whisked off. Like I’d done the whole thing on purpose.

Nightingale put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it for a second. “Good to have you back.”

“Good to be back,” I said, fervently. “Really good.”

“Were we there?” Abigail wanted to know.

I turned to face them. “You were, matter of fact. All four of you.”

“But, like,” said Mal. “We’re much better than the other ones.”

“You’re much better than Commander Grant,” said Matt, looking unhappy.

“I suppose,” I said. “If I had to choose.”

Abigail scowled at me, said, “I’m not sure you are better,” and then, before I could take evasive action, hugged me so hard I think I felt my ribs squeak. The other three eyed her like they wished they’d had this idea and would rather die than admit it.

“Ooof,” I said. “Fine, anybody else, this is your one-time chance.”

I think I just about disappeared under a pile of apprentices, as much as that was possible, since even Matt’s a good three inches shorter than me. I didn’t need to see Nightingale to know he was silently laughing.

I hoped Molly didn’t want to give me a hug as well. That would really be going too far.

I woke up on the floor again. This did not improve my mood.

“Commander Grant?” said Nightingale cautiously. I sat up. It was just him; no apprentices, no other me, nobody – oh, wait, there was Molly, hovering in a doorway.

“Last time I checked,” I said, and climbed to my feet before he could offer me a hand. “I take it you’ve been hosting DS Grant for the last couple of days.”

“Yes,” said Nightingale. “Were you in his…place?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“You don’t seem to be suffering any ill effects.”

“Not that I’m noticing,” I replied, although I was developing a faint headache. I remembered Abdul Haqq Walid’s cauliflower brains. I hoped that wasn’t my fate. But I was still upright and functioning, so probably not. “If you don’t mind, I’d better be getting away. God knows what everybody thinks -”

“You’re home with food poisoning,” Nightingale said. “It seemed like the most expedient explanation. Check your emails and so on, show up at work tomorrow, and you’ll be fine.”

I’d missed at least two meetings, but I suppose he had no idea about that. I’d just have to work around it. “Oh, that’s – helpful.”

“It seemed best not to draw attention to your…substitution. DS Grant flatly refused to contemplate pretending to be you for longer than the length of a phone call.”

“Of course he did. That’d be incredibly stupid.” He wouldn’t know any of my immediate colleagues, my PA, anything like that; he’d be adrift. Any more than I could do magic. “I’m not incredibly stupid.”

“You’re,” Nightingale said. “More similar than I would have expected.”

He was regarding me critically. It was a jolt, after the last two days of dealing with a Nightingale who hadn’t known how to put his walls back up, to be faced with my aloof Inspector again. I told myself off; I had no reason to expect anything else.

“The divergence doesn’t seem to have been that long ago,” I said quickly. “We had the same childhood, far as I can tell, joined the police at the same time – it’s just that he became a wizard and I….didn’t.”

“That’s not a small difference, all things considered.”

“I think we’re still the same people, though.” I didn’t want to be that person. I was just afraid I was anyway.

I made my escape as quickly as I could after that. I had food poisoning to finish recovering from.

I spent a lot of the next hour reassuring Nightingale that this wasn’t going to happen again, at least not unless we got very, very seriously unlucky, which meant going through all the stuff I’d worked out in that other universe about the whys and hows. The apprentices were in on that conversation too – they didn’t necessarily understand everything we were saying but it wasn’t worth trying to keep them out of it. Although I could see all sort of unexpected questions piling up behind their eyes to be sprung on me or Nightingale or both of us over the next month or so. I think this is known colloquially as karma. 

Then Beverley rang up and demanded to lay eyes on me just in case I’d “come back wrong”, a phrase I took some slight offence to, so I went out for lunch with her. Apparently Nightingale had gotten her in to verify that Commander Grant wasn’t me.

“He wasn’t sure?” I said.

“No, he knew it wasn’t you, but it could have been anything, couldn’t it,” said Bev. “Another wizard, a changeling, who knows.”

“Not within the walls of the Folly,” I argued.

“I told him that, too,” said Beverley. “What was it like? This…other place? Did you talk to me there?”

“Nah,” I said. “Too busy trying to not get mistaken for a senior officer. Anyway, wouldn’t you know if I had? I talked to the other Ty, and she made it sound like you would.”

“I’m not sure.” Beverley sounded like she was thinking about it. “Talk to anybody else interesting? Come on, you must have. Did anybody have a goatee? Were the Daleks in charge? Something.”

“It really was the same,” I said. “Except I was the Commander for Community Engagement and Nightingale’d been on his own for years and Lesley -” I cut myself off, but too late. Bev jumped on it.

“And Lesley?”

I looked down at the table. “She was a DCI, Sahra’s job now. Sahra was in Fraud, someone told me. And she was…she was okay.”

Beverley took my hand. “She’s okay now, you know. More or less.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I said, and Beverley didn’t say anything, but she didn’t let go, either.

“I didn’t want to see you look at me like I was a stranger, like you didn’t really know me,” I said, still looking at the table. “The other you. Everybody else did, except for Lesley.” And she’d been a stranger to me, in her own way, DCI May. 

“I know,” Beverley said.

“Besides,” I added. “Like I said. Too busy. I had to figure out how to get home.”

“Good thing you did,” she said, finally letting go. “Imagine what you’d get up to in the upper ranks of the Met.”

“I don’t want to.” We both laughed.

Although apparently, somewhere, that had worked out pretty well. I was going to hold on to that thought.

*

When I got back to the Folly, the list of questions started early – not about the mechanics of magic, like I’d expected, but about what it had been like, in the Folly, in that other universe. Annie wanted to know if she’d gone to the same university and Mal wanted to know if she was still dating her girlfriend and Matt wanted to know about his parents, none of which were things I had asked their alternate selves, so they weren’t very pleased by the answers.

“How come I was there?” was Abigail’s question. “If you weren’t an apprentice, and your mum didn’t tell everybody, and I never asked you to teach me magic…how come I was there?”

“You were an officer,” I said. “DC, sounded like you were up for DS soon. I think you said you’d been in Fraud with Guleed.”

“Guleed was in Fraud? Not the Murder Team?”

“Lesley was running the Murder Team,” I said, and Abigail’s eyes went wide. “Oh. But still – why’d I get from Fraud to here? Did the other me say?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I want to know if…” Abigail gestured around us, at the whole edifice of the Folly. “If it’s accident or if it’s something else, you know?”

I’d asked myself that once. Well. More than once. A lot of times.

“I’m going to pass on some words of wisdom Dad once gave me,” I said. Abigail looked sceptical, as well she should. “Who knows why the fuck anything happens?”

Abigail rolled her eyes. “That’s not helpful. Look, Commander Grant said he recruited me; I know that. I want to know why, that’s all. He never said why.”

I realised, all of a sudden, what she was asking – because that’s the thing with the magic we do: anybody can learn it. It doesn’t mean you’re special. And Abigail was wondering if it was just proximity to me or whether she had something else going for her, that meant she’d become a wizard in two different timelines. Like that was a question.

“You probably pestered him once you found out about the Folly, too,” I said. “Abigail – you’re here because you never stop wanting to know, and why would that be different somewhere else?”

“Yeah,” said Abigail. “Okay.” 

*

So, between one thing and another, I didn’t manage to get Nightingale alone until much later that day - that night, actually. But when I did I pulled him into my room, the room that hadn’t been there in that other universe, or had been there but hadn’t been mine. I kissed him like I hadn’t seen him for a month, deep and warm, and he kissed back like it was the same. It had been three days; only two, if you counted in twenty-four hour blocks rather than sunsets and sunrises.

But it’d been three days when I’d had Nightingale there, or rather almost Nightingale, without being able to touch him. We’d been together four years or thereabouts, not like I count exactly, I don’t know where I’d count from, and it turned out I’d gotten used to touching him. Instead I’d had a stranger looking back at me who flinched or went stiff when I accidentally got too close. So I kissed my Thomas Nightingale, pulled him as close as I could get, fitted one hand around his flank and another at the base of his neck, drank it all in.

Nightingale was doing the same right back, hands all over me like he wasn’t sure I was real. He nipped at my lower lip, and ground against me, and suddenly this wasn’t enough, I needed to get all our clothes off right then.

Fortunately he was on the same page, because both of us were too eager to be co-ordinated about it, not to mention having a hard time letting go of each other. I think we lost at least one button on my shirt, which wasn’t really mine to start with, and then we didn’t even manage to finish undressing. Nightingale got my fly open and his hand into my pants, and gave me one long, slow stroke, and I pretty much lost the ability to stand upright and tumbled us both down onto the bed, trousers around my ankles. He did it again and I arched upwards and said “Thomas, please, please.”

He didn’t even bother saying any of the teasing things he could have said, just kissed me hard and kept at it. I managed to get his fly open, not by the use of magic but otherwise I don’t remember how, and he shuddered and nearly collapsed onto me when I put my hand on him, so we rolled onto our sides and pulled each other off. It was messy and fumbling and I bit the base of his neck when I came hard enough to leave a red mark.

“Peter,” he said, “Peter, Peter,” and I’ve never been so happy to hear my first name.

We didn’t even bother getting up to clean ourselves off, just threw arms over each other and got our breath back. I kicked my trousers the rest of the way off. At some later point it was going to be sticky and uncomfortable. I didn’t care.

“Think about never doing this again,” I said into his cheek. “I bet you would have had a hard time getting Commander Grant into bed.”

Nightingale snorted. “I was, if you’re in any doubt, not tempted to try.”

“Enjoy this while it lasts,” I said, rubbing my face against his. “I’m definitely growing the beard back. Clearly it has its uses.”

Also I looked like Abigail’s close-in-age sibling without it, I could now acknowledge. I’d seen Commander Grant, after all.

“He looked older than you,” Nightingale said, in what I’m sure he would deny was agreement. “I’m sure you have theories.”

“The stress of command,” I said. “Obviously. My carefree lifestyle keeps me young. Works for you, right?”

He didn’t say anything, and that was okay, because I didn’t want to talk about it either.

“I told them I was obviously the evil twin,” I went on. “Beard, and all that. Even if it wasn’t a goatee.”

He didn’t laugh, but I felt him smile. “I suspect it was rather a wasted joke.”

“Hah,” I said. “Abigail got it, I think. The other one, I mean.”

“Commander Grant said they were all there,” said Nightingale. “The apprentices, I mean, not just Abigail. Although rather newer than they are for us.”

“Apparently you needed me to round them up in any universe. Even if I’m not a wizard.”

That was the thing I really couldn’t imagine. Being that high up in the Met, maybe; having never met Nightingale or Beverley or anybody, maybe; but not knowing magic, not being able to cast spells like breathing, not sensing vestigia? I’d forgotten what that felt like. It was like trying to imagine the time before I could read. I know it happened; I was there. But in my memory, in my dreams, I always can.

“And Lesley was a DCI,” Nightingale went on. “He seemed to know Beverley quite well, too, and he’s keeping an eye on the Folly, so…”

“You want to know if I think he’s got it better,” I realised. “Come on.”

“It’s a reasonable question.”

“There’s other stuff,” I said. “I know where I’d rather be.”

There’d been that report I’d found at Commander Grant’s flat, not just out lying around, tucked in the drawer of a side-table. I’m a police officer, I look in drawers, it’s a compulsion. I’d read the top of the first page and then I’d put it away and not read any more. Whatever had happened in Berwick Street, fifteen years before, all the gory details - I gave myself the gift of never having to know.

It wouldn’t have made any difference.

“I mean,” I said, “he was pretty insufferable, the other you. Clearly I have an improving effect.”

“Yes,” Nightingale said seriously, pulling back to look me in the eye, “you do.”

That was almost sweet, so I groaned and told him to get a grip. You’ve got to maintain some standards.

It was good to be home.

The next week I stopped by to ascertain exactly how much Inspector Nightingale had been lying to me about everything being in Latin, which it turned out was about as much as the other Nightingale had said he’d been.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked when he found me in the library. I’d talked PC Blake into showing it to me – not that I hadn’t spent enough time in the alternate version of that room. Blake seemed, for want of a better word, sulky. I didn’t think this was fair – of course his other self had disliked me being not quite his boss, but this one pretty much only knew me. I was responsible for him being in the Folly at all. I was so many ranks his senior it might as well be the Grand Canyon between us. That should at least get a facsimile of good behaviour. And yet: sulky.

“Checking whether everything really is in Latin,” I said. “You’ve been holding out on me. I’m told it’s a handicapping tactic.”

“Is that so,” he said meaningfully, and didn’t ask me who’d told me that. Sensible of him.

We ended up going out for dinner, like we’d done once a few weeks ago, when I’d started to see a few cracks in the shell and accidentally talked too much about jazz and my father. This time we talked about anything except our other selves. At least, we held out for over half the meal. I think we should be commended for that.

“The other you was very -” said Nightingale.

“I know what you mean.” I toyed with the label on my beer bottle. “I think they were sleeping together.”

“I did get that impression,” said Nightingale. He didn’t look happy about it. I wasn’t happy about it either, so there was no need for him to look that upset.

“Can you imagine,” I went on, like an idiot.

“Quite,” he said.

“We’re smarter than that, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

*

“We’re never going to talk about this again,” I said some time later, back at the Folly. I’m not saying how much time. It’s not relevant.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said Nightingale. He was propped up on his elbows on his bed, lying on his front, wearing a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead and absolutely nothing else. Not that I was any more dressed, aside from one sock. We’d missed it in the rush. We’d managed to slow down after that, but I’d been, how to put this, distracted. You wouldn’t think of DCI Nightingale as a distracting sort of person, but I assure you that you’d be extremely wrong. In the right circumstances.

“At least we’ve got it out of our system?” I tried.

“Just,” he said. “Stop talking.”

“Try and make me,” and I swear that wasn’t actually a challenge; the man’s a wizard, after all.

At least all of his constables were sound asleep when I snuck out of the place. That really would have been awkward.

*

It did get awkward, eventually, because I had been weighing up the options with Cecelia’s plans, and then less awkward, even more eventually. But that’s another story and I’m not going into it.

The point is I’m not sure DS Grant wasn’t my evil twin, considering the consequences. After all: he was the one with the beard.