‘What circumstances?’ I asked flatly, wondering whether I should be worried that my lawyer had shanghaied me when she clearly realised I didn’t detest vampires quite as much as she did.

She turned the laptop around. The screen showed a smiling family portrait: an attractive man—the father, presumably—in his mid-forties, delicate-looking blonde wife probably in her late twenties or early thirties (going by her kids), although she looked younger. Three boys, I guessed around ten, nine, and eight, all with their dad’s brown hair and serious smile, a pale, waif-like girl of about seven with curling blonde hair like her mother’s, another child, maybe three years old, with a wild crown of brown curls, and a very obvious bump under Mum’s clingy dress. Five and a half kids seemed like half a dozen too many to me, but then, I didn’t even want one, so who was I to know?

‘My son Oliver, his wife Ana and their children: Charles, Edward, Andrea, James and little Henry,’ she said fondly. Oliver bore such a distinct resemblance to her that her words were more confirmation than anything else. It also confirmed that as the son of a witch, Oliver was a wizard.

‘Nice-looking family,’ I said, waiting with apprehension for the tale that obviously went with the picture.

‘My daughter-in-law, Ana is a faeling,’ she said. ‘Her mother was a water fae.’

Damn. The wife was a faeling, which meant the kids were too, and all of them susceptible to the curse. I studied the picture again: there didn’t appear to be a pair of gills, a flipper or a fishy eye in sight, so she and the kids seemed to have inherited more human genes than fae. My dread went up another notch as I wondered which one had fallen victim to the vamps.

‘When Ana was fourteen,’ Victoria Harrier carried on, touching the screen with a gentle fingertip, ‘her mother disappeared, on the way home from work one night. She was found in the Thames three weeks later.’

‘Vampires,’ I said redundantly.

‘Yes. I looked up the police report later. It was horrific reading. There were at least six of them; they drained her dry, then tossed her away like an empty drink can.’ She looked down, clasping her hands together as she composed herself for a minute, then carried on, ‘Ana understandably went a little wild after that, substituting anger for her grief, except—’ She stopped, and drew in a calming breath. She smoothed her skirt down over her knees, then resumed talking. ‘You know about the curse, Ms Taylor, so you can imagine how well a fourteen-year-old’s attempt at fighting back turned out.’

Actually, I could, and I was amazed Ana had not only survived, but had ended up with a husband and a large brood of kids. I’d have bet on her living a short, painful life as some vamp’s blood-slave. Maybe she’d been lucky.

‘Oliver—my son—found Ana in one of those blood-brothels in Sucker Town.’ Her lip curled, although I don’t think she realised it. ‘Blood-houses, I think they call them. She was sixteen. She’d been there more than two years by then. Oliver’s very quixotic in nature. He set out to save this beautiful, sweet, damaged girl; he got her out of Sucker Town, into rehab at the HOPE clinic, and then of course he fell head over heels in love with her. A year later they were married.’ She smiled proudly at the laptop screen. ‘That was taken not long ago to mark their ninth wedding anniversary.’

‘The vamps at the blood-house just let her go?’ I exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Of course,’ she said, closing the laptop with a smug snap. ‘Oliver was working with the law firm responsible for updating the licensing laws for vampire premises. He didn’t give the owners of the blood-house any choice in the matter.’

‘Ri- ight,’ I said, getting it. Oliver had blackmailed them—and, surprisingly, it had actually worked. Ana had been lucky after all; except something about the story felt off … I clasped the pentacle at my throat and frowned out the tinted window, absently noting we were driving through Trafalgar Square.

‘You were expecting a tragic ending after such an awful beginning.’ Victoria Harrier derailed my thoughts. ‘So far it hasn’t transpired. I intend to see that it never does. For the sake of my daughter-in-law and my grandchildren, I am going to help you to put an end to this terrible curse.’ She held out a box of tissues. ‘You’re crying …’

‘Sorry, didn’t realise,’ I muttered absently as I grabbed a couple and swiped at my face.

She frowned, then decided to ignore me. ‘My aim is to give you any practical help I can.’ She picked up a manila folder and pushed it towards me. ‘Jane Bird’ was printed on the white label stuck on the front. ‘I know you’re convinced that the faeling found dead this morning is something to do with the curse, so this file contains photocopies of the police reports. The faeling hasn’t been identified as yet, but she is thought to be late teens, early twenties. She doesn’t match any missing person on the list—I’ve put a copy of their latest list in for you—but going by “Jane Bird’s” appearance, it’s possible she is related to the ravens at the Tower of London.’

Her mention of the ravens reminded me of the bird at Tower Bridge this morning, and the one bobbing its head at me from the stone archway outside Old Scotland Yard. He/she/they had to be something to do with ‘Jane Bird’, it was too much of a coincidence otherwise. But I realised the raven—easier to think of it as only one bird—couldn’t be from the Tower: the Tower ravens agreed to have their wings clipped when they took the job and couldn’t fly for the duration of their contracts. Although that didn’t mean ‘Jane Bird’ wasn’t a relative. Something definitely to look into, I decided, and flipped open the file. The top sheet had Hugh’s signature on it.

‘That’s everything I’ve been able to obtain so far,’ Victoria Harrier said, her efficient tone suggesting that I should find it impressive. It was, sort of, if I hadn’t known that Hugh would’ve given me the same info soon anyway. ‘I’ve also arranged for you to meet with the Raven Master and the ravens tomorrow lunchtime. I will, of course, be with you, to forestall any future problems with your Conditional Caution and DI Crane’s own investigation.’

A meeting with the Raven Master? Nice!Victoria Harrier’s practical help was, well, practical, except … I tapped the file as I narrowed my eyes at her. ‘You have to know that DI Crane doesn’t like me’—an understatement, but I was being polite—‘and while I noticed you and she don’t get on … well, to be blunt, you’re a witch, and you detest vamps, so how do I know you’re not just stitching me up in some way?’ Okay, so maybe I wasn’t being that polite.

‘A valid question, Ms Taylor.’ She smiled. ‘I hope I can put your mind at rest, if you’ll bear with me. I take it you’ve heard of the Merlin Foundation. But do you know what it does?’

The Merlin Foundation financed the HOPE clinic where I volunteered, and others like it, plus it was into schools and other things. Its bureaucracy was something you had to experience to believe when it came to asking for funds: the doctors at HOPE were forever complaining about it. ‘I’ve heard it described as a sort of Magical Masonic Society devoted to charitable works,’ I said, going for diplomatic.

She laughed. ‘I know it’s sometimes seen as secretive, but then, it’s been around a long time. And you’re quite right that it’s devoted to a tremendous amount of valuable charitable work, but it is the older, more private side of the Foundation that I want to tell you about.’ She smiled, and proceeded to give me a history lesson. ‘The Foundation came into being back in the fourteenth century, when the witch persecutions were at their worst. The Witches’ Council devised a plan: a select number of witches would marry into the higher echelons of our country’s ruling classes and produce sons—more wizards, of course: Great Wizards, who would grow up to occupy positions of influence, able to protect their witch relatives, and who would also marry witches chosen by the Witches’ Council, to ensure our magical legacy would continue. That tradition still carries on today, albeit in a somewhat different form.’