Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, "Who knows why the fuck anything happens?

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.

For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.

I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they're that strung out.

Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis —he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land.

We decided to go back to basics and put the frighteners on some snouts.""Really?""We adopted a proactive intelligence-gathering policy utilising appropriate stakeholders in the community and pre-established covert human intelligence sources."And nobody can put a frightener on a covert human quite like Lesley can.

We stopped and listened. Just on the cusp of hearing I detected a rhythmic pounding, more a vibration in the concrete than a sound.'Drums,' I said and then because I couldn't resist it. 'Drums in the deep.''Drum and Bass in the deep,' said Kumar.

I looked into the literature on this," said Nightingale, "and it wasn't very helpful.""There's a literature about this?""You'd be amazed, Constable, about what there's a literature on.

I've already told the police what happened, they didn't believe me. Why should you,' he said.'Because we're the people that believe people that other people don't believe,' I said.'How can I know that?' he asked.'You're just going to have to believe me,' I said.

This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.

Can you sacrifice people?' I asked. 'Take their magic that way?''Yes,' he said. 'But there's a catch.''What's the catch?''You get hunted down even unto the ends of the Earth and summarily executed.

Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.

I did feel a 'something', like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.

The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.

He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.

On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.

As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn’t it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain — they absolutely weren’t going to sparkle in the sunlight.

The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.

That’s because they don’t know,’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

I didn't think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.

It's a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.

Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for.

My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

The world was different before the war,' he said. 'We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.

The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

So magic is real,’ I said. ‘Which makes you a … what?’‘A wizard.’‘Like Harry Potter?’Nightingale sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not like Harry Potter.’‘In what way?’‘I’m not a fictional character,’ said Nightingale.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

You know there's always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I'm not a country person. I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.