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strictly for geezers in roll-necked sweaters and goatees reading poetry and listening to folk music. Bob Dylan played there a couple of times in the 1960s and so did Mick Jagger. But none of that meant anything to my dad, who always said that rock and roll was all right for those who needed help following a beat.
    Up until that lunchtime I’d never so much as been inside the Spice of Life. Before I was a copper it wasn’t the kind of pub I drank in, and after I was a copper it wasn’t the kind of pub I arrested people in.
    I’d timed my visit to avoid the lunchtime rush, which meant the crowds milling around the circus were mainly tourists and the inside of the pub was pleasantly cool, dim, and empty, with just a whiff of cleaning products fighting with years of spilled beer. I wanted to get a feel for the place and I decided the most natural way to do that was to stand at the bar and have a beer, but because I was on duty I kept it to a half. Unlike a lot of London pubs the Spice of Life had managed to hang on to its brass-and-polished-wood interior without slipping into kitsch. I stood at the bar to drink my half and as I took my first sip I flashed on horse sweat and the sound of hammers ringing on an anvil, shouting and laughter, a distant woman’s scream and the smell of tobacco—pretty standard for a Central London pub.
    The sons of Mūsā ibn Shākir were bright and bold and if they hadn’t been Muslims would have probably gone on to be the patron saints of techno-geeks. They’re famous for their ninth-century Baghdad bestseller, a compendium of ingeniousmechanical devices that they imaginatively titled
Kitab al-Hiyal
—The Book of Ingenious Devices. In it they describe what is possibly the first practical device for measuring differential pressure, and that’s where the problem really starts. In 1593 Galileo Galilei took time off from astronomy and promulgating heresy to invent a thermoscope for measuring heat. In 1833 Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a device to measure the strength of a magnetic field, and in 1908 Hans Geiger made a detector for ionizing radiation. At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe
is
the history of science itself.
    And what do Nightingale and I have to measure
vestigia
with? Sod all, and it’s not even as if we know what we’re trying to measure in the first place. No wonder the heirs of Isaac Newton kept magic safely under their periwigs. I had jokingly developed my own scale for
vestigia
based on the amount of noise Toby made when he interacted with any residual magic. I called it a yap, one yap being enough
vestigia
to be apparent even when I wasn’t looking for it.
    The yap would be an SI unit, of course, and thus the standard background ambience of a Central London pub was 0.2 of a yap (0.2Y) or 200 milliyaps (200mY). Having established that to my satisfaction I finished the half-pint and headed downstairs to the basement, where they kept the jazz.
    A set of creaky stairs led down to the Backstage Bar, a roughly octagonal room, low-ceilinged and punctuated with stout cream-colored columns that had to be load bearing because they certainly didn’t add to the sight lines. As I stood in the doorway and tried to get a feel for any magical ambience, I realized that my own childhood was about to interfere with my investigation.
    In 1986 Courtney Pine released
Journey to the Urge Within
and suddenly jazz was back in fashion and with it came my dad’s third and last brush with fame and fortune. I never went to gigs, but during the school holidays he used totake me with him on visits to clubs and recording studios. Some things linger even from before conscious memory—old beer, tobacco smoke, the sound a trumpet makes when its player is