Amongst Our Weapons

8 Manoeuvre

We caught the morning train to Manchester Piccadilly. Seawoll upgraded us to first class.

‘I’m too fucking large for economy,’ he’d said, and paid for me and Danni out of his own pocket. Even with the upgrade, he barely fitted into the gap between the table and the seat, and had to raise the armrest to sit comfortably. The seat next to him had been marked reserved, but when the designated passenger arrived – a flustered-looking white man in a business suit – he took one look at Seawoll and hesitated.

‘Plenty of room,’ said Seawoll with a friendly smile, but the man said he’d see if there was a free seat further up.

Going first class meant we got free beverages and a choice of microwaved mini-meals. But, despite this bounty, Seawoll plonked an M&S bag on the table and started pulling out two weeks’ worth of snacks – some of them, like the grapes, even vaguely healthy.

As we divided up the goodies I briefed them on the Sons of Wayland.

‘They were the engineering branch of the Folly,’ I said. ‘They claimed to be part of a smithing tradition that goes all the way back to prehistory. They made all the battle staffs and other enchanted stuff.’

‘Like what?’ asked Seawoll.

‘Like the statue in the Smithfield Garden – that was one of theirs,’ I said.

And the battleship steel doors that guarded the Black Library in the Folly basement, which I didn’t mention.

‘And you think they made the rings?’ said Seawoll.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But Mr Goodfellow said that if anyone in Britain made enchanted rings, it would be them. And if they didn’t make them, then they would know who did.’

Seawoll turned to Danni.

‘That’s good policing, that is,’ he said. ‘Don’t make any assumptions, check everything. Even if it is weird bollocks.’ He waved half a large-sized sausage roll at me. ‘Especially if it’s weird bollocks.’

Danni looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged back.

‘Why doesn’t your boss know about them?’ asked Seawoll.

‘He knows about them,’ I said. ‘He even trained with them before the war.’

I saw Danni react. The fact that Nightingale was born in 1900, had fought in World War Two and then started getting younger again in the early 1970s had, strangely, been omitted from Danni’s briefing material.

‘Once your trainees are up to their neck in magic,’ Guleed had said, when I’d canvassed her for advice on writing the briefing, ‘Nightingale won’t come as such a shock – it’ll just be one more thing in the mad, mad world of magical policing.’

‘After the war—’ I said, but Danni interrupted me.

‘This is like the Second World War, right?’ she said.

‘I’ll explain later,’ I said. ‘The Folly never recovered from the losses during the war and the Sons of Wayland disbanded.’

Many of the smiths, who were also practitioners in their own right, had taken part in the abortive attack on Ettersberg, and subsequently been killed in action or grievously wounded. The Sons of Wayland’s main headquarters on the outskirts of Manchester had been destroyed by German bombing shortly before the operation took place. There had been an archive and a repository of valuable artefacts, but that, like the contents of the Tate and the British Museum, had been moved to a safe location at the start of the war.

When I asked Nightingale where it was now, he said he didn’t know.

‘I wasn’t told,’ said Nightingale. ‘Nobody who went out into the field was given that sort of information. What we didn’t know we couldn’t reveal under interrogation.’

‘And after the war?’ I asked.

‘Things were confused,’ said Nightingale. ‘I spent a great deal of time in hospital and by the time I was back on duty nobody could tell me where it had gone. The official position of the new government was that magic belonged to a bygone age, and good riddance.’

The reports from the camp at Ettersberg – what the raiders had found, what they had fought on the ground that night – had only reinforced the conviction that the world was better off without modern magic.

But Mr Goodfellow had been adamant that the smiths’ evacuated archive still existed, and that somebody had access to it.

‘I hear things from time to time,’ he’d said. ‘I have factors at the horse fairs and conclaves in Cumbria and both borderlands, and they pass on information. Rumours, mostly, of enchanted items that have nothing to do with the fae or the spirits. Things of cold iron.’

Seawoll sighed and split open a packet of corn chips.

‘To be honest,’ he said, and unscrewed a jar of salsa dip, ‘I don’t like the fact that all we have so far is that somebody did something to somebody at some time which may or may not have some fucking connection to some other people who we’re not sure still exist.’

‘We have Preston Carmichael’s ex-wife’s home address,’ said Danni.

‘Let’s hope she’s in,’ said Seawoll.

Our GMP liaison was waiting for us on the concourse. She was a dark-haired white woman with sharp features, blue eyes and narrow shoulders which she hunched forwards when at rest. She was instantly recognisable from her smart but dull black trouser suit, her sensible shoes and her look of narrow-eyed suspicion. She might as well have been wearing her warrant card on a lanyard around her neck.

She’d obviously been given a good description of Seawoll, because she had him spotted before he cleared the ticket barrier and marched over to introduce herself.

‘DC Eileen Monkfish,’ she said.

We shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and Monkfish led us to where her car was waiting illegally in the taxi drop-off area. It was raining hard and we all dashed to climb into what turned out to be yet another battered Hyundai. Judging from the state of the interior and the fact that the heater had stopped working, this was probably Greater Manchester Police’s least loved pool car.

‘We followed up your query,’ said Monkfish, aggressively pulling out in front of a black cab, which honked. ‘Seeing as our last known for Samantha Carmichael was from all the way back in the eighties, I’ve got to say we weren’t hopeful.’

So imagine their surprise when it turned out that, according to the electoral register, Sam Carmichael was still living at that address thirty years later.

‘That’s a long time to live in Fallowfield,’ said Monkfish.

Once we were away from the station, Manchester became a city of wide straight roads with low-rise terraces, urban parks and shopping arcades sweeping past us in the rain. It could have been an inner city suburb anywhere in Britain, except that it was much flatter – even than South London.

The address was a two-storey plus an attic conversion on a street running back from the high street. One of a row of late Victorian red-brick terraces with orthogonal bay windows and vestigial front gardens given over to recycling bins and rusty un-stealable bicycles. Our address was neat and well maintained in contrast with the scruffy frontages and neglected front doors of the rest of the terrace. The area had the unmistakable signs of multiple-occupancy rented accommodation. Short-term tenancies at that.

‘Students,’ said Monkfish.

‘Hasn’t changed, then,’ said Seawoll and, ignoring the doorbell, he banged on the front door.

A small slim white man dressed in a pair of green tracksuit bottoms opened the door and immediately took a shocked step backwards. Having four police turn up unexpectedly can have that effect – Seawoll can have that effect all on his own.

‘Hallo,’ Seawoll said brightly. ‘I’m looking for Samantha Carmichael.’

‘What for?’ said the man, recovering a bit of his Englishman’s castle and straightening up.

Seawoll showed his warrant card.

‘My name is Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Seawoll from the Metropolitan Police,’ he said. ‘And why we’re here is her business. Is she still living at this address?’

‘Yeah,’ said the man and chuckled. ‘Samantha is my dead name. I haven’t used it for twenty years.’

‘In that case, we’d like to ask you some questions about your ex-husband,’ said Seawoll.

‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘How many have you had?’ asked Seawoll.

The rain was definitely trickling down the back of my neck, but Seawoll’s stance was relaxed but implacable. It indicated that he was willing to stand there forever if need be – whatever the weather.

The man hesitated and then shrugged.

‘Just the one, actually,’ he said, and eyed the four of us looming in his doorstep. ‘Some of you better come in.’

We left Danni and Monkfish in the car, although we could certainly all have fitted in what was definitely not a multi-occupancy home. Instead, the whole ground floor had been knocked out so that the living room segued into a dining room, which became a big kitchen conservatory complete with breakfast bar and ceramic island hob. Yellow and red covers were thrown over a big and slightly saggy sofa and armchairs, and the flat surfaces not covered in knick-knacks and framed photographs supported potted plants. This was not a room that had been decorated; rather it had accumulated over time around someone with a yen for comfort and a wicked sense for colour.

Instant coffee arrived in a set of rainbow-coloured mugs.

Seawoll did the notification. Like many large men, Seawoll can come across as sympathy itself when he exerts himself. He sat on the edge of the sofa, leaning forwards to make himself a comforting bulk as he notified Sam Carmichael of his ex-husband’s death.

‘I’m a bit shocked by my response,’ said Sam, after he’d blown his nose. ‘It was a fair time ago.’

‘We never truly put our loved ones behind us,’ said Seawoll. ‘We think we move on, but we carry our baggage with us.’

Sam bustled off to make a second cup of coffee, despite the fact that we’d barely touched the first, and I took the opportunity to look at the photographs scattered around the room. They looked like holiday snaps, groups or individuals set against foreign backgrounds – beaches, palm trees, ancient ruins and a handful with snow and mountains. Sam only appeared in a few of the pictures – perhaps because he’d been behind the camera for the others. It was hard to tell what decade they were from. Some were definitely old-fashioned printed film images, while others had the 4K sheen of modern hard copy.

Nobody stood out as being a partner or significant other.

Sam returned with more rainbow-coloured mugs and noticed the originals still sitting fussily on their coasters on the glass coffee table.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m getting senile.’

He scooped up the old cups and took them away.

‘You obviously like to go on holiday,’ I said when he came back.

‘As much as possible,’ said Sam. ‘I’m trying to visit every country in the world.’

‘Even the war zones?’ asked Seawoll.

‘Nowhere stays a war zone forever,’ said Sam primly.

Seawoll cued me and I extracted my tablet and showed him the group picture. Sam sighed.

‘He was a good-looking bloke,’ he said.

We asked after the other figures in the photograph but Sam claimed that he’d never met them.

‘We were drifting apart by then,’ he said. ‘We got on fine, but it’s difficult when one of you has a passion the other doesn’t share. To be honest, I was never what you would call an enthusiastic spouse – I’m not very romantic, you see. Or religious.’

Seawoll asked when Preston had become more interested in religion.

‘Preston had always been very spiritual,’ said Sam. ‘We were both raised as Catholics, and you know what they say – once you’re a Catholic you stay a Catholic no matter what you actually believe in.’

But Sam and Preston had very much been lapsed Catholics when they bought the house in Fallowfield. Sam was teaching at a local comprehensive and had met Preston when he came in as a supply teacher.

I asked what he taught.

‘Any subject that needed cover,’ said Sam. ‘He had a degree in theology.’

Our information on Preston Carmichael had remained maddeningly scarce, and so we took a couple of minutes to establish that Preston had read theology at Durham University and had, in fact, gone on to Ushaw College, a Roman Catholic seminary, but had left before taking any vows.

‘He always said that priest was really too limited a role to appeal,’ said Sam. ‘He was very eclectic in his interests, read widely and was extremely popular as a supply teacher.’

‘With the schools or the kids?’ I asked.

‘Both,’ said Sam. ‘The kids loved him. He had that way with them that the best teachers have – strict but friendly – not an easy balancing act.’

He’d also had a bit of an American accent that young Sam had thought really sexy.

‘He’d spent time in San Francisco,’ he said. ‘I found him quite irresistible.’

They’d bought the house in the spring of 1986 and got married the same year at St Kentigern’s – it was just down the road.

‘Is that the same church where Preston attended mass?’ asked Seawoll, and he gave me a look. Jocasta had said she’d met Preston at a special mass.

‘Yes, it was,’ said Sam.

Seawoll asked me to tell Danni and Monkfish to run up to the church and see if anyone remembered Preston in his mass-going prime.

‘Oh, I doubt anyone from that time is still there,’ I heard Sam say as I stepped outside to pass on the instructions.

The rain had slackened to a drizzle and the pair asked if they could grab some refs while they were at it – I said yes, but to canvass the church first.

‘And text us if something startling turns up,’ I said, knowing that it probably wouldn’t.

As I went back inside it was obvious that Seawoll had circled back to Preston’s religiosity. In an interview, even a non-confrontational one, you always look to cover the important facts from several directions at once.

‘In any case, it wasn’t sudden,’ said Sam. ‘Like I said, Preston had always gone to church on Sundays. Then he started going in for special masses as well – remembrances, All Saints’, Ascension Thursday. I remember over breakfast one morning he told me he was running a prayer group with some students, but I didn’t really pay attention.’

‘Do you know whereabouts he was running the prayer group?’ asked Seawoll as I re-entered the living room.

‘In a community hall around the corner,’ said Sam, and he gave an address which I noted down. ‘It really was just a weekly prayer meeting.’

Until suddenly something happened.

‘He didn’t come home one night,’ said Sam. ‘I thought he’d gone out to the pub at first. But by three in the morning I was getting angry. By six I was getting worried, and I was wondering whether to call the police when he turned up on the doorstep.’

Manic is the word Sam used. Manic, demented … he would have said hyped up on uppers, except that Preston never took drugs.

‘“I’ve been one with the Holy Spirit!” he said. “And he has shown me so many things.”’ Sam shook his head. ‘I thought it was rubbish. And then he turned to me and asked me why I wasn’t living as a man.’

And then he passed out on the living room floor – Sam had considered calling an ambulance, but his breathing seemed natural and even.

‘We separated less than a month later,’ said Sam. ‘He announced it one morning over breakfast as if we were discussing the shopping. It was like he was a different person.’

‘What exactly changed?’ I asked.

‘This is going to sound weird,’ said Sam, and I saw Seawoll perk up at the word weird. ‘But he used to be much angrier.’

‘At you?’ I asked.

‘Not at me,’ said Sam. ‘At the world, at society, at things he couldn’t change like Margaret Thatcher and Section 28 and the miners’ strike.’

‘The poll tax,’ said Seawoll.

Sam rolled his eyes.

‘Oh God, the poll tax,’ he said.

But when I asked whether Preston had been politically active, Sam laughed and shook his head again.

‘Not active,’ he said. ‘Just angry and shouty. I didn’t mind because he used to be funny about it. I used to tell him that he should do stand-up. If he’d taken my advice he’d be on Mock the Week by now.’

And then after the first manic phase, it changed. He’d become eerily calm.

‘I mean, I like mellow … but suddenly I was living with the Buddha,’ said Sam. ‘If the Buddha was a Roman Catholic.’

In mundane policing, such a sudden change in personality might lead to thoughts of drug use or coercion. But in my line of work I had to consider the possibility of sequestration or the glamour.

The glamour, in which magic was used to influence someone’s mood or intentions, was usually short-lived. Sequestration was our technical term for possession by an entity or entities unknown and could last longer, but was nearly always fatal.

‘Did he ever experiment with drugs?’ I asked.

‘I thought it was drugs, too,’ said Sam. ‘But I think in the end it was religion. He said that he had been charged to go out and do God’s work. I asked him what he’d been doing all this time and he said “messing about”. But now he could see clearly what he was supposed to do.’

‘Did you stay in contact?’ asked Seawoll.

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘The next time I had any contact at all, it was ten years later and he was asking for a divorce. Which was just as well really, because I’d transitioned by then and was looking to divorce him in absentia.’

‘Did you want to marry someone else?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Sam, and he made a face. ‘But I did want to be legally unencumbered – he signed over his stake in the house as part of the settlement.’

‘Generous,’ I said.

‘Not really – I’d been paying all of the mortgage for a decade. It was mostly mine already.’

Sam stared gloomily into his coffee mug, Seawoll caught my eye and tapped his ring finger.

‘Did your husband have a puzzle ring?’ I asked. ‘In silver or platinum?’

Sam gave me a surprised look.

‘More than one,’ he said. ‘Were they stolen – is that what this is all about? No … that was thirty years ago. They can’t be important – can they?’

‘We think they may be connected to Preston’s death,’ I said.

‘He had seven,’ said Sam. ‘I remember because he kept on quoting Tolkien – “Seven rings for Dwarven kings, one ring to rule them all.”’ Sam frowned. ‘That’s not how it went …’

‘When did he acquire these rings?’ asked Seawoll, before I could correct the quotation.

‘He didn’t steal them,’ said Sam, straightening up. ‘He was a very honest man – at heart.’

I assured him that we didn’t have any reason to think that Preston had stolen the rings, but were interested in when and under what circumstances they came into his possession. Sam relaxed a little. That’s the purpose of that kind of long-winded police speak – it lulls witnesses into a false sense of security.

‘It was February 1989,’ said Sam. ‘And he found them inside a book.’

Literally inside a book, an old one with a leather cover – a hole had been cut into the pages to make a space.

‘Like they use to hide booze,’ said Sam. ‘Only smaller.’

‘Do you remember the name of the book?’ I asked.

‘No, sorry,’ said Sam.

And I thought, Shit, dead end.

But Sam jumped up and shook his finger in the air.

‘I might still have it,’ he said, and we watched him scamper up the stairs.

‘After thirty years?’ I said to Seawoll.

‘You’d be amazed what you end up keeping,’ he said.

Sam was gone for fifteen minutes, in which time I took the opportunity to rifle through his Blu-Ray and DVD collection, stick my nose in his kitchen cupboards, read all the notes stuck to his fridge and, because I’m a nice guy, rinse and put the used rainbow mugs in his dishwasher.

What I learnt, apart from the fact that he had a fondness for Wes Craven and Wim Wenders, was that Sam was neat, organised and self-contained.

I was about to push my luck and start exploring on the next floor up, but Sam came down with a book-shaped Co-Op bag held out before him.

‘Found it,’ he said. ‘It was in the attic.’

After dithering between me and Seawoll, he handed the bag to me and I removed the book. It was much smaller than I was expecting, smaller than a modern hardback, but it did have a cover made from scuffed brown leather. If there was a title on the front it, and the lettering on the spine, had worn away. I briefly closed my eyes but there were no vestigia. I opened it to the title page: Principia Prima Formarum: lux et impello by Victor Casterbrook.

By now my Latin was getting quite good, proof positive that if you bang your head on a copy of Pliny the Elder eventually the Romans will seep in. In any case I recognised the title – First Principles in Formae: Lux and Impello – a magical textbook published in limited edition by Ambrose House Press. Halfway down the page was their compass and pyramid logo, and below that the publication date of 1924.

‘Inside,’ said Sam.

I opened the book to a middle page and found, as advertised, the hollowed-out space. Cylindrical and quite small – just large enough for seven or eight rings, if packed in neatly.

Written in pencil at the top of the title page were words – Portico Library, Manchester, followed by a nine-digit alphanumeric sequence. When I showed this to Seawoll, he said he knew where the library was.

‘Thank you, Mr Carmichael,’ he said, getting ponderously to his feet. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

The Portico Library was on the top floor of a grandiose Regency building built in what I was beginning to recognise as the solid monumental Manchester style. Obviously the city had been feeling its oats at the end of the eighteenth century and, between all those displaced agricultural workers in the mills and the slaves on the plantations in the Caribbean, it had money to burn.

Danni did the googling on her phone as DC Monkfish drove us back from Fallowfield.

I’d have liked to do a vestigium assessment at the old church hall, but that had gone the way of all gentrification in the teens and was now a featureless faux Edwardian terrace of affordable housing. Whatever had happened there would probably have been bulldozed along with the hall.

Danni continued her report from the back of the car.

‘It was set up by some local bigwigs in 1802 because Manchester didn’t have a private lending library,’ she said. ‘It’s a Grade II listed building and has a loggia, whatever that is, and four Ionic columns. What’s an Ionic column, Peter?’

‘Like you get in Greek or Roman temples,’ I said.

And originally it had been a temple of learning, but unfortunately the library had fallen on hard times and had to lease the ground floor to a pub chain. Now the grand façade with its three-bay pedimented loggia leads to a selection of real ales, and speciality pies, fish and chips or burgers served on a slate.

Or possibly a plank of wood – we never did get to find out, despite Seawoll calling up the menu and eyeing it speculatively.

The Portico Library proper was reached via a modest side door which led to a staircase with sandy-coloured walls and brown carpet that wound up to the top floor. Each landing had a folding chair and a leaflet rack – presumably so visitors could pause and take a rest on the long slog up.

It was worth the walk. The main reading room took up almost the whole of the top floor, with a beautiful flattened dome ceiling with an oculus, and radiating skylights in subtly coloured stained glass depicting coats of arms and the red rose of Lancaster.

Black varnished bookcases lined the walls from floor to ceiling, and there was a counter island right in front of the entrance. Seawoll, after pausing to catch his breath, threw himself into one of a pair of chairs to the left of the counter and grabbed an FT from the nearby newspaper and magazine rack.

‘You do the Falcon stuff,’ he said. ‘And I’ll supervise from over here.’

We showed the nice librarian behind the counter our book and asked if it was theirs.

‘You need to talk to Bob,’ she said, and called him over.

Bob the librarian was a short round white man in a navy V-neck jumper, with big black-framed Malcolm X glasses and greying brown hair that, while thinning at the top, was long enough to pull into a respectable ponytail at the back.

He took the book and examined it with the same careful briskness with which vets handle pets. When he found the hollow cut out of the pages, he frowned and looked back up at me.

‘This wouldn’t have been on the shelves,’ he said. ‘It would have been in the store in the gods.’

Bob went over to his computer terminal and typed in the number pencilled onto the title page.

‘According to our records it belongs in a box upstairs,’ he said.

Seawoll waved pleasantly at me and Danni as we followed Bob into the back room, where an extendable ladder took us up through the ceiling and into the attic. It was, I decided, exactly what you’d expect from a library attic – clean, untidy and filled with random paper. The walls were lined with wooden and metal-framed bookcases. Some held box files, some piles of stationery or random piles of books. I was reminded of Robin Goodfellow’s van full of ledgers – this was where the Portico Library kept its memories.

And quite a lot in the way of random bric-a-brac. Some rather tasty oak library ladders, old picture frames with curlicue edges leaning against a bookshelf filled with old doorknobs, coat hangers and modern metal bookends. The air was close and filled with the woodsmoke smell of old books. I was getting continuous flashes of vestigia – sunlight, rain, the scratching of pens – all as faint and delicate as spiderweb. We followed Bob around a U-turn, ducking to get under the slope of the roof, and into another corridor filled with the same mixture of shelves and junk. Bob reached up and pulled down a white cardboard storage box, cleared a space on the top of a chest of map drawers, and plonked it down. He lifted a cover to reveal that it was full of books.

I recognised the titles The Principia, Cuthbertson’s A Modern Commentary on the Great Work, and the bloody unavoidable Charles Kingsley – both his magical work On Fairies and Their Abodes and an 1863 edition of The Water Babies that looked like it had gone for a swim itself at some point.

This was obviously the box for Folly-related books. Postmartin would want to know, so he could pop up north and deprive Manchester of its cultural heritage.

‘This was the box where your book was supposed to be,’ said Bob.

He pulled out a manila folder that contained two sheets of A4. The first held a list of titles printed by a dot matrix printer that was probably coming to the end of its ribbon. Despite the fading, Bob could easily point out the listing for First Principles in Formae: Lux and Impello.

‘According to this,’ said Bob, ‘it was inventoried twenty seven years ago – February 1989.’

The same month that Preston Carmichael had discovered them. We’d have to follow up and see if Preston had either worked at, or been a member of, the library – he must have gained access somehow.

‘Does it give the provenance of the books?’ said Danni, winning double librarian score for use of the word provenance.

The second sheet of paper was thin and almost transparent, like tissue. I recognised it as a carbon duplicate from the time I had dug bombing reports out of the London Metropolitan Archive. The faded type-written note identified them as books handed in by dependents for return to SOW ARCHIVE, Volcrepe, Milltown, Glossop, Derbys. It didn’t say whose dependents they might have been, or why they had handed them in. But I had a good idea of why they had to go to the Sons of Wayland Archive.

Preston Carmichael must have found the book and the rings hidden inside, and taken them off to his prayer group. I had no idea what had happened next, but I was willing to bet it had involved some form of ritual magic.

Something that had drastically changed Preston’s personality – a sequestration, perhaps, or something more subtle. Had they conjured Our Lady of the Burning Spear? And, if so, why had it taken thirty years to come to our attention? It was hard to believe that something so powerful had eluded detection for so long. Nightingale admits that he took his eye off the ball, but flaming wings and a halo are pretty fucking hard to miss.

Not to mention the whole heart-reduction surgery.

‘Where’s Glossop?’ asked Danni.

‘It’s a town up by the moors to the east,’ said Bob. ‘It’s the start of the Snake Pass. Last town before Sheffield.’

‘Seawoll’s from there,’ I said.

We checked the rest of the box, but all the other books on the list were accounted for. One of them, a 1911 copy of the Second Principia, had a yellow bookmark sticking out the top. It turned out to be a Post-it Note. Somebody had written a couple of lines … I recognised the handwriting. Somebody who just couldn’t resist a bit of a gloat when she got ahead of me.

Obviously, Lesley had written, Nightingale don’t know everything.