Amongst Our Weapons

10 Logistics

Seawoll’s dad turned out to be a painter. Quite a well-known one, if you listen to Radio 4 or hang around at the right kind of soirée. Obviously me and Danni had never heard of him, but this didn’t seem to worry him at all.

‘I like to paint,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing it for the fame or the fortune.’

‘Certainly not the fortune,’ muttered Seawoll.

His dad lived in a small brick two-up, two-down terrace in the mini-suburb of Dinting, within view of the famous viaduct. The one Seawoll had told us about in his story of foolishly alighting passengers falling to their death. From the valley floor it was even more impressive, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be first on the scene at that particular fatal accident.

This wasn’t Seawoll’s ancestral seat. That had been further up the road in Glossop proper, but his dad had downsized ten years earlier, after Seawoll’s mum had died of ovarian cancer. This was all news to us lower ranks who, while we’d theoretically known Seawoll had parents, had always assumed that he’d been assembled in a factory somewhere outside Wakefield. I was making sure I remembered details, because Guleed and Stephanopoulos were bound to want to know.

Half the small back garden was occupied by Seawoll’s dad’s studio/man shed. His dad slept on the couch in that, Seawoll got his dad’s room, Danni the spare, and I got the sofa in the living room downstairs. Since this not only opened directly onto the street but also the kitchen and the stairs, there was no chance of me sleeping through Seawoll and his father arguing about the best way to fry bacon.

Looking at Seawoll’s dad, you could see where his son had got his height. But he himself was rake-thin. Age had shrunk him further, until the cuffs on his denim shirt had to be rolled up to stop them slipping down his arms. He had a big forehead, thinning grey hair and a stubborn chin which jutted out when he fought with his son.

They were still arguing – this time about whether a collective should be allowed to win the Turner Prize – when I came down from my turn in the bathroom. Danni joined in the discussion over breakfast – Seawoll had warned us that police work was not to be discussed under his father’s roof.

Seawoll father and son were civil, but there was a definite coolness. From my long experience dealing with the internecine conflicts within my mum’s vast extended family, it was clear that some deadly past grievance had not been so much resolved as locked in a box and then walled up – never to be spoken of again.

My therapist says that repressing such feelings is counterproductive, but she probably hasn’t seen as many family fights as me.

While the others discussed whether sticking a tree outside a petrol station really constituted a work of art, I wrote up my notes on my encounter with Lesley. She’d been commissioned to steal an item, but it had been damaged during the theft and ‘something’ had escaped. A something that Lesley believed was responsible for the murders of Preston Carmichael and David Moore. A something that was probably the Angel of the Burning Spear that I’d run into on Middlesex Street.

For something that had been stuck in a lamp, she’d looked pretty solid to me. And, more importantly, she’d showed up on CCTV … so what kind of container could she have been trapped in?

We knew that there were other dimensions of existence – what one of Nightingale’s old school friends had labelled allokosmoi. I’d even spent time in one, the land of Faerie, twice now. We also knew that they brushed up against our world and created weird boundary effects like invisible unicorns and localised private weather systems. The genii locorum seemed to be able to attract them to a locality – the suddenly uncluttered airfield of the previous night was an example, as was my beloved’s ability to swim like a dolphin in a river that’s less than a half a metre deep.

However, I would be reluctant to suggest that the stolen lamp may have been a bit like a Tardis even in the confidential Folly files, let alone on CRIMINT.

Still, if we could narrow down the date and time of Lesley’s lamp theft, then we might be able to track Our Lady of the Weirdly Glowing Halo from Glossop to London. The more we learnt about her and her origins, the easier she would be to deal with … this chain of reasoning being bloody optimistic even by my standards.

Disputes over the role of the individual artist aside – the breakfast was delicious.

After eating, we threw our overnight bags back in the Ford Escort and Seawoll headed back towards the address Glossop Brook had given me. This was across town and off the A57 on a turn-off I’d walked past in the darkness on the way back down from the beacons.

‘This goes up to the quarry,’ said Seawoll, wrenching the Escort’s steering wheel round and revving it up the slope. ‘I didn’t know there was anything else up here.’

‘Down there,’ said Danni who was navigating – pointing down a narrow lane completely overshadowed by old trees. We rounded a curve, following the contour of the hill, and suddenly we were pulling up in front of a gleaming white modernist tower. It was built into the hillside so that the drive terminated in a sunken entrance/garage with vertical concrete revetments rising diagonally with the slope. Mature trees overshadowed the approach, the damp green canopies dripping onto us as we climbed out of the car.

‘Fuck me,’ said Seawoll, looking up. ‘How long the fuck has this been here?’

Three more storeys rose above the ground floor, all the same blank white plastered masonry finish, with picture windows running the full width – bisected by the railings of a purely decorative balcony. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it would have a flat roof with a parapet to ensure rainwater pooled and caused it to need replacing every ten years. It was a poem of volume and geometry without humanity – a little bit of Swiss megalomania come to the North.

As Bev says, I have views about the International Style.

The front door was made of frosted glass in a brushed aluminium frame and the doorbell was a palm-sized rectangle of pale blue plastic. When I pressed it we heard a low musical chime from somewhere above.

We waited a bit and then I rang again – three times.

Nothing – and it started to rain heavily again.

I was about to press again when we heard a strange breathy, hissing sound and footsteps getting closer. A tall shape loomed behind the frosted glass and then the door opened.

A very tall East African woman stood there, with her hair in convenience twists above big brown eyes and a crooked smile. She was dressed in a black cashmere jumper that looked very expensive, despite the definite animal hairs on her arms and shoulders.

‘Hello, Peter,’ she said in a low murmur. ‘This is awkward.’

‘Hello, Caroline,’ I said, and would have said more except Caroline shushed me.

‘You have to be quiet,’ she whispered, ‘or they’ll wake up.’

I lowered my voice.

‘Who will wake up?’ I asked, but Caroline ignored me and turned to Seawoll.

‘You I remember,’ she said, and then, nodding to Danni, ‘You’re new. Is this an official visit?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Folly official or Old Bill official?’

‘Yes,’ I said, because you can’t show weakness to posh people or they’ll mercilessly take advantage. I think it’s something they learn at school in between conversational French and practical condescension. Lady Caroline Elizabeth Louise Linden-Limmer may have been adopted into the gentry, but she’d picked up the attitude from an early age.

Seawoll obviously remembered her, too, so I introduced her, quietly, to Danni.

‘You’d better come in, but keep it down,’ she said. ‘If you wake them up you can sing them back to sleep yourself.’

Inside was a cool white hallway with a floor of red terracotta tiles and a side door that, presumably, opened into the garage. At the far end was that most beloved of modernist deathtraps – a spiral staircase. This took us up, the steps creaking slightly under Seawoll’s weight, to an open-plan lounge, dining room and kitchen which seemed to be furnished entirely with enormous beanbags in a variety of pastel shades – blue, pink and purple. There was a strange smell, and I saw that people were curled up asleep on the beanbags. One was close enough to the stairs for us to get a good look and I heard Danni stifle a ‘Fuck’.

It was easy to see that the woman, dressed in loose shorts and a pink T-shirt, was covered in fur from head to feet. Large pointed ears rose from the sides of her head, and her mouth and nose were elongated into just enough of a muzzle to be clearly non-human. No whiskers, I noticed, but the fur was thick and slate-blue. Although I could see whitening around her face.

The first Faceless Man had made chimeras for his select clientele in the Strip Club of Dr Moreau. The ones we’d found had all been dead, except for Tiger Boy, who’d been shot by armed police on a Soho rooftop.

‘Yes yes yes,’ hissed Caroline, looking at us staring. ‘Upstairs and we’ll talk.’

The next floor had several rooms off a hallway – bedrooms and bathrooms. We kept climbing up into a stair tower with a door out onto a roof garden. Or possibly the upper ground floor, since the roof was level with the hillside and the garden extended back into a terrace. There was an empty swimming pool outside, with white concrete walls stained with old leaves and mould at the bottom. Next to it was a pool house with a raked skylight roof, to which Caroline led us and told us to make ourselves comfortable while she made coffee.

We hadn’t asked for coffee but we all recognised a stalling tactic when we saw it.

One entire wall of the pool house was floor-to-ceiling patio doors, and rain rattled on the skylights to run in rivulets down the slope and into the guttering – which, in keeping with the International Style, had been designed for the south of France, not Derbyshire, and was overflowing, and probably responsible for the disfiguring damp patch on the south wall.

‘When do you think this was built?’ asked Seawoll, who was trying not to wallow in a pastel-coloured modular sofa unit. The rest of the furniture was definitely late seventies, from the Habitat catalogue and fitfully cared for since then. The corners were worn and the colours faded.

‘Judging by the building materials,’ I said, ‘1930s probably, maybe later.’

The garden showed echoes of old landscaping but had been allowed to run wild and the trees had encroached until they overshadowed the flat roof of the main house and the pool house. It was mature growth, too – thirty years’ worth of trees, maybe more. It explained why the satellite view on Google Maps had failed to show anything. There was a path leading from the pool area into the trees and I could hear an intermittent clang coming from that direction. A ringing industrial sound – metal hitting metal.

‘We’re definitely in the right place,’ I said.

Danni snorted and I looked over to see her staring at me and biting her lip. She had a lot of questions, starting with WTF cat-girls? and WTF tall posh black woman? But she knew better than to ask them until we were away from said posh woman. Seawoll knew about the chimera, and had met Caroline before when she and her mother had got involved in our hunt for Martin Chorley.

Who, incidentally, had inherited the title, the chimera and the casual cruelty from the first Faceless Man. We’d thought all the original cat-girls, the ones created to entertain the Faceless Man’s select clientele, had died ages ago. That was one connection we were going to have sort out straight away. Also, there were things Danni would need to know – potential eavesdropping or not.

‘Caroline is a practitioner,’ I said. ‘A good one from a separate British magical tradition. You would have been briefed about them last week if we hadn’t been distracted.’

‘Not another local god, then?’ said Danni, and I heard Caroline laughing in the kitchenette.

‘Have you perfected flying yet?’ I called.

‘Not quite yet,’ said Caroline, bringing in four mismatched mugs on a tin tray. ‘There seems to be a rather strict time limit.’

She put the tray down on an oval glass-topped coffee table. Thoughtfully, she had provided a scattering of sugar packets with differing labels.

‘How long?’ I asked.

The fact you couldn’t levitate yourself using magic had been a source of constant frustration to generations of practitioners.

Caroline pulled a face.

‘That’s the problem,’ she said. ‘The duration is variable, from as little as thirty seconds to as long as two minutes. So I try not to get too far off the ground.’

‘Impressive, though,’ I said.

‘Not enough,’ said Caroline.

‘That’s all very interesting,’ said Seawoll. ‘Would you like to tell me why you have a house full of illegal medical experiments?’

‘Victims,’ said Caroline sharply. ‘Victims of illegal medical experiments. This is a shelter for them, and I think they’ve suffered enough without the authorities taking an interest.’

I wanted to say that we didn’t care – we were pursuing a double murder inquiry, and what consenting adults chose to do with their time was none of our business. But the trouble with turning a blind eye is that people often take the opportunity to punch you in the face.

‘Do you run this place?’ I asked. ‘Is your mum about?’

‘Still back in Montgomeryshire,’ said Caroline. ‘Thank God.’

‘So what’s your involvement?’ I said.

She explained she was there to keep an eye on the ‘ladies’, but others helped out. I didn’t press on who the ‘others’ were, but I guessed that they were probably further practitioners – what the Folly had used to call hedge wizards or hedge witches. I supposed we’d better come up with a modern term, probably something like ‘Unregistered Informal Practitioners’.

‘They used to have a house on our grounds,’ said Caroline. Her mum owned twenty hectares of ex-hill farm in Wales where she raised foster-kids and ran alternative therapy retreats for nervous rich people. ‘But they were beginning to attract attention and this place became available. Mum still pops up to do medical checks.’

‘How long were they at your mum’s?’ I asked.

‘Since the eighties at least,’ said Caroline. ‘They used to babysit us when we were kids.’

‘Who owns this place?’ asked Seawoll.

‘Technically, the IronFast Trust, which is famous for sponsoring apprenticeships in traditional country crafts with a focus on … guess what?’

‘Smithing,’ I said.

‘And less famous for its property portfolio in Manchester, Leeds and Bradford,’ said Caroline. ‘And this place. It’s all totally legal with a board of trustees of which, unsurprisingly, my mum is one. If you want more details you’re going to have to ask her about it.’

Seawoll looked at me and I shrugged. This was something we could pursue later.

‘Does that property portfolio include the Sons of Wayland’s archive?’ I asked.

‘As it happens,’ said Caroline, ‘it does. But if you want to see inside you’re going to need permission from the Grand Master.’

Seawoll sniggered.

‘The Grand Master?’ I asked.

‘Traditional title of the leader of the Sons of Wayland,’ she said. ‘Didn’t Nightingale tell you?’

‘I think he assumed there wasn’t one,’ I said.

Caroline looked up at where rain was still pounding the skylights.

‘Let me get an umbrella,’ she said. ‘And I’ll take you to see her.’

Having procured a pink and yellow polka-dot umbrella from a stand by the door, Caroline led us away from the pool house down a path paved with tan concrete slabs. It had probably originally been intended to wind through an attractive terraced garden, which had subsequently been left to be overrun by the forest. As we threaded our way through the dripping trees, the clanging sound got louder and the rhythm of the hits became obvious – it was the sound of someone hammering metal. As we got closer I saw flashes of light radiating, like lens flare in a film, from a single point ahead. The path opened into a small clearing in front of an open-fronted Nissen hut made of rusty corrugated iron that extended back into the hillside.

There, sheltered from the rain, worked the Grand Master.

She was a short East Asian woman in her late twenties, dressed in jeans, sensible steel-toed work boots and a scarred leather apron over a long-sleeved grey cotton sweatshirt. She had an angular face with a dramatically pointed chin, a small mouth, snub nose and black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Behind her thick protective glasses her eyes were large and black.

Those eyes flicked up briefly to clock us arriving, but then it was back to work. The workspace looked like every other modern smithy I’ve been in. Shelves and workbenches, bundles of metal rods, sturdy metal and plastic containers full of useful bits and pieces, metal sinks, a water tank for quenching, racks for tools, gas tanks to drive the forge and a utilitarian cement floor with a drain. The Grand Master had two anvils – a standard farrier’s type for dropping on cartoon characters, and a broader-topped one with no horn that she was currently using. A blade-maker’s anvil.

If the weird lens flare flashes weren’t a sufficient giveaway, as I got closer I could sense the spell she was using to enchant her workings. Too fast and concussive to get a read on her signare, but it was different. Not like mine or Nightingale’s, or even the weird yin–yang thing Guleed was rocking these days.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name’s Peter Grant.’

The Grand Master ignored me and continued hitting the blade with a hammer. A leaf-bladed spearhead, I saw, with a long neck and flanges to stop it going in too deep.

‘You know that’s an illegal weapon, right?’ I said – more to make conversation.

‘Wait until she’s finished,’ said Caroline. ‘Have you got no manners?’

The Grand Master gave the spear blade a last smack, held it up in front of her face and turned it left and right to examine it before laying it down on a stone-topped workbench to cool. I noticed that she only wore a glove on her left hand, which held the tongs – the right, in which she held the hammer, was bare.

Once she’d carefully placed her hammer in a rack, she turned to Caroline and started signing.

I’d learnt a bit of BSL in training, just enough to say ‘yes/no’, ‘police’, ‘are you OK?’ and ‘please make your way to the nearest emergency exit.’ All of which I realised I had completely forgotten.

Caroline signed back and the Grand Master signed again.

‘This is Grace Yutani, Grand Master and current custodian of the archive of the Sons of Wayland,’ said Caroline. Then, after another flurry of signing by Grace, ‘And keeper of the true secret flame.’

Seawoll signed his own name, but Caroline had to introduce me and Danni.

I had a million questions, but when you don’t know where to start you go with trivia to break the ice. I pointed at the spearhead cooling on the workbench.

‘What’s this for, then?’ I asked, and Caroline signed.

Grace signed back.

‘Dragon spear,’ said Caroline, but I remembered to keep my eyes on Grace.

‘Are you expecting to meet a dragon?’ I asked, and remembered Brook had mentioned them, too. Perhaps dragons were a northern thing, like flat caps and an ingrained sense of grievance.

‘I don’t know,’ signed Grace. ‘But it’ll work with fish as well.’

I wanted to touch it and see what vestigia it had, but I figured that would be a mistake and not just because I would burn my fingers.

‘We heard you had a break-in?’ said Seawoll. ‘Somebody stole a lamp.’

Grace flinched when Caroline translated, and frowned at her friend, who then signed back. I didn’t need a translation to know that Caroline was denying she was the source of that information.

She didn’t want us to know, I thought. I wonder why?

‘We had a break-in,’ signed Grace, and then crossed her arms across her chest.

‘But you didn’t think to report it?’ asked Seawoll.

Grace kept her arms crossed and glared at Caroline.

‘You’ve seen who lives here,’ said Caroline. ‘Whom do you think I should have called?’

‘You should have called Peter here,’ said Seawoll. ‘He likes cats.’

‘We didn’t think it was any of the Folly’s concern.’

‘Two people are fucking dead,’ said Seawoll. ‘Perhaps if you’d fucking reported this we might have got to them first.’

This, I thought, was highly unlikely, but it had its effect. After Caroline had signed her the gist, Grace uncrossed her arms.

‘We had no reason to think it was a significant item,’ she signed. ‘We thought the thief had snatched it while running away from the ladies.’

Because, while sleeping, eating and watching soaps were the ladies’ primary activity, a couple of them liked to go out at night and prowl around the forest.

‘And do what?’ asked Danni.

‘We don’t ask,’ said Caroline. ‘But they have to wash up before they’re allowed indoors. Anyway, the screaming woke me and I ran out to see what was going on.’

‘Who was screaming?’ asked Seawoll.

Danni had her notebook out by then and was taking notes.

‘The ladies,’ said Caroline. ‘They have a very distinctive scream but I didn’t think it was anything important – sometimes they can be very cat. So I got up and went out to tell them to shut up.’

Seawoll asked Grace, through Caroline, where she’d been when the screaming started. When Caroline went to answer for her, she slapped her hand on the bench. They exchanged looks and Caroline dutifully signed the question. Grace signed back.

‘She was fast asleep because nobody bothered to wake her,’ said Caroline. ‘We share the pool house, and the ladies are my responsibility so I didn’t think it was worth ruining her beauty sleep.’ She signed the last bit with more emphasis.

Grace signed again – also with emphasis.

‘We’re a couple,’ said Caroline to us wearily, and then she signed something angrily back at Grace, who crossed her arms again.

Two monomaniacs and a litter of cat-women, I thought. That’s got to be an interesting family dynamic – not to mention the basis of an exciting new reality show.

‘Anyway, I saw someone dodging out of here carrying something heavy, with Mildred and Sophia in hot pursuit,’ said Caroline. ‘They were having a great time, by the way.’

That ‘someone’ looked like a woman, according to Caroline, but she was dressed in black or dark blue, ‘with one of those tight hoods, like a hijab but not’, so Caroline couldn’t be sure.

That would have been Lesley, I thought, in full ninja mode.

Caroline had done what she called an ‘assisted jump’ to close down the distance.

‘Nearly hit a tree, by the way,’ she said. ‘Which is why you shouldn’t fly on instruments without instruments.’ Grace laughed when Caroline signed that – a sort of breathy giggle like one of Abigail’s foxes. ‘Then I hit them with a tangle and down they went.’

I was dying to know what a tangle was, but knew I’d have to wait.

‘My main concern was getting to them before Mildred and Sophia,’ said Caroline. ‘But I think she hit them with a serious impello and, the next thing I know, they’re flying in my direction. So I had to catch them, didn’t I?’

While she did that, Lesley used the time to regain her feet and head down slope. She’d talked about having a bike close by, and looking at the map on my phone it looked like there were houses and cul-de-sacs. Plenty of places to stash a bike – had she meant a motorbike rather than a pushbike? No, a pushbike would be silent, with no number plate to get caught on CCTV. A pushbike which she rides downhill to the outskirts of Manchester, where she has a car ready to go.

Only something happens.

‘I got one last shot at her,’ said Caroline. ‘I could see movement at the bottom of the hill so I cast a radiradi at her. Given how far away she was, it didn’t have any effect.’

A radiradi was one of her mother’s spells, handed down to her from her mother.

‘A couple of formae that you lot at the Folly don’t use,’ said Caroline. ‘It creates a sort of thunderclap at a distant point. Sometimes lightning, too, depending on the weather conditions. You can change the inflectentes to vary the effect but I was aiming for maximum bang.’

And maximum bang is what she got. And a flash of light.

And everything goes white and then black – Lesley.

I looked at Seawoll and Danni, who were both thinking the same thing as me. Pushbike or motorbike, a loud bang might have drawn attention. Throw in an accurate time frame, and the fact that Lesley would have been desperate to escape vengeful cats, and we had a good chance of tracking her movement.

Better still, we had the location for where the Angel of the Lamp had escaped. Unless she spent her hours between hits hidden in hyperspace – a possibility I wasn’t going to think about – then we might be able to track her movements as well.

So we divided up the tasks. As senior magic wrangler, I would go into the archive with Grace and see what we could find from the crime scene. Danni would go into the woods with Caroline and see if she could trace the route of the chase and look for clues. Seawoll would return to the pool house, where there was a phone signal, and extract some co-operation from the GMP and Derbyshire Constabulary.

‘And what if the ladies wake up while you’re gone?’ he asked.

‘Tea and biscuits,’ said Caroline, over her shoulder as she headed out. ‘And be charming. Oh, and ask about their knitting.’

Grace beckoned me to the back of the forge, where a double-width roll-up metal door opened into an equally wide rectangular corridor. This only went back five or six metres before making a right-angle turn to the right. The original single-bulb light fittings had been ripped out and their cables rerouted to power a single line of fluorescent tubes. In accordance with the iron law of creepy ambience, every third or fourth tube was either out or flickering fitfully. The walls were bare concrete and the floor cement. I recognised the style – this was either Second World War or early Cold War British engineering at its most functional. The original Quatermass would have had a bunker like this. I’d have suspected a nuclear shelter except that, etched into the massive steel doors that were embedded every five metres in the left-hand wall, was the hammer and anvil sigil of the Sons of Wayland.

This was no hurriedly repurposed command centre. It had been purpose-built to house the archive. Beneath the sigil, each door had interlocking circles scored into the surface at waist height. These I associated with the wards and defences on the vault door back at the Folly, but when I let my fingers brush against the steel of the doors there wasn’t even a whisper of vestigia.

Built, but not finished then.

After a hundred metres we reached a spiral staircase constructed to exactly the same specification as the ones in the Tube. It even had the same railings and cross-hatched foot grips on the risers. Since an unfortunate incident where I was buried alive, I’ve developed a well-founded caution about cramped underground spaces, so I didn’t really want to go down. But down we went.

To stop at a landing and enter another long corridor identical to the one above. How much stuff did the Sons of Wayland stash away before the war – and why? Grace stopped at the third door and pointed at the lock – or rather, the hole in the metal where the lock should have been.

I put my hand up to get her attention and mimed touching the lock – she nodded.

The vestigia was the same muddled set of impressions as the lock on Althea Moore’s door back in London. Only now I knew who’d worked the spell, I could feel the tick-tock and razor strop of Lesley’s signare. Grace motioned me inside and I saw that I’d overestimated the amount of stuff you could store here. The room was a cement cell three metres deep and two wide. Instead of the floor-to-ceiling shelves I’d expected, there were free-standing cabinets separated from each other by half a metre. One had had its doors ripped off, allowing me to see that the doors and walls were at least three centimetres thick and made of dense hardwood.

I pulled on my nitrile gloves and squatted down for a good look. I do have a full exhibits kit in a go bag in the boot of the Asbo, but that was back at the Folly. Something told me that Caroline and Grace would not welcome a full forensics team tramping over their nice secret magic stash – not to mention asking difficult questions like ‘Are these your cat-women?’ The interior of the cabinet was a metre high and after I mimed measuring the height of a missing object, Grace indicated that it had been seventy centimetres tall.

The lamp had been larger than I thought. This explained why Lesley had had trouble legging it down the hill. I wondered why she hadn’t zapped one or more of the ‘ladies’. Lesley was a murderer – had shot a man in the head in cold blood, right in front of me. But hardened killers, outside of war zones, are rarer than people think. It probably would have been a last resort. Still, between Caroline flinging mystical smoke ropes to tangle and Lesley putting up shields and possibly returning fire, they had triggered the lamp.

Wood is terrible at retaining vestigia – which presumably was why these cabinets were made of it – so I wasn’t surprised to feel nothing inside. There was a shallow internal drawer at the top – with no metal fittings, I noticed – that looked suitable for storing documents.

I mimed opening it and Grace signed knocking twice with her right fist – ‘yes’ in BSL. I was glad to realise some of it was coming back.

Gingerly, and holding my head as far back as I could, because you never know, I opened the drawer and extracted yet another manila folder. Inside was another tissue-thin carbon copy of a typed letter – the faded letters read:

WARNING DANGEROUS. MAGICALLY ACTIVE. HANDLE WITH CAUTION

ITEM: One (1) Iberian patterned lamp 30” tall with opaque fluting of faience in the Egyptian manner. Active containment intaglio in gold and silver around base and brass top cap. Hebrew lettering, also in silver, on cap and on the bottom of the base. Believed to be a containment vessel for a Class A malignancy. Formerly stored at Bevis Marks Synagogue, London – requested for special storage by Sir Leon Davies FSW as part of war contingency plans.

I knew the term ‘malignancy’ from the reading I’ve done as part of my training. From the Latin malignus – ‘wicked, bad-natured’ – another catch-all term like ‘fae’ that could mean anything. Except I didn’t think ‘Class A’ indicated that it was top streamed at school.

‘We need to find out where this came from,’ I said, and then, remembering, pointed upwards.