Amongst Our Weapons

14 Love

We arrested Heather Chalk for assisting an offender and took her home with us to the Folly, where we keep the least-used, nicest-smelling and best-catered PACE-compliant suite in the Metropolitan Police Service area in the basement.

More importantly, the suite here was magic-resistant – so long as we persuaded Foxglove to sleep in her own basement studio, so that her anti-magic field, or whatever it was, extended to the cells. Not that we were worried about Heather doing magic … but we weren’t sure that Francisca wouldn’t stage a rescue.

I remembered the comfortable way they’d walked together down the towpath and thought a rescue attempt a real possibility. Or so I hoped.

Meanwhile, we had to check Heather in with the custody sergeant and store her shopping safely so it could be returned to her in the event of her release. Since assisting an offender is a serious offence, we arranged to have a solicitor come in even before she asked for one. In response we got a posh white woman in her fifties, in a tailored black pinstripe skirt suit and a tooled leather briefcase. This was not what we were used to in the way of legal aid briefs, so I took a moment to make friends. She turned out to be a senior partner in the local criminal law firm, who had heard so many weird stories about the Folly that she’d come to check them out. Her name was Cynthia Hoopercast.

Good for upholding the principle of legal protection for all – not so good for your working police.

‘So where did you meet Francisca?’ I asked.

‘I don’t have to answer that,’ said Heather Chalk, and Ms Hoopercast nodded approval.

I was flying solo on this interview since Nightingale, Guleed and half of the Belgravia mob were trying to track down Jacqueline Spencer-Talbot, the remaining member of the Manchester Bible studies group unaccounted for, while my FBI contacts at least tried to confirm that Andrew Carpenter and Brian Packard were still safely in the States.

At least Danni and Seawoll were on their way back.

‘I’ve stuck Barry’ – one of his up-and-coming detective sergeants – ‘with the follow-up with GMP and points in between,’ Seawoll had said.

I think the rush to get back was to provide cover for Stephanopoulos because of our failure by the canal. Now, to the rest of the Met Stephanopoulos continues to be the single most terrifying police officer who ever put the fear of God into a subordinate, but to Seawoll she was still his bright-eyed protégée. Would probably still be when she was chief constable of some county force and he was living in the Sunshine Home for Retired Northern Detectives on the seafront at Scarborough.

If Scarborough has a seafront – I’d have to check.

‘Don’t you dare get our Miriam into any more trouble,’ he’d said, and then sent me everything he had on the Thelma and Louise of the Macclesfield Canal.

‘We know you met at the halfway house in Stockport,’ I told Heather.

‘Then why did you ask?’ she said.

‘Because we need to know your side of the story,’ I said.

‘Like you care,’ she said. ‘Like you give a fuck about me.’

We did twenty minutes of the woe is me nobody cares I’m just an insignificant nothing until she cracked. Proper professional criminals can keep schtum indefinitely but ordinary people always want to explain themselves. However hard the Ms Hoopercasts of the world frown at them. You just need to stay calm and look sympathetic and eventually out it comes.

‘What are you after her for, anyway?’ she asked. This was a genuine question and my first real opening.

‘We think she may have seriously hurt people,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Heather, but the slight edge of desperation in her voice meant she knew something, at least. ‘Not a chance, she’s nice.’

‘We’re worried because we think she may be acting under duress,’ I said, and Ms Hoopercast looked suddenly interested, as I was hoping she would. ‘We think she may have been abused and conditioned to carry out a series of attacks.’

‘Are you saying she’s a terrorist?’ said Heather before Ms Hoopercast could stop her.

‘Why would you think she was a terrorist?’ I asked.

Heather looked at Ms Hoopercast, who shook her head and then back at me.

‘You said she was,’ said Heather, causing a pained crease to appear between Ms Hoopercast’s elegantly plucked eyebrows. ‘Whatever else she is – she’s not a terrorist. She’s a beautiful soul.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘She was touched by the numinous,’ said Heather.

‘What’s the numinous?’ I asked.

‘It’s that feeling you get when you’re in church,’ said Heather. ‘Or a bit stoned, but in a good way. You saw it, didn’t you? You was there, weren’t you? She’s an angel. A real angel – from Heaven.’

‘She has power,’ I said. ‘But we don’t think she’s a messenger from God.’

Ms Hoopercast stopped making notes and stared in amazement, first at me and then at her client, and then back at me – her eyes narrowing.

‘Ah,’ she said softly. ‘So it’s true.’

I ignored her and kept my eyes on Heather. Love is a terrible thing in an accomplice – you can’t turn one suspect against another if they put the needs of the other ahead of their own.

You have to sneak in through the back door instead.

‘We think she might be being forced to attack people,’ I said.

‘Against her will?’ asked Heather.

Ah, I thought, she knows something for sure.

‘We think so,’ I said, even though she’d looked pretty enthusiastic to me. ‘Did she say where she was from?’

‘Seville,’ said Heather. ‘It’s in Spain, but I think she was from somewhere a bit rural, if you know what I mean?’

‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

Because Heather had had to teach her how to turn on a cooker, let alone use a phone. She’d been suspicious of the toilet, took really long baths and thought the Hoover was the best thing since sliced bread. She did know how to make bread, though, and she knew exactly how to use the wood and coal stove on the narrowboat.

It never seemed to occur to Heather that Francisca might be a refugee from the dim and distant past – not even when she fainted at her first sight of an airliner. I’d have sussed it on the first day – which just goes to show why more science fiction should be included in the National Curriculum.

‘Was she religious?’ I asked.

‘In what way?’

‘Did she go to church?’

Heather shook her head.

‘Did she pray?’

‘All the time to herself,’ said Heather. ‘In Spanish, I think.’

‘Did you ever see her with the spear?’ I asked.

Heather hesitated.

‘What spear?’ she said, and I had a sudden memory of the spear as it swung through the air towards me … Flames streaming from what I realised was a blunt tip. The flames had made it hard to see, but the top quarter of the weapon had been a narrow cylinder. Grey-green, roughly textured with organic swirls and dribbles.

Lightning glass, I thought, and realised that both Heather and Ms Hoopercast were staring at me.

‘The burning spear,’ I said.

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Heather, but I could see that she did.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the trip down on the canal – it must have been hard in winter.’

‘It can get very cold,’ said Heather. ‘But if you’re moving every day you’re working locks, stopping at pubs, meeting new people – keeps you warm.’

There was a rhythm to it — wake up, stoke up the stove. Heather would check the boat and look at the map – if they had a decent signal she’d log on to the boating sites. Plan the day’s move. Have breakfast while they were under way. Take it in turns to steer while the other warmed up in the cabin. Spend the evenings in a pub, or in the boat snuggled up in the bed together.

‘So what was your relationship?’ I asked – casually.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Friends, girlfriends, lovers?’ I said

Heather actually blushed and, although she tried to hide it, smiled a shy smile.

‘I swear neither of us were lezzies,’ she said. ‘Only she used to cry at night if she were in her own bunk and … one thing led to another. I’d never done it with a girl before, but obviously, you know it’s not hard to work out, she didn’t have a clue.’ Heather was staring at her lap. ‘Sexually speaking. She’d been treated like shit when she was young – I’m pretty certain of that.’

Tears had started to fall from Heather’s eyes. She made no attempt to wipe them away, they just fell into her lap.

‘I reckon she was an angel,’ she said. ‘A broken angel.’

Ms Hoopercast asked for a break at that point and I suspended the interview.

A broken angel.

‘But a real person,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘Indoctrinated or compelled – it’s hard to tell.’

We were sitting in the small but pristine medical examination room that sits next to the cells. Neither of us thought it wise to get too far from Heather, just in case her angelic friend Francisca came looking for her.

‘Could you compel someone to kill another human being?’ I asked.

Nightingale was silent for a long moment, and then he looked away from me.

‘During the war,’ he said. ‘I’ve ordered men to shoot strangers and I was the moving force behind an air raid in Norway. I didn’t give the order directly, but it was at my instigation.’

‘I meant with magic,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Nightingale. ‘That. Possibly – I’ve never tried it. Certainly not in a way that would last for weeks and months, let alone span the centuries.’

I suspected that time had been suspended for Francisca while she’d been in the lamp, otherwise she’d be even weirder than she was.

‘Could any of your contemporaries make someone kill?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Interfering directly with a man’s free will was not encouraged at the Folly. David Mellenby, whose notebooks you have, was of the opinion that the main purpose of the Society of the Wise was to distract its members from such things. “Drowning our Mussolinis in brandy and cigar smoke”, he called it.’

According to those notebooks, the body’s own defences were constantly renewed so that even spells like Vox Imperante – that parade-ground bark that could make a room full of people sit down on the floor or drop their weapons – only work about fifty per cent of the time.

‘What about an old-fashioned ritual spell, pre-Newtonian?’ I said.

Ritual spells used non-practitioners to amplify their effect. These types of spells had been considered by the old buffers of the Folly as either déclassé, dangerously foreign, or like, totally Dark Ages, man.

‘David did believe that if you could marshal enough participants and focus them sufficiently, you might overwhelm a man’s innate defences,’ said Nightingale.

‘Did anyone try?’ I asked.

‘Lord, no,’ said Nightingale. ‘David was careful never to reveal that particular theory, especially during the early part of the war – when things were desperate. He only told me because he had to tell someone.’

‘I haven’t seen it in his notebooks,’ I said.

‘You won’t,’ said Nightingale. ‘I believe he destroyed those notes before he died.’

Only David Mellenby hadn’t just died. He’d committed suicide in the face of the horrors they’d discovered during the raid on Ettersberg. He’d done it while Nightingale was recovering from his war wounds – I don’t think it helped his recovery at all.

‘Assume for the moment that our angel Francisca dates back to the Middle Ages or something – probably Spain,’ I said. ‘She’s then sort of enchanted and turned into a super-assassin and further indoctrinated to kill a number of people. But this is hundreds of years ago, so whoever her original targets were, they’re long gone. So what’s the criteria for her current target selection?’

‘Could they be the descendants of the original targets?’ asked Nightingale.

‘You might have to ask Dr Walid for details,’ I said, ‘but I’m pretty sure that after twenty generations, hundreds of thousands of people would be the biological descendants of anyone from back then. And even if it’s some weird mystical direct line thing, it would be a bit of a coincidence that they all ended up in the same Bible study group in Manchester.’

‘Unless it was divinely ordained,’ said Nightingale.

‘Do you believe that?’

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘But we have to consider all the options – even divine providence.’

‘Or it could be something more obvious,’ I said.

‘You think it might be the rings?’ said Nightingale.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know why. They’re enchanted and so was the lamp. They were supposed to be stored with the Sons of Wayland, as the lamp was. The only trouble is platinum is a modern metal – it’s mostly mined in South Africa and they didn’t open up those mines until the 1900s.’

‘I believe Harold may have made some headway on that mystery,’ said Nightingale. ‘He was sounding quite pleased with himself on the phone earlier.’

‘Did he say why?’

‘You know Harold,’ said Nightingale. ‘He likes to make a performance of these things. In the meantime, it’s always possible that Francisca shared her motivations with her lover.’

It took another hour to get Heather to admit that Francisca had talked to her about her mission.

‘What mission was that?’ I asked.

But Heather had clammed up again, and we circled around the question of whether she’d known that her girlfriend had been off murdering people.

‘They had it coming,’ she said suddenly, when I described David Moore’s death in the Silver Vaults. ‘They’, I noticed – not ‘he’.

‘What had they done?’

‘We should never have come south,’ she said, and she crossed her arms. ‘We was all right until we came south.’

‘Why did you come south?’ I asked.

Heather mumbled something like ‘She wanted to.’

‘Who wanted to?’

‘Francisca wanted to,’ said Heather.

I caught Ms Hoopercast’s eye. Her job is to act in the best interest of her client, and shifting the guilt on to an associate is a classic. Ms Hoopercast didn’t do anything as crass as suggest Heather incriminate her lover, but I knew the next time her client looked to her for guidance she’d get a nod, not a head-shake.

Sure enough, when I asked whether Heather knew why Francisca had wanted to come to London, Ms Hoopercast didn’t object when Heather said it was to find the blasphemers.

‘That’s what she called them,’ said Heather. ‘She called them Marranos as well – whatever that means. Definitely not a good word, though. I think she thought they were dead, but she saw one of them on YouTube.’

I remembered Preston Carmichael’s relentless self-promotion on YouTube, but he wasn’t that big an influencer. I wondered whether it was chance or the malign workings of the YouTube algorithm. Because you liked happy cat videos, you might also like to smite this man with furious vengeance.

‘She knew how to use the internet, then?’ I said.

‘It’s not like it’s hard, is it?’ said Heather. ‘She did love YouTube, though, spent hours watching travelogues and that kind of shit.’

We’d be able to check exactly what she’d watched once our Digital Forensics Technician had finished sucking the guts out of Heather’s laptop. I was thinking that, if I was right, then in 1989 Preston Carmichael and his merry band of God-botherers were experimenting with forces they didn’t understand. Francisca had been stuck in a magic lamp in a box under a hill just outside Glossop. How would she know what Preston Carmichael or any of the others looked like?

I asked Heather that very question but I left out the lamp stuff.

‘She saw them in a holy vision,’ said Heather. ‘She said that they stood before her, and the angel Camael whispered in her ear that they were the new blasphemers and descendants of the original Marranos.’

I made a note of the angel’s name and asked whether this revelation happened while Francisca was on the boat, but Heather said no.

‘Francisca said it happened when she was reborn into the new world,’ she said.

Was this the Manchester group’s 1989 experiment with the rings and ritual magic? If no proper time passed within the pocket dimension of the lamp, assuming that’s what it was, then that implied two things. One: that the rings were magically connected to the lamp and/or Francisca, and two: that ritual had marked the Manchester group as legitimate targets for Francisca’s murderous rage.

Which begged the question – who were her original targets and what had they done to deserve having Francisca set on them? Nightingale is fond of saying that there is nothing you can do with magic that isn’t cheaper and quicker to do by mundane means. Fireballs are fun, but it takes months of training to gain basic proficiency, while you can train an ordinary person to fire a handgun accurately in less than a week. The Germans had made a concerted effort to militarise their magical base, probably the most advanced in Europe at the time, but had ended up being ground into dog food by the conventional Red Army and its allies in Europe.

The magical forces on all sides had cancelled themselves out and the outcome was decided by strategy and logistics, courage, bullets, pain and blood.

And DNA evidence will catch more killers than my ability to sense vestigia ever will.

Nevertheless, magic was very much at work here. We didn’t have the details yet, but transforming what appeared to have been an ordinary woman into an ersatz angel of death must have cost enormous magical resources. Just who had the resources to do such a thing? And why had they thought it necessary?

‘Did Francisca ever say who gave her this mission?’ I asked.

‘The Holy Father himself,’ said Heather.

‘The Pope authorised the hit?’

‘I don’t know if it was the Pope directly,’ said Heather. ‘But it was definitely a Monsignor somebody something Prado – I think. She said he did it in the name of the Pope.’

I circled back to clarify as many details as I could, but Heather was getting tired and sleep deprivation only works as a tactic if you don’t care whether the suspect is telling the truth or just what they think you want to hear.

Francisca had often gone off by herself.

‘She wasn’t a child!’

Once they were in London, Heather had shown her how to use an Oyster Card and after that there was no stopping her.

I asked Heather where Francisca had visited but Heather didn’t know for sure, although Francisca would occasionally bring her back presents. Sweets and chocolate mostly, although one time it was a bunch of yellow roses that she suspected Francisca had plucked from someone’s garden or a park.

‘The stems were all different lengths,’ she said.

On one of these trips, Francisca was probably torturing poor Preston Carmichael to death – probably to get intelligence on the rest of the Manchester group. Efficient torture for information is not something you pick up from TV – not even HBO – so I wondered who had taught her that.

‘I think I can hazard a guess,’ said Postmartin, when we convened upstairs in the atrium for tea. Molly had placed a tiered silver cake stand in the middle of a coffee table and surrounded it with plates of daintily cut mustard and cress, cheese and pickle, salmon paste and …

‘Cucumber sandwiches,’ said Nightingale. ‘Molly must be feeling traditional today.’

Toby, who had obviously learnt a trick or two from Molly, appeared as if by magic beside my chair and gave me a much-practised look of pitiable hunger. Across from me, Seawoll delicately plucked a cucumber sandwich and popped it into his mouth.

‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ I said.

Postmartin flourished his tablet at us and pulled up an enhanced picture of the scratches on David Moore’s door. He cleared a space on the coffee table and laid it down. He reached down and retrieved a thick book bound in scuffed leather from a side table, opened it up to a bookmarked illustration plate, and laid it down beside the tablet. The picture in the book was a line illustration of a sigil – an upright oval containing a branch with leaves, a very knobbly cross in the centre and, on its right, a sword blade pointing upwards. Around the oval border were the words Exurge domine et judica causum tuam – Psalm 73.

Side by side, it was obvious that the scratches on the door were a crude reproduction of the sigil. You could even see where the scratcher had tried to do the oval, but given up halfway through when they couldn’t get the curve right.

‘Exurge domine et judica causum tuam,’ said Nightingale. ‘“Arise, O God, judge thy own cause.”’

‘Psalm 73,’ said Postmartin. ‘The motto of the Spanish Inquisition.’

‘Well, fuck me,’ said Seawoll. ‘I wasn’t expecting them.’

‘There’s long been speculation,’ said Postmartin, ‘that there was a magical component to the Inquisition – particularly in Spain and Portugal. We know for a fact that there was a strong Islamic and Jewish magical tradition in Andalusia and Granada, even if we don’t understand its underlying principles.’

The Newtonian synthesis – as Postmartin liked to call it – codified the ‘forms and wisdoms’ that underpinned European wizardry. But knowing how to do something doesn’t mean you know why it works.

‘Nor does it preclude,’ Nightingale had said during my early training, ‘the possibility that some other techniques might work – possibly just as well.’

Isaac Newton himself, like many of his contemporaries, had been interested in the Jewish esoteric practice known as Kabbalah. For all we knew, he might have drawn inspiration – or even whole techniques – from Jewish and Muslim practitioners. It’s not like our boy Isaac was famous for sharing credit.

‘Some of those practitioners must have converted,’ I said.

Must have become ‘New Christians’, and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition whose purpose was to root out backsliding converts.

‘They might have used their skills to mess with the Inquisition when it came after them,’ I said.

‘Hence the lamp,’ said Postmartin. ‘And it might well have been that the rings were part of the process of entrapping the angel that was sent after them.’

‘But the rings are made of platinum,’ I said. ‘That’s a modern metal – like aluminium.’

‘Aha,’ said Postmartin, who’d obviously waiting for his cue. ‘There was platinum available in the Renaissance – it was found in the New World and brought back to Spain. They called it platina, the diminutive of plata – which is Spanish for silver. There was certainly enough circulating by the sixteenth century for a suitably motivated craftsman to fashion seven rings.’

‘Don’t tell me it was cursed,’ said Seawoll.

‘I doubt it,’ said Postmartin. ‘But it is exactly the sort of rare and exotic material that attracted pre-Newtonian practitioners.’

‘If there was a magical opposition to the Inquisition,’ I said, ‘then there was bound to be pushback by the Inquisition. They’d have needed a way to deal with the resistance.’

‘I’ve never heard of Monsignor something Prado,’ said Postmartin, ‘but the name sounds Spanish. Perhaps he was influential in Peter’s hypothetical magical inquisition.’

‘Good God,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think Leon all but told me.’

Back in the 1920s, when they’d all been young – or at least that’s how it felt – and drinking in the Lamb off Guildford Place to stay out of the way of the old bores that ran the Folly. Nightingale had mentioned to Leon and some other friends, over a pint, that he was planning to travel up to Manchester.

‘I’m curious as to how the Sons do their enchantments,’ he’d said.

‘Did you put him up to this?’ Leon had asked David Mellenby, who was already famous as one of the new breed of scientific practitioners.

‘Good Lord, no,’ David had said. ‘I believe he’s looking to make his own staff.’

‘It’s a total bore,’ said Leon. ‘Take it from me. My family have been silversmiths and enchanters since biblical times, and the best thing my father did was agree to send me to Casterbrook.’

David, of course, had been instantly interested and asked whether Leon’s family had truly practised enhanced metallurgy …

‘That was David’s term for it,’ Nightingale told us. ‘I’m almost certain that he coined it himself. He wanted to know whether it really dated back to the ancient world. David had this notion that a great deal of wisdom had been lost with the fall of the Roman Empire and the Christianising of the East.’

Leon Davies had admitted that he didn’t know whether his family’s skills really dated back to the time of Abraham, but they’d definitely been famous as makers of amulets and cunning devices in Muslim Spain. Indeed, had been men of substance until they were driven out by the Spanish Inquisition.

‘Being crafty made them particularly suspect in the eyes of the Church,’ Leon had said, ‘who weren’t above employing their own sorcerers.’

‘Did he say any more?’ asked Postmartin eagerly.

‘Not that I remember,’ said Nightingale, and Seawoll sighed.

‘Are you really saying that the Catholic Church had its own version of the Folly?’ he asked.

‘Might still have,’ said Postmartin. ‘For all we know.’

‘But not the bloody C of E, I hope?’

‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘That was part of the post-war settlement.’

‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Seawoll.

Apart from anything else, Francisca being a weapon of the Spanish Inquisition would explain the archaic Castilian. But it still left the question of who Francisca was, or rather had been, before she was an instrument of divine justice. With this in mind, for the next interview we switched Heather to the Folly’s very own Achieving Best Evidence suite, which is furnished with a comfortable leather sofa and matching overstuffed armchair salvaged from one of the unused lounges on the fourth floor. The shift in venue wasn’t lost on Ms Hoopercast, who – no doubt rightly – surmised it marked a shift for her client from suspect and co-conspirator to member of the public caught up in events beyond her control. Practically a victim in her own right. A new status that would only be helped by full and enthusiastic co-operation with the forces of law and order. Just to make the point, we threw in a pot of tea and a round of tuna sandwiches. I think Ms Hoopercast was somewhat taken aback by the willow pattern china teapot, but she rallied and continued to glower at us for the rest of the interview in the approved manner.

‘She was a skivvy,’ said Heather, when I asked what she thought Francisca had done back in Seville. ‘Like she should have gone to university, but never got the chance and had to do shit jobs for a living. She might have been one of those modern slaves you hear about, only I thought they were mostly Filipino or something.’

Weirdly, we’d done being a servant in olden times at school with Miss Redmayne, who was one of those dead-keen humanities teachers straight out of training and ready to dismantle patriarchal capitalism one lesson plan at a time. In fact, being a top-class servant in the late medieval period was a prime job because of access to the great and powerful – plus perks. But being a skivvy and a cleaner was every bit as shit as modern slavery.

A person might clutch at any opportunity to escape that.

Especially if that opportunity was blessed by the highest moral authority you know.

I asked whether Heather thought Francisca truly believed that the blasphemers deserved to die, and she said that she did.

‘Besides,’ said Heather, ‘I don’t think she thinks she’s going to be free until they’re dead.’

‘Free from what?’ I asked.

Heather shrugged. ‘She promised,’ she said. ‘And she always keeps her promises.’