Amongst Our Weapons

18 Command and Control

On the basis that we were already there, and that the place had already been trashed, we set up camp at the shelter. Although the indoor garden and kitchen were a mess, a surprising amount of the canteen area and the offices that led off it had survived intact. The fire brigade had given the remains of the kitchen and the structure the once-over and declared it safe, though they did turn off the mains gas just to be on the safe side.

Since the TSG often find themselves parked on standby for hours and hours, they can always be counted on to either have snacks or to know where the nearest refs can be found. Danni had gone off to ‘liaise’ with them while Guleed and Nightingale headed back to the Folly with Jacqueline Spencer-Talbot.

I sat at a table in a corner with a good view of both entrances. The rings were tucked into one of the pouches of my uniform MetVest.

‘You’re supposed to put that on before you get in a fight,’ Danni had said as she headed out.

I wrote up my notes while waiting for coffee.

We’d tentatively formed a theory that Francisca only struck when both her intended victim and one or more rings were in the same locale. On the additional assumption that only Lesley was interested in the rings for themselves, I was keeping them in the hope she’d come back for a second try while Nightingale stashed Spencer-Talbot and Alastair McKay in the basement with Molly and Foxglove.

I thought of the alleged magical defences around the Folly – perhaps we’d get a chance to see how well they worked.

I was still waiting for coffee when I looked up to find Professor Postmartin picking his way through the debris to reach me. He was wearing what I think of as his action academic suit – thick tweed with leather reinforcements at the elbow. The patches went with the battered green leather briefcase he’d brought with him.

‘My, my, my,’ he said. ‘What a mess.’

‘It’s a circus,’ I said.

‘I do love the classics,’ he said. ‘Although somehow I missed out on the original TV series.’

He looked around what was left of the indoor garden and joined me at my corner table.

‘This must have been very nice – before,’ he said, not specifying before what. ‘I came down because Nightingale said you’d probably go straight home from here.’

‘Pretty much ordered me to,’ I said. ‘I think he’s worried about me.’

‘Should he be?’

‘I don’t know if we can stop this woman.’

‘The sīphōnem spell didn’t work?’

I talked him through my two failed attempts to put the spell on Francisca.

‘She’s too fast and destructive,’ I said. ‘We all piled in and she nearly took us all to the cleaners, Nightingale included.’

Postmartin opened his briefcase and pulled out an A4 envelope folder made of clear rigid plastic.

‘I don’t know if this will help,’ he said, opening the folder, ‘but I think I’ve found your Inquisition practitioner.’

He removed a picture from the folder and put it on the table before me. It was an old-fashioned engraved portrait of a middle-aged white man with hooded eyes, a beaky nose and surprisingly fleshy lips. He wore a high collar with a minimalist ruff.

‘Magister Cristoval Romano,’ said Postmartin. ‘Born 1581 in Carmona, which is near Seville, died … Well, nobody’s that certain. We have no confirmed date of death but the last reference to his life was from 1623, when he was listed as a calificador for the Inquisition in Seville.’

A calificador was a consultant who assisted the Inquisition by assessing the evidence against the accused. What was unusual was that normally this post was taken by a theologian.

‘Whereas the Magister was famous as an alchemist and a natural philosopher,’ said Postmartin. ‘Another unusual feature is that the Inquisition kept next to no records of the cases that he worked on.’

The Inquisition were famous for keeping records of every denunciation, confession, torture session and trial they participated in. So detailed were their ledgers, including meticulous record-keeping of goods seized from suspects’ households, that social historians know more about the material culture of ordinary Spaniards of that period than anywhere else in the medieval period.

‘It’s an ill wind,’ said Postmartin.

‘Maybe the records were lost,’ I said. ‘You’re always moaning about gaps in the historical record.’

‘According to my friend at Queen’s,’ said Postmartin, ‘and he can bore for England on the subject, we have good records from the Inquisition in Seville for that period. Their absence speaks to secrecy, rather than rising damp or rapacious mice.’

‘You think he was part of an occult branch of the Inquisition?’ I said.

‘Or perhaps the whole of that branch,’ said Postmartin. ‘Or a mere consultant brought in on an ad-hoc basis. Whatever his official standing, I believe I have found his nemesis.’

Postmartin produced another A4 hard copy of an antique portrait. Judging by the flattened greyscale, this was a monochrome printing of a full-colour painting. This man was darker-skinned than the previous guy, younger, and his hair was cut long enough to show loose curls. His eyes were black, his nose what they call patrician, and his expression one of utter confidence. Even without colour I could see that his clothes – the embroidered doublet, the ruff, the silver chain around his neck – were not just richer but finer than those of the magister. He was practically smirking at the painter.

‘Enrique Jorge Perez,’ said Postmartin. ‘Born 1570, also in Carmona, died 1656 in London at the ripe old age of 86, in bed and surrounded by the weeping and wailing of his family.’ Postmartin winked at me. ‘Now, that’s the way I want to go, although I think I’m good for at least a century – don’t you?’

I said, if anything, he seemed to be getting younger.

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said. ‘He was a converso, a New Christian whose family probably converted following the pogroms of 1391.’

When the synagogues of Seville had been converted to churches, the Jewish quarter was looted and Jewish property seized by the Church. Postmartin suspected that the Perez family had abandoned their original Jewish family name when they bowed to the inevitable.

‘But possibly not the religion of their fathers,’ said Postmartin. ‘As evinced by later events. Because we don’t know their original family name, we can’t trace their activities prior to 1391, but given the speed with which they built a reputation as apothecaries, alchemists and natural philosophers, I suspect that they had been pre-Newtonian practitioners under the Almohad Caliphate.’

Who had been the Muslim rulers of Morocco and southern Spain until Charlton Heston turned up tied to his horse and drove them out. I admit I may have faded out a bit during that part of Postmartin’s explanation. I tuned back in at 1478, when Seville became host to the first Spanish Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Three years later they held their first auto-da-fé, which is Latin for ‘act of faith’, in which sinners were helped to give penance for their sins by being set on fire in front of a festival crowd. Most of these sinners were new Christians who had been judged insufficiently Christian – or worse, secretly Jewish.

‘Denunciation was a common way to settle scores or duck out of debts,’ said Postmartin. ‘So it probably isn’t that surprising that a rich and powerful family like Enrique Perez’s would be denounced. Still, they managed to stay out of trouble for over a century until Enrique was accused in 1622.’

The Inquisition locked Enrique up in the Castle of San Jorge by the River Guadalquivir that served as their HQ and jail. Just to be on the safe side, and because the Inquisition was nothing if not thorough, they locked up his wife, his children, his sisters, their husbands and their children. They seized all the family’s property and did a very thorough assessment of their worth.

‘It was the sheer amount of glassware, crucibles and metalworking gear,’ said Postmartin, ‘that allowed us to identify Enrique as an alchemist.’

There was no detailed account of any subsequent investigation or trial. Instead, there was only a sketchy report of a severe fire at the castle, which claimed a surprisingly large number of members of the Inquisition.

‘It is the very next month that Magister Romano is enrolled as a calificador,’ said Postmartin. ‘It’s possible that his name turns up in other records we haven’t checked yet, but the last reference to him we have is the payment he received from the Bishop of Seville of a large sum in silver.’

Enough to build a small castle.

Postmartin pulled out some more prints to show me. A woodcut of the Castle of San Jorge, a map of Europe with arrows showing the Jews’ escape routes from Spain and Portugal. And a portrait of what I realised was an older Enrique Perez.

‘Antwerp, 1645,’ said Postmartin, ‘only now he is calling himself Rodrigo Alfonzo and claiming to be a Portuguese merchant.’

‘The same Alfonzo family that left the lamp at Bevis Marks?’ I asked.

‘That seems likely,’ said Postmartin.

Antwerp, while under Spanish control, was a cosmopolitan trading city. The Inquisition had yet to get a foothold there, and it became a well-known stop on the underground railway that was moving threatened Jews from Spain and Portugal to the relative safety of the Ottoman Empire. Going a very long way around – according to the map.

The alchemist formerly known as Enrique Perez had white hair, grown sparse and thin, but the artist had captured a great satisfaction in the eyes and the twist of his lips. This was a man who was obviously pleased with himself. He was resting his right hand on a cluttered bench – both he and the bench were illuminated by daylight streaming in through a window. Behind him, the shadows hinted at expensive wood panelling, portraits and furniture.

Postmartin passed me a blow-up detail of the workbench and grinned.

Next to the subject’s right hand was a tall fluted glass lamp with gold and silver intaglio around its base and a brass cap – either Leon Davies’s lamp or its twin. Next to that was a thick book, open to show pages that were blank except for a single line of Latin. Scattered across the pages, with deliberate casualness, were seven silver rings. The artist had taken care to ensure that his work was detailed enough to guarantee that the occult symbols on the rings were visible, and the writing legible.

Quoniam requirens sanguinem eorum recordatus est, I read. ‘“Because requiring their blood it is remembered”?’

‘It’s from the Av HaRachamim, a medieval Jewish prayer,’ said Postmartin. ‘The rest goes like this in English …

Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”

Let it be known among the nations in our sight

that You avenge the spilled blood of Your servants.

And it says: “For He who exacts retribution for spilled blood remembers them.

He does not forget the cry of the humble.”’

‘He definitely wanted the world to know what he’d done,’ I said.

‘It gets even better,’ said Postmartin, who was practically vibrating with excitement. ‘This particular painting was part of the Cathedral collection in Seville. It may have been seized by the authorities in Antwerp, but I prefer to think that Enrique Perez sent it to the Church authorities himself. He didn’t care about the rest of the world, but he definitely wanted the Inquisition to know he’d bested them.’

The painting had been sold as part of a job lot in the late 1970s to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The details of the book, the rings and the lamp were obscured until the painting was restored in 2008 as part of a push to uncover hidden artistic gems. Which meant that somebody – possibly Brian Packard – could have spotted the lamp and rings at the gallery. There’d been a great deal of publicity surrounding the restoration, and a special exhibition of the restored works. The portrait and the close-up Postmartin had showed me had been featured in an online article.

‘Sensibly, he didn’t hang around for the Inquisition to catch up with him,’ said Postmartin, getting back on track.

A certain Rodrigo Alfonzo was named amongst the ‘Portuguese’ merchants operating in London – the ones that went on in 1657 to legally change their status in the face of wartime confiscation. Although he died before the case was brought.

‘Neither Alfonzo nor Rodrigo are exactly unusual names,’ said Postmartin. ‘But luckily we can work back from Leon Davies to the point where his family take an anglicized surname in 1897. Since we know Leon was in charge of the lamp, we can surmise that they are the same family.’

Which is why we knew that the alchemist formerly known as Enrique Jorge Perez died smugly of old age in bed.

‘I don’t suppose he left a handy treatise on how the rings and the lamp worked?’ I asked.

Postmartin laughed and started to neatly pack hard copies back in their folder. In the same order as they’d come out, I noticed.

Danni arrived with some coffee and offered to do another run for Postmartin, who told her not to bother.

‘I brought my own tea,’ he said, and he pulled a vacuum flask from his briefcase. It was an antique 1950s model with a rounded stopper and a faded blue and green tartan pattern on its sides. ‘I always pack my own refreshments,’ he said. ‘Got into the habit back before there was a coffee shop on every corner.’

Danni slipped out to join the perimeter while Postmartin popped the plastic cup off the top of the Thermos and poured black tea. Steam rose, and there was a citrus scent which weirdly reminded me of the orange smell I’d got from Francisca’s boundary effect.

‘I’m partial to milk and sugar,’ said Postmartin. ‘But black tea with lemon stays hotter longer.’

He lifted his cup and blew on the surface to cool it.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘This is what I think happened. Our boy Enrique falls out of favour and is denounced, accused and arrested. But the Inquisition don’t realise how powerful he is and he breaks out of prison, grabs all his family, extracts a bit of revenge and gets the fuck out of Spain.’

Postmartin nodded and sipped his tea.

‘So the Inquisition is not having this and, not being stupid, they know they’re outclassed,’ I said. Suddenly I could see the whole bloody thing as if Mary Beard was narrating it to camera. ‘So they bring in this Magister … what was his name?’

‘Cristoval Romano,’ said Postmartin.

‘They bring in Romano as their big gun and set him the task of dealing with Enrique.’

‘Bring me the head of Enrique Perez,’ said Postmartin with a straight face.

To that end, they recruited Francisca, gifted her with incredible powers and set her on Enrique’s tail. I thought of the cat-women and the child soldiers and all the fanatical cannon fodder that had been drummed up by powerful men to suit their purposes, and felt suddenly sick.

‘But our Enrique was too good and too clever,’ I said. ‘He fashioned the lamp and the rings and used them to trap Francisca. Then he had that painting done and I bet he was already halfway across the Channel before it had left for Seville.’

‘Do you have an inkling as to how the rings worked?’ asked Postmartin.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I think she’s drawn to them. Whatever weird bollocks Preston Carmichael did in 1989 created a link between him, their wearers and Francisca. Once she has identified her victim, she needs them and the ring to be in the same location. I think Preston Carmichael was wearing his when she tortured him for information.’

‘But David Moore was still looking for his ring when he was struck down in the Silver Vaults,’ said Postmartin.

‘Lesley slipped up,’ I said. ‘She knew that Francisca had been in angel form at the vaults. So how did she know?’

‘Because she was there?’ said Postmartin, and sipped his tea. ‘But she didn’t steal David Moore’s ring until later.’

‘Meaning that it doesn’t have to be the owner’s ring,’ I said. ‘Any of the seven rings will do. By then Lesley had the one she glamoured off Alastair McKay in Davos. She must have had it with her when she followed David Moore to the Silver Vaults. So it doesn’t look like Francisca cares about the rings themselves per se.’

I patted the pouch on my MetVest.

‘Interesting,’ said Postmartin, and poured himself another cup. ‘That implies that the rings form a gestalt – a collective linkage between the Manchester seven and the rings. Since they were obviously designed as a countermeasure to Magister Romano’s magic, I doubt their purpose was to attract his angel of death.’

‘Something obviously happened at that prayer meeting,’ I said, and finished my coffee. ‘But me and Nightingale have no idea what.’

‘Prior to Newton,’ said Postmartin, ‘a great deal of weight was given to the notion of correspondence. The idea that one thing, either through resemblance or a symbolic connection, could be used to influence another thing.’

So the penis-shaped stinkhorn mushroom made a frequent appearance in folk recipes for curing impotence. Although given how they smelt, I couldn’t see it helping with the foreplay part of the problem.

‘So if Carmichael did, unwittingly, practise an effective ritual in Manchester,’ said Postmartin, ‘then I think it’s entirely possible that the group may have created a bond with the rings and thus with Francisca.’

‘It would be nice if we knew what they were for originally,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t be so prominent in the painting if Enrique hadn’t thought they were important.’

‘And they wouldn’t have been included,’ said Postmartin, ‘if he hadn’t been sure their significance would be obvious to the Inquisition in Seville. There’s no point taunting your enemies if they don’t understand the insult.’

‘Perhaps not to the Inquisition at large,’ I said. ‘Maybe just the Magister.’

‘That’s a definite possibility,’ said Postmartin.

‘Have you reached out to Leon Davies’s family?’ I said, thinking it was too much to hope that they had a lost family journal lying around the house.

‘I’m still waiting on a reply,’ said Postmartin. ‘Do you have a backup plan to deal with our troublesome Lady of Spain?’

There was a lump in my stomach that I wasn’t used to.

‘Nightingale does,’ I said.

‘I could not control her, nor bind her, and you saw what happened when I tried to knock her down,’ he’d said. ‘It’s obvious that the sīphōnem variant you have developed will not work while she actively resists it.’

I’d pointed out that we really didn’t have any alternative.

‘Yes,’ Nightingale had said quietly, ‘we do. If we position snipers out of her immediate range, I’m confident that a suitably high-powered round will bring her down.’

‘Ah,’ said Postmartin when I told him. ‘It does have the virtue of simplicity.’

I said nothing, He was right and so was Nightingale. Francisca had killed two already, and what’s more, if we didn’t deal with her she’d probably kill again. I’ve never had a moral problem about lethal force to save lives – in the abstract, anyway. But luring Francisca into an ambush and gunning her down seemed a bit premeditated to me. I didn’t feel good about it at all.

I was still feeling queasy about our options when I arrived home to find my mum had moved in. She was in the kitchen; all four burners on the cooker were in use and the emergency backup rice cooker had been dragged out from its cupboard and was running in tandem with the main rice cooker.

The air smelt of cassava leaf, palm oil and fried fish – I wondered how many people she was catering for.

‘So where’s Dad?’ I asked, because my mum never leaves my dad on his own overnight. He might be in his seventies but my mum still remembers that mad bad jazzman she married – and what that led to vis-à-vis addiction and self-neglect.

‘E dae na di Folly,’ she said in Krio. ‘Thomas and Molly dae watch am for me.’

‘You can’t just dump Dad on my boss,’ I said, but of course she could. Mum was a world-class exponent of the it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission school of interpersonal relations. Not that she ever begged forgiveness, either.

‘E nor dae tay,’ she said, and then banged her ladle on the edge of one of the bubbling pots.

One of the foxes came running in and skidded to a halt in front of her, claws skittering on the tiles.

‘Tell Abigail to lay the table,’ said my mum.

‘Yes, boss,’ said the fox and, turning, scampered out.

My mum turned back to me.

‘You dae hep me for cook?’ she asked. ‘No? Then why don’t you go and see what Max has done in the garden – he’s very proud.’

Apart from anything else, Maksim had laid the groundwork for an occupying army. Half a dozen pop tents had been pitched next to the patio, their nylon flysheets glistening in the drizzle.

Beyond them, I found the man himself surveying his handiwork.

At least the JCB had been sent back to the rental agency – assuming Maksim hadn’t just ‘borrowed’ it off a construction site. Maksim had been a professional criminal in both Russia and London, and he had the tattoos to prove it. Occasionally he forgot that he’d given all that up in favour of being Beverley’s Mr Fixit.

‘It was quite an easy job,’ he said. ‘You dig hole, pour in floor, concrete blocks for the walls and render on top. It should have taken longer because of drying but Beverley did her miracle thing and speeded it up. Then I put in the fittings, the pump, the drain and finally paint. What do you think?’

I thought it looked more like a slipway than a pool – although it was painted a nice sky blue. It ran twenty metres – half the length of the garden – and was six metres wide, not counting the flagstone border path. There were white Perspex dome lights fitted along the sides and textured navy non-slip tiles along the border. At the end nearest the house it had a gradual slope like a kid’s pool, and the far end was open to the river. As a result, the water in the pool was full of algae, twigs and other unidentifiable bits of urban river debris.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Maksim. ‘We take care of that when the time come.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘We block off the end,’ said Maksim, ‘build sauna, and next time it snows we can have a proper swimming party.’

I was almost certain he was joking about the winter swimming parties, but the sauna sounded like a good idea.

‘Where is Bev?’ I asked. Maksim always knew.

‘She’s bringing her sisters.’ Even as he said it, spring arrived – sort of.

It had been late evening when I walked out of the kitchen, and under the low clouds it darkened quickly until the garden was lit only by the patio lamps and the muted glow of the underwater pool lights.

Then a very localised dawn broke at the point where the pool met the river. Pale sunlight filtered through deep water, as if the sun was coming up somewhere under Beverley Brook.

It only lasted a moment, and I wasn’t even sure if it had been real light made from real photons, or some artefact my brain had conjured up in response to a magical stimulus. Two small shapes came shooting like seals up the pool towards us, slowing only when they reached the shallow end. Two black girls in expensive pink and yellow neoprene wetsuits broke the surface and came up the incline towards us. The youngest, Brent, who was seven, leapt into Maksim’s arms. I was glad to see that even he staggered under the momentum.

‘Uncle Max!’ she yelled. ‘Are we sleeping out?’

The other girl, Nicky – a too sensible twelve to show enthusiasm – gave me a wave and walked sedately out to join us. Behind her came Beverley in her specially adapted wetsuit. I stepped forwards to help her out – chill water sloshing into my shoes. She kissed me; her lips were cool from the water. But she refused a hug.

‘Your clothes,’ she said. ‘You idiot.’

She handed me a yellow waterproof holdall to carry back to the house. We walked hand in hand past where Maksim was showing Brent her pop tent while Nicky followed on, asking about supper.

What with Nicky, Brent, Abigail, Maksim, various hangers-on and my mum, we’d had to lay the extra gateleg table and use a couple of folding garden chairs to get everyone seated. Not that Mum ever sat down for more than five minutes – instead, she bustled around dishing out rice and soup and making sure the less habituated, like Maksim, ate from the less spicy pot. This, I might add, means ‘less spicy’ by West African standards, so the big man’s face went an interesting red colour at one point.

The sacrifices people will make for their religion, I thought, and felt a twist in my stomach. It must have shown on my face because I caught Mum giving me a strange look.

I caught her looking at me again when we were clearing up.

I don’t like overloading the dishwasher, so I was doing the big pots and crockery by hand when I turned to grab the next dish and found Mum staring at me. This is unusual. Growing up, most of my interactions with my mum were done in the teeth of some other distraction – football, cooking, cleaning, family gossip, EastEnders … my dad. I’m not used to getting the full force of her regard. It was unsettling.

‘Why are you upset?’ she said. ‘Is this not a beautiful home? Is Beverley not a beautiful woman? Are you not about to be a father?’

‘What makes you think I’m upset?’ I asked, but even as I said it I realised I was.

‘Because you had that face when you were a boy,’ said Mum.

‘Well, that’s hardly surprising, is it?’ I said. ‘It’s my face. I only got the one.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘So what is the problem, hey? Is it this case? Or this?’ She waved her hand to encompass a house full of relatives, foxes and shouting.

‘I think I might have to kill someone,’ I said.

Mum took an involuntary step backwards and her hand flew to her mouth.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No – please say this is not true. God nor wan mek you kill porsin. You did not become a policeman to kill.’ She stepped closer to me again and stared up at me. ‘Who is this someone?’

‘There’s a woman who believes herself to be an angel of death,’ I said. ‘She’s killed two already, and she has five more on her list.’

‘Is she a witch?’ asked Mum, who has pretty culturally specific notions about right and wrong.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She was made this way by wicked men. And I don’t think I can stop her without killing her.’

‘Let someone else do it,’ said Mum. ‘Let Thomas kill this woman. What would one more killing be in his life?’

The last straw, maybe, I thought, but Nightingale was not Mum’s concern.

‘It doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger,’ I said. ‘It will be my responsibility either way.’

Mum shook her head.

‘You must find another way,’ she said.

‘If I don’t stop her, she will kill again.’

Mum picked up the mop and bucket and headed for the back door.

‘Find another way,’ she said, as if the issue was decided.

‘Peter, love,’ said Beverley as we were preparing for bed. ‘You need to get a move on and either wrap up this case or hand it on.’

‘I’m not sure I can hand it on,’ I said.

‘Of course you can, and you’re going to do it tomorrow afternoon,’ she said.

I took her hand and helped her into the bed – strategically placing pillows as she wriggled into a comfortable position.

‘Really – tomorrow afternoon?’ I said.

‘At the latest,’ she said. ‘After that, I can’t say for sure.’

We lay side by side in the darkness, while outside I could hear rain pattering on the pop tents and the sounds of Beverley’s sisters definitely not settling down to sleep.

Lesley wanted the rings and we wanted Lesley.

Francisca wanted to poke out the hearts of the Manchester seven, but would only show up if both victim and at least one ring were in close proximity.

But there was no reason to believe it meant being in the same room.

Or even the same floor.

The sīphōnem spell had nearly worked, but I needed more time to find the connection back to the allokosmos that was driving Francisca’s powers and sever it.

A restrained suspect was a safe suspect, but Nightingale couldn’t do it on his own.

There was a mechanism to save Francisca; I was sure I had all the pieces. I just needed to figure out how to put them together.

I think I must have dozed off, because all was suddenly quiet when I realised I had a plan– one that would kill two birds with one stone. If it worked.

And if it didn’t?

There was always Nightingale’s alternative.

I got up and padded into the kitchen – the only part of the house devoid of relatives, friends or foxes – and phoned Nightingale.

He picked up on the second ring.

‘Peter?’ he said – sounding wide awake.

‘The Folly’s magical defences,’ I said. ‘Can we turn them off?’