‘Guilt for what?’ asked Guleed.
And again, for some reason everyone turned and looked at me.
‘He’s not a practitioner,’ I said. ‘Or a special person, or anything else.’
‘We’re definitely missing something,’ said Seawoll.
‘That makes a change,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘What have we got so far on Preston Carmichael?’
Guleed checked her notes.
‘He’s got a sizable social media presence, lots of YouTube where he offers courses in spiritual healing backed by a ton of self-published books and merchandise,’ she said, and showed us an example.
It had a strangely dated Californian hippy mood, although Jesus and God definitely got namechecked at regular intervals.’
‘Nice,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Anything on his actual background?’
‘We’ve heard back from the DVLA and Carmichael first registered a vehicle in 1977, a Mini no less, at what we think is his parents’ address in Hexham, Northumberland.’
‘That’s funny,’ said Seawoll. ‘The concierge thought he was American.’
‘Geordie, American – who can tell the difference,’ said Stephanopoulos.
‘He doesn’t register another vehicle until 1985,’ said Guleed. ‘This time with an address in Fallowfield, Manchester. This one a six-year-old Ford Cortina.’
‘Classic car,’ said Seawoll. ‘Didn’t David Moore go to Manchester University at around that time?’
‘It’s a big city,’ said Stephanopoulos.
‘Ah, but Fallowfield is where all the students live,’ said Seawoll. ‘Especially back then.’
‘We need to reach out to the GMP,’ said Stephanopoulos, and Seawoll said he’d do that.
‘All friendly northerner, like.’
And, just like that, the investigation expanded to encompass our friends in the North. It’s not unusual for a major inquiry to balloon out in the first couple of days as the inquiry team desperately squeezes every teat it can grab looking for anything useful.
Like I said, information management.
Which was what Seawoll and Stephanopoulos were paid to do. And they couldn’t even claim overtime.
We spent half an hour dividing up our actions and lines of inquiry before Seawoll slapped his hands on the table and declared that it was time for elevenses.
‘And while your elders and betters are having cake,’ he said to me and Guleed, ‘you two can see if you can liberate us some smellies.’
I never wanted to be Falcon Two. When I’d drafted the document that went on to become the Interim Falcon Operational Procedures Manual I’d tried to get everyone to use Foxtrot or Zulu or Kilo or anything other than bloody Falcon. But they refused.
‘Life’s too fucking complicated already,’ Seawoll had said.
So I stayed Falcon Two while Nightingale, obviously, was Falcon One. And Guleed was Falcon Three and Danni was Falcon Four. When I went on paternity leave, any day now, Guleed would move up to Falcon Two and be seconded to the Folly as paternity cover.
I don’t think the prospect filled her with glee, but she was a professional and knew it had to be done.
Since Lesley had made her presence known, Nightingale as Falcon One became our mobile reserve. Since he was stuck on call at the Folly, he decided to take the opportunity to start Danni’s Countermeasures Training. Otherwise known as how to deal with magic when you can’t do it yourself.
‘Why not train up more wizards?’ Stephanopoulos had asked when we’d started the scheme.
‘That will come in good time,’ said Nightingale. ‘In the meantime we need magic-aware officers to deal with problems in the short term. When we have a suitable structure in place we can graduate to full apprenticeships. Eventually we’ll have a cadre of officers who are in a position to make an informed choice about further training.’
So it was that me and Guleed, Falcons Two and Three, headed down to Spitalfields to talk to Jocasta Hamilton. Or, more properly, Dame Jocasta Hamilton DBE FRSA – for services to making tons of cash and donating it to the right political party.
‘Or all her charity work,’ said Guleed as I negotiated the Asbo down the joy that is Great Eastern Street.
‘That too,’ I said and made a mental note of the index of a Mercedes A-Class that cut us off at the junction to Shoreditch High Street. Chances of that driver ever coming to my professional attention were slim. But if they did, things would go very hard on them indeed.
Dame Jocasta Hamilton had her offices in a surprisingly stylish converted warehouse on Middlesex Street. On approach the clean lines fooled me into thinking they were 1920s art deco, but as I got closer the brash white-brick pilasters that shot up two storeys topped by Corinthian capitals gave it away as late Victorian. There was a double door sandwiched between a barber’s shop and an Argentinian cantina, on which a tasteful brass plaque announced Jocasta Hamilton Holdings.
Spitalfields had once been the heart of London’s rag trade, where subsequent waves of immigrants had crowded into sweatshops turning Indian and Egyptian cotton into clothes for the burgeoning English middle class. That might have explained the strange babble of voices I felt as I brushed my fingers along the pale cream brick.
But not the weird sensation like a cold breath on the back of my neck.
Guleed felt it, too, because she paused and, like me, turned to scan the street behind us.
It had been raining on and off all morning and the cars parked outside were beaded with moisture. Pedestrians scuttled past with their heads down or hidden under umbrellas. The chattering of pneumatic drills floated through the damp air from further down the street, where yet another uninspired office building was going up.
I saw nothing suspicious – which is unusual. A copper can usually find something suspicious if they look hard enough. Nobody was loitering in the doorway of the Indian restaurant opposite or covertly watching us from any of the parked cars.
The cold feeling had evaporated, but its memory remained.
I exchanged looks with Guleed, who shrugged and turned to press the button on the gunmetal grey intercom box.
‘Detective Sergeant Guleed,’ she said when an indistinct voice squawked at us from the box. ‘To see Dame Jocasta.’
The offices on the first floor were definitely from the Lidl school of office furnishings. There weren’t even cubicles, just rows of dark wooden tables that looked like they might have been bought at a garden centre, with lots of extension cables snaking up between gaps so that the minions could plug their laptops in. Either everyone was an intern or nobody over thirty could stand to work there. I judged them to be typical London office jockeys, mostly white, mostly from affluent suburbs in the Midlands and the North. Lots of skinny jeans, checked shirts and noise reduction headphones. Their posher counterparts were all working in publishing, PR or advertising and subsidised by Mummy and Daddy. This lot would be sharing with four others in a three-bedroom house in Zone 4 or living in narrowboats on the canals.
Surprisingly, Dame Jocasta didn’t have a separate office, but instead she sat amongst her underlings at one of the tables near the windows that looked out onto Middlesex Street. In the flesh she looked nothing like the young woman in the Manchester photo – not just older, but more animated. Her face was in constant motion, expressions flickering almost too fast to read. Her eyes were bright and a proper cornflower blue. She was still too young to be a bohemian granny, but with her long greying hair pulled into a ponytail, multicoloured cardigan and a sheath of bracelets on both wrists, she was obviously heading in that direction.
When she looked up and spotted us, I saw surprise, puzzlement, and then what almost seemed like genuine pleasure. This is not a normal reaction to having a pair of plods turn up in your office and I was instantly suspicious.