Guleed introduced us and a couple of minions were booted off their hot desks so we could be offered seats – and coffee. We declined the coffee because Guleed is getting increasingly finicky about her coffee ever since she was promoted. And generally you don’t accept a beverage without an ulterior motive. Like having a chance to poke around in someone’s kitchen.
‘Is this bad news?’ asked Dame Jocasta. She spoke with a low, throaty contralto. A natural voice for the blues, my dad would have said.
‘We believe you’re acquainted with a man called Preston Carmichael,’ said Guleed.
We’d agreed to hold back David Moore’s name to see if she volunteered it herself.
‘Was acquainted,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘Quite a long time ago.’
There’d been no hesitation, so not a very casual acquaintance. Her hands were in constant motion, making it hard to see whether she was wearing a platinum ring amongst the five or six bands that adorned both hands. I thought I saw a flash of silver but I couldn’t tell if it was a puzzle ring.
‘Wait,’ she said, her eyes flicking from Guleed to me and then back. ‘Has something happened to Preston?’
‘I’m afraid Mr Carmichael died last week,’ said Guleed.
‘How did he die?’ asked Dame Jocasta.
‘We’re treating it as a suspicious death,’ said Guleed.
‘That’s not exactly an answer.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Guleed. ‘That’s all I can reveal at the moment.’
Dame Jocasta would have insisted further, but this was my cue to ask a question and break her chain of thought.
‘When did you know him?’ I asked.
‘What?’ Dame Jocasta blinked at me.
‘You said “quite a long time ago”,’ I said. ‘How long exactly?’
‘Oh.’ She paused to count it up in her head. ‘At least twenty-five years ago, when I was at uni.’
We already knew that Dame Jocasta had attended Manchester University at roughly the same time as David Moore – that was one of the reasons we’d pushed up this interview. ‘Just in case something effing horrible happens,’ Seawoll had said.
Guleed asked where Dame Jocasta had gone to university, in order to keep the rhythm going, and then I asked what kind of an acquaintance Preston Carmichael had been.
‘That’s a good question,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘I suppose you might call him my spiritual advisor. That was before I learnt that it was better to forge your own relationship with the cosmos rather than rely on other people.’
‘What was the nature of the spiritual advice?’ asked Guleed.
‘Oh,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘We did everything he told us to. It was a cult, darling.’
6 Spear
‘Or can you call something a cult when it’s a recognised part of the Catholic Church?’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘Actually, I’m not sure it was that well recognised – certainly I don’t ever remember anyone particularly churchy turning up. Not a dog collar in sight. I was nominally raised a Catholic, so the absence of official priests might have been part of the appeal.’
According to my therapist, attaching conditionals to your past is a classic distancing technique indicating an unwillingness to face your memories directly. Or, I pointed out, it could be a rhetorical device designed to add a humorous note to enliven a story. To which she said, ‘Or both.’ You can’t win with therapists, you know. And even if you do, they just tell you it’s part of the process.
Guleed showed Dame Jocasta a copy of the group photograph.
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she said, taking the picture from Guleed and holding it close to her face.
‘Just to clarify,’ said Guleed. ‘The woman on the left is you?’
‘Don’t I look young?’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘And the hair …’
‘Where was this taken?’ asked Guleed.
‘In Manchester,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘In Fallowfield. At a church hall near my digs – about 1989, judging by my clothes. I can’t believe I was such a frump.’
‘Were these your fellow cult members?’ I asked.
‘I suppose so,’ said Dame Jocasta.
‘Can you remember their names?’ asked Guleed.
‘Let me see,’ said Dame Jocasta, and she pointed at the only other woman. The same age as young Jocasta, but tall and thin with blonde hair cut into a Lady Di style. ‘That’s Jackie, who was so stuck-up you’d think she was related to the queen.’
She stabbed her finger at a young man with dark curly hair, thick eyebrows and a strong jaw. He was dressed in a denim jacket and loose jeans and leering at the camera as if daring it to make something of it.
‘That’s Alastair, the randiest man on earth. The girls used to call him the octopus.’ Dame Jocasta paused and, looking up from the picture, laughed. ‘If he’d been at university now, you lot would have had to arrest him. Terrible groper, although I heard he did reform.’
Since Guleed was a skipper and I was but a lowly constable, I was the one scribbling this down in my notebook. I’d just written Alastair – groper when I had a sudden cold sensation as if someone had opened a window. It was strong enough that I looked over at the windows, but they were all still closed.
I glanced over at Guleed, who gave me a slight head tilt to show she’d felt it, too. She flicked her eyes over at the entrance and I stowed my notepad and went to have a look.
‘So who’s this here?’ said Guleed behind me.
Another garden table facing the entrance served as a reception desk. As I passed it I caught flashes of hot sunlight, lemon-scented dust and what sounded like a choir singing something medieval and off-key in the next room.
The nervous young white man with floppy hair who served as receptionist gave me a worried look as if he sensed something, too. When the phone on his desk rang it took him a moment to remember it was his job to answer it.
All my mobiles and Airwave handsets are rigged to have a hard on/off switch. It’s a pain to get them retrofitted, but if there’s no power running through them, the chipsets don’t get damaged by nearby magic. I took a moment to thumb off my mobile before cautiously making my way to the entrance and out on to the landing. But I left my Airwave on, just in case and because it came out of the Folly’s budget, not mine.
Whoever had converted the warehouse into offices and flats had obviously done it back in the carefree sixties, when lifts were for wimps and people with disabilities hadn’t been invented. This explained the long steep staircase, minus handrails, stretching straight down to the double doors at the front. Halfway up, climbing the stairs towards me, was a small white woman in a grey zip-up hoody.
‘Lesley!’ I shouted, because she was about the right size and shape and you never know.
The woman looked up and her eyes literally flashed – a white light in both sockets like a pair of camera flashes. Bright enough to make me flinch but leaving, I noticed, no after-image. A magical effect, not a real one. The light faded to reveal brown, widely spaced eyes in a smooth tanned face with a straight nose and an oxbow mouth.
Lesley can change her face but this woman’s response was all wrong. She’d hesitated, and after the flashes the eyes looked puzzled – no hint of recognition at all. Not Lesley but, potentially, the person who had scooped the hearts out of two men’s chests.
‘Sahra!’ I shouted. ‘Code Zulu, IC1 female on the stairs. Bring in Falcon One. Call in Zulu One.’
Or translated, major Falcon threat on the stairs, looks like a white woman, get Nightingale quick. Since there was a good chance Dame Jocasta was the next target, Guleed would have to stay with her. So that just left me on the landing and little Ms Code Zulu on the stairs.