‘No,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘Not serious serious. He was making a point with a kind of knowing wink behind it. But he was serious about his faith and the power that faith brings.’
‘So did you get any superpowers?’ I asked.
Dame Jocasta hesitated, glanced out of the window and then back at me.
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But it did renew my faith in God and my Church.’
There hadn’t been any mention of religion in our background report – all her charitable foundations and organisational affiliations had been defiantly secular. If she went to church, it didn’t appear in any of her PR.
‘So you’re still a practising Catholic?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t need to practise any more,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘I’ve got that good at it.’
‘So how long were you with the group?’ asked Guleed.
‘Not that long,’ said Dame Jocasta. ‘Until Easter the next year – 1989 that would have been, I think.’
‘Why did you leave?’
Again the hesitation – this time Dame Jocasta frowned down at the rough blue wood of her trestle table desk and idly rubbed the surface with her fingertips.
‘I suppose I drifted away,’ she said without looking up. ‘Besides, I felt it was time to concentrate on my studies.’
‘So there wasn’t a particular incident that decided you?’ asked Guleed.
‘Like what?’ asked Dame Jocasta, sharper than I think she meant to.
‘We’re trying to establish whether you’re at risk,’ said Guleed.
‘Am I at risk?’ asked Dame Jocasta.
‘We think you might be,’ said Guleed.
‘Should I be worried about my safety?’ asked Dame Jocasta.
I thought of the angel and its spear of burning gold.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You never went to university, did you?’ said Guleed as we walked down the long stairway to the entrance. Nightingale was waiting at the bottom. She didn’t wait for me to answer.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘it’s like school – you make friends there that you keep for ages and even if you never see them again you remember their names.’
‘Maybe she’s crap at names,’ I said.
‘And that was not the only thing she was keeping back,’ she said.
‘Something definitely happened at her not-really-a-cult,’ I said.
‘We need to TIE the rest of them,’ said Guleed.
As we reached the tiny hall at the bottom, Nightingale held up his hand to halt us.
‘Just a moment,’ he said, and then, louder to someone on the other side of the closed door, ‘Have you finished, Allison?’
‘All done,’ said a muffled voice on the other side.
‘Splendid,’ said Nightingale and, opening the door with a flourish, said, ‘Observe.’
Scratched into the paint on the outside of the door was a series of horizontal, diagonal and vertical lines. Despite being obviously fresh, I could still see curls of paint on some of the edges. They were faint enough that me and Guleed had walked right past them. In our defence, we’d been more worried about securing Dame Jocasta.
It was the same design we’d found on David Moore’s front door and it hadn’t been there when we’d first arrived – that much was certain.
7 Intelligence
Sometimes we police believe a member of the public might be at risk of serious death and/or injury but we’re not in a position to arrest the person or persons we believe to be a threat. This might be due to lack of evidence, the intended victim being unwilling to give a statement or, as in the case of Dame Jocasta Hamilton, having no fucking idea who might be trying to kill her.
Beyond the possibility that they were the Angel of Death. Or at least an angel of death.
In these cases the police are obliged to issue a ‘threat to life’ warning, otherwise known as an Osman letter, named after a famous case which established that members of the public had a right to know when someone was out to kill them. The counterpart of an Osman letter is a ‘Disruption Letter’, which is what gets sent to whoever we suspect is thinking of murdering someone in the hope of making them think twice.
‘Bugger,’ said Seawoll, when me and Guleed returned to Belgravia to brief him and Stephanopoulos. ‘Who the fuck are we supposed to say is after her?’
He held up a hand to stop me from speaking.
‘And you better not be just about to say an angel of bloody death,’ he said.
‘I was going to say person or persons unknown,’ I said.
‘Liar,’ said Stephanopoulos.
‘What’s Dame Jocasta’s level of security now?’ asked Seawoll.
‘Nightingale has stayed on site,’ said Guleed, which pleased Seawoll.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘If anyone can twat an angel it’s going to be him.’
‘What do we do if she asks for protection?’ asked Stephanopoulos.
It was a good question. Contrary to what people think, the Metropolitan Police are not in the habit of stashing potential victims in safe houses. For one thing, we don’t have any safe houses, and for another, we don’t have the manpower to protect everyone who’s vulnerable. But if you want an entertaining hour of shouting, get Stephanopoulos started on the subject of the underfunding of women’s refuges.
‘It would have to be at the Folly,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Problem solved.’
Me and my mouth, I thought, and headed back to the Folly to tell Molly to prepare a guest room just in case.
I’d parked up the Asbo in the coach house and was crossing the atrium when Professor Harold Postmartin, MA, DPhil (Oxon), FRS, AFSW came bounding in from the front lobby. He stopped when he saw me and caught his breath.
‘An angel?’ he said. ‘Really?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But that’s what she looked like.’
He threw himself down on one of the green leather sofas and waved at me to join him. He was a tall thin man in, I guessed, his seventies, with a stereotypical shock of white hair and a vast collection of tweed jackets, all with suede patches on the elbows. When I first met him he’d seemed physically older, slower – but recently he’d seemed full of energy.
Being the suspicious type, I’d asked him whether he’d been consorting with fairies or collecting mystic portraits in his attic, but he insisted it was Molly’s cooking.
‘Nothing motivates a man like a proper suet pudding and custard,’ he’d said.
Toby ran up to Postmartin and barked twice, turned to give me a reproachful look and scampered off in the direction of the kitchen stairs. Postmartin gave me a less reproachful look. I shrugged. Now that I lived full-time with Bev, I’d lost track of the intricate weirdness of life in the Folly.
Postmartin wanted details on my encounter.
‘It’s hardly likely to be an actual biblical angel,’ he said when I’d finished.
‘Why not?’
‘In a world chock-full of murderous blaspheming bastards,’ he said, ‘why would an omnipotent and omniscient deity pick a couple of obscure Brits to do away with in such a public manner.’
‘Maybe they did something particularly bad?’
‘Have you looked at the news recently?’ said Postmartin. ‘It would have to have been something truly magnificent to get that manner of personal attention.’
‘So you’re ruling out religion?’ I said, and then started as Molly materialised beside my seat and placed a tea tray on the coffee table in front of me.
‘Ah, lovely,’ said Postmartin. ‘Thank you, Molly.’ He leant over to pour the tea. ‘I’ve been wrestling Hatbox for rare books and that always gives me an appetite.’
Elsie ‘Hatbox’ Winstanley was a senior librarian at the British Library, and frequently feuded with Postmartin over his attempts to acquire rare books for the Folly archive in Oxford.