While she did that, Lesley used the time to regain her feet and head down slope. She’d talked about having a bike close by, and looking at the map on my phone it looked like there were houses and cul-de-sacs. Plenty of places to stash a bike – had she meant a motorbike rather than a pushbike? No, a pushbike would be silent, with no number plate to get caught on CCTV. A pushbike which she rides downhill to the outskirts of Manchester, where she has a car ready to go.
Only something happens.
‘I got one last shot at her,’ said Caroline. ‘I could see movement at the bottom of the hill so I cast a radiradi at her. Given how far away she was, it didn’t have any effect.’
A radiradi was one of her mother’s spells, handed down to her from her mother.
‘A couple of formae that you lot at the Folly don’t use,’ said Caroline. ‘It creates a sort of thunderclap at a distant point. Sometimes lightning, too, depending on the weather conditions. You can change the inflectentes to vary the effect but I was aiming for maximum bang.’
And maximum bang is what she got. And a flash of light.
And everything goes white and then black – Lesley.
I looked at Seawoll and Danni, who were both thinking the same thing as me. Pushbike or motorbike, a loud bang might have drawn attention. Throw in an accurate time frame, and the fact that Lesley would have been desperate to escape vengeful cats, and we had a good chance of tracking her movement.
Better still, we had the location for where the Angel of the Lamp had escaped. Unless she spent her hours between hits hidden in hyperspace – a possibility I wasn’t going to think about – then we might be able to track her movements as well.
So we divided up the tasks. As senior magic wrangler, I would go into the archive with Grace and see what we could find from the crime scene. Danni would go into the woods with Caroline and see if she could trace the route of the chase and look for clues. Seawoll would return to the pool house, where there was a phone signal, and extract some co-operation from the GMP and Derbyshire Constabulary.
‘And what if the ladies wake up while you’re gone?’ he asked.
‘Tea and biscuits,’ said Caroline, over her shoulder as she headed out. ‘And be charming. Oh, and ask about their knitting.’
Grace beckoned me to the back of the forge, where a double-width roll-up metal door opened into an equally wide rectangular corridor. This only went back five or six metres before making a right-angle turn to the right. The original single-bulb light fittings had been ripped out and their cables rerouted to power a single line of fluorescent tubes. In accordance with the iron law of creepy ambience, every third or fourth tube was either out or flickering fitfully. The walls were bare concrete and the floor cement. I recognised the style – this was either Second World War or early Cold War British engineering at its most functional. The original Quatermass would have had a bunker like this. I’d have suspected a nuclear shelter except that, etched into the massive steel doors that were embedded every five metres in the left-hand wall, was the hammer and anvil sigil of the Sons of Wayland.
This was no hurriedly repurposed command centre. It had been purpose-built to house the archive. Beneath the sigil, each door had interlocking circles scored into the surface at waist height. These I associated with the wards and defences on the vault door back at the Folly, but when I let my fingers brush against the steel of the doors there wasn’t even a whisper of vestigia.
Built, but not finished then.
After a hundred metres we reached a spiral staircase constructed to exactly the same specification as the ones in the Tube. It even had the same railings and cross-hatched foot grips on the risers. Since an unfortunate incident where I was buried alive, I’ve developed a well-founded caution about cramped underground spaces, so I didn’t really want to go down. But down we went.
To stop at a landing and enter another long corridor identical to the one above. How much stuff did the Sons of Wayland stash away before the war – and why? Grace stopped at the third door and pointed at the lock – or rather, the hole in the metal where the lock should have been.
I put my hand up to get her attention and mimed touching the lock – she nodded.
The vestigia was the same muddled set of impressions as the lock on Althea Moore’s door back in London. Only now I knew who’d worked the spell, I could feel the tick-tock and razor strop of Lesley’s signare. Grace motioned me inside and I saw that I’d overestimated the amount of stuff you could store here. The room was a cement cell three metres deep and two wide. Instead of the floor-to-ceiling shelves I’d expected, there were free-standing cabinets separated from each other by half a metre. One had had its doors ripped off, allowing me to see that the doors and walls were at least three centimetres thick and made of dense hardwood.
I pulled on my nitrile gloves and squatted down for a good look. I do have a full exhibits kit in a go bag in the boot of the Asbo, but that was back at the Folly. Something told me that Caroline and Grace would not welcome a full forensics team tramping over their nice secret magic stash – not to mention asking difficult questions like ‘Are these your cat-women?’ The interior of the cabinet was a metre high and after I mimed measuring the height of a missing object, Grace indicated that it had been seventy centimetres tall.
The lamp had been larger than I thought. This explained why Lesley had had trouble legging it down the hill. I wondered why she hadn’t zapped one or more of the ‘ladies’. Lesley was a murderer – had shot a man in the head in cold blood, right in front of me. But hardened killers, outside of war zones, are rarer than people think. It probably would have been a last resort. Still, between Caroline flinging mystical smoke ropes to tangle and Lesley putting up shields and possibly returning fire, they had triggered the lamp.
Wood is terrible at retaining vestigia – which presumably was why these cabinets were made of it – so I wasn’t surprised to feel nothing inside. There was a shallow internal drawer at the top – with no metal fittings, I noticed – that looked suitable for storing documents.
I mimed opening it and Grace signed knocking twice with her right fist – ‘yes’ in BSL. I was glad to realise some of it was coming back.
Gingerly, and holding my head as far back as I could, because you never know, I opened the drawer and extracted yet another manila folder. Inside was another tissue-thin carbon copy of a typed letter – the faded letters read:
WARNING DANGEROUS. MAGICALLY ACTIVE. HANDLE WITH CAUTION
ITEM: One (1) Iberian patterned lamp 30” tall with opaque fluting of faience in the Egyptian manner. Active containment intaglio in gold and silver around base and brass top cap. Hebrew lettering, also in silver, on cap and on the bottom of the base. Believed to be a containment vessel for a Class A malignancy. Formerly stored at Bevis Marks Synagogue, London – requested for special storage by Sir Leon Davies FSW as part of war contingency plans.
I knew the term ‘malignancy’ from the reading I’ve done as part of my training. From the Latin malignus – ‘wicked, bad-natured’ – another catch-all term like ‘fae’ that could mean anything. Except I didn’t think ‘Class A’ indicated that it was top streamed at school.
‘We need to find out where this came from,’ I said, and then, remembering, pointed upwards.