I phoned Bev after the train left Stockport and was relieved that nobody seemed to be constructing anything in the background. Whatever the big diggy thing had been for, they weren’t using it just yet.
‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘How was the North?’
‘Friendly, open and honest.’ I said. ‘Also strangely whippet-free.’
‘You obviously went to the wrong bit,’ she said. ‘Are you going to have this case wrapped up soon?’ There was a dangerous edge in her voice – the kind to make anybody living on a flood plain nervous.
‘Hope so,’ I said quickly.
‘Only I don’t think the twins are going to hold up much longer,’ she said.
I promised that even if I didn’t wrap up the case, paternity cover was in place.
‘Poor Sahra,’ said Beverley. ‘You make sure you don’t drop her in it.’
We chatted for a bit, but then I heard Abigail calling in the background and Beverley had to hang up. Feeling I’d done my bit to keep flood insurance premiums in Beverley’s catchment area down, I put my phone away and got to work.
Even standard investigations can get complex, which is what the whiteboard is for. It’s all too easy to be lost in a welter of conflicting detail. There are thousands of pieces of information, some of which are firm facts, others are inferences from forensics reports or statements by unreliable witnesses, and some are total conjecture. Like your best guess at the theory of the crime. None of them come with reliable labels, or even a soundtrack where the music gives you a clue as to when you’ve discovered something significant.
This is why modern police have massive data mangles like HOLMES 2, whiteboards and digital displays in their offices and, occasionally, a nice clean pad of A4 and a pen.
I settled for my unofficial notebook and, blasphemously from a policing point of view, an HB pencil.
In 1989 Preston Carmichael found a nifty set of seven platinum puzzle rings inside a hollowed-out book at the Portico Library. Realising that what the library don’t know it had, it wouldn’t miss, he half-inched them and, possibly because even if he didn’t know what it was he could sense their enchantment, he decided to hand them out to the members of his charismatic Bible group. After all, there’d been seven rings and seven of them, so it must have seemed practically ordained by a higher power.
Something happened later that year and the Bible group split up and went their separate ways. Flash forward to the start of this month and Preston Carmichael is tortured and then killed and his ring taken. We’d assumed that murderer and thief were the same person, but now Lesley had shown her hand we knew it was her who stole the ring. Did she sneak in and grab it off his corpse, or had she nicked it prior to his introduction to magical heart surgery?
That was a crucial question.
David Moore and Preston Carmichael were still in touch enough for Moore to have Carmichael’s phone number. Had Carmichael been tortured to reveal Moore’s details, and had he given up other future victims’ names?
David Moore had given away his ring – obviously not so precious to him. At least not until he was suddenly desperate to get it back. Did he think it would protect him?
Dame Jocasta Hamilton had also been a member of the Manchester Bible study group and, unlike Moore, had kept her ring. This hadn’t prevented our fiery Angel of Death marching up the stairs to her office. What would have happened if she’d reached Dame Jocasta? Would the ring have protected her?
Which led me to the next question.
Who the fuck was the Angel of Death?
Something – or someone – had been trapped in a ‘containment device’ or lamp that had originally been stored at the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. I couldn’t keep calling her the Angel of Death, so I decided on Zelda. Because Angela would have been too obvious.
Zelda had been trapped in the lamp for at least eighty years, since the time it was transferred to the Sons of Wayland archives, probably longer. We would have to see if the synagogue knew when it had come into their possession.
When I’d checked up with Nightingale, he’d remembered Leon Davies. He’d been a near contemporary, a graduate of wizard school, a merchant banker in the 1930s. And had been reported missing in action, presumed killed, in 1943. He’d been performing a clandestine mission in French-occupied Morocco. Nightingale didn’t know the details.
He’d also been from a prominent Jewish family, which might explain the connection to Bevis Marks Synagogue. Nightingale had said Postmartin, who had contacts everywhere there might be even the possibility of interesting books, would be looking into that connection.
So … assume Zelda had been in the lamp for ages, sitting on a shelf in London. Then the lamp had been evacuated first to the Volcrepe factory in Glossop and then, after the war, to the Sons of Wayland’s secret bunker. Likewise, a bunch of enchanted platinum astrolabe puzzle rings were hidden in a book and erroneously stored at the Portico Library. I was assuming they, too, were destined for secure storage, but had gone astray.
Somebody American – I decided to call them the Collector – had hired Lesley to tax the lamp. Did Lesley find it on her own, or was she briefed by the Collector? Did the Collector want the rings as well, or was that a side hustle by our favourite former colleague?
Were they even linked? That was a dangerous assumption. Certainly all of the victims so far had possessed rings, but they’d also been part of Preston Carmichael’s Bible study group. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the rings – correlation does not equal causation, and all that.
But David Moore had thought the ring would protect him. Was desperate enough to get it back that he tried to rob the Silver Vaults with an Airsoft pistol.
And if the rings really could protect them from Zelda, could they be the key to making a capture and an arrest – if that was possible? Otherwise, what were the alternatives? Nobody had tried shooting her yet. I didn’t like the idea, but if we couldn’t stop her before she killed again, it might come to that.
We needed to know where Zelda had come from, and what she was doing in the lamp. We needed to know what had happened to the Bible study group in 1989. On the last bit we were in luck, because Guleed called me just after Milton Keynes to let me know that they’d located another individual in the picture – Alastair, the world-class groper.
Guleed picked me up at Euston in her dragon mobile, a second-hand BMW Series 2 convertible in fire engine red that she shared with her fiancé. As inconspicuous as a clown at a funeral, it didn’t often get used for police work, but Guleed said that all the pool cars were taken.
‘Jocasta Hamilton has left the country,’ she said as I climbed into the nice clean leather seat.
‘When?’
‘Late last night,’ said Guleed, pulling out onto the Euston Road with the confidence of a woman who has not only completed the Met’s celebrated advanced driving course but can also arrest any fucker that cuts her off at a corner. ‘She boarded a private jet at Biggin Hill and flew to the Canary Islands.’
‘Are we going to warn the Spanish police?’
‘And say what?’
Police forces don’t have the resources to babysit people against vague potential threats – especially on a resort island filled with tax exiles, celebrity golfers and other international criminals.
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘And we think we’ve traced Andrew Carpenter to the States,’ said Guleed.
‘Let’s hope Zelda hasn’t discovered air travel, then.’
‘Who’s Zelda?’ asked Guleed.
Alastair McKay lived in three million quids’ worth of ugly detached red-brick villa off a private road on the Moor Park Private Estate, just across the north-west boundary of London proper. It wasn’t gated or nothing, but a discreet green sign made it quite clear that this was, in case we hadn’t twigged yet, private land and CCTV was in operation.