‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the trip down on the canal – it must have been hard in winter.’
‘It can get very cold,’ said Heather. ‘But if you’re moving every day you’re working locks, stopping at pubs, meeting new people – keeps you warm.’
There was a rhythm to it — wake up, stoke up the stove. Heather would check the boat and look at the map – if they had a decent signal she’d log on to the boating sites. Plan the day’s move. Have breakfast while they were under way. Take it in turns to steer while the other warmed up in the cabin. Spend the evenings in a pub, or in the boat snuggled up in the bed together.
‘So what was your relationship?’ I asked – casually.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Friends, girlfriends, lovers?’ I said
Heather actually blushed and, although she tried to hide it, smiled a shy smile.
‘I swear neither of us were lezzies,’ she said. ‘Only she used to cry at night if she were in her own bunk and … one thing led to another. I’d never done it with a girl before, but obviously, you know it’s not hard to work out, she didn’t have a clue.’ Heather was staring at her lap. ‘Sexually speaking. She’d been treated like shit when she was young – I’m pretty certain of that.’
Tears had started to fall from Heather’s eyes. She made no attempt to wipe them away, they just fell into her lap.
‘I reckon she was an angel,’ she said. ‘A broken angel.’
Ms Hoopercast asked for a break at that point and I suspended the interview.
A broken angel.
‘But a real person,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘Indoctrinated or compelled – it’s hard to tell.’
We were sitting in the small but pristine medical examination room that sits next to the cells. Neither of us thought it wise to get too far from Heather, just in case her angelic friend Francisca came looking for her.
‘Could you compel someone to kill another human being?’ I asked.
Nightingale was silent for a long moment, and then he looked away from me.
‘During the war,’ he said. ‘I’ve ordered men to shoot strangers and I was the moving force behind an air raid in Norway. I didn’t give the order directly, but it was at my instigation.’
‘I meant with magic,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said Nightingale. ‘That. Possibly – I’ve never tried it. Certainly not in a way that would last for weeks and months, let alone span the centuries.’
I suspected that time had been suspended for Francisca while she’d been in the lamp, otherwise she’d be even weirder than she was.
‘Could any of your contemporaries make someone kill?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Interfering directly with a man’s free will was not encouraged at the Folly. David Mellenby, whose notebooks you have, was of the opinion that the main purpose of the Society of the Wise was to distract its members from such things. “Drowning our Mussolinis in brandy and cigar smoke”, he called it.’
According to those notebooks, the body’s own defences were constantly renewed so that even spells like Vox Imperante – that parade-ground bark that could make a room full of people sit down on the floor or drop their weapons – only work about fifty per cent of the time.
‘What about an old-fashioned ritual spell, pre-Newtonian?’ I said.
Ritual spells used non-practitioners to amplify their effect. These types of spells had been considered by the old buffers of the Folly as either déclassé, dangerously foreign, or like, totally Dark Ages, man.
‘David did believe that if you could marshal enough participants and focus them sufficiently, you might overwhelm a man’s innate defences,’ said Nightingale.
‘Did anyone try?’ I asked.
‘Lord, no,’ said Nightingale. ‘David was careful never to reveal that particular theory, especially during the early part of the war – when things were desperate. He only told me because he had to tell someone.’
‘I haven’t seen it in his notebooks,’ I said.
‘You won’t,’ said Nightingale. ‘I believe he destroyed those notes before he died.’
Only David Mellenby hadn’t just died. He’d committed suicide in the face of the horrors they’d discovered during the raid on Ettersberg. He’d done it while Nightingale was recovering from his war wounds – I don’t think it helped his recovery at all.
‘Assume for the moment that our angel Francisca dates back to the Middle Ages or something – probably Spain,’ I said. ‘She’s then sort of enchanted and turned into a super-assassin and further indoctrinated to kill a number of people. But this is hundreds of years ago, so whoever her original targets were, they’re long gone. So what’s the criteria for her current target selection?’
‘Could they be the descendants of the original targets?’ asked Nightingale.
‘You might have to ask Dr Walid for details,’ I said, ‘but I’m pretty sure that after twenty generations, hundreds of thousands of people would be the biological descendants of anyone from back then. And even if it’s some weird mystical direct line thing, it would be a bit of a coincidence that they all ended up in the same Bible study group in Manchester.’
‘Unless it was divinely ordained,’ said Nightingale.
‘Do you believe that?’
‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘But we have to consider all the options – even divine providence.’
‘Or it could be something more obvious,’ I said.
‘You think it might be the rings?’ said Nightingale.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know why. They’re enchanted and so was the lamp. They were supposed to be stored with the Sons of Wayland, as the lamp was. The only trouble is platinum is a modern metal – it’s mostly mined in South Africa and they didn’t open up those mines until the 1900s.’
‘I believe Harold may have made some headway on that mystery,’ said Nightingale. ‘He was sounding quite pleased with himself on the phone earlier.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘You know Harold,’ said Nightingale. ‘He likes to make a performance of these things. In the meantime, it’s always possible that Francisca shared her motivations with her lover.’
It took another hour to get Heather to admit that Francisca had talked to her about her mission.
‘What mission was that?’ I asked.
But Heather had clammed up again, and we circled around the question of whether she’d known that her girlfriend had been off murdering people.
‘They had it coming,’ she said suddenly, when I described David Moore’s death in the Silver Vaults. ‘They’, I noticed – not ‘he’.
‘What had they done?’
‘We should never have come south,’ she said, and she crossed her arms. ‘We was all right until we came south.’
‘Why did you come south?’ I asked.
Heather mumbled something like ‘She wanted to.’
‘Who wanted to?’
‘Francisca wanted to,’ said Heather.
I caught Ms Hoopercast’s eye. Her job is to act in the best interest of her client, and shifting the guilt on to an associate is a classic. Ms Hoopercast didn’t do anything as crass as suggest Heather incriminate her lover, but I knew the next time her client looked to her for guidance she’d get a nod, not a head-shake.
Sure enough, when I asked whether Heather knew why Francisca had wanted to come to London, Ms Hoopercast didn’t object when Heather said it was to find the blasphemers.
‘That’s what she called them,’ said Heather. ‘She called them Marranos as well – whatever that means. Definitely not a good word, though. I think she thought they were dead, but she saw one of them on YouTube.’
I remembered Preston Carmichael’s relentless self-promotion on YouTube, but he wasn’t that big an influencer. I wondered whether it was chance or the malign workings of the YouTube algorithm. Because you liked happy cat videos, you might also like to smite this man with furious vengeance.