‘She knew how to use the internet, then?’ I said.
‘It’s not like it’s hard, is it?’ said Heather. ‘She did love YouTube, though, spent hours watching travelogues and that kind of shit.’
We’d be able to check exactly what she’d watched once our Digital Forensics Technician had finished sucking the guts out of Heather’s laptop. I was thinking that, if I was right, then in 1989 Preston Carmichael and his merry band of God-botherers were experimenting with forces they didn’t understand. Francisca had been stuck in a magic lamp in a box under a hill just outside Glossop. How would she know what Preston Carmichael or any of the others looked like?
I asked Heather that very question but I left out the lamp stuff.
‘She saw them in a holy vision,’ said Heather. ‘She said that they stood before her, and the angel Camael whispered in her ear that they were the new blasphemers and descendants of the original Marranos.’
I made a note of the angel’s name and asked whether this revelation happened while Francisca was on the boat, but Heather said no.
‘Francisca said it happened when she was reborn into the new world,’ she said.
Was this the Manchester group’s 1989 experiment with the rings and ritual magic? If no proper time passed within the pocket dimension of the lamp, assuming that’s what it was, then that implied two things. One: that the rings were magically connected to the lamp and/or Francisca, and two: that ritual had marked the Manchester group as legitimate targets for Francisca’s murderous rage.
Which begged the question – who were her original targets and what had they done to deserve having Francisca set on them? Nightingale is fond of saying that there is nothing you can do with magic that isn’t cheaper and quicker to do by mundane means. Fireballs are fun, but it takes months of training to gain basic proficiency, while you can train an ordinary person to fire a handgun accurately in less than a week. The Germans had made a concerted effort to militarise their magical base, probably the most advanced in Europe at the time, but had ended up being ground into dog food by the conventional Red Army and its allies in Europe.
The magical forces on all sides had cancelled themselves out and the outcome was decided by strategy and logistics, courage, bullets, pain and blood.
And DNA evidence will catch more killers than my ability to sense vestigia ever will.
Nevertheless, magic was very much at work here. We didn’t have the details yet, but transforming what appeared to have been an ordinary woman into an ersatz angel of death must have cost enormous magical resources. Just who had the resources to do such a thing? And why had they thought it necessary?
‘Did Francisca ever say who gave her this mission?’ I asked.
‘The Holy Father himself,’ said Heather.
‘The Pope authorised the hit?’
‘I don’t know if it was the Pope directly,’ said Heather. ‘But it was definitely a Monsignor somebody something Prado – I think. She said he did it in the name of the Pope.’
I circled back to clarify as many details as I could, but Heather was getting tired and sleep deprivation only works as a tactic if you don’t care whether the suspect is telling the truth or just what they think you want to hear.
Francisca had often gone off by herself.
‘She wasn’t a child!’
Once they were in London, Heather had shown her how to use an Oyster Card and after that there was no stopping her.
I asked Heather where Francisca had visited but Heather didn’t know for sure, although Francisca would occasionally bring her back presents. Sweets and chocolate mostly, although one time it was a bunch of yellow roses that she suspected Francisca had plucked from someone’s garden or a park.
‘The stems were all different lengths,’ she said.
On one of these trips, Francisca was probably torturing poor Preston Carmichael to death – probably to get intelligence on the rest of the Manchester group. Efficient torture for information is not something you pick up from TV – not even HBO – so I wondered who had taught her that.
‘I think I can hazard a guess,’ said Postmartin, when we convened upstairs in the atrium for tea. Molly had placed a tiered silver cake stand in the middle of a coffee table and surrounded it with plates of daintily cut mustard and cress, cheese and pickle, salmon paste and …
‘Cucumber sandwiches,’ said Nightingale. ‘Molly must be feeling traditional today.’
Toby, who had obviously learnt a trick or two from Molly, appeared as if by magic beside my chair and gave me a much-practised look of pitiable hunger. Across from me, Seawoll delicately plucked a cucumber sandwich and popped it into his mouth.
‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ I said.
Postmartin flourished his tablet at us and pulled up an enhanced picture of the scratches on David Moore’s door. He cleared a space on the coffee table and laid it down. He reached down and retrieved a thick book bound in scuffed leather from a side table, opened it up to a bookmarked illustration plate, and laid it down beside the tablet. The picture in the book was a line illustration of a sigil – an upright oval containing a branch with leaves, a very knobbly cross in the centre and, on its right, a sword blade pointing upwards. Around the oval border were the words Exurge domine et judica causum tuam – Psalm 73.
Side by side, it was obvious that the scratches on the door were a crude reproduction of the sigil. You could even see where the scratcher had tried to do the oval, but given up halfway through when they couldn’t get the curve right.
‘Exurge domine et judica causum tuam,’ said Nightingale. ‘“Arise, O God, judge thy own cause.”’
‘Psalm 73,’ said Postmartin. ‘The motto of the Spanish Inquisition.’
‘Well, fuck me,’ said Seawoll. ‘I wasn’t expecting them.’
‘There’s long been speculation,’ said Postmartin, ‘that there was a magical component to the Inquisition – particularly in Spain and Portugal. We know for a fact that there was a strong Islamic and Jewish magical tradition in Andalusia and Granada, even if we don’t understand its underlying principles.’
The Newtonian synthesis – as Postmartin liked to call it – codified the ‘forms and wisdoms’ that underpinned European wizardry. But knowing how to do something doesn’t mean you know why it works.
‘Nor does it preclude,’ Nightingale had said during my early training, ‘the possibility that some other techniques might work – possibly just as well.’
Isaac Newton himself, like many of his contemporaries, had been interested in the Jewish esoteric practice known as Kabbalah. For all we knew, he might have drawn inspiration – or even whole techniques – from Jewish and Muslim practitioners. It’s not like our boy Isaac was famous for sharing credit.
‘Some of those practitioners must have converted,’ I said.
Must have become ‘New Christians’, and thus fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition whose purpose was to root out backsliding converts.
‘They might have used their skills to mess with the Inquisition when it came after them,’ I said.
‘Hence the lamp,’ said Postmartin. ‘And it might well have been that the rings were part of the process of entrapping the angel that was sent after them.’
‘But the rings are made of platinum,’ I said. ‘That’s a modern metal – like aluminium.’
‘Aha,’ said Postmartin, who’d obviously waiting for his cue. ‘There was platinum available in the Renaissance – it was found in the New World and brought back to Spain. They called it platina, the diminutive of plata – which is Spanish for silver. There was certainly enough circulating by the sixteenth century for a suitably motivated craftsman to fashion seven rings.’