She brought him in round the back way, where the metal gates, Portakabin and concrete prisoner access ramp gave the illusion of being a bog-standard police station. At least how they appear in gritty TV dramas. We didn’t want him getting comfortable.
Me and Seawoll sat in the cramped remote-monitoring room next door, and watched as Guleed got Alastair settled and gave him the ‘caution plus three’. This is your standard caution followed by the assurance that you aren’t under arrest, you are entitled to legal advice and we totally won’t make anything of it if you try to leave. Thanks to TV, nobody ever believes the last bit – which is all to the good.
Danni walked in with a manila folder and sat down to the right of Guleed, who introduced her.
‘Straight to the chest,’ said Seawoll as Alastair dragged his gaze up to Danni’s face with a visible act of will.
Guleed explained that they needed Alastair to see if he could recognise a number of people, and Danni opened the folder and started extracting photographs. Actually they were hard copies run off on my crap inkjet printer, but they would do.
This was where having a modern twenty-first-century interview room without a table, the better to monitor the suspect’s body language, had its main disadvantage. Danni had to clumsily hold up each picture in turn, using the folder as backing.
‘We need to get a folding table,’ I said.
‘That’s what you get for fucking with tradition,’ said Seawoll. ‘And as for the folding table, you’d need to have it bolted down otherwise the next evil scrote will pick it up and twat you with it.’
The first set of pictures were blow-ups of the people from the 1989 Manchester group photograph, interspersed with pictures of the same individuals sourced from family and friends. True to form, Alastair remembered the women’s full names but only had the first names for the men.
He confirmed that a Brian ‘maybe his surname was Packard but I don’t really remember’ had taken the photograph.
Then we brought out contemporary pictures of the Manchester Bible study group. We had images of all of them, either cadged from relatives or taken off the internet, except for Jacqueline Spencer-Talbot, aka Jackie, who we still hadn’t found.
‘Look at Jocasta,’ said Alastair when he saw her in a still from a magazine article about third way entrepreneurs. ‘How many companies has she started? It used to be a struggle to get her to make the tea. Just goes to show you really can’t judge how someone’s going to turn out when they’re young.’
He recognised the 2009 picture of Brian Packard that we’d taken off Facebook – it was the latest picture we could find. Brian at a colleague’s leaving do in Los Angeles. Originally a group shot, he’d had his arm around the shoulders of a plump elderly white woman with curly brown hair. Next stop Florida was the caption. Both the retiree, his other colleagues and Brian were tagged by name on the Facebook page.
All of their names had now been duly entered into what me and Reynolds were, this year, calling the Unreality Files. A database of people that had come to our attention, tagged only by nationality, by which of us had entered them, and by a code word representing the reason they were in there. No personal details or case references were attached to the names, to avoid violating data privacy laws on both sides of the Atlantic. The photograph and the names of the people in it were all tagged as BANANAs, meaning they were associated with something or somebody ‘hinky’ and/or ‘sus’.
The picture we showed Alastair wasn’t marked with a name.
‘That’s him,’ he said when he saw it. ‘That’s the guy from Davos who was with the blonde. Only he was different.’
When we asked in what way, Alastair got the slightly glazed and defensive look that I’ve come to associate with people who have been subject to the glamour. Once it’s worn off, the victim can remember what happened but they don’t understand why they acted the way they did. This can lead to cognitive dissonance and denial – although if you listen to my therapist, so does walking down the street.
So Brian Packard was, probably, the mysterious Collector that Lesley was collecting the rings and the lamp for. Which meant he’d known about the rings and the Manchester Bible study group from the start. Had he learnt of the lamp after he started collecting the rings? It would be a hell of a coincidence otherwise.
‘That’s not bloody likely now, is it?’ said Seawoll when I discussed it with him.
I didn’t wait, but fired off an email to Special Agent Reynolds straight away. Even if she didn’t have enough to initiate an investigation of her own, she definitely needed to know about Brian Packard. It was possible he’d wanted the lamp for his mantelpiece, but I didn’t think that was the way to bet.
These days Big Brother, or more precisely, your Bratty Techno Uncle, doesn’t need an army of paid informers to keep tabs on you. Everybody seems dead keen to take personal responsibility for their own surveillance. So the problem with trying to keep a low profile is that sooner or later you’ll have an involuntary encounter with someone who’s dying to share your details with the world.
Not that Jacqueline Spencer-Talbot, aka Jackie, was trying to hide exactly, but she hadn’t been making an effort to blow her own trumpet either. What she had been doing was running a very successful homeless charity in Southwark. She was accredited with helping loads of people break various cycles of addiction, debt, mental illness and deprivation and get off the streets. And some of her clients were so grateful that they recorded their selfies with her on social media and dutifully tagged her by name.
So finding her was only a matter of time. The real question was what we should do once we found her. She was the obvious next target. But there was always the risk that Lesley was using us to find the rings and that Francisca was using her to find her targets.
Or perhaps she had already tortured Ms Spencer-Talbot’s location out of Preston Carmichael. In which case, any delay could get her killed.
In the end we took the risk – policing is all about being on the spot, being visible and being in a position to do something about it. Even when you’re not sure what ‘it’ is. So once we’d persuaded Alastair McKay to stay in the Folly, me and Guleed headed for Southwark in the Asbo. Five minutes behind us were Nightingale and Danni in the Jag. Stephanopoulos headed out from Belgravia with a couple of Sprinters’ worth of TSG in tow, while Seawoll stayed decanted in the Portakabin in the coach yard to provide a god-like overview.
Guleed was driving, fast, with the Asbo’s light strips flashing but the siren off.
‘I don’t agree,’ she said, when I said Lesley wasn’t going to be stupid enough to try and acquire the ring while we were on scene. ‘You overestimate Lesley, Peter – you always have done. You underestimate the freedom of movement being police gives us.’
And she proceeded to prove her point by whooping her siren and running a red light at the junction of Charterhouse Street and Farringdon Street. I offered a few conciliatory words to the Goddess of the River Fleet as we surged under the Holborn Viaduct – not a prayer exactly, but it pays to be respectful.
‘So you planning to do some mock exam papers?’ asked Guleed.
‘Before I try any mocks I thought I’d get into General Police Duties and Roads Policing,’ I said.
Guleed expressed her doubts about whether I would have any time to study with two newborns and Beverley prepping for her finals. All the while weaving in and out of traffic on Blackfriars Bridge, where the strange blue bulging shape of the skyscraper known as the Pregnant Nun marked the way into Southwark.