On the other side of the wall was a 1950s council estate, six or so storeys, brick-built and solid in a way later estates aren’t. A concrete access road ran left and right but there was no sign of Lesley.
I sighed and hauled myself over the wall and through the hole in the fence. At my feet, I found a pile of rags. I squatted down and had a look – they were the remains of Lesley’s disguise. By now she would have grabbed a jacket from somewhere, changed her face and would be Jason Bourne-ing it off into the sunset.
If she knew what was good for her.
I heard running feet and looked left.
Nightingale was loping up the access road towards me. He slowed to a walk when he saw I wasn’t chasing anyone any more.
‘Do you think she went to ground in the flats?’ he asked when he reached me.
I said it was possible but not likely.
‘She knows how we work,’ I said. ‘She’s counting on the fact that we’re going to have to go door to door just to be on the safe side.’
‘How many dwellings do you think that is?’ he said.
There were two main blocks, plus a three-storey block that ran along the back.
‘Over two hundred,’ I said, and pointed out the other, bigger tower block over the road to the right and the even bigger high-rise to the left.
‘I’m not sure that would be a good use of our time,’ said Nightingale.
He was thinking that safely tackling Lesley would be a job for both of us, and even if we used Danni, Guleed and the TSG as beaters – Nightingale’s analogy, not mine – chances are she could still evade us.
‘And then, while we’re otherwise occupied,’ said Nightingale, ‘she could be about her business.’
Which was, for some reason, collecting rings.
‘She took a bit of a chance trying to grab it with us there,’ I said. ‘Not to mention Our Lady of the Radical Heart Transplant. She must want those rings quite badly.’
Nightingale’s eyes had never stopped scanning the blocks in front of us.
‘It appears so,’ he said. ‘Although she did act to save your life. Twice, in fact.’
‘I did sort of notice that,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t count on her saving it a third time,’ he said.
‘Interesting, though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘First she warns us about the angel and then she saves my life. She could have gone after the last ring, but she shielded me instead.’
‘Do have any idea why?’ asked Nightingale.
‘We were friends,’ I said. ‘Mates are like family sometimes. You don’t always behave in your own best interest.’
‘True,’ said Nightingale. ‘Combat is disorientating – soldiers often act on instinct rather than rational consideration. I’d rather you avoided such situations in the future.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘That’s what worries me.’
Somebody was frying something in a nearby flat and my stomach rumbled. I was about to suggest that we went in search of a working phone when Danni and Guleed drove up in a commandeered response car.
Given that both Francisca and Lesley had escaped, they seemed in a good mood. Danni was practically bouncing up and down on her heels and Guleed had that particular shade of non-expression that I’d learnt to interpret as unbearable smugness.
‘What?’ I asked when they walked over and Danni grinned.
‘Guess what we snatched off Lesley?’ she said.
And she held up a yellow and black narrow-gauge bungee cord tied into a loop and strung with silver rings. Platinum rings, to be more precise, and there were five of them.
18 Command and Control
On the basis that we were already there, and that the place had already been trashed, we set up camp at the shelter. Although the indoor garden and kitchen were a mess, a surprising amount of the canteen area and the offices that led off it had survived intact. The fire brigade had given the remains of the kitchen and the structure the once-over and declared it safe, though they did turn off the mains gas just to be on the safe side.
Since the TSG often find themselves parked on standby for hours and hours, they can always be counted on to either have snacks or to know where the nearest refs can be found. Danni had gone off to ‘liaise’ with them while Guleed and Nightingale headed back to the Folly with Jacqueline Spencer-Talbot.
I sat at a table in a corner with a good view of both entrances. The rings were tucked into one of the pouches of my uniform MetVest.
‘You’re supposed to put that on before you get in a fight,’ Danni had said as she headed out.
I wrote up my notes while waiting for coffee.
We’d tentatively formed a theory that Francisca only struck when both her intended victim and one or more rings were in the same locale. On the additional assumption that only Lesley was interested in the rings for themselves, I was keeping them in the hope she’d come back for a second try while Nightingale stashed Spencer-Talbot and Alastair McKay in the basement with Molly and Foxglove.
I thought of the alleged magical defences around the Folly – perhaps we’d get a chance to see how well they worked.
I was still waiting for coffee when I looked up to find Professor Postmartin picking his way through the debris to reach me. He was wearing what I think of as his action academic suit – thick tweed with leather reinforcements at the elbow. The patches went with the battered green leather briefcase he’d brought with him.
‘My, my, my,’ he said. ‘What a mess.’
‘It’s a circus,’ I said.
‘I do love the classics,’ he said. ‘Although somehow I missed out on the original TV series.’
He looked around what was left of the indoor garden and joined me at my corner table.
‘This must have been very nice – before,’ he said, not specifying before what. ‘I came down because Nightingale said you’d probably go straight home from here.’
‘Pretty much ordered me to,’ I said. ‘I think he’s worried about me.’
‘Should he be?’
‘I don’t know if we can stop this woman.’
‘The sīphōnem spell didn’t work?’
I talked him through my two failed attempts to put the spell on Francisca.
‘She’s too fast and destructive,’ I said. ‘We all piled in and she nearly took us all to the cleaners, Nightingale included.’
Postmartin opened his briefcase and pulled out an A4 envelope folder made of clear rigid plastic.
‘I don’t know if this will help,’ he said, opening the folder, ‘but I think I’ve found your Inquisition practitioner.’
He removed a picture from the folder and put it on the table before me. It was an old-fashioned engraved portrait of a middle-aged white man with hooded eyes, a beaky nose and surprisingly fleshy lips. He wore a high collar with a minimalist ruff.
‘Magister Cristoval Romano,’ said Postmartin. ‘Born 1581 in Carmona, which is near Seville, died … Well, nobody’s that certain. We have no confirmed date of death but the last reference to his life was from 1623, when he was listed as a calificador for the Inquisition in Seville.’
A calificador was a consultant who assisted the Inquisition by assessing the evidence against the accused. What was unusual was that normally this post was taken by a theologian.
‘Whereas the Magister was famous as an alchemist and a natural philosopher,’ said Postmartin. ‘Another unusual feature is that the Inquisition kept next to no records of the cases that he worked on.’
The Inquisition were famous for keeping records of every denunciation, confession, torture session and trial they participated in. So detailed were their ledgers, including meticulous record-keeping of goods seized from suspects’ households, that social historians know more about the material culture of ordinary Spaniards of that period than anywhere else in the medieval period.