‘Sensibly, he didn’t hang around for the Inquisition to catch up with him,’ said Postmartin, getting back on track.
A certain Rodrigo Alfonzo was named amongst the ‘Portuguese’ merchants operating in London – the ones that went on in 1657 to legally change their status in the face of wartime confiscation. Although he died before the case was brought.
‘Neither Alfonzo nor Rodrigo are exactly unusual names,’ said Postmartin. ‘But luckily we can work back from Leon Davies to the point where his family take an anglicized surname in 1897. Since we know Leon was in charge of the lamp, we can surmise that they are the same family.’
Which is why we knew that the alchemist formerly known as Enrique Jorge Perez died smugly of old age in bed.
‘I don’t suppose he left a handy treatise on how the rings and the lamp worked?’ I asked.
Postmartin laughed and started to neatly pack hard copies back in their folder. In the same order as they’d come out, I noticed.
Danni arrived with some coffee and offered to do another run for Postmartin, who told her not to bother.
‘I brought my own tea,’ he said, and he pulled a vacuum flask from his briefcase. It was an antique 1950s model with a rounded stopper and a faded blue and green tartan pattern on its sides. ‘I always pack my own refreshments,’ he said. ‘Got into the habit back before there was a coffee shop on every corner.’
Danni slipped out to join the perimeter while Postmartin popped the plastic cup off the top of the Thermos and poured black tea. Steam rose, and there was a citrus scent which weirdly reminded me of the orange smell I’d got from Francisca’s boundary effect.
‘I’m partial to milk and sugar,’ said Postmartin. ‘But black tea with lemon stays hotter longer.’
He lifted his cup and blew on the surface to cool it.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘This is what I think happened. Our boy Enrique falls out of favour and is denounced, accused and arrested. But the Inquisition don’t realise how powerful he is and he breaks out of prison, grabs all his family, extracts a bit of revenge and gets the fuck out of Spain.’
Postmartin nodded and sipped his tea.
‘So the Inquisition is not having this and, not being stupid, they know they’re outclassed,’ I said. Suddenly I could see the whole bloody thing as if Mary Beard was narrating it to camera. ‘So they bring in this Magister … what was his name?’
‘Cristoval Romano,’ said Postmartin.
‘They bring in Romano as their big gun and set him the task of dealing with Enrique.’
‘Bring me the head of Enrique Perez,’ said Postmartin with a straight face.
To that end, they recruited Francisca, gifted her with incredible powers and set her on Enrique’s tail. I thought of the cat-women and the child soldiers and all the fanatical cannon fodder that had been drummed up by powerful men to suit their purposes, and felt suddenly sick.
‘But our Enrique was too good and too clever,’ I said. ‘He fashioned the lamp and the rings and used them to trap Francisca. Then he had that painting done and I bet he was already halfway across the Channel before it had left for Seville.’
‘Do you have an inkling as to how the rings worked?’ asked Postmartin.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I think she’s drawn to them. Whatever weird bollocks Preston Carmichael did in 1989 created a link between him, their wearers and Francisca. Once she has identified her victim, she needs them and the ring to be in the same location. I think Preston Carmichael was wearing his when she tortured him for information.’
‘But David Moore was still looking for his ring when he was struck down in the Silver Vaults,’ said Postmartin.
‘Lesley slipped up,’ I said. ‘She knew that Francisca had been in angel form at the vaults. So how did she know?’
‘Because she was there?’ said Postmartin, and sipped his tea. ‘But she didn’t steal David Moore’s ring until later.’
‘Meaning that it doesn’t have to be the owner’s ring,’ I said. ‘Any of the seven rings will do. By then Lesley had the one she glamoured off Alastair McKay in Davos. She must have had it with her when she followed David Moore to the Silver Vaults. So it doesn’t look like Francisca cares about the rings themselves per se.’
I patted the pouch on my MetVest.
‘Interesting,’ said Postmartin, and poured himself another cup. ‘That implies that the rings form a gestalt – a collective linkage between the Manchester seven and the rings. Since they were obviously designed as a countermeasure to Magister Romano’s magic, I doubt their purpose was to attract his angel of death.’
‘Something obviously happened at that prayer meeting,’ I said, and finished my coffee. ‘But me and Nightingale have no idea what.’
‘Prior to Newton,’ said Postmartin, ‘a great deal of weight was given to the notion of correspondence. The idea that one thing, either through resemblance or a symbolic connection, could be used to influence another thing.’
So the penis-shaped stinkhorn mushroom made a frequent appearance in folk recipes for curing impotence. Although given how they smelt, I couldn’t see it helping with the foreplay part of the problem.
‘So if Carmichael did, unwittingly, practise an effective ritual in Manchester,’ said Postmartin, ‘then I think it’s entirely possible that the group may have created a bond with the rings and thus with Francisca.’
‘It would be nice if we knew what they were for originally,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t be so prominent in the painting if Enrique hadn’t thought they were important.’
‘And they wouldn’t have been included,’ said Postmartin, ‘if he hadn’t been sure their significance would be obvious to the Inquisition in Seville. There’s no point taunting your enemies if they don’t understand the insult.’
‘Perhaps not to the Inquisition at large,’ I said. ‘Maybe just the Magister.’
‘That’s a definite possibility,’ said Postmartin.
‘Have you reached out to Leon Davies’s family?’ I said, thinking it was too much to hope that they had a lost family journal lying around the house.
‘I’m still waiting on a reply,’ said Postmartin. ‘Do you have a backup plan to deal with our troublesome Lady of Spain?’
There was a lump in my stomach that I wasn’t used to.
‘Nightingale does,’ I said.
‘I could not control her, nor bind her, and you saw what happened when I tried to knock her down,’ he’d said. ‘It’s obvious that the sīphōnem variant you have developed will not work while she actively resists it.’
I’d pointed out that we really didn’t have any alternative.
‘Yes,’ Nightingale had said quietly, ‘we do. If we position snipers out of her immediate range, I’m confident that a suitably high-powered round will bring her down.’
‘Ah,’ said Postmartin when I told him. ‘It does have the virtue of simplicity.’
I said nothing, He was right and so was Nightingale. Francisca had killed two already, and what’s more, if we didn’t deal with her she’d probably kill again. I’ve never had a moral problem about lethal force to save lives – in the abstract, anyway. But luring Francisca into an ambush and gunning her down seemed a bit premeditated to me. I didn’t feel good about it at all.
I was still feeling queasy about our options when I arrived home to find my mum had moved in. She was in the kitchen; all four burners on the cooker were in use and the emergency backup rice cooker had been dragged out from its cupboard and was running in tandem with the main rice cooker.