Amongst Our Weapons

11 Communication

Police work can be frustratingly slow at times – you’re always hanging around waiting for backup or a prisoner van or forensics, or for a suspect to arrive home, or just sometimes waiting for a witness to calm down enough to give a statement. Police work out of your area can be even slower because you have to keep explaining things to senior officers who have never heard of you and have their own problems, thank you very much, without a bunch of Londoners turning up and telling them what to do. According to Caroline, Seawoll’s accent grew noticeably more regional during these conversations, see-sawing between Glossop, Bolton and Stockport with occasional pure Manc when he was swearing. To be honest, it all sounded the same to me. But I’m a soft southerner so what do I know?

One thing you learn early on in your career is how to fit refs into your shift. Especially now that senior management have decided to reduce the influence of ‘canteen culture’ by closing all the canteens. I can live without the racism and the misogyny, but I miss the food – and the camaraderie, of course.

These days you can drop a copper anywhere and they will have sussed out the nearest and most economical takeaway, greasy spoon, kebab shop or, if all else fails, fake KFC establishment. Out here on the outskirts of Glossop, and far from civilisation, we were treated to a Grace Yutani special – which seemed to be pan-fried tofu in a teriyaki sauce with rice and steamed mini-broccolis.

‘What about the ladies?’ I asked, as I helped Caroline lay the table.

‘They don’t eat tofu,’ said Caroline, ‘and they’re perfectly capable of feeding themselves.’

I immediately thought of soup bowls full of raw meat, and it must have shown on my face because Caroline laughed.

‘They’re not obligate carnivores and they definitely have to cook their food,’ she said. ‘The bastard didn’t alter their biochemistry that far. The evil fucker was only interested in surface appearances anyway.’

We ate in silence so that Caroline and Grace could use both hands for eating. Before we’d finished, Seawoll got a call that the GMP were about to arrive at the bottom of the hill to start their evidence sweep and house-to-house inquiries. Pausing only to finish his rice, my rice and the leftovers in the pot, he left and took Danni with him.

This suited me because I wanted to talk to Grace and I didn’t think she’d talk with Seawoll in the room. I wanted to know if she knew why the remaining leadership of the Sons of Wayland had kept their new archive secret from the Folly.

‘There were plenty of senior practitioners left at the Folly in 1946,’ I said. ‘Ones that hadn’t been on active duty. I’m guessing this was true of the Sons of Wayland, too.’

‘Not so many Sons,’ Grace signed. ‘Many of the senior masters were killed when their headquarters was bombed.’

‘I heard about that,’ I said. ‘Unlucky.’

‘Maybe not luck,’ signed Grace. ‘Maybe treachery.’

‘Treachery by who?’ I asked, not liking where this was going.

Grace gave a complex shrug that Caroline didn’t need to translate.

‘There was always a rivalry,’ signed Grace. ‘Resentment at the skills of the smiths. And there’s the whole north–south thing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You think someone at the Folly leaked the location of the Sons of Wayland’s secret wartime HQ to the Nazis because they preferred rugby union to rugby league?’

Which got a blank look from Caroline even as she translated, and an equally blank look from Grace when she saw the signing.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘What’s your evidence?’

‘There was a famous V1 raid on Christmas Eve 1944,’ signed Grace. ‘Two flights of Heinkel He 111s approached the coast of Yorkshire and launched forty-five …’ There was another flurry of conversation as Caroline checked her translation … ‘Cruise missiles aimed at Manchester.’

Fourteen fell into the sea and most of the rest fell onto open fields. Only a couple did proper damage, killing forty-two people and injuring just over a hundred more. One landed in Hollingwood, completely destroying the wartime headquarters of the Sons of Wayland.

‘It’s a puzzle,’ signed Grace. ‘The missiles came down from Spennymoor to Northamptonshire. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that of the two that did real damage, one of them took out the headquarters?’

‘Coincidences happen all the time,’ I said. ‘And if the V1s were that inaccurate, how would they aim it at one particular building? Especially one in a built-up area?’

‘The Germans originally planned to use radio for terminal guidance,’ signed Grace – I think she had to spell out terminal. ‘But that proved impractical. I think for this particular attack they may have used magic.’

‘How?’ I asked, and Caroline opened her palms and banged them together.

‘I’ve been up on the moors,’ signed Grace, ‘and found all the crash sites I could. You’d be surprised how much of a bomb survives its detonation. Most of the wreckage had been recovered after the war, but there was enough for me to determine that in at least three instances there had been significant enchantment associated with a missile. A definite vestigium associated with all three. The sense of a raven in flight.’

I thought of the ghost of the raven – a ghost that had responded to German commands, that had so confidently joined the other ghosts, the human ones, for their final departure. Could you train or enchant ravens to fly a V1? Weirder shit had happened during the Second World War, including gigantic Catherine wheels, anti-tank dogs and incendiary bats.

‘That would be evidence that the Ahnenerbe were experimenting with V1s,’ I said. The Ahnenerbe being the mystical branch of the SS. The ones that had weaponised the pre-war German magical establishment and run the camp at Ettersberg. ‘Not that somebody at the Folly betrayed the Sons of Wayland.’

‘It doesn’t matter if it’s true,’ signed Grace. ‘The surviving masters thought it might be – that’s why they kept this location secret.’

‘Not from the Society of the Rose,’ I said, which got a gratifying double take out of Caroline.

When the gentlemen of the Society of the Wise froze out the women, perhaps they imagined they would return to ‘proper’ feminine pursuits. Which just goes to show that the Society of the Wise was no such thing, because many female practitioners formed their own society. Although they never had a hope of getting royal patronage.

‘When did you learn that name?’ she said – which was a mistake, of course, because now my suspicions about her, her mum and the ‘others’ that helped out with the Ladies were confirmed. She’d have been better off pretending not to know what I was talking about.

I looked directly at Grace.

‘This is not sustainable,’ I said. ‘We have to establish some form of co-operation between all the magical disciplines or people like Lesley are just going to walk all over us.’

Grace made that hissing laugh sound again and signed something, with unmistakable smugness, at Caroline, who hesitated before translating.

‘Catch the thief, return the property – then we’ll talk.’

Seawoll put me on the train back to London while he and Danni stayed to see if they couldn’t track our escaped angel from the Manchester end.

‘I don’t want your missus coming after me,’ he said. ‘Plus I think the people this angel woman is after are probably all in London. You’d be better deployed as a counter there.’

I went back in economy class with a delay for engineering works, feeling a bit like a chess piece in somebody else’s game.

I phoned Bev after the train left Stockport and was relieved that nobody seemed to be constructing anything in the background. Whatever the big diggy thing had been for, they weren’t using it just yet.

‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘How was the North?’

‘Friendly, open and honest.’ I said. ‘Also strangely whippet-free.’

‘You obviously went to the wrong bit,’ she said. ‘Are you going to have this case wrapped up soon?’ There was a dangerous edge in her voice – the kind to make anybody living on a flood plain nervous.

‘Hope so,’ I said quickly.

‘Only I don’t think the twins are going to hold up much longer,’ she said.

I promised that even if I didn’t wrap up the case, paternity cover was in place.

‘Poor Sahra,’ said Beverley. ‘You make sure you don’t drop her in it.’

We chatted for a bit, but then I heard Abigail calling in the background and Beverley had to hang up. Feeling I’d done my bit to keep flood insurance premiums in Beverley’s catchment area down, I put my phone away and got to work.

Even standard investigations can get complex, which is what the whiteboard is for. It’s all too easy to be lost in a welter of conflicting detail. There are thousands of pieces of information, some of which are firm facts, others are inferences from forensics reports or statements by unreliable witnesses, and some are total conjecture. Like your best guess at the theory of the crime. None of them come with reliable labels, or even a soundtrack where the music gives you a clue as to when you’ve discovered something significant.

This is why modern police have massive data mangles like HOLMES 2, whiteboards and digital displays in their offices and, occasionally, a nice clean pad of A4 and a pen.

I settled for my unofficial notebook and, blasphemously from a policing point of view, an HB pencil.

In 1989 Preston Carmichael found a nifty set of seven platinum puzzle rings inside a hollowed-out book at the Portico Library. Realising that what the library don’t know it had, it wouldn’t miss, he half-inched them and, possibly because even if he didn’t know what it was he could sense their enchantment, he decided to hand them out to the members of his charismatic Bible group. After all, there’d been seven rings and seven of them, so it must have seemed practically ordained by a higher power.

Something happened later that year and the Bible group split up and went their separate ways. Flash forward to the start of this month and Preston Carmichael is tortured and then killed and his ring taken. We’d assumed that murderer and thief were the same person, but now Lesley had shown her hand we knew it was her who stole the ring. Did she sneak in and grab it off his corpse, or had she nicked it prior to his introduction to magical heart surgery?

That was a crucial question.

David Moore and Preston Carmichael were still in touch enough for Moore to have Carmichael’s phone number. Had Carmichael been tortured to reveal Moore’s details, and had he given up other future victims’ names?

David Moore had given away his ring – obviously not so precious to him. At least not until he was suddenly desperate to get it back. Did he think it would protect him?

Dame Jocasta Hamilton had also been a member of the Manchester Bible study group and, unlike Moore, had kept her ring. This hadn’t prevented our fiery Angel of Death marching up the stairs to her office. What would have happened if she’d reached Dame Jocasta? Would the ring have protected her?

Which led me to the next question.

Who the fuck was the Angel of Death?

Something – or someone – had been trapped in a ‘containment device’ or lamp that had originally been stored at the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. I couldn’t keep calling her the Angel of Death, so I decided on Zelda. Because Angela would have been too obvious.

Zelda had been trapped in the lamp for at least eighty years, since the time it was transferred to the Sons of Wayland archives, probably longer. We would have to see if the synagogue knew when it had come into their possession.

When I’d checked up with Nightingale, he’d remembered Leon Davies. He’d been a near contemporary, a graduate of wizard school, a merchant banker in the 1930s. And had been reported missing in action, presumed killed, in 1943. He’d been performing a clandestine mission in French-occupied Morocco. Nightingale didn’t know the details.

He’d also been from a prominent Jewish family, which might explain the connection to Bevis Marks Synagogue. Nightingale had said Postmartin, who had contacts everywhere there might be even the possibility of interesting books, would be looking into that connection.

So … assume Zelda had been in the lamp for ages, sitting on a shelf in London. Then the lamp had been evacuated first to the Volcrepe factory in Glossop and then, after the war, to the Sons of Wayland’s secret bunker. Likewise, a bunch of enchanted platinum astrolabe puzzle rings were hidden in a book and erroneously stored at the Portico Library. I was assuming they, too, were destined for secure storage, but had gone astray.

Somebody American – I decided to call them the Collector – had hired Lesley to tax the lamp. Did Lesley find it on her own, or was she briefed by the Collector? Did the Collector want the rings as well, or was that a side hustle by our favourite former colleague?

Were they even linked? That was a dangerous assumption. Certainly all of the victims so far had possessed rings, but they’d also been part of Preston Carmichael’s Bible study group. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the rings – correlation does not equal causation, and all that.

But David Moore had thought the ring would protect him. Was desperate enough to get it back that he tried to rob the Silver Vaults with an Airsoft pistol.

And if the rings really could protect them from Zelda, could they be the key to making a capture and an arrest – if that was possible? Otherwise, what were the alternatives? Nobody had tried shooting her yet. I didn’t like the idea, but if we couldn’t stop her before she killed again, it might come to that.

We needed to know where Zelda had come from, and what she was doing in the lamp. We needed to know what had happened to the Bible study group in 1989. On the last bit we were in luck, because Guleed called me just after Milton Keynes to let me know that they’d located another individual in the picture – Alastair, the world-class groper.

Guleed picked me up at Euston in her dragon mobile, a second-hand BMW Series 2 convertible in fire engine red that she shared with her fiancé. As inconspicuous as a clown at a funeral, it didn’t often get used for police work, but Guleed said that all the pool cars were taken.

‘Jocasta Hamilton has left the country,’ she said as I climbed into the nice clean leather seat.

‘When?’

‘Late last night,’ said Guleed, pulling out onto the Euston Road with the confidence of a woman who has not only completed the Met’s celebrated advanced driving course but can also arrest any fucker that cuts her off at a corner. ‘She boarded a private jet at Biggin Hill and flew to the Canary Islands.’

‘Are we going to warn the Spanish police?’

‘And say what?’

Police forces don’t have the resources to babysit people against vague potential threats – especially on a resort island filled with tax exiles, celebrity golfers and other international criminals.

‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘And we think we’ve traced Andrew Carpenter to the States,’ said Guleed.

‘Let’s hope Zelda hasn’t discovered air travel, then.’

‘Who’s Zelda?’ asked Guleed.

Alastair McKay lived in three million quids’ worth of ugly detached red-brick villa off a private road on the Moor Park Private Estate, just across the north-west boundary of London proper. It wasn’t gated or nothing, but a discreet green sign made it quite clear that this was, in case we hadn’t twigged yet, private land and CCTV was in operation.

‘And, no doubt, minimum wage pretend police,’ said Guleed, who had become ill-disposed towards Mr McKay when she discovered he wrote for The Spectator.

‘And The Times, and the Telegraph,’ I said.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I may lose my objectivity.’

It wasn’t even the biggest or the ugliest villa that lurked behind the walls or the front lawns you could play tennis on. All of them were built in a strangely utilitarian style, like enormous council houses, with undecorated flat facades of red brick and PVC windows.

There was a horseshoe drive.

I was expecting a maid, a housekeeper or an au pair to answer the door, but a vigorous white man in his mid-fifties opened the door. His hair was still thick and curly with just a bit of grey, and the jaw was still strong, and the eyes, when they switched to Guleed, still leering.

‘Mr Alastair McKay?’ asked Guleed, showing her warrant card. ‘My name is Detective Sergeant Sahra Guleed. This is my colleague Peter Grant. May we come in?’

He hesitated, which was sensible, I wouldn’t let the police into my house straight away and I am the police.

‘Is this about Preston and David?’ he said.

‘May we come in?’ said Guleed.

He nodded and stepped aside to let us in. The hallway was spacious, with a modern steel-frame staircase leading up, doors to either side and a door at the end, through which I could see a black dining table with a pale blue mug steaming on it.

Alastair led us into a vast kitchen–dining-room–lounge combo that took up the entire width of the house. The decorator had obviously tried to fill it with expensive furniture, but had run out of budget and been forced to space everything out to make it look less empty. You could have raced a go-kart in a figure of eight around the dining table and the granite-topped island in the kitchen area. Although the polished white marble floor was probably a skid hazard.

When we eventually reached the piano-finish varnished mahogany dining table, Alastair picked up his mug, put it down again and offered us coffee or tea. Guleed said no thank you in her fake Cheltenham Ladies’ College accent, and I realised that we were playing sophisticated attractive hijabi cop and lumpish cockney sidekick. I tried to cultivate my inner Neanderthal but I think it was a wasted effort. Alastair hardly noticed me – he could barely keep his eyes off Guleed.

‘It’s the forbidden fruit thing,’ she’d explained the last time we’d played these roles. ‘They fantasise about us being highly contained bundles of repressed sexuality. The bigger the lecher, the more uncontrolled the fantasy.’

Alastair McKay had his lechery under control – finding out that two old acquaintances had been brutally murdered can have that effect.

‘Are you sure there’s a connection?’ he asked.

Guleed said there was, and explained about the potential attack on Jocasta Hamilton.

‘Have you suffered any vandalism recently?’ asked Guleed. ‘Any damage to your property or signs of an attempted break-in?’

Alastair hesitated, and then admitted, yes, there had been.

‘Somebody scratched my front door,’ he said.

His door had looked pristine when we’d come in.

‘So when did this happen?’ I asked, putting a bit of Hollywood Brit-thug into my accent. Guleed suppressed a smile.

Alastair said three days previously. He had reported it to the private security firm which covered the estate, and then had it repainted.

‘You didn’t report it to us?’ I asked.

‘It didn’t seem worth the trouble,’ he said.

His or ours? I wondered.

‘Was there like a gang marking?’ I said, and Guleed did a strange half-sneeze. ‘Or was it just random, like?’

‘There was definitely a pattern,’ said Alastair.

When we asked if he could remember what it looked like, he went one better and showed us a photograph on his phone. It was almost identical to the design scratched into the door of David Moore’s flat in Millwall.

‘Mr McKay,’ said Guleed. ‘Do you own a platinum astrolabe ring?’

Alastair blinked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What has that—?’ He looked up suddenly and then back at us – a look of sudden realisation on his face. ‘You mean those rings? From Manchester?’

‘Do you currently own one?’ asked Guleed.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘We think there’s a link between the rings, the Bible study group in Manchester and the recent attacks,’ I said. In my proper voice, because however amusing Guleed was finding it, I didn’t think the stupid cop thing was working.

He had a puzzled look on his face that slowly changed to apprehension. You could practically see his thoughts slowly passing behind his eyes. Guleed had run an IIP check on him as soon as she’d got his name and found he was a semi-journalist. What Stephanopoulos described as that weird breed of posh writers who move between public relations, think tanks and newspapers, and write think pieces before turning up on The Moral Maze to tell us how outraged they were.

Skimming his articles in The Spectator, The Economist and The Times, it was apparent that Alastair’s particular concern was overpopulation, which he blamed on an overly generous welfare system encouraging the feckless to breed. Since he had six kids of his own, he obviously thought sprog overproduction was fine for the appropriately wealthy. Just the one mother, though, which was odd given what Jocasta had said about him. He hadn’t been me-too’d either, but that could just be luck.

He’d gone to Radley College, which was an all-boys boarding school in Oxfordshire. We couldn’t get his results and, like most journalists and PR people, his social media was carefully scrubbed to keep things like his exams and school record secret. Manchester University was an odd choice, though – posh kids that fail to reach Oxbridge generally go to Bristol, Edinburgh or, for the true walk of shame, Exeter.

‘Why did you go to Manchester?’ I asked, and again there was the same slow response to the change of tack. I wondered if he was stoned, or perhaps medicated.

‘Girls,’ he said suddenly. ‘I went for the girls. I thought I’d have a better chance at Manchester than at … somewhere else.’

‘Why did you think that?’ asked Guleed.

‘I honestly don’t remember,’ he said. ‘You think lots of stupid things when you’re young, don’t you? To be honest, I went to an all-boys school, so it’s safe to say I was a bit ignorant of the actual practicalities. There were plenty of girls at Manchester so I was right about that.’

‘But then you found religion?’ asked Guleed.

Again the delay as Alastair processed. Then he laughed.

‘Better to say that I was in love with Jackie,’ he said.

‘The Jackie who was in the Bible study group?’ asked Guleed.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Alastair. ‘In those days you wouldn’t have caught me at a group like that otherwise.’

‘Do you remember her full name?’ I asked, since we hadn’t managed to identify her yet.

‘Jackie …? Jackie …?’ said Alastair, and then, triumphantly, ‘Jacqueline Spencer-Talbot.’

‘Was it reciprocated?’ asked Guleed, as I texted Jacqueline’s full name to Stephanopoulos.

‘Definitely reciprocated,’ said Alastair. ‘Providing I did a bit of praying with her first.’

For a moment a proper leer twisted his lips, although it did look more nostalgic than current. Maybe he was over forbidden fruit. He looked off to the left for a moment – lost in memory – and then back at Guleed.

‘She was very convincing. That’s why I joined. I do believe in God, though,’ he said quickly. ‘As in an ultimate creator. You believe in God, obviously. But it’s different for me – I didn’t have any reason to believe in anything until …’

He trailed off.

‘Until?’ asked Guleed.

‘Do you know what the gifts of the Holy Spirit are?’ he asked.

We said no just in case he meant something different, but his explanation of how the Holy Spirit gives gifts to good Christians in order to strengthen the Church – that these were essentially miracles for ordinary people – was pretty much the same as the one Dame Jocasta of the blessed Canary Islands had given us.

So, he said, there had been a lot of talking and discussing aspects of the Bible and the real meaning behind certain passages. I asked him which ones, but he couldn’t remember.

‘I did learn to sleep with my eyes open,’ he said.

I remembered one of my mum’s many new church experiments, from when I was still young enough to drag to services, had been a series of long and exceptionally dull passages read by members of the congregation. There’s something to be said for a professional clergy – especially when they can put some oomph into a sermon. I wished I’d been able to sleep with my eyes open back then, too.

‘I thought it was all nonsense, really,’ said Alastair, ‘until things really happened. And they didn’t start happening until we had the rings. At first I thought it was a placebo thing, you know, to encourage us. Like Dumbo’s magic feather. Things got a bit freaky after that.’

‘Freaky how?’ I asked.

Alastair gave a lopsided shrug.

‘Do you know what glossolalia is?’ he asked.

‘Speaking in tongues,’ said Guleed.

‘That’s the lay term for it, yes,’ said Alastair, and I could see he was a bit miffed that one of us had actually known what the term meant. ‘The idea is that the Holy Spirit gives you a gift to preach the gospel beyond the limitations of your own language. It sounds like gibberish, but if you truly listen it makes sense. That’s the theory, anyway.’

‘And the practice?’ said Guleed.

‘It sounded like Spanish to me,’ said Alastair. ‘Or maybe Portuguese, and once I thought it might be Hebrew or Arabic. I still didn’t understand any of it but that’s what it sounded like.’

‘Who was doing the speaking?’ I asked.

‘All of us,’ said Alastair. ‘At the same time.’

‘Talk me through the process,’ I said. ‘And start with where the rings came from.’

He confirmed that Preston Carmichael had brought them with him one day and handed them out. He’d even made a joke about it being seven rings for seven dwarves. Although Alastair admitted that he hadn’t got the joke until the first Lord of the Rings film came out.

‘We sat in a circle with our new rings on, bowed our heads and Preston led us in prayer,’ said Alastair. ‘Just as he had many times before.’

Only this time it was different – it felt different. When I asked him if he could describe how, Alastair became agitated, waved his hands and expressed frustration and worry.

‘This is going to sound like I’m mad,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Guleed in a firm posh accent. ‘On the contrary, we think you might have the key to the whole mystery.’

‘I felt something flow between us,’ said Alastair. ‘A sort of power.’

‘Can you describe this sensation?’ I asked.

‘Like the shade you get in hot countries like Italy,’ said Alastair, ‘where the landscape is all sunny but you’re sitting on a terrace in the shade with a cold drink. And there was an animal smell, a living animal, and perfume. It smelled like Jackie’s perfume as well. Sort of lemony.’

Nothing like the bell-like silence and the hymnal that I’d sensed around the Angel.

‘Then what happened?’ asked Guleed.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Until later that night. I’m shaken awake by this blonde girl who’s yelling that I’m having a nightmare.’

The blonde girl, whose name Alastair couldn’t remember, had been a hook-up at a party he’d gone to after the prayer meeting. She said he’d been shouting in his sleep. When he asked, ‘Shouting what?’, she’d said that it had sounded like Spanish.

‘Six o’clock the next morning, we’re all in a café opposite the campus talking about what the hell had just happened to us,’ said Alastair.

He couldn’t remember exactly what everyone said. Jackie, he was sure, had said she’d been dreaming in Hebrew. She knew because of the letters. The others had similar tales of waking up shouting, or dreaming in a foreign language.

‘I think we tried to convince ourselves it was a sort of mass hallucination,’ said Alastair. ‘But at the same time we wanted to do it again.’

They’d literally marched over to Preston’s house and demanded he lead another session. He said he’d be delighted, but they’d have to wait until the evening when he was finished at work.

‘We really didn’t want to wait,’ said Alastair. ‘We’d have done it morning, noon and night.’

And probably killed yourself with magic, I thought. And what was left of your brains would have ended up in the Folly’s frighteningly extensive brain collection to serve as an awful warning to future apprentices.

‘Why?’ asked Guleed.

‘It was exciting,’ said Alastair. ‘A revelation. That evening, when we prayed again, I could feel myself being …’ He made grasping motions with his hands. ‘Being filled up with the Holy Spirit. Becoming close to God. I’ve taken some drugs … this was better. Better than alcohol – better than sex, even.’

They held prayer meetings for three more days.

On the first night they found themselves talking to each other in tongues – or, at least, in foreign languages they didn’t speak.

‘And definitely some Latin,’ said Alastair. ‘Which I’d done at school, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘And had never really got the hang of it – all those declensions,’ said Alastair. ‘But that evening we sat in the pub afterwards and chatted away – in Latin! Like we’d been speaking it all our lives.’

‘Hard c or soft c?’ I asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Did you pronounce it wenee, widee, weeshee,’ I said, ignoring Guleed’s puzzled look, ‘or weekee?’

‘It’s funny you should ask that,’ said Alastair. ‘Somebody else asked me the same question once. Why is it important?’

‘It’s not really that important, but it would be useful to narrow down what flavour of Latin you were speaking,’ I said.

This threw Alastair into confusion and got me a definite bit of side-eye from Guleed – who has picked up some prejudices from Seawoll and Stephanopoulos.

Especially now I had a better and more important question to ask.

‘So who asked the same question?’

‘Some American guy I got talking to at Davos in January,’ he said.

But he couldn’t remember the man’s name, or even what he was doing at the World Economic Forum – although he wasn’t an economist, a journalist or even a friend of will.i.am.’s Nor could he remember what he looked like beyond tanned, fair-haired and middle-aged.

‘Maybe West Coast,’ said Alastair. ‘Had that kind of smoothness.’

He’d asked a lot of bizarre questions about the Bible study group, but Alastair had been more interested in the American’s companion.

‘Very blonde, very fit. Had big blue eyes and cheekbones you could butter your toast with,’ he said. ‘Helga, that was her name – Helga from Sweden.’

‘So what was your answer?’ I asked.

‘About what?’ asked Alastair.

‘The Latin,’ I said.

‘Suddenly I could speak Latin,’ said Alastair. ‘It was like something out of The Matrix. You know – I know Kung Fu – like that. I didn’t notice if I was using a hard c or not.’

‘You said you met three days in a row,’ said Guleed, a little impatiently. ‘What happened the next evening?’

‘We went and healed the sick,’ said Alastair.