Amongst Our Weapons

12 Faith

They walked into a hospital and bestowed their blessings upon the sick.

‘And you saw them get better?’ asked Guleed.

‘We felt them get better,’ said Alastair. ‘We felt the Holy Spirit, the power of God’s love, flow through us and into the sick people. We must have saved the NHS millions that night.’

Although he couldn’t say which hospital they’d blessed with their presence.

‘Whichever is closest to Fallowfield,’ he said airily.

Another follow-up for Seawoll and Danni, I thought, and asked him about the third and final session.

‘Prophecy,’ said Alastair. ‘We saw the future.’

Both me and Guleed were actually struck dumb – which is not a good look in a pair of experienced police officers. Fortunately, Alastair was off with the fairies and so didn’t notice, and thus was the much-vaunted mystique of the Metropolitan Police preserved.

Guleed recovered first.

‘And what did you see?’

‘Jocasta said there would be floods and famines – which I thought at the time was just stating the obvious. But, what with global warming, I think she might have been on to something.’ Alastair shook his hand from side to side to show that he kept an open mind. ‘David spoke of war in the Middle East,’ he said. ‘And guess what happened in 1990? Right. I saw the dawning of a new age of understanding, but I’m an eternal optimist. Jessica said the towers would fall and they did, didn’t they?’

There was more of this, and I was disappointed because it was exactly the sort of vague prognostication that you get with your daily star sign. Unless Danni reported a rash of medical miracles dating from 1989, then I was seriously doubtful that Alastair and his prayer circle were talking anything but gibberish.

And yet … I was sure something had happened over those three days. I suspected it was some of that pre-Newtonian ritual magic that Postmartin was so keen on. He always claimed that it formed the kernel of human religious belief.

‘Why do all that chanting and fasting,’ he’d said, ‘if you don’t get something tangible out of it?’

I was yet to be convinced – people did stupid things for stupid reasons all the time, and also a lot of singing and dancing was enjoyable, especially in a group. I was willing to bet that Postmartin had been a romantic bookworm as a youth. Even when he was on active duty in Malaya.

‘What happened next?’ asked Guleed.

‘I went back to my digs and slept,’ said Alastair. ‘Alone, unfortunately.’

‘I meant,’ said Guleed, slowly, ‘what happened with the group?’

Alastair seemed surprised at the question.

‘We never met again,’ he said. ‘Preston cancelled the next meeting, and the next, and kept cancelling, until one day he wasn’t there any more. Jocasta went all exam-mad and Jackie caught feminism and became a lesbian or something.’

‘What about the others?’ asked Guleed.

‘We never saw Preston again,’ he said, ‘and, to be honest, I don’t remember what happened to the rest.’

He remembered the women but not the men. At least he’s consistent.

‘You didn’t think that was odd?’ asked Guleed.

‘You lose touch with people,’ said Alastair. ‘You move on.’

‘No,’ said Guleed. ‘You were speaking in tongues and healing the sick. You said the Holy Spirit filled you up and brought you closer to God.’ She leant forwards, fixing Alastair with her eyes. ‘If I had been taken closer to God I wouldn’t have just wandered off afterwards.’

‘I think we all had the impression that that was our lot,’ said Alastair. ‘We had been given our gifts and now we had to go out and do good works. Also, it was …’ He hesitated, and he winced as if remembering pain. ‘Terrifying,’ he said, and nodded to himself. ‘Getting that close to God. Best not to be greedy.’

‘So a close encounter with God,’ I said. ‘And then back to lectures the next day?’

‘It did change me,’ he said with some emphasis. ‘I was a more serious person after that. If God puts his hand upon your shoulder it leaves a lasting impression. And I have been blessed in my life. I have to assume it’s for a reason.’

‘Blessed in what way?’ I ask.

‘In little ways that add up,’ said Alastair.

His first newspaper job, for example, after he’d graduated with a semi-respectable 2:1. An old school chum who had gone to Oxford called him out of the blue and asked if he could write a piece about life up North.

‘Because you were at Manchester?’ I asked.

‘That,’ said Alastair. ‘And I grew up in Harrogate.’

One article led to another. His friend brought him on as a guest editor and networking did the rest.

‘And you think that was down to God?’ I asked.

‘Either you believe God organises the universe or you don’t,’ said Alastair. ‘And I met my wife when I moved to London.’ The smile faded and he looked away. ‘That was another blessing.’

I was more inclined to put it down to him being a posh boy with posh friends, the right accent and the right attitude. Still, I’ve been having my suspicions about the more subtle influence of the supernatural ever since my dad gave up heroin and cigarettes overnight. Just after I’d done Mama Thames a solid.

And that led me back to ritual magic and, of course, the rings.

‘Do you still have the ring?’ I asked.

‘I lost it,’ said Alastair, without looking back at us.

We waited, but he didn’t elaborate – lost in some other memory.

I glanced at Guleed.

‘Can you remember when and where you lost it?’ she asked, and Alastair immediately turned back to look at her.

‘I think at Davos,’ he said. ‘At least I wasn’t wearing it when I went through security at the airport. It always set off the metal detector, so I always automatically slipped it off and put it in the tray with my keys and wallet. When I got to security, I went to remove it and found it was missing.’ He mimed taking the ring off. His little finger, I noticed. ‘I assumed that I’d left it in my bag and went through. Getting on the plane was a scramble – it always is when it’s filled with hacks – and I didn’t think to check until I got home.’

‘So you usually wore it?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Even when you were asleep?’

‘I always wore it,’ he said. ‘As a sign of God’s favour. Also, if you don’t take it off you can’t lose it.’

‘Except you lost it,’ said Guleed.

‘Yeah,’ said Alastair.

Something about the confusion on his face reminded me of Althea Moore when we’d asked her about losing her own ring.

‘Did you have companionship on the last night?’ I asked.

‘What?’ said Alastair. ‘Did I get laid? Definitely.’

‘Was it Helga the impossibly blonde Swede?’

‘As it happens,’ said Alastair. ‘You don’t think …?’

‘Do you remember the sex?’

‘What?’

‘Do you remember having sex – the positions, who did what to who?’

‘I’m not …’ started Alastair and then stopped, a look of horror on his face.

I couldn’t help wondering whether that was because his ring had been stolen, or Helga the Swede might have escaped his room without putting out.

We didn’t ask for details. Apart from anything else, while we weren’t sure whether the rings were a real defence against Zelda of the burning spear, Alastair didn’t even have that possible protection.

We told him it was better that he relocated for his own safety. When we asked where his wife and six kids were, he told us California. Something about the way he said it suggested that they might not be coming back. But, from our point of view, his family tragedy was our logistical simplification.

We suggested, strongly, that he book in to the Hotel Russell, which was conveniently located across the square from the Folly. We’d discussed this contingency with Nightingale and, while we weren’t keen filling up the Folly with ‘guests’, it would be handy to have them close by – just in case.

While Alastair was upstairs packing a suitcase, Guleed asked me what all the business about the hard and soft c’s was about.

‘Latin pronunciation changed over time and different parts of Europe,’ I said. ‘Ecclesiastical Latin has softer consonants than Classical Latin – I thought it might give us a clue to what time and space the ritual spell came from.’

‘Time and space?’

‘Region,’ I said. ‘What country it came from.’

‘When do you find time to learn all this stuff?’

‘It’s like PACE,’ I said. ‘You learn the basics and pick up the details as and when you need them.’

‘The healing and the prophecy didn’t seem authentic to me,’ she said. ‘Why do you think the speaking in tongues is important?’

‘Because they weren’t speaking in tongues, were they?’ I said. ‘They were speaking actual languages, which could be connected to the rings, which are probably connected to Zelda, the Angel of Death,’

‘Spanish, Latin and Hebrew,’ said Guleed. ‘But not Arabic. So probably Southern Spain after the reconquest.’

‘Or a Jesuit mission in Mexico,’ I said. ‘Let’s see if Postmartin has worked out where the lamp came from.’

Back in the days of the Old Republic, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England and 360-degree religious zealot, believed fervently in the Second Coming of Christ his Lord, and that one of the preconditions for this was supposed to be the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. The Spanish monarchy, inspired by the same prophecies, took a robust straightforward approach and offered their large Jewish population a simple proposition – convert, leave or die. Most converted, and the rest left, heading for Antwerp, Italy and the Ottoman Empire – anywhere they could find a place of refuge, however tenuous. This approach proved popular in Spain and Portugal, too, and in fact in most Christian countries where the rulers needed to write off some debts, keep the mob happy or curry favour with the Church.

Cromwell, in marked contrast to his approach to the Irish and other dissenting voices, felt that it would be better to convert the Jews by setting an example of how decent, lovely and God-fearing his branch of Christianity was.

His main problem was that all the Jews had been murdered or expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, and you can’t convert people who aren’t there. His solution was to advocate readmitting the Jews so that they could be shown the benefits of the true religion. That this would give the English better access to the capital markets of Antwerp and the lucrative spice trade in the Far East probably never crossed his mind – honest.

Cromwell convened an advisory council and asked their advice and they said no. So he convened a grand council consisting of lawyers, merchants and some of the finest and most august theologians in the land, and put the proposition to them.

Their response was fuck no.

But Cromwell hadn’t got where he was today, effective dictator of England, by letting other people tell him what to do. He invited the Jews back into England to inhabit a strange legal limbo whereby they weren’t explicitly tolerated, but neither were they bound up in the sort of rules that circumscribed the lives of Jews in other European countries.

Meanwhile there were, living in London, quite a few ‘Portuguese’ merchants who were probably not as Christian as the Inquisition might have wished. These were the New Christians, the Marranos, descendants of Jews who had converted rather than face death or exile from Spain and Portugal. Unfortunately, merely being baptised and attending church on a regular basis was not enough to allay suspicions, and the Inquisition, first in Spain and then Portugal, persecuted them for fun and the greater glory of God.

Some families forwent the dappled sunlit hills and red-roofed towns of Iberia for the dreary, crowded and pestilential confines of sixteenth-century London. There they could practise the religion of their ancestors in peace – providing they didn’t do it in public. When England went to war with Spain, again, these merchants went to court to prove that they were in fact Jewish, not Spanish, and so therefore shouldn’t have their stuff nicked by the state. They won their case and the resettlement of the Jews in England became a matter of common law.

These were the Sephardim, the Jews of the Southern Diaspora, and they built a great synagogue in Bevis Marks in Aldgate, which opened in 1701. There it has survived fire, riots and two rounds of bombing by the Germans and the IRA, to become the oldest synagogue in England still in use.

Shortly after its founding, a Sephardic family going by the name Alfonzo had deposited the lamp at the synagogue.

‘Although, maddeningly, there’s no mention of why,’ said Postmartin, who I’d found in the reading room, sitting at a table covered in papers, books and the remains of a light supper. Toby had jumped on a chair next to him, the better to clean up any crumbs or crusts that might have been left over.

I’d barely managed to sit down before I got the potted history of the early modern Jewish diaspora – or at least the bits of it that related to our mysterious lamp.

‘There’s no mention of the rings,’ said Postmartin. ‘But I do have a name – Moses ben Abraham Alfonzo. We have records of the circumcision and bar mitzvahs of two sons, but no record of his death, although he donated a particularly fine silver menorah sent down from Manchester in 1735.’

Postmartin showed me a close-up photograph of the candelabrum revealing that it bore two hallmarks, one of which was the distinctive hammer and anvil of the Sons of Wayland. The other looked like a sideways A, which Postmartin identified as the Phoenician letter Aleph.

‘Which was associated with a famous Manchester-based jeweller,’ said Postmartin, ‘whose name was Mordecai Alfonzo. One of Moses Alfonzo’s sons, as recorded at Bevis Marks.’

Postmartin tapped the image of the hallmark and managed to put his phone into sleep mode.

‘Blast,’ he said, and found the picture again.

‘A Mordecai Alfonzo is listed as master in the formal rolls of the Sons of Wayland,’ he said, ‘until his death in 1803. And that surname occurs twice more during the nineteenth century and never again.’

‘So the family died out?’ I said.

‘The name may have changed instead, because the hallmark continued to be used by the firm of Davies and Company.’

‘Any relation to Leon Davies?’

‘I’m looking into that. But it seems likely, given Leon Davies was the one who committed the lamp into the care of the Sons of Wayland at the start of the war.’

‘So Zelda could have been in the lamp for over three hundred years,’ I said, and then had to explain who Zelda was.

‘That would certainly explain her irritable nature,’ said Postmartin, but I was thinking of the raven on the moor and my theory that it had been used as a guidance system for a V1 cruise missile.

‘Could Zelda be a weaponised ghost?’ I asked. ‘A variation on the way demon traps are made?’

‘She seems a tad too corporeal for that,’ said Postmartin. ‘But she could be a human being, or even a fae that has been altered to serve as a weapon, and then trapped in a sort of pocket allokosmos in the lamp.’

‘What – in case of emergency, break glass for Angel of Death?’

‘You’re making an assumption there, Peter,’ said Postmartin, wagging his finger at me. ‘You’re assuming that whoever created Zelda … Ha! I see what you did there. You’re assuming that the creator of the weapon was also the creator of the lamp. But perhaps the lamp’s purpose was defensive – to trap Zelda before she could eliminate her target.’

‘Assuming,’ I said, ‘that Moses Alfonzo made the lamp to trap Zelda, and assuming that Zelda’s not a natural phenomenon or a messenger of a god or gods unknown, then who created her?’

‘When you find her,’ said Postmartin with a touching faith in our abilities, ‘you can ask her.’

I went and found Nightingale in the now repurposed visitors’ lounge and we had a group call to Stephanopoulos to brief her on what we found.

‘It’s all very interesting,’ she said. ‘But none of it gets us closer to apprehending Zelda.’

‘Let’s hope Alexander and Danni have more luck at the Manchester end,’ said Nightingale.

I drew some lines and squiggles on our whiteboard to show willing while Nightingale set up shop in the atrium – the better to rush out and fight Zelda should she try to have a go at Alastair, now snugly ensconced in the slightly decaying splendour of the Hotel Russell.

‘Go home, Peter,’ said Nightingale.

And, never one to disobey a lawful order, home I went.

It was dark when I got back to Beverley Avenue, and heavy rain was drumming on the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes that took up the lower half of the garden.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked Beverley, who was standing on her patio in nothing but a pair of knickers.

‘Shush,’ she said. ‘You’ll break my concentration.’

But she turned and held out her hand towards me. I stepped back out into the rain, took her hand, and she wrapped my arm around her so that she could lean back against my chest. I slipped my other arm around the smooth curve of her bulge. I felt two kicks against my palm.

‘Soon, babes,’ she said. ‘Not long now.’

‘Tonight?’

‘No.’ Beverley nodded at the tarpaulin-shrouded shadows at the end of the garden. ‘Things aren’t ready yet. But soon … Don’t leave town again.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘But you should come in – you’ll catch your death.’

She took my palm and kissed it.

‘No I won’t,’ she said.

Beverley’s back was warm against my chest, but the rain was beginning to soak through my jacket and shirt.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll catch my death.’

‘You’d better not,’ she said. ‘But I’ll come in if you rub my feet.’

‘Deal,’ I said.

As she led me by the hand back into the house, all the rain evaporated off her in a cloud of sweet-smelling vapour.

Not off me, by the way – I had to strip off and get a towel.