‘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.