‘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.
Monday An almost fanatical devotion …
13 Improvisation
There’s nothing the modern copper loves more than attempting the arrest of an armed and dangerous suspect in a public space. Especially when you’ve had to organise it on the fly while driving to their last known location. But when we looked at the map, it was obvious that we were never going to get a better shot at nicking Zelda with the minimum of risk.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Stephanopoulos, who, while Seawoll was in Manchester, was the senior officer and therefore responsible for everything that went wrong. ‘But we don’t dare let her evade us again.’
Because, notwithstanding the possible teleporting thing, Zelda was on a narrowboat at a mooring in Kensal Green, which meant she could shift location at any moment the old-fashioned way, by water. We knew she was heading east into the centre of London – so the collateral was only going to get denser.
So me and Guleed arrived at the Ladbroke Grove bridge over the Paddington Branch of the Grand Union Canal and started tooling up. We’d both dug out our uniform Metvests because the outer cover came with pockets and handy clips for attaching Airwaves, handcuffs and useful bits of police kit. Like our CS spray and the X-26 Tasers that Stephanopoulos had authorised us to use. Guleed had her extendable baton, but I had half a metre of iron-cored oak stave with a canvas handle at one end and a metal cap at the other. It was a genuine antique Second World War battle staff and I normally didn’t get it out of its case, but I reckoned this was a special occasion.
Once we were suitably equipped, we checked on everyone else’s status and found that our Sprinter van of TSG and the ‘just in case’ armed response unit were still ten minutes out. More importantly, Nightingale hadn’t reached the Scrubs Lane Bridge, a kilometre and a bit down the canal to the west. Once he and his contingent of TSG were in place, the plan was to cautiously work our way along the towpath from both directions.
‘And I mean cautiously,’ said Stephanopoulos.
Me and Guleed leant against the parapet and stared gloomily towards where the low charcoal clouds brushed the top of the gas towers, and wondered if it was going to rain on us as well.
‘It’s true what they say about the Job,’ said Guleed, hitching her utility belt into a more comfortable position. ‘You really do never know what the day’s work will bring.’
What it had brought that morning was the Danni report, just as I was pulling into the car park at Belgravia nick.
‘We think we’ve found her,’ she said. ‘I’m texting you a picture now.’
So I stayed in the Asbo, which had a hands-free kit, and propped my phone on the dashboard.
The picture was of a wild-eyed young woman who I immediately recognised as Zelda. Only her name wasn’t Zelda – it was Francisca.
‘Spanish?’ I asked.
‘We think so,’ said Danni. ‘Or at least from a Spanish-speaking country.’
She’d been found wandering naked and in distress along Glossop High Street first thing in the morning following Lesley’s theft of the lamp. An ambulance had been called and, worried by her obvious disorientation, the crew had taken her to Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, where she was treated for exposure, dehydration and anaemia. Fearing that she’d been a victim of a sexual assault who’d then been dumped on the moors, the staff called the police.
‘That’s where the picture comes from,’ said Danni.
Francisca continued to present as confused and agitated, and appeared to be unable to speak, although she was clearly trying. The hospital decided to keep her overnight for observation. When she did start speaking the next morning, it was in a language which a Filipino nurse identified as Spanish. Although the nurse said that she had trouble understanding the dialect. They did get her name – Francisca Velasco.
‘Apparently there’s almost as many Spanishes as there are Englishes,’ said Danni. ‘You’re going to like this bit. When they brought in a Spanish interpreter from the university, he said that while he could understand what she was saying and it was a little bit like Castilian, it was not a dialect he’d heard before. Also, GMP got on to the Spanish consulate, who couldn’t find any reports of a missing Spanish citizen of that name. Ditto Argentina and Colombia and the others. A couple of close matches, but nobody who fits the description.’