‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s findings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.
Stephanopoulos sent us over to Seawoll’s office.
‘Yeah, okay,’ he said. ‘But this had better be done with some fucking tact and diplomacy.’
Martin Chorley didn’t actually live in London, but out beyond the M25 in a two million quid eighteenth century rectory near High Wycombe. Fortunately me and Guleed were saved a schlepp up the M40 because Mr Chorley, having formally identified his daughter that morning, had moved on to his place of work in the City. He’d outright refused a Family Liaison Officer – plenty do – but had already been statemented as soon as he’d made the identification. Because, for police officers, ‘close relative’ frequently rhymes with ‘prime suspect’, Mr Chorley had already accumulated quite a large section in HOLMES. From that me and Guleed got all the salient details — birth, school, degree, work history, the big family home and the complimentary chairman’s flat above the office in Little Britain.
‘What, no villa in Tuscany?’ I asked.
‘He prefers America,’ said Guleed, who was going through twenty years’ worth of travel documentation. ‘Washington, New York, Miami, couple of trips to Atlanta – most of these are going to be work related.’
As were the trips to Berlin, Paris and Geneva – in his capacity as chairman of something called the Public Policy Foundation. There’d been a helpful note from whoever had run the initial check – Influential think tank, watch it. I checked the address and me and Guleed headed off to put our sensitivity training to the test.
The wind had picked up by the afternoon and on Ludgate Hill the tea-break smokers were huddled under the inadequate awnings – designed that way on modern buildings to discourage rough sleepers – trying to get their nicotine fix before hypothermia set in.
City traffic is always grumpy in the rain, and so was Guleed when my shortcut to avoid St Paul’s put us behind an Ocado delivery van for twenty minutes. Fortunately it peeled off before we hit the Rotunda and we did a quick spin around the Museum of London and into the bit of Little Britain that runs beside Postman’s Park.
The trees in the park still had most of their leaves, and the street was narrow and shaded and smelt of wet grass rather than the busy cement smell you get in the rest of the City. The office was based in a Mid-Victorian pile whose Florentine flourishes were not fooling anyone but itself. There was a brass plaque by the door engraved with ‘Public Policy Foundation’ and beyond the doors a cool blue marble foyer and a young and strangely elongated white woman behind a reception desk. Because it’s not good policy to, we hadn’t called ahead to make an appointment. Which gave Guleed a chance to tease the receptionist by not showing her warrant card when she identified herself.
The receptionist’s expression did a classic three point turn from alarm to suspicion and finally settling on professional friendliness as she picked up the phone and informed someone at the other end that the ‘police’ had arrived to talk to Mr Chorley. We agreed later that while she’d lost points for the hesitant way she’d identified us as police, it was good effort overall.
‘Definitely in the top half of the leaderboard,’ said Guleed while we were waiting for someone to show us upstairs.
Martin Chorley’s office was carefully designed to be unpretentious with varnished floorboards, mismatched throw rugs, a John Lewis leather sofa set and a glass-topped desk which I happened to know came from Ikea because I’d considered getting it for the tech cave.
Chorley himself was my height, generally slender but with a spare tyre that was going to see him spending much more time in the gym in future. His hair was dark brown and conservatively cut, his eyes a pale grey and closely set. Judging from the rumples he was wearing yesterday’s suit trousers – no time to change – but a fresh pale blue shirt with packing creases. Mint in its wrapper, I guessed, and kept in the office for emergencies.
He offered us coffee and we declined. Generally you only accept a beverage if the subject is going to make it themselves – creating a sense of normality – or if you’re going to make it, giving you a good chance to snoop around their kitchen. He himself scooped up a bottle of Highland Spring from his desk and waved us onto the black leather sofa while he lowered himself carefully into the matching armchair. His face, I saw, was grey and there were smudges under his eyes so I started gently enough – explaining that this was a routine follow-up interview, blah blah blah, and got about half a sentence in before he cut me off.
‘I heard you made an arrest,’ he said. He spoke with that deliberately toned down posh accent that, before they allowed regional dialects on the radio, used to be known as BBC standard.
The law of the police interview is inviolable – information is only supposed to flow in one direction. But you’ve got to handle grieving parents carefully, otherwise they might write to the Telegraph. Or, in the case of someone like Martin Chorley, call the editor at home.
‘An arrest has been made,’ I said. ‘How it relates to your daughter’s death remains unclear.’
He nodded glumly at this and took a sip of water.
I waited to see if he’d ask who, exactly, had been arrested. When he didn’t, I went back to asking the routine questions that disguised the real reason I was there.
Nightingale’s definition of a rogue practitioner was essentially ‘one that is practising magic without the sanction of the Folly’. Since the only currently sanctioned practitioners were me and him, I’d pointed out that this was not a very useful definition. Besides, there were still a number of wizards of the old school who, despite having ‘rusticated’ themselves, could still practise if they had to. Not to mention all the Rivers, Russian night-witches, fae, demi-fae – and who knew what other kinds of fae – running around doing stuff that looked suspiciously like magic to me.
So we refined our definition down to ‘someone who practised magic in breach of the Queen’s Peace’, and started developing a series of sophisticated tools for determining whether someone’s nearest and dearest might have been dabbling in the metaphysical equivalent of sticking their head in a microwave for fun and profit.
‘Had you noticed any recent changes in Christina’s behaviour?’ I asked. ‘Any sudden new interests?’
‘She’s seventeen,’ he said. ‘So yes, lots of sudden interests.’
He turned his head to look out the window and took a deep breath.
‘Any of them particularly noteworthy?’ I asked.
‘Any of what?’ He turned back to face us.
‘Any of the new interests,’ said Guleed with a note of respectful curiosity – it was her party trick. According to legend she’d once got a confession out of a rapist just by looking sympathetic and nodding occasionally.
‘Me personally,’ Stephanopoulos had said, ‘I’d have nailed his testicles to the chair.’
Ah, the good old days, I’d thought.
Martin Chorley succumbed.
‘History,’ he said. ‘She started reading a great deal of history. I did find it a little bit odd because she wasn’t taking history at A-level.’ He was hazy about exactly when and where her interest had been focused, and I could see that pressing him was just going to make him angry. So I let it go. Tact and fucking diplomacy and all that.