The duty brief, when he finally turned up, was a lad who looked as if he was about sixteen. All done up in a suit and tie, he was a million miles away from the usual ‘duty’, who tended to be middle-aged, fat and heavily lined. They were always divorced.

  Mr Walters, by contrast, was a very eager beaver indeed and looked as if he might well still be a virgin. He was keen to keep Colin Macbeth out of trouble and had clearly advised him to say nothing. Brown and Pinker had been subjected to the ‘no comment’ routine for a good half hour when they took a comfort break.

  They both went to the bog and then had five minutes in the canteen with some wretched coffee and a bag of chocolate buttons which they shared. While they sat miserably and silently opposite each other, Wilko arrived.

  He pulled a chair out and sat down next to Brown.

  ‘My old mate Lee Arnold’s just turned up to report a MisPer,’ he said.

  ‘He that PI used to be a copper up Forest Gate?’

  ‘Yeah. His business partner’s gone missing on our patch,’ Wilko said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Last known Carter Lane.’

  Pinker said, ‘Near the cathedral?’

  ‘That’s the one. Lee says they’ve been looking into a sighting of an injured boy in Carter Court, house next to The Hobgoblin.’

  ‘So why didn’t they report it to us?’ Brown said.

  ‘It was kids what reported it. They were selling hooky gear door to door.’

  ‘So, did they find …’

  ‘Nah. And now the person looking into it, this Mrs Mumtaz Hakim, has gone missing.’

  ‘How long?’ Pinker asked.

  ‘Over twenty-four hours,’ Wilko said.

  ‘She’s a grown woman.’

  ‘Someone,’ Wilko said, ‘sent a text from her phone to Arnold’s telling him she’s with a relative in Birmingham. But she’s not and now her phone has disappeared completely.’

  ‘Father Edward has been seen many, many times over the centuries,’ Mrs Hardwick said. ‘He generally turns up when things are particularly bad. He was around a lot in World War II.’

  ‘I spoke to him,’ George said.

  ‘Oh yes, he speaks,’ she said. ‘If he didn’t speak, how could he warn us?’

  ‘Warn us about what?’ Jordan asked.

  ‘Evil,’ Mrs Hardwick said simply. ‘It never takes a day off, as it were, but when it pertains directly to the cathedral itself, Father Edward usually takes a hand.’ She put one of her hands on George’s shoulder. ‘And you being an exorcist, you were the perfect recipient for a Father Edward message. Old Canon Proctor was a great advocate for Father Edward and always took his pronouncements seriously. Not like this one. What did he say to you, Father George?’

  ‘He said that evil had come to this place. To be honest I’d felt it myself by that time. He said that no one in the cathedral would acknowledge it.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And he mentioned sacrifice.’

  ‘Mmm. Well, you saw how the canon and his team reacted,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but couldn’t the person Father George spoke to just be a visitor?’ Jordan asked.

  ‘No,’ she said with absolute certainty.

  ‘But how …’

  ‘I just know,’ she said. ‘What you have to understand is that those currently working within the cathedral do not hold with anything as “mediaeval” as ghosts or as troubling as sacrifice. They are good people, committed to the care of the poor and needy and to the worship of God, who I think they see as a rather pleasant, vaguely left-wing man from Esher. What they fail to appreciate is that the world is no longer a sun-filled garden from The Good Life. They live in a benign past that never happened. Those of whom Father Edward speaks also live in a past that never was, the difference being that their delusion is decidedly toxic.’ She held a hand up to Jordan and continued, ‘And before you ask me to elucidate, young man, I can’t. I don’t know who these people are, where they are or why they killed this child. Or rather I imagine they killed the poor little thing because she was mixed race. What I do know is what both ritual magic and that which purports to be ritual magic look like, and so I know that this is the latter. But it’s no less dangerous for that.’

  ‘So you don’t believe that the clergy here are colluding in whatever this is?’ George asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘At least not consciously. Although I do fear they may know who did do this.’

  ‘So they’re shielding them?’

  ‘They don’t know these people have done anything wrong,’ Mrs Hardwick said. ‘They’re just congregants, you know. Christians who always put a little something in the collection plate and who never rock the boat.’

  TWELVE

  Wilko had been given two special constables only, on account of the fact that EC4 was sparsely populated and Mumtaz was an adult MisPer. That Lee came with Wilko on the house to house wasn’t known to the City Police’s more senior officers. Besides, while the specials concentrated on the swanky new flats in the area, Lee knew where he and Wilko should go.

  Carter Court was entirely in darkness except for the lights from The Hobgoblin. Although nobody was outside the pub, it seemed to be pretty lively inside.

  Wilko said, ‘Sounds like they’re having a good time.’

  If Lee wasn’t too much mistaken, the music they were hearing sounded like some sort of obscure punk. It jarred in an area like this and, as they passed the pub, Lee caught a glimpse of a lot of men drinking and smoking – indoors. That remained illegal as far as he knew.

  Wilko knocked on the blue door and they both waited.

  ‘I don’t know about all this ghost stuff, Father George,’ Jordan said once they were out of the cathedral walking towards St Paul’s Tube station. ‘I mean, with respect, I know you …’

  ‘Oh, I don’t necessarily believe it myself, Constable,’ George said. ‘Just because I do what I do doesn’t mean I’m not critical about the existence of these things. I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen what you’d call a ghost, although I have been around some very lively poltergeists.’

  ‘And yet you sense evil?’

  ‘Oh that’s another matter,’ he said. ‘Ghosts are not evil in themselves. This is different. Of course the man I met may have been a ghost, I’m not ruling it out, but I think he was someone like me, someone who picks up on these things.’

  ‘So was Mrs Hardwick mad?’

  Father George shrugged. ‘What is mad?’ he said. ‘Personally, I don’t think so. I think she’s just someone who knows things. The way she volunteered to be alone with us so quickly makes me tend to think that her motives are genuine. And like her, I am inclined to believe that the motives of the clerics are in no way sinister. They want to preserve what they see as the benign status quo, not rock the boat.’

  ‘So you think the cathedral was left unlocked on purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ George said. ‘Maybe, but not in order to allow that terrible thing to happen. They are too detached, I feel, for that to be possible. And of course their story about having no set procedures for locking up may be true, but I doubt it, not these days.’

  ‘Why these days?’ Jordan asked.

  Father George laughed. ‘And there you show your youth, Constable,’ he said. ‘Back in the 1970s and 80s, way before you were born, there was no such thing as Health and Safety, no forms to fill out telling organisations like the NHS how you rated their service. Things just, for better or worse, jogged along. There were more industrial accidents in those days, but hey, at least you had no forms to fill out did you?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘Now fewer people die but, over the years, people my sort of age have continued to moan about things like Health and Safety, which they construe as something that limits their freedom. They also regard it as emanating solely from the European Union, which is not the case,’ George said. ‘And so hence we have the current destructive culture wars. Not just in the UK, but in the USA too. And there’s big money behind it – just not for the ordinary person on the street.’

  ‘And you think the priests are in collusion?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, they’re clerics, they don’t like change, whatever that may entail. What they don’t realise is that change is coming whether they like it or not, and not all of it is going to be for the better.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘because sometimes change means going backwards and that’s a very bad thing in my experience.’

  Jordan smiled. ‘You really do talk like Wilko a lot of the time, Father George,’ he said.

  George, who had started to head for St Paul’s Tube Station, looked back over his shoulder and said, ‘If you see Wilko before I do, tell him to ring me will you, please?’

  Was this gnome-like old man the one Loz and Habib had seen with their boy with the bloodied face? And while gnomes couldn’t, to Lee’s way of thinking, be trusted, there was also something of the cheery Father Christmas about Arthur Hobbs too. Mumtaz, he remembered, had found the old man unsettling.

  In answer to Wilko’s question about Mumtaz, and after he had seen her photograph, the old man said, ‘I seen her about but I don’t know her.’

  ‘She knew you,’ Wilko said. ‘Joined her in the pub together with a lady called Danielle. Pregnant apparently. You know her, Mr Hobbs?’

  He thought for a second and then said, ‘Nah.’

  ‘So you can’t point us in the direction of the lady who might know where Mrs Hakim is?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t know nobody round here now, not these days. All City types they are now, round here. Don’t talk to me.’

  ‘What about the blokes in the pub?’ Lee asked.

  ‘What, The Hob?’ he laughed. ‘I dunno mate, I don’t go there.’

  ‘Mrs Hakim said you went there when she was having lunch with this Danielle.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll go and get meself a pie there sometimes …’

  Wilko said, ‘Looked like your sort of place to me, Arthur.’

  ‘Ain’t.’

  ‘I see no “City types” in there tonight.’

  ‘Dunno about that.’

  ‘You sure you haven’t spoken to Mrs Hakim?’ Wilko held the photograph up again. It was always as well to give people the chance to change their minds. If indeed Arthur Hobbs was changing his mind.

  Eventually the old man said, ‘As I say, I see her about but I don’t know her and I ain’t eat with her. Ask young Bradley, he’s usually on the bar at The Hob during the day. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘We will. And Danielle?’

  ‘Don’t know her neither,’ the old man said. ‘Like I say, nobody round here talks to me no more.’

  Was it young Mr Walters who had changed his mind? Did he, during the comfort break, tell Colin to throw them some red meat? It could be a good tactic sometimes. But Brown, if not Pinker, didn’t trust it or him.

  ‘I dunno what her name was,’ Colin Macbeth said. His head was down, as if in shame.

  ‘Where’d you meet this woman?’ Brown asked.

  Macbeth shrugged.

  ‘You had sex with her,’ Brown said, ‘you must know where you met?’

  ‘I was pissed.’

  ‘Even so!’

  Colin Macbeth lapsed into silence.

  Pinker said, ‘Colin, I’m assuming this was in the right time frame? About nine months ago?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So beginning of this year?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So where …’

  ‘Look, my missus and me, we was going through a bad time at the beginning of this year,’ he said. ‘Wendy, my other half, she had a hysterectomy, made her weird.’

  ‘In what way, weird?’ Pinker asked.

  ‘She … Well, she went off it, you know …’

  ‘She lost interest in sex.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t excuse it, I know. But …’

  ‘You say you’d had a few,’ Pinker said. ‘Where’s your local?’

  This seemed to stump Colin Macbeth.

  ‘I may be wrong, but you look like the sort of bloke who has a local,’ Brown said. ‘I mean, we can ask around …’

  ‘Jolly Sailor,’ Macbeth said.

  There you go. Where’s that?’ Pinker asked.

  ‘Southwark Park Road.’

  ‘So maybe you met this girl there,’ Brown said.

  ‘What was she like?’ Pinker dived in.

  ‘Young.’

  ‘Young? How young?’

  ‘Not too young if that’s what you mean!’ Macbeth said.

  ‘So what’s too young then, Colin?’ Brown asked.

  Images of those she loved came into the utter blackness to torment her. Her parents, Shazia, Lee. Against a matt-black background she could see them easily and she wondered what they were thinking. To them she must have just disappeared. Lee had known where she’d gone but it was doubtful he knew this place.

  In her calmer moments, Mumtaz had reasoned that ‘this place’ had to be connected in some way to the house with the blue door. Was it underneath it? In a building close to it? Was this in fact some far-flung part of Arthur Hobbs’s house? He’d told her the place was massive, that it comprised rooms that went back to as early as the fourteenth century.

  And what about Danielle? She’d told her as much as she’d been able, in fact a bit too much, about what she’d been doing. And Lee knew about her. Surely if he was looking for her, he must have remembered the name Danielle?

  If she concentrated, Mumtaz could hear water. Not rushing water but more like the sound water makes when it laps against the shore. Was she close to the Thames? The old man’s house was near but not exactly close to the river. And yet who knew what ancient tributaries flowed under the city? She remembered that legend about that pre-Roman king, Lud, who had been buried on the banks of the Thames. Was his body down here with her somewhere?

  Nobody had come with either food or drink for her, and so she felt that she was probably not being held hostage for some reason. She’d just been left here, in a dank black room with a deep well. The only possible reason she could think of: because someone wanted her dead.

  ‘He’s called Henry Blizzard, he’s a brief,’ the young constable said. ‘His partner, the woman he lives with, she’s pregnant.’

  ‘And who told you this again?’ Wilko asked.

  The lad looked down at his notebook and said, ‘A Mr Alexander Perry. Him and his wife live next door. I tried calling on Mr Blizzard but he was out.’

  Lee said, ‘Where’d they live?’

  ‘It’s called The Wren, sir,’ the young man said. ‘Block of apartments on Carter Lane.’

  ‘Sounds about right from what Mumtaz told me,’ Lee said.

  There had been no reason for them to question Arthur Hobbs further after they left the house with the blue door. But then they’d moved on to The Hobgoblin. As soon as Wilko, in full uniform, had walked in, the place had taken on a hostile air. But then a lot of people were smoking and so when he didn’t so much as mention that, it came as a relief. Those inside the pub even took Wilko and Lee to meet the barman, Bradley, who had no recollection of Arthur Hobbs meeting with any ladies.

  Lee, for his part, had cast a critical eye over the punters. They were, he noted, all men, which was odd in the twenty-first century. Young, middle-aged and old, on the one hand they were a mixed bunch, while at the same time they seemed to be of a type. It was a type, furthermore, that looked out of place in the City. They were like him – their accents, the way they stood, some of their mannerisms. Working-class London, even if there were more than a few Rolexes on show. Money, though often discriminating on the basis of class, didn’t always.

  No one had seen or heard of Mumtaz. Wilko had allowed them to carry on smoking in peace. He’d told Lee it was because he ‘didn’t need the ag’ but maybe, at some time, he might need the goodwill not slapping a fine on the place might bring. Who knew?

  Now they were inside a building named after a famous architect, looking at a Mr Henry Blizzard. Probably in his mid-thirties, Mr Blizzard was a dark, good-looking man. What Lee would have called his ‘flat’ was a cool, pale, minimalist place. Clean to the point of clinical – Lee admired it. He’d only managed to kick his addiction to booze, many years ago, by cleaning his own place to within an inch of its tired, late-Victorian life.

  ‘Mr Blizzard, do you have a partner called Danielle?’ Wilko asked.

  Mr Blizzard frowned. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Can you just answer the question, please?’ Wilko said.

  Blizzard, a solicitor, considered his options and then said, ‘I do. Why?’

  Wilko took Mumtaz’s photograph out of his pocket and showed it to him. ‘We’re looking for this lady,’ he said. ‘Called Mumtaz Hakim. She’s missing, last seen in this vicinity. We’ve reason to believe Danielle may have spoken to her.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We tried to call earlier but you were out.’

  ‘We went to supper,’ Blizzard said. ‘Covent Garden.’

  ‘Can we speak to Danielle?’ Wilko asked.

  ‘Well, she’s lying down, she’s pregnant …’

  ‘We won’t take long.’

  He left, leaving the two of then standing in the bright white living area. Wilko looked at Lee and whispered, ‘Sounds promising.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Dust seemed to have been banished completely from this space. Did Danielle clean all the time? Surely this was professional work. Lee began to feel his skin crawl.

  Blizzard returned with a small blonde woman who was probably in her late twenties. She was hugely pregnant and had very swollen ankles.

  Wilko said, ‘Sorry, to disturb you, Miss er …’

  ‘Saint,’ she said. ‘Danielle Saint.’

  Jordan’s grandfather had gone to bed, which was good. If he was in bed he’d stop phoning him up all the time, wanging on about how he’d missed his tea which was now in the bin. Back at Bishopsgate, the young man used his time to Google myths and legends related to St Paul’s Cathedral. Father George, as Wilko had once told him, tended to have a profound effect on everyone who met him. His enthusiasm for the history of EC4 had been infectious. But Jordan wasn’t just back at the station to use his computer. Brown and Pinker had a suspect under interrogation, a man thought to be the father of the dead baby.