by Mark Roberts
‘I’d have thought that marked him down as a genuine priest,’ said Rosen.
‘Genuine but not best-serving the interests of the Church. To draw a sporting analogy, it was like a high-scoring premiership striker asking for a transfer to a pub team. Flint was under all kinds of pressure from all kinds of people to make him withdraw his request but nothing moved him, and then there was a meeting with the Holy Father. Private, behind closed doors, one on one. It was due to last ten minutes, but it went on for an hour and, when he came out, the Holy Father apparently said, Permission granted, request approved. Flint went to Kenya.’
Outside, rain ground against the windows.
‘So, Father Sebastian went to Kenya. What happened to him out there?’
‘He got lynched by a hysterical mob,’ said Alice, without emotion.
‘Pardon?’ Rosen sat up a little in his seat. ‘Why?’
‘Flint was an exorcist.’
David Rosen, a lifelong sceptic, kept his mouth firmly shut, reminding himself that the woman opposite had made her central life choices based on a faith that made little or no sense to him.
‘I know what you must be thinking,’ said Alice. ‘Demonic possession in any context adds up to mental illness by any other name.’
‘Why did he get lynched?’ asked David.
‘Flint went to Kenya, in his late twenties and in perfect health, but came back twelve months later as if he’d been smashed on death’s door. He was based in a rural district, in the highlands of south-western Kenya, north of Lake Victoria. It began with one case, one fifteen-year-old boy from a small band of nomadic farmers. The boy started with convulsive fits, then went into a catatonic state. His grandmother – she was the family doctor, lawyer, soothsayer – tried everything but the boy was out of it. Until . . . the sun comes up one morning. The boy’s gone. They went looking for him. No sign. He’d upped and left in the night. One night, two nights, three nights. On the third night, the hammer fell.
‘He came back and attacked his family in their beds. The other families got it when they heard the screams and came to intervene. The boy escaped from the mob but, as he did so, he took a machete. He came across a goatherd, a young boy. Then he came across the goats. They found what was left of the boy in twelve separate places. The news spread, and there was a panic. Sebastian was twelve miles away. Hundreds of men gathered to hunt down the demon-possessed child. They caught up with him and, just after that, Sebastian arrived.
‘This boy, he was on a rock, surrounded, raving at the crowd, machete swinging. No one would go near him but Sebastian. He commanded the spirit out of the boy. The spirit knew Sebastian. We’ve been waiting for you, it said through the boy. Then it left the boy. And everything went quiet. For a few days. Then, ten miles north, another case of child possession, another massacre.’
‘Grimly reassuring, isn’t it?’ said David Rosen.
‘What?’
‘It’s not just the developed countries that cop it when a teenager flips out.’
Rosen considered the contrast. If they’d been in Milwaukee, these ‘possessed’ children, armed with subautomatics, there’d have been a much bigger body count. They’d have gone into the school dining room and blasted indiscriminately. We blame TV and video games; they blame the devil, he concluded.
He asked, ‘How come Father Sebastian ended up being lynched?’
‘He had a powerful gift. Devils recognized him, just as they recognized Christ in the Gospels. They were scared of him. He cast out ten devils in three months, and each time the spirit was different, stronger. How did he end up getting lynched? The tenth devil took up residence in Sebastian, the tenth devil was the devil, Satan himself, according to the Kenyan first-hand accounts.’
‘Are you saying—’ Rosen chose his words as carefully as if he’d been picking nettles with his bare hands. ‘Are you saying that Father Sebastian followed the pattern of those other murderous, possessed men and women, and actually massacred people under the influence of an evil spirit?’
‘The story goes cold there. He was attacked by the mob, subjected to a brutal beating and left for dead. I can see your scepticism, Detective Rosen, it’s written all over your face.’
‘No, Alice, I believe you. I believe the surface of this history. I just don’t know how Sebastian Flint could survive that.’
She pulled out a placebo cigarette from her handbag and sucked hard on it. There was a lengthy silence.
‘So, he survived the lynch mob. What happened next?’ Rosen encouraged her to go on.
‘He was found three days later by a safari bus and was taken to the nearest medical centre. When his identity became clear, he was collected by a local diocesan representative.’ She paused. ‘I need to pay a visit,’ said Alice, standing. ‘Stay there.’ She wandered off to the ladies.
From a dirt road in Kenya to a monastery in Kent? It was the stuff of legends and Rosen hoped it wasn’t true. He spiralled quickly through a grim chain of thought. If it was true and Father Sebastian had acted like all the other demon-possessed people he had exorcised, that made him a mass murderer. And if that was the case, he should be extradited back to Kenya and the Kenyan police needed to reopen some cold cases.
Rosen ran through the logic of the detail in Alice’s story. How could a man at death’s door survive the heat of the African day and the cold of the tropical night with no water or shelter?
The wind pummelled the darkened windows. Alice returned and sat down.
‘If they find out I’ve told you all this, I could lose my job,’ she said.
‘They’ll never know.’
‘Anyway, he’s tucked away in St Mark’s now, safe and sound.’
‘I know,’ said Rosen. ‘I’ve been to see him.’
‘Really?’ She sounded amazed.
‘When I went there, I showed him my laptop because they don’t have computers at St Mark’s. I Googled his name. There was very little about him. There were brief replicated accounts of him dying in a road traffic accident in Kenya, but there was absolutely nothing about the story you’ve told me, Alice.’
‘I’m only telling you what I heard at the time, in the nineties.’
‘I’m not doubting you,’ said Rosen. ‘It’s just . . . How is it that he’s been reported as having died in a road traffic accident? The internet thrives on events such as you’ve recounted: devils, possession, murder, lynch mobs, miraculous survival . . . Yet there’s nothing on the net.’
‘This happened during the infancy of the internet and it happened a long way from here.’ She paused, waiting for Rosen to speak. Easily irritated by half-baked speculation about police corruption and manipulation of the truth, he remained silent about his conclusions on the behaviour of the Roman Catholic Church.
‘What do you think happened, David?’ asked Alice.
‘From what you’re saying,’ – Rosen spoke as if he found it hard to believe the words coming from his mouth – ‘the Catholic Church got Father Sebastian out of Kenya as quickly as possible.’
Alice nodded. ‘And?’
‘And stories about his death in an RTA were manufactured and posted on the internet during the early days of the World Wide Web to kill off the version you’ve told me.’
‘That’s about the top and bottom of it. We’ve covered up tens of thousands of child abuse cases, why not this?’
Why not a handful of dead Africans? thought Rosen. Especially as Flint had received summary justice from the mob. Especially as he had gone to Kenya with the pope’s blessing.
‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.
Alice shook her head. ‘No. Nothing else to add.’
Rosen thanked her sincerely and reassured her that he would protect her as a source of information.
He stood up. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else?’
‘Yes. I’ll have another large glass of red wine before you leave. And will you be seeing Father Sebastian again?’
‘Almost certainly.’
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‘Then be very, very careful. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. No one does.’
24
The idea for the hoist came from a TV medical documentary that Herod had taped and watched whenever he needed a distraction. He’d had the tape for years and, although he wasn’t keeping count, he knew he must have watched it from beginning to end at least two hundred times.
‘Saving Dannie’ detailed a day in the life of Laura Ashe, a single mother from Glasgow, and her daughter Dannie, a paraplegic eight-year-old with profound and multiple learning difficulties. Dannie, whose range of independent abilities extended to blinking, swallowing, filling her nappy and – sometimes – smiling at the sound of her mother’s voice when she sang, made Herod feel better.
To bath Dannie, Laura used a Faboorgliften hoist, a merciful wonder of Norwegian engineering. The Faboorgliften was strong and sturdy. It was a gift for carers too old, too young or too ill to handle heavy equipment and the heavier bodies that the hoist made manageable.
The documentary was tastefully filmed with no specific nudity. The Faboorgliften hoist acted much like a claw in an amusement arcade ‘Grab-a-Gift’ game. When the arm of the hoist descended, Laura fitted the sling, which was hooked to the arm by four clips, beneath Dannie’s body. With the aid of the hoist, Dannie could be lifted by her sciatic mother from wheelchair to bath to mobile bed.
When the will of Satan was made known to him, his first step on the path of faith was to order a Faboorgliften hoist, just like the one used by Dannie’s self-deprecating mother.
Long distance and direct to Faboorg Medical Suppliers in Oslo, he gave his Mastercard number and was asked, for the purposes of market research, ‘Is the sling for an elderly relative? Your mother, maybe?’
Now, he wheeled the hoist alongside the flotation tank and flicked open the locks on the side of the lid, wondering if the vibration caused would alert the carrier inside the tank.
On the sling, he’d placed a hypodermic needle, its chamber filled with Pentothal, an insurance policy against futile but tiresome resistance.
He waited a moment, to see if there would be some idle, worn-out attempt to raise the lid of the tank but there was nothing, absolutely no sign, and he was assailed by a moment of blind terror: Carrier dead, baby’s soul departed.
He raised the lid quickly and something snapped.
One of the locks had not opened fully. The snapping seemed to echo. The body of the lock buckled and a piece of the catch flew away, clinking as it landed on the ground.
He lifted the lid and looked down on her.
One hand covered the curve of her womb, one hand reached out. For what? he wondered. The fingers of her outstretched hand curled in the stillness and her mouth moved but was soundless.
Her lips continued to move but the probing hand sank back into the saline. She was so removed from the reality of where she was and what was happening, more so than the others, that he wondered if the part of her brain that computed language had already started to decay, a process of living death inside the carrier.
Each time, he was getting better at piping in less oxygen to the tank: just enough to sustain the body and blow the mind.
She didn’t need all the functions of her brain to sustain the soul of the life inside her. As soon as she was dead, he had minutes to remove the child, minutes in which the retained soul – still unblemished by original sin – swam in the flesh of the infant.
Herod unhooked the cloth catches of the sling and fed it beneath Julia’s body.
‘Bh-rhh!’ It was just a mental sneeze from her battered brain, but she had been the first to utter anything, whether consciously or not. She was further into her pregnancy than the others and it was difficult to weave the sling underneath her distended belly.
He hooked the sling’s catches to the arm of the hoist.
Beneath her skin, the infant moved, blunt fumblings under her belly, waves in the womb.
He depressed the lift button and with a comforting, Norwegian-engineering-standard whirr, Julia’s body rose from the sensory deprivation chamber, hanging in the air like a cow being transferred from ship to shore, swinging slightly, her arms and feet dangling down.
He looked at the sensory deprivation chamber, feeling a weight settle on his shoulders. He was used to cleaning it out because they all fouled it. Eighty kilos of salt and gallons of fresh water were easy to come by. But the broken lock? He was useless at DIY but would have to try to mend the lock somehow.
A surge of hot anger shot up inside him.
She stared at him with empty eyes.
‘You know that greedy, money-grabbing plumber that you were married to, Julia?’ He paused, rubbing the side of his neck. ‘Do you want to know something? It’s quite ironic or maybe just a coincidence but your husband . . .’
And just as quickly as the anger surged within him, a coldness replaced it.
There was no need to speak to the carrier, so why speak? There was no need to have feelings, so why feel? There was no need for opinion, so why think? All he needed to do was act.
So he acted.
Julia Caton’s body descended onto the table at 4.13 a.m. Times and dates were irrelevant in Satanic worship but he couldn’t escape his compulsion to pay attention to detail. He then produced the oldest piece of surgical equipment, the first piece of kit he’d ever owned, from the battered doctor’s case he’d carried and loved since his two years as a medical student attached to St Thomas’s.
No other doctor, no other medical student had one of these, but he was special.
Memory. Act. Ritual. Worship.
It was a thin piece of metal, three millimetres in diameter at the base, one at the sharpened tip; cut down from its original thirty-eight centimetres in length, it was now twenty centimetres long. It was his childhood in a single artefact.
He had a mental snapshot of a bicycle, its wheel turning, a broken spoke pointing out at the sky, and he heard himself as he lay on the ground, a crying child.
Julia’s eyes rolled and her lips made a single smacking noise, as if blowing a kiss.
He adjusted her position, swung the sling over the table and pressed the ‘down’ button. She touched the table feet first, followed by her backside and spine. She seemed to squirm in the sling and said, ‘Garld!’
Her eyes stopped rolling, became still, as he unhooked the straps from the hoist and the rest of her body slammed on the table like something dead. She shivered, and the surface of her skin was raised in goosebumps.
He straightened her legs and placed at her side the arm that flopped over the table’s edge, as he surveyed her swollen form. She was dehydrated so that the bladder wouldn’t get in the way of the womb.
He drew a straight line with his finger from her right hip to her left hip. Once open, the womb could not be missed.
And he held the tip of the spoke against her chest cavity.
Julia Caton let out a cry that froze him, and then there was a noise of running liquid.
Fluid poured across the table and dripped onto the floor. Her waters had broken.
He plunged the spoke into her heart.
At 4.17 a.m., Julia Caton let out a long sigh and died.
He raised his sharpened scalpel and gave thanks to Alessio Capaneus, Satanic prophet, before turning his attention to the unborn.
And the last of her oxygen passed to a little boy who would have been called Jamie.
25
Rosen was drifting into what felt like a deep but troubled sleep when he felt Sarah getting out of their bed and heard her walking through the darkness of their room.
‘You OK, love?’
‘Yeah, just going to the loo. Go to sleep . . .’ Her voice tailed off as she moved in the direction of the bathroom.
He felt himself rise from the tug of sleep. Since he’d picked her up from school, he’d noticed she’d seemed unsettled, distracted, a bit unhappy, even. He’d asked her as gently as he could if there was anything wrong but sh
e’d insisted she was fine, just a little tired, and he’d told her she ought to quit as teacher-governor: it was a thankless and time-consuming role, when her life was already cluttered enough.
He opened his eyes wide and blinked, growing accustomed to the darkness around the digital display on his bedside clock. Halfway between midnight and one o’clock in the morning, he wondered how Julia was, whether she was alive still; alive and terrified or just plain dead.
Sarah was taking her time in the bathroom.
Rosen waited, rolled over into her space to keep it warm for her and saw the curtains twitched by a stray March breeze. Original windows were Sarah’s passion; he’d have to press the case for double glazing sometime. As he waited, he was seized by acute anxiety.
Unsettled, distracted: was she on the downward curve? Was this the first step towards illness, a recurrence of the depression that had crippled her?
He got out of bed, walked to the bathroom and tapped on the door.
‘Are you OK, love?’
She didn’t reply.
‘OK if I come inside?’
She didn’t reply, and his apprehension rocketed.
He pushed the door open, slowly so as not to alarm her.
‘Sarah, is everything—?’
She stood between the door and the toilet, with something white in her hand, plastic, her face streaming with tears.
‘Sarah, what’s wrong?’
By way of answer, she held out her hand, the one with the device in it, and Rosen recognized it for what it was. This was confirmed by the rectangular box in the sink with the words ‘ClearView digital pregnancy testing kit’ printed across it.
‘Sarah, what is this?’
She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a sob from the heart that cut him in two. A massive heat rose up behind his eyes and the weight of their grief and despair pressed down inside him.
