The Sixth Soul

by Mark Roberts

  ‘I’ll be there. What time?’

  ‘Ten o’clock, St Thomas’s.’

  He smiled, while thinking about how much he had to do tomorrow. He was going to have to be up two hours earlier than he’d hoped.

  ‘Can you make it? Realistically? If you can’t, I’ll go alone.’

  Guilt dug its claws into him and shook him around for fun.

  ‘I’ll go into the incident room early, set a few things up, delegate and meet you there at the hospital. Quarter to ten, OK?’

  She softened and smiled. ‘OK.’

  ‘Which clinic?’

  ‘Antenatal, would you believe. I thought you’d dismissed me, thrown me down the pecking order of important things to do.’

  ‘I don’t always get it right, Sarah, in fact, I feel as if I rarely do, but you’re my number one priority, always. It’s just sometimes . . . It’s like I have to hack my way through the jungle just to be with you. A policeman’s wife’s lot isn’t always a happy one.’

  ‘Better than being married to a bloody teacher.’ She smiled again.

  ‘You’re right there!’

  ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  ‘I need a bath.’

  ‘I know you do,’ she said, sniffing the air between them.

  As he turned off the bath taps, David heard his wife softly snoring from the bedroom and made a strict mental note to himself not to fall asleep in the alluring warmth of the bath. Sinking into its embrace, he closed his eyes and started developing ideas on what to do with the CCTV footage from the British Library: how and when it would be best to release it.

  Rosen pictured Dwyer and Flint in the British Library and thought, Let the mind games begin.

  43

  At seven o’clock in the morning, Rosen found a pen drive on his desk and a note from Gold, explaining that Karen Jones had left the stick for him the day before and wanted to see him. The words, ‘Had her knickers in a bit of a twist’ were underlined twice.

  When he called her, Karen Jones was already on her way into work early, to try to catch him first thing. Within an hour, she stood with him in front of the assembled murder investigation team and a troupe of twelve officers drafted in to assist with the trawl through the Capaneusian Bible.

  Rosen began with an account of the meeting at Charing Cross Station with Father Sebastian and his subsequent disappearance from St Mark’s.

  He showed the images from the John Ritblat Gallery of Flint with another suspect, believed to be Paul Dwyer.

  Baxter arrived in the room just as a question came from the team.

  ‘The Capaneusian Bible. We’ve got in on a website, right?’

  ‘I’ll pass you over to Karen.’

  Karen went on: ‘Yes and no. The Capaneusian Bible is an inverted Bible. We have the whole of the Old Testament but I can’t get into the New Testament. The password for the website is protected and I can’t as yet crack it. I’ve called in help from Steve Lewis from Scotland Yard’s Police Central e-Crime Unit.’

  Across the room, Rosen saw Baxter shake his head. Karen handed over to Rosen again.

  ‘We’re going to have to root through the books of the Old Testament while Karen gets on with cracking open the New Testament. The last line of the last book of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi, states that the New Testament will be made known only to true believers, and that in the New Testament instructions will be given to disciples down the ages and across the world. Is Dwyer getting his orders from the New Testament of Capaneus? Is Flint giving him access to it? What can we pick up from the Old Testament?’

  Rosen handed out a set of papers, a memo with instructions. ‘Take one and pass these on; you’re each responsible for three books of the Old Testament of Alessio Capaneus. Read through, make notes, dig out anything you can, stick any names that crop up on the NCP, run it through HOLMES. If you’re stuck, Mike Marsh is here to help Carol Bellwood process entries into HOLMES.’

  Apart from the rustling of paper, there was the silent diligence of an examination hall.

  ‘David?’ said Feldman. ‘We heard back yet on the DNA from the water bottle?’

  ‘Blank, sorry to say. OK,’ said Rosen, ‘let’s crack on.’

  44

  Sarah’s phone was turned off. At twenty past ten, as Rosen hurried from his car to St Thomas’s – heart jittering and head pounding with the stress of being late – he tried to call her for the fourth time since he’d left the incident room. He was running woefully behind. When he walked into St Thomas’s reception, he was faced with a dilemma: go to the clinic and try to find Sarah, or stay at the reception and intercept her as she made her way out of the huge building.

  He opted to stay at the main doors, hoping she wouldn’t use one of the other, less obvious routes out of the hospital building.

  For a whole half-hour, human life, in all its stages of glory and decay, passed him by. He reached into his pocket again for his phone, knowing that in a hospital setting hers would still be turned off, and that phoning her was as futile as it was desperate. Still, he called her and left a voicemail message.

  ‘I’m in reception at St Thomas’s. It’s moving on to eleven. I’ve been here since ten-twentyish, I’m really, really sorry . . .’

  The word sorry echoed sourly within his skull and, as it faded into silence, he saw her face in the oncoming tide of strangers. She was smiling and looked calm.

  He raised a hand, waved, but she didn’t see him. He walked towards her and her eyes met his. For a moment, it was as if she didn’t recognize him. Her eyes flicked right and back again in the space of a second. But then she smiled. She wasn’t angry with him, which made Rosen even angrier with himself.

  ‘Sarah, I’m so, so sorry . . .’

  She held up a hand.

  ‘Do you know what? Everything’s OK. It’s a perfectly healthy pregnancy, that’s what the consultant Mr Gilling-Smith said; everything’s good and the baby’s fine. I saw the main man himself and his senior registrar, Dr Tom Dempsey.’

  Relief swept through Rosen and he felt his whole body relax as the news sank in. He had many questions but, for a few moments, he was tongue-tied by happiness.

  Finally, he managed, ‘Did they do any tests on you?’

  ‘They took samples in Phlebotomy to see if my bloods are OK, but the consultant said all seems well. He agrees with the scan: I’m twelve weeks. I’ve got to go back to school. Go back to work and I’ll see you tonight. And don’t beat yourself up about missing the appointment.’

  Rosen grabbed Sarah by the hand and held onto it tightly as they walked out of the hospital into the late London morning.

  ——

  FIFTEEN METRES AWAY, a man stood still and silent, watching the middle-aged couple emerge from the hospital entrance. The watcher’s blue eyes shone at the moving picture of a handful of moments of marital happiness.

  As the Rosens, still hand in hand, merged into the ebbing crowd, the watcher took out his mobile phone and made a call.

  The phone rang briefly.

  The ringing stopped.

  A voice said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘That you, DC Harrison?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Daniel Taylor, Greater Manchester Constabulary. You’re a reliable source of information, mate. I like that, I like that a lot. Listen, I’ve got a job for you to do. OK?’

  45

  When Rosen returned to Isaac Street Police Station, there was the atmosphere of a library in the normally noisy incident room. Detectives sat either alone or in pairs, hunched over printouts from the Capaneusian Bible. Karen Jones waited by Rosen’s desk where a thin, pale man was seated, working at a laptop.

  ‘David,’ said Jones, ‘this is Steve Lewis from Scotland Yard’s e-Crime Unit.’

  Lewis looked up from the laptop and, without speaking, shook Rosen’s hand, then typed in ‘www.a.acalpha.org’.

  A black screen. A red book emerged from the darkness, looking old and battered. Lewis clicked ‘enter’ an
d the screen turned black. Points of light appeared, stars trapped in the night sky, pinpoints swelling into whole words: books of the old testament.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Lewis to Jones. Rosen felt a presence behind him. Bellwood, Corrigan, Feldman and Gold had now gathered around his desk, taking it all in.

  ‘The devil’s side of the story. Herod’s bedtime reading. Genesis. Exodus. Leviticus. They’re all here.’

  In one corner of the screen, the word ‘Continue’. He clicked it and the image turned to red sand, which blew away to reveal the name of every book of the Old Testament.

  ‘Take Genesis, for instance,’ suggested Jones.

  ‘What’s the gist?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘The Capaneusian Bible takes a Biblical style and infuses it with the heart and soul of a guttersnipe tabloid journalist. The Garden of Eden was a twenty-four-hour drunken orgy, an abomination. Adam and Eve were created in God’s image for his carnal gratification. According to Capaneus, wild animals were the physical incarnations of angels, put on earth to dominate and oppress humankind. Satan, the serpent, felt great compassion for Adam and Eve. When Eve confessed to Adam that she loved him and not God, God flew into a black rage and passed a death sentence on Adam to be fulfilled by the lions. God, you see, loved sport. Adam went into hiding. When Satan found Eve crying in the Garden of Eden, he gathered together the friendly animals – the other serpents, the jackals, the hyenas – and, under Satan’s guidance, they helped Adam and Eve escape from the wrath of God. The wrath of God was turned on Satan and the other animals who’d been kind to the human beings.’

  ‘How does that make Herod go out and kill women and their babies?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘Directly, it doesn’t. That’s where you come in.’

  She pointed to the screen of Lewis’s laptop, at the word ‘More’.

  He clicked ‘More’. Black screen. From the centre, a blossoming red light from which appeared the words: ‘ To read the New Testament, type in your password,’ alongside a box.

  ‘And the password needs cracking?’ asked Lewis, looking at Rosen.

  ‘We believe this is where Herod’s been getting his ideas. Can you help?’

  Lewis reached into his pocket and took out a pen drive. ‘Come back in, say, half an hour.’

  ——

  LATER, ROSEN RETURNED to his desk, where Lewis and Jones were in tight discussion.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘I suspect this site’s got some serious encryption software,’ said Lewis. ‘It kind of reminds me of the NSA mainframe.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s the IT used by the US government’s intelligence gathering services. It’s not using biometric screening, fingerprint or retinal access, but whoever’s put this together is a serious maths head. It’s running its security off a mutating algorithmic program. NSA security programs change on a daily basis. This is changing every few minutes. Devilishly clever.’

  ‘Is there anything you can do?’ asked Rosen.

  ‘Yes.’ Lewis pulled up a briefcase and took out a black pen drive. ‘Something I’ve been working on for another department. It’s not quite finished but it’s operational. We’ll run it from my laptop. It’ll watch your Capaneus website and as soon as a user logs on with a password, it’ll relay that right back to my laptop. The moment that happens, it’ll send me an alert and I’ll be straight on to you. Then we’ll be able to get into the New Testament.’

  Rosen thought about the website and the individuals who would have access to the New Testament of the Capaneusian Bible. There was one in particular.

  ‘In that case, we’ll know exactly when Dwyer’s online.’

  46

  Herod.

  It was all drifting away from him. Beginning with time, the length of hours and the value of calendar days, the quality of night and the shifting colour of daylight.

  A pulse of doubt beat within the heart of certainty.

  Fifteen hours lying on the floor at one stretch, with the clearest conviction that he had merely stumbled and paused to catch his breath but would rise again in a matter of seconds, pushed on by the awful thought: Alessio Capaneus had all been a dream.

  The thought caused an acute pain in his chest and he imagined his heart breaking, literally snapping like a dried-out husk.

  He pulled himself up from the floor.

  ‘I believe in Capaneus, the One True Prophet of the Lord Satan . . . I believe . . .’

  Leaving up the hatch to the basement – his fear of confined spaces had returned – he walked backwards down wooden steps into the subterranean space where the hoist remained ready by the table in the dim artificial light, central to the trio of windowless rooms.

  The mobile air-conditioning unit hummed, a reassuring sound that seemed to murmur to him, ‘It’s real.’

  He opened the half-door on the wall facing the staircase. Beyond, it stank of earth, the wetness of a world fit only for worms and crawling creatures. The farmer had made a good job of compacting the walls of the tunnel with sand and cement to produce a hard-finished surface that made it possible to scramble to the manhole on the surface of the farmyard without pulling away handfuls of soil and dead roots. But on the three occasions he’d made the journey from basement to farmyard through the tunnel, he’d hated acting like a sightless bug.

  He closed the half-door on the tunnel and wandered into the meditation suite where the sensory deprivation chamber remained sadly idle, minus Julia, a coffin for the living without its mentally unravelling carrier. It was strange how the hollowness inside him shrank when the carriers were present, strange how it swelled again when they were gone.

  He needed the comfort, the total affirmation that his efforts had not been in vain, that he had laboured well in the service of Satan under the guidance of Alessio Capaneus.

  So he walked into the room where the souls were trapped.

  He took his first lingering look at Julia’s foetus, Baby Caton. In spite of the waters breaking, he’d been the easiest to deliver. Herod felt a rush of pride in his growing surgical skills that blew out the fire of doubt that had burned him as he lay upstairs with his face to the floor. His doubts in Capaneus now seemed as ridiculous as the fear of his mother’s footsteps in his nightly dreams.

  On a wide shelf on the wall, six cylindrical jars were set out in a line, filled to the brim with formaldehyde. In five of the six jars, there were foetuses.

  What was real was before his eyes. The five souls awaiting sacrifice, and the one empty space awaiting the sixth soul.

  He pursed his lips at Baby Caton and wondered, what song was in his soul?

  And, he wondered, what songs would burst forth from these souls when they were sacrificed?

  He moved to the sixth and final jar, stared into the formaldehyde awaiting the sixth foetus, the sixth soul, and, in the dim light, saw his own face reflected in the curve of the glass, his features blurred, his doubts dispersed.

  47

  Rosen stared at the faceless model construction that John Mason had created based on the ear print and the single hair found in the loft of Julia Caton’s house. He pored over the range of images of the man who he assumed was Paul Dwyer, captured at the British Library, pictures of him alone as well as with Father Sebastian.

  Rosen needed to think very carefully about which images to release, and in what order. Getting the choice right was a matter of life and death.

  He looked at the one of Dwyer, enraptured as he left the toilets, then at the image of Dwyer, dead-eyed and alone on his way into the British Library.

  Rosen glanced at the clock on the incident room wall: a quarter past ten. Rosen felt gluey with tiredness; it really was time for home. But he stayed where he was, gazing at the images, racked by choice.

  One by one, he separated all those of Flint and moved them to the edges of his desk so that they were out of his eyeline, leaving only those of Dwyer on his own: in front of the faceless, eyeless, mouthless, soulless m
odel created by Mason.

  And, as time moved on towards eleven o’clock, Rosen came to a decision about the release of the CCTV images.

  The strategy would be simple.

  He would isolate Dwyer. He would use the imagery to make Dwyer feel alone.

  ‘Sir!’

  Rosen was stirred from the depths of his thoughts by the unwelcome sound of Harrison’s voice. He looked up slowly.

  ‘You’re working late, Robert.’

  ‘You gave me something I could really get my teeth into. The Church of the Living Light.’

  Rosen noticed that Harrison had a file of papers in his hand, as thick as a telephone directory.

  ‘Sit down, Robert.’

  Harrison placed his papers on Rosen’s desk and wheeled over a chair.

  ‘The Church of the Living Light, then, Robert?’

  Harrison sat down, his gaze meeting Rosen’s directly.

  ‘Lots of stuff on the internet to begin with. In a nutshell, it was a cult dressed up as an evangelical Christian Church. The head guy was a Pastor James “Jim” Walsh. To begin with, all seemed right as rain: lots of good works in the East End of London, a growing congregation, soup for the hungry, solace for the lonely, nothing to alarm anyone. Pastor Jim, however, didn’t have a single qualification to run a church; he was a self-made minister who’d actually ordained himself on the sex offenders’ wing at Durham. I managed to track down a woman called Jane Rice, who coordinates Unlock, a charity for survivors of cults. She’s elderly now, but she’s still all there.’ He tapped the side of his head with a patronizing calm. Rosen thought, You’ll be old yourself one day.

  Harrison reached into his file and pulled out the top ten sheets.

  ‘This is a transcript of the whole interview I conducted with her this afternoon.’

  ‘How’d you get it typed so quickly, Robert?’

  ‘I did it myself, sir.’ Harrison handed the pages to Rosen. ‘I’ve highlighted all the key information.’

  ‘Thanks. How did you get on with Jane Rice?’