by A. N. Wilson
A. N. Wilson
MY NAME IS LEGION
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Picador ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
To Sarah Sands
And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.
But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee, by God, that thou torment me not.
For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.
Mark 5: 5–9
The body which lay beneath the thin white linen sheet was in pain. Only occasionally did groans or whimpers come from the bed. Then, one of the women would try to dab his lips with water, but though he sucked the moisture with the desperation of a baby, his face remained tormented. The torment, however, was a controlled torment, and this was what struck all who saw it as so powerful, so strange. One of the younger monks said that he knew now what it must have been to witness the Crucifixion. The agony on that bed appeared, to this young observer, to be offered to God, and shown back to them: a pattern of how to die. But much of the agony was spiritual. None of them could doubt that, as he lay there, he underwent mental suffering which matched the wounds in his body. Sometimes, he opened his eyes and looked up at the crucifix which hung on the wall opposite the end of the bed. His large blue eyes, full of tears, gazed at the figure on the Cross.
He had sinned much, though quite what those sins were, only God knew – God, and the monk who had been to hear his last confession. There were others, evidently, prepared in their different capacities to rush to judgement.
The police had suggested that he should be taken to a prison hospital and held in custody until the various allegations and counter-allegations could be investigated. He stood, as far as they were aware, suspected of a string of terrible crimes: the abuse, and the murder, of a minor; involvement in terrorist activity; possession of illegal firearms; conspiracy to murder.
A lawyer, the family lawyer of his brother, the Earl of Longmore, was able to point out, however, that he had not been charged with any of these crimes, and that there was no evidence against him. Yes, they had seen him shoot the boy. There were dozens of witnesses to that. But though he was illegally in possession of his old service revolver, his shooting had saved another human life, and would certainly be defended as a justified homicide.
The tall, military gentleman – a brigadier working for the Ministry of Defence, but clearly an intelligence officer – had, against the better judgement of the infirmarian, been allowed into the room to sit beside the bed to interrogate the dying man.
The questions had all been, if not ignored, then quietly sidestepped.
‘Can you hear me, Father, Father Chell?’
The Brigadier’s upper class voice was gentle, but insistent.
‘I’m sure you would want the truth to be known.’
From the bed, a murmur, perhaps an expression of pain, perhaps an ‘mm’ of agreement.
‘Did you know anything about the plan to assassinate the General? The bomb in the hotel?’
‘Mm.’
‘You did? You knew who was going to organize the attack? Was it Thimjo, or one of the other Albanians? It wasn’t an Irish device.’
‘Mmm …’
‘The bomb in Bermondsey was defused – the one in the newspaper building,’ said the Brigadier. He spoke in such a quiet tone that he might have been relaying cricket scores. ‘We’ve a fairly clear idea who planted that one. But please, Father. You have made your peace with God, man. If you know something which can prevent any more innocent people being killed … The bomb in the hotel didn’t just kill the General, you know. There was the waiter. One of the women lost an arm – the women who were with him in his room. Surely you don’t want to die with that on your conscience. If there’s anything you know, anything at all …’
There was silence from the bed. Then the great blue eyes opened again.
‘Mother of Mercy,’ said Vivyan Chell quietly.
‘You’re talking about Mrs d’Abo? The mother of Mercy Topling?’ asked the Brigadier.
The old grey head on the pillows nodded slightly but then murmured, ‘Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail our life our sweetness and our hope …’
The Brigadier looked sheepish. The prayer was obviously unknown to him, but he was respectful – more than respectful, evidently awestruck in the presence of the monk’s stoicism. The dying man was not just a monk. He had been awarded the Military Cross for valour when a major in the Coldstream Guards.
‘To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve …’
‘Quite,’ said the Brigadier, quietly. ‘Perhaps, anyway, if any names occur to you …’
‘Mother of Mercy …’
‘We would offer them amnesty in exchange for the explosives, the weapons.’
‘Is Joshua dead – little Joshua?’
‘Yes – General Bindiga is dead. There has been a regime change in Zinariya.’
‘Lennie dead?’
‘Lord Mark is alive. General Bindiga is dead.’
The monk on the bed closed his eyes, and for the first time in days, a smile played on his face. The interview was over, and the Brigadier never heard him speak again.
There were rules in the house about women; ever since Kelvedone, a cavernous, ugly brick mansion, had been turned into a religious house in the early twentieth century, women had been banished from most of its rooms. They were allowed into a small chamber near the front door, to seek advice or spiritual counsel from one or other of the monks. No woman had ever dined in the refectory since the house became a monastery. None had ever entered a monk’s room. None had entered the infirmary.
But now it was the twenty-first century, and the figure lying beneath the white sheet was no ordinary man. The Superior of the community had not even consulted with his brother-monks. When Father Vivyan’s body had been brought back to the mother-house of the order, groaning and bullet-wounded, the young, dark-haired, intense woman had been with him in the ambulance. It would hardly have been possible to turn her away at the door. Later, when the black woman had arrived, it was equally difficult to think of a good reason why the rules should not be broken. The black woman was the mother of the boy Father Vivyan had killed.
‘How many more parish women are going to follow?’ had been the weary misogynistic question of one of the older fathers. It was a rhetorical question, though. The monks had no intention of allowing crowds into the sickroom of a mortally ill man. It was necessary, apart from anything else, to keep out the press. One of the papers – the Legion, inevitably, against which he had waged his lonely war – had asked, on the day after Father Vivyan was shot, IS THIS THE MOST EVIL MAN IN BRITAIN?
The dark-haired, intense young woman, Rachel, had wept when she saw the headline. The Father Superior, w
ho was allowing her to stay in one of the guest houses, said nothing. Later in the day, he pointed her to a passage in one of Father Vivyan’s devotional books:
The Cross does not make us despair, as Darwin might do. It says, rather, ‘The only sort of God worth worshipping would be a God, not of Absolute Justice, but of Absolute Love. You only find out whether such a God could be, not by arguing, but by living the life of Christ; by dying with Him to self, and by rising with Him to glory. Then we have to become the loving gods of creation. We have to animate the pitiless universe with love, endow the impersonal infinite with personhood. Then the human waste, whom Nature casts aside as statistics – a million famine victims here, a thousand killed here by flood or earthquake – becomes the mass of individuals, queuing with rice bowls or sleeping bags at our doors, calling in our hearts for the love of Christ.
Rachel, the intense young woman, handed the book back to the Superior without a word. Later, writing to thank him for allowing her to be with Father Vivyan to the end, she confided that she was an incurable atheist, to whom such words meant nothing.
The other woman, some ten years older, Mercy Topling, was a very different figure. When the monks discovered who she was – the mother of the dead boy – they had feared that she had come to cause trouble. She was a plump, sensual-looking person, whose face, all the time she sat beside the bedside, was wet with tears. She did not sob. She wept silently. Sometimes, in spite of protests from the Brother Infirmarian, she stroked the brow of the semi-conscious monk. Sometimes, she placed her hand beneath the sheet.
‘Oh, Vivyan, Vivyan, we’ve lost our boy … we’ve lost our darling boy,’ she would whimper. Sometimes her hands moved beneath the sheet with the words ‘my lovely, lovely man’. None of the monks who had ministered to Father Vivyan discussed the implications of these words at the time. They did not wish to do so. The truth was that Father Vivyan was viewed at best ambivalently by the rest of the community. Though a monk of their order – the Community of the Holy Redeemer – he had hardly spent any time at Kelvedone since joining them. After his initial period of training in the mother-house, he had returned to his beloved Africa, where his life-work had made him famous. Lately, as almost all newspaper readers by now knew, he had returned to Crickleden, to run a parish in south London.
No small community, college, family, monastery takes completely kindly to one of its members becoming a star. Father Vivyan’s fame brought lustre to the order, and in this the monks to some degree basked. Most of them, however, had been known to say that ‘there are over a hundred and fifty members of the order worldwide, and it is a pity if the only one who ever gets mentioned is Father Vivyan.’
Rachel Pearl, the one whom the Superior thought an intense young woman, realized in retrospect that the scene of Father Vivyan’s dying in the monastery had parallels with the death of the staretz, Father Zossima, at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov:
Though the late elder had won over many hearts, more by love than by miracles, and had gathered round him a mass of loving adherents, none the less, in fact, rather the more on that account, he had awakened jealousy and so had come to have bitter enemies, secret and open, not only in the monastery, but in the world outside it.
Had Father Vivyan been killed by his own pride: by his belief that he could ‘save’ a dangerous and mentally unstable boy? Had he been killed by his own fanatical political posture, his alliance with those whom the rest of the world saw as terrorists? That was clearly what the old Brigadier felt, the tall, genial man who sat beside the bed, trying to pump Vivyan for information. Or had he been destroyed by the popular press, and in particular by Lennox Mark, the proprietor of the Legion? Perhaps by a bit of all these things.
The time of watching beside the bed was seemingly interminable. When the end came, as it happened, there were quite a number there. It was dawn. Old Monty Longmore, Vivyan’s brother, knelt beside the bed in an attitude of prayer which would not have been out of place in a medieval altar-piece. Mercy Topling knelt on the other side, holding Vivyan’s hand. Rachel Pearl, Brigadier Courtenay and a number of monks stood at the end of the bed. When the whimpering from the body ceased, and with it the breathing, the Superior began to recite the prayer ‘Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul’. There was a moment of intense calm which all present would recollect for the rest of their lives. It was a calm broken, seconds later, by the insistent ringing of the front door-bell.
It was a young novice who opened the door. He saw the Bentley pulled up on the gravel. The paunchy, short figure in a light grey suit smelt of the frankfurter sausage with onions which he had been consuming in the back of his limousine.
‘Tell me I’m not too late,’ he gasped. ‘Tell me I’m not too late. I must see him, I must see him.’
‘But … there must be no more visitors … the Father Superior …’
So it was that within minutes of Father Vivyan’s soul leaving its body and soaring God alone knew where, to purgatorial shade or celestial bliss, the silence of that religious house was broken. Even in the infirmary, which was at the back of the house and yards away from the front door, they could hear the coarse accents of Lennie Mark shouting, ‘Don’t you realize – you CUNT – don’t you realize who I FUCKING am!’
PART ONE
ONE
There had been no witnesses, but it was easy enough for the police to reconstruct what had happened. Whoever perpetrated the outrages – the attack on the delivery boy, the unlawful entry, the thefts, the threatened assault on Mrs Mark herself – must have been watching the house for several days. They would have seen the same delivery boy, on the same motor-scooter, arrive from the same large Knightsbridge shop at the same front gates on three successive afternoons.
Granville Stoppard did not reckon to operate a takeaway or same-day delivery service; but Mrs Mark was Mrs Mark, and this had been an emergency. Okay, she had agreed on the first day it happened, she was ringing after the Food Hall had closed. Surely that did not stop the fool of a man from getting her a pint of milk. And while he was about it – lobsters. Three lobsters. A dinner party? What the fucking hell had it to do with him if she was giving a dinner party? As it happened, the lobsters were for her husband to eat in the bath before they went out to dinner. Oh, and she had run out of cigarettes.
More to the point, she had run out of servants. So, the first day, and the second, and the third, Granville Stoppard had been on hand to supply Mrs Mark and her household needs. They would not open up the Food Hall after hours for Everyone. But Mrs Mark was Someone. And the manager knew what view would be taken in The Daily Legion, The Sunday Legion and Gloss if the capriciously ordered deliveries were not supplied. No lobsters (whether or not available after the closure of the Food Hall), no semi-skimmed milk, no Dundee cakes and Vacherin cheese (‘My husband likes to spread Vacherin on Dundee cake’) and it was easy to imagine the damaging publicity which would ensue.
Mary Much, the editor of Gloss, would plan the long-term damage: articles in the opinion-forming glossy dismissing Granville Stoppard as the John Lewis of the new millennium, a place for suburban aunties, where the truly chic would not have been seen dead. Meanwhile, in the women’s pages of the Legions, Daily and Sunday, articles would remind readers that only has-beens went to Granville Stoppard. The paid gossip columnists – ‘Creevey’ of the Sunday, ‘Dr Arbuthnot’ of the Daily – would bristle with stories of famous people closing their accounts at Granville Stoppard. It was even possible to imagine them commissioning L. P. Watson to write one of his ‘outrageous’ columns about the venerable old store. The manager would not put it past them to infiltrate reporters from The Daily Legion, posing as members of the human race, to enter the shop as customers and engineer situations in which they had been insulted by the lift boy, ripped off at the parfumerie or kept waiting inordinately long in Accounts.
Easier by far to send off the required lobsters and milk – at seven p.m. the first day. She had the decency, on following days, to ring
slightly earlier with her requirements. On the day that the delivery boy was attacked, she had added a cold chicken to the order at the last minute, two jars of pickled herrings, and not just Dunhill cigarettes. She wanted menthol. No – as well as Dunhill. As well. As well. Did not the fool know English? Menthol as fucking well. She knew that the Food Hall did not stock cigarettes. This she had been told on the first day and the second, but if a motorbike-rider did not have the intelligence to stop at a corner shop and buy forty menthol cigarettes was it any wonder the country had become a fucking laughing-stock in the world? Oh, and bread – they needed bread. What kind of bread? What kind of a question was that? Brioche, sun-dried tomato, pain au chocolat, any of those, anything except fucking whole-meal, which gave her husband the squits.
Ahmet Hussein will not play a large part in our story, though strangely enough, he too had his connection with the world of The Daily Legion. His father, Ali Hussein, a newsagent in Crickleden, rose early each morning to slice open the bales which were dumped on his doorstep by the wholesalers’ vans. The Legion was his biggest seller, and it was the newspaper he read himself. In future, Ahmet – aged eighteen when the attack occurred – would always feel queasy as he watched his father hump the heavy parcels of newspaper and jab with the Stanley knife at the plastic tapes which bound them.
As he was able to tell the police, after he had been treated at the Chelsea and Westminster, Ahmet had parked his Honda City Express (50 cc) beside the kerb in the leafy street, Redgauntlet Road, SW7, somewhere behind the Brompton Oratory. Darkness was falling. It was about four in the afternoon. He took the plastic bags containing lobsters, cold chicken, pain au chocolats, pickled herring and menthol fags from the plastic tub on the back of his moped and approached the twin brick pillars which sustained the ten-foot-high reinforced gates. On the previous days, he had rung the buzzer and spoken into the entryphone. He was just about to do so on this afternoon when an arm came from the shadows behind him and he felt something sharp prick his throat.
