Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1)

by James Costall

  “Beautiful isn’t it?”

  Alix jumped. She hadn’t heard Keera Julian walk up behind her but she stood now at the crossing, her arms folded defensively, her thin lips tightened and creased.

  “Beautiful?” said Alix, bemused. She watched as the older woman walked round, appearing at the other side of the pyre close enough so the smell of cigarettes was stronger than the stench of the bodies.

  “You don’t appreciate it? The art of killing, I mean. I find that... difficult to believe, you being a criminal shrink and all.”

  There was something distasteful about the way that Keera spoke that put Alix on edge. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck react as she drew nearer, like a serpent drawing in on its prey.

  “No, I don’t appreciate this,” she said firmly.

  “Interesting. What’s your book: Inside the Criminal Mind?”

  “Yeah. Have you read it?”

  “No. Too busy catching criminals. No time to try and guess what haircuts they might have.”

  “You should read it. Probably make you better at catching them.”

  She snorted loudly, a sort of forced, unpleasant noise. “You don’t get it you academics, do you? You waste so much precious time trying to understand what makes a murderer tick. It’s all bullshit. What makes them tick is that they like killing people and you try to justify that for us by linking it back to their childhood and whatever.”

  “Hey, I didn’t ask for this conversation,” Alix pointed out, throwing up her hands and holding Keera’s gaze. Their eyes locked for a second before Keera turned swiftly away.

  “Don’t get in my way, doctor,” she called back.

  She was out of the door quickly and Alix was left alone again with the bodies.

  “Building bridges,” she said quietly to herself. “Good start, kid.”

  Chapter 23

  Parkview Abbey had been in Ephraim Speck’s family for four generations although Ephraim, or Eph as most people knew him, was the first to have actually taken up residence there since the house was first acquired by his great-grandfather, Hanns Speck. The Speck family had a long and complicated history. They were predominantly German and, although Eph had lived in Parkview Abbey almost his entire life, he had retained a noticeable hint of his ancestry in his voice.

  The house was not an abbey at all but the name referred to the ruins of an ancient monastery in the grounds. It was built in the late eighteenth century and acquired by Hanns Speck in 1868 but, sensing a change in the political attitude to their heritage, the Specks moved back to Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. The Abbey was left in the hands of friends and cared for until Eph’s return as a young man in 1970.

  Eph jokingly referred to the period when the Specks lived in Germany as an exile but his quip was only partially mocking. Some family members were rumoured to have supported the Nazi party. There were close links between Eph’s father and Hitler himself. But mercifully those were matters that, generally, no longer haunted Eph.

  Eph would always tell people that the house looked a lot grander than it actually was. The sweeping driveway through the elms meant it wasn’t visible from the road. The frontage spread out across a gravelled courtyard which twisted round the west wing and lead to a set of underground garages. Few visit but those that did would find a varied collection of automobiles – from an old Triumph motorbike to a DB9.

  But despite its illustrious past, Parkview Abbey had never accepted a guest as mournful and dishevelled as Megan Laicey.

  Eph had discharged the remaining full time staff some years ago in an effort to maintain more independence in his twilight years and so had set about the task of cooking up a meal of baked beans and poached egg on toast himself. When he delivered the tray into the small reception room where Megan was, he found her sat on the edge of the sofa, her hands underneath her bottom, staring at a blank TV. Her face was expressionless. She still hadn’t spoken a word.

  “Hello, Megan,” Eph said with as much brightness as he could muster.

  She didn’t acknowledge him. She just sat there, looking at the blank screen.

  “I’ve brought you some tea.” He set the tray down next to her. He knew that when he would come back into the room later the tray would be untouched but he had decided that that alone did not justify him not being a good host. He couldn’t imagine her pain. Megan and Katelyn Laicey had spent their lives not knowing who their families were or why they had been abandoned. The only consistency they had in their lives was each other. And now she didn’t even have that. But of course it was deeper than just the loss of her sister. It was the loss of herself.

  “I’ll just leave this here for you.”

  He flicked on the TV; he knew it was pointless, that everything he did for her was meaningless. But it gave him a little comfort knowing that he had tried.

  For a second or two, the image of Katelyn’s face flooded the screen. Eph had seen it before. It was a picture of her from when she was at St Clair’s, the orphanage in Bristol. It must have been a news bulletin about her dreadful murder. He fumbled with the remote and quickly changed the channel.

  He found some channel that appeared to show only children’s television programmes and pocketed the remote.

  “You’re safe now, Megan,” he said to her. He knew it wasn’t true and that Megan was already dead. She was nothing more than an empty, fragile little shell.

  “Keep her safe, Eph,” Harker had told him. “You know what’s at stake here.”

  And he did.

  Only too well.

  He had prepared for it his entire life.

  Outside, the rain had washed away a lot of the snow that covered the ground. Parkview was set deep in the wilderness of the Lincolnshire Wolds, a far cry from where the worst of the winter weather had hit the south west.

  That was why there were no tracks leading from the main road to the Abbey’s grounds.

  That was why the malevolent eyes that appraised the mansion from the cold had so far not been seen.

  But when Eph picked up the phone and found the line dead, he knew instantly that he and Megan were not alone.

  Chapter 24

  “Damn it, Ash, you know I’m less than six months from retirement, right?”

  Maurice Reid made his way irritably to the front of the church and put a case down on the front pew, ignoring the bodies piled before the altar as if they were a perfectly ordinary sight. He was clad in the blue plastic scrubs from the neck down; his bald head was the only visibly exposed part of him.

  “Yeah, Maurice, I know but your duty pathologist and I got a real mess here so better someone who knows what they’re doing than that sixteen year old you sent me last time.” Ash had brushed his hand through his hair so many times that it now stuck up on end so that he looked like a horrible cross between Jedward and a toothbrush.

  “That girl is smarter than you, kiddo,” Maurice said. He started to circle the pyre carefully studying the mess. Alix noticed how differently he approached it to everyone else. No distaste, no shock. Just like any other examination.

  “Please don’t call me ‘kiddo’, Maurice. Have you met our new psycho-analyst, by the way?”

  “Nope and don’t intend to unless she’s young and attractive.”

  Ash coughed and Maurice looked up, conscious of the awkward silence that followed. He looked around and his eyes fell on Alix. She tried unconvincingly to conceal a wry smile.

  “Ah,” he said, “well I’m not disappointed, Doctor..?”

  “Franchot,” she said, offering her hand, which he took. He had a weathered but kindly face and Alix took an instant liking to him. There was something wholesome about him, something endearing.

  “Charmed,” he said. She smiled, trying to think whether anyone had ever said the word “charmed” to her before. She didn’t think they had and she flashed Ash a curt glance. He shifted his weight from foot to foot gawkily.

  “Well, doctor Franchot, please call me Maurice an
d please don’t listen to a word that Fielding says about me, okay?”

  “I try very hard not to listen to him and it’s a pleasure meeting you,” she laughed.

  “Good. I can see you’ll do very well.”

  “Hello?” said Ash. “Dead bodies? Media frenzy? I like the Brady Bunch as much as the next guy but could we please focus?”

  “If it’s one thing I’ve learnt, Ash,” said Maurice walking towards his bag and producing a Dictaphone which he started fiddling with, “it’s that it doesn’t matter how freaky people are, the world stops for beautiful women. Now, what the Hell happened in here?”

  *

  It didn’t take Maurice long before he strode back across the length of the church to join Ash and Alix over by the font. Keera had been circling round like a vulture, not really knowing what to do with herself. She had asked Ash earlier if she could get back to base but he had told her, much to her disgust, that she needed to hang around to hear what Maurice’s preliminary findings were. She had compensated for the inconvenience by throwing Alix as many dirty looks as she could practicably fit into the hour and half or so that it took Maurice to examine the bodies.

  By now, dusk had started to settle in and the pyre was bathed in a blue moonlight. The decomposing flesh shimmered and glowed surreally. It seemed like there was an energy coming from it; something powerful and dangerous.

  A forensics team had arrived and were busying themselves photographing and recording every conceivable variable at Maurice Reid’s direction. But as industrious as they were, they crept round the pyre uneasily like it was a giant, sleeping demon; a thing to be respected and feared.

  “Sixteen bodies,” said Maurice, wiping his brow and placing his glasses on the side of the font.

  “The whole village,” murmured Keera.

  “What?”

  “There are sixteen people in White Helmsley. We found all the houses deserted.”

  They looked down the centre aisle and to the pyre.

  A whole village.

  “How did they die?” asked Ash.

  “From what I can see – and I stress that I need to separate the bodies, the cold has already started to freeze them together making close analysis difficult – but from what I can see, they all had their throats slashed with a blade. Probably something short. A kitchen knife would do it.”

  “Did they all die at the same time?”

  “They’re all at pretty much the same stage of rigor, yes.”

  “With the same weapon?”

  “The same type of weapon, yeah. Same weapon? Too early to tell.”

  “So this is a massacre?” said Keera.

  “Not necessarily,” said Alix.

  Keera looked at her darkly. “So what else is it?” she said, folding her arms and cocking her head to one side as if she couldn’t-wait-to-hear-this.

  “Could be mass suicide.”

  “Sixteen people kill themselves and then – what? – their dead bodies just fall on top of each other? Yeah, nice one,” Keera smirked, mockingly.

  “No, obviously there’s another party to this we haven’t found yet.”

  “Okay,” said Ash, noticing the tension for first time. “Why don’t you expand on that a little more, Alix. You mean like a suicide pact?”

  “No, a suicide pact is usually the term that’s used to describe distressed Goths who hate their parents and decide to take an OD together. This would be better referred to as a mass suicide.” She looked at Keera, who stared back blankly. She had probably been one of those girls – the ones who first got laid at the age of thirteen and hung around after school smoking Greek cigarettes. The image cheered her up a little.

  “Have you ever heard of Jonestown?” she asked.

  “Hell yeah,” said Maurice, picking up his glasses and cleaning the lenses on his plastic suit. “Nobody does it bigger than our Yankee cousins.”

  “No, that’s right.” She looked at Ash who shrugged his shoulders, signalling her to go on. Keera didn’t say anything.

  “Jim Jones was an American cult leader who founded a group called the People’s Temple in the seventies. Their aims were loosely connected to religion. Jones was an orthodox Christian but his followers believed he had foreseen the end of the world. They thought that the only salvation was Jones himself and that only they would be saved when the apocalypse came. And so his support grew. But the secret operation of the People’s Temple brought heavy media pressure and rumours of corruption and abuse within the Order were ripe. So, to avoid public scrutiny, Jones moved himself and his followers to a forest area in Guyana, in South America, that he called Jonestown. They leased thousands of acres from the government and lived in a self-sustained, isolated community. There are differing accounts of why Jones and his followers fled America. Some say they were divorcing themselves from what they perceived to be a growing trend of fascism in the US. Others say that they were the subjects of American government funded mind control experiments. Like many things, for every forcible, logical explanation, there are always five crackpot conspiracy theories.”

  “But these people didn’t move here together,” protested Keera. “They just live here. Probably because the houses are cheap and the council tax is low.”

  “May be, but the point is about what happened next. You see, there were rumours about sexual abuse within the People’s Temple.”

  “I saw a documentary a few weeks ago about a religious cult in America run by a guy named Michael who told his females followers that God had commanded them to sleep with him,” interjected Ash, slightly over-excitedly.

  “Yes,” said Alix, “isn’t religion just the perfect excuse to do things that otherwise would be considered morally reprehensible. Anyway, the rumours prompted a congressman from Washington to pop down and start snooping around. He found that things were hardly Toon Town and some of the residents of Jonestown expressed an interest to come back with him. He was apprehended on the way out and shot dead, along with at least one defector. Several other people were wounded.”

  “I think I’m starting to remember this story,” said Ash.

  “Don’t try and make out like you know what I’m talking about,” she scolded before continuing. “Fearing reprisal, Jones then apparently ordered that everyone commit suicide. 914 people died. Men, women, children.”

  “You’re telling me that this guy convinced over 900 people to kill themselves?” said Keera sceptically.

  “Ah, well, not necessarily. The psychological process involved in breaking someone’s mind so fundamentally that they are prepared to kill themselves for someone else’s cause is very complex and only achievable if you know what you’re doing and on a small number of vulnerable individuals. Even on a small scale, it takes years of careful manipulation and grooming. Take suicide bombers for example. How do you get people to strap enough Semtex to their bodies to blow a hole in the world and walk into a bank? You work on them. You tell them it’s their duty. You tell them they will be rewarded in the afterlife. You play on their beliefs. You tell them God has chosen them. You honour them, let them live like kings. Everyone gives them nothing but the highest respect and regard, for years. You make them into living martyrs. And when the time comes, how can they refuse without being outcast, or killed anyway? The Aztecs were no different. Before you were sacrificed you got to live as a King for a year. It’s difficult to refuse to take one for the team after so long a time going round sleeping with whomever you wanted, isn’t it? But that’s just when you’re talking about one or two people. That kind of brainwashing wouldn’t work on the scale of Jonestown.”

  “Okay, so how then?”

  “I guess this is where the boundary between murder and suicide is a little blurred,” she said. “Not all of the people in Jonestown killed themselves. The rest were murdered. Some escaped into the forest but there was evidence that a number of others were shot, or injected forcibly with poison. But how many of the residents of Jonestown killed themselves and how many were killed by
others isn’t known.”

  “But why?” said Maurice. “Why did these people kill themselves, even if there was some outside influence helping them on the way?”

  “Clearly we’ll have to find that out.”

  “This is bullshit,” said Keera. “Guv, we’re looking for a serial killer not a cult leader.”

  “A serial killer?” exclaimed Alix, her voice rising. “No way. Serial killers murder individuals carefully over long periods of time for personal reasons. They don’t kill groups of people randomly at the same time.”

  “They’re all killed in the same way,” said Keera angrily. “Like a serial killer.”

  “At the same time. Unlike a serial killer.”

  “Okay!” shouted Ash, rubbing the sides of his head and closing his eyes, like the squabbling was giving him a headache. “Okay. Listen: priority one right now is the media. So far, we’re lucky because of the weather but sooner or later someone is going to notice this entire village is missing so I want focus, please, not conflict.”

  He looked up and saw the two women glaring at each other. “And you two need to learn to work together,” he said, pointing at them both. Alix shot him a look and was about to speak before she thought better of it. Like it or not, he was technically her boss now. She suppressed the urge to say, “she started it.” Keera pursed her lips even more than usual so that they nearly disappeared altogether.

  “The fact is,” said Ash, “we need time and we need analysis. Careful analysis based on facts, not guess work. I reckon we have a window of twelve hours or so before this place turns into a media frenzy and when that happens the heat will be on.”

  He looked up at the techies buzzing around the pyre. Nine times out of ten the media got wind of crime scenes through techies trying to cash in. Tabloids would pay up to five grand for this sort of gig. Well who would blame them? The pay was lousy and the hours unpredictable.