Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1)

by James Costall

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “What about this guy?”

  Ash pushed another picture across the table. Again, Ernst looked at it quickly and then away again.

  “Same as the first, same as the first. Never seen him.”

  “But this is a picture of you.”

  Ernst flapped his mouth open and shut a few times, which was a disturbing sight, and leant right over the table to look at the photo. It was him; his picture from the hospital intranet.

  “Oh, well, yes, now you come to-”

  Ash leant across to meet his gaze, their noses almost touching, “Ernst,” he said dangerously. “You’re not looking at the goddamn pictures very well are you? Look again.” He pushed the picture of Anwick right in his face. “Do you know this man?”

  Ernst opened his mouth but shut it again abruptly when he heard the knock at the door.

  “What?”

  Baron’s head appeared and he motioned for Ash and Keera to leave the room. They did so reluctantly.

  “This half-wit knows nothing,” said Baron.

  “Guv-”

  Baron raised his hand and Ash stopped. “I’ve found a friend of Anwick’s I want you two to interview. It’ll bear more fruit for you than talking to simpletons like this. I’ll finish the interview but I want you two at this address now.”

  “Guv-”

  “That’s what’s happening, detective. End of.”

  Ash took the piece of paper, looked at Baron. He didn’t often throw his weight around but he knew what pressure he must be under. There’s no way he’d give them a dud lead when the stakes were so high. A quick glance at Keera and he walked away.

  Inside the interview room Ernst watched the new man enter the room and sit opposite him uneasily.

  “Hello, Ernst,” said Baron. “Here’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

  Chapter 33

  As Ash tossed his coins into the toll booth bucket and drove over the suspension bridge, the image of the snow covered valley momentarily distracted him. The Avon had frozen over a few weeks ago and looked like the slime trail of a giant snail curling its way through the gorge, the silver path shimmering in the sunlight. It was beautiful, but the moment was short-lived.

  His mind was filled with doubt. He was being hampered from doing his job. People were keeping things from him, possibly even Baron. And a nine year old girl was missing. It was Innsmouth. That was the piece that looked like it came from a different jigsaw. Maybe Anwick was involved, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was mad, maybe he wasn’t. That was fine. He could deal with that. That was his job.

  But the Innsmouth factor made him feel stupid. Like there was another layer to everything which was out of his reach. Like he was being used.

  No, not Innsmouth. Harker. She was the key. She was the piece that didn’t fit.

  “Tell me about who we’re going to see,” he said to Keera, who sat gazing out of the window in the passenger seat. She also seemed unusually lost in her own thoughts.

  “His name is Erik Crow. He’s fifty-three and he was one of Anwick’s colleagues in the Physics department at Cambridge. He lives alone. His wife left him five years ago. By all accounts, he didn’t deal with it particularly well and he became a hermit. His work is about the only thing he’s got left but he did assist Anwick in his research and he is purportedly a well respected scientist.”

  “Did the CPS talk to him?”

  “No. Why would they? This is pointless, anyway. Anwick killed Katelyn and someone else kidnapped Megan. We should be moving the investigation away from Anwick.”

  “Your concerns are noted, sergeant.”

  She opened her mouth but thought better of it. She knew better than to argue with him. Admittedly, he wasn’t as two dimensional as Baron but he was still a stubborn male when you stripped away the hair wax and the moisturiser. But Keera could never quite bring herself to regard Ash with the same distaste that she showed other men. Some of the time anyway.

  She looked at him and, shuffling in her seat, made sure her skirt rode up just a little to expose another inch of her leg. Keera had learnt at a very early age that her curvy body and ample breasts had an effect on men that could be used to her advantage. She had never been a pretty girl; her face bore a residual blemish from teenage acme, small scars that never seemed to heal, and her features were sharp and angular to the point of being gaunt. But what she lacked in natural beauty she compensated for with other less subtle attractions.

  “So you and doctor Franchot...” she said.

  “Sergeant, let’s not do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Listen to you give me shit. Which house is it?”

  “Up here on the left. Thirty one.” Keera smiled to herself. As they pulled up outside a three storey Victorian mid-terrace, she leant back in her seat and ran her hands through her hair, arching her back so her breasts pushed tightly into her shirt and her jacket fell open around them. She sighed heavily and smiled turning to her side to face him. She grunted her annoyance as the car door slammed and she watched him march towards the front door without looking back.

  Erik Crow lived in a part of Bristol that looked as though, in its day, it might have been a prosperous, middle class haven. But although the houses were modestly sized, with large bay windows and intricate brickwork, they looked tired and unkempt. There were streets like this in every city in the UK: where families of professionals had moved out of the city and into the commuter villages where the driveways were big enough for two Land Rovers and the gardens big enough for a hot tub. In their place, greedy landlords had converted their homes into flats to accommodate the massive influx of students. Now the gardens were littered with old bikes, clapped out Citroens and spliff heads and the once magnificent fireplaces were filled with empty beer cans and tin foil. In a student house, tin foil is a natural resource.

  Outside number thirty one, there was an old sofa covered in snow and ice and a T registered Mercedes.

  Erik Crow turned out to be Doctor Erik Crow and Doctor Erik Crow turned out to be one of the largest men that Ash had ever met. He sat spanning the entirety of a two-seater sofa, his massive body drooping and bulging in unpleasant places. He wore a scruffy mustard coloured t-shirt that was perhaps once white and a pair of joggers that could have been gainfully employed as a tent for a good half a dozen boy scouts were it not clinging on desperately to his enormous thighs. The fat under his arms was folded over his torso like wings and it seemed inconceivable that he would have the strength to move his gigantic frame if he needed to. It was an altogether unpleasant sight.

  Ash and Keera sat perched as delicately as possible on two rickety chairs that Crow had put out for his guests opposite him. Separating them was a small coffee table, the surface of which was entirely covered by various china ornaments of birds. Their delicate bodies and pretty colours seemed out of place in the shadow of the swollen mountain of fat behind them.

  There was a disagreeable smell in the room, which Ash put down to the assumption that a man of Crow’s size only washed infrequently, such was the effort of doing so and the cost of the water involved. Hopefully, he wasn’t on a meter.

  “Tell me, Doctor Crow, what exactly are you a doctor of?” asked Ash, shuffling uncomfortably in his seat.

  “Particle physics,” he replied gruffly, as if the answer had been obvious.

  “Do you know why we’re here?” asked Keera.

  “Eugene,” he said. “I guess you’ve come about Eugene.” He looked at the floor sadly when he said Anwick’s name revealing another three or four chins. Ash noticed that he secreted a small amount of saliva from his thick lips every time he spoke. It was a nice touch.

  “Yes,” said Ash. “You were a colleague of Professor Anwick.”

  “Yes I was and never worked with a more brilliant scientist. He was wasted with me. Should’ve gone to CERN like I told him. I saw on the news what you think he’s done but liste
n: Eugene Anwick didn’t have a violent bone in his body. He was a good man. He drove a fucking Prius for God’s sake.”

  “We tend not to discount suspects based on their choice of car,” said Keera.

  “Would it surprise you to know that Professor Anwick may admit to killing Katelyn Laicey?” asked Ash. Whether it was true or not was irrelevant.

  “Did he say that? Did you hear him say that?”

  Ash smiled but he could see immediately the passion behind the squinting eyes of this strange man. He meant what he said, at least.

  “What about his wife?” asked Keera. “No doubt you heard-”

  “I tell you now that Eugene was a gentleman and I guarantee that he wasn’t having an affair with a housemaid.”

  Ash raised an eyebrow before asking, “how can you be so sure?”

  “Because Eugene Anwick didn’t have time for an affair. He only had time for his work. And also Eugene Anwick was gay. That’s common knowledge.”

  Ash’s smile fell away. He exchanged a brief look with Keera and sat back in his chair.

  “But he was married,” Keera pointed out.

  “Oh, come on,” scoffed Crow. “Many gay men and women are married. There are lots of reasons for it: confusion, desperation to cling on to something normal; fear, denial. It happens all the time. Eugene is – was – homosexual. Even his wife knew and before you ask it wasn’t a reason for him to push her down the stairs. They had a mutually beneficial relationship.”

  “Which was what?” Ash asked.

  “He got to satisfy whatever psychological need he had to be considered normal and she got to live in a fucking big house and shop everyday and no doubt let into her bedroom whatever loathsome man she could find to satisfy her. Judge that against whatever moral code you subscribe to, it doesn’t make a difference. The fact is that if Eugene was gay, which he was, then your idea that his wife killed a housemaid he was sleeping with and he pushed her down the stairs afterwards is rather flawed, is it not?”

  A bitter taste had accumulated at the back of Ash’s throat. The smell of sweat and rot seemed to have intensified and he noticed his hands were sticky with perspiration. In the distance, he heard Keera ask Crow how he knew that Anwick was gay. Why couldn’t he have been bisexual, for example? But whilst Erik Crow may have eaten himself into a shameful epitome of ugliness and gluttony, he was sincere and resolute with what he was saying and Ash was already beginning to construct alternative theories.

  “Oh for goodness sake,” he heard Crow say. “I don’t have to do your job for you. You’re the detectives. I’m just telling you what I know. But listen: Eugene didn’t kill his wife. He absolutely didn’t kill any kid either. It wasn’t in his nature. He was a workaholic. Obsessed even, with his work I mean.”

  “Tell me about Anwick’s work,” Ash prompted.

  Crow looked thoughtful for a moment, clearly considering his answer carefully. Outside, there was the sound of birds singing.

  Chapter 34

  George Bricken wrapped the old, woollen coat tightly around him as he made his way carefully down Gloucester Road to his mid-terrace home. The paths had been gritted but there were still considerable sections where the salt didn’t cover the surface and he had to negotiate around a number of large ice pools. The cold wind stung his craggy face and the sunlight glinted off the snow piled up against the sides forcing him to squint but, after eighty-six years of life, he had seen much worse weather than this.

  At the Somerfields near the top of the road he had bought eggs, milk, some bread and a Daily Mail. He didn’t cook much, that was Martha’s department, but since she had died he had had to make do as best he could. Occasionally, Sally would turn up, unannounced and stinking of fags, and bring a cake that she had left over from one of her parties. He guessed she only came to see if he was still alive, see if she had inherited anything yet and to make sure he kept her in the will. In fact he had written her out years ago but there was little to be gained by telling her that. The dog home, and various other charities, would soon acquire an unencumbered, neatly kept property worth somewhere close to one hundred and fifty thousand and that gave his old heart some much needed comfort on a lonely night.

  When he got back home he was greeted by the remnants of a snow man made by the students next door. Its bloated body sagged under the weight of its head, the eyes were made of black sludge and a rolled up envelope was stuck in the place where its mouth should be, no doubt representing a spliff or whatever it was they referred to drugs as nowadays. Disgusting creatures, those that lived next door to him. Constantly singing at three o’clock in the morning, shagging each other and generally treating his garden as a tip for their beer cans and kebab wrappers. The notion of respect had sadly died shortly after Thatcher stood down and the country had yielded to a series of incompetent and dishonest leaders.

  Inside his home, George felt a waft of heat soothe the chill on his face. Things here were pretty much how they had been since Martha died: every room wallpapered and carpeted, jammed with odd little items of furniture that didn’t go together, leather poufs and stools, side tables displaying china ornaments, a beige sofa and a fancy welsh dresser in the corner of the lounge where Martha kept her best plates. He hadn’t used them since he had found her dead in her favourite chair, a smile on her face and a glass of sherry by her side, five years ago.

  George liked his house. It was predictable, untouched by the fast changing world outside, cut-off from the pressures and vices of the modern world. His haven, his sanctuary.

  In the kitchen, he boiled the kettle and made tea, being careful to allow the bag to stew in the pot for two minutes, no more, no less. He added the milk and took his mug to the lounge where he planned to spend the rest of the morning reading the paper and watching the news. Later, he might see about clearing the snow from the backyard and perhaps visiting the bookies if it didn’t snow again.

  When he found a man sitting in his chair looking for all the world like he had lived there for years, he dropped the tea to the floor and cracked his knee on the table.

  Chapter 35

  “It’s important to understand that I was about the closest thing to a human friend that Eugene Anwick had, but in truth I was hardly close to him at all.”

  From the angle that Ash was sat, it was difficult to tell exactly where Erik Crow ended and the sofa he was crushing began. He sort of merged into it. To his left, he could hear Keera shuffling in her seat. He didn’t need Alix’s psychology degree to guess what she was thinking.

  “We don’t have time for this, boss,” she whispered, leaning across to catch Ash’s eye.

  “Is this gonna’ help us, Doctor Crow?” asked Ash. “I have a missing child to find.”

  “You need to understand Professor Anwick. That’s why you came. I’m going to help you understand him, or at least understand him as best anyone can. Take it or leave it.”

  Ash thought about it.

  “Go on,” he said eventually.

  “Oh, Jees, guv-” Ash raised his hand and Keera fell silent. She muttered something under her breath but he didn’t catch it.

  Crow glanced at Keera and, satisfied that she wasn’t going to interrupt him again, continued. “Eugene didn’t let me see the forensics of his theories, or his experiments. But he did discuss them with me. At least to some degree.”

  “What was he working on?” asked Ash.

  “Eugene’s discipline was what most people now know as quantum physics, a very misunderstood science. Are you familiar with Schrodinger’s cat, inspector?”

  “No. But I remember Top Cat. Is that the same thing?”

  “There’s no need for cynicism, inspector. Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment designed to illustrate the illusion we call reality. We would call it a paradox.”

  Keera cringed at the use of the word “we”. It made Crow and his colleagues sound like they were higher beings, that only they were capable of understanding the complexities of their world. It was bullsh
it. They were college nerds. The only paradox was that Crow was the size of a small Travelodge but somehow his overworked heart hadn’t packed up yet. She folded her arms and sat back in her chair refusing to take any notes. Ash ignored her. “Go on,” he prompted, much to her annoyance.

  “Schrodinger’s idea was to put a live cat into a sealed box rigged up to a mechanism that may slay the cat, or not as the case maybe, depending on an indeterminable action. In fact, he proposed to rig up a bottle of hydrochloric acid that would be shattered if a radioactive atom – which was also placed in the box – decayed. The point is not to worry about the technical aspects of the experiment but to accept that there is a cat in a box and, after it has been left for, say, an hour or two, there is no way of knowing whether the cat is alive or dead unless you open the box.”

  In truth, Ash had begun to question whether any of this was helpful. He had a sinking feeling that, at the very least, whatever Crow had to say was unlikely to be of any immediate help. It was times like this when his craving for nicotine started to distract him. He hadn’t smoked in six months but he still found himself occasionally sucking on a pen lid absentmindedly.

  “One interpretation – known as the Copenhagen Interpretation – says that the cat exists in two states at the same time until someone observes it. In other words, it’s both dead and alive – known as a superposition - up until the point that someone opens the box whereupon the cat assumes one of those two states.”

  “A bit like the question of whether or not a tree falling in a wood with no one around to hear it fall actually makes a noise,” suggested Ash.

  “Not quite on point but not far off either,” Crow said. Keera had now started to play with her nails.

  Crow continued, “But the Copenhagen Interpretation is not the only possible solution. For instance, an idea developed which said that where I might open the box and find the cat dead, there is a parallel universe almost identical to our own in which I have opened the box and found the cat to be alive. Or perhaps you opened the box and found the cat dead, or that I had forgotten to put the cat in the box at all. There are an infinite number of possibilities all of which are played out in other realities.”