by Simon Toyne
Bonnie’s eyes rolled back in her head and her heavily pregnant form crumpled to the floor, despite the best efforts of Myron and the midwife to keep her upright. Instinctively, Liv dived for the emergency cord dangling by her side and pulled as hard as she could.
Within seconds the room filled with orderlies fluttering around Bonnie like moths, crunching homeopathic pills underfoot. A trolley appeared from nowhere and she was wheeled from the room, away from Liv and the gentle music of the shoreline, down the hallway to another room full of the latest drugs and clinical equipment.
Chapter 31
Ruin Homicide shared office space with the Robbery Division on the fourth floor of a new glass block built behind the carved stone facade of the original police building. The office was open-plan and noisy. Men in shirtsleeves perched on the edge of desks and tipped back in chairs as they talked loudly into phones or with each other.
Arkadian sat at his desk with his hand clamped to his ear, trying to listen to the answer-phone message on the number he’d just called. A woman’s voice. American. Confident sounding. Direct. Late twenties or early thirties. He hung up rather than leaving a message. You never got any information by leaving messages. Best just to keep on trying until whoever you were calling got curious and picked up.
He dropped the handset into its cradle and tapped the spacebar on his keyboard to banish the screensaver. The photos from the examination table appeared. With his eyes he traced the neat scars snaking across the dead monk’s body, strange lines and crosses that ultimately formed one giant question mark.
Since the post-mortem, the mystery of the monk’s identity had deepened. The Citadel still hadn’t claimed him as one of their own, and all the regular methods of victim identification had so far drawn a blank. His fingerprints had come back unknown. Ditto his dental records. His DNA swabs were still working their way through the labs, but unless the dead man had been arrested for a sex crime, a homicide or some kind of terrorist activity it was unlikely he was going to show up on any of those databases either. And Arkadian’s boss was starting to lean on him for some kind of progress report; he wanted to draw a line under this thing. So did Arkadian, but he wasn’t going to whitewash it. The monk belonged to someone. It was his job to find out whom.
He glanced at the clock on the far wall. It was now a little after one in the afternoon. His wife would just be getting in from the school where she helped out three days a week. He dialled his own number and clicked on the lower left corner of his computer screen to open up a browser window while he listened to it connecting.
His wife picked up on the third ring. She sounded breathless.
‘It’s me,’ Arkadian said, tapping ‘Religion’ and ‘Scars’ into the search box and hitting return.
‘Heeeey,’ she said, drawing out the middle of the word in a way that still got him twelve years after he’d first heard it. ‘You coming home?’
Arkadian frowned as the results came back, all four hundred and thirty-one thousand of them.
‘Not yet,’ he said, scrolling through the first page.
‘Then what are you calling for, getting a girl’s hopes up?’
‘Just wanted to hear your voice. How was work?’
‘Tiring. You try teaching English to a roomful of nine-year-olds. I must’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar at least a couple of hundred times. Though by the end, there was one kid I swear could read it better than me.’
He could tell from her voice she was smiling. She was always happiest when she’d spent the morning in a room full of kids. The realization also made him feel sad.
‘Sounds like a know-all,’ he said. ‘You should get him to read it to the class next time, see how he copes under pressure.’
‘It’s a girl, actually. Girls are cleverer than boys.’
Arkadian smiled. ‘Yes, but you end up marrying us. So you can’t be all that bright.’
‘But then we divorce you and take all your money.’
‘I don’t have any money.’
‘Oh well. . then I guess you’re pretty safe.’
He clicked on a link and scrolled through pictures of tribes-men with raw wounds slashed red into ebony flesh. None of them matched the scars on the monk.
‘So what case are you working?’ she asked. ‘Anything gruesome?’
‘The monk.’
‘You find out who he is yet, or can’t you say?’
‘I can’t say because I don’t know.’ He clicked back to the results page and opened a link dealing with stigmata, the unexplained phenomenon of wounds similar to those Christ suffered during his crucifixion appearing on ordinary people.
‘So you going to be late?’
‘Too early to tell. They want to get this one squared away.’
‘Which means “yes”.’
‘Which means “probably”.’
‘Well. . just be careful.’
‘I’m sitting at my desk doing Google searches.’
‘Then come home.’
‘I always do.’
‘Love you.’
‘You too,’ he whispered.
He looked up at the office, humming with noise and attitude. Most of the people currently occupying it were either divorced or well on their way, but he knew that would never happen to him. He was married to his wife, not the job; and even though that choice had meant he’d never been given the sexy, high-profile cases from which careers and reputations were made, he didn’t mind. He wouldn’t swap his life with any of them. Besides, there was something about this suicide that made him feel he might just have caught a live one. He clicked randomly on one of the stigmata websites and started to read.
The site was pretty academic and consisted of dense, dry text only occasionally punctuated by a juicy photo of a bleeding hand or foot, though none of them matched the scars he’d found on the monk.
He removed his glasses and rubbed at the indentations they left on the side of his nose when he wore them too long, which was every day of his working life. He knew he should be getting on with his other cases while he waited for word to come down from the Citadel, or until the American woman answered her phone, but the case was already getting under his skin: the apparent public martyrdom, the ritualized scars, the fact that the monk didn’t appear to officially exist.
He closed the search window and spent the next twenty minutes typing the few facts he had gathered and his initial thoughts and observations into the case file. When he had finished he reread his notes, then jogged back through the post-mortem photos until he found the one he was looking for.
He looked again at the thin strip of leather laid out on the evidence tray, the harsh light of the camera flash picking out the twelve numbers scratched crudely on its surface. He copied them into his mobile phone then closed the file, grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair and headed for the door. He needed some air and something to eat. He always thought better when he was on the move.
Two floors down, in an office stacked high with old file boxes, a pale hand dusted with freckles tapped a hacked security code into a computer belonging to an admin clerk working a switch shift who wasn’t due in for another couple of hours.
After a brief pause the monitor flashed into life, bathing the dark office in its cold light. An arrow slid across the screen, found the server icon, and clicked it open. A finger stroked the wheel on the mouse, jogging down through the file directory until its possessor found what he was looking for. He reached under the desk and plugged a flash memory stick into the front of the processor tower. A new icon appeared on the desktop. He dragged the monk’s case file to the icon and watched the contents copy on to it — the post-mortem report, the photos, the audio commentary, Arkadian’s notes.
Everything.
Chapter 32
Liv Adamsen leaned against the rough trunk of the single cypress that sprang from the lawn by the hospital. She tilted her head back and blew long, relieved streams of cigarette smoke towards the overhanging branches. Th
rough the canopy she could see a large illuminated cross fixed to the top of the building, like a twisted moon in the slowly brightening sky. As a defective tube blinked fitfully inside it, something glistened on the bark a few feet above her head. She reached up and touched it tentatively. Her hand came away sticky and smelling of the forest. Sap; quite a lot of it — far too much to be healthy.
She stood on tiptoe to examine the source of the flow. She made out a series of indentations and cracks in the bark. It looked like seiridium canker, a common disease in this type of tree, no doubt brought on by the long, dry, icy winter. She’d noticed the same thing on the leylandii in Bonnie and Myron’s garden. The increasingly warm summers were drying out the ground and weakening root systems. Sharp, cold periods were allowing these cankers and other forms of rot to take lethal hold on even the strongest of trees. You could cut out canker if you got it early enough, but by the looks of it this tree was already too far gone.
Liv laid her hand gently on the trunk and inhaled deeply on her cigarette. The smell of the sap on her fingers mingled with the smoke. In her mind she saw the cypress burning where it stood, branches twisting and blackening, hungry flames licking at the red sap as it boiled and hissed. She looked at the silent car park, checking she was still alone, spooked by what her imagination had just conjured up. She put it down to her own fragile emotional state, coupled with the exhaustion of witnessing a ‘natural’ labour that had ended with white-coated men whisking Bonnie to a waiting ventouse. At least both babies, a boy and a girl, were healthy and well. It wasn’t quite the story Liv had set out to write, but she guessed it would do. It certainly had plenty of drama. She remembered the moment when she had pulled the emergency cord.
Then she remembered the call.
She’d had the cell for years. It was so old she could barely send a text, let alone take a picture or surf the net with it. Not many people even knew she had it. Fewer still possessed its ex-directory number. She ran through the very short list of those who did while she waited for it to get up to speed.
Liv had adopted what she called her ‘home and away’ system shortly after starting work on the crime desk. The very first story she’d covered had required her to chase down and interview a particularly slippery attorney representing an even more slippery local property developer being sued by the State on several counts of bribery to obtain building licences. She’d left a number for the lawyer to get back to her. Unfortunately the man who’d called her back was his client. She’d been halfway up a cherry tree with a pruning saw in her hand when she’d taken the call. The force of the abuse he’d hurled at her had almost made her fall out of it, but she’d walked into the kitchen, grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down everything he said, word for word. The entire incident, and the direct quotes arising from it, became the cornerstone of the damning article she subsequently wrote.
She learned two valuable lessons from the incident. The first was never to be afraid to put herself in the story, if that was the best way to tell it; the second was to be more selective about who she handed out her number to. She bought herself a new cell and began to use it exclusively for work. Her old one, with a new SIM card and number, had subsequently been reserved exclusively for friends and family. It now shuddered in her hand as it ended its start-up sequence. She peered down at the screen. She’d missed only one call. There were no waiting messages.
She pressed the menu button and scrolled through to the missed-call log. Whoever had called her had done so from a withheld number. Liv frowned. As far as she could remember, everyone who had this number was also in her address book, so should automatically be recognized. She took a final drag on her cigarette, ground it into the damp pine needles and headed back towards the hospital to say goodbye to the human part of her human interest story.
Chapter 33
The church that filled one side of the great square in the old town was always busiest in the afternoon. It seemed to scoop up the crowds who had spent the morning wandering around the narrow cobbled streets, staring up at the Citadel. The weary visitor would enter the cool, monolithic interior and be immediately confronted with the answer to their unspoken prayers: row upon row of polished oak pews offering, for no charge, a welcome place to sit and contemplate life, the universe and how unwise their choice of footwear may have been. It was a fully working church, holding services once a day and twice on Sunday, offering communion for those who wanted it and confession for those who needed it.
It was into this throng that a man now entered, slowing momentarily to remove his baseball cap in a half-remembered gesture of deference and let his eyes adjust to the gloom after the sun-bleached brightness of the streets. He hated churches — they gave him the creeps — but business was business.
He threaded his way through the knots of tourists staring up at the soaring columns, stained-glass windows and arching stone-work of the clerestory — all eyes to heaven, as the architects had intended. Nobody gave him so much as a glance.
He reached the far corner of the church and his mood immediately soured. A line of people sat on a bench by a row of drawn curtains. He briefly considered jumping the queue, but didn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself, so sat down next to the last sinner in line until an apologetic-looking foreigner tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to a vacant booth.
‘It’s all right,’ he stammered, avoiding eye contact and gesturing towards the corner. ‘I want the one on the end.’
The tourist looked perplexed.
‘Go ahead. I’m funny about where I do my confessing.’
The man hunkered down on the bench. Normally his freelance business took him to the shadowy recesses of a bar or a car park. It felt weird, doing it in a church. He watched two more sinners emerge before the stall he needed finally became available. He was out of his seat and into the booth almost before the previous incumbent had emerged. He yanked the curtain shut behind him and sat down.
It was cramped and dark, and smelt of incense, sweat and fear. To his right a small, square grille was set into a wooden panel slightly lower than head height.
‘Do you have something to confess?’ prompted a muffled voice.
‘I might,’ he replied. ‘Are you Brother Peacock?’
‘No,’ the voice replied. ‘Please wait.’
Whoever was on the other side of the grille got up and left.
The man waited, listening to the whispers of tourists and the clicking of cameras. They sounded to him like the rasping legs of scuttling insects. He heard movement on the other side of the grille.
‘I am the emissary of Brother Peacock,’ a low voice announced.
The man leaned forward. ‘Please forgive me, for I have sinned.’
‘And what have you to confess?’
‘I have taken something from my place of work, something which does not belong to me, something I believe concerns a fellow Brother of your church.’
‘Do you have this thing with you?’
A pale hand dusted with freckles took a small white envelope from an inner pocket.
‘I do,’ he said.
‘Good. You understand that the purpose of confession is to enable sinners who enter the house of God burdened with their sins to leave again free of those burdens?’
The man smiled. ‘I understand,’ he said.
‘Your sin is not grave. If you bow your head before God I believe you will find the forgiveness you seek.’
A hatch slid open beneath the grille. He passed through the envelope, feeling a slight tug as it was taken from him. There was a brief pause. He heard it being opened and inspected.
‘This is everything you took?’
‘It’s everything there was to take as of about an hour ago.’
‘Good. As I said, your sin is not grave. I bless you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. You may now consider your sins absolved — provided you remain a friend to the Church. Bow your head before God once more and he will reward his fa
ithful servant.’
The man saw another envelope poking through the hatch. He reached down and took it. The door slid shut and whoever had been on the other side departed as quickly as he had arrived. Inside the envelope was a thick wad of unsigned hundred-dollar traveller’s cheques. They always paid him this way, and he smiled at the neatness of it. If he had been followed, which he knew he hadn’t, he could plausibly claim they’d been mislaid by a tourist. They were also untraceable, probably purchased by someone using a fake ID at any one of the Bureaux de Change that lined the old streets.
He pocketed the envelope and slipped out of the booth, past the patient queue, his eyes making contact with nobody until he’d left the church well behind him.
Chapter 34
Five minutes after Brother Peacock’s emissary had absolved the man with the freckled hands, the envelope was placed in a basket alongside twelve dead chickens and eight pounds of ham at the foot of the tribute wall on the shadowy northern side of the mountain, then winched up on a swaying rope until it disappeared from sight.
Athanasius wiped a sheen of sweat from his skull as he watched the refectory monks haul in the basket. He retrieved the envelope before it joined the rest of its contents in the large copper stock-pot. He had walked down nearly half a mile of corridors and stairwells to get to the tribute cavern. Now he had the envelope he turned wearily on his heels and walked right back up them again, heading to the ornate splendour of the Abbot’s private chambers.
Athanasius was breathing heavily by the time the gilded door closed behind him. The Abbot snatched the envelope and ripped it apart, hungry for the knowledge it contained. He stalked over to a writing desk set against the wall by the stained-glass window and folded down the front to reveal a sleek modern laptop.
