“I only just uncovered the evidence. I was here writing a letter to Sharpe on the matter. Look, look for yourself.”
She crouched forward and turned the paper he had been writing on, and yes, in black and white, he had been asking Sharpe to look into his findings, to determine what connection Strand might have with the murders. “I tell you I am now frightened to be alone around the man. But I did not link the problem at first with murder, of course, undl I telephoned the bank. He's been forging my name to accommodate himself in whatever manner he sees fit. He made a major purchase from an antique store.”
“What sort of purchase?”
“An altar of some sort, an altar I have not seen.”
“Are you certain of this?”
“I inquired. The storeman I spoke to over the phone thought me mad. Said I had paid for it with my own personal check. Forged, you see.”
“His own personal altar?”
“I've not seen or located it. I have no idea where it stands. But this and my curiosity about what he does with his evenings… Well, I'd often wondered over that… and so last night I followed him down to the bazaar near old Crown's End pub on Oxford Street, and there I lost him. You know how crowded Oxford is always with tourists, all the quaint shops there. He disappeared into thin air before me, somehow into the bowels of the underworld there.”
“Underworld? What underworld?”
“There's said to be a series of catacombs and vaults, old cellars left over from Roman times down there below the bazaar. No one goes there of course, rat-infested, perhaps a few homeless living down there, but Martin somehow disappeared there.”
“Shall we go have a look?” she asked.
“By all means, but shouldn't we call for what is it? Backup? As they say in police parlance?”
“If we find something, we'll call for backup. Come on. Lead me to where he disappeared.”
“First, I want to settie your mind about St. Albans.”
She looked queerly back at him.
“Don't deny it. I know you've come to suspect me in all this hideous affair. Rampant suspicion. Isn't it all part and parcel of what you do for a living, my dear?” She sighed heavily, nodding. “Yes, I'm guilty.”
He took her gently by the arm. “Now come along to our dungeons here in the cathedral, so you will put your mind at ease about Father Luc Sante.”
At midday, Richard Sharpe pulled up to the York Hotel in search of Jessica, time seeping away from him like water through a sieve. He'd been unable all morning to locate her to even inquire if she would consider wearing a wire. He inquired with the crime lab, Schuller and Raehael. No one had seen her this morning.
She had left word with no one.
He then tried telephoning her at her room, but he'd been unable to reach her at the York, either.
He had a mad notion she might actually be in her room, sound asleep with earplugs in her ears, or in the shower when the phone had continued to blare. He kept telling himself that she could not be so foolish as to go into Luc Sante's lair again, alone.
He banged uselessly on the door even as he listened for the shower within, but no report of any noise whatsoever on the interior returned to him. Finally, he went back downstairs and demanded a key, flashing his badge, fearful she might be incapacitated inside her hotel room.
When he and the chief of hotel security, a friend of longstanding, entered the room, they found it immaculate, the bed even neatly arranged, he supposed so that the maids needn't work so hard where she might be concerned.
Richard searched the premises for any clue, any sign of where she might have gotten off to when his eyes fell on Luc Sante's book on the nightstand. “Can we trace her last call from here, time and destination?” he asked the security head. “Absolutely. I'll just have to make a call,” Harlan Nelson replied.
The wait felt longer than it was, Sharpe nervously pacing the empty room. Finally, Nelson read the phone number, saying, “The call was put in at 10:40 p.m.”
“That's the Yard, CID, no help.”
“Anything else I can do for you, Richard?”
“No, Harlan, but thank you. Will you lock up here? I must hurry.”
“Certainly, Richard, and my best to your girls.”
But Sharpe had disappeared through the doorway. In the lobby, he ran into Erin Culbertson who slowed him, saying, “Aren't you spending a lot of dme here these days!”
“Out of my way, Erin.”
“Cheeky of you, Richard, not returning my calls!” she called out after him. She then located her assistant who drove the van with all the equipment, and they tried to follow Richard Sharpe through the noonday traffic.
Driving as fast as he dared, Richard imagined all sorts of horrors for Jessica. He suspected that she had indeed gone back to St. Albans, knowing what she now knew, in an attempt to confront Luc Sante with the facts.
Sharpe feared such an act both brash and deadly. He rushed toward St. Albans, but he found himself hopelessly snarled in traffic, some accident ahead. He radioed for Copperwaite to join him at St. Albans, to stake the place out as Stuart had suggested, explaining that Jessica Coran had already returned there before he could get to her to discuss the wire device. “Can you meet me there?”
“Where are you now?” asked Copperwaite. “In traffic at a streetlight. Some accident has gridlocked me in. I'm abandoning the car for a few blocks' walk, and from there I'll catch a cab.”
“See you a block south of St. Albans, then? On Exeter, maybe?”
“Fine, yes, do that.” Richard was off and running.
Using a flashlight, Luc Sante led Jessica to and through. “All the known secret chambers of the cathedral,” as he put it, explaining that the crypt they stood in, at the very bottom-bottom of the church had, in the Middle Ages, become the burial crypt of the early priests who had lived their lives behind the walls of St. Albans.
Her penlight in hand, Jessica felt the breathing, staring walls closing in on her. They'd left the warmth and sweet-smelling incense of rosewood in the cathedral, left its familiar corridors. This place formed a dungeon mired in dme, sodden with dampness. It recalled the mine shaft she and Richard and Tatham had traversed.
“You have a cemetery below the church. How… interesting,” she managed. “I'm something of a cemetery enthusiast, and I've seen crypts and cemeteries in every place that I've ever visited, but nothing like this.” The room opened on a secret chamber where headstones lay in rows on the dirt floor; beneath each a former priest lay at eternal rest.
“In ancient times, it was thought the only way the graves of the holy fathers would remain undisturbed,” explained Luc Sante.
“They were robbed in those days by grave robbers, body snatchers, I know,” she said.
“Actually, the holy men had their bodies hacked up and pieces sold to the superstitious who-”
“My God, why?”
“Oh, but a holy man's finger or even more so his penis could bring joyful bounty to a family who blessed it each night!” Luc Sante laughed. “Human idiocy, but there you have it. Imagine how much people paid out in funds for the purported bones of Christ over the years. His body has been sold over and over for countless generations like some of your swampland in Florida.” Again, his laugh bounced about the silent sepulcher. He then pointed to the slabs with inscriptions. “My predecessors. Their remains still considered as holy as ever.”
Luc Sante next opened another room, using a huge jailhouse key on a large ring, and there he displayed a small crypt. Jessica saw the crypt here as an ancient, sealed stone coffin, like something out of a Robert Bloch gothic novel, where a timeless vampire might reside within.
Here, too, stood walls lined with torches that burned centuries before, now sitting silent under Luc Sante's modem, battery powered, handheld torch, the flashlight sluicing through cobwebs, creating a patina of flying dust particles everywhere. The walls were festooned with dust-laden cobwebs, appeared crumbling as did the stairwell leading to this place
.
“I think I've seen enough,” she confessed.
“Not at all. There are corridors on either side of this room. A regular mausoleum. What we hide here is fairly banal, of no interest, and certainly out of use.”
“You've made your point well, sir.”
“We may just as well take this path,” he countered. “It leads full circle to where we entered, and it is no further, and along the way, you can decide for yourself if St. Albans has any other skeletons in her closet.”
They continued along ancient corridors, the odor of earth and mineral-rich water, seeping through the rock face here, filled her nostrils. They passed several dungeonlike rooms, each of which Luc Sante insisted on opening, each sending forth a vile, stale breath like that of cadavers. Cobwebs and filth which appeared to have gone undisturbed for centuries met them at every turn. “Nothing whatever here,” he assured her again. “Still, I can well understand both your suspicion and curiosity.”
“How did you know I was suspicious and curious?”
“It's part of you, isn't it? In your genes, your nature? And me
… I read people. Part of my genetic makeup to read and understand people.”
Jessica felt a sense of calm acceptance and welcomed relief waft over her as a result of Father Luc Sante's simple gesture and his revelations here. She felt badly that she ever doubted the man, felt badly about herself as well, that she could be so stupid as to embarrass herself this way, and she readily discounted all the coincidences when Father Luc Sante said, “I fear my suspicions about young Father Strand, however, to be true. Do you know he brought many people here for solace, such as the twins, you know, the hapless pair you met the other day. He thought they could benefit from both his ministering and my therapy, and perhaps they have. They respond to me because I was once their minister, when they were younger, you see.”
She noted his absolute innocence in admitting this fact. “Father Strand knew this fact, and so he arranged to bring them here?”
“He did.”
“And what about Father Strand. How long have you known him?”
“It seems forever. He was just a boy first time I met him. He readily joined our choir at Bury St. Edmonds at the time.”
“Bury St. Edmunds?” she asked.
“No, no… Gloucester. Edmunds was my second parish. Had to pay my dues to find my way to a London parish. “I didn't want the twins here, but Strand stood his ground, saying they had no other place of refuge, that the world was too big for them. He convinced me to take them in. They live nearby, but in practice, they live here at St. Albans.”
“O'Donahue lived in Bury St. Edmunds,” she told him. “And you never told police of your connection with her.”
“I had none. If she were in congregation there, she did not make herself known to me.”
“But you saw the police report saying where she had once lived.”
“I did, but I didn't think it relevant. I did not know her.”
She nodded, accepting this. “I'm sorry,” she told him, “for ever having suspected you of… of being involved in such evils as… as I did.”
“Nonsense, my dear. It is your job to cultivate a healthy, suspicious, and cynical mind. Without it, where would you be? Shall we go down to Crown's End, to the street bazaar, see if we can learn where Martin has been hiding himself away of late?”
“Do you think it might tell us something?”
“Me, perhaps. I know the young man has been doctoring books. I just don't know why, and this purchase of an altar? I know he's not set up a storefront church anywhere.”
“I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a look.”
“That's exacdy what I had thought.”
“Where is Strand now?” she asked.
“I'm not sure. He comes and goes pretty much as the spirit moves him, especially of late.”
“Well, then, let's have at it.” It was a phrase she'd picked up from Sharpe.
On exiting the church, just before pushing through the doors, Luc Sante spotted Martin Strand getting into a cab. He pointed at the man in black and said, “It's him-Strand. He's likely off to the bazaar. We must flag down a cab and follow him.”
Jessica rushed out ahead of Luc Sante and waved down a passing cab. They clambered into the cab and with Strand's cab long out of sight, the old man shouted, “Crown's End bazaar.”
“Which end, east or west?” asked the driver.
“Either! Just get us there the quickest possible speed.”
“That'd be east end, then,” replied the cabby.
“Then do it, man! Do it!”
They soon found themselves deposited amid the street bazaar, a series of street hustlers in makeshift cubicles, many surrounding ancient buildings here which by day served as office buildings. Booths and open air stands invited tourists in, the booths three layers deep, some fixed up around ancient pillars. This, the east end of the serpentine bazaar, teemed with shoppers, mostly tourists, but somehow, amid the crowds, Jessica made out the back of Father Strand's head. She feared losing sight of him. Strand moved along briskly just across and down the street from where Jessica stood alongside Father Luc Sante. They froze for a moment, seeing the shadowy, distant figure of Strand looking about before disappearing again into the crowd.
“Where the deuce is he?” Luc Sante wanted to know, waving his cane.
“He's there!” she told Luc Sante, pointing. But Strand's visage, or rather his long golden hair, went in and out of a sea of others. “We need to get closer, or we'll lose him.”
“I'm slowing you down. Go ahead, shadow him as you police people like to say. I shall come along behind you. I don't wish to lose him any more than you do. Go, go!”
She did so, putting all her effort now into keeping Strand in her sight. If anyone at St. Albans was guilty of serial killing, it must be the mysterious Father Martin Strand, she told herself as she became Strand's shadow.
She gazed back once to see if Father Luc Sante followed, and she could see him coming along, slowly but surely. People on the street engaged Luc Sante, called out to him, asked for his blessings. When Jessica returned her gaze to Strand, the man had again vanished. “G'damnit,” she cursed.
Luc Sante, catching up, gasping for breath, asked, “Why have you stopped? Where is he?”
“He's gone.”
“Gone?”
“Vanished.”
“Without a trace?”
“Like smoke… like a chameleon.”
“Oh, and this is exactly where I lost him when last I was here.” Luc Sante jabbed the sidewalk with his black cane.
Circling, staring in all directions, being jostled by the crowd, Jessica said, “Then there must be someplace he is disappearing to, right about here. He can't have stepped into another dimension.”
“Oh, you don't know Strand. He's something of a magician, that one. Had me fooled, and I'm the supposed expert. Let's face it. For all these years, his choirboy looks have gotten him by. He simply is not what he appears to be.”
Jessica began the search through this street-comer madhouse of electric energy, a kind of Sodom and Gomorra of bartering. Every item imaginable could be purchased here, and one of the shops Jessica now stood before must be where Strand purchased his ancient altar. At the same instant Jessica's eyes fell on the incredible array of oaken furniture made to appear ancient. Father Luc Sante, growing excited, pointed it out as well, saying, “This is the shop on the receipt for the altar I told you about, Jessica. This is where he purchased the missing oak altar.”
On entering the shop, Jessica saw that it was filled with an array, indeed the enure spectrum of religious icons and paraphernalia, including crosses as large as the beams on ancient firehouse ceilings. She immediately wondered if Strand had also purchased an ancient cross here, with spikes thrown in to seal the deal? Jessica asked the question of Luc Sante who puzzled it out.
She followed with, “What about having a custom-made brand for the underside of the to
ngue made here?”
“There is a shop for every taste at this street bazaar,” he assured her. “No doubt there is a shop where this sort of branding is routine, like tattooing now! Or body piercing. Trust me, on this street, anything can be had for a price.”
Jessica could easily imagine it possible here from the evidence of her eyes. For here, staring from every tabletop and street vendor's booth, lay black market items from rhino homs to human skulls, ancient swords too heavy to lift to entire table and chair sets that appeared to have been taken from royal homes, the workmanship that fine and intricate. Here Jessica saw the arcane and archaic, the bizarre and fantastic, including a fellow whose entire stock comprised of branding tools Branding irons, both large and small, even miniature in size to create ready-made tattoos without the wait for those able to withstand the pain.
Jessica wondered if the tongue branding iron had not come from this collection of knockabout junk. Jessica saw real family crests for sale, stamps of office, royal seals, extraordinary candles, canes, boxes, paintings, artwork, and sculptures from around the globe; she saw mantels, clocks, children's toys, portmanteaus, chests, armoires, cast iron stoves, kitchenware, pirate ware, fantasy ware, warfare ware, and pinned insects of the most exotic nature, followed by an array of colorful African, handcarved coffins, and beside these, Old World headstones made to order, all this and more within walking distance of St. Albans, and all the variety of wares displayed within feet of one another. Many of the outdoor salespeople had covered ancient doorways, alleyways, and stairwells leading up this way, inviting down that way. The street vendors had built their makeshift booths, like any flea market, wherever they found space, and this section, where Jessica and Luc Sante found themselves, sat squarely in a run-down area of old warehouses that had fallen on hard times many years before, long since abandoned. In other districts, particularly along the Thames, property in ill repair had become fodder for real estate developers following the lead in America to build condominiums and time shares out of old buildings via judicious refurbishing. But this blighted area would have none of that.
So where had Strand disappeared to?
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