The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  It was all very eloquent, and it said: this is a nice prosperous house. The home of a young, attractive, privileged metropolitan London couple, a couple doing well, a couple maybe thinking of having children.

  And where did Nina fit into all this? The unmarried unattached younger daughter, with her drinking and her dark, dark hair.

  Adam could discern the dynamic between the sisters. There was a strong bond there, but also perhaps a tiny bit of resentment. Nina was the prettier one: she was certainly the more damaged and neurotic, the more fragile.

  Hannah was attractive but more stolid, more sensible perhaps; yet she had already made a slight and apparently jesting remark about Nina being ‘Dad’s favourite’. Adam had also noticed a definite bickering underlying their mutual sadness at their father’s death, Hannah apparently feeling that their father’s final illness, the cancer he had kept quiet, entirely explained his suicide.

  The older sister finished her recitative from Wikipedia. ‘So we know the Green Man is a common architectural motif. Originally pagan. We know that they represent, probably, a wild man of the woods, a fertility figure, or even a pre-Christian heathen god like Woden. Commonly they have leaves for hair and beards, and sometimes shoots growing from their mouths, eyes, and noses. They are found—’ she checked the screen, ‘—across Europe. They date from the eleventh century to the twentieth. Some of the earliest can be seen in Templar sites in the Holy Land.’

  Nina sat back on the kitchen stool. ‘What does that tell us? Cube root of fuck all.’

  Adam gazed at the dark black rectangle of kitchen window, smeared with snowmelt. Who was out there, pursuing them? The serious anxiety was actually a flavour in his mouth: as if he was sucking a key. Sour and metallic. And the winter night was so dark.

  ‘Can we have a light on?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Hannah said. ‘I got carried away, I didn’t realize, yes of course.’ Her accent was almost perfectly English, the Scottishness long since departed. There was a stark contrast with Nina: blonde and brunette, English and Scottish. But he could also sense the sincere love between the sisters as well: their hugs and kisses on meeting had been unabashed.

  Soft bright light flooded the kitchen; Adam gazed at a photo perched on top of a breadmaker: a recent holiday photo of Hannah and her boyfriend with palm trees behind them. He was as blonde as her.

  ‘Where is … ah …’

  Hannah followed his gaze to the photo. ‘My fiancé? Nick? In Paris working, but he’s back tomorrow.’

  Adam felt the barometer of risk twitching further towards danger. The fiancé was away. So he was the only man in the house. If anything happened he would have to defend them. Follow the notebooks to the daughter.

  But this was absurd; he chided himself; what was really going to ‘happen’? They were in an agreeable house in an agreeable Georgian suburb of north London, a fashionable district with delis and restaurants and gastropubs serving Portuguese custard tarts. The idea of brutal violence erupting into this nice kitchen with its different kinds of balsamic vinegar was purely surreal.

  Yet so was the notion of an academic being killed because of what he discovered about the Templars.

  Nina was using Hannah’s laptop now, pointing at the screen, and going through it all again. ‘So. The Templars were obsessed with Green Men. And Dad was aware of this. But what did the Green Man mean to the Templars?’

  Adam gave the obvious answer. ‘That they worshipped something pagan, pre-Christian? Or at least elements of this? Maybe that is the big secret?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Nina agreed.

  Hannah was making coffee. She voiced her thoughts with her back to them as she filled the cafetière with grounds. ‘The Templars were accused, of course, of worshipping the devil, in their trials, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes. Baphomet,’ Nina said. ‘Baphomet. That was the name of the god they were meant to idolize. A head. A grotesque wee head. Wasn’t it? I’ll have mine black, Han.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Adam. He took out his notebook. ‘Let’s write down everything that links the Templars to pagan worship, in a proper list.’ He clicked his pen. As he did so, a shadow passed across the window. Adam stared – alarmed. But it was just people coming home from work, momentarily blocking the streetlight.

  The cafetière filled, Hannah turned back. ‘Wasn’t there something about weird rituals in their initiations?’

  Adam wrote a sentence in his notebook. ‘We know the Templar rites were deeply secret. They were held at midnight, or before dawn, which got people intrigued. And your dad mentioned the initiation rites at Rosslyn.’

  Nina looked at Adam. ‘So. What did happen? At these rites?’

  ‘We don’t know for certain. People have been that asking since the Templars emerged. The King of France was so obsessed with finding out that he actually installed a sleeper agent in the Templars, who was meant to report back. But the man went native and refused to tell the King. Which was one reason the French King was so enraged by the Order he finally took vengeance on them. That’s the legend anyway. Could be garbage.’

  Hannah plunged the cafetière. The dark grounds roiled and agitated in the coffee liquor, like tiny trapped living creatures. ‘What about … the gay sex thing?’

  Adam answered again. ‘Yes. That’s also … curious. We know the Templars were accused of committing strange homosexual acts during their rituals. Novice knights supposedly had to kiss the “base of the spine” of the superior knight. They were accused of conducting sexually perverse rituals, almost a Black Mass, drinking wine to get drunk, then … well, fellating each other. Anal sex. Gay orgies basically.’

  ‘So they were gay, so what?’ Nina accepted her coffee from her sister. ‘Lots of these monastic orders were gay – young men sworn to chastity, living in dormitories in a desert, it would be amazing if they weren’t a bit that way.’

  Adam agreed. ‘The sexual angle is interesting, but it’s not necessarily or even remotely pagan. And, besides, many other heretical sects were accused of homosexuality and blasphemy, quite unjustly. It was a standard way of demonizing unwanted communities. What else?’

  ‘Cats.’ Nina said. ‘The Templars were alleged to worship a cat. There is a cat gargoyle at Temple Bruer.’

  Adam wrote. ‘What else?’

  ‘What about all the blasphemy? Go back to the blasphemy.’ Nina sipped her coffee. Adam wrote down the word blasphemy. ‘You say it’s crap but they confessed, didn’t they? The violent gay knights? At the trials? To spitting on the cross, urinating on it, stamping on it.’

  Hannah interrupted. ‘But those confessions were extracted under torture. They are wholly unreliable, Nina. They had their feet roasted over fires; one poor Templar came to the courts with the bones of his feet in a bag, the bones had fallen out, he was tortured so horribly. You would confess to anything in that situation, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Dad used to talk about the tortures. The pity and the horror.’ Nina screwed her mouth up in that peculiar way which Adam had come to understand meant she was repressing some deep, conflicted emotion.

  A stagey and anxious silence stifled the kitchen. The sisters were staring into their Met Museum coffee mugs, Thinking About Dad. Adam looked around, prickling with nerves. The windows were so dark. Was that someone staring into the house? He yearned for curtains. Why did upper-middle-class English people have an aversion to curtains on the ground floor?

  ‘What about your father?’ said Adam, just to break the awkward moment. ‘Did he ever talk about anything pagan connected with the Templars?’

  ‘Not much,’ Hannah answered. She revolved her mug clockwise, then anticlockwise, staring into the black, black coffee. ‘Maybe the head worship. The adoration of this Baphomet idea. He found that intriguing.’

  A jarring thought occurred, Adam voiced it. ‘And what about that horrible piece of pottery we saw, in your dad’s study? The one he brought back from South America?’

  It was Hannah who responded. ‘I lo
oked into that. It’s from Peru, from a culture called the Moche.’

  ‘And they were?’

  She hesitated. ‘Some kind of strange pre-Inca civilization, a very bloodthirsty people. Sixth century, I think … But we know Dad went to Peru from his receipts, so there might be a link.’

  ‘It fits with the Green Men,’ Nina said. ‘Yes. A pagan head? A pagan deity? Then that explains the evil skeletons in Temple Bruer! No? Sacrificial victims? Adam, this must be it – the Templars worshipped a pagan deity: they were involved with some violent, evil, pagan religion, for real. It must be this. But what is so terrible about this revelation, that even today …’ She stopped.

  It is so terrible that it gets you killed was written in chilling silver letters in the very air between them.

  ‘It seems an awful long way. From medieval Europe to Peru in the sixth century,’ Adam said dubiously.

  ‘Sure,’ Nina answered, ‘but if my dad saw a link there must be a link. Otherwise why did all these people steal his notebooks, then come back and burgle his flat afterwards? They wanted what he found!’

  ‘And they still want it,’ Adam said. ‘They still want it now.’

  The atmosphere was as dark as the windows outside. Hannah spoke, over-brightly. ‘Does anyone want supper? I think I’ve got some sea bass. No pud I’m afraid …’

  Nina smiled, sadly. ‘I’d love some, Han.’

  The doorbell rang.

  Hannah got up. ‘That’ll be the delivery guy, Ocado to the rescue. Thought they’d never make it through the snow.’

  Adam watched Hannah walk to the door. He drank some more coffee. Hannah opened the front door to the darkness outside.

  30

  Canonbury Square, Islington, London

  He was thwarted. For almost the first time in his police career, DCI Mark Ibsen felt utterly defeated, and also at fault. Why had he even agreed to this tail, when he’d known the risks? There was always the likelihood that the suspect would limbo neatly under the radar – slip their feeble knot. And so it had turned out.

  Morosely, he gazed out of the Met Police Lexus at the snowbound Georgian terraces of Canonbury Square. They were parked in a part of old London made more beautiful by the flurries and eider feathers of snow, now settling contentedly on every lateral surface.

  ‘Maybe we’ll get a visual, sir,’ said Larkham from behind the wheel, sounding entirely unconvinced. Their suspect had absconded with disdainful ease.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ibsen. ‘We’ll get a visual when we find the next body, with its fucking head hacked off, pretending to be a suicide.’

  This was harsh and overdone. Ibsen didn’t care. A freezing cold December night had fallen on his hopes. He picked up his iPad. He’d been doing this on and off for the last hour as they sat here, helpless, waiting for Kilo team to pick up the scent of Antonio Ritter, who was somewhere out there, in Islington, doing whatever it was he did. Persuading people to cut their own limbs off.

  The image of the girl in the wardrobe returned to him, uninvited. The pure horror. He needed to work. Deftly, Ibsen Googled the words ‘death cult’. A number of rock bands topped the screen. Southern Death Cult. Monolith Death Cult. Horizon Death Cult. Lots and lots of death cult metal bands. This was useless. He turned and asked his junior a question.

  ‘Larkham. Do you ever think of jumping under a train?’

  The answering silence was amplified by the muffling snow. Eventually Larkham shrugged and said, ‘Not really, no. Except when I am changing my ninety-eighth nappy of the day. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘I’m just thinking about suicide – as a concept. I wonder if we are all capable of it at some time or other.’

  A solitary pedestrian scrunched past the parked police car. The man was dressed as for an Arctic walk to a remote Inuit village.

  Larkham spoke up again: ‘Actually, sir, there was this one …’ He scratched his nose: the universal body language of uncertainty.

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘I remember, when I was a kid, my grandfather had this old well in his back garden. It was very deep and mysterious, and kind of scary. We used to drop stones and coins down it when we were kids, me and my sisters, listening for the plop when it hit the water. Took ages. And I used to have nightmares about that scary old well. About falling down it and not being able to get back up. And yet … sometimes I think a bit of me wanted to fall down the well. Just to know what it was like, how horrible it would be, never able to get back up. I guess that may be the same thing? Some kind of internal death wish? Bit ghoulish!’

  Ibsen gazed at his driver. ‘Yes,’ His voice was low. ‘Yes, it is. A bit ghoulish. But interesting.’

  The car was quiet. London was quiet. Quietened by the ward sister of snow, hushing everyone, tucking them all up in stiff white quilts, then turning off the lights.

  He glanced at his radio, as if looking at it would make it crackle into life. Nothing. Kilo team were drawing a blank. Larkham was lost out there, in the icy wastes of failed police work, trudging towards the North Pole of pointlessness.

  He switched on his iPad again. But Larkham was sighing impatiently. Ibsen glanced across.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘I could slaughter a coffee.’

  ‘So why not go and get a coffee?’

  ‘You always get to the heart of the matter, sir. That’s why I respect you so much.’

  ‘Ditto your sarcasm, Larkham. I’ll have an espresso.’

  Larkham laughed, and climbed out; the car door slammed shut behind him. Ibsen bent to his iPad and typed ‘Islington cult’. Of course he drew a zero. ‘Islington murders’ was equally unfruitful, not least because Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen already knew all the murders in Islington.

  ‘Islington suicides’ seemed just as unproductive. But Ibsen read the citations anyway. There were a lot of suicides. An old lady in a care home. A kid with some pills. Not rich, just a kid. Then a Scottish academic with Islington relatives, who drove into a wall.

  This Scottish guy even had a Facebook page, cached; the page itself had been deleted. Ibsen scanned the contents and one of the photos struck him, but he wasn’t sure why. It was just a photo. And so he moved on, and glanced at some more examples. And then he stopped.

  The sudden, retroactive realization impaled Ibsen.

  There was something about that photo. Something he had seen, subliminally maybe. What was it? Quickly he paged back through his history to the cached Facebook page and read the text carefully.

  Archibald McLintock had driven himself into a wall. The daughters thought it was not suicide. They had set up the Facebook page. They were appealing for information. Their father was an elderly but distinguished historian who had no cause to blah blah.

  Now Ibsen went to the Contacts. One daughter was called Hannah McLintock. She was an ‘economist, living in Islington’. The Facebook page gave no other info, and no phone numbers, just an email address. So what was it about this photo that had so struck him?

  With a flick of two fingers he enlarged the photo. It showed the suicide victim, the late Archibald McLintock, sitting in some kind of study. It was a portrait of a scholar in his work room: behind him were shelves and cases full of old books, in front of him was a big, handsome desk. It was a very posed photo, presumably a publicity shot, for the jacket cover of the guy’s own history book, maybe.

  Ibsen looked closer. What was that? On the desk?

  Another protraction of two fingers enlarged the photo further.

  There. Sitting on the desk, was a very strange pot. The strange, old-looking pot showed a man in a loincloth kneeling at an altar.

  Both of his feet had been cut off.

  Ibsen swore out loud, cursing himself for allowing Larkham to wander off. This was it; this was it. They needed to get going now, right this minute, not wait around as they did with Imogen Fitzsimmons. And they needed to go in hard, mob-handed, and with armed response: Ritter was very dangerous.

  But finding Hannah McLintock co
uld take hours.

  31

  Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London

  Adam sensed the danger immediately. He leapt from his stool and ran to the door; just as the dark, leather-coated man kicked it with a boot-heel.

  Adam’s fist connected with a chin, satisfyingly; the man reeled back; Adam punched again – but this time his fist missed, and instead the hard butt of a pistol cracked Adam’s head, sending him spinning. And then, with great speed, the intruder twirled the gun and pressed it hard into Adam’s stomach. Ready to shoot. Adam froze.

  ‘Good move, mate, very sensible. Back off.’ The man spoke, in an American accent. He eyed Nina in the semi-dark. ‘Same goes for you. Back the fuck off, bitch.’ His gaze switched between them. ‘So we’re all here. Very good. Both of the girls, both of the McLintocks. And you, the brawling Aussie. Adam Blackwood, right? My name’s Ritter. Not that it’s going to help you now, mate. Get over there, join the girls. And put all your fucking cellphones on the counter. Right now. Or,’ he angled the muzzle of the gun at Hannah, ‘I will put my gun in her cunt. And shoot.’

  The phones clattered on to the counter.

  Ritter briskly filled a sink with water, and chucked the phones in the liquid. Then he commanded, ‘Upstairs. Let’s have ourselves a little downtime. A meeting. So we can share. Condemned Fuckers Anonymous. Hi, I’m Adam and I’m about to die. Hello, Adam. Hello, Tony.’

  His pistol pursued them up the stairs into a green painted sitting room. Leather couches, some not-too-abstract art.

  ‘Typical. No proper fucking chairs. The fucking English bourgeoisie.’ Ritter sighed.

  Adam watched, waiting for a moment to fight, it could be the last chance. Ritter’s thirty-something face was darkish. And he was big. A fleck of foam silvered at the corner of his mouth as if he had the lips of a rambling coke addict. But he did not seem high; eager, alert and bright-eyed, but not high. He seemed wary, wised up, lean, ruthless.