by LJ Ross
Nothing was going to happen to her, Anna thought. Why think like that?
“Are you hungry?” she asked him, brightly.
“I can make something,” he said, and nuzzled Emma’s tummy to make her laugh again.
Ryan had always been one of those rare creatures who didn’t expect others to do things for him, especially not things he could do perfectly well himself—unless, of course, they really wanted to.
“I think your dad is planning to grill some steaks,” she said. “Your mum thinks I’m getting too thin, so she’s been trying to feed me up.”
Ryan tucked Emma against his chest and looked at his wife—properly looked, removing the ‘love goggles’ he wore every day.
“Perhaps you’ve lost a bit of weight, but that’s bound to happen when you’re running around after this little one and probably forgetting to eat.”
Anna nodded. “I’m sure that’s it,” she agreed. “But, as I told your mum, if I have to stuff my face with steak and chips, followed by a slab of coffee cake, then I guess I’ll have to force myself—for the good of my health.”
“That’s the spirit,” Ryan agreed, and flashed a devastating smile that, even after all these years, could still make her stomach flip over.
Then, she caught an odd look in his eye, and knew there was something he needed to tell her. But, not now.
If they needed to speak of dark things, they would do it far away from their daughter’s ears.
“Let’s give her a bath,” she said, huskily. “Then, we’ll have some dinner. There’ll be time to talk, once Emma’s asleep.”
“All right,” he said, and leaned across to press a kiss to her temple. “I love you.”
“I know. I love you too.”
* * *
Ryan’s parents seemed to have sensed something about his manner, too, for they seemed as eager as she was to enjoy every moment of their dinner together, where there was no shop talk whatsoever. However, once the plates were cleaned away and small talk dried up, Ryan knew it was past time to address the thought that was uppermost in his mind.
But, still, he delayed.
“Did you have any time to look out those notes about the gospel book?” he asked his wife.
Anna grasped the topic like a lifeline. “Yes, I did,” she said, and rose from her chair to reach for a slim folder she’d printed off, earlier that day. “A copy of all this is saved on my laptop, too.”
Ryan flipped open the first page and felt a shudder of recognition.
The image was a colour print of a painting entitled, ‘The Death of the Venerable Bede’ by an artist called William Bell Scott, painted in 1857. It showed the dead man, Bede, lying on the floor of a study or workroom within the walls of a grand monastery, one full of books and interesting treasures. In the painting, Bede is surrounded by five other monks, one of whom is kissing the crown of his head. On the window ledge in the background, there were four multi-coloured bottles, and to the left of the body was a rustic worktable slanted inward, on top of which rested a long white feather.
In Bede’s lap there was a small red book containing the gospel of St. John.
“I saw this,” he said quietly. “Or parts of this—at the scene at Crayke College.”
“What do you mean?” his mother asked, leaning forward to look over his shoulder.
“The killer had tried to recreate this painting, or parts of it,” Ryan said. “They left four bottles on the window ledge of the cider mill, where Father Jacob was found, and a long white feather perched exactly like this on the edge of a worktable, not far from the body.”
He paused, feeling vaguely ill. “I can’t say the body was left in the same condition.”
“I’m sorry,” Anna said. “I had no idea—I included that picture because it’s quite famous, and shows the gospel book in Bede’s lap. It was made at the same monastery where he spent most of his life, down in Jarrow.”
“No, don’t be sorry,” Ryan said, flipping through more pages. “The more information we have, the better.”
“Knowledge is power,” his father murmured.
“Exactly. The more insight I have into this person’s mind, the better chance I have of catching him.”
“You think it’s a male, then?” Charles asked.
Ryan gave up all pretence of confidentiality and nodded.
“It feels male,” he said. “The association with Cuthbert, the physicality of the person I saw at the British Library…it fits.”
“From a historical perspective, anyone who knows about Cuthbert would also know he was reputed to have disliked women because he saw them as distractions.”
“Quite right,” Charles chimed in, and received a playful nudge from his wife.
“There’s a long black marble line across the floor which traditionally barred women from crossing into the nave,” Anna said. “Anyone who wanted to devote themselves to the cult of Cuthbert would know about this and, frankly, speaking as a woman, it’s a stumbling block.”
Ryan grinned, and looked back at the folder, thinking of all the time she’d taken that day to try to help him.
“Thank you for doing all this, I—what’s this?”
He pulled out the last page of the folder, which consisted of a single sentence which read:
If Cuthbert ye seek, look atop the highest throne
“Ah,” Anna said, with a gleam in her eye. “This is the interesting bit.”
She reached for the folder and extracted forty sheets of paper, each showing a printed image of a different page from the St. Cuthbert Gospel, not in chronological order as they appeared in the gospel book, but numbered with a red pen in the top right corner of each page. Moving aside their coffee cups, Anna laid out the pages for her family to see, then sat back down again.
“Notice anything?” she asked.
They studied the images, but nothing was immediately apparent, except to Charles.
“These dots,” he said, tracing a finger over what, at first, appeared to be no more than a tiny fleck or a photographic blip beneath certain letters.
“I wonder why I didn’t see it,” Ryan said, and could have kicked himself. “I might have known ol’ hawk-eye would have spotted it.”
“Old habits die hard,” Charles shrugged. “Is this the message it spells out?”
Anna nodded. “When I was going through the full digital version of the gospel book, I hardly noticed these little pin-pricks and, to be honest, I wouldn’t have noticed them at all, if I hadn’t been looking for something unusual in the first place,” she said. “Anybody flicking through those pages would probably miss it—there’s only a single dot beneath a single letter on different pages throughout the book, and they had even been jumbled into an anagram. It took me a minute to unscramble the letters.”
Ryan smiled, and wondered how long it would have taken him to perform the same task—days, probably.
“Whoever did this was smart, and they were obviously very familiar with the specific details of this book,” Anna said. “For instance, it already has pinholes on parts of its pages, but those relate to its binding, nothing more. Whoever concealed their message in this way knew it would be a fairly safe bet that anybody casually looking through the book wouldn’t consider the new pinholes to be significant—unless they were already looking for something of significance.”
“Especially as the book is written in Latin,” Eve said. “It’s only once you put individual letters together that it makes any sense, in English.”
“Exactly.” Anna nodded.
“What do you think it means?” Ryan asked, trying to understand what it was about that single sentence that had been so important as to motivate someone to kill. “That Cuthbert’s spirit has ascended to heaven, or something like that?”
“Possibly,” Anna said. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I feel like something’s tugging at the edge of my mind. It’ll come to me, probably after a good night’s sleep.”
Ryan smiled, an
d rose from his chair to walk around and kiss her.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“For looking into all of this,” he said. “I want you to know how much I appreciate it—how much I appreciate all of you.”
He looked between them, and knew the time had come to say what he hoped he would never have to say.
* * *
They moved into the living room, where all was cosy and warm.
Charles and Eve settled themselves on one of the sofas, whilst Ryan and Anna took the opposite one, tidying away some of Emma’s leftover toys into a basket as they went. They took the time to stoke the fire and turn the lights down low, before Ryan broached the subject he had been avoiding all evening.
“Things have changed, over the past few days,” he began, and reached over to link his fingers with Anna’s. “Previously, there was a nebulous threat from a person who was careful and quiet, organised and ruthless. In the last two days, that person’s behaviour has escalated. Two people have died in as many days, and another artefact has been taken, causing serious injuries to another person in the process.”
Charles reached down to lay his hand over his wife’s, in silent support. They had lost one child to a madman already; they would not be losing another.
“What can we do?” he asked. “Tell us, and we’ll do it.”
Ryan nodded, and turned to his wife.
“Anna—before, it made sense to maintain a status quo. It looked the least suspicious, and there was safety in numbers. But now that Operation Bertie is no longer covert, this person knows they’re being hunted and that I won’t stop until I find them. That leaves them with two choices, as far as I can see.”
“Run and hide, or stay and fight,” Charles muttered.
Ryan nodded.
“If they come for me, they’ll come for my whole family. If they want something from me, they’ll try to use my family as leverage, and I can’t allow it.”
He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the soft skin of Anna’s hand.
“I think it’s time you and Emma went down to Devon,” he said, and turned to his parents. “All of you. Just for a while, until this is resolved.”
It killed him to say it, to send away those he loved most, but it was the best and only way to protect them.
“But—you said it wouldn’t matter where we were, if this person really wanted to find us,” Anna said.
“I still believe that,” he said, frankly. “But there’s no need to make things easy for them.”
“I could travel down to Devon with the girls, then come back to help you,” his father offered.
Ryan shook his head.
“I appreciate the thought, Dad, but I’m relying on you to stay and look out for everyone down south,” he said. “I want you to call in your old security team and turn Summersley into a fortress.”
He referred to the family home, set in hundreds of acres of land in the Devonshire hills.
“There’s nobody else I’d trust with my family’s life,” he added.
Charles looked him in the eye. “You can trust me.”
“For how long?” Anna asked, keeping her emotions in check as best she could. “How long will we be apart?”
Ryan looked down at their joined hands, thought of the sleeping baby upstairs, and tried to stay strong.
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “I’ll try to finish this as quickly as I can, Anna, so we can all be together again.”
“What about you?” Eve asked, and her voice trembled. “Who’ll be looking after you?”
“I’m a big boy,” he said, with the ghost of a smile. “I’ll look after myself.”
Eve was hardly satisfied with that.
“We could arrange some security for Ryan, too,” she said to her husband, who nodded his agreement.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Ryan told them. “For now, I want to know all of you will be somewhere safe, far away from anything remotely to do with any of this. Will you do that for me?”
This last question he aimed at Anna, whose brown eyes shone with unshed tears.
“Yes,” she whispered. “For the sake of our family, and to give you the space you need to work without worrying about any of us, yes, I’ll go to Devon.”
“Thank you,” he said, and held her as she snuggled closer and laid her head against his chest. “It’s for the best.”
She knew that he was saying it to convince himself, as much as her.
“I know,” she reassured him. “But knowing doesn’t make the doing any easier.”
Across the room, Eve and Charles exchanged a glance.
“We’ll leave you two in peace,” his mother said. “We’ll get on the road first thing tomorrow.”
Eve brushed a maternal hand over Ryan’s head as she passed, then leaned down to kiss his brow, blinking away the tears that threatened to fall.
“Goodnight,” she whispered, and left them both to say their long goodbye.
* * *
It took him a couple of days to crack the anagram, which was lowering for him to admit.
But it was easily explained.
He would hardly be a worthy recipient of Cuthbert’s Code if he was able to understand its mysteries straight away, and nor would Father Jacob have been a worthy guardian if his message had been obvious to all who read it.
Only the most loyal followers could see it, and understand it.
Once he’d understood the message, he knew immediately where to look for the next clue, and it had taken all of his restraint not to go there immediately and claim what was rightfully his.
But he could not.
That would be foolish, for the place was under constant surveillance and its unique placement made it almost impossible to access without being discovered.
He needed a proxy.
Somebody with the intelligence, the means, the power and the incentive to do his bidding.
He knew just the man.
Reaching for the prosthetic mask he kept in a glass case, laid out on a satin pillow, he lifted it to his face and looked at himself in the mirror, smiling like the madman he was.
He was Cuthbert’s holy heir.
He was the vessel for his power.
He reached for one of a stack of unused burner mobiles and placed a call to one of his most useful contacts. When the arrangements had been made, he fell to his knees and prayed.
CHAPTER 32
Thursday, 10th December
The only person who slept through the night was Emma, who awakened fresh as a daisy and blissfully ignorant of any sad undercurrents in the household. Through her child’s eyes, she saw her father’s face appear above her cot, looked into his loving blue gaze and kicked her arms and legs in excitement, ready to be held in his strong arms. She breathed in his smell, as she laid her small head in the crook of his neck and heard the rumble of his voice as he sang a shaky rendition of ‘Water of Tyne’ on their way downstairs. Then she smiled for her mother, who followed after them with eyes that were bloodshot, for reasons she couldn’t understand.
“I’m going to miss you, little one,” Ryan told her. “Don’t forget me, will you?”
He turned to Anna, and held out his free arm, which curved around her to form a tight circle, just the three of them.
“I’ll come and get you, the minute this is done,” he promised, kissing the top of both of their heads. “If you see anything unusual, anything that concerns you, don’t stop, don’t wait—you just run. Understand?”
Anna nodded, and knew that her tears would soak through his shirt.
“Be careful,” she said, and took the baby from him. “Don’t worry about us, focus your attention to bringing him in.”
Ryan looked at the pair of them, turned and made for the door, before turning and walking swiftly back to claim Anna’s mouth in a searing kiss, as if it was their last. Afterwards, he cupped the baby’s head in his hand, kissed the top of it, and turned to leave.
His mother met him at the front door.
“You don’t need to worry,” she said, with admirable control. “We’ll look after them for you, but you must promise me something in return.”
“Anything,” he said.
“Look after yourself,” she said. “You’re all I have left.”
Ryan enveloped his mother in his arms and breathed in her scent, which was worth a million memories.
“I promise,” he said. “Drive quickly, but safely.”
She nodded, and raised her hand to wave as he walked swiftly down the drive towards his car, where Charles was waiting to see him off.
“Just been checking the tyres,” he said, for something to say. “Your front ones needed a bit of air, so I…”
Ryan pulled him in for a hard hug, and held his father for longer than was strictly necessary.
“There now,” Charles said, with a catch to his voice. “We’ll be fine, and so will you.”
“It’s for the best, isn’t it?”
“You know it is.”
Ryan nodded, and pulled away, scrubbing a hand across his face.
“If you see anything, hear anything—”
“I’ll know what to do,” Charles assured him, and then took his son’s shoulders in a light grip, standing eye-to-eye. “Listen to me now, Ryan.”
It was the first time he’d used the name, and Ryan stood up a little taller because of it.
“Wondered when you’d use that name,” he said. “I won our bet, after all.”
“Yes, you did.” Charles smiled. “Six straight bullseyes, that I counted. But it’s the seventh one that counts, son. That’s the one you don’t see coming, the one that comes at you when you least expect it, and it’s not always a bullet.”
He paused, his eyes demanding attention.
“You watch your back—that’s an order.”
Ryan gave a brief nod, and looked back towards the house.
“Get as far away as you can, as quickly as you can.”
“We’ll be on the road within thirty minutes,” Charles replied, and shook his son’s hand. “Go and do what you do best.”
* * *
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
