by Kim Fleet
‘Actually it was my girlfriend, Eden, who found it.’ He caught sight of her and beckoned her over. ‘There she is.’
The camera swung round to her. She turned her face away. ‘I don’t really want to be filmed …’ she started.
‘You found the skeleton?’ the reporter said, undeterred. ‘Tell me how that happened.’
‘Well, a child fell into the drainage gully and I went to get him out, and there was a skull down there.’
‘You rescued a child? That’s very brave of you.’
‘Not really.’ She tried to edge away. ‘That’s enough now, I don’t want to …’
‘And what’s your name?’ the reporter asked.
‘It’s not relevant …’ she began.
‘Eden Grey,’ Aidan said at the same time.
‘Thank you, Dr Fox and Eden Grey,’ the reporter said, then addressed the camera full on. ‘This is BBC Midlands Today, at Hailes Abbey.’
As soon as the first reporter started to walk away, another scurried over. ‘Dr Fox! Dr Fox, ITV News here. Tell me about the skeleton. How long has it been there?’
‘What’s going on?’ Eden asked, but Aidan had already launched into his answer.
‘We’re not sure how old the skeleton is at present. We’ll only know that once we’ve done more tests,’ Aidan said. ‘At the moment our job is to painstakingly remove, clean and examine these bones to form as detailed a picture of the individual as possible.’
Seeing Trev looming nearby, Eden went over, holding up her hands in a ‘what the hell?’ gesture.
Trev crushed her in a bear hug. ‘Eden, you’re a star! Aidan says you’re the one who got us this stiff.’
‘And obviously we’ll treat these remains with the utmost sensitivity and respect,’ Aidan concluded.
The reporter took a step forwards. ‘You’re the Director of the Cheltenham Cultural Heritage Unit. Are the remains going to be taken to Cheltenham or will they stay at Hailes Abbey?’
‘That’s undecided at the moment,’ Aidan said. ‘Bearing in mind the significance of today’s find, it’s likely that they’ll go to an undisclosed location for testing and analysis.’
The interview finished and he caught up with Eden.
‘Come with me,’ he said, taking her hand and leading her through a throng of reporters and TV technicians to the visitors’ centre. Word had got around that Eden was the one who’d found the skeleton, and she pushed away cameras and microphones, repeating, ‘I don’t want to be interviewed, thank you.’
Inside, Aidan took her through the shop to a small staffroom, and then into a store room, packed with archaeological find boxes on metal shelves. She caught the labels on some of the boxes: chancel tiles; C14th pottery; statues. The skeleton was laid out on a trestle table in the middle of the room.
‘Why the circus?’ Eden asked. ‘Just for a skeleton?’
Aidan’s eyes burned. ‘It’s not the skeleton. When we excavated we … I … found something else.’
‘And?’
He wriggled his fingers into a pair of white cotton gloves and gently raised the lid of a cardboard finds box. Reaching inside, he brought out a round, reddish bottle with a long neck. ‘This.’
‘A perfume bottle?’ she hazarded. ‘Is it glass?’
‘It’ll have to be tested, but it might be garnet or beryl.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘You don’t know what it is, do you?’
Eden shrugged. ‘Just a pretty bottle.’
‘No.’ He pointed to a copy of an etching pinned to the wall. The characters depicted wore mediaeval clothes and processed with a canopy, under which was a man holding a cushion bearing a round bottle with a long neck sealed with a tall silver stopper. ‘See the resemblance?’ His gaze shifted back to the bottle. ‘It’s the Holy Blood of Hailes.’
CHAPTER
THREE
Newgate, September 1571
The straw piled against the far wall of the cell heaved and rustled. Counting the rats made a change from cracking fleas or betting on which drop of water would slide down the wall first. A cough racked the air. The beggar in the corner across the cell was dying, spewing his lungs up in an arc of blood.
‘Shut up and die quietly, you bastard!’ Lazarus shouted.
Silence for a moment. Maybe he had died, as ordered. Then the retching started again.
He’d die in here, too, no doubt. Everyone has to die sometime, somewhere, may as well be here. In his own country, at least. He thought back over his last few brushes with death. The bare-knuckle fight with a madman outside a tavern in Cadiz. The doxy in Calais who’d stabbed him for his coins. And then there were the paid for deaths, the sword and stiletto and gunpowder deaths and the gold coins in his breeches to take the taste away.
He splayed his fingers on his thighs. Three missing, cut off at the knuckle on his left hand. The price he paid for doing another man’s dirty business.
Hawking up a gob of phlegm, he spat it onto the floor near the rat. ‘Dinner time,’ he said.
He stared at the rat; the rat stared at him. It was waiting for him to die. He could smell the wound on his leg festering. A few more days in here and it would poison him altogether, and then the rat would enter his mouth and guzzle its way into his stomach and back out of his throat. He’d seen it before. Men dead in ditches and the rats swimming out of their silent screaming mouths.
He crawled over the stone floor towards the rat. It held his stare, never flinched. It thought it was quick. He knew he was quicker, snatching up the rat with practised speed.
‘Now who’s going to eat who?’ he asked.
Footsteps in the corridor outside. They halted at his door. An eye appeared at the grille. ‘Prisoner, stand back!’ a voice ordered.
A key scraped in the lock and a boot kicked the door open. The swollen wood grated against the floor.
‘Out!’ the warder said. He caught sight of the rat in his hand. ‘Leave your friend.’
Lazarus held the rat by the neck between his fingers and yanked its tail hard. The neck bones snapped. He tossed the rat at the warder. ‘A token of my gratitude,’ he said, as he walked out of the cell.
The warder jabbed his staff in his back all the way down the corridor, up two flights of stone steps lined with spitting sconces, and into a set of apartments hung with tapestries and with freshly strewn herbs on the floor. He crushed lavender and rosemary underfoot, releasing a long-forgotten scent of summer as he was marched through the antechamber and into a small withdrawing room. A fire burned in the grate. Apple logs, from the scent. Heavy draperies shrouded the windows and doorways. No draughts to rattle old bones here. In the centre of the room was a plain oak table with two oak chairs set opposite each other.
‘Mind your tongue,’ the warder said, giving him a final kick in the arse, then left him.
He peered round, senses taut. He wasn’t alone. Not that he could hear a man’s breath or smell his skin, but he knew there was another here, hiding in the shadows.
He didn’t speak. To speak first showed weakness. He waited, enjoying the stroke of the fire on his legs. How long it had been since he was warm. Months, he reckoned, since they’d hauled him out of that whore’s bed, clamped on the irons and dragged him here. That was the last time heat had warmed his flesh, with the woman’s hot thighs wrapped round his.
A figure revealed itself. A good few inches taller than him, whip-like, sinuous. A hint of plush velvet, a thick padded doublet. A flat pale face with dark almond eyes and a pointed black beard, expertly trimmed.
‘You’re the man they call Lazarus?’ the figure asked.
‘Who wants to know?’
The blow stunned him. A leather-clad smack right across his chops, snapping back his head. He rubbed his chin and reset his head on his neck.
‘You are Lazarus?’
‘Yes, they call me that.’
‘You have a real name, too, I take it?’
‘Matthew Sweet is what my parents decided in their mercy to call me.’
He jutted his chin, waiting for the next blow. It didn’t come.
The stranger flapped a document at him. ‘You are here because you injured a man in a fight.’
When Lazarus didn’t answer, the man continued, as if reading from the document. ‘You were brawling with a man named White. You tried to throttle him with your bare hands.’
They both glanced at Lazarus’s hands, at the stumps where his fingers used to dwell.
‘And you bit off his ear.’
‘Aye. I did.’ White’s foul breath in his face as he squeezed his neck; Lazarus’s hands jabbing at White’s neck in return as he fought him off. Faces so close they were like lovers. White’s ear in his mouth. His teeth gnashing through skin and gristle; the bloody gob of it in his mouth.
The stranger looked again at the paper. ‘And you ate it.’
Lazarus shook his head. ‘If that’s what they say then they’re lying. I did the decent thing and spat it into the fire.’
The mangled lump in the flames, hissing, then extinguished.
Pointed-beard looked him over for a long time, then folded the document and slid it inside his jacket. ‘Someone has a job for you, Lazarus,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘My Lord Cecil.’
Lazarus laughed. ‘Cecil, my arse. Just hang me if you’re minded to.’
‘We might well, Lazarus, but first, there’s something we need you to do.’
‘Oh?’ Lazarus said. So that was the size of it. They never did their own killing, these men. Not when murder was cheap and easily had. ‘Who and when?’
‘Patience, patience.’ The stranger pointed to one of the oak chairs. ‘Sit. I’ll tell you our dilemma.’
Lazarus sat where he commanded a view of the whole room. He kept the fire behind him, knowing it threw his face into shadows and made him unreadable. The stranger saw his calculations and laughed.
‘I see we have chosen well,’ he said. ‘You know your craft.’
‘I should do, after all these years.’
The man took the seat opposite him. ‘I am Robert Sidney. I work for Lord Cecil.’
‘Never heard of you.’
‘Good. Our work is not to be broadcast like peas in a field,’ Sidney said. He tugged off his leather gloves, one then the other, and laid them, fingers touching, on the table. ‘Our Sovereign Lady the Queen has a number of ungrateful subjects who are causing her great sorrow.’
Lazarus studied the stumps of his fingers. ‘So?’
‘There are some who doubt Her Majesty’s right to reign. There are some who plot to replace her with the Queen of Scots.’ Sidney steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them. ‘There are many heretics, foolishly blinded by an erroneous faith, who would assist in this treason.’
‘You want me to hunt down and kill every Catholic in the country?’ Lazarus said.
‘No, just one in particular.’ Sidney leaned back in his chair. ‘He lives in Gloucestershire. You were born there, hm? It’s your home.’
‘Born, yes, but I have had no home since I took to the road to make my living.’ From slaughtering cattle to slaughtering men. Not so different. The butcher had found him dipping his finger in a pool of blood and licking it when he was five years old and orphaned by the sweats. And there were times when he killed a man, felt the judder of the knife as it met bone, and his hand was slicked with blood. These times, too, he licked his palms clean.
Sidney was still talking. ‘There is a priest, living outside Winchcombe. You know it?’
His heart stilled for a beat. ‘I have heard of it.’
‘His name is Brother John. Our intelligencers tell us he is plotting.’
‘You want me to bring him in?’
‘No,’ Sidney smiled. ‘I want you to make him disappear.’
CHAPTER
FOUR
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
10:15 hours
‘Do take a seat.’ The doctor didn’t look at him, but studied the computer screen and clicked the mouse a few times. ‘There we are. Scan results. Let me see.’ There was an extended pause. ‘Right.’
The doctor swivelled round in his seat to face him, his hands pressed together between his knees. ‘I’m not going to sugar the pill, Mr Luker, it’s not good news.’
The headache he’d had for weeks now punched harder at his temples. He nodded for the doctor to continue.
‘It’s a brain tumour, I’m afraid, and it’s not in a very helpful place.’ The doctor waved a pen over the image on the computer screen: the white outline of Luker’s skull, inside it a jumbled, scribbled porridge. The doctor was talking, an esoteric language of tests and areas of the brain and procedures that meant nothing to Luker. All he could do was stare at the picture of his brain and hear the word ‘tumour’ echoing over and over again.
Eventually the doctor shut up and asked, ‘Any questions?’
‘What next?’ was all Luker could manage.
‘We’ll operate, and hopefully we’ll get all of it out, but I won’t lie, it’s a tricky business and we might have to leave some of the tumour there.’
‘What’s ...’ His lips stuck to his teeth, he had to run his dry tongue over them and attempt the question again before the words came out whole. ‘What’s the prognosis?’
The doctor rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s not good, to be frank with you. But try to keep positive.’
‘Is that all you can say?’ Anger flared and he sat on his fists to stop himself punching the computer screen. ‘Is this the best you can do?’
‘It’s how it is, unfortunately,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m a doctor, Mr Luker, not God.’
There was peace to be had, held in their sexy heavy-lidded gazes. Saints and Madonnas, all-knowing, surrounded him. He dragged his chair to the centre of the room and collapsed into it, his tired mind fixing on old prayers and invocations. He would find solace here, in this room filled with religious icons who had heard and answered the prayers of the faithful for centuries. Yet today their succour eluded him: mere painted boards tarted with gold leaf.
The reliquaries, too, mocked him with their incompetence. Scraps and leavings of little-known saints. No real power, not for this. Not for a tumour munching its way through his brain. How could a few strands of hair or a fingernail paring effect his rising from the dead?
He needed a miracle.
Tuesday, 15 September 2015
11:00 hours
‘It is lovely, eh?’ Vasily’s voice boomed behind him. Luker spun around, reluctantly dragging his eyes away from the reliquary.
‘Shame it’s not titty milk.’ Vasily made a face. ‘Only tears. Still.’ And he shrugged.
It was the shrug that did it. Power surged through Luker. This time, it would be his. Damn Vasily, he didn’t appreciate the true worth of reliquaries, just collected them like a schoolboy scavenges birds’ eggs. Not like him: he knew and understood and loved the relics. And believed them, too. This one, containing the precious tears of the Virgin Mary, would be his. He needed it.
Vasily took his usual place at the side of the saleroom, his numbered paddle on his lap. Luker sat diagonally opposite and slightly behind so he could observe him without being observed. His heart banged against his ribs and he took some steadying breaths.
The auctioneer ascended the podium and the room fell silent. Bidding opened at two hundred thousand pounds. Luker blinked. He hadn’t anticipated it being so hot so quickly. He sat tight as the bidding rose, a trickle of cold sweat fingering between his shoulder blades.
‘Three hundred and fifty thousand pounds.’ The bidding was slowing. The early bidders had put down their paddles and were shaking their heads with regret.
‘Three sixty,’ Vasily called.
‘Three seventy.’ Luker was in the game.
Vasily waved his paddle like a fan and the auctioneer called, ‘Three hundred and eighty. Do I hear three hundred and ninety?’
Luker caught the auctioneer’s eye and raised his eyebrow a fraction.
This was getting very hot indeed. His breath was shallow and his palms slick. He had to have this. Not the gold, not the jewels, not the exquisite craftsmanship, but the holy relic it contained. He would pay this amount if it was in an old sauce bottle. It was his only chance.
‘Do I hear four hundred thousand?’
No one moved a muscle. Just a few more seconds and it would be his. The auctioneer glanced at Vasily, who gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Luker clenched his fists so tight his nails dug into his palms. Almost over.
‘At three hundred and ninety thousand pounds then, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re all done. Going once, going twice.’ The auctioneer raised the gavel, his eyes sweeping the room.
‘Five hundred thousand pounds.’
A gasp shuddered round the room.
‘Five hundred thousand pounds I’m bid, thank you, sir. Any further bids?’ He caught Luker’s eye and he shook his head. Half a million pounds. Far too much for him. He stared at Vasily’s back, wishing he would drop down dead.
‘At five hundred thousand pounds, then.’ The gavel came down. ‘Sold to you, sir, well done.’
Applause rippled through the saleroom followed by a gust of astonished laughter at Vasily’s daring. He stood and bowed to left and right, his round, smooth face beaming, then came over to Luker.
‘No hard feelings, eh?’
‘Actually, I really wanted that one,’ Luker blurted out. He fingered his scalp where the hair was just growing back.
Vasily studied him for a moment. ‘My friend, you try to play with a straight bat, that’s your trouble.’ He dug his smartphone from his pocket and flicked his finger over the screen. ‘See this? Bought it two months ago. Finger bone of Mary Magdalene. Beautiful, ha?’
Luker squinted at the photograph on Vasily’s phone of a golden reliquary studded with sapphires and pearls. It was truly exquisite. His mind chased the details. Surely he’d know if a Magdalene relic went up for sale? ‘But I haven’t seen any sale details for that,’ he said.
