Holy Blood

by Kim Fleet

  He ended the call and stood. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘There’s a problem at work.’

  ‘What about our meals?’

  ‘You have them. You’re eating for two. I’ve got to go.’

  Lisa pulled on her jacket. ‘What is it?’

  Aidan ran his hand through his hair, shocked by what Trev had told him. ‘The Holy Blood of Hailes. It’s missing.’

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Wednesday, 28 October 2015

  09:57 hours

  Eden glanced at her watch. Still no sign of Lewis. So much for the demand for an early start. Mind you, from the sounds she’d heard coming from his room the evening before, he might well be recovering and in need of a lie in. Idly, she wondered who his lover had been. Xanthe, or Jocasta, or someone else entirely? From the gossip magazines, Lewis had no shortage of women willing to jump into bed with him.

  She’d gone to see him around half-six, but finding him out, had popped back around eight, concerned by the poison pen letter he’d received. When she’d opened it and read out the message, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. You don’t deserve to live’, Lewis had turned a porridgy colour and all his usual swagger left him like a retributive wind sweeping through a Biblical land. Lewis was rattled.

  There was no chance to talk to him alone, not with Xanthe’s regular bulletins from Twitter, Jocasta always hovering at his elbow and the technical guys in everyone’s way, so Eden had returned to the hotel hoping to ask Lewis again who hated him enough to send those threatening letters.

  She’d made her way along the corridor to his room and lifted her hand to knock, then hesitated. A woman’s laugh came from inside the room, answered by a sexy purr from Lewis. If he was getting it on with a new bird, she didn’t want to blurt in with her libido-crushing questions about anonymous letters. It could wait until the morning. So, she’d turned around and gone home, thinking she’d catch Lewis during an early breakfast before filming. But the night of passion must’ve taken it out of him, because there was no sign of Lewis and the crew was getting antsy.

  ‘We haven’t finished looking through yesterday’s footage,’ one moaned. ‘Until we do that, we don’t know what we need to reshoot today. Could mean an extra day filming, and that’s going to knock out the whole schedule.’

  Xanthe materialised, her fingers dancing over the iPad. ‘Lewis having breakfast in his room?’ she asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ Jocasta said. ‘I went up and knocked over an hour ago and there was no reply.’

  ‘I’ll get him,’ Eden said, idly wondering if last night’s chick was into kinky tricks and had left Lewis trussed to the bedpost. Try keeping that out of the gossip mags.

  She trotted up the stairs to Lewis’s room and knocked. No reply. Empty breakfast trays lay outside the bedroom doors along the corridor. There was nothing outside Lewis’s door, not even a newspaper. She rapped again. ‘Lewis! Lewis, it’s Eden. It’s getting late and everyone’s eager to get to work.’

  No response.

  ‘Lewis? Lewis, are you OK?’

  She pressed her ear to the door. No sound. She tried the handle. The door was locked. Eden glanced up and down the corridor. No sign of a chambermaid or anyone delivering breakfast in bed. No sound of a linen trolley rattling along the corridor, either.

  She hunted in her bag for her purse and slid out her library card and flexed it. Nice and bendy. She slotted the card into the gap between the door and the frame then, tugging the door sharply towards her, flexed the card over the strike plate and the door swung open.

  As she stepped inside something crinkled underfoot. She bent and retrieved an envelope from the floor. She folded the envelope and put it in her bag.

  ‘Lewis? It’s Eden.’

  The room was in darkness, heavy drapes shrouding the windows.

  ‘Lewis? Time to wake up.’

  She stepped over to the windows and stumbled, falling heavily on the floor. When she yanked open the curtains and let in some light, she saw what had tripped her. Lewis, lying face down on the carpet, a huge wound in the back of his head, his body haloed in red.

  Eden rushed to turn him over. The sight that met her sent her staggering back in shock, a scream escaping from her throat.

  Lewis’s eyes were burnt out. Two holes gaped in his face, the flesh puckered and raw. His lips hung open and inside his mouth was black: tongue, teeth, lips. There was a black stain on the carpet where he’d lain.

  Choking, Eden ran to the door and shouted, ‘Help! Someone help!’ into the corridor.

  A chambermaid in a blue uniform appeared, a frown between her eyes. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Get an ambulance,’ Eden said. ‘The man in room 204 has collapsed. No, don’t go in, just get help quickly. Go!’

  The girl scurried away and Eden returned to the room. Pressing her fingers into Lewis’s neck, she checked for a pulse. Nothing. She sat back on her heels, fighting panic. Remembering her training, she checked again for a pulse. Too easy to miss it when you’re in a state. Too easy not to keep your fingers in place for long enough to detect life. Her skin crawling, she counted a full minute. Nothing.

  Already there were footsteps and loud voices in the corridor outside. She didn’t have long. The police would be called soon and she’d be muscled out of the picture. Lewis was her client. He’d called her in to protect him and look what a fucking shambles she’d made of that. Soon there’d be plod all over the room. This was her chance to get ahead of the game.

  She met the startled hotel manager at the open doorway.

  ‘Mr Jordan has been attacked,’ Eden told him in a low voice, standing aside just enough so he could register the horrific state of Lewis’s face. The manager blanched and looked as though he was going to be sick. ‘We need an ambulance and the police straight away. And don’t let anyone else come in this room – it’s a crime scene.’

  ‘Who are you?’ stammered the hotel manager.

  Eden took out her identification. ‘Eden Grey, private detective. I was hired by Mr Jordan. Now go and get an ambulance and the police.’

  The hotel manager hurried away. Here was her chance. Starting at the doorway, Eden scanned the room while she drew latex gloves out of her bag and slipped them on. The room was neat and tidy, the drawers firmly shut, the wardrobe doors closed. A heavy lamp with a stone base stood on the chest of drawers, its plug and flex coiled on the carpet. The bed hadn’t been slept in, though there was an indentation in the duvet where someone had sat on it. Lewis himself was in a bathrobe tied tightly at the waist, his long brown legs sticking out and his bare feet looking strangely vulnerable. Steeling herself, Eden bent to his face, gently wafting the air towards her nose. The smell caught in the back of her throat, making her gag.

  She lifted his arms and legs, noting the stiffness in the elbows and knees, and breathed hard through her mouth for a moment, fighting the urge to vomit. Clamping her lips tightly shut, she bent and touched the bloodstain on the carpet and raised her gloved fingers to her eyes. The blood was sticky; when she rubbed her fingers and thumb together it formed stringy webs of blood. Bloody marks tracked across the carpet. Shuddering, she jerked a tissue out of her pocket and wiped her fingers.

  In the bathroom, Lewis’s bottle of eye drops lay uncapped on the floor. She stepped over it and checked out the contents of Lewis’s washbag: condoms, aftershave, men’s grooming products in black and grey bottles. The bathroom held two hotel bath sheets, one neatly folded on the metal rack above the bath. She sniffed: biscuits. The scent of an industrial tumble dryer. The second was in a heap on the floor, still damp. The bin held only a soggy teabag, an empty liquorice packet, and a tissue smeared with red lipstick.

  A commotion out in the corridor startled her. She snapped off the latex gloves and shoved them in her bag. As she went to the door, her eye caught something on the bedside table. Eden stared at it, her mind whirring. How could that be here, in this room where Lewis Jordan had met a violen
t death? Without thinking, she scooped it up and put it in her pocket.

  It was an origami swan.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Winchcombe, September 1571

  They gave him a horse for his journey. A broken-backed nag that plodded slower than he could walk and kicked up mud so his leggings were coated and thick with mire. Still, a horse was a horse. No wading through the lanes on his own two legs. Old injuries pained him, the wound in his leg tormented him, and he was glad these mornings to clamber aboard his mare and let her set the pace.

  He kept to the back lanes. His face was the sort to threaten children with. Say your prayers or Lazarus will visit you in your dreams. Do as you’re told or Lazarus will come for you. Safer to stay out of sight so no one could remark on the scarred stranger who passed through. The country was watchful; uncertain and afraid.

  Sidney had bid him farewell when they released him from Newgate.

  ‘Lord Cecil thanks you for this service,’ Sidney had said, a sly leer on his face. As Lazarus hauled himself into the saddle and gathered the reins into one fist, he’d added, ‘And he says if you fail in your mission, don’t bother to come back. You won’t rise from the dead again, Lazarus.’

  With that he’d slapped the nag’s rump and guffawed as she skittered and slid over the cobbles. Lazarus swore an oath under his breath and brought the mare under control. When he’d found Brother John, he’d come back and slit Sidney’s throat for him.

  Lazarus. The name haunted him. It had been his since he was five years old. The only living thing in a house slaughtered by the sweats; his father and mother dead, jaws gaping, side by side in the feather bed; his brothers and sisters in a stiff line on the truckle bed, and him in the middle, squashed between the baby and his older brother, alive.

  The midwife who found him crossed herself. ‘Sweet mother of Jesus, the child’s alive.’ She’d plucked him out of the nest of bodies and cooed to him. ‘Been there a while, my poppet, from the looks of you.’

  She’d handed him over to the woman who’d broken into the house with her, both of them alerted by neighbours reporting there’d been no sound from the house these past days, and set about laying out seven corpses.

  ‘Looks like he died hisself and rose again from the dead,’ she said, often, to any who would listen, and to a good many who wouldn’t. ‘A regular Lazarus he is.’

  So Lazarus he was. Through fights that weren’t his own, battles he was paid to win, and other people’s enemies he was contracted to kill. Death had breathed its foul breath in his face on many occasions, and each time he’d been pulled back from purgatory to live and kill another day.

  Only Theresa had known him truly, Lazarus thought, as he wrapped his cloak about him and settled to sleep in a pile of leaves after a long day trudging the byways. Her face floated in front of his eyes as sleep captured him. Theresa, with her long oiled hair and slick slender body. There was a time when he thought of staying forever in the circle of her arms. Her and the child. They were everything to him.

  That night he dreamed of her. Her dark eyes luminous, flashing in the night as she rose above him, twirling her hips and driving him wild with lust.

  ‘Matthew,’ she whispered. ‘Matthew, the child cannot stay here.’

  In the dream he turned his head and saw the child, little Mariam, crouched in a corner. The same dark eyes as her mother, the same smooth olive skin. She caught him staring at her and smiled a gap-toothed smile that twisted his heart.

  ‘Dadda,’ she said, and suddenly he was awake, drenched with sweat and shivering with cold.

  A pink dawn was staining the horizon and the morning star pierced the dark dome overhead. He dragged himself up, his hips groaning and his scars aching, and went in search of the horse. Pissing against a tree, he saw the dark shape of the nag, a blacker shadow in the gloom and he whistled softly to her. She clopped towards him, dragging her hobble. He pressed his face into her warm flank, snuffing up the warmth of her, for a second overcome with gratitude for another living thing to share his hell.

  ‘Come on, old girl,’ he said. ‘Let’s find this troublesome priest.’

  He entered the town early, seeking only to fill his saddlebags with bread and ale, then leave to take up his journey again. To his surprise, though the baker’s fire was hot and the scent of pies seasoned the air, there was no sign of the baker apart from a tray of puddings left to cool on a windowsill. Lazarus scuffed around outside the shop until shouting drew his attention away. Shielding his face from gawpers with his hood, he sought out the cause of the commotion.

  A crowd was gathering in a nearby street, the number swelling with each minute. Heads poked from upstairs windows to watch and cat-call as a nightshirted family was prodded from their beds and out into the chill morning air.

  ‘Search it again,’ shouted a man with a black beard and a thick head set on muscular shoulders.

  The crowd bayed as four men brandishing pikes marched into the house.

  ‘There is nothing to find!’ cried the father of the family, his face white. ‘I swear we have done nothing wrong.’

  ‘That’s not what we’ve been told,’ Blackbeard growled.

  The upstairs windows were flung open and a mattress hauled out. It landed with a whump below, and two more men with pikes stabbed it until the stuffing swirled in a cloud down the street. Another followed, and another. All were ripped to shreds.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ Lazarus asked a matronly woman who stood with her arms tucked under her breasts.

  ‘Papists,’ she spat, barely looking at him. ‘They came seven nights ago and searched and found nothing. Now they’re back.’

  And meant to find something, judging by the sounds coming from within. Floorboards being prised up, stairs dismantled, furniture broken to sticks. A trunk was hefted out of the window and broke open, spilling its innards into the dust. Blackbeard swooped, holding up a rosary and a crucifix. The crowd jeered.

  ‘What have we here?’ he demanded, pushing his face close to the father of the family. The man’s mouth worked silently.

  ‘Treason!’ Blackbeard cried. He tossed the rosary on the ground and stamped on it. The wife clutched her husband, trembling like a sapling.

  Blackbeard took a flint from his jacket and built a pyre of the trunk, the mattresses and the broken furniture that flew from the window. Lighting the straw, he bellowed, ‘Death to the enemies of the Queen,’ and the crowd echoed him.

  The fire took hold quickly and smoke clotted the air.

  One of the pikemen hurtled out of the house and handed a tile to Blackbeard.

  ‘What is this?’ he said, advancing on the family.

  ‘It is but a tile,’ the wife said. Blackbeard raised his fist as if to strike her, but at that moment the youngest child piped up, ‘Father Renaldo brought it.’

  The crowd fell silent at the words as foreboding shivered through them. Lazarus drew back. This was treason indeed. One thing not to go to church and pay the fine, another to hear a Catholic Mass within your home. The family – father, mother, three children – were dead, betrayed by their heresy.

  ‘And where is this Father Renaldo?’ asked Blackbeard.

  The mother shook her head violently. ‘You cannot listen to a child, sir. A stupid boy he is, too.’

  ‘Where is Father Renaldo?’

  The woman shrank back. ‘He is not here, I swear.’

  ‘We’ll find him.’ Blackbeard shouted to the men inside the house. They appeared, shaking their heads and empty handed. ‘Burn it,’ he said.

  Grabbing sticks from the fire in the street, the men thundered back inside the house. Within minutes, smoke poured from the windows and flames licked at the walls. The men retreated outside and stood, leaning on their pikes and waiting. After what seemed an interminable time, a young man dashed from the house and collapsed, coughing his lungs up, his skin blackened. The men dragged him up by his arms and hauled him over to the family.

  ‘Who
is this?’

  The father sank to his knees with a moan. ‘Please,’ was all he was able to say.

  ‘Been hiding seven days and nights,’ the woman next to Lazarus commented. ‘Starving, no doubt. Serve him right.’

  The young priest was in a bad way. His legs gave out beneath him every time he was hauled to his feet and his eyes stared wildly about him.

  ‘Father Renaldo?’ Blackbeard addressed him. A whimper in reply. Blackbeard grabbed his chin, his fingers digging into his flesh. ‘You are a priest?’

  He let him go only to smack him across the face. The priest’s head snapped back and hung loose on his neck.

  ‘Tie them,’ Blackbeard ordered, and the men jumped to work, binding the waists of everyone in the family and joining them in a ragged, barefoot chain. The priest was fettered with iron, though it was clear to Lazarus the man had no strength to blow his nose never mind escape, and was loaded head first over the back of a horse, his rump in the air.

  The crowd jeered as the men took up position each side of the family and marched them down the street. Blackbeard mounted his horse and grabbed the reins of the animal that carried the priest, jerking it into a trot to jolt the priest’s bones every step of the way.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lazarus caught sight of a figure escaping through the crowd: a rat-faced boy with a fluffy chin.

  ‘Who is he?’ Lazarus asked the woman, pointing out the lad.

  ‘He worked for the family, was their apprentice,’ she said. ‘Was turned out three months ago for stealing. Lucky not to hang.’ She sniffed. ‘It was most likely him who told them where to find the priest.’ She hitched up her skirts, the morning’s entertainment over. ‘Least he will have coin to keep him a few weeks more.’

  The crowd ebbed away with a sense of righteousness well played. Lazarus returned to his horse and set out along the road, his appetite evaporated. He would buy provisions at the next town, when the stink of smoke and treachery was gone from his throat. On his way out of the town, he passed the band of men and their prisoners. The priest was muttering prayers to the horse’s stomach; the father was near collapse and had to be prodded upright every few paces. Lazarus swivelled his eyes away from the procession and kicked his horse on to a canter, escaping the high road as soon as he could.