The Devil’s Architect: Book Two of the Dark Horizon Trilogy

by Duncan Simpson

  Blake looked back to his daughter. ‘Night, sweetheart.’

  ‘Night, Dad,’ said Sarah, pushing herself up on her elbows and expectantly waiting for Alina to find the page.

  ‘Not too late,’ he said. He smiled to himself and then left the room.

  After making two mugs of tea, Blake found Rosalind in the living room stretched out on the sofa like a cat on the porch of a Mediterranean villa. He handed his sister a mug and, after putting his onto the coffee table, he collapsed into an armchair.

  ‘Tired?’ said Rosalind, cupping her tea in her hands.

  ‘It’s been a long day.’ Blake looked over to his sister and fought down a yawn.

  ‘If I’m not very much mistaken, you’re going grey?’ teased his sister.

  ‘Just a touch of snow on the mountain,’ said Blake smiling.

  Rosalind looked so much better than the last time he had seen her. Her face was bright and sun-kissed, though how much of her healthy glow was down to the Californian sunshine or from a bottle, he was unsure. She was wearing faded, figure-hugging hipster jeans and a delicate checkerboard print blouse that met the soft waves of hair at her shoulders.

  Despite her healthy appearance, her eyes still had something careworn about them, some trace of a troubled journey that couldn’t be hidden with makeup.

  ‘When were you discharged?’ he said gently.

  ‘Two weeks ago,’ said Rosalind.

  ‘You discharged yourself?’

  ‘I was feeling much better, and I couldn’t see the point in staying there any longer.’

  ‘Roz, you know you have to complete the programme,’ he said, casting her a worried glance.

  ‘I’m okay, honestly,’ she said.

  Blake caught her eyes.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  As he reached over to the table to retrieve his mug, he scanned her forearms for the tell-tale signs. He couldn’t see any.

  ‘And what about the actor? You guys still—’

  ‘Marcus is filming in Australia. There’s a lot of interest in the studio doing a spin-out TV miniseries. He got me this,’ she said, admiring a distinctive silver and turquoise ring on her middle finger. ‘It’s Native American. Navajo, I think.’

  ‘Nice,’ he said.

  For a moment, a silence filled the space between them.

  Eventually Rosalind swung her legs around on the sofa and planted her feet onto the floor. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry about the funeral, my head wasn’t in any kind of state to fly over.’

  A knot of resentment tightened in Blake’s stomach. He had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t lose it, but he could already feel cracks forming in the dam of his resolve.

  ‘Not even a phone call, Roz?’

  Shifting uncomfortably on the sofa, Rosalind’s eyes began to go gauzy.

  ‘I don’t know what to say? I know I’ve been a self-centred shit.’ She swallowed hard and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I’m so sorry Vincent, I can’t change what I’ve done. I know I have no right to ask for your forgiveness.’ The sides of her mouth drew down and quivered.

  Blake’s attention turned inwards. Nomsa’s death had become part of him. Time hadn’t lessened the pain; it had just changed its shape. He had tried to outrun his grief through working and concentrating on Sarah’s recovery, but it was still eating at him from the inside. On the day of the incident, his world changed forever. Guilt squeezed at his heart. The thought of how love could vanish in the blink of an eye hounded his dreams. Seeing Rosalind had brought it flooding back again.

  ‘Let’s put this behind us, Roz,’ he said through glistening eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ said Rosalind softly.

  ‘You are very welcome to stay here as long you like,’ said Blake.

  Chapter 31

  The elevator doors opened and Blake and Milton stepped out into the basement of the police station. After dropping his coat onto the table next to the elevator, Blake glanced around the large windowless storage area. The basement provided shelving for the physical case reports that had yet to be digitised onto the Metropolitan Police’s crime database. From a cursory look around, Blake could see that at least three quarters of the shelving was covered by the familiar light blue colour of Metropolitan Police case files.

  Blake noticed that the air smelt like an old bookshop. A childhood memory began to surface in his mind. His father had once run an antique bookshop, and his nostrils greeted the familiar musty smell like an old friend.

  Milton double-checked the writing on the scrap of paper in his hand.

  ‘K20713,’ he said, slightly perplexed. ‘I’m sure the K’s start over here.’ He motioned to an area of shelving to their left. Whilst mumbling the location identifier to himself, Milton scoured the racks.

  ‘Gotcha,’ he said triumphantly after a short while of searching. He prised the bulging file free from its neighbours and dropped it onto the table next to Blake’s coat. ‘Enjoy. I’ll be back with some tea after I’ve seen the desk sergeant.’ He tossed Blake a salute and walked back to the elevator.

  Soon the basement was quiet apart from the soporific drone of the air-conditioning system. Blake pulled up a chair and opened the case file. He didn’t really know what he was searching for, but it was his only lead. Angelo Ricard had identified the photograph of the homeless woman in his office as Mary and apart from other scant details, he was in the dark. He said that she had suffered some kind of mental breakdown and become deranged. So deranged that she had attempted to set light to the shelter attached to the offices of the Servant Church of London. This is when Enoch Hart had been called in as a last resort to help her. Now Blake knew that Hart hadn’t just provided Mary with counselling but had performed some kind of exorcism on her. She had also been at St Paul’s Cathedral the day of the shootout.

  Reading through the officer’s statements, Blake felt a heavy sense of foreboding. As he read, he learned that the police had arrived at the scene to find Mary grunting and growling in the corner of her room like a bedraggled cornered animal. She was banging the back of her head against the wall and cursing in what sounded like Italian to the officers. Her arms were covered in blood from deep cuts in her fingertips. The wounds were self-inflicted with a shard of glass from a mirror that laid shattered on the floor. The walls of her room were covered in strange writing made with her own blood. The report noted that it had taken three officers to finally restrain her.

  It also noted several other unsettling pieces of information about the police’s arrival on the scene. Firstly, the police officers recorded a foul odour on entering the room, like the smell of sulphur. Secondly, a section of wood panelling next to the washbasin had been scratched raw, as if someone or something had clawed at it.

  He turned the last page of the file to discover a wallet of crime scene photographs pasted to the inside back cover. Blake’s mouth dried as he laid the pictures out one by one on the table. There were eleven in all. Four of the photographs were layouts showing the general configuration of the room and the position of the sparse furniture contained within it. Two others were of the strange scratching marks in the wood panelling next to the sink and the remaining five were of the bizarre blood writing that had been written onto the walls.

  He moved all but the five photographs of the writings to the side of the table. Even though the water from the sprinklers had washed several areas into messy streaks of red, a patch of lettering was clearly visible in the photographs. Blake’s face drained as he decoded the cryptic writing.

  At the top, the word HAWKSMOOR was scrawled in crimson. Underneath it, four more lines were marked out in sharp, angular capital letters.

  FOUR BLOOD ALTARS

  FOUR BLOOD SACRIFICES

  FOUR BLOOD COINS

  FOUR BLOOD MOONS

  Blake’s nerves were shot through with the implications of the photograph he was holding. Blood altars, coins, sacrifices and blood moons?
It fitted the pattern of Hart’s killings exactly. Were there going to be four? Damn it. How could she have possibly known this? Was it some kind of prophecy? A hurricane started to blow in his mind, with thoughts flying in every direction. He appraised each line again in turn. Skipping through the photos, he noticed that one of the five photographs had been taken from a slightly different angle, from which two additional lines of writing were visible. Blake’s internal radar was now on full alert.

  EVE CAN’T BLINK

  He thumbed his chin, trying to recall where he heard this phrase before, but he just couldn't place it. The chilling image of the mutilated faces of two of Hart’s victims suddenly reared up in his mind. They had both had their eyelids cut out. Was this the meaning of the phrase? Did it refer to blinding women? That must be it, he thought as he focused vacantly onto a patch of basement wall where a window might have been.

  He looked back to the photograph. The second new line was a reference to a bible scripture.

  JOEL 2:31

  Although he was sitting in the basement of the police station, his phone still managed a weak signal. He typed the bible reference into his search engine app and tapped the return button. The bible passage appeared instantly on his phone’s display.

  The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.

  Chapter 32

  Blake circled the incident board as Milton drummed his knuckles on the table. Suddenly his hand went still.

  ‘Your hunch better be right my friend. Ten detectives, that’s half my unit tied up on this.’ A silence fell as the awful reality of the situation weighed heavy in the air.

  Milton pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. He approached the board as he scratched the side of his craggy face.

  ‘Alright, let’s go over it again,’ he said.

  The board was taken over by a large street map of London, the distinctive shape of the River Thames winding its way across its centre. Eight large red drawing pins punctured the map at various positions across its surface.

  ‘Hart is killing to a ritualistic plan,’ said Blake. ‘In his mind, I think he rationalises the killings as some kind of sacrifice. To intensify the potency of the sacrifice, he carries out the killings to coincide with the appearance of the blood moons.’

  ‘And there lies the problem with your theory. Hart’s first murder at St George’s didn't coincide with anything. We’ve checked with the meteorological office, and the moon wasn’t even in its first quarter on the date of the killing, let alone part of a tetrad that has occurred less than ten times in the last two thousand years.’

  Blake swallowed loudly. ‘I know,’ he said, conceding the point.

  Milton’s eyes tracked back over the map.

  ‘But what does match with your theory is the location of the murders. All the killing sites are churches designed by this Hawksmoor architect some three hundred years ago.’ He paused. ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘I must have trawled a dozen websites by now. He was born in Nottinghamshire around 1661 and at the age of eighteen entered the service of Christopher Wren here in London. He had the reputation for being a brilliant student and became Wren’s apprentice, involving himself in some of his master’s building projects. Following the Great Fire of London, a commission was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1710 with the purpose of building fifty new churches for the rapidly growing City of London.

  ‘With Wren now at 79 years of age, the commission appointed Hawksmoor as one of its surveyors. Due to mounting costs, only twelve churches were completed. Hawksmoor was solely responsible for the architecture of six of them and collaborated on a further two with fellow commissioner John James. Miraculously, all of Hawksmoor’s unique city churches have survived to this day, apart from one.’

  ‘St John Horsleydown, where the Servant Church of London now have their headquarters,’ said Milton.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And why are they special?’

  ‘Hawksmoor was considered a maverick and not fully accepted by the establishment. There are rumours that he dabbled in the occult.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘His churches are completely devoid of Christian iconography. Instead Hawksmoor took his inspiration from the ancient pagan traditions of Rome and Egypt. How he got away with this amazes me. He was known to have had a large library that included books on the architecture of many pagan temples from the ancient world, along with the great Islamic mosques and the design for Solomon’s Temple. Hawksmoor incorporated aspects of the Solomonic design into his buildings. You’ve seen the churches; they’re strange, unsettling places.’

  Milton growled an acknowledgement, his deep voice sounding like it was covered in dust. ‘So there are eight churches that Hawksmoor designed outright or built parts of,’ said Milton, referring to the pins on the incident board.

  Pointing at each of the pins in turn, Blake’s finger circumnavigated the map of London.

  ‘St Alphege, Greenwich; St Mary Woolnoth, in the City of London; St Anne’s, Limehouse; St George-in-the-East, where the first two killings took place; Christchurch, Spitalfields; St George’s, Bloomsbury; St Luke’s, Old Street; and finally we have St John Horsleydown, where Joyce Khumalo was murdered.’

  ‘And you’re convinced that they’re all connected: the killings, the Hawksmoor churches and the blood moons?’

  ‘Almost certainly. Hart’s killings are ritualistic. A series of human sacrifices consecrated around Hawksmoor’s pagan churches.’

  ‘And the blood moons?’

  ‘They amplify the occult significance of the sacrificial act.’

  ‘Because they are important to the Jewish faith?’ asked Milton with a dour face.

  ‘Lots of people think the blood moons are of global significance,’ said Blake. ‘Some even believe that they are linked to the biblical prophecy of the End Times.’

  ‘You believe in this stuff?’ asked Milton.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. It’s what Hart believes is the issue. The third blood moon of the current tetrad is tonight and he’s out there roaming the streets.’

  ‘So if he plans to kill tonight, it’s going to be at one of these Hawksmoor churches. The question is which one? I have officers at each one, including a couple of other detectives patrolling outside the shelter at the Servant Church of London. If Hart is going to try something tonight, we’ll be there to nail the son of a bitch.’

  ‘I hope it’s enough,’ said Blake with a subdued tone.

  ‘The unit is at maximum capacity. With the demonstrations for the city mayoral elections, we just don’t have the resources.’

  Before Blake could object, Milton’s phone went off in his pocket. He answered it and his head dropped in concentration as a voice shouted down the line.

  ‘Pyramid? Slow down man. What did you say, on fire?’

  Blake’s eyes widened. ‘Where? St Anne’s Limehouse?’

  Milton’s massive leathery hand pointed to the drawing pin marking St Anne’s church on the map. He ended the call with his on-site detective and moments later was issuing orders to the duty sergeant of the control room.

  ‘Redeploy all units. Everyone to St Anne’s church in Limehouse. Get moving.’

  Chapter 33

  Her parents had christened her Janet Brenda Easton, but her clients on the escort agency website knew her by a multitude of other names. A gentleman had once called her ‘Snow White’ on account of her trademark crimson lips, porcelain skin, and raven hair. It was her special look, he had said.

  Janet took the gold lipstick case from her handbag and reapplied the luxurious bright-red colour to her lips. Smiling at her reflection in the large oriental cherry wood mirror, she undid the top two buttons of her blouse and then closed the door of the restroom behind her.

  As she returned to the dining booth of the upmarket Mayfair restaurant, she could feel eyes upon her. It was often the case. A young vi
vacious woman in a revealing outfit, out with an older man, regularly drew disapproving looks. She didn’t care. This evening’s customer was turning out to be very interesting. He was good-looking despite his advancing years, confident, expensively dressed, with good manners and a knowing smile that could have melted the ice in her gin and tonic. If she played her cards right, she might have actually hit the jackpot this time.

  With a small shuffle of her bottom she wiggled herself down the length of the dining booth and returned to her place opposite her new gentleman friend.

  ‘Did you miss me?’ she said playfully. She sipped down a large measure of her drink.

  ‘I did. It’s been a very agreeable evening. A shame for it to end here.’

  Very deliberately Janet leant back in her chair and crossed her long stockinged legs. The man’s eyes followed the progress of her thighs under the tight fabric of her silk skirt.

  ‘It would be a pity,’ she said, biting her rouged lips.

  From under the table, her slim leg reached out and met the edge of his chair. Concealed by the white linen tablecloth, she edged her foot forward, easing a gap between his thighs. She heard the click of his throat swallowing as her foot made contact with his crotch. From over the table, she threw him a stare and slowly applied pressure.

  ‘So what do you want to do now?’ she said, her finger teasing an arc around the neck of her blouse and her formidable cleavage. The man followed the path of her painted fingernail.

  ‘I think I should get the bill. Perhaps a nightcap back at my place?’ he said, his eyes bright and alive.

  ‘I’m in your hands,’ she said as she moved the ball of her foot in a small circular motion. ‘Is it far? Because you seem to be getting very excited.’ Her last word hung in the air like a smoke ring.

  She had thought him a bit uptight when they first met, but now he was well and truly in her tractor beam. She didn’t want him to explode; well, at least not yet. She slowly eased off the pressure and returned her foot to the floor.