by Rob Campbell
“What?”
“No wonder he didn’t mind us walking off with the letter,” Monkey laughed.
“Who?”
“The vicar. He’s obviously read it.”
“What makes you think that?” I preferred to take a man of the cloth at his word. If he said that he hadn’t opened it, who were we to doubt him?
“You remember what he said when he heard that noise at the back of the church the other night?”
How could I forget? “The man in the long black coat.”
Monkey held up the letter and smacked it theatrically with his free hand. “Those exact words are right here.”
“Why? What does it say?”
“It’s mostly gibberish,” Monkey replied, looking back at the letter. “It seems like the vicar who recorded all this thought the same. He’s even said as much in the comments he’s added at the side.”
“Come on, don’t keep me in suspense!”
“It says something about the boy on God’s roof. That’d be me, but we already know all about that. Something about a fire and a flood.” At this point, he ran his finger across the page and screwed up his eyes, as if he was struggling to make out the words. “Oh yeah, then there’s a bit about a prophet of evil with a mark on his skin.”
“Sounds like a bad movie. What about the man with the long black coat?”
“I’m getting to that bit. Here it is. Apparently, the boy on God’s roof will have to join forces with the man in the long black coat to discover the… holy crap!”
One of the things that I loved about Monkey was his good nature. Where other boys his age would be swearing like it was going out of fashion, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I’d heard him use bad language. I took this as a sign that he’d found something interesting.
He looked up at me, his eyes like two huge wheels on the side of a four-by-four. “To discover the truth!”
“The truth? As in The Truth?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t say.”
“Here, let me have a look.” I prised the letter from his hands, no longer concerned about who had the right to be reading it. I was getting frustrated with Monkey’s lack of clarity, but when I started to read it, I had to agree with him; it was mostly gibberish. I couldn’t see why somebody would have gone to the effort of writing all of this down in the first place, let alone keeping it in the parish records for all these years. But when I turned the letter over, I was surprised to see that the final paragraph was written with some lucidity. It was clearly written by the then vicar, James Hutton.
I must stress again my belief that, in his final days, Mr Abram is afflicted with some sickness of the mind. His ramblings have become more feverish of late, so much so that I am quite sure that the reader will think that I too have suffered a similar fate, such are the words that I commit to this paper. However, it would be remiss of me to ignore the pleas of a dying man – he was most insistent on this point. He has therefore bequeathed his painting, the truth, to the care of the church, in the hope that one day, it may find its way into the right hands.
“What does he mean, his painting?” Monkey asked when I’d finished reading.
If my head had been transparent, I’m sure that an observer would have seen a thousand tiny cogs moving inside at that precise moment. Was this a simple turn of phrase used by the vicar, or was he referring to a painting that was named The Truth? Not for the first time, I cursed people’s inability to use the correct punctuation or, in this case, capitalisation. But who was I to question a man who had been acting as the scribe for a dying man on the edge of his sanity? Was this the moment when the nature of The Truth had been finally revealed to us? And if that was the case, what was Josiah Abram doing with the painting in the first place?
“What are you thinking, Lorna?” asked Monkey, obviously having seen the puzzled look on my face.
“I don’t know. It’s all just a bit too weird. I’m beginning to think you’re right.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that there’s something going on here.”
Monkey’s posture changed subtly. “What, you mean when I said that it feels supernatural?”
Could I admit to my friend that I was beginning to see things his way? All this stuff in the letter seemed an incredible coincidence. But as I’d discovered last year, when all the coincidences continue to stack up, can it really be labelled as such? Or was it now just too uncanny to dismiss as anything other than supernatural?
I tried to calm my thoughts, returning to a more rational explanation that I’d suspected earlier. “Of course, it could just be a massive hoax.”
“How do you mean?” Monkey looked crestfallen, his shoulders slumping.
“You know. Somebody talks to somebody else, finds out about all this stuff that Lester has been investigating and whacks it in a letter.”
“Do you really think so?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
* * *
“What do you take me for?” bellowed the vicar indignantly.
“You said that you hadn’t opened the letter,” I pointed out.
“Okay. So I lied about the letter, but as you probably saw, it was all gibberish anyway,” he said dismissively. “But I certainly didn’t write all that stuff, and I swear with God as my witness, that letter has been in the care of this parish for years.” He even put his hand on his heart, suggesting an earnest effort to convince us of his honesty.
“If it’s all gibberish, why were you so worried about it before? Why were you so upset at the crash site, and why were you so disturbed when your parishioners reported hellish visions?”
“I was hoping that it would all mean something to the two of you.”
“Why would it mean anything to us?” Monkey exploded.
The vicar’s voice climbed an octave. “Well, are you or are you not the boy who climbed on God’s roof?”
“How would I know?” Monkey threw his hands up in the air and stalked away from the altar behind which we’d found the vicar when we’d returned to his church.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said. “Isn’t there anything you can tell us about what it all means? What about this painting, The Truth?” I was quite pleased with how I’d worked this question into the middle of a heated debate. If the vicar did know something, I hoped that he wouldn’t detect my keen interest in finding out if he knew where this painting was.
“There are some old paintings in the vicarage, and we keep some more in the crypt. You wouldn’t believe how many works of art are donated to the church over the years.”
“What about the man in the long black coat?”
“That’d be me,” came a voice from the side of the church.
I turned to see Dylan Fogg approaching us from the door that led to the vicarage. This time, he wasn’t wearing his leather coat. He was busy wiping his hands with a towel and soon applied it to his black rock T-shirt, trying to remove the dust which I noticed had gathered there. With a sigh of irritation, he tossed the dusty rag onto the altar, much to the annoyance of the vicar.
“A man could search all year back there and still not find what he was looking for,” Dylan said. His voice had a gruff quality that put me in mind of somebody used to barking orders – an observation I couldn’t reconcile with his student-like dress sense. I also detected the trace of a Geordie accent.
“What are you looking for?” Monkey asked.
“Probably the same thing you are, if that letter’s anything to go by.”
“You’ve seen the letter?” I asked incredulously, turning to the vicar and putting on my best angry face.
The vicar held his hands out. “He’s mentioned in the letter. You saw what it said about the man in the long black coat!”
“The letter that you weren’t supposed to open! You said that it was to be opened by the boy who climbed on God’s roof.”
The vicar looked embarrassed. “I’m a
fraid this is all getting rather confusing.”
“To be fair, I believe that the instructions stated that the letter should be opened when the boy climbs on God’s roof, not necessarily by him,” Dylan said, a little too smugly for my liking.
I took the envelope out of my pocket and scanned the handwritten instructions. Annoyingly, he was right.
“Are you a lawyer?” I asked, making little effort to disguise my irritation.
“Not quite,” he chuckled. “Look, I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot. Allow me to introduce myself—”
“I know who you are – you’re Dylan Fogg,” I spat.
“Is she always this hostile?” Dylan looked over to Monkey, who shrugged noncommittally.
“I’m sorry. All this mysterious letter business. It’s put me on edge. I’m Lorna Bryson.” I offered him my hand, which he shook firmly. “This is my friend, Monkey Arkwright.”
Dylan reached over to shake Monkey’s hand. “Monkey Arkwright, eh? The boy on God’s roof.”
“That’s me,” beamed Monkey, once again enjoying a small moment of recognition. I watched the two of them smiling at each other and tried to suppress the uneasy feeling that fluttered across my stomach. There was clearly a gap between what Lester had told us about Dylan Fogg, and what he knew about his former employee. Equally, there seemed to be a gap in Lester’s knowledge, running from the time that he and Dylan had parted ways until the latter had re-appeared in Culverton Beck. Outwardly, Lester was still insisting that Charles Gooch was behind the bungled attempt to snatch The Frenchman. But was this truly how he felt? Did he harbour some secret that made Dylan Fogg a more likely suspect? At this point, I resolved to keep my cards close to my chest and could only hope that Monkey would do the same.
“Are you going to tell me what all of this nonsense is about?” asked Dylan, pointing to the letter that I still held in my hand.
“How about you tell us what you were looking for back there?” Monkey said, pointing towards the vicarage. I smiled at that. It seemed that Monkey was on the ball and wouldn’t be too quick to give anything away before discovering a bit more about Dylan.
“Just some old painting the vicar reckons might be stored back there. Seems he was wrong.”
“Some old painting?” said Monkey suspiciously. “I thought you said you were probably looking for the same thing that we were?”
Dylan smiled. “Now that I think about it, I’m not so sure.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that a letter supposedly written a century ago talks about a boy and a man in a long black coat joining together to find the truth?” I asked.
Again, Dylan tried to laugh off my question. “It could mean anything. Besides, I know a bit more about what I’m looking for than you.”
“Oh, really. And how’s that?”
“I’ve spent years researching this painting, that’s why.”
That part could certainly be true. After all, he’d spent some time in Lester’s organisation. Despite my desire to tread carefully, it appeared that the conversation had reached an impasse: like a tactical game of chess that required one of the players to make a move.
“This painting that you’re looking for. It wouldn’t be known as The Truth, would it?” I asked.
Dylan’s eyes narrowed behind his expensive steel-framed glasses. “What do you know about the truth?”
“We could ask you the same thing.”
“Okay. Yes, the painting that I’m looking for is called The Truth.”
Finally.
“The letter says that the church had this painting, right?” Monkey asked, looking at Dylan and then the vicar.
“Apparently so,” the vicar replied. “But I don’t recall seeing it all these years.”
“How do you know what you’re looking for?” I asked.
A look of confusion crossed the vicar’s face. “I don’t know,” he conceded.
“I’m fairly sure it’s not back there. I’ve been rummaging through a pile of old stuff for a few hours,” Dylan said.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?” I asked him.
“No. I don’t know what the painting looks like, but I’m fairly sure that I’d recognise it by the artist’s signature.”
D.A.A. The initials that the artist Abernathy always put on his works, in memory of his wife. Lester had told us this during our hunt for The Frenchman last year. Sure enough, when we’d recovered the miniature Napoleon, those same initials had been on the underside of the base. It was a fair bet that Dylan was aware of this; whether he’d learned it whilst working for Lester, or some other time, who could say?
We needed to get out of here. More specifically, I needed to see what Monkey thought of all this before we made our next move. “Well, good luck with your search. It’s been nice meeting you.” I looked over at Monkey and angled my eyes towards the main doors of the church, hoping that he’d understand my signal.
“I need to be somewhere else now,” he said, raising himself from the bench where he’d been sitting. After a brief smile at the vicar and Dylan, we made our way out of the church and started down the path that led back to the lawn out front.
“So, what did you make of all that?” I asked Monkey when we were clear of the church.
“He knows more than he’s letting on.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Before we had time to discuss the matter further, there was a shout from behind,
“Hey! You two. Wait up!” Dylan ran to catch up with us.
“Look, it's obvious that you two know something that you aren't telling. If I say the name Lester Hawkstone, does it mean anything to you?”
“Might do,” Monkey replied defensively.
“We know all about you falling out with Lester,” I added.
Dylan looked surprised at that. “It seems that you have me at a disadvantage.” He looked around conspiratorially. “It's true that I had a falling out with Lester, but it's not what you think. You think I'm with the black hearts, don't you?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” admitted Monkey.
“And you do look the part.” I gestured towards the black leather coat that he’d donned since leaving the church.
“How about we trade some information, as a show of good faith? After all, the letter said that we should come together.”
“Okay,” I responded. “But first, I want to know why you ran away when you saw Frank at the lecture.”
Dylan winced, sucking air across his teeth. “I didn’t want to talk to Frank. After I cut ties with Lester—”
“What’s wrong with Frank?” I asked defensively.
“Nothing. Frank’s a nice guy. It’s just that working with Lester… I don’t know. I just didn’t want to get involved again.”
“What were you doing at the lecture in the first place?”
“I knew there was some connection between Abram and the painting.”
“Really?” I was shocked at that. “You know that he didn’t paint The Truth, right?”
“Abernathy,” he replied. Maybe his one-word answer was a test for us.
“D.A.A.” I responded.
“How do you know all of this?” Dylan asked, genuine surprise in his voice.
“Maybe we work for Lester too,” Monkey chipped in.
“Only unlike some people, we didn’t have a falling out with him,” I added, unable to resist the temptation to get one over on Dylan.
“How did you end up working for Lester?” he asked. This time, I thought that I detected a note of admiration. I told him about how we had found Lester’s missing coin and how our involvement stemmed from there.
Dylan nodded approvingly. “Well, you two are certainly full of surprises. But let me give you a word of warning. You can’t trust Lester Hawkstone.”
Chapter 16
I knew that Dylan and Lester had not parted on the best of terms, and I should have expected him to say something like this, but even so, I felt alarmed at
his stark warning about not trusting Lester. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to get into it now, but just keep your wits about you. Let’s just say that I’m not sure he has the courage to do what needs to be done.”
It was a comment that demanded further explanation, but no amount of cajoling could get Dylan to shed any light on the matter.
“This isn’t working out too well as an exchange of information, is it?” I pointed out.
“You know I used to work for Lester; I know that you still do. We both know there are bad people out there attempting to spread chaos, and we all know that we need to get our hands on The Truth before they do.”
“How about The Frenchman?” I pressed.
“That as well, wherever it may be and whatever it is,” he said dismissively. “But it feels like we’ve got more chance of securing The Truth if it is somewhere in the church.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Monkey. “We’ve already got The Frenchman.”
“Monkey!” I said in dismay.
“You’ve got The Frenchman?” said Dylan breathlessly.
“Well, we did have it.”
“What is it? Where is it now?”
“It’s a miniature figure of Napoleon, and it’s in Lester’s vault.” I saw no need to lie, given that Monkey had let the cat out of the bag.
Dylan ran a hand through his hair. “And you’re sure it’s genuine?”
“It had D.A.A. on the base.”
Dylan gave a low whistle, looking up at the church tower behind us and turning in a circle as if seeking divine inspiration. He laughed nervously. “Well, I’ll say it again – you two are not what I expected.”
“Back in the church, you said that you’d researched the painting – The Truth. We’ve told you how we got to know Lester, but how did you get into all this?”
“Fair question, after what you’ve just told me,” Dylan admitted. “Is there anywhere we could go for a coffee?”
* * *
With it being late on a Saturday afternoon, I supposed that most people had headed home, ready for a night out or in front of the television. So, when we settled in for a coffee with Dylan Fogg at the Beanfeast Café, the place was almost empty.
