Black Hearts Rising (Wardens of the Black Heart Book 2)

by Rob Campbell

  “None taken,” I replied.

  “No, if I had something like The Frenchman sitting in my possession, then I would put it to good use. I wouldn’t act all impotent like Lester Hawkstone. The world could use a bit of good fortune, don’t you think?”

  “But what if the Wardens of the Black Heart got their hands on it?” Monkey protested.

  “Every action carries a risk.”

  “You said you’re a man of means. You got rich parents or something?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Dylan said, a devilish look in his eyes. He looked like he was enjoying this, drip-feeding us information. He came across as a nice guy, but it made me wary, more determined to guard what little information Monkey and I could come by and be careful who we shared it with.

  “Back when I was working for Lester,” Dylan continued, “he had me track down and bring in a few objects that he and the Reverend considered minor. One of them was a lucky pen that was quite easy to grab from an insurance office.”

  “A lucky pen? So, you do believe in all this good luck/bad luck thing?”

  Dylan didn’t answer me directly. He didn’t have to.

  “On my way back to Lester’s, I decided to stop by the local newsagents and buy a newspaper. Whilst I was at the counter, I spotted a rack of lottery tickets.” He paused there for dramatic effect.

  “You didn’t?” I half-whispered.

  “What’s a man to do?” Dylan asked, holding his hands out. “I filled in one ticket using that lucky pen and bingo!”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred and sixty thousand quid! Fortune favours the brave, eh?”

  “Holy crap!” Monkey blurted, his eyes going wide. “That’s more than a quarter of a million quid!”

  “Eking the money out, a bit of shrewd investment here and there, and you can live for a long time on that kind of cash.”

  “And the pen?” I asked, dying to know what had become of it.

  “Oh, I handed it to Lester as planned. In fact, it’s probably still in his vault alongside The Frenchman. At the time, I was young and starry-eyed and wanted to continue working for him. I didn’t want to rock the boat.”

  “You could have kept it,” Monkey suggested.

  “I said fortune favours the brave, not the stupid,” Dylan replied. “Even I didn’t want to tempt fate. But the point is, at least I tried to experiment, tried to prove something. Mark my words, Lester Hawkstone will never get anywhere. He’s the king of procrastination.”

  Whilst Monkey was trying to work out what part of Europe ‘procrastination’ was in, I decided to switch the conversation to our mutual interest in the painting that may or may not have been languishing somewhere in St Stephen’s.

  “Any luck with the painting?”

  “Nah,” he answered, draining the last of his coffee and pushing his cup to the middle of the table. “There’s a lot of junk in the vicarage and the crypt, and I must have been through it all twice. I’m beginning to think that someone might have got there before us.”

  A look of pure dismay crossed Monkey’s face. “Don’t say that!”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving up just yet. I’ve got time to go through it all a third time if necessary. I’m just worried that we’re taking the content of that letter too literally.”

  “How else are we supposed to take it?” I asked. “It seems pretty clear that Abram left something in the care of the church that he believed was important.”

  “Yeah,” Dylan agreed, drawing out the one-syllable word with a resigned sigh. “But that’s just us putting our interpretation on the matter because of what we know, right?”

  He had a point there.

  “And anyway, how do we know this Abram wasn’t some random nutter spouting nonsense and leading us all a merry dance?”

  I nodded along, considering his words. This certainly wasn’t the time to float my theory about who Josiah Abram really was.

  “So, are you back at St Stephen’s tomorrow going through the junk again?”

  “No. Got a lot on the next few days. Moving into a new house I’ve rented.”

  “Anywhere nice?” I asked, glad of a more mundane matter to discuss.

  “Nothing to write home about, but it’s good enough for me and has plenty of room for my equipment. I’m renting, six months initially.”

  Equipment? I looked at his leather jacket and rock-student look. “Are you in a band or something?” I imagined a drum kit or a stack of amplifiers.

  Ever the mysterious loner, Dylan simply tapped his nose and winked. “It’s a secret. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  “Very funny,” Monkey commented.

  Dylan rose from the table. “It’s been nice catching up. I’ll be seeing you around, now that I’m renting in the Beck.” With that, he slid effortlessly between the tables and slipped out the door.

  “There’s something odd about that guy,” Monkey said.

  “Seems to be something odd about most of the people around here these days,” I grumbled. “If that painting is somewhere in St Stephen’s, we need to find it before Dylan Fogg does.”

  “How are we going to do that?” Monkey asked.

  A good question, but one that I didn’t have an answer to.

  Chapter 23

  Finally, half-term arrived, and I was granted an early escape from college on Friday. Whether Monkey had the same deal at his school or was simply playing truant, I didn’t bother to ask, but he met me at the Recorder office all the same.

  Anja was busy on the phone when we arrived and, once again, Ramón was working at his desk close by. I’d got so used to seeing his face in the office now that it seemed like he’d always been there. Neil was but a distant memory now, and Mick seemed glad about the fact like he’d finally eradicated a troublesome rash or had a bad tooth pulled.

  “Hello, Lorna, and Monkey.” Elaine, the receptionist, greeted us with a warm smile. The office had a more convivial feel when she was around as if her very presence smoothed off Mick’s rough edges. Of course, the chance of harmony in the office was greatly improved by Neil’s absence anyway.

  We chatted with Elaine about her recent weekend break, half listening in on Anja’s conversation on the phone: something about a wedding ring being pawned and the subsequent attempt to buy it back.

  “Have you got a receipt or some other proof of sale?” Anja said into the receiver.

  Monkey had taken one of the spare seats by the window and was busy experimenting with its point of equilibrium, rocking it back and trying to balance it on the steel bar that joined the feet at the back. Ramón seemed to find my friend’s simple experiment amusing, the journalist wheeling his chair back from his screen and staring intently as Monkey overbalanced and narrowly managed to avoid sliding head-first into the window.

  “Better not join the circus just yet!” the Spaniard remarked as Monkey steadied the chair and slumped down with a sheepish look on his face.

  “He can climb a church tower, yet he struggles to sit on a chair without falling off,” I said.

  “It’s not as easy as it looks,” Monkey protested.

  “What, sitting still?”

  “No, I mean balancing on the footrest.”

  “So easy to wind up,” I added with a smile.

  “How’s the project going?” Ramón asked.

  “Slowly. I took some photos of a couple of Abram’s paintings, and I’m wondering whether to include them as full pages or just a small image in the middle of the page,” I said, more for something to say than searching for advice. But Ramón was forthcoming with his opinion all the same.

  “They say a picture paints a thousand words, no?”

  I smiled. His English was pretty good if he was coming out with idioms like that. I wondered whether there was a Spanish equivalent.

  “Your friend, Lester Hawkstone. He’s an art connoisseur, is he not?”

  “Do you know him?” I asked, genuinely puzzled by this strange change
of tack in the journalist’s line of questioning.

  “No. But I’m sure that I read somewhere that he has a few prized pieces of art.”

  “If he has, I haven’t seen any,” I lied.

  Ramón considered my response, nodding slowly. “You still find time to work for Señor Hawkstone’s charity foundation with all of your school work?”

  “College work,” I corrected. “He’s not too demanding. He understands that we have our studies.”

  “He should talk more about his charity work in the press. It might help the way he is viewed. He has, how shall I put it, a less than favourable reputation in some quarters.”

  “Lester’s a nice guy,” Monkey said. He sounded irritated. “A little strange, maybe, but he’s always been okay with us, hasn’t he, Lorna?”

  I nodded my agreement, turning back to Ramón. “You seem very interested in Lester Hawkstone. Are you after an interview?”

  “Not necessarily,” Ramón replied guardedly, “but as I said, it might help with his reputation.”

  “Why should Lester feel the need to improve his reputation?” Ramón’s questions were getting under my skin now.

  “Idle gossip mostly, but I’ve heard tales from more than one source – rumours of occult practices.”

  “That’s absurd! Do you journalists believe everything that you hear?”

  “It pays to keep an open mind, Lorna.” Ramón’s calm manner was completely at odds with my escalating sense of injustice. I recalled the conversation that Monkey and I had had with Mick and Anja before we’d first met Lester. They’d peddled a similar line: that there were rumours of strange practices at Lester’s mansion. I was about to blurt out that Monkey and I had been to Lester’s many times and had never seen anything untoward. Of course, anybody outside of Lester’s organisation might think some of the discussions regarding the Wardens of the Black Heart or everyday objects with mysterious powers were strange, but there was no way that Ramón, Anja or Mick could know anything about all that stuff.

  At that point, Anja put the phone down with a heavy sigh. Ramón saw an excuse to extricate himself from a discussion that was in danger of overheating. “A new story?” he said to Anja.

  “A sad story. An old lady who pawned in her wedding ring because it was the only way that she could afford repairs that were needed for her house. Leaking roof or something. Anyway, now she’s had a small windfall on the lottery, so she’s decided to buy it back, but it’s been sold on. Poor woman.”

  Ever since we’d started working for Lester, whenever anybody mentioned an object in conversation, such as a wedding ring, it was as if an alarm went off in the back of my mind. What was the object’s history? Who was the previous owner? Had some lucky or unlucky event befallen the owner recently? But in this case, it was something else that Anja had said that switched my train of thought to a different track entirely.

  It was the only way that she could afford repairs that were needed for her house. Leaking roof or something.

  “Come on, Monkey. We’ll miss our appointment if we don’t leave now.”

  Monkey looked bewildered. “Appointment?”

  “Come on,” I repeated, bundling him out of the door whilst saying my goodbyes.

  Here was an opportunity to perform the type of search at St Stephen’s that hadn’t occurred to Dylan Fogg.

  “Explain it to me again,” Monkey said when he struggled to understand my line of reasoning.

  “Dylan said that he’d searched the church and found no sign of the painting, The Truth, left behind by Abram.”

  “I know what painting we’re talking about, Lorna. I’m not thick!” he replied indignantly. “I mean that bit about the proof of sale.”

  “When Anja was talking to that woman on the phone, she said something about a proof of sale. The woman had sold her wedding ring so that she could pay for some repairs to the house.”

  “A leaking roof or something?”

  “That’s right. But what if the church was short of money and sold the painting to cover the cost of repairs?”

  “Churches always have some appeal for a new roof,” Monkey commented. “But surely they wouldn’t sell Abram’s painting. He made it obvious that it was important. You saw the letter.”

  “Maybe not all vicars are as nosey as the current one. If they didn’t read the letter, or if they did and saw it as a load of old gobbledygook, it’s not hard to imagine the church trying to raise cash by selling off its assets!”

  * * *

  “It’s just through here,” the vicar said as he led us into the back of the vicarage. “We keep receipts for everything, but I don’t know how far the records go back.” He pushed open a heavy-looking door that revealed a musty smelling room whose walls were lined with bookshelves and filing cabinets. A small stained-glass window that looked like something out of a fairy tale let in a few weak rays of light, revealing dust motes in the air.

  “The parish records,” he announced ceremoniously. “I have a service to prepare for, so I’ll leave you to it.” He started to walk away from the door before turning back. “I can trust you not to mess the place up?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  He gave a brief nod and headed off for his service.

  I surveyed the contents of the room with a mounting sense of dismay. “You didn’t have any plans for the rest of the day?” I asked Monkey.

  “You really think we’ll find something in this lot?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “We could search the paintings first,” he suggested.

  “I’m working on the assumption that Dylan knows what he’s talking about, and he won’t have missed something so obvious.”

  “But he didn’t think of this?” Monkey pressed.

  “I know it’s a long shot, but we might get lucky,” I said hopefully.

  “Well, we’ve seen plenty of luck in the past year,” he said, sounding brighter. “Where shall we start?”

  We started with the filing cabinets. There were four in total, three drawers in each, and based on our initial inspection, each drawer was crammed with papers, most of them yellowed with age. The writing on some was illegible, and it was hard not to feel discouraged. What if there was something important that we missed because we couldn’t read it?

  “Let’s work one drawer at a time,” I suggested. “We’ll grab all the papers and put them on the floor next to this table.” I gestured at the heavy-looking piece of furniture standing against the wall. “Then we’ll go through each document and see where it takes us.”

  Twenty minutes later, we’d made our way through about half a drawer’s worth of documents that covered everything from plans for Christmas services to estimates for the number of graves that could be dug in the church graveyard.

  After forty-five minutes came the first sign of fatigue. “My eyes are starting to see double,” Monkey announced, dropping a piece of paper to the table disconsolately. I wasn’t listening because I was looking at a piece of paper that had given me a bit of faith in our search.

  “Look at this!” I announced excitedly.

  “What?”

  “It’s a receipt for the sale of a statue of the Virgin Mary!”

  “How does that help us?”

  “It doesn’t. But at least it shows that there’s a good chance that if the painting was sold, there could well be a record after all.”

  “The church sold a statue of the Virgin Mary?” Monkey repeated incredulously. “Isn’t that a sin or something?”

  “They didn’t sell it, they bought it,” I said with a laugh. “But I’m guessing that they keep receipts for purchases and sales.”

  We didn’t find anything of interest in the first filing cabinet or the top drawer of the second. We’d found a few receipts for dates ranging from 1904 to 1981. Again, I took this as an encouraging sign. However, the bad news was that there didn’t appear to be any filing system. At least none that made sense. Documents for the early part of
the twentieth century were just as likely to be found amongst those that were significantly newer. The dates were all over the place. Once again, I tried to keep a lid on the rising sense of futility as we rifled through the old documents.

  Five minutes into the top drawer of the second cabinet – which was just into the second hour of the search – Monkey held out an old-looking parchment.

  “Hey, Lorna, this look’s interesting.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something about the sale of a painting. See this at the bottom?” he said, pointing to the document.

  “Reason for sale,” I said, reading the words aloud. “To raise funds for sandblasting the church.”

  “What’s sandblasting?”

  “I think it’s how they clean up the brickwork,” I answered, but I wasn’t really sure. “They sold it for seven hundred pounds in 1985.”

  “Who to?”

  “Some museum in Oxford. Doesn’t sound like Lamb’s Hiding Place is the painting that we are looking for, does it?”

  He shook his head, and we continued our search.

  When I next glanced at my watch, I was surprised to see that it was just after four. We’d been searching for nearly two and a half hours, and although we’d be in a good position if we were ever to appear in a quiz where the specialised subject was the history of St Stephen’s church, we hadn’t found anything that remotely suggested the presence of an Abram masterpiece.

  “I’ll just finish the papers in this drawer, and we’ll call it a day,” I announced.

  “We’re giving up?” The relief in Monkey’s voice was evident.

  “We’ll come back and go through the rest tomorrow morning. Just give me five minutes.”

  As I concentrated on the last few documents, I heard a drawer sliding open and was vaguely aware of Monkey standing over by the filing cabinets. I had no doubt that when my head hit the pillow tonight, I’d be seeing yellowed parchment floating in front of my tired eyes. The thought made me close my eyes for a brief instant.

  “Lorna!” Monkey’s voice had the sound of somebody irritated that one or more previous calls had gone unanswered.

  “Sorry, what?” I said, coming out of my daze. I needed a coffee.