by Rob Campbell
“Next Saturday, it’s my seventy-third birthday. Do you think that the delightful Miss Halfpenny would like to attend a party here? You’re all invited, of course.”
“You’re never seventy-three!” said Victoria as she waltzed back into the lounge. “You don’t look a day over sixty.”
“It’s very kind of you to say so,” Lester said with a sigh, “but I can feel the years in these old bones.”
“What have you got planned for your birthday?” Victoria asked.
“Well, nothing really. I was just thinking of another informal gathering like tonight.”
“Nonsense,” Victoria said in an overly dramatic voice. “We should have a big party. I’m sure a man of your means could organise something.”
“Well, I… I’m afraid I’m not very good at organising things, parties least of all,” Lester admitted with more than a hint of embarrassment. “I usually get Frank to sort most of my personal business out.”
“That’s right,” Frank said. “Last year, I organised three trips to the dentist, two to the doctors, and I even managed his fantasy football team!”
“Then it’s lucky that I know the best party organiser in the county, isn’t it?” continued Victoria.
A surprised look crossed Lester’s face. “Who’s that then?”
“Why, it’s me, of course!”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Just leave it to me. I’ll organise a night to remember.”
Lester laughed nervously. I got the impression that he was used to being in control – except when he had Frank organising his personal business. But by the same token, he was smitten with Victoria Halfpenny, and it was obvious that he was prepared to live a little dangerously on this occasion.
“If you say so,” he managed finally.
“Good, that’s settled then,” she said, placing a hand on Lester’s knee and leaving it there for a few seconds. Lester took a long swig of brandy.
His embarrassment was saved, quite literally, by the front doorbell.
“Whoever could that be, at this time?” he said.
I looked at my watch: 9.05.
“I’ll go,” offered Frank, climbing up from the sofa with an exaggerated grunt and making his way into the hall.
“I can’t wait for next Saturday,” Monkey said, his voice brimming with excitement.
“Don’t you worry, I know how to put on a good show,” Victoria said.
I was certainly seeing a different side to her this last week: mild-mannered history teacher by day, party organiser by night.
The sound of Frank’s surprised voice made us all turn as one towards the hall. “I don’t believe it!” I heard him say, and before anybody had time to pass comment, the reason for his surprise walked through the lounge door. The face was familiar but that was about all; with a light travel bag slung over his shoulder, he was otherwise attired in the full outfit of a priest, right down to the black robes and gleaming white dog collar.
“Reverend?” Lester said, slowly rising from his seat, barely able to contain his surprise.
“Who’s that?” Victoria whispered to me.
“The Reverend Jeremiah Dubois. He’s a close friend of Lester’s.”
Lester walked up to the Reverend and shook his hand warmly. “It’s good to see you again, old friend. You’ve been away far too long.”
“I bring grave news,” the Reverend said in his slow Southern drawl. Along with his change of wardrobe, he seemed to have substituted his trademark wordsmithery with a more direct and far less subtle delivery.
“Grave news?” Lester said with more than an edge of concern in his voice. “What’s with the outfit?” he added, gesturing towards the Reverend’s attire.
“Fancy dress party is next week,” Victoria quipped with a giggle, but nobody else was laughing. To her credit, she quickly gauged the mood and issued a mumbled apology.
“I was wrong, Lester. So wrong,” the Reverend said, mad eyes darting around the room before settling back on the millionaire’s face once more. He gripped Lester’s arm tightly.
“Wrong? Calm down, you’re not making any sense,” Lester spluttered.
Frank walked over to the drink’s cabinet, poured a generous measure of what looked like dark rum and placed it in the Reverend’s shaking hand. The Reverend accepted the glass gratefully and finished the dark liquid in one easy gulp, clenching his teeth as if the spirit had burned him.
“I’ve seen the light. The Lord is my light, the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”
When Monkey and I had first met the Reverend, he’d made it clear that he’d renounced God – he was a reverend in name only. He’d even said that he worshipped at a different church now: one that didn’t involve God or Jesus or anything that they might teach you at Sunday school. I’d never seen him in a religious collar; a bootlace tie was more his thing. But to see him here tonight, like this, was a revelation.
“Darkness falls, Lester,” the Reverend croaked as if the rum had burned his vocal cords. “The beast walks amongst us, and his true purpose is revealed. We must fight it! We must fight it!”
“I think you’d better sit down,” Frank suggested as he and Lester eased the rambling Reverend down onto the sofa.
“Is he okay?” Victoria asked, her previous frivolity replaced by what sounded like genuine concern.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s had a long journey,” Lester explained, adopting the tone of a wife trying to explain away the bizarre behaviour of her drunken husband.
From where I was sitting, the Reverend seemed anything but fine, and I wondered what would happen when the dust had settled. Lester had thrown his lot in with this man, hunting down the fabled pieces of heaven and deploying considerable resources, Monkey and I included, to ensure that the Wardens of the Black Heart were kept at bay.
Once more, something that Dylan had said about Lester came back to haunt me. He’d doubted Lester’s courage to see through what he’d started, and the fact that Napoleon languished in his vault seemed to back up this opinion. With his main ally and spiritual advisor, the Reverend, in this state, how could Lester possibly carry on the fight from here?
Chapter 25
Some might say that heading out for a climb first thing on a Sunday was a crazy idea, but with all of the recent revelations spinning around my head, I thought that some fresh air and a bit of exercise would do me the world of good.
We passed the crash site; the petrol station forecourt had been cleared, but the old building still bore the scars of that terrible night. The place had an eerie feel, as if it had already been consigned to history, the petrol pumps doomed to stand unused like a child’s unwanted playset.
Next, we had to make our way through the field where the plane had come down. Here, the clean-up operation seemed somewhat incomplete; the broken wings and fuselage had been removed, leaving a scattering of small, broken bits of plastic and oddly shaped pieces of metal lying in the blackened grass.
“What the hell was up with the Reverend last night?” Monkey asked as he climbed the wooden fence that marked the boundary of the field. I followed him over, landing on the cinder path that led into the dense copse of trees behind the crash site.
“Search me. Looks like he’s finally lost the plot.”
“All that stuff he told us about not following God anymore – it looked like he was starting to believe in God again last night.”
It was true. A concerned Lester had fired several questions at the Reverend, but despite his coaxing, the Reverend wouldn’t say what had happened to cause such a sea change in his religious outlook.
“Maybe Lester was able to get the full story out of him after we left,” I said. “He might have felt embarrassed about saying too much with Victoria there.” I’d thought about it a lot last night before falling asleep, and this was the best explanation I could come up with.
“Possibly,” Monkey commented.
“Right now, I’m more concerned with what Ge
rald May might say when we see him tomorrow.” Would the antique dealer be able to lay his hands on a receipt from a sale that took place more than forty years ago? He seemed confident in his father’s record-keeping, but I was starting to think that we might reach a dead end with our search for The Truth – even if Abram was Abernathy like I suspected. So many questions, it made my head hurt.
“I assume we’re here to climb a tree,” I commented, needing some relief from what seemed like a thousand half-baked theories.
“Yep. But not just any old tree. This is one of the biggest trees in the area.” Monkey led the way into the undergrowth. Whilst this piece of woodland was only small, it was densely packed with trees, the trunks of which looked thicker than the concrete pillars that supported the raised section of the nearby relief road.
“There’s an old cleaner at the orphanage who told me that this used to be one of the biggest woods in the area, but they cut a lot of the trees down to build the road about twenty years ago.”
I looked up at those still standing, feeling sad that grand old trees such as these had been cut down to make way for the concrete monstrosity no more than thirty metres to our right. Maybe this was the way of things: clearing forests and woodlands to make way for roads, then clearing half of what was left to make way for new housing estates. Would there be any trees left in a hundred years?
Monkey didn’t seem too concerned by such profound thoughts. He was in the process of scrambling up the lower limbs of a huge tree. Part of his reason for bringing me here was, in his words, to teach me the specialised technique required to climb large trees. I didn’t understand what was so different to the various other structures and buildings that he’d had us climbing in the past few months, but he was in his element as he explained the best way to grip the trunk with your feet or move from one branch to another.
We took a breather on the main limb that jutted out horizontal to the ground, about three or four metres above the woodland floor.
“Do you know what the main danger is when climbing trees?” he asked, sounding like a professional instructor.
“Falling?” I responded, only half in jest. I looked down from the branch on which we stood. It would certainly hurt if we fell from here.
“Apart from that,” he said, taking my quip in his stride. “No, it’s getting poked in the eye by these.” He grasped the thin end of a protruding branch, and I winced as I imagined unwelcome contact with such a sharp point. “You’re concentrating so much on your footholds and where your next grip is coming from that you forget to keep an eye out for things in the way.”
Without further comment, Monkey set off along the branch, back towards the main trunk, where he continued his climb.
“We’re not going all the way to the top, are we?” I asked nervously.
“Just a little further. Wait till you see the view,” he said enthusiastically as his backside disappeared through a thick cluster of leafless branches.
I set off after him and was just pushing my head through the dry knot of wood, taking care to keep my head away from any stray branches – Monkey’s warning fresh in my mind – when I heard him call out.
“Oh my God! Lorna, get up here. I don’t believe it!” There was an urgency to his words.
I made sure that my trainers had a solid footing as I finally escaped the claw-like branches and was able to stand next to my friend. The sight of the field through which we’d recently walked did indeed take my breath away, but not because of the spectacular view that he’d brought me up here to see.
“Is that my imagination?” I asked, unable to tear my eyes away from the scene below.
“No. I can see it too,” he replied robotically.
Whilst the wreckage of the plane crash had been cleared away, the blackened grass marked the point where it had come to rest in a ball of flames. From our viewpoint – a good five or six metres above the field – we were in the perfect spot to bear witness to the mark that the shocking event had left on the earth.
The burnt grass around the crash site roughly approximated the shape of a heart. Naturally, given the mark left by the flames, this meant that we were now looking down on a large black heart.
“Are you sure there isn’t something you’re not telling me?” I said, turning to Monkey. “How do you always chance on these things? The coin? The receipt for the painting? And now this?”
“I swear…” he started but didn’t finish, simply shaking his head in disbelief. He seemed genuine, but I felt a little part of my mind close in on itself as if my suspicions were putting up safety barriers, making me believe that everybody except me knew what was going on here.
* * *
We descended wordlessly, crunching through the dried branches, before making our way back through town. For the most part, I didn’t look at Monkey, keeping my eyes on the path ahead. Could I trust my friend? Was there something he was not telling me? These were just two more questions that I added to the ever-growing list.
As if sensing my mood, Monkey pleaded with me.
“Lorna, I swear, I know as much as you about what’s going on.”
“Okay,” I mumbled as we turned the corner and entered the alley.
“Fancy seeing you here,” said a cultured voice.
I looked up in shock. Charles Gooch stood in our way, not three metres ahead.
“Oh no!” Monkey groaned. “This alley is bad juju.” My mind on other things, I hadn’t realised the significance of where we were until Monkey had spoken. “This is where Goofy cornered us last year!” he added in dismay.
How could I forget? My first meeting with the school bully who’d tormented Monkey. But this time it was Gooch, who was wearing his usual coat and hat with the ever-present briefcase clutched firmly in his gloved hand.
“Speaking of our mutual friend, how is he doing?” Gooch asked, his left eye squinting slightly behind his glasses.
“Goofy? What do you know about what happened to him?” I asked. I’d quickly recovered from the shock of seeing Gooch. The last time that we’d seen him had been in the reservoir tunnel, the night that had seemingly changed Goofy’s personality forever. “He was practically a vegetable for months!”
“After he’d stopped screaming,” Monkey added.
“I didn’t do anything,” Gooch responded coldly. “I warned him not to look into the briefcase, and the dumb kid goes and takes it!”
“What’s in there?” Monkey asked.
“Nothing you'd want to see. Nothing anybody should see.”
“I thought you’d left town,” I said, growing bolder by the second. Although my heart was still hammering, I was determined not to be cowed by Gooch’s sudden reappearance. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that he’d slithered back into view now that Monkey and I were homing in on The Truth, and we needed to know exactly what he was up to.
“I won’t be leaving just yet. I’ve got unfinished business here.”
“You won’t get The Frenchman back,” I spat, unable to resist feeling smug. Gooch seemed to think about this for a few moments as if choosing his words carefully.
“We’ll see about that, miss. You’re messing with things you don’t understand here.”
“Goofy says he’s got a message for you,” Monkey said.
“A message?” Gooch was clearly surprised, his voice rising from its usual menacing snarl.
“Something about a bookkeeper.”
“Bookkeeper?” Gooch repeated dumbly. He seemed rattled. In the space of a few sentences, he’d gone from evil, to curious, to edgy. His face, pale at the best of times, had drained of what little colour it had had.
“Who's the bookkeeper?” Monkey asked, clearly enjoying our momentary advantage.
“I don't know what you know,” Gooch said, taking a couple of steps towards us, his voice slipping back into a snarl, “but I strongly suggest that you don't play games with me!” He managed to grab Monkey’s jacket and squeezed it so that the collar tightened around my friend�
�s throat. Monkey went wide-eyed in shock, backpedalling and trying to break Gooch’s hold. “What do you know about the Bookkeeper?” Gooch yelled, his eyes bulging behind his spectacles.
“Leave the boy alone,” came a voice. As if from nowhere, Dylan Fogg stepped into the alley and grabbed Gooch by the scruff of the neck. He yanked hard, causing Gooch to stumble slightly before righting himself.
“You’ll be sorry you got involved in this!” Gooch threatened, panting as if he’d run a few miles. He backed off slowly, not taking his eyes off Dylan.
The three of us watched as he finally reached the end of the alley and scarpered around the corner.
“Thanks,” Monkey said. “But I thought you were busy moving house this weekend.”
“I’ve finished,” Dylan replied before asking, “What was all that about the briefcase, and who was that?”
“How long were you listening?” I countered as if I needed reminding that we hadn’t told Dylan everything about what we knew; the painting, Gooch’s briefcase and what had happened to Goofy being foremost in my mind.
“Long enough.”
I did a quick mental inventory on my list of secrets, deciding what we could admit to Dylan, and what we couldn’t.
“Remember that passenger list for the ship you told us about?” I finally settled on.
“The Mauritania manifest?”
“That’s the one. That guy is Charles Gooch – his name appears alongside Daniel Turnbull’s on that list.”
“But that was over one hundred years ago.”
“You seem surprised.”
“Why wouldn't I be?” Dylan asked innocently.
He was good, I’ll give him that. It was only there for an instant, but it was long enough that I could sense, beyond reasonable doubt, that he wasn’t as surprised as he appeared.
“Come on, Dylan, you know more than you're letting on.” It was a bold gambit, given that it was us that was keeping info from him, but I wanted to throw him off the scent. I was dreading the moment that he mentioned his search for the painting at St Stephen’s. If he went back to see the vicar, and the vicar told him that Monkey and I had been snooping around in the parish records…
