Sanctus Гофман Эрнст

23

‘The victim shows signs of recent laceration and trauma to hands and feet,’ Reis said as he continued his preliminary examination of the body. ‘The cuts are numerous. Deep. Down to the bone in some cases. Also irregular and torn. There are fragments of what look like rock embedded in some of the wounds. I’m removing them and bagging them for analysis.’

He held his hand over the microphone on the headset and turned to Arkadian.

‘He climbed up there before he jumped, didn’t he?’

Arkadian nodded. ‘There’s no ancient lift in there, far as we know.’

Reis turned back and looked at the ravaged hands and feet of the monk, picturing the monumental height of the Citadel in his mind. ‘Tough climb,’ he said quietly, before releasing his hand from the microphone and continuing.

‘The cuts to the victim’s hands and feet, though recent, show signs of significant blood coagulation, suggesting the injuries were sustained a good few hours ante-mortem. There’s scar tissue forming on some of the smaller cuts, in some cases grafting over the fragments of rock. I’d say, going purely on the extent of healing, that he’d been up there a few days before he jumped.’

He lowered the hand on to the cold ceramic table and examined the exposed arm.

‘The length of rope attached to the victim’s right wrist has also rubbed extensively on the skin, removing the epidermis. The rope is a rough, hemp-like weave, tough, and abrasive.’

‘It’s his belt,’ Arkadian said. Reis looked up and frowned. ‘Look at the cassock, around his waist.’

Reis switched his gaze to the middle of the dark, stained garment and spotted a thick leather loop stitched roughly to the cloth on one side and a tear on the other where its twin should have been. He’d noted other rips in the cassock, two above the hem and two by the wrists, but he’d missed this one.

‘The rope may be the victim’s belt,’ Reis stated for the record. ‘There are some leather loops round the middle of his cloak, though one appears to be missing. Again I will bag everything and send it across the hall for analysis.’

Arkadian reached behind Reis and pressed the flashing red square to pause the recording.

‘In other words,’ he said, ‘our guy climbed up the mountain using his belt as a makeshift rope, cut his hands and feet on the rocks in the process, hung around on the summit long enough for them to start healing, then threw himself off as soon as there was a big enough crowd to ruin my morning. Case closed.

‘Now, much as I’d love to hang around, I’ve got some less glamorous but nevertheless deserving cases to pursue. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just borrow that phone over by the coffee pot and try to get on with some real police work.’ He turned and disappeared beyond the harsh white light of the examination table. ‘Just holler if you find any clues.’

‘Oh, I will.’ Reis reached for a pair of heavy-duty shears. ‘You sure you don’t want to watch? I’m about to cut his cloak off. Not every day you get to see a naked monk.’

‘You’re a sick man, Reis.’ Arkadian picked up the phone and wondered which of his six active cases he should catch up on first.

Reis looked down at the corpse and smiled. ‘Sick!’ he muttered to himself. ‘You try doing this every day and staying normal.’

He opened the shears, slipped them over the collar of the monk’s cassock and started to cut.

24

Athanasius followed the filament of light in the floor round the corner and into the long dark corridor where the forbidden vault lay waiting. If there was anyone there ahead of him he couldn’t see them. The blood-red light in the chamber was not designed to carry far. He hated the darkness, but he hated the fact that you couldn’t hear anything even more. He’d heard Thomas explaining it to Samuel once – something to do with a constant low-frequency signal, inaudible to the human ear, which disrupted all sound waves and prevented them from carrying further than the circle of light that surrounded you. It meant you could be ten feet from someone and still have no idea what they were saying. It ensured that all forty-two chambers, even when full of scholars passionately arguing theological points, remained in a permanent state of librarian silence. It also meant that, despite his rapid and purposeful march through the Bible-black corridors, Athanasius could not even draw comfort from the sound of his own footfalls.

He was halfway down the corridor when he saw it. Briefly, at the edge of his light. A white spectral flash in the dark.

Athanasius sprang backwards, scanning the blackness. Trying to glimpse again what he thought he had seen. Something smacked into his back and he whirled around. Saw the stone upright of a bookcase. Whipped his head back to try and penetrate the ominous darkness.

He saw it again.

At first, just the faintest of outlines, like a web drifting in the dark. Then, as the thing advanced, it began to solidify into the gaunt and shuffling shape of a man. His body was thin and bony, barely looking strong enough to support the cassock that hung around him like partially discarded skin, and his long, sparse hair hung down in front of sightless eyes. Despite the ghastly appearance of the slowly advancing monk Athanasius felt his whole body relax.

‘Brother Ponti,’ he breathed. ‘You gave me quite a start.’

It was the caretaker, an old monk specifically chosen for the task of cleaning and maintaining the great library because his blindness meant he needed no illumination to work by. He twitched his head in the direction of the voice, staring straight through Athanasius with his milky gaze. ‘I’m sorry,’ he rasped, his voice parched by the arid air. ‘I do try and keep to the walls so as not to bump into folk, but this section’s a bit on the narrow side, Brother …?’

‘Athanasius.’

‘Ah yes,’ Ponti nodded. ‘Athanasius. I remember you. You’ve been in there before, haven’t you?’ He waved in the direction of the vault.

‘Once,’ Athanasius replied.

‘That’s right.’ Brother Ponti nodded slowly, as if agreeing with himself. ‘Well,’ he said, turning stiffly towards the exit, ‘don’t let me keep you. You’ll find it’s already occupied. And if I were you, Brother, I wouldn’t keep him waiting.’

Then he turned once more and melted into the blackness.

25

It took Reis several minutes to slice through the saturated material of the monk’s cassock. He cut from collar to hem, then down each arm, careful not to disturb the body beneath. Rolling the corpse slightly, he then removed the garment and placed it in a steel tray ready for separate analysis.

The guy was in pretty good shape.

At least he would have been before he fell a thousand feet on to solid rock.

Reis tapped the red square on the computer screen with his knuckle and restarted the recording.

‘First impressions of the subject’s body match what one would expect to see following a fall from a great height: massive trauma to the torso, shards of fractured rib jutting out through several places on both sides of the thorax, totally in keeping with the types of compression fracture caused by the extraordinary deceleration of a body in freefall coming into contact with the ground.

‘The body is covered in thick, dark, coagulated blood from numerous puncture wounds. Both clavicles are fractured in several places, and the right one protrudes through the skin at the base of the neck. There also appears to be …’

He looked more closely.

‘… some kind of historical, uniform incision running horizontally across the neck from shoulder to shoulder.’

He took hold of the retractable hose arching over the examination table and squeezed the handle, directing a jet of water on to the neck and chest of the corpse. The sticky, dark film began to wash away.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Reis muttered.

He moved the spray across the rest of the body: first the chest, then the arms, then the legs. He paused the recording once more.

‘Hey, Arkadian,’ he called over his shoulder, still transfixed by the livid body on the slab. ‘You said you wanted a clue. How does this grab you?’

26

Athanasius stopped at the door, aware that he did not possess the right to enter the restricted room, and more than slightly fearful of what might happen if he did.

He looked inside.

The Abbot stood imposingly in the confined space, the red light seeming to radiate from him as if he were a demon glowing in the darkness. His back was to the door, so he could not see Athanasius. His eyes were fixed on a grid of fifteen apertures carved into the far wall, each containing a receptacle made from the same material as aircraft black box data recorders. Athanasius recalled Father Malachi telling him how they were strong enough to protect their precious contents even if the whole mountain fell upon them; that did little to comfort him now.

He glanced down at the invisible line on the floor and contemplated stepping boldly into the room, but the phrase ‘See no evil, hear no evil’ rose unbidden into his thoughts and he remained where he stood until the Abbot, either sensing his presence or wondering at the lack of it, turned and looked straight at him. Athanasius noted with relief that his master’s face, despite its unsettling crimson pall, did not display the glower of a man on the warpath but the thoughtfulness of one with a problem to solve.

‘Come in.’ The Abbot removed one of the boxes from its recess and carried it to the lectern in the centre of the room. Sensing Athanasius’s continued reluctance to step inside, he said, ‘I spoke to Malachi on my way through. You may enter the vault – for an hour at least.’

As Athanasius obeyed, a second red glow accompanied him across the vault, confirming that – for the time being – his presence was legitimate.

The lectern stood in the centre of the room, facing the entrance but with the reading surface angled away from it. Anyone standing at it would be warned of an approach by the tell-tale sign of the advancing light, and any book placed there could not be seen from outside.

‘I summoned you here,’ the Abbot said, ‘because I wish to show you something.’

He unlatched the box and gently opened it.

‘Do you have any idea what this might be?’

Athanasius leaned forward, his aura joining the Abbot’s to illuminate a book, bound with a single panel of slate with a bold symbol etched on to its surface – the symbol of the Tau.

His breath caught in his throat. He knew at once what it was, as much from descriptions he had read as the circumstances in which he was now discovering it.

‘A Heretic Bible,’ Athanasius said.

‘No,’ the Abbot corrected. ‘Not a Heretic Bible. The Heretic Bible. This is the last remaining copy.’

Athanasius gazed down upon the slate cover. ‘I thought they had all been destroyed.’

‘That is what we wish people to believe. What better way to prevent them from searching for something than to persuade them that it does not exist?’

Athanasius considered the wisdom of this. He had barely spared a thought for the legendary book in years, because he thought it was exactly that – a legend. Yet here it was, close enough to touch.

‘That book,’ the Abbot said through clenched teeth, ‘contains thirteen pages of outrageous, poisonous and twisted lies; lies which dare to contradict and pervert the very word of God as recorded and set down in our own true Bible.’

Athanasius stared down at the innocuous-looking cover. ‘Then why spare this copy?’ he asked. ‘If it’s so dangerous, why keep even one?’

‘Because,’ the Abbot replied, jabbing his finger at the box, ‘you can destroy books, but their contents have a way of surviving; and in order for us to confound and defeat our enemies it helps if we first know their minds. Let me show you something.’

He placed a finger on the edge of the cover and opened it. The pages inside were also made of slate, held by three leather thongs. As the Abbot turned them, Athanasius felt an overwhelming temptation to read what was scratched on their surfaces. Unfortunately the rate at which the Abbot was proceeding, coupled with the nebulizing quality of the red light, made it virtually impossible. He could see that each page contained two columns of dense script, but it was several moments before he realized they were written in Malan, the language of the first heretics. With his brain now attuned he managed to pick up just two fragments as the pages flipped over. Two fragments, two phrases – both of which added to his already considerable state of shock.

‘There,’ the Abbot announced as he reached the final page. ‘This is part of what equates to their version of Genesis. You are familiar with their bastard tongue, I believe.’

Athanasius hesitated, his mind still trembling with the forbidden words he had just read.

‘Yes,’ he managed to say without his voice betraying him. ‘I have … studied it.’

‘Then read,’ the Abbot said.

Unlike the previous pages, the final tablet of slate contained only eight lines of text. They were arranged as a Calligram forming the sign of the Tau – the same textual symbol Kathryn Mann had gazed upon two hours previously. This one, however, was complete.

The one true cross will appear on earth

All will see it in a single moment – all will wonder

The cross will fall

The cross will rise

To unlock the Sacrament

And bring forth a new age

Through its merciful death

Athanasius looked up at the Abbot, his mind racing.

‘This is why I brought you here,’ the Abbot said. ‘I wanted you to see with your own eyes how Brother Samuel’s death may be interpreted by our enemies.’

Athanasius studied the prophecy again. The first three lines read like a description of the extraordinary events of the morning; it was the last four that made the blood drain from his cheeks. What they suggested was something incredible, unbelievable, momentous.

‘This is why we kept the book,’ the Abbot said solemnly. ‘Knowledge is power; and knowing what our enemies believe gives us the advantage. I want you to keep a close and watchful eye on Brother Samuel’s body. For if these twisted words contain any truth, and he is the cross mentioned here, then he may yet rise up – and be seen by our enemies as a weapon to use against us.’

27

Reis and Arkadian stared down at the body. Criss-crossing the skin was a complex and elaborate network of livid white scars; some old, some more recent – all deliberate. In the macabre setting of the autopsy room they gave the impression that the monk was some kind of gothic monster, stitched together from the component parts of a number of men.

Reis restarted the recording.

‘The subject shows significant and uniform scarring over much of his body, the result of cuts made repeatedly by a sharp, clinical instrument such as a scalpel or a razor, possibly during some kind of ritual.’

He began the grisly inventory.

‘Starting at the head … An old, healed scar entirely circumscribing the neck where it connects with the torso. Similar scars circumscribe both arms at the shoulder and both legs at the groin. The one at the top of the upper left arm has been recently re-opened, but already shows signs of healing. This incision is also straight-edged and extremely neat, surgically precise even, from a highly sharpened blade.

‘Also on the left arm at the junction of the upper bicep and tricep is a T-shaped keloid scar, thicker than the others, caused by repeated heat trauma.’ He glanced across at Arkadian. ‘Looks like this boy’s been on the receiving end of a cattle brand.’

Arkadian stared at the raised ‘T’ on the monk’s upper arm, all thought of his other cases now forgotten. He picked up Reis’s camera. Its LCD screen displayed a miniature version of the monk lying on the autopsy table. With a press of a button it was transmitted wirelessly to the case file.

‘There’s another scar running along the top of the ribcage, and one bisecting it, down through the sternum to the navel.’ Reis paused. ‘In shape and size it resembles the Y-cut we make to remove major organs during a post-mortem.

‘Radiating from the areola of the left nipple are four straight lines arranged at right angles to form the shape of a cross. Also not recent, each is approximately …’ Reis produced his tape again ‘… twenty centimetres long.’ He took a closer look. ‘There’s another cross on the right side of the torso, level with the base of the ribcage; different from the rest; roughly thirteen centimetres laterally, like a Christian cross lying on its side; evidence of stretch marks on the skin surrounding it; must have happened a long time ago. It also hasn’t been subjected to ritualistic re-opening, so maybe it isn’t as significant as the others.’

Arkadian took another snap then examined the scar close up. It did look exactly like a fallen cross. He pulled back, searching for meaning in the pattern of incisions. ‘Have you seen anything like this before?’

Reis shook his head. ‘My guess is some kind of initiation thing. But most of these scars aren’t fresh, so I don’t know how relevant they are to his jumping.’

‘He didn’t just jump,’ Arkadian said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘With most suicides, death is the principal objective. But not with this guy; his death was somehow … secondary. I think his primary motive lay elsewhere.’

Reis’s eyebrows disappeared beneath his hair. ‘If you throw yourself off the top of the Citadel, death has got to be fairly high on your agenda.’

‘But why climb all the way to the top? A fall from almost any height would have been enough.’

‘Maybe he was scared of winding up crippled. Lots of half-hearted suicide bids end up in the hospital rather than in here.’

‘Even so, he didn’t need to struggle to the very top. He also didn’t need to wait. But he did. He sat there, for God knows how long, in the freezing cold, bleeding from multiple wounds, waiting for morning. Why did he do that?’

‘Maybe he was resting. A climb like that is going to wipe anyone out; he would have been losing blood all the way up. So maybe he got to the top, collapsed from exhaustion, and the sun eventually revived him. Then he did it.’

Arkadian frowned. ‘But that’s not how it happened. He didn’t just wake up and topple off the mountain. He stood there with his arms outstretched for at least a couple of hours.’ He mimicked the pose. ‘Why would he do that if he just wanted to end it all? I’m pretty sure the public nature of his death is significant. The only reason we’re standing here having this conversation is because he waited until there was an audience. If he’d pulled this little stunt in the middle of the night I doubt whether it would even have made the news. He knew exactly what he was doing.’

‘OK,’ Reis conceded. ‘So maybe the guy didn’t get enough attention when he was a kid. What difference does it make? He’s still dead.’

Arkadian considered the question.

What difference did it make?

He knew his boss wanted the whole thing dealt with quickly and painlessly. The politic move would be to ignore the natural curiosity he’d been born with and stop asking difficult questions. Then again, he could just turn in his badge and sell holiday apartments or become a tour guide.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I didn’t ask to be put on this case. Your job is to establish how someone died. Mine is to work out why, and in order to do that it’s important to try and understand this guy’s mindset. Jumpers are usually victims – people who can’t cope any more, people who take the path of least resistance to death. But this guy had courage. He wasn’t a classic victim, and he damn sure didn’t take the path of least resistance. Which makes me think his actions meant something to him. Maybe they meant something to someone else too.’

28

Athanasius hurried up the corridor after the Abbot, their personal haloes brightening with every step they took.

‘So tell me,’ the Abbot said, without breaking stride, ‘who has made contact from the investigation?’

‘An Inspector Arkadian has been assigned to the case,’ Athanasius replied breathlessly. ‘He has already requested an interview with someone who might have information on the deceased. I told our brothers on the outside to say that the death was a tragedy and we would do everything we could to assist.’

‘Did you say whether he was known to us?’

‘I said there were many people living and working inside the Citadel and we would endeavour to discover if any of them were missing. I wasn’t sure whether or not we wanted to claim him as ours at this point, or whether you would prefer us to remain distant.’

The Abbot nodded. ‘You did well. Inform the public office to maintain the same courteous degree of cooperation, for now. It may be that the question of Brother Samuel’s body will resolve itself without our interference. Once the authorities have completed the post-mortem and no family members come forward to claim the body, we can step forward and offer to take it as a gesture of compassion. It will show to the world what a loving and caring church we are, one prepared to embrace a poor, wretched soul who sought to end his life in such a lonely and tragic way. It will also bring Brother Samuel back to us without our having to admit kinship.’

The Abbot stopped and turned, fixing Athanasius with his sharp, grey eyes.

‘However, in the light of what you have just read we must also be vigilant. We must leave nothing to chance. If anything unusual is reported, anything at all, then we must be ready to get Brother Samuel’s body back immediately, and by any means necessary.’ He stared at Athanasius from beneath his beetled brows. ‘That way, if some miracle does come to pass and he rises again, he will at least be in our custody. Whatever happens, we cannot let our enemies take possession of his body.’

‘As you wish,’ Athanasius replied. ‘But surely if what you have just shown me is the only remaining copy of the book, who else would know of the …’ he hesitated, not quite sure how to describe the ancient words scratched on the sheet of slate. He didn’t want to use the word ‘prophecy’ because that would imply that the words were the will of God, which in itself would be heresy. ‘Who else could know the specifics of the … prediction …?’

The Abbot nodded approvingly, picking up on his chamberlain’s caution. It confirmed to him that Athanasius was the right man to handle the official side of the situation; he had the political sophistication and the discretion for it. The unofficial side he would handle himself. ‘We cannot simply trust that the destruction of all the books and the people who carried them has also destroyed the words and thoughts they contained,’ he explained. ‘Lies are like weeds. You can grub them up, poison the root, burn them away to nothing – but they always find a way to return. So we must assume that this “prediction”, as you wisely refer to it, will be known in some form to our enemies, and that they will be preparing to act upon it. But do not worry, Brother,’ he said, laying a hand heavy as a bear’s paw on Athanasius’s shoulder. ‘We have withstood far more than this in our long and colourful history. We must simply do now as we have always done: stay one step ahead, pull up the drawbridge and wait for the outside threat to withdraw.’

‘And if it does not?’ Athanasius asked.

The hand tightened on his shoulder. ‘Then we attack it with everything we have.’

29

Reis reached across the monk’s body to a point at the top of the sternum, pressed down firmly with a long-handled scalpel and drew the blade smoothly down through the flesh, clear to the pubic bone, carefully following the line of the existing scar. He completed the Y-incision by making two more deep cuts from the top of the one he had just made to the outer edge of each of the monk’s shattered collarbones. Finally he cut away the skin and muscle from the monk’s chest and folded it open, revealing the ruined ribs beneath. At this point he would usually need surgical shears or the Stryker saw to cut through the cage of bone that protected the heart, lungs and other internal organs, but the massive impact of the landing had done most of the work for him. With just a few ligament cuts he managed to gain access to the chest cavity.

‘Tap the square for me, would you,’ Reis said, nodding towards the monitor. ‘Got my hands full here.’

Arkadian looked at the bloody section of ribs Reis was clutching and restarted the recording.

‘OK,’ Reis said, the jaunty tone back in his voice, ‘first impressions of the internal organs are that they are surprisingly well preserved, considering the impact. The ribs clearly did their job, even if they were all but destroyed in the process.’

He laid the ribcage down in a stainless-steel tray then made some well-practised cuts inside the body cavity to detach the larynx, oesophagus and ligaments connecting the major organs to the spinal cord before lifting the entire block out in one piece and transferring them to a wide metal container.

‘The liver shows some evidence of haemorrhaging,’ he said, ‘but none of the major organs are particularly pale so he didn’t bleed out. The subject probably died of systemic organ failure following massive trauma, which I’ll confirm once I’ve run the tox and tissue tests.’

He carried the container to an examination bench by the wall and started taking routine measurements of the liver, heart and lungs, as well as tissue samples from each.

Arkadian looked up at the TV in the corner and was once again confronted by the eerie sight of the man now lying in pieces in front of him standing proud and very much alive on the summit of the Citadel. It was the footage all the networks were now using. It showed the monk shuffling towards the edge. Glancing down. Tipping forward, then suddenly dropping from view. The camera jerked downwards and zoomed wide as it tried to follow the fall. It tightened back in, losing focus as it found him again and struggled to keep him in frame. It was like watching the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, or the footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. There was something momentous about it, and deeply terrible. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. At the last moment the camera lost him again and pulled wide just in time to reveal the base of the mountain and the crowds of people on the embankment recoiling in shock from where the body had hit the ground.

Arkadian dropped his gaze to the floor. He replayed the sequence in his head over and over, piecing together the glimpsed fragments of the monk’s fall …

‘It was deliberate,’ he whispered.

Reis looked up from the digital scales currently displaying the weight of the dead monk’s liver. ‘Of course it was deliberate.’

‘No, I mean the way he fell. Suicide jumps are usually pretty straightforward. Jumpers either flip over backwards, or launch themselves forward and tip over head first.’

‘The head’s the heaviest part of the body,’ Reis said. ‘Gravity always pulls it straight down – given a long enough fall.’

‘And a fall from the top of the Citadel should be plenty long enough. It’s over a thousand feet high. But our guy stayed flat – all the way down.’

‘So?’

‘So it was a controlled fall.’

Arkadian went to the stainless-steel tray holding the cassock. He grabbed a set of tongs and peeled open the stiff material until he found one of the sleeves. ‘Look. Those rips you found at the wrists? They were for his hands. It meant he could pull his robe tight against his body – like a kind of wing.’ He dropped the sleeve and sorted through the grisly folds until he found the other cuts a few inches above the hem. ‘And these were for his feet.’ He dropped the material back down and turned to Reis. ‘That’s why he didn’t fall head-first. He didn’t jump off the mountain – he flew off it.’

Reis looked across at the broken body under the examination lights. ‘Then I’d say he really needs to work on his landings.’

Arkadian ignored him, following this new thought. ‘Maybe he thought he could reduce the speed of the fall enough to survive it. Or maybe …’

He pictured the monk again, his arms stretched out, his body tilted down, his head held steady, as if focusing on something, as if he was …

‘Aiming.’

‘What?’

‘I think he was aiming for a specific spot.’

‘Why on earth would he do that?’

It was a good question. Why aim somewhere if you were going to die wherever you landed? But then, death wasn’t his primary concern, it wasn’t nearly as important as … witnesses. ‘He was aiming because he wanted to land in our jurisdiction!’

Reis’s brow furrowed.

‘The Citadel is a state within a state,’ Arkadian explained. ‘Anything that side of the moat wall belongs to them; anything this side is our responsibility. He wanted to make sure he ended up on our side of the wall. He wanted all this to happen. He wanted public investigation. He wanted us to see all these cuts on his body.’

‘But why?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. But whatever it is, he thought it was worth dying for. His dying wish, literally, was to get away from that place.’

‘So what are you going to do when some big religious cheese comes calling, asking for his monk back? Give them a lecture on jurisdiction?’

Arkadian shrugged. ‘So far they haven’t even admitted he’s one of theirs.’

He glanced over at the gaping body of the monk, the body cavity now empty, the surgically precise scars round his neck, legs and arms still visible. Maybe the scars were some kind of message, and whoever came forward to claim the body would know what they meant.

Reis picked up a cardboard container from underneath the examination table, restarted the recording, and began squeezing the contents of the monk’s stomach into it. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The major intestine contains very little, so our friend’s last supper wasn’t exactly a banquet. Looks like the last thing he ate was an apple and maybe some bread a while before that, which I’ll label and send for analysis. The stomach contents appear to be largely undigested, suggesting that his digestive system had wholly or partially shut down, indicating a high degree of ante-mortem stress. Wait a minute,’ he said, as something shifted inside the slippery membranes between his fingers. ‘There’s something else here.’

Arkadian stepped over to the table as something small and dark dropped into the soup of apple pulp and gastric juices. It looked like a curled-up strip of overcooked beef. ‘What on earth is that?’

Reis picked it up and moved across to the sink, knocking the long arm of the tap with his elbow and holding the object under the stream of water.

‘It appears to be a small strip of leather,’ he said, laying it down on a tray lined with a paper towel. ‘It was rolled up, maybe to make it easier to swallow.’ He took a set of tweezers and started opening it out.

‘He was missing a belt loop from his cassock, wasn’t he?’ Arkadian whispered.

Reis nodded.

‘I think we just found it.’

Reis moved it alongside a centimetre scale etched into the surface of the tray. Arkadian sent another picture to the case file. Reis flipped it over so he could photograph the other side and all the air seemed to be sucked from the room.

Neither of them moved.

Neither of them said anything.

Arkadian raised the camera.

The click of the shutter snapped Reis out of his trance.

He cleared his throat.

‘Having unrolled and cleaned the leather object, something appears to be scratched on its surface.’

He glanced up at Arkadian before continuing.

‘Twelve numbers, seemingly random.’

Arkadian stared down at them, his mind already racing. The combination for a lock? Some kind of code? Maybe they referred to a chapter and verse from the Bible and would spell out a word or a sentence that might shed light on things, possibly even the identity of the Sacrament. He checked the numbers again. ‘They’re not random,’ he said, reading the sequence from left to right. ‘Not random at all.’

He looked up at Reis.

‘That’s a telephone number,’ he said.

II

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3:16

30

The primal screams echoed round the bright room with a desperate, animal quality that seemed out of place in the sleek modern setting of the New Jersey hospital.

Liv stood in the corner, watching Bonnie’s face contort in pain. Her phone had woken her a little after two in the morning, dragging her out of bed, into her car, and south on I-95 with all the empty trucks making their way out of New York City. It had been Myron; Bonnie’s waters had broken.

Another lung-deep scream tore through the room and she looked across at Bonnie squatting naked in the centre of the room, howling so hard that her face had gone purple and the cords in her neck stood out like high-tension cables. Myron held on, supporting one arm, while the midwife held the other. The howl ebbed slightly, making way for the incongruous sound of waves lapping against a beach. They flowed gently from a portable boom box in the corner.

In Liv’s nicotine-starved mind the supposedly soothing sounds of the seashore morphed into the tormenting crackle of cellophane being ripped off a fresh pack of Luckies. She craved a cigarette more than she had ever desired anything in her life. Hospitals always had that effect on her. The very fact you were expressly forbidden to do something made it almost irresistible to her. She was the same in churches.

Bonnie’s scream rose again, this time something between a moan and a growl. Myron stroked her back and made shushing noises like he was trying to calm a child who had woken from a terrible nightmare. Bonnie turned to him and in a low voice made raw from screaming panted a single word: ‘Arnica.’

Liv reached gratefully for her notebook to log the request and the time it was made. Arnica was also known as wolf’s bane or mountain tobacco and had been used since the dawn of time as a herbal remedy. Liv often used it herself to reduce bruising; it was also thought to alleviate the trauma of a long drawn out and painful childbirth. She found herself sincerely hoping this would prove to be true as she watched Myron fumbling with a small vial containing the tiny white sugar pills. The screaming started again and rose in pitch as another contraction arrived.

For God’s sake, take the Pethedine, Liv thought.

An advocate of the healing properties of plants she may have been; a masochist she most definitely was not. Bonnie’s screaming soared to a new zenith and her hand shot out to grab Myron, knocking the entire contents of the blue box on to the shiny vinyl floor.

Liv’s cell phone rang in her pocket.

She felt for the ‘off’ button through the thick cotton of her cargo pants and pressed hard, hoping to catch it before it rang again. No one gave the slightest indication they even remembered she was there. She fished the phone out and glanced down at the scratched grey screen, made sure it was definitely off, then returned her attention, just in time, to the unfolding story in the room.