Father Jones had capitulated with a sigh and
declared he was going to go and clear his head and walk back over
to the other side of the river. He’d been cooped up for days
between the police station and the cloister, and so he was off to
get some fresh air.
‘Well, some London rain, I suppose,’ he said
as he opened the door to discover the heavens had opened once
more.
He took his overcoat and a brolly from the
hallway and departed. Iqbal followed him out to make sure he went
past the Church, then returned to the parlour.
Once more they laid out the files and
started to go through them meticulously. Gatto had brought with him
photographs from Embleton’s file and Maryam confirmed that was the
man who had been praying in the Church before. She didn’t mention
anything other than noticing him ‘because of a smell of old
books’.
‘And Father Jones knew him as Keith
Pargiter?’
‘Yes. He runs a book shop, old books.’
‘Well, if it is him, it’ll be interesting to
see if he has an old Qur’an in stock. Or rather, missing.’
‘Didn’t Inspector Barham ask for the
antiquarian book shops to be looked into, to see where the copy of
the Qur’an could have come from?’ Iqbal asked Gatto.
‘Yes, she did, son. Keep asking questions
like that and you’ll do okay.’ Iqbal almost blushed but held it off
by staring hard at some paperwork.’
‘And you got a strange feeling off him, did
you, Miss Michael?’
‘I never said that, Sergeant Gatto, did
I?’
‘No, you didn’t, what was I thinking?’ His
wry tone fooled no one. Maryam sipped some coffee and looked placid
and neutral. Gatto excused himself and went outside to phone
headquarters in private to see if the book shop had already been
visited. Iqbal stayed and took them through what they’d uncovered
in their own inquiries.
‘Shortly after Embleton was issued the ASBO
for the mosque conversion, he was admitted to hospital. He was
suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. There were marks on
his body, self inflicted.’
‘What sort of marks?’
‘He’d whipped himself with something that
had metal on it. One of the wounds on his back had become infected
and it was the blood poisoning that caused him to collapse in Marks
& Spencer’s. After treatment, he was voluntarily admitted to a
psychiatric unit. No idea of the diagnosis or treatment, still
looking.’
Maryam sighed. ‘It is rather unfortunate
that Mr Pargiter appears to have been born in the wrong
millennium.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Never mind, Detective, carry on.’
‘He came back into police view about two
years later, when he was the subject of a complaint from a
synagogue in Golders Green. He had been trying to convert to
Judaism and things were not going well. I’m not sure what that
means. He’d been asked to leave the synagogue in question and not
return.’
‘And he kept coming back?’
‘Yes, Bishop, he did. I spoke to the local
officer who worked on this case. It was only when Mr Embleton was
threatened with an ASBO that he backed off.’
‘Did they know of the prior one?’
‘Yes, they did. They’d been looking into his
background and it popped up in the system. PC Shirley Deal, who
phoned me back, remembers him as it was such an odd case. Although
still registered at his Peckham address, he was staying with
friends in Golders Green. Intellectual sorts with a huge house;
always had lots of people staying. She went round there and spoke
to him, pointed out his previous ASBO and that they’d apply for
another one for the synagogue if he kept pushing it. From her
account, he left the area there and then.’
‘When was this?’
Iqbal looked at his notes. ‘About three
years ago.’
‘Well,’ said Maryam, in a tone that made
Gatto feel as if he was talking to his Chief Inspector. ‘I think we
need to do two things. Firstly, establish that Keith Pargiter and
Geoffrey Embleton are the same person, and then prove a connection
between him and Jason Briggs.’
She’d been expecting it to be a slow and
tedious affair. Police work was, despite the film and television
versions of everything happening within two days. However,
circumstances moved quickly once her report had been received in
Rome. It only took twenty-four hours for Rome to return the
information that Keith Archibald Pargiter had been accepted into
training for the priesthood in 1964, when he was twenty years old.
He had been carefully nurtured by his family, who had presented him
as a gifted scholar and dedicated postulant. It had helped that the
family had the wealth to support his training in Rome itself. The
report she received back, which included a scan of a faded passport
photo of the young man, was scant. It outlined only that Keith had
had immense difficulty in accepting the changes being deliberated
in the Holy City by the Vatican II council. He left the seminary by
mutual consent in 1967. Rome had no more record of him. The fact
that his true name was Pargiter and not Embleton helped the police
untangle everything.
Keith Pargiter had been arrested and
convicted of arson in 1970 and had spent three years in a secure
psychiatric unit before being deemed ‘cured’ of the religious
obsession that had resulted him in burning an Anglican Church to
the ground. On release, he’d been sent to a private sanatorium in
Switzerland by his family. He’d disappeared off the radar until
turning up in Peckham three years prior, to inherit his maternal
uncle’s book shop. However, his fingerprints were on file, and they
matched the fingerprints of Geoffrey Embleton, which had been taken
in the fuss that had resulted in the ASBO. The 1970 files were from
Surrey police and had never made it into a computer database.
The matching of the fingerprints allowed
Barham to seek a search warrant for Pargiter’s shop and his flat
above. Pargiter himself had flown: no one had seen him since he
encountered Maryam in the Church. The investigation into the shop
accounts revealed an industrial storage unit where he kept the
majority of his stock. Whilst the shop and the house had revealed
nothing out of the ordinary, the storage unit was packed with all
manner of occult and religious texts, including several copies of
the Qur’an. It also contained crates of artefacts: chalices, altar
cloths and a myriad of Catholic altar vessels. One small box had
been locked and bolted into a larger crate and stored out of
sequence with everything else. It contained two items, a communion
chalice and a crucifix. Both bore the fingerprints of Jason Briggs.
The feet of Christ on the base of the Crucifix also had his saliva
and epithelia: he had kissed it at some point, no doubt when Keith
had been tutoring him on Catholic tradition. Maryam could have
returned home at that point, but she chose to stay on and see the
parish settled back down. It was an odd time for all concerned. Wyn
was allowed to return with no problem, and as he’d never been
charged, there was no press coverage on him in connection with the
murder. That was one reason Barham had been so meticulous on his
being taken in and out of the police station on a daily basis. A
dedication to preserving the reputation of those that passed though
her official hands that Maryam appreciated. Not all officers of the
law were so diligent.
The accounts of Geoffrey Embleton revealed
that he’d sent money to a private detective in Nigeria in the past
six months and had received ‘documents’ in return. Whilst the
Metropolitan police could do little, the Curia investigated and
supplied proof that the confirmation certificates shown to Father
Jones by Jason Briggs had been bought by the private detective,
from a young man in the village that Jason’s father had come from.
This freed Father Jones to reveal everything that had been told to
him by Briggs under the Seal of the Confessional. Fred and Maryam
had stayed with him and the Diocese lawyer, as he’d gone through
everything that Briggs had told him. The endless confessions of how
he was repeatedly raping young girls in the Church, how the vows of
priesthood had trapped Wyn into listening.
Maryam had spent a couple of hours with
Barham, Gatto and Iqbal and an individual from the Crown
Prosecution Service, explaining out the nature of the trap that had
been sprung on the young priest. How sophisticated it was and how
grounded in Catholic teaching and belief it had been. Barham was
angry and Iqbal confused. Sergeant Gatto was affected the most: he
resonated with Jones’s problem about knowing things professionally
that couldn’t be revealed on a personal level. It said a lot about
why he was happy to remain a sergeant. Maryam wasn’t surprised when
Gatto turned up to Mass a week or so later.
What had surprised her was what happened
when Father Jones took Mass. How the Church of the Mother of All
Sorrows appeared to expand as if it were a living, breathing thing.
How the singing of the choir when Jones was at the altar brought
tears to your eyes. About the sense of life and light and wonder
that sometimes filled you as he read the Gospel. It was a
bittersweet experience. For side by side with the joy, with the
sense of the sacred when he handled the Host, there was also the
pain. The sharp stab of the sword piercing the heart: the shadow
that sometimes stood by his side. The ghost sitting at the feast;
the look in his eyes sometimes when he laughed out loud. How deep
the darkness of desolation was now rooted. How the wound was
unhealed. How his bedroom light would often stay on until dawn and
how he would spend hours in the Church kneeling in prayer and yet
not look at peace. How his light was sometimes occluded by
doubt.
Maryam waited until the call came for him to
go to Rome. She then packed her cases as he packed his. She needed
to get back home and wake up with the night in her room. A still,
dark night, with no lights or cars or trucks or people: just the
night. She and Barham had got a little drunk the night before, over
a goodbye dinner, where they had spoken freely and drained out the
canker that could form from a case unsolved. Both had learned that
most cases were left unproven and that few were ever prosecuted
successfully. Just as they both knew who had killed Jason Briggs
and how, they were unlikely to ever be able to prove it or bring
him to justice. Barham had thanked her for her help and confided
that she was glad there had been none of ‘this occult nonsense’ to
sidetrack the investigation from diligent police work. Maryam had
smiled and poured the inspector another glass of wine.
Her cases were in the car being driven by
Andy Scott. She hugged ‘Jones the Priest’ as he liked to call
himself and said goodbye. He was flying to Rome later that evening.
He wished her well and smiled, but avoided looking directly at her.
He knew that she saw the pain, the doubt, and it had begun to
distance them from each other. She hoped that by the time they met
again that pain would be healed. She turned and gave Father Jacob,
who was staying on as the new parish priest, a hug. She then went
up into the Church to say her goodbyes there.
In front of the altar of Mary, she prayed
for Wyn, that he would not lose his vocation. She prayed that
Pargiter and whatever force had worked through him, had failed in
his attempt to derail him. She prayed that she and Fred would
continue to be on good terms and that Father Edwards would end his
life peacefully in the retirement home that he’d elected to move
to. She prayed for Iqbal, hoping that his career would not take too
harsh a toll upon his spirit and prayed for comfort and safety for
Gatto and Barham. She prayed that Andy Scott would come to terms
with the work of the Congregation and forgive himself for throwing
up in the back of the Church. She prayed that Pargiter would find
peace and the world would be free of his evil.
When all her prayers were said, Maryam lit
three votive candles and placed them side by side, her voice
speaking so softly no one would hear it even if they were standing
next to her.
‘I give this light to you, Jason, in honour
of your spirit. This one I give to your mother, who gave you life.
This one I give to your father, wherever he may be. May you all
three find each other one day and may you all find rest. Blessed
Be.’
As she left the Church, the scent of tea
roses went with her.
Author’s Note:
No one should expect to recognise anyone, or
anything, in this tale. Writers are liars who get paid for their
time. The world in this story does not exist, it just happens to
almost mirror the one we live in. No one should expect to recognise
either the Metropolitan Police, or the Roman Catholic Church from
the above words. Whilst the Church is real, the Office of the
Congregation of the Arcane is completely fictional and is not based
on any existing, or historic office within any actual religion.
Demons do not infect people in the real world, only in this fake
one. Peckham does have gangs, and Churches, and Mosques, and none
of them are in this work of fiction. The real world is but a
template for my pretend one: a world two shades different from the
real one. In those shades you will find my characters and their
stories.
If you have enjoyed these stories, please
tell your friends. Word of mouth is life blood for books, and
writers. You can also contact me directly at the website listed
above. Reviews are also gratefully received, and if you want to
help Maryam Michael get to her other adventures, then a good review
would help her crawl to the top of my ‘to do’ pile.
The Office of the Arcane thanks you for your
time.
Also
available by Morgan Gallagher
Changeling
A young woman vanished from the streets, a
life destroyed, her humanity a battle ground.