The Gardens of the Dead

For
The Passage

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For endless
support, patience and guidance, I warmly thank: Ursula Mackenzie, Joanne
Dickinson, Araminta Whitley, Pamela Dorman, Beena Kalmani, Austin Donohoe, Victoria
Walker, Catherine Browne, Stephen Guise, Sr Jean-Baptiste Koetschet OSB, Fr
David Middleton OSA. As ever, I remain gratefully indebted to the communities
at Bec.

One of the principal characters is concerned with how evil might be
undone. The seed for this question came from a talk given by Metropolitan
Anthony of Sourozh.

Finally, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Anne and our three children.
They have helped me at every turn, sharing the peculiar weight of a second
novel’s making.

NOTE

As I hope the
Bunyan undertones make clear, much of the landscape in this book is imaginary
or serves a symbolic purpose. I ask pardon from readers who note, for example,
that there are no ‘Four Lodges’ at Hornchurch Marshes. The Gilbertines were an
English religious order that did not survive the reformation. References in the
text to ‘The Rule’ are to that of St Benedict.

Sleep is well for dreamless head,

At no breath astonishèd,

From the Gardens of the Dead.

Walter de la Mare

 ‘Dust to Dust’

PREAMBLE

Elizabeth Glendinning QC
walked purposefully beside Regent’s Canal in Mile End Park towards a
trestle-table covered with junk from the houses of the dead. Behind it, his jaw
working as if he’d tasted ash, sat Graham Riley, lolling in a camp-chair. To
her right, sausages and onions sizzled on a hotplate; steam rose from an urn;
clothing hung jammed on racks; bits of houses were laid on a blanket by a sign
that read Architectural Reclamation’; tools from yesteryear, rusted, robust and
manly, stood propped against a dinted van. Elizabeth passed them all, not quite
looking, keeping her eye rather on the calm of the waterway to her left, and
away from Graham Riley.

Despite
years of handling tension, Elizabeth found the strain this morning unbearable:
she had devised two grand schemes to bring this man from the camp-chair to the courtroom,
that he might answer to his many victims. The first of these, after months of
preparation, was about to be fulfilled.

Riley
looked up, across the autumn fair, in utter disbelief.

Elizabeth
was dressed in courtly black. She wore no make-up. Her hair had been precisely
cut at quite fantastic expense. Through anxiety, her skin was pale and her lips
peculiarly bloodless.

Riley’s
jaw was still. He looked like a wasted, frightened boy surrounded by broken
toys. But Elizabeth had travelled a long way beyond pity; she’d climbed to the
mysterious and airless place where justice and mercy met. Holding her breath,
at this the culmination of so much effort and sacrifice, she picked up a set of
Edwardian spoons.

Feeling a sudden giddiness
and a race of contractions in the heart, Elizabeth stumbled back the way she’d
come, beside the smooth, green canal. She slumped in the driver’s seat of her
lemon-yellow VW Beetle, stunned at her carelessness: she’d mastered the facts,
but had failed to consult the law On the passenger seat was the orange flyer
that had led her to Riley’s stall. She crumpled it with one shaking hand and
forced the ball into an ashtray. She began to sweat and her breath fell short.
Feeling a strange sense of moment — as when a train, out of view, hums on the
lines — she unhooked her mobile phone off the dashboard and called Inspector
Cartwright, being careful to leave only a message. She then rang Mrs Dixon. A
rush of wind seemed to come, and Elizabeth dropped the phone mid-sentence. In
the sluggish seconds left to her, Elizabeth found a last, winning smile.

Yes,
she was inconsolable. She would never behold Charles, her husband, again… he
was at Smithfield Market, fretting over the morrow; or Nicholas, her unwary
son.., he was probably on the Barrier Reef, among the brightly coloured fish;
or George, her friend and accomplice, who was waiting beneath a fire escape.
And, yes, in terms of these grand designs of hers, death had come too soon. It
was, as ever, the spoiler. But Elizabeth could laugh, and did. She’d devised
contingency arrangements for precisely these circumstances. And there was one
scheme left untried — the most far-reaching, and the most grave.

Her
heart became wonderfully still.

All at
once Elizabeth felt cold. It seemed that she was high above the clouds, coming
down to earth at last. As she tumbled in the sunlight, she thought: Now is the
hour of the unsuspecting friend, of the puzzled monk to whom I gave the key.

PART ONE

the story of a key

1

Anselm returned to
Larkwood, weaving through the apple trees in Saint Leonard’s Field. The scooter
skipped over tufts of grass, and Anselm bent his head, thinking of Steve
McQueen at the end of
The Great Escape.
He could see the fence ahead. In
a vivid reverie he saw himself soaring over the barbed wire, away from fiends
who would cart him off to the cooler.

Whistling
to himself, Anselm pushed the bike into the old woodshed, where he met Brother
Louis, the choirmaster.

‘Hullo,’
said Anselm. ‘How was it?’

Appalling.’
He’d been on a ten-day residential counselling course. ‘I had to talk about
myself Eye-to-eye stuff.’

‘Oh
hell.’

Louis
sat on a stump. He was tall and seemed to fold himself up. His eyebrows were
copper and straight, as if they’d been electrified. Anselm rolled two
cigarettes, obedient to a wink.

‘From
the global perspective,’ said Louis, pensively ‘I found some relief’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.
My parents aren’t to blame after all.’ He slowly pushed out the blue smoke. ‘I
am.’

‘Don’t
be deceived.’

Louis
tilted his head towards the scooter. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Buying
wood to bank the Lark.’

‘I hope
you’ve got a receipt.’

Anselm
had thrown it in the bin. ‘Why?’

‘Cyril’s
gone round the bend. It’s that time of the year, I’m afraid. He’s doing the
books and he can’t account for twenty-eight pence.’

As the
cellarer, Cyril was responsible for the financial affairs of the monastery; he
was the commercial brain behind various industries derived from apples and
plums. An amputee after an industrial accident sustained before joining
Larkwood, he had the appearance and character of a one-arm bandit chock-full of
fruit and numbers.

‘Speaking
of madness,’ resumed Louis, rummaging in a habit pocket, ‘the elderly Sylvester
put this in my pigeonhole.’

Anselm
unfolded the slip of paper: ‘Elizabeth called. Roddy is dead.’

Roderick
Kemble QC, Anselm’s old head of chambers, a friend and guide from those
half-forgotten days. ‘Oh, God.’

He ran
to reception, where Sylvester struggled with buttons to get an outside line.
Anselm hovered, itching to grab both the receiver and Sylvester’s larynx — it
was a common problem at Larkwood — but shortly he made the call and a growing
suspicion was confirmed. ‘I am still here,’ said Roddy ‘but Elizabeth is not.’

Anselm
stepped into the sunlight. He looked towards Saint Leonard’s Field as if he’d
been warned; and he thought of the key.

Anselm made for a quiet
place beside the river — the place he’d brought Elizabeth when she’d turned up,
all of a sudden, three weeks ago. A narrow flowerbed ran along a wall to an
arch. Passing through, he turned right and sat on a bench of dressed stone —
remnants of the medieval abbey, turned up by one of the tractors. The Lark
splashed in front between the shoring of black timbers. Elizabeth had sat
beside him. ‘I need your help,’ she’d said, quietly.

Thinking
of that conversation now, Anselm recalled an earlier impromptu meeting ten
years earlier — their last, in fact, before he’d left the Bar. Within a month
he’d be at Larkwood. He’d been at home in Finsbury Park listening to Bix
Beiderbecke knock out ‘Ostrich Walk’ when the doorbell rang (Anselm was a fiend
for all jazz prior to an indefinable but tragic moment some time in the 1950s).
It was Elizabeth, clutching a box of Milk Tray.

‘I don’t
expect you’ll taste such delights in a monastery,’ she said. They sat in Anselm’s
small garden eating chocolates, and reminiscing, while Bix moved on to ‘Goose
Pimples’. They talked of the job and its strange compromise.

‘We always
stand on an island,’ she said, ‘the cold place of not knowing, and not being
able to care.’ Her hair fell forward: it was straight and black and cleanly
cut, like a queen’s in the days of pharaoh. A silver streak marbled one side.
It had appeared quite recently almost overnight. ‘We never know if they’re
guilty, and we can’t care if they’re innocent. The terms are, of course,
interchangeable. And yet, we
do
care; more than most. But we’re marooned
from our conscience.’ She looked at her hands, checking the palms. ‘I’m sure
there’s a trial out there for each of us, which could slip between the not
knowing and the not caring and pull us off that beach.’

Anselm
reached for the praline and Elizabeth smiled thinly.

Then
and now Anselm was struck by her forcefulness, for Elizabeth, like many
prosecutors, had been inclined to perceive guilt in anyone who’d been charged.
It was a sort of infection, caught through excessive exposure to flimsy
defences. ‘You’re lucky to be called away from it all,’ she said, adding
cheekily ‘Did you hear a voice?’

A quiet
one,’ replied Anselm. ‘I’ve had to learn how to listen.’

Her
question had been a joke, but she’d become serious. ‘How?’

‘It
sounds through your desires.’

Elizabeth
thought for a while, as though examining the pointing on the yard wall. ‘You
listen by heeding what you want to do?’

Tentatively
Anselm explained what he’d learned. ‘Yes. But it’s deeper than any desire. It
won’t let you go. And even then you need a guide who knows the ways of the
heart, in case you’re deceiving yourself.’

Elizabeth
seemed to snatch a thread. ‘Someone to help you understand a voice that won’t
be stilled.’ It was as if she’d decided to become a nun. She knew the score
already.

‘Exactly.’

‘And to
ignore it would bring a kind of death?’

Smiling,
Anselm studied the curtain of hair with its strands of silver. This was a
wind-up, after all. She must have been reading a manual on the spiritual life.

Elizabeth
went on, ‘So you don’t have a choice?’

‘Not
really’ This was no prank. Anselm wanted to revive the cheekiness that had
fled. ‘I get the impression God isn’t that keen on dialogue. It comes with the
territory of always knowing what’s for the best.’

She
took the praline from the second layer. ‘Are they a strict lot, these monks?’