Authors: Mark Roberts
‘Karen?’
‘David? You don’t sound too good.’
‘I’m OK. Listen, it’s probably a cinch to find . . .’ He explained the bare bones of what Flint had told him. ‘Can you find anything about this thing, this
A
, this Capaneusian Bible? Dig as deep as you can.’
‘I take it mum’s the word?’ said Karen.
‘Mum is indeed the word,’ said Rosen, as he turned on the ignition and shifted into gear.
O
n the platform, the station guard slammed shut the last open door of the train and raised his whistle to his mouth.
On the 17.15 train from London Charing Cross to Ramsgate, Carol Bellwood sat seven seats behind Father Sebastian. There was standing room only for the commuters and the journey promised to be
short of fresh air.
He was sitting next to the aisle, two seats away from the door. She’d picked a seat that gave her the best unobstructed view of her mark. A heavy inward surge of passengers at Chatham
Station, the next along, and a shuffling of bodies up the aisle would be enough to completely obstruct her view of him.
She stood up to gain a better view of the priest.
Just before the train doors closed at Chatham Station, she felt a tightening in her stomach, expecting him to rise and calmly get off at the last moment, leaving her behind. But he didn’t.
He remained where he was, and she was struck by his stillness in the milling of bodies around the doors. Even the woman sitting next to him, and the people opposite, seemed over-animated as they
sat staring at newspapers and into space.
A newspaper unfolded just in front of him. There was a photograph on the front page of the
Evening Standard
of the white tent around Julia Caton’s corpse and, next to this, a
picture of Julia from her wedding day. It was close to Sebastian, just diagonally across the aisle from him. Still, his head was set like stone.
At Gillingham, Bellwood’s adrenalin pumped. A handful of people left the train but many more boarded, forcing door-hangers further down the aisle and making the carriage uncomfortably
full.
In the jostling of bodies, a lone mother, tired and stressed to the point of tears, double buggy in tow with two crying children under the age of three, struggled to find a space between the
doors and the aisle. As the doors slid shut and the train pulled out of Gillingham, no one moved a muscle to help her.
Then Father Sebastian stood up. He was taller than he’d appeared at Charing Cross. He caught the woman’s attention and spoke to her, but it was clear she didn’t follow his
English. He spoke again. Bellwood struggled to hear but couldn’t make it out through the din of the moving train, but the woman’s expression shifted to one of understanding.
Father Sebastian reached out and, in a single motion, took the buggy from the woman, folded it and stored it in the coat rack above. He indicated the seat he’d occupied and with her
children in tow, she edged past the passengers to take it.
Flint half turned to smile down at the woman and Bellwood caught his profile. He would be handsome when he was an old man – his bone structure was good; his immense good looks were not the
fleeting gift of time.
The woman spoke to him and he listened. There was clearly a problem with the wriggling children in the space-to-adult ratio of the double-facing seats.
Flint made a suggestion, waited a moment and then leaned down to pick up the older of the two children, a boy of about two and a half years.
In his arms, the fractious child settled, smiled and raised a hand towards Flint’s face. Then, Flint turned slowly, slowly, his profile clear once more.
Bellwood felt her spine stiffen. The boy’s fingers were inside Flint’s mouth. The mother’s voice cut across the carriage as she ordered her child to remove them in a language
Bellwood didn’t understand.
Flint tugged the boy’s hand away as he turned his back on Bellwood. He replied to the mother in a calm voice, in her own language, telling her, Bellwood guessed, not to worry, children
will be children . . .
By Sittingbourne, the passengers thinned out, but Flint still stood, his body rocking slightly, his head now moving with the motion of a nursery rhyme or some song for bedtime. The boy laid his
head on Flint’s shoulder and by Sheerness-on-Sea was fast asleep.
At Faversham, Flint reclaimed a seat, with the sleeping child on his lap, and returned to the stillness of his former self, the complete, unassailable self-possession that was as remarkable as
it was enviable.
The automated voice and the electronic noticeboard told the passengers that Canterbury East was the next stop. Tenderly, Flint handed the child to his mother and made his way to the door.
Bellwood tried to imagine what it would be like to utterly dismiss the prospect of tenderness, intimacy and sex, as he had done by pledging himself to God and the Church.
She stood up and shuffled down the aisle, her magazine open.
Cosmopolitan
. ‘How to Have First-Time Sex Every Time.’
The train slowed.
He glanced back not at her but at the magazine, and she shut it fast, suddenly blushing to the roots of her hair, embarrassed by what she was apparently reading.
Handsome, calm, a natural with children. It was a waste of a man.
The train stopped but the doors remained closed. As he reached to press ‘open’, between his coat sleeve and the hem of his glove, she caught sight of a wound on his wrist. The white
scar looked like the result of a blow from a heavy blade, the edge of a machete perhaps. She looked up. He was gazing back at her. The doors opened.
‘After you?’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, and stepped off the train. Bodies flowed past on either side of her but he was not among them. She stopped.
She turned slightly and almost bumped into him as he came the other way. His hand grasped her shoulder and slid down a few inches. He said, ‘I beg your pardon.’
She nodded. And on he went.
She followed him. As he headed for the taxi rank outside the station, she waved as if saying goodbye to a friend still on board the train. When she waved, DS Corrigan, in the private hire car
he’d occupied at the head of the taxi rank since half past five, caught sight of Father Sebastian approaching his passenger door.
‘St Mark’s,’ said the priest.
‘Get in,’ Bellwood heard Corrigan reply.
Bellwood watched the car go and, reaching in her bag for a cigarette, remembered she’d quit many years ago.
She called Rosen. ‘He’s in the car with Corrigan.’
‘Any incident?’
‘None.’
‘Good job, Carol, well done.’
Bellwood didn’t agree with Rosen, but said nothing.
In the space of a single train journey from Charing Cross to Canterbury East, station by station, she had grown steadily and more deeply attracted to the man she’d been tailing. And, as
she made her way to the meeting point with Corrigan, who would drive her back to London once he’d dropped off Flint, she wished her mother had been there. She wished her mother had been there
to give her a damn good slap in the face.
A
t just after half past eight, Corrigan and Bellwood arrived back at the incident room. Feldman and Gold had already begun the eye-watering task of
viewing a combination of over twenty-four hours of footage from the British Library’s CCTV, both interior and exterior.
Rosen called them all together.
‘Let’s do it chronologically.’ He turned to Feldman. ‘Take it from the point where I passed over to you, Mike, in the reading room at the British Library.’
Feldman held his hands up. ‘He read, he got up and stretched his legs, he visited the toilet, he read . . .’
‘How long was he in the toilet?’
‘Half a minute to a minute. Time to pee and wash his hands. He went to the café and had lunch.’
‘Which was?’
‘Tap water and an apple. He went back and read. At four o’clock, he went to the John Ritblat Gallery and looked at the old manuscripts.’
‘Did he talk to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone sit with him in the reading room?’
‘Lots of people sat near and around him, coming and going, but no one engaged with him and he didn’t engage with any of the other readers. Then he made his way to the front
entrance.’
Gold picked up the baton.
‘Feldman joined me in the entrance and, separately, we followed him on the tube to Charing Cross. We waited on the concourse until you met up with him.’
‘He got the train to Canterbury East,’ said Bellwood. ‘He has a way with small children, he’s very good with little kids. He engaged with a mother struggling with her
little ones, but that was all.’
Corrigan continued, ‘I took him by car to St Mark’s. He went inside.’
‘Have you looked at the footage inside the Ritblat Gallery?’ asked Rosen.
‘No, not yet,’ Feldman replied.
‘Look at that footage next.’
Gold and Feldman exchanged glances.
‘Because I want to see how he is around the things of antiquity, the ancient and the sacred . . .’
‘Why?’ asked Bellwood.
‘Humour me. There’s background on this character Flint. He opted to leave a plum job in the Vatican to go and work in Kenya. Flint hits the outback at a time of a plague of demonic
possession, with people running around “possessed” by devils, but also, more to the point, lots of brutal murders. No one else on the team needs to know this, so keep it close, OK?
Flint the exorcist himself becomes “possessed”. He ends up getting lynched. Why? Did the saviour turned into the scourge? I spoke to a Kenyan police officer today, Sergeant Kimurer. He
said he’s talked to reliable eyewitnesses who saw Flint enter and leave a house. A mother and her child were butchered while Flint was inside that house. Kimurer said there were twelve
victims in total. The Catholic Church whisked Flint out of Kenya before you could say boohoo. If Kimurer’s right, Flint’s a serial killer. I found out only a few hours ago, just before
I met up with him at Charing Cross.’
The door to Baxter’s office opened and Baxter walked into the middle of the incident room.
‘OK, troops, that’ll do for now.’
‘David!’ called Baxter, disappearing back into his office. Rosen followed.
‘Shut the door.’
Rosen closed the door. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘Where did you disappear to mid-afternoon?’
‘Hospital appointment.’
‘What’s up with you?’
‘Plenty.’
‘What medical reason can you give for walking away on the day a body is discovered?’
‘I can’t. The appointment wasn’t mine. It was Sarah’s.’
‘Is it her nerves again?’
‘No, her nerves are fine; they have been for a long time. I think I’ve explained to you on more than one occasion, mental illness isn’t permanent.’
Rosen regretted having to mention Sarah’s name in Baxter’s presence, let alone discuss her former illness. It felt like an enforced act of betrayal.
‘What else did you do, when you weren’t otherwise occupied?’
‘I went to pursue a lead.’
‘Which was?’
‘At the British Library.’ Rosen considered telling Baxter about Father Sebastian and dismissed the notion in the same instant.
‘What was at the British Library that you had to deploy officers there?’ The colour purple shot up from Baxter’s throat. ‘And what’s with all this fucking off up
and down to Kent?’
‘Robert really has been doing a good job. He wasn’t in on the Kent loop.’
‘At least DC Harrison has the communication skills to inform his superior officers about what is going on, unlike you.’
‘Do you believe in God, Inspector Baxter? The devil?’
Baxter looked as if he’d just bitten into a shiny red apple that was rotten to the core.
‘The Herod murders could be – could be – copycat killings. Herod, it appears, is basing his MO on a thirteenth-century Florentine Satanist.’
‘Alessio Capaneus.’
‘Robert again,’ said Rosen.
‘Do you know what, David, I just wanted to hear it from your own mouth because I can’t believe the way you’ve wasted the time of officers on your team. I’ve heard enough
from you. I’m not even going to ask you any more. I can wait a couple of days, because on Tuesday morning you can explain it all in the initial peer review meeting, which will take place at
nine o’clock. Everyone who is or has been involved in this investigation on any level whatsoever has been invited and is strongly advised to attend. The guys from Islington can ask you where
and why because, frankly, I’m sick to death of trying to talk to you.’
Rosen closed Baxter’s door behind him and looked around the incident room.
Gold and Feldman stared at CCTV footage. Bellwood was on the phone.
Corrigan entered through the main door.
‘Peer review, Tuesday,’ said Rosen.
‘Crock of shit, Wednesday,’ said Corrigan.
T
he morning brought cold daylight and the arrival, at last, of Gwen Swift’s cold case file.
Baxter’s door was shut tight and there had been no sign of him all morning.
Flint’s water bottle had been sent by DHL to the DNA database and had been signed for at nine, with an urgent request to process the sample.
Bellwood watched Rosen as he took the cold case file from the clerk who delivered it to his desk.
‘Sorry it took so long,’ said the clerk. ‘It was misfiled under G and not S.’
The thinness of the brown card file told Rosen, at a glance, that the detectives investigating back in the early 1970s had laboured in a desert, chasing phantoms. How he sympathized as he opened
it.
Inside lay a deeper tale of frustration. There was no order. The last person to handle it must have thrown back the papers and pictures in anger or despair.
Rosen now sorted it. Three fruitless interviews with three schoolboys who had the misfortune of being short, thin and dark haired; a description in a witness statement given by a driver, of a
boy of this type, seen following – or maybe just walking behind – Gwen when she got off the bus.
The photographs of Gwen at the scene of the murder were black and white and grainy. It hadn’t been a ferocious attack. There was no blood evident and, had the attack not occurred on a
lonely footpath, she could have been sleeping. He lingered on her face, going back in his mind to the discovery of her mother’s body, and the picture of her in her shrine of a bedroom. Then
his thoughts turned to the children in the heart-shaped locket on the dressing table, the picture of a girl and a little boy.