“I learned of some questionable bills. That's how my suspicions were first fueled. These led to even more questionable donations, death gifts, actually. As it turns out, Coibby, O'Donahue, Burton, all of them have left funds with St. Albans through roundabout means, and it smacks as suspicious as bloody… as can be, you see.”
“How long have you known of this?”
“I only just uncovered the evidence. I was here writing a letter to Sharpe on the matter. Look, look for yourself.”
She crouched forward and turned the paper he had been writing on, and yes, in black and white, he had been asking Sharpe to look into his findings, to determine what connection Strand might have with the murders. “I tell you I am now frightened to be alone around the man. But I did not link the problem at first with murder, of course, undl I telephoned the bank. He's been forging my name to accommodate himself in whatever manner he sees fit. He made a major purchase from an antique store.”
“What sort of purchase?”
“An altar of some sort, an altar I have not seen.”
“Are you certain of this?”
“I inquired. The storeman I spoke to over the phone thought me mad. Said I had paid for it with my own personal check. Forged, you see.”
“His own personal altar?”
“I've not seen or located it. I have no idea where it stands. But this and my curiosity about what he does with his evenings… Well, I'd often wondered over that… and so last night I followed him down to the bazaar near old Crown's End pub on Oxford Street, and there I lost him. You know how crowded Oxford is always with tourists, all the quaint shops there. He disappeared into thin air before me, somehow into the bowels of the underworld there.”
“Underworld? What underworld?”
“There's said to be a series of catacombs and vaults, old cellars left over from Roman times down there below the bazaar. No one goes there of course, rat-infested, perhaps a few homeless living down there, but Martin somehow disappeared there.”
“Shall we go have a look?” she asked.
“By all means, but shouldn't we call for what is it? Backup? As they say in police parlance?”
“If we find something, we'll call for backup. Come on. Lead me to where he disappeared.”
“First, I want to settie your mind about St. Albans.”
She looked queerly back at him.
“Don't deny it. I know you've come to suspect me in all this hideous affair. Rampant suspicion. Isn't it all part and parcel of what you do for a living, my dear?” She sighed heavily, nodding. “Yes, I'm guilty.”
He took her gently by the arm. “Now come along to our dungeons here in the cathedral, so you will put your mind at ease about Father Luc Sante.”
At midday, Richard Sharpe pulled up to the York Hotel in search of Jessica, time seeping away from him like water through a sieve. He'd been unable all morning to locate her to even inquire if she would consider wearing a wire. He inquired with the crime lab, Schuller and Raehael. No one had seen her this morning.
She had left word with no one.
He then tried telephoning her at her room, but he'd been unable to reach her at the York, either.
He had a mad notion she might actually be in her room, sound asleep with earplugs in her ears, or in the shower when the phone had continued to blare. He kept telling himself that she could not be so foolish as to go into Luc Sante's lair again, alone.
He banged uselessly on the door even as he listened for the shower within, but no report of any noise whatsoever on the interior returned to him. Finally, he went back downstairs and demanded a key, flashing his badge, fearful she might be incapacitated inside her hotel room.
When he and the chief of hotel security, a friend of longstanding, entered the room, they found it immaculate, the bed even neatly arranged, he supposed so that the maids needn't work so hard where she might be concerned.
Richard searched the premises for any clue, any sign of where she might have gotten off to when his eyes fell on Luc Sante's book on the nightstand. “Can we trace her last call from here, time and destination?” he asked the security head. “Absolutely. I'll just have to make a call,” Harlan Nelson replied.
The wait felt longer than it was, Sharpe nervously pacing the empty room. Finally, Nelson read the phone number, saying, “The call was put in at 10:40 p.m.”
“That's the Yard, CID, no help.”
“Anything else I can do for you, Richard?”
“No, Harlan, but thank you. Will you lock up here? I must hurry.”
“Certainly, Richard, and my best to your girls.”
But Sharpe had disappeared through the doorway. In the lobby, he ran into Erin Culbertson who slowed him, saying, “Aren't you spending a lot of dme here these days!”
“Out of my way, Erin.”
“Cheeky of you, Richard, not returning my calls!” she called out after him. She then located her assistant who drove the van with all the equipment, and they tried to follow Richard Sharpe through the noonday traffic.
Driving as fast as he dared, Richard imagined all sorts of horrors for Jessica. He suspected that she had indeed gone back to St. Albans, knowing what she now knew, in an attempt to confront Luc Sante with the facts.
Sharpe feared such an act both brash and deadly. He rushed toward St. Albans, but he found himself hopelessly snarled in traffic, some accident ahead. He radioed for Copperwaite to join him at St. Albans, to stake the place out as Stuart had suggested, explaining that Jessica Coran had already returned there before he could get to her to discuss the wire device. “Can you meet me there?”
“Where are you now?” asked Copperwaite. “In traffic at a streetlight. Some accident has gridlocked me in. I'm abandoning the car for a few blocks' walk, and from there I'll catch a cab.”
“See you a block south of St. Albans, then? On Exeter, maybe?”
“Fine, yes, do that.” Richard was off and running.
Using a flashlight, Luc Sante led Jessica to and through. “All the known secret chambers of the cathedral,” as he put it, explaining that the crypt they stood in, at the very bottom-bottom of the church had, in the Middle Ages, become the burial crypt of the early priests who had lived their lives behind the walls of St. Albans.
Her penlight in hand, Jessica felt the breathing, staring walls closing in on her. They'd left the warmth and sweet-smelling incense of rosewood in the cathedral, left its familiar corridors. This place formed a dungeon mired in dme, sodden with dampness. It recalled the mine shaft she and Richard and Tatham had traversed.
“You have a cemetery below the church. How… interesting,” she managed. “I'm something of a cemetery enthusiast, and I've seen crypts and cemeteries in every place that I've ever visited, but nothing like this.” The room opened on a secret chamber where headstones lay in rows on the dirt floor; beneath each a former priest lay at eternal rest.
“In ancient times, it was thought the only way the graves of the holy fathers would remain undisturbed,” explained Luc Sante.
“They were robbed in those days by grave robbers, body snatchers, I know,” she said.
“Actually, the holy men had their bodies hacked up and pieces sold to the superstitious who-”
“My God, why?”
“Oh, but a holy man's finger or even more so his penis could bring joyful bounty to a family who blessed it each night!” Luc Sante laughed. “Human idiocy, but there you have it. Imagine how much people paid out in funds for the purported bones of Christ over the years. His body has been sold over and over for countless generations like some of your swampland in Florida.” Again, his laugh bounced about the silent sepulcher. He then pointed to the slabs with inscriptions. “My predecessors. Their remains still considered as holy as ever.”
Luc Sante next opened another room, using a huge jailhouse key on a large ring, and there he displayed a small crypt. Jessica saw the crypt here as an ancient, sealed stone coffin, like something out of a Robert Bloch gothic novel, where a timeless vampire might reside within.
Here, too, stood walls lined with torches that burned centuries before, now sitting silent under Luc Sante's modem, battery powered, handheld torch, the flashlight sluicing through cobwebs, creating a patina of flying dust
