The exit door was just beyond.
No doorman.
She stood in the queue, her heart pounding.
No one watching the door.
She never saw the woman with the child beckon a member of staff to her.
Never saw her pointing at Shanine.
Two to go, then she was at the check-out.
Shanine turned, trying to look unconcerned, despite the fact that she felt her heart was about to burst through her ribs.
She saw the uniformed member of staff walking down the aisle, gaze fixed on her.
That’s it.
Shanine dropped the basket, leaped to one side and hurdled the chain next to the other till, dashing for the door.
She heard shouts behind her.
Shanine crashed into the door, hurled it open and dashed out into the street, glancing behind her.
She saw two members of staff emerge seconds behind her. One of them shouted something which she didn’t hear.
Shanine turned the first corner and ran as fast as she could.
When she finally looked back there was no one following.
She kept running.
Twenty-eight
The steps leading down to the crypt were narrow, the stonework shiny with hundreds of years of wear.
Cath wondered how many feet had traversed these steps over the centuries.
The staircase wound down in a tight circular shape, the fusty odour which she’d detected when Patterson first opened the door now becoming more overpowering the deeper they went. Exactly how far beneath the ground they were she had no idea but she was aware of a growing chill too. Even the walls were icy to the touch, the very stone itself cold beneath her fingertips.
‘How did they ever get the coffins down here?’ she asked, her voice echoing slightly in the subterranean stairwell.
Patterson didn’t answer, he merely walked a few feet ahead of her, the powerful beam of his torch cutting a swathe through the blackness.
Cath slipped on one of the stairs.
‘Shit,’ she hissed.
Patterson looked round at her.
‘Sorry,’ she said, quickly.
The priest smiled.
‘Watch your step’ he said, grinning. ‘You could break your ankle down here.’
They continued to descend.
‘Who uses this place now?’ Cath wanted to know.
‘No one. The last body laid to rest here was in the 1920s,’ he told her. ‘I
think most people tend to see crypts and tombs as archaic, something belonging in horror films. Besides, even in the old days they were the preserve of the wealthy.’
‘What was wrong with burial?’ Cath asked, her breath clouding before her.
‘Families used to remain together even in death. A family vault or crypt was quite a status symbol.’
‘The family that plays together decays together’ Cath murmured.
‘You could say that’ Patterson chuckled.
‘Who did this crypt belong to?’
‘The Parslow family. It was built in the late eighteenth century. The family owned the land on which the church was built. Before it was a cemetery it was private land, they were a rich family. The crypt used to be above ground.’
‘Why move it?’
‘They wanted it beneath the church. Perhaps they thought it would bring them closer to God.’
Cath sucked in a deep breath, the smell of damp strong in her nostrils. She could see motes of dust turning lazily in the bright beam of Patterson’s torch. The steps were getting smaller, levelling out.
‘Look, Reverend, this is fascinating stuff but what’s it got to do with the desecrations?’ Cath asked, almost stumbling the last couple of steps.
Patterson shone the light at the far wall.
‘Jesus Christ’ Cath whispered, transfixed.
‘I don’t think Christ had anything to do with this, Miss Reed’ Patterson commented, playing the torch beam around the crypt.
It was large, fully twenty feet from end to end and side to side, the sarcophagi piled on top of each other, reaching to a height of almost fifteen feet, close to the damp ceiling of the crypt.
On the far wall an enormous pentagram had been drawn.
It looked as if it had been hacked into the stone itself with a chisel.
There were figures too.
Cath moved closer, gazing at the crudely painted outlines.
On either side of the pentagram they stood like sentinels: one of a man sporting a huge, erect penis, the woman adorned with bulbous, thick-nippled breasts.
Cath took a couple of pictures, the flash from the camera bathing the crypt in cold white light each time she pressed the button.
‘When did you find this?’
‘About two weeks ago,’ Patterson informed her. ‘I arrived at the church one morning and found that someone had broken in. I checked to see if anything had been stolen inside and noticed that the crypt door had been forced. I came down and found this.’
Again the flash of cold light. ‘Did you show the police?’
‘They said it was vandals.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘I don’t know what to think, Miss Reed.’
Cath took a step closer to the wall, closer to the obscene figures and the massive pentagram, her eyes fixed on something else scrawled on the cold stone. Words. Symbols.
She could feel the skin prickling on the back of her neck.
Patterson kept the torch beam steady on the meaningless scribble.
‘It took me a while to work it out’ he said, softly. Cath looked at him, seeking an answer. ‘It’s the Lord’s Prayer written backwards.’
Twenty-nine
‘So who the fuck is he?’ demanded Talbot, his eyes never leaving the front entrance of the shop.
‘No one knows,’ Rafferty replied, his own gaze also directed at the building.
‘What about the girl, do we know her name?’ the DI persisted.
‘Emma Jackson. She works in there.’
‘Who saw it?’
‘One of the customers,’ Rafferty told his superior. ‘She’d just opened up,
about an hour ago now. This geezer walks in, pulls a knife out of his pocket, tells the customer to fuck off, then went for the girl. As far as we can tell she’s not hurt.’
‘Not yet,’ murmured Talbot.
The Ann Summers shop in Wardour Street looked deserted, apart from the lifeless shapes of the models standing in the window. They seemed to stare back at Talbot.
What had those blank eyes seen? he wondered.
