come into this room and bring me your thoughts. When you come in here, you bring only the truth.’
The monk fell to his knees.
‘Forgive me, Father Abbot,’ he pleaded. ‘I have failed you.’
The Abbot looked down at him in disgust. Brother Gruber was the man who had thrown Brother Samuel into the cell from which he had subsequently escaped. It was Gruber’s fault the Sacrament had been compromised.
‘You have failed us all,’ the Abbot said.
He turned and gazed once more upon the secret of their order. He could almost feel the eyes of the world turning towards the Citadel, burning through the rock like X-rays in an unquenchable search for what lay within. He was tired from the long night’s wait, and irritable with it, and the cuts ached beneath his cassock. He’d begun to notice that, even though his ceremonial wounds healed as quickly as they always had, they pained him for longer and longer each time. Age was creeping up on him — slowly maybe, but gaining ground.
He didn’t want to be angry with the cowering monk. He just wanted this situation to pass and the fickle gaze of the world to move on to something else. The Citadel had to weather the siege, as it always had.
‘Stand up,’ he said gently.
Gruber obeyed, his eyes still lowered so he didn’t see the Abbot nod to the monk standing behind him, or the man remove his Crux and pull the top away to reveal the bright blade of the ceremonial dagger sheathed within.
‘Look at me,’ the Abbot said.
As Gruber raised his head to meet the Abbot’s gaze the monk slashed quickly across his exposed neck.
‘Knowledge is everything,’ the Abbot said, stepping back to avoid the fountain of arterial blood pumping from Gruber’s neck.
He watched the look of surprise on Gruber’s face turn to confusion as his hand fluttered up to the neat line across his throat. Saw him sink back to his knees as the life flooded out of him and into the channels in the floor.
‘Find out exactly what has happened to the body,’ the Abbot said. ‘Contact someone in the city council, or the police division, someone who has access to the information we require and is prepared to share it with us. We need to know what conclusions are being drawn about Brother Samuel’s death. We need to know where the events of this morning may be leading. And above all we need to get Brother Samuel’s body back.’
The monk stared down at Gruber, twitching feebly on the floor of the chapel, the rhythmic spurts from his neck weakening with every beat of his dying heart.
‘Of course, Brother Abbot,’ the short monk said. ‘Athanasius has already begun to deal with press enquiries through his outside intermediary. And I believe — I mean, I
The Abbot felt the muscles tighten in his jaw as he sensed the eyes of the world upon him once again.
‘Keep me informed,’ he said. ‘And send Athanasius to me.’
The monk nodded. ‘Of course, Brother Abbot,’ he said. ‘I will pass word that you wish to see him in your chambers.’
‘No.’ The Abbot stepped over to the altar and wrenched the blood vine out at the root. ‘Not there.’
He glanced up at the Sacrament. His chamberlain was not a Sanctus so did not know its identity, but if he was going to be effective in containing the current situation he needed to be more aware of what they were dealing with.
‘Get him to meet me in the great library.’ He moved towards the exit, dropping the vine on Brother Gruber’s corpse as he stepped over it. ‘He will find me in the forbidden vault.’
He grabbed a wooden stake set into the door and heaved against it. The rumble of stone over stone echoed through the chapel as the cool sweet air of the antechamber spilled through the opening. The Abbot looked back to where Gruber lay, his face pallid against a pool of blood in which the reflected candles danced.
‘And get rid of that,’ he said.
Then he turned and walked away.
Chapter 18
The city coroner’s office was housed in the cellars of a stone building which had, at various periods in its history, been a gunpowder store, an ice house, a fish locker, a meat store and briefly, for a short time in the sixteenth century, a prison. Its robust security and subterranean coolness were perfect for the new department of pathology the city council decided to create at the tail end of the 1950s. Here in these retro-fitted, vaulted cellars, on the middle of three old-style ceramic post-mortem tables, the broken body of Brother Samuel now lay, starkly illuminated and under the scrutiny of two men.
The first was Dr Bartholomew Reis, the attendant pathologist, the white lab coat of his profession worn loose over the black clothes of his social tribe. He had arrived from England four years previously on an international police exchange programme, his Turkish father and dual nationality easing the paperwork. He was supposed to stay for six months, but had never quite managed to leave. His long hair was also black, thanks more to chemistry than nature, and hung on either side of his thin, pale face like a pair of partly opened curtains. Despite his sombre appearance, however, Reis was renowned throughout every division of the Ruin police force as being the most cheerful pathologist anyone had ever met. As he often said, he was thirty-two, earning good money, and while most Goths only dreamed of making a living amongst the dead, he was actually doing it.
The second man appeared much less at ease. He stood slightly behind Reis, chewing on a fruit-and-nut breakfast bar he’d found in his pocket. He was taller than Reis but looked crumpled somehow, his summer-weight grey suit hanging loosely from shoulders that drooped under the weight of nearly twenty years’ service. His thick, dark hair, shot through with silver, was pushed back from an intelligent face that managed to appear both amused and sad, a pair of half-moon tortoiseshell glasses halfway down his long, hawkish nose, completing the image of a man who looked more like a tired history professor than a Homicide detective.
Inspector Davud Arkadian was something of an oddity within the Ruin police force. His undoubted abilities should easily have raised him at this advanced stage of his career to the rank of chief inspector or beyond. Instead he’d spent the larger part of his life as a police officer watching a steady procession of lesser men get promoted above him, while he remained lumped in with the general raft of anonymous career detectives marking the days until their pensions kicked in. Arkadian was much better than that, but he’d made a choice early in his career that had cast a very long shadow over the rest of it.
What he’d done was meet a woman, fall in love and then marry her.
Being a happily married detective was rare enough, but Arkadian had met his wife while working vice as a sub-inspector. When he met his bride-to-be she was a prostitute preparing to testify against the men who had trafficked her from what was then the Eastern Bloc, then enslaved her. The first time he saw her he thought she was the bravest, the most beautiful and most scared person he’d ever met. He was detailed to look after her until the case came to trial. He often joked that he should bill for all the overtime because, twelve years later, he was still doing it. In that time he’d helped her kick the drugs they’d hooked her on, paid for her to go back to school to gain her teacher’s diploma, and restored her to the life she should have been leading in the first place. In his heart he knew it was the best thing he’d ever done, but his head also knew the price that came with it. High-ranking police officers couldn’t be married to ex-prostitutes, no matter how reformed they were. So he remained a mid-level inspector, where the public scrutiny was less, occasionally picking up a case worthy of his abilities, but often catching the tricky ones no one more senior wanted to touch.
He looked down now at the monk’s crumpled form, the lenses in his glasses magnifying his warm brown eyes as he assessed the details of the corpse. The forensics team had swept the body for trace evidence but had left it clothed. The rough green habit was dark with cold coagulated blood. The arms that had stretched out for so long making the sign of the cross were now arranged by his sides, the double loop of rope around his right wrist coiled into a neat pile by his ravaged hand. Arkadian took in the grisly scene and frowned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like autopsies — he’d certainly been to enough of them; he just wasn’t sure why he had been specifically asked to attend this one.
Reis tucked his lank black hair into a surgical cap, logged on to the computer on the mobile stand by his side
