She had clear, almost translucent skin stretched over fine bones. Her lips were parted, and small white teeth shone in the moist darkness of her mouth. He leaned close enough to feel her warm breath against his skin and noticed a faint crease of concentration running between her closed eyes. He had one himself, forged over years in the furnace of self-education, mostly in prison libraries.
Seeing her holdall, he picked it up and rummaged inside for the book she had been reading on the flight. He always liked to keep something. A sou-ve-nir. There was hardly anything in the bag so he found it immediately. But he also saw something that soured his good mood.
He removed the Gideon Bible, handling the tattered remains as tenderly as if it were an injured bird. The cover fell open and he felt fresh disgust when he saw all the scribble on the one page remaining. She had taken the Lord’s words in vain, destroyed them even, and in doing so had committed, in his eyes, the gravest of sins.
He looked down at her unconscious form. She no longer seemed pretty to him. All he wanted was to finish the job and leave.
Outside, the fire alarm cut out and the room fell silent. He would have to be quick if he wanted to use what confusion remained to aid his escape.
She had broken the spine of the Gideon Bible and now he would break hers. There was a certain Old Testament balance to this: an eye for an eye.
As he took hold of her head in his giant hands and tensed his shoulders ready to snap her neck, something chirruped in the silence of the room, the sound of a text message. He so wanted to hear the noise of her neck breaking, but instinct and experience told him to wait, and discipline made sure he complied. Pulling the phone from his pocket, he opened the message. It made his own frown line deepen. He read it twice then looked back down at her.
‘You like words,’ he whispered at her sleeping form. ‘Well, I have a good one for you. Re-prieve.’
67
Ruin
The old town had remained closed all morning while the earthquake damage had been cleared away from the streets. When they finally did open the portcullis gates, a little after two in the afternoon, there were thousands of people waiting to climb up to the public church at the top of the hill to give thanks for their safe deliverance. Dr Anata was one of them.
She jostled along with the flow of packed bodies, noticing how everything in the old town appeared remarkably untouched. Some of the pilgrims remarked on this apparent miracle, but Dr Anata knew better: it had more to do with geology than theology. Earthquakes were like waves and so looser ground amplified them, whereas the solid rock the old town was built on had damped them down, rendering them less effective. The earthquake had been less intense here, that was the only difference.
It took her nearly forty minutes to make it to the top of the hill and pass into the cool, monolithic interior of the public church. It was packed with the penitent and hummed with the combined sound and nervous energy of all the tourists and worshippers who had gathered to offer up prayers of forgiveness, thanks or contrition. Dr Anata weaved between them all, heading directly across the flagstoned floor to the confessional booths in the furthest corner of the church. Gabriel had offered to go, but with normality returning to the city, and too many people on the lookout for him, she had gone instead, thrilling at the opportunity to play a small part in something as momentous as this. Her entire life she had read about history; today she was actually making some.
She arrived at the confessional and took a seat on the end of a pew lined with subdued worshippers, all staring resolutely at the curtained booths. The walls behind them were painted with an elaborate and vividly imagined mediaeval fresco depicting the day of reckoning. Dr Anata wondered if they would let her jump the queue if they knew she was here to try to avert the very thing they were all staring at. She doubted it. People were funny about queues — even when the end of the world was at stake — so she settled down for a wait. It took a further twenty minutes before she made the short walk of shame and closed the curtain behind her.
Inside, it was cramped and smelled of incense and fear. She perched on a wooden ledge, bringing her face level with the grille.
‘Do you have something to confess?’ a muffled voice prompted.
‘I would like to pass a message to Brother Peacock.’ There was a brief pause, then whoever had been sitting there promptly got up and left without uttering another word.
Dr Anata listened to the sound of retreating footsteps melting into the general hubbub of the huge church. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but this sudden and silent departure certainly wasn’t it. She felt nervous in its wake. As an academic she was wholly unused to situations that placed her at risk and her mind was now in overdrive, imagining all sorts of scenarios involving security guards and brutal interrogation. Only the importance of the message she carried, and everything that hung on its safe delivery, prevented her from slipping away while she still had the chance. A moment later the hiss of the curtain on the other side of the grille told her it was already too late for escape. A different voice spoke, so close it made her jump.
‘I am the emissary of Brother Peacock,’ it said. ‘Do you have a message for him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell it to me and I will make sure he gets it — in confidence.’
Dr Anata pulled a sealed envelope from her pocket. ‘I have a letter for him.’
‘Then bow your head before God and pray that he receives it.’
She did as she was asked. A small section of panelling slid open to create a hatch between the two stalls. She reached down and passed the envelope through it. There was a slight tug as it was taken from her, then the hatch slid shut as quickly as it had opened.
‘When will Brother Peacock receive the message?’ she asked. But there was no answer. Whoever had taken the message had already gone.
68
The fourth floor of the Ruin police building was as busy and chaotic as Arkadian had ever seen it. Raised voices and ringing phones filled the open-plan office and the whole place smelled of stewed coffee and stress. The major problem was looting. In the wake of the earthquake the usual opportunists had stalked through the darkness, sifting through shops and businesses cracked open by the tremors. It was only in the cold light of day, when everyone else stopped rejoicing that they were still alive and turned their attention to more temporal matters, that they discovered they had been robbed. The moment the power had come back on, and the phones with them, the robbery section of the Robbery and Homicide Division had been inundated.
Arkadian sat at his desk in the corner, doing his best to shut out the noise. Today he was one of the few people dealing with a body and not a break-in. Since returning from the hospital and regaining access to the databases, he’d been trying to discover where the dead police officer had come from. He’d found no mention of a Nesim Senturk in the service records from the surrounding districts so had spread his search wider, taking in all departments, anywhere in the country. His computer terminal was now busily crunching through all the data, looking for the needle of one single name in a haystack made up of years of accumulated details.
In the meantime Arkadian had been doing what he could to check up on Liv. A phone call to Yun had confirmed that her flight had landed a few minutes ahead of schedule at 3.05 a.m. local time. Arkadian had then called the security police at Newark International Airport and, after explaining who he was and undergoing a lengthy security check that involved giving out more personal details than he usually gave his bank, they put him through to the main control centre. Here the duty manager confirmed that Liv Adamsen’s passport had been swiped through immigration eleven minutes after her flight landed and that CCTV showed her leaving the main terminal building a minute later and being picked up by a cop in a police cruiser; he even gave him the registration number. A further call to the New Jersey Police Department, and a slightly less stringent security check, and Arkadian had a name: Sergeant William Godlewski, currently off duty, though the desk sergeant promised he’d contact him and get him to
