looted.’
‘Then he’d best give me a call. On my mobile number.’
‘It isn’t evidence?’
‘It isn’t the murder weapon, if that’s what you mean. I’d be as keen as anyone to see as much of what was done here undone as can be. My keeping that piece of wood won’t bring back the women killed here. Have your priest give me a call.’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘Good ones on the brass of the case. And I think we both know whose they are. We don’t need that stick.’
‘Won’t people see it’s missing?’
‘It won’t be missing. I’ll replace it myself with one similar from the dead wood in the park over the way.’ He was almost whispering. ‘Materially, it doesn’t matter to this investigation. Whatever properties you think it possesses, it isn’t bringing those poor lasses back.’
Suzanne nodded. He was right about that. ‘If you release it into my charge, I’ll take it to the priest myself, Bernard,’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘At some stage, you are going to need to make a statement. I’m going to trust you to come back and see me over the next few days to do that.’
She nodded again.
‘Call yourself a taxi. I’ll meet you outside the front in five minutes. Goodbye, Suzanne. And God go with you.’
She risked her first real look at Spalding’s house. The windows stared back blackly at her. She was fearful of the face that might be gazing out from behind the glass. But he wasn’t there. The house was empty. She had no sense of him at all. He was elsewhere, in one of his other places. He was deliberately elusive, as Jane had remarked of him. And Harry Spalding must have known many places on the travels of his long and awful life, the affliction of him spreading like disease.
She drove all night to get to Northumberland, having taken a taxi from Southport to Liverpool Airport to hire a car. She had to go south to go north-east. But she thought it was worth it as she pulled up at 5 a.m. outside Delaunay’s Gothic keep and saw him waiting there for her amid a deputation of grim and eminent-looking Catholic clergy. She wondered for how long they had maintained their vigil. And she saw that it did not matter to them in their relief and joy when she took the holy relic from its bed of screwed-up newspaper pages in the boot of her rental car.
She had a mind to turn round immediately and press on. But Delaunay leaned into the open driver’s window and the look of concern on his face persuaded her that this was foolish. The window was open because she had nearly nodded off at the wheel once already. She had been awake too long. She had never in her life needed greater alertness, sharper clarity of thought and instinct for danger. She had time. She had done the calculation. At ten to twelve knots, it would be another couple of days before the
Delaunay was waiting for her at the door.
‘Re-consecrate what I gave you, Monsignor.’
‘It’s done,’ he said, simply.
She drove to Dover in five hours, crashing every speed camera on the route. She prayed she would not be stopped for speeding and she wasn’t. Others were praying on her behalf, she knew. And she thought she might need every intercession made for her, every flicker of flaming brightness from every candle lit, if she was going to succeed. The weather was good and the traffic, as far as the London orbital at least, was light. She was forced to slow down in Kent. But she made the 11 a.m. ferry with five minutes to spare. And this time she did not need to slow for directions. She knew where she was going. She did not turn on the radio, of course. But one thing was the same. The sky grew sullen and bruised and, still a dozen miles from her destination, the rain began to steeple down from the clouds.
She drove over Duval’s fields to his barn along the track beside his ditch, hoping that the rain was a recent thing and that her wheels would not be claimed by a quagmire of French mud. It was muddy, but the ground had been cindered. She could hear the crunch and squeal of the cinders wedging in the tread of her tyres. The barn grew in her windscreen from a monument incongruous and remote to one ever closer and more disturbing. She felt the tiny hairs prick on the backs of her hands with the sheer, out-of-kilter strangeness of it. All her instinct, just as on the first occasion, was to flee this odd and morbid place. But she could not.
She slammed on her brakes with a final, cindery crunch and sat in the silence before her destination. Rain pattered on the car roof. The stopped engine ticked, cooling. And she saw that the high door of the barn was slightly ajar. It opened on a void of pure blackness. And as she got out of the car she felt her legs buckle and her resolve weaken, engulfed by the pure terror flooding through her. She watched the rain dance on summer puddles. She felt drops of it plaster her hair to her head. And she was undone. And she thought then of Martin with his arm cleaved open in an underground carriage and she battled with her quavering will and she gathered her strength.
She took the spade she had borrowed from the seminary out of the car boot. She walked into the barn and heard a collusive whisper from the spectral army of coats that hung, shivering, under a draught that wasn’t there, over on the far wall. She heard a distinct and undeniable whistling. The tune was ‘Camptown Races’. And it was distorted and faint with some last, scornful vestige of remembered humanity. There was a bark of laughter, a short explosion of mirth. And there was accordion music, heard as if through a dim green sea, ‘Roses of Picardy’, the notes distorted, drowning on the air.
‘Fuck this,’ Suzanne said. ‘Fuck you all, you crew of fucking butchers. And fuck you in particular, Harry Spalding.’ And she gathered the spade in the grip of both hands and began to shovel away the beets at the base of the high pyramid of them. And all around her, they tumbled and they fell. Rolling down from the pinnacle, they ricocheted and bounced and ran. And she heard what she thought sounded like explosive gunfire, twice, in her ears and ignored it, teeth clenched with such ferocious resolve that she brought forth the blood from her own gums and swallowed it bitterly down.
She booted away beets from the centre of the flattened pyramid and revealed the earth and began to dig. And only a foot beneath the surface, she encountered bone. It was a skull. It was long with bleak-shaped eye sockets and a narrow jaw and she knew it had been the head of a goat. And what she was looking for had been used, she thought, to kill the goat, skewering the brain of this animal sacrifice in some baleful ceremony from which the other remnants, revealing themselves now, included a burned Bible and a votive candle, a smashed statue of the Virgin and a chamber pot, amid the old encrusted filth of which had been placed a set of rosary beads. Shit had been daubed on the crucifix. Blasphemy was a puerile art. But it was the blade embedded in the skull of the goat, only, that concerned her. It was the tip of the ancient spear to which she had already recovered the shaft.
She thought she heard another noise outside. She disregarded it. It would wait. Outside would wait. There was business here. There was no more important business in the world. Knowing what it was, she felt reluctance to touch the spear tip with her hands. This was not squeamishness. Suzanne was not a squeamish woman. This was awe. She had been told the significance, symbolic and actual, too, of the glimmering, ancient shard of hammered and honed iron she retrieved from inside the skull of the goat and held between her own soiled fingertips. On her knees, she kissed the metal, as Delaunay had told her to. As Delaunay had told her to, she crossed herself with the metal in the grip of her right hand.
The assault of corruption hit her then. From the crates heaped high over against the wall of the barn, she could hear the fizz and burst of decay and smell the blister of erupting, rotten fruit. All around where she knelt, the beets steamed and flattened with decomposition, gaseous, foul, an affront to nature exposed finally to nature’s immutable laws. Suzanne coughed and retched and rose to her feet and looked over at the ragged army of Jericho Crew greatcoats and saw that they were becoming thin and threadbare, pale shrouds descending to dust as they should have done decades ago. She gave out a grunt of satisfaction. It was not triumph, though. Some sly instinct told her that pride in such a situation would be a dangerous, perhaps even deadly indulgence. Cradling what she had recovered, she made for the door.
Duval, the farmer who owned the land, was there outside, with his shotgun over his arm. He was waiting for her. Trespass on his domain was not a thing that went unnoticed. She knew that from her last visit here. But this
