He welcomed the first stone from James as it struck his temple. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t feel it. Nor did he feel the second from Luke, or the third cast by John. The stones hit, one after another, each one thrown harder than the last until they drove Iscariot to his knees. All he felt was the agony of the garden.
Matthew came forward with the rope and looped it around Judas’ neck.
Judas wept.
2
It was two minutes to three when the woman walked into Trafalgar Square.
Dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting, yellow tee-shirt she looked like every other summer tourist come to pay homage to Landseer’s brooding lions. There was a smiley face plastered across her chest. The grin was stretched out of shape by the teardrop swell of her breasts. Only it wasn’t summer. The yellow tee-shirt set her apart from the maddening crowd, because everyone else was wrapped up against the spring chill with scarves and gloves and woolen hats.
She stood still, a single spot of calm amid the hectic hustle of London. She uncapped the plastic bottle she held and emptied it over her head and shoulders, working the syry liquid in to her scalp. In less than a minute her long blonde hair was tangled and thick with grease as though it hadn’t been washed in months. She smelled like the traffic fumes and fog of pollution that choked the city.
Pigeons landed around the feet of the man beside her as he scattered chunks of bread across the paving stones. He looked up and smiled at her. He had a gentle face. A kind smile. She wondered who loved him. Someone had to. He had the contentment of a loved man.
Around her the tourists divided into groups: those out in search of culture headed toward the National Portrait Gallery; the thirsty ducked into the cafe on the corner; the royalists crossed over the road and disappeared beneath Admiralty Arch onto Whitehall; the hungry headed for Chandos Place and Covent Garden’s trendy eateries; and those starved of entertainment wandered up St Martin’s Lane towards Leicester Square or Soho, depending upon their definition of entertainment. Businessmen in their off-the-rack suits marched in step like penguins, umbrella tips and blakeys and segs, those uniquely English metal sole protectors, tapping out the rhythm of the day’s enterprise. Red buses crawled down Cockspur Street and around the corner toward The Strand and Charing Cross. The city was alive.
A young girl in a bright red duffel coat ran toward her, giggling and flapping her arms to startle the feeding birds into flight. When she was right in the middle of them the pigeons exploded upwards in a madness of feathers. The girl doubled up in laughter, her delighted shrieks chasing the pigeons up into the sky. Her enjoyment was infectious. The man rummaged in his plastic bag for another slice of white bread to tear up. The woman couldn’t help but smile. She had chosen the yellow tee-shirt because it made her smile. It seemed important to her that today of all days she should.
She took the phone from her pocket and made the call.
“News desk.” The voice on the other end was too perky for its own good. That would change in less than a minute when the screaming began.
“There is a plague coming,” she said calmly. “For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now.”
“Who is this? Who am I talking to?”
“I don’t need to tell you my name. Before the day is through you will know everything there is to know about me apart from one important detail.”
“And what’s that?” “Why I did it.”
She ruffled the young girl’s hair as she scattered another cluster of pigeons and burst into fits of giggles. The girl stopped, turned and looked up at the woman. “You smell funny.”
The woman reached into her pocket for her lighter. She thumbed the wheel, grating it against the flint, and touched the naked flame to her hair. She dropped the phone and stumbled forward as the fire engulfed her.
All around her the city screamed.
3
Nah Larkin lay on his back, looking up at the cheap hotel room’s equally cheap ceiling fan. The blades stuttered as they turned, making a painfully shrill squeal every fourth revolution. The room, in the basement of an old Victorian Town House, set him back twenty quid a night. As the old saying went, you got what you paid for, and what he’d paid for was a mattress riddled with the black smears of crushed bed bugs, a crusty top sheet that hadn’t been washed since Victoria herself sat on the throne, and water stains that crept more than halfway up the wall.
The light from the fly windows looking onto the street was almost non-existent.
The room smelled of whiskey-fueled dreams, stale sweat and week-old kebab relish. It was not a pleasant mix.
He closed his eyes.
On the other side of the bed the woman shifted her weight, causing the entire mattress to yaw alarmingly. A coil of bedspring stabbed into Noah’s backside. The woman beside him wasn’t a beauty, but that really didn’t matter to him. It wasn’t that Larkin was deep or looked beyond the shallows of beauty; he wasn’t and he didn’t. There were no hidden depths to him. Like the room, she was cheap, and like the room, he got exactly what he paid for. It wasn’t about sex. He hadn’t touched the woman. He just wanted someone to sleep beside him. Of course, he couldn’t sleep.
Mercifully, his mobile rang. He reached over for the phone on the night stand.
“Larkin,” he said, sliding back the handset.
“Where the hell have you been?” Ronan Frost’s Derry brogue grew more pronounced when he was angry. That one sentence would have been enough for a linguist to pin-point what street he was born on.
Noah looked down at the prostitute as she lay beside him. Her red lace bra sagged beneath the weight of the years. She opened her eyes. They were lost, like one of T.S. Elliot’s Hollow Men. She smiled up at him. “Preoccupied,” he told Frost.
“Well, stop arsing about and get yourself down here, soldier. The brown stuff’s exploding all over the fan.”
“On my way, boss,” he said.
On the other end of the line Frost grunted.
Noah killed the connection and fumbled the phone back onto the nightstand. Beside it, the neon light of the clock tried to convince him it was almost midnight. He didn’t believe it for a minute.
He pushed himself out of the bed.
The prostitute leaned forward on her elbow, studying his naked body. He repaid the compliment. He would have said something but he couldn’t remember her name. Instead he took his wallet from his pocket, folded a handful of notes in his hand and offered them to her.
“It’s too much,” she said, looking at the cash. It was. It could have paid for her for a week.
Noah shrugged. “Call it a bonus for not having to do the deep and meaningfuls while we cuddled up.”
She rolled the notes and stuffed them into her bra.
“The room’s paid for the night. Stay here, sleep. Get yourself a good breakfast in the morning.”
He went across to her side of the bed, bent down and kissed her gently on the forehead. It was a surprisingly intimate and tender gesture. She reached up and touched his cheek, her red-painted fingernail lingering on the scar
