‘I know I have to wait for the postmortem,’ Sebastian raged. ‘Just give me your opinion, Doctor-’ He stared at her ID tag. ‘Parslow. You are a doctor of medicine, not philosophy, right?’
Ellen Parslow glanced past him and caught the gaze of his assistant, who looked embarrassed. ‘I have medical qualifications from Yale, Johns Hopkins and the Navy,’ she said, brushing back a lock of blond hair.
‘So diagnose,’ Sebastian ordered.
‘How was he beforehand? Had he been under strain?’
‘We were questioning him,’ the senior Bureau man said, glancing at Arthur Bimsdale. ‘It’s on film if you want to take a look. He was under pressure, sure, but he seemed to be bearing up.’
Parslow looked at the younger man, who nodded his agreement. ‘No shortness of breath, excessive sweating, redness of face?’
‘No,’ the agents said in unison.
‘Do we have access to his medical records?’
‘We can get that,’ Sebastian said. ‘He’s a Brit.’
‘Right. The pathologist will need to be copied.’
Sebastian raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Obviously. Do I have to get on my knees, Doctor? Give us some help here.’
Ellen Parslow beckoned to Bimsdale and together they lifted the dead man’s upper body from the table.
‘Hold him there, please,’ she said.
Arthur Bimsdale grimaced, but carried out the instruction.
After she’d examined the face, neck and chest, Parslow straightened up. ‘I take it he’d just drunk coffee from that cup,’ she said, pointing to the empty paper container.
‘I…I brought him it,’ the younger agent said. ‘Along with something to eat.’ He looked at the still wrapped sandwich that had been knocked to the floor. ‘He didn’t have time to…’
‘I smelled coffee on his lips.’ The doctor made notes on a clipboard.
‘Good for you,’ Sebastian said. ‘So what happened?’
‘The obvious candidate is heart failure. He’s in good physical condition for his age, but there may have been an underlying problem-we need those records. The sudden nature of this death is interesting. You say he showed no signs of difficulty or discomfort in the period immediately before he collapsed. I would expect there to have been some signs, even minor ones. Same with other potential causes-stroke, anaphylactic shock and so on.’
‘He was alone for about ten minutes before I came back with the coffee and food,’ Bimsdale said. ‘We checked the film before you got here. He didn’t seem to have done anything to himself.’
Parslow nodded. ‘That corresponds with what I’m looking at here-no signs of him having taken anything toxic. Besides, you were both in here with him for-how long?’
‘At least five minutes,’ Sebastian said. ‘The film will show the exact time.’
‘So you would have seen if he was struggling for breath or the like.’
There was a knock at the door and a pair of crime scene technicians swathed in white appeared.
‘All right,’ Sebastian said. ‘We need to clear the area.’
‘The medical examiner’s on his way, sir,’ one of the CSIs said.
Peter Sebastian stalked away, followed by Bimsdale.
Ellen Parslow watched them go. She’d done a course on stress management in the Navy. It looked to her that the Director of Violent Crime was in urgent need of advice in that area, not that she was going to tell the overbearing cocksucker so.
I was left alone in the cell for some time. My watch had been taken, along with my shoes and belt, and I guessed it was at least an hour. I was tired after the long, violent day, but there was no chance of me sleeping. Apollyon had obviously mentioned Hades to put the shits up me. It didn’t have that effect literally, which was just as well considering the lack of facilities. My mind was working overtime. I made myself take deep breaths and tried to get into a self-protective zone. I had no doubt that I was going to have to use my combat skills if I was to get out of the camp in one piece. I tried to remember what Dave Cummings had taught me about mental preparation. That made me think of Quincy-he had reiterated much of that during our sessions. Quincy. He was another victim of Sara’s brutality. I owed her for him, too.
At last, the door opened and a pair of large specimens with buzz cuts advanced on me. My wrists were pinned behind my back with plastic restraints and I was led into the corridor. The concrete chilled my bare feet and gave the soles an abrasive rub that soon became unpleasant. At the end of the passage, we came to a steel door. One of my guards swiped a card through the locking device and it opened inward. On the other side was an elevator with a steel mesh cage. We went down what seemed like a long way. Another sealed door was opened and we walked into the underworld.
‘What the-’ I broke off in amazement as the full extent of the scene in front of me became apparent.
‘Welcome to Hades,’ Apollyon said, coming out of the darkness on the right. ‘In the Antichurch, we prefer to call it Hell.’
Both names were appropriate. The underground area beneath us was huge, with lights flashing in the distance and flares of flame blasting out all over. I made out buildings dotted around, some low and some as much as three stories high, but all of them in a partially ruined condition, as if a tank had driven around firing through windows and smashing against walls. Lengths of timber hung from some of the roofs like gibbets-when I looked closer, I realized that from some of them bodies were dangling. There was a roar and fire consumed a block in the middle distance. I could hear screaming from it, but saw no one emerge. A black-surfaced river wound through the domain, carcasses of animals aground in the shallows. A wrecked car was hanging from a rickety humpbacked bridge in the foreground, much of the brickwork having been knocked away. The horizon in the far distance was bright red, silhouetting ramparts and uneven walls above which smoke was curling. There was a stench of rotting matter much worse than any swamp.
Apollyon smiled grimly. ‘What do you think?’
‘Someone’s been to art school,’ I replied, with a lot more bravado than I felt; I had just noticed that the pale-colored objects in the middle of the river were naked, and incomplete, human bodies. ‘Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, right panel,’ said a familiar voice.
I looked past Apollyon. Like me, Sara was barefoot and the fatigues she’d been given were too big for her. Her face was pale and drenched in sweat. What had they done to her?
‘Correct,’ the bearded man said, apparently gratified.
‘Also, Pieter Brueghel’s Dulle Griet, Jan Brueghel’s Orpheus,’ Sara continued. ‘Plus shades of works by Michelangelo, Memling, the JS Monogrammist, Simon Marmion, Dore, John Martin…’ Sara’s voice faded away and her head dropped. She looked in a bad way.
‘You know a lot about infernal affairs,’ Apollyon said to her. ‘It’s a pity you can’t join the Antichurch.’
I wasn’t surprised that my ex-lover had educated herself about depictions of hell-after all, she did call herself the Soul Collector and her sister had been a practicing Satanist. Despite that, I was still taken aback by what I saw moving beneath us. At first I thought it was fake, some kind of model projected onto a screen, but then I realized the figures and the terrain they were moving through were real-though what did ‘real’ mean down here? Demonic figures with blackened faces, carrying lances and curved swords, were heading into the Hades landscape. They were followed by others, whose forms had been shaped in the imagination of Bosch-diabolical creatures with the heads of birds and fish, all armed with vicious blades and stabbing weapons. Another had the front half of a beetle and the extended rear legs of a frog, and behind it came one with a rat’s head and butterfly’s wings attached to its back. There was only one group missing.
‘Where are the souls of the wicked?’ I asked.
‘Ah, you noticed,’ Apollyon said. ‘Where are the naked humans that the creatures of Hell will torment and feed upon?’ He laughed. ‘Take a guess, why don’t you?’
I looked at Sara. She was nodding slowly.
‘Don’t worry, you can keep your clothes on,’ the bearded man said. ‘We’ll even give you some weapons.’
One of the gorillas stepped up and dumped wooden staves in front of us, two long and two short ones.
‘Oh, thanks,’ I said.
‘You prefer we take them back?’ Apollyon demanded.
‘No, that’s okay.’
‘All right. Now listen up. This isn’t just a turkey shoot-or should I say, a turkey slash and stab.’ He grinned.
