by F. G. Cottam
He thanked the pale novice who had brought her there and then shook her formally by the hand. He was, as Martin had said, enormous. Her hand was completely enveloped in the grip of his, and his arms inside his soutane were as broad and dense-looking as those of a shot-putter or a power-lifter. He had not acquired muscles like these in the gym. She was certain of that. He was one of those men born strong, his future muscular power determined even as he grew from something tiny in his mother’s womb. The word for what he possessed physically was almost archaic, Suzanne thought. But it was accurate. And it was ‘might’. Monsignor Delaunay was mighty. His handshake, though, was gentle. And in his demeanour he seemed almost abashed.
There was a leather sofa at the opposite end of his room from where his desk was placed, and it was to this that he guided her. He took her coat and hung it on a corner stand. He gestured for her to sit. But he did not sit himself. He offered to have tea or coffee fetched, but she declined both. He offered water and, when she nodded acceptance, poured her a glass from a carafe on a small circular table. Then he stood before her with his hands clasped behind his back. She sipped from her glass. The water was very cold. She wondered was it drawn from a well – they might have their own. It had not come from a bottle left to stagnate for a month under fluorescents.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me.’
‘When I tell you what I have to tell you, you’ll agree it was the very least I could do.’
She sipped water, wondering how bad this could be. She had left her cigarettes in the glove compartment of the car. Then again, you weren’t allowed to smoke in church. And she was unacquainted with the protocol. Everything here might be a church, the way that embassies shared the status of sovereign states.
‘May I call you Suzanne?’
‘Of course you may, Monsignor Delaunay. I’d like you to. And I’d like you to tell me the truth about the man who masqueraded as Peitersen.’
‘He is one of us, Suzanne.’
‘A representative of the Catholic Church?’
‘A priest.’
‘He did not seem very much like a priest.’
‘Nor was he meant to.’
‘For example, he really does know about boats.’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘I might take that cup of coffee off you.’
‘You must feel free to smoke.’
‘Damn. I mean, darn. I left them in the car.’
Delaunay smiled. ‘It may shock you to learn that there are priests who indulge that vice, Suzanne. What I mean is, I can probably cadge you a pack of Marlboro Lights.’
Peitersen, whose real name was Sean McIntyre, was a Boston Irishman who never knowingly entertained a religious thought until he was forty-five years old. His family business was building fishing boats. The business went back five generations. He broke with tradition and began building racing yachts after racing them himself as a teenager and realising that his own makeshift improvements to the basic design made any yacht he raced both significantly faster and easier to handle, too.
McIntyre Marine prospered. Sean celebrated two decades of business success by buying a cruiser as a fortieth birthday present for himself. When the cruiser foundered a week later on a reef off the Bahamas, Sean’s wife and fourteen-year-old son were aboard and Sean, piloting, had drunk the best part of a pint of white rum. His wife and boy drowned. Sean was picked up alive. He’d been in the water eighteen hours and was delirious but, by that time, sober. He began his training for the priesthood a month later.
‘Why did he pretend to be Peitersen?’ Suzanne said.
‘Because we told him he should,’ Delaunay said, who was still meeting her eyes, she thought, only from supreme effort of will.
‘Because we told him he should. As penance.’
‘I think you had better explain, Monsignor.’
Delaunay was at the window. Its shape was arched and its glass heavily leaded. It did not let in much light. It was one of a row of four that embellished the exterior wall of the chamber. Even collectively they did not admit much light. But then the weather outside was foul. Though the windows were all tightly closed against it, Suzanne could hear the rain hurled against the panes.
‘Early in the winter of 1918 an infantry captain called Harry Spalding looted something very valuable from Rouen cathedral. We know this because one of the men charged to protect this object survived the raid.’
‘What did he take?’
‘Something brought out of Palestine in the First Crusade. An item taken to France lest it be sold by Rome for influence with kings during the great Papal Schism. This artefact is among the most important relics in the entire history of the Church. And Spalding was successful in stealing it.’
‘For profit?’
‘For power. For the power its desecration would give him with the great adversary we have faced since the Fall. That was why he stole it.’
‘And you thought McIntyre, masquerading as Peitersen, might find it aboard the Dark Echo?’
Delaunay smiled. ‘You’re very bright, Suzanne.’
‘No, I’m not. Because actually, I’m very confused. If it was that valuable to you, Cardoza Associates would have won their pissing contest at Bullen and Clore with Magnus Stannard.’
Delaunay turned to the window and the rain.
‘I’m sorry, Monsignor. I’m sorry for the profanity.’
He spoke with his back to her. His voice was grave. ‘We did win the pissing contest. With respect to Magnus Stannard, the Vatican has very deep pockets. But the auctioneer was incompetent, or he was drunk. And the gavel came down early.’
‘Who are Martens and Degrue?’
‘You’ve heard of the Jericho Club?’
‘Recently, yes.’
‘They are the continuation of the Jericho Club by other means. Or, perhaps more accurately, under another name, because the means remain the same.’
‘Why are you choosing to tell me all this now?’
He turned back to her. ‘None of this was known to me until a few days ago. None of it. Martin told me about Peitersen over lunch on the day that I blessed the Dark Echo at Magnus Stannard’s request. Magnus was convinced he was merely some kind of crank. Then Martin mentioned Spalding and I remembered only that the name had vague, uncomfortable associations. I made some enquiries of my own among knowledgeable people in Rome. And I was told what I have told you.’
‘Weren’t you sworn to secrecy?’ Suzanne had considered that the sort of question she would never have asked without her tongue firmly in her cheek. She had been wrong.
‘I was pledged to silence on the subject. I have chosen to break that pledge.’
‘Why?’
‘Father McIntyre did not find what he was looking for aboard Harry Spalding’s boat. He is convinced it is not there. But Martens and Degrue may think it is. These people are not beyond an act of piracy.’
Suzanne thought about what she was hearing. ‘When you blessed the boat, Monsignor, did you think it benign?’
Delaunay smiled, looking at the floor. Then he looked at her. He raised an arm and tapped at the window with his knuckles. His fist was enormous. The impact thudded dully in the silence of his chamber. ‘The sea down on the shore outside our refuge here is sometimes benign. And sometimes it rages. Its power waxes and wanes. At the time I was aboard her, at least, the Dark Echo was no threat to anyone.’
‘I cannot believe you let them go.’
‘I knew about none of this until after their departure. I had not set eyes on Martin for a decade. Magnus called me out of the blue.’
Suzanne smiled. ‘Come, Monsignor. Does anybody ever really do anything entirely out of the blue?’
‘Now is not the time for theological debate,’ Delaunay said. ‘We are not here to discuss predestination. I have broken a vow in order to tell you what I have.’
‘Because I called you. Out of the blue.’
‘I was concerned for them on their departure. My concern for t
hem has only increased since learning what I have since then. I would have called you, Suzanne. I was resolved to. I would have called you, had you not called me first.’
And this, she believed.
She did the calculation in her mind. They would be three, perhaps four hundred miles beyond the West Coast of Ireland. And they would be heading directly west, if they were on their charted course. And Delaunay had told her nothing that would make Magnus Stannard turn back. Quite the opposite, since McIntyre had established that Spalding’s desecrated relic was not aboard the Dark Echo. Good luck to them, she thought Magnus might remark, warned of Martens and Degrue’s potential piracy. He had guns aboard, Martin had told her. And he was expert in their use. He was a man capable of such hard-headed belligerence that he would probably relish the action if pirates tried to board.
She rose to go.
‘I don’t think it wise for you to leave here tonight.’
‘You have facilities for female guests?’
‘We have facilities for any guest of our choosing.’
Suzanne looked at her watch. It was just after seven in the evening. Outside, the rain fell unrelentingly from a sky sullen with cloud. She had booked a room at an inn just outside the village of Holburn. It was a drive of around eight miles. It had looked very cosy in the pictures on the website. She had travelled most of the day to get here and was tired. She wanted an early night and an early start.
‘Why don’t you think it wise for me to leave?’
‘An intuition,’ Delaunay said. ‘It might be more circumspect to wait until morning. You will be comfortable here.’
‘I’ll take my chances,’ she said.
‘As you please.’ He got her coat from the stand and helped her into it. Then he guided her out the way she had come. They were both silent on the walk back through the dim, stone-flagged corridors and staircases of the seminary. But, to Suzanne’s mind at least, the silence was a comfortable one. Everything necessary had been said between them. She found herself liking Monsignor Delaunay despite the disturbing implications of the things he had told her. He had broken a vow in order to impart the information. He had chosen to sin out of friendship and loyalty and the instinct to protect. She suspected that he loved Martin. She thought that if it were not for his vocation, he would have made a very different kind of father than the one Magnus Stannard was. His strength, his might, was the key to him. He was mighty, so he could express his tenderness without fear of being considered weak. As a priest, of course, he should not have cared about whether or not his character impressed people. But she suspected that he did. He was possessed of enormous strength. His great weakness was his vanity.
She ran from the shelter of the seminary doorway, using her coat above her head as a hood. The rain sang a shrill note through the cinders under her feet in the car park. It felt more like October than June on the cliff top, in the exposure to the sea. She shivered, unlocking the car door, reminded of the capricious nature of the sea by its fury now, boiling on the rocks beneath her. And she wondered, as she kept on wondering, how Martin and his father were doing aboard the boat. She did not think the Dark Echo intrinsically evil. But her first master had been. Harry Spalding had been evil and corrupt and had practised dark magic since his boyhood. Was evil contagious? Could malevolence seep into the timbers of an old racing vessel?
Despite knowing what she did about the Waltrow brothers’ mystery and the death of Gubby Tench, Suzanne did not think that it could. But there was danger. She’d felt it in the barn in France. She had been warned about it by her ghost. With her car door unlocked, staring at tussocks of grass on the cliff edge at the brink of the void, she realised where her logic led. The baleful influence of Harry Spalding persisted because the stolen relic remained an object of desecration.
It made her wonder if Spalding had ever really died.
It was 7.20 p.m. when she turned the key in the ignition. That was still early in England on a June evening. But the weather on the Northumberland coast was so bleak and gloomy that she felt obliged out of caution to switch on her lights. She drove carefully, but saw no oncoming traffic on the road that led to the village and to her hot date with a lamb casserole and a decent glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. At some point, as it travelled inland, the road became tree-lined. A gust of wind soughed through branches and leaves and dumped rain from trees on the windscreen. Reflexively, Suzanne switched on the wipers. And switched on the radio.
The volume was so great that Paddy McAloon’s croon was a bellowing roar as ‘When Love Breaks Down’ burst out of the speakers. She leant forward against the restraint of her seatbelt to switch it off and the windscreen imploded in stinging fragments of shatterproof glass as the car halted and the roof bulged inward. Suzanne looked up at the thick shape of the fallen trunk in the thin steel above her. She heard the rasping strain of metal and knew she would be crushed and die here.
She snapped the seatbelt off and slithered down to the footwell to try to hide and make herself small and safe as the interior of the car continued to diminish under the weight of the tree trunk crushing it. Suddenly she heard the rent of metal on the passenger side. She glanced over and saw two huge hands pulling at the jammed door through foliage over the lower edge of the window. Blood spilled blackly down the door interior from the palms as glass still embedded in the sill bit into them. The thick fingers whitened with strain and the door was torn from its hinges and lock as Delaunay’s head intruded, wide-eyed. He reached for her and she was jerked like a strung puppet out of the car as it folded in on itself like something deflating under the burden of the fallen tree.
Delaunay half dragged and half carried Suzanne through the pelting rain back along the road. He lifted her into the passenger seat of his Land Rover as she tried to regain her breath and composure. He unscrewed the lid from a spirits flask and offered it to her. She was alert enough to notice that he held the flask by the tips of his fingers so the blood from his palms would not smear it. She took the flask and drank. It was whisky and its warmth and strength were very welcome.
‘You followed me.’
‘A precaution.’ His eyes were looking down the road, where the cabin of her hire car was now flat to its axle with the weight of the fallen tree. One of the rear tyres had punctured. Oil or petrol was leaking out of the vehicle in a rainbow stain on the road. The colours were subdued in the absence of real summer light.
‘You tried to warn me.’
‘An intuition.’
‘I think that Harry Spalding never died.’
Delaunay stopped. After offering her the drink, he had torn a cloth fetched from the back of the Land Rover into strips and was bandaging his hands with them. He leaned forward, plucked the flask from her grip and took a couple of hefty swallows before giving it back. He was wearing a cagoule over his soutane. The hood was down. His hair was plastered to his dripping head. When he had thrust that head through the branches and leaves of the fallen tree at the car window, he had reminded her of one of those pagan pub signs depicting the Green Man. She had thought he was a demon, not a priest.
‘I owe you my life.’
She was saying everything, she knew. And she knew it was the shock making her do so. Delaunay merely nodded and blinked. He got behind the wheel of the Land Rover and turned it, spraying through the surface water on the road, back towards the seminary.
Because she was trying to avoid the implications of what had just occurred, Suzanne spent the short journey back wondering what the seminary’s facilities to suit every guest were going to be like. The women’s were bound to be different from the men’s. She imagined a bed chamber built for one of those wan Pre-Raphaelite beauties from the paintings of Millais and Arthur Hughes. There would be tapestries and stained glass and the bed would be heavily canopied. Her well water would reside in a silver chalice. Should she require the diversion of music, she would have to learn the harp and play the one standing in the corner. Or she could take the lute down from the wall.
But she was glad of that. As calm and normality returned to her, she was glad of the fact of where she was and the potent reminder of it up there on the wall. When she went to bed and turned out the lights, she knew she would be grateful for the reassurance of the holy fortress surrounding her.
‘You’ll lose nothing by leaving in the morning, in the daylight,’ Delaunay had said.
‘I owe you my life,’ she repeated.
‘It’s to God you owe your life,’ he said. ‘But thank you anyway, Suzanne. I’m a vain enough man to accept any compliment going.’
She laughed. But she had known that about him.
‘Where do you intend to go? You’re going after Spalding, aren’t you? You’re undeterred.’
Suzanne nodded.
‘I tried telephoning them. I wanted to appeal to their good sense and urge them to return.’
‘They won’t,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t get through. We’ve a satellite phone, but I could not get through on that either.’
‘I’m going to Southport, Monsignor Delaunay. He settled there for a while. He must have had a reason. Like you, I sometimes have intuitions. You’re right. I’m going after him. I can’t just do nothing. I’d go mad.’
‘Then for God’s sake take the train.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve no choice. My hire care isn’t up to the journey.’
Delaunay waved an imaginary irritant away. His hands were still bandaged, blood in dried clots and stains on the fabric. ‘I’ll talk to the hire car people. They’ll believe a priest. They might call you for confirmation and send you papers to sign, but I’ll deal with it here. And I’ll have one of the lads drive you to the station in the morning.’