by Tom Marcus
‘Gone?’ Martindale breathed.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
No more Stevie. I felt a massive surge of relief. I’d passed the first part of the test.
Then I felt a quick stab of panic.
Who the fuck was I supposed to be now, then?
43
Martindale helped me up and led me gently out of the cell with the blanket round my shoulders. As we inched our way slowly through the passage together, leaving the sickly stench of burned flesh behind us, I could barely feel the floor under my feet, they were so numb. I stumbled a couple of times, but Martindale caught me before I fell and hauled me back upright. It felt strange, hanging on to him for dear life when all I wanted to do was smash his head against the wall.
Climbing up the ladder took forever. Each step seemed to take all the strength I had, even with Martindale pushing from behind. But eventually I managed to crawl out into the little room and then finally into the room with the bookcase. I glanced up at the crucifix and thought of Stevie. At least his suffering was over.
Martindale locked the doors and pushed the bookshelf back against the wall. I stood in the middle of the room, uncertain of what to do next.
‘Let’s get you cleaned up,’ he said. ‘Then you can have something to eat.’
He steered me through the door and back into the interior of the church. The only light was from his lamp, and that was beginning to dim. So it’s night, I thought. It was almost as if no time had passed at all, and everything that had happened in that terrible cell was just a bad dream. He shone the beam towards a short flight of steps with a door at the bottom.
‘There’s a shower. It’s a bit cramped, but there’s hot water. And a toothbrush. Just give me that –’ he took the blanket – ‘and there’ll be some fresh clothes for you when you’re finished.’
I grunted, not yet trusting myself to speak, and walked down the steps. Now that I didn’t have Stevie to fall back on, I was afraid that at any moment he’d take a look at me and see I was a fake.
The shower room was bare concrete, and the water was only lukewarm and barely more than a trickle, but I didn’t care. I stood under it for as long as I dared, soaping myself from head to foot, scraping my flesh with my nails, then starting all over again. When the little bar of soap was almost worn away to nothing, I turned the water off and picked up the toothbrush, using the last of the soap as toothpaste. There was a tatty old hand towel on a rail, and I used that to dry myself as best I could.
Martindale was holding out something white when I opened the door. At first I thought it was a dressing gown, but then I realized it was a robe – a monk’s robe like the one he was wearing.
He saw my hesitation. ‘Take it. It symbolizes purity. A new beginning.’
I slipped it over my head and tied the cord round my waist, then followed him into the vestry. There were two chairs, lit by the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. We sat down, facing each other.
‘How are you feeling? I mean, physically.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘And in your mind?’
I shook my head, as if there were no words.
That seemed to be the right response. ‘Good. Now, do you know who you are?’
‘No.’ I tried to make it sound as if I wasn’t bothered.
‘Can you remember anything about your life before you came here?’
‘No.’ Same flat tone.
‘Do you know your name – what people call you?’
‘No.’
‘Shall we give you a new name?’
I shrugged. ‘If you like.’
‘We’ll call you Peter. Like the disciple. In the Bible. I don’t suppose you’ve done much Bible reading?’
‘No.’
‘But you can read?’
I felt as if I was stepping onto thin ice. ‘Yes. I think so. I don’t know.’
‘Well, we’ll find out. Not that it matters. The Holy Spirit will speak to you directly now, through me. Do you believe that the Holy Spirit can speak through me? That when I tell you something, it comes from God – that it’s God’s word?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you will obey God’s commands without thought, without question?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because if you don’t – if you disobey God’s commands, any of God’s commands – then you will cease to exist. Instantly. Like the flame of a candle being snuffed out. Because He has made you for one reason and one reason only: to do His will.’
I nodded. For a moment I did believe it.
‘But if you obey him – if you do His will faithfully – then He will love you as a son. Your brothers and sisters will be angels, and they will be your family forever.’
He stood up and put his hands on my shoulders. I swear I could feel a glow flowing through his fingertips and into my body. I thought he was going to say something, some sort of blessing, but after a minute I realized he wasn’t. He was waiting for me to say something.
I took a deep breath. ‘What does He want me to do?’
44
Alex had her arms crossed and was shaking her head. ‘He said to wait – until he can get a message out.’
‘We can’t wait forever,’ Mrs Allenby said evenly. She took a sip of her coffee.
‘You said six days.’
‘Six days is too long.’
‘But—’
‘I know what I said,’ Mrs Allenby cut in tersely, putting her cup down carefully on the table. ‘But that was never going to be realistic. We should have gone in after seventy-two hours. That’s quite long enough. I only waited until now because . . . well, I thought I’d give him another twelve hours because he was so adamant. Now I’m beginning to worry that could have been a fatal mistake.’
‘It could be a fatal mistake if we go in now and Martindale gets spooked,’ Alex said.
Mrs Allenby took her glasses off and put them carefully into a small green leather case, then snapped it shut. ‘I am relying on you not to spook him.’
‘You won’t give him one more—’
‘No!’ Mrs Allenby’s voice wasn’t loud, but Ryan and Alan found themselves sitting back in their seats as if she’d just delivered a full-on hairdryer. ‘Time is running out and I will not waste any more of it.’
She locked eyes with Alex. Alex stared back, an expression of defiance on her face, then looked away. ‘Fine.’ She got up, pulled her motorcycle jacket from the back of the chair and walked to the door.
‘Thank you, my dear,’ Mrs Allenby said without looking up.
Now that she knew she had no choice, Alex found herself racing to get to the church, as if all the anxiety she’d been keeping a lid on had been released by Mrs Allenby’s order. Maybe it was too long. Alex had wanted to do it Logan’s way, but perhaps trusting his instincts had been a mistake – just misplaced loyalty. He had been acting strangely for a while, she had to admit. Maybe his judgement was shot.
Still, it made sense to wait until there was a service; otherwise she’d have to come up with an excuse for sneaking around, and she didn’t want to go there quite yet. First she just wanted to take a look – see the lie of the land – before deciding how to play things. She’d parked a couple of streets away, and now she was standing in the shadows between a white van and a skip overflowing with builder’s rubble and broken furniture, with a good view of the front of the church. At first she thought she must have got the time wrong, or Martindale had stopped celebrating mass at all. She hadn’t seen a soul go anywhere near the church. With nothing else to look at, she’d found herself birdwatching. A flock of pigeons wheeled one way, then the other, over the church, making her think they’d been alarmed by a predator, but if there was a hawk about, she couldn’t see it. Then, with five minutes to go, an old lady with tight white curls and a bent back appeared, opened the big wooden door and slipped inside, followed by a bloke in his twenties with a wispy beard and the unmistakeable look of a junkie, and soon half a dozen more went in, of va
rious ages and types, but all looking equally battered by life. She slipped out from behind the van. After a hurried trip to her local Oxfam shop, she’d worried she’d maybe overdone the shabbiness. She hadn’t even washed the clothes before she put them on. But now it looked as if she was going to blend in just fine.
Inside, the church looked as if it was either in the middle of a major renovation or about to be demolished. There were ladders and buckets against one wall, and a section of the roof looked as if it had been hastily covered over with plastic sheeting. The pews looked relatively new, but at least one row seemed to be missing, and the row at the back had a sheet draped over it at one end. She took a seat on the aisle, in the second pew, which gave her a decent view of the rest of the congregation, shuffling and coughing their way into their places. She looked towards the altar. There didn’t seem to be a pulpit, and there was no sign of Martindale. She knelt down, rested her elbows on the back of the next pew and put her hands together. She heard the soft muttering of prayer in a language she didn’t know from somewhere in front of her.
With her eyes closed, she still felt the figure go past her down the aisle. When she looked up he was resting his hands on the altar. Medium height, slim build, thinning blond hair and steel-rimmed glasses, he had the look of a priest, even if he wasn’t wearing any of the regulation vestments, just dark trousers and a black shirt, the collar undone.
‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, amen.’ His voice was deeper than she thought it would be, carrying easily through the cavernous space. Muttered amens came from the hunched figures scattered around her. ‘Let us first give thanks for His bounty . . .’
She’d been expecting something a bit more . . . radical. Martindale might not quite dress the part, but he sounded like every other priest she’d ever heard, just droning on in this fuddy-duddy way, like he was reading an autocue. His bounty? As far as she could see, Martindale’s congregation had all been right at the back of the queue when the bounty was being handed out. So what the hell were they supposed to be giving thanks for? Thanks for precisely nothing, mate. It was this sort of nonsense that had made her an atheist as soon as she’d understood what the word meant. She realized she’d folded her arms crossly, and quickly put her hands together in prayer again. She also realized Martindale was probably too smart to wear his heart on his sleeve. The old dear with the crooked back probably looked back fondly to the days when the mass was said in Latin: she might forgive Martindale his shabby clothes, but if he started preaching revolution, she’d no doubt be straight off to the bishop to complain. Which might explain why the revolution hadn’t happened yet.
As Martindale droned on, Alex checked out the rest of the congregation. There were eight of them – nine including herself – spread out as if they were trying to put as much distance between each other as they could. It didn’t seem very Christian: love thy neighbour, and all that. It made her think of perverts watching dirty movies, all pretending they weren’t really there. She couldn’t get a good look at the one on the last pew, nearest the door, without making it obvious what she was doing, but she could see the rest reasonably clearly without turning her head: three women, two old, one baby mother probably still in her teens; and five men, none of them in the best of health, judging by the wheezing and coughing, and at least a couple of them living on the streets, if the sour smell wafting through the church was anything to go by.
No Logan.
She risked a look at the guy to her left, pretending to have a crick in her neck: comb-over; pale, puffy face. Nope.
Which left Plan B: wait until the church was empty and Martindale had fucked off, and then break in and have a little look around. Not ideal.
She watched Martindale at the altar. ‘The peace of the Lord be with you always,’ he intoned solemnly.
‘And with your spirit,’ came the muttered response.
‘Let us offer each other the sign of peace,’ Martindale said.
Along the pews, the ragged congregation shifted reluctantly towards each other. Two old biddies in the front shook hands with each other then put their hands back in their laps, eyes fixed rigidly to the front. So much for brotherly love, Alex thought.
She felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. It was Logan, holding out his hand. Where the hell had he sprung from?
‘Fancy seeing you here. Didn’t think you were the religious type,’ he said as she grasped his hand.
‘Bloody hell, Logan, I thought you were—’
‘Shh, don’t talk now.’ He took his hand away and she felt a crumpled piece of paper in her palm. She quickly pocketed it as Logan shuffled back to the end of the pew.
The van was parked under an old railway bridge half a mile from the church. A ragged queue of homeless people – most of them men – lined up patiently, waiting to be given a styrofoam cup of soup and a sandwich wrapped in cling film. Alex sat against the wall opposite, feeling the cold through her thin skirt as she watched Logan doling out the free food. There was someone else in the van with him, because she occasionally saw him turn his head and smile, but she couldn’t see them properly. She hoped if it was Martindale, he wouldn’t see her and recognize her from the service.
After a while she allowed herself to slide down the wall and gently topple over, like she was pissed or just passing out from exhaustion. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Logan pointing towards her and saying something to the other person in the van. A minute later he’d left the van and was crouching over her with a cup of soup steaming in his hand. He touched her shoulder with his other hand.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Never better,’ she whispered, giving him a little grin from her prone position. ‘Is that chicken, by any chance?’
‘Tomato, I’m afraid. It’s all we do. Anything else upsets the vegans.’
‘There’s homeless vegans?’
‘There’s homeless everything,’ he said. ‘Look, we don’t have much time. Let me sit you up and you have some of this soup while I talk. OK?’
Alex nodded, slowly pushing herself back up against the wall. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she said, taking the cup. ‘And I’m not sure the shaved look is really you.’
‘Yeah, never mind that. Listen, Ryan was right. Since I passed the audition, I’ve had nothing but the bloody crusades, morning, noon and night. It’s like doing fucking history GCSE.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Shut up. Anyway, he definitely thinks we’re all living in Jerusalem East Seventeen, and it’s time we took it back, and then Christ will turn up waving a big sword made of fire or something and we’ll all live happily ever after.’
Alex took a sip of the soup, then made a face. ‘Tomato, you said?’
‘Or mushroom. Same difference.’
‘And what does “taking it back” mean, exactly?’
‘That’s what I don’t know yet. But he’s a fanatic. He’s capable of anything. Whatever it is he’s planning, it’s going to be big.’
‘And what’s your role in all this?’
‘We’re going to be the points of God’s spear, that’s what he calls it.’
‘We?’
‘There’s four of us, I think. All simple-minded fucks-ups just like me, who’ve had their brains scooped out and replaced by this crazy religious stuff.’
Alex sat up straighter. ‘And you’re all right?’
‘So far. He’s a sick bastard, though. I think he enjoys fucking with people’s minds. He’s good at it, too. He would have made a top interrogator – seems to just have a knack for figuring out your weak spots and then sticking the knife in.’
She saw Logan shudder.
‘So what do we do now?’
‘I can’t leave the church, except when I’m helping the homeless, like now – which really means recruiting for Martindale.’
‘Identifying psychologically vulnerable people?’
‘Basically.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I d
on’t think Jesus knows too much about it, to be honest. Look, I’ve got to go. He’s got eyes in the back of his fucking head, this one.’
‘You’re scared of him?’
‘Too fucking right I am.’
‘So how will we stay in contact?’
‘There’s bins down the side of the church. It’s my job to take out the slops. Look under the grey bin. Careful of the rats, though.’
Alex nodded, handing back the cup. ‘Talking of slops. Quickly, before you go. I need to tell you what Ryan found in the files.’
45
As John drove the van back to the lock-up round the corner form the church, I thought about what Alex had told me. Ryan had been through Craig’s and Claire’s files forwards, backwards and sideways and found precisely nothing – or at least nothing that suggested why they should have become targets. I already knew the basics: Craig had grown up on a council estate in Glasgow, and then got a scholarship to Edinburgh University to study history – which is where he got the tap on the shoulder and was recruited as an intelligence officer, before moving to the A4 surveillance team. Claire, I remembered, had a military background as an avionics technician and had applied for a job as a mobile surveillance officer on the MI5 website. Nothing out of the ordinary in any of that, and according to Alex, Ryan hadn’t found anything else that raised a red flag.
Except for one thing. For two months, between the beginning of February and the end of March 2016, they’d both taken a sabbatical. Nothing particularly unusual in that: recent experiences had made MI5 wary of burnout; better to give your officers a decent chance to clear their heads and recharge their batteries every once in a while – especially if they were on the front line of the war against home-grown terrorists – than keep pushing them until one day the lights just went out, with potentially hundreds of lives on the line. Claire and Craig had both done their time. They were both due a break.