A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  They were just leaving when Hynes’s phone rang: Priestman.

  “I don’t want to take it,” he told Gackowska.

  “It might be good news.”

  “And it might be Father Christmas, calling about that train set he forgot to bring me when I was seven.”

  “Oh, how lovely,” said Gackowska. “I hope that’s it.”

  Hynes answered the phone, listened, thanked Priestman, and hung up.

  “They’ve found Kathy Hicks,” he said.

  CHAPTER CVIII

  The call came through to Parker’s hotel room just as he was emerging from the shower. He didn’t recognize the number, but the area code indicated that the call was coming from London. When he picked up, a woman’s voice asked him to hold for Emily Lockwood.

  “I’ve decided to allow you to view the Old Firm,” said Lockwood, when she came on the line. Her voice sounded hoarse, as though she’d recently endured a coughing fit.

  “Can I ask what caused your change of heart?”

  “It’s nothing to do with my heart,” she said. “If I don’t let you see it, you’ll think we’re hiding something. If I allow you to examine the building for yourself, your suspicions can be laid to rest, and you will, with luck, go about your business and find other people to bother.”

  “That’s usually how it works,” said Parker. “Persistence, persistence, persistence. When can we do this?”

  “We can have someone show you around tomorrow. How about two o’clock?”

  “Two is fine. I appreciate your help.”

  “Unwillingly given. Tell me something, Mr. Parker: Is it true that you’ve been shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often?”

  “Twice, allowing for multiple injuries the second time.”

  “Only twice?” she said, and hung up.

  Everyone, Parker reflected, was a comedian.

  * * *

  THE BODY OF KATHY Hicks had been weighed down with stones from the walls of the Well Garden, including three or four placed in a sack and tied around her waist. Her throat had been cut, but the misbaha was missing, at least at first. It was subsequently found in the mud at the bottom of the well, probably having become dislodged from her mouth when the body was dropped in the water.

  It had been one of the more challenging killings for Sellars. The ruins of the priory stood at the edge of Walsingham, but close to the Common Place. The estate of which they were a part was hidden from view by buildings and high walls, but the main gate was always locked, and visitors entered via a door at the Common Place. Sellars had been forced to half carry the drugged girl down to the riverbank opposite the wall of the estate, and enter from under a bridge. Mors had dropped them off, and waited nearby while Sellars took care of Hicks. He’d scouted out the ground the previous week, and thought that dumping the body in one of the wells might save him the trouble, and risk, of digging a grave. He hadn’t reckoned on the water level falling, or the keen eyesight of some amateur photographer.

  Leaving the site, flecks of Kathy Hicks’s blood on his hands, Sellars had glanced back at the ruins.

  And the east window of the priory had been filled with unfamiliar stars.

  * * *

  QUAYLE WAS PREPARING TO leave the Old Firm for the last time. A calfskin case stood open on his bed, containing all he would need for the coming days and weeks—for the rest of his life, in fact. Soon he would depart this place, and shortly thereafter he would sleep without dreaming, never to wake again. The end was close. The Pale Child had told him so.

  Behind the walls, John Soter was screaming.

  * * *

  MORS TOOK THE CALL from Sellars. Dispensing with a greeting, Sellars said, “Did you know Parker was here, in England?”

  Sellars had remained in touch with the last of the Familists after the destruction of the church at Prosperous, and the accompanying extirpation of the spirit that dwelt within and beneath the old kirk. They told him what they suspected: that the devastation was revenge for their abortive attempt to kill Parker, and the consequences for the town—fire, death, and the abandonment of land and homes by families that had lived there for generations—confirmed that nothing of their god had survived. Sellars had urged them to try again, but they demurred. The church was gone, half of Prosperous lay in ruins, and even if this incarnation of their god were somehow to be reborn, its maturation would come too late. Generations would live out their lives, and centuries would pass, before the god’s roots began to spread once more. What good was that to them?

  But Sellars had faith. He still believed. The Green Man had spoken to him, and made him its apostle. The original seed of it lay dormant beneath the Hexhamshire Moors. It needed only a little moisture.

  A little life.

  So he had directed Holmby to give Romana Moon to it. He believed in the Not-Gods, but he venerated the Green Man. As the blood left Romana Moon, it had passed into the seed of the deity beneath the ground, and woken it from its slumber. Within hours, Sellars had seen in his dreams the first shoots emerging, and heard the song of rebirth.

  And then Parker had come. The farmer, Hood, told Sellars of what the detective had done: an old cross buried in the ground, and after that the descent of the rain, hiding all traces of disturbance. Hood claimed not to have seen the actual committal of the cross. He turned away, he said, in case someone like Sellars should follow, seeking to undo what Parker had achieved. Sellars didn’t believe Hood, but it was of no consequence. The god was dead. Had Parker been present in the farmhouse at that moment, Sellars would have torn him apart with his bare hands. In Parker’s absence, Sellars had to be content with Hood. He’d tried to make it last, but his rage was too great. At least Hood’s pain had been commensurate with it, however briefly.

  But now Sellars wanted Parker.

  “We knew only that he would come eventually,” Mors told him. “We could not say when.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “He has only lately shown himself in London.”

  “He has been to the moors,” said Sellars. “He has killed my god.”

  Sellars’s voice caught in grief. Who knew how much DNA he’d left at Hood’s cottage, along with footprints in the dirt, and tire tracks in the mud? The police would soon be looking for him, but he didn’t care. He’d take his own life before they got to him, but only after he’d avenged his god.

  “What do you want me to do?” said Mors.

  “Help me to find Parker. Help me to kill him.”

  And Mors saw the circle begin to close.

  11

  Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;

  Light dies before thy uncreating word:

  Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

  And universal Darkness buries All.

  —Alexander Pope, “The Dunciad”

  CHAPTER CIX

  Parker, Angel, Louis, and Bob Johnston met for dinner at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields. As requested, they were shown to a booth, and left Louis to order the wine.

  “An apt choice,” said Johnston to Louis, who had decided on the venue. “A steakhouse named after a noted architect and occultist.”

  Louis stared hard at Johnston.

  “I picked this place,” he said, once he’d determined that Johnston wasn’t kidding, “because I heard the steaks were good. You start using a crystal ball to make dinner reservations, and you’ll be eating alone.”

  From Johnston, Parker had received a history lesson on Nicholas Hawksmoor while walking to the restaurant. Hawksmoor’s fame was based on the six churches he had designed for the city of London as part of the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711, along with two others built in collaboration with another surveyor, John James. Hawksmoor’s architectural creations were curious, involving pyramids and obelisks, as well as a sacred geometry derived from the Old Testament book of Numbers, which lent very particular alignments to these places of worship. St. Mary Woolnoth, one of Hawksmoor’s churches, stoo
d 2,000 cubits from another of his designs, the masterpiece of Christ Church, Spitalfields, which in turn lay 2,000 cubits from Wellclose Square, long a hotbed of occultism.

  Two thousand cubits, Johnston explained, or about two-thirds of a mile, was the distance from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem, and the farthest a Jew was permitted to walk on the Sabbath. The rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, masterminded by another occultist architect, Christopher Wren, was based on this measurement, and Hawksmoor, who clerked for Wren, worked from it in turn. According to some observers, the disposition of Hawksmoor’s churches could, if examined correctly, be seen as points on triangles and pentacles mapped over the city of London, like power generators on a great occult grid.

  All of which would have been of only passing interest to Parker, had Johnston not added: “In his youth, Hawksmoor trained as a clerk with a Justice Mellust in Yorkshire. I found only one reference to Mellust, in a history of the London rare book trade. In 1673, Mellust was sued in the Court of Chancery for the return of a copy of the Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex, a sixteenth-century treatise on magic written by a Jesuit scholar named Martin del Río, which Mellust was alleged to have obtained under false pretenses from the estate of a Yorkshire wool merchant named Paxton. The copy of the Disquisitionum was del Río’s own, from the Jesuit college at Leuven in the Low Countries, and annotated in his hand, including a lengthy essay on the Fractured Atlas, possibly intended for a later edition.

  “The litigant was Geoffrey Paxton, the son of the deceased. Paxton was almost illiterate, a dissolute and a drunk, with no interest in books of any kind. The gossip of the time suggested he had been encouraged to take the case by a wealthy collector, someone who didn’t want his desire for the book to be made public, and was funded accordingly. Paxton was found dead at an inn two days after the resolution of the case in favor of the defendant, murdered for what was assumed to be the contents of his purse, although his killers took their time with him, and left him with his balls in his mouth. Guess which London law firm represented Mellust?”

  “Quayle,” said Parker.

  “In the form of one Creighton Quayle,” Johnston confirmed. “Would you like the last piece of the puzzle?”

  “Go on.”

  “The Disquisitionum was the only volume Mellust bought from the Paxton collection, and there is no record of him purchasing, or even attempting to acquire, another book in his lifetime. It seems that Mellust, like Paxton, wasn’t a big reader.”

  “Except Mellust, unlike Paxton, didn’t end up castrated.”

  “Because he secured the book, even if someone else took the loss badly enough to sue him over the circumstances of its acquisition.”

  “And the firm of Quayle represented Mellust in the case…”

  “… because Mellust acted as a front for the firm in obtaining the Disquisitionum,” Johnston finished. “Why Mellust chose to do so is another question. Perhaps some men enjoy the whiff of brimstone by association.”

  Given Louis’s response to his earlier comment about Hawksmoor, Johnston elected not to repeat that particular lecture at the restaurant. Everyone ordered steak, since it seemed foolish not to, and shared bread and ribs to start. Once the wine had arrived, Johnston took out his notes and updated them on the progress of his researches, which included collating, at Parker’s request, media reports on the killing of Romana Moon on the Hexhamshire Moors, and the murders connected to it by the presence of misbaha—or, in the case of Gary and Karl Holmby, by suspicion of involvement in at least one of the killings.

  “What links the body dumps are their antiquity,” said Johnston. “They’ve all been places of worship—and, in some cases, sacrifice—for a long, long time.”

  “But why not Fairford?” Parker asked Johnston. “We know its church is connected to the Atlas, so why not stage a killing there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Johnston. “But you haven’t seen those stained-glass windows, and I have. The images on them have been intruding on my dreams. And…”

  His face pantomimed his inner feelings, as he debated continuing.

  “Go on,” said Parker. “How much stranger can it get?”

  “There is a word—paneel, or sometimes panelen in the plural—that recurs in Dutch texts related to the Atlas. It has always been translated as ‘panel,’ as in the illustrative panels of a book, usually in reference to the final page of the Atlas, the laatste pagina, but it also means ‘pane,’ as in a pane of glass. The original translation came from Couvret, the Huguenot who was Quayle’s partner for a time, and probably died because of it. Couvret is the one believed to have transported the Atlas to England, before hiding it when he realized just how dangerous it was. What if the mistranslation was part of Couvret’s effort at concealment? What if panelen doesn’t refer to paper, but glass, and Fairford is the last place? What if, in the end, everything comes down to that old church?”

  “But why wouldn’t others have spotted this?” asked Louis. “Why not Quayle?”

  “Because Quayle hasn’t seen what Parker and I have seen,” said Johnston. “He didn’t get to glimpse the figures that haunt the pages of the Rackham book, the ones resembling images from the windows at Fairford. Perhaps he just doesn’t know, or hasn’t realized how significant they are.”

  Johnston put his papers away, and made up for lost ground with his wine.

  “I think you’re right,” said Parker. He thought of Sam’s phone call, one daughter passing on a message from another: Jennifer says they’re in the glass. “It comes down to Fairford, or it will, in the end.”

  When they’d all spent too much time thinking in silence, Parker told them of his visit with Emily Lockwood, and the subsequent call offering him access to the Old Firm.

  “Do you really think he might still be in there?” said Angel.

  “It doesn’t seem likely, but it can’t hurt to take a look.”

  Their steaks arrived. As Johnston cut into his—it was cooked so blue that he had to skewer it with his fork to prevent it from making a break for freedom—he said, “That’s not why you want to see it.”

  Parker tasted his own steak. It was very good: maybe not New York good, but still pretty darned fine, and served with a lot less attitude. Parker had largely given up on restaurants that made out like they were doing him a favor by taking his money.

  “Really?” he said, neutrally.

  “You want to go there,” said Johnston, “because you believe the Quayle you’re hunting may be the same Quayle who hired John Soter to find Lionel Maulding.” He was concentrating intently on his food, so did not look up from the plate as he continued. “And he is.”

  “That would make him kind of old,” said Angel. He was picking at his food, having ordered only the smallest of cuts. “The AARP could use him as a poster boy for active aging.”

  Johnston waved his knife in the air as he chewed, indicating that he wanted to swallow before he replied.

  “Don’t choke,” said Parker. “It would spoil the evening.”

  Johnston got the mouthful down.

  “Not only is he that Quayle,” he said, “but he’s the same man who represented clients in the mid-nineteenth century, and the eighteenth, and—since we’re on a roll—probably the seventeenth and late sixteenth centuries as well.”

  “And you figure this how?” said Louis. “Through the same psychic who picks your restaurants?”

  “Handwriting,” said Johnston, resolutely refusing to rise to the bait.

  “What?”

  Johnston took a sip of water.

  “Lawyers leave a paper trail,” he said. “It’s in the nature of the profession, and solicitors like Quayle leave behind more paper than barristers. They deal with a lot of mundane business that doesn’t require the involvement of courts—wills, transfers of ownership, trusts, business agreements—and copies of all those documents have to be stored somewhere.

  “So, using some of Special Agent Ross’s money—actually my own, but in th
e certain knowledge that it will be repaid from funds—I engaged a pair of impoverished English law graduates to go poking around the records of the Law Society, and the four Inns of Court, along with the National Archives, county record offices, diocesan record offices, and the Old Bailey, for criminal proceedings. They were told to look for any cases or disputes that might have involved the firm of Quayle, with a particular emphasis on matters relating to the acquisition of valuable books.

  “In the end, they found less than I might have anticipated from a business that had been in existence for so long—if Quayle was using his offices to hunt for the Atlas, he did so very warily—but they still came up with a sizable sheaf of material. Most of it was uninteresting, even by the standards of legal papers. It’s almost as though Quayle deliberately chose to specialize in the dullest aspects of the law—wills, administering estates, probate, property—in order to keep a low profile. But even he had to sign his name occasionally, or scribble a note.”

  Johnston reached into his ever-present bag and produced a fresh bundle of papers.

  “Take a look.”

  They did. Parker started out by trying to understand the contents of the documents themselves, but that made his eyes glaze over, so he stopped. Instead he took in a series of wills, property agreements, handwritten amendments to drafts, occasional letters to barristers, and signatures—many, many signatures. The earliest were ornate, in the manner of the times, and the style altered as the years progressed, but gradually a pattern became discernible. Sometimes obvious deviations occurred, as though the signatory had become aware that consistency over such long periods, and between supposedly different individuals, might invite investigation, but eventually even these fell by the wayside, probably at the start of the nineteenth century. After that, until the closure of the firm of Quayle in the 1940s, the signature appeared to be written in the hand of the same person. A graphologist might have begged to differ, and any graphoanalytical testimony either supporting or contradicting the theory wouldn’t have stood up in court anyway, not without a mass of other corroborating evidence, but to the layman’s eye, Atol Quayle had been signing his name, or variations upon it, for a very long time.