by Mark Roberts
‘There are seven men permanently here, including myself and Father Sebastian,’ Aidan replied to a question Rosen hadn’t posed.
Above the staircase, a Victorian oil painting of St Dominic, unsmiling and solitary, cast his eyes on Rosen as he made his way up to the upstairs landing and a dark windowless corridor.
‘I was surprised by his asking me to call you.’ Aidan smiled but didn’t look happy. ‘You should listen to him closely. He’s – the word blessed seems inappropriate. He’s insightful.’
Aidan stopped at a door with the number eleven painted onto its dark surface. There was a single scratch mark that cut through the white digits, along with a network of cracks, and made Rosen think of a DNA helix.
‘There are more rooms than men,’ said Aidan, tapping on the door, nervously it seemed to Rosen. Silence. He knocked again, a little more firmly and said, ‘Father Sebastian? You have a visitor. Father, are you there?’
In the space of a breath, Rosen recollected the grey acres of his childhood. The central image was of a thin man, his own absent father, with a few possessions stuffed into two carrier bags, walking away from the front door of the flat, along the landing of the tenement block, never looking back as he turned onto the staircase, never to be seen again.
‘He mightn’t be in his room.’ Aidan banged on the door with the palm of his hand. ‘He has hearing difficulties. After Kenya.’
Slowly, Aidan turned the handle and pushed the door open. Inside the room, a match was struck on a coarse surface, its red tip flaring. The door opened wider.
His back turned to the opening door, Father Sebastian was lighting an incense stick. A sliver of smoke rose from its tip. He killed the match with dampened finger and thumb.
It was a small room, with a single bed, one closed window, a small row of books, and a porcelain sink with a mirror above in which Rosen glimpsed Father Sebastian’s face. His eyes were blue, his face ageing but model handsome, his hair black and slick with sweat or water. Their eyes connected in the glass.
‘It’s an upside-down and back-to-front world,’ said the priest, smiling and turning. ‘Chief Inspector David Rosen?’
‘Father Sebastian.’
‘Thank you for coming to see me. Would you like to – please, come in.’
Sebastian turned back to the sink, ran hot water over a white flannel and placed the plug in the plughole. His white T-shirt was grey with age and clung to his back with a circle of sweat. There was a hole in the side, the size of a fifty-pence piece, just above the hip where the elasticized band of his shapeless jogging bottoms hugged his narrow waist. Lean and poor, thought Rosen, poor and lean.
Rosen moved into the room, the smell of incense rising above the salt of the priest’s body and the fading sulphur of the match.
‘Aidan, thank you so much for calling Detective Rosen.’
‘You spoke with him yourself, last night.’
‘A ringing phone in an empty room. In the silence of the evening, the sound could have pierced the walls and disturbed your prayers. I picked up and spoke to Detective Rosen. Serendipity.’
He dipped his head and wiped his face with the flannel.
So why weren’t you praying with them?, thought Rosen, but asked, ‘You a keen runner, Father?’
‘Just a couple of hours each morning.’
‘Would you like some tea, Detective Rosen?’ asked Aidan. ‘Coffee, perhaps?’
‘Aidan, we’ll join you in the kitchen, in a few minutes,’ said the priest, and Rosen wondered who the most senior member of the community was.
‘No problem, Sebastian.’
Aidan closed the door and walked away with brisk footsteps; the sounds of someone keen to be elsewhere.
There were deep white marks, fierce lines on the priest’s skin, scar tissue, showing through the wet patch on his T-shirt. Rosen ran his eyes up and down his muscular arms. Nothing. Only unmatching sweatbands, oddly old-fashioned, around each wrist, and on his feet trainers that didn’t belong to the same pair.
‘I hope you don’t mind the holy smoke. It’s a small room and it becomes unpleasant if I don’t. Someone, some clever soul, painted over the woodwork on the window and it’s stuck, it won’t open.’
Sebastian dried his face on a hand towel and sat down on the bed.
‘I haven’t got a chair.’
The bed was the only alternative then, to standing awkwardly and trying not to stare down at the priest’s face.
Rosen sat on the bed. On the floor, at his feet, face down, lay a sheet of glossy paper, A4, with blu-tak in each corner. A picture for the bare walls? There were blu-tak marks on the wall between the bed and the sink, and the discolorations made Rosen think of the remains of the old lady at 24 Brantwood Road; chemical stains left behind by a neglected life.
‘You look pensive, Detective.’ Rosen felt pensive. ‘Mind if I call you David?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Did your mother name you after the great Hebrew king?’
‘I come from a long line of secular Jews, Father. But I am married to a Catholic.’
He appeared not to hear.
‘You didn’t do Hebrew at your school?’
‘We didn’t do a great deal of English at my school, Father.’
‘I’m younger than you, David. Drop the “Father”, and call me Sebastian, if you like.’
‘You said you had some information.’
‘What a world we live in.’
Rosen gave him time, but he said nothing further for what soon felt like too long. Monastic time and real time collided in Rosen’s head and his patience frayed. He pulled a dictaphone from his pocket.
‘Mind if I record this chat of ours?’
Nothing. Not a flicker.
Rosen pressed ‘record’.
‘Date, fourteenth of March. Time of interview, eight-fifteen. DCI David Rosen interviewing Father Sebastian, in his room, room number eleven, at St Mark’s Monastery, near Faversham in Kent. No other witnesses present.’
Amusement danced in the priest’s eyes.
‘Would you please state your name? For the tape.’
‘Father Sebastian.’
‘Father, you told me on the telephone last night that you knew the motive for the killings of four women and the abduction of Julia Caton. Is that correct?’
‘That is correct.’
‘You also told me how the killer gained access to the home of his fifth victim.’ Flint nodded at Rosen’s words. ‘That detail is known only to the police and to the killer. Given that knowledge, and your claim to knowing the motive for the abduction and killings, then, logically, as I stated on the phone last night, this means you either know the killer or are the killer.’
‘I do not know the killer. I am not the killer.’
‘Then how do you know the motive?’
‘I also told you, on the phone last night, I was once the pope’s adviser on all matters relating to the occult.’
‘That is indeed what you told me.’ Rosen made a mental note to check the claim.
Silence, broken only by the drone of a tractor in the distant countryside.
‘How does your former occupation give you an insight into the motive for the murders? How does your expertise in the occult allow you to know how the killer got into Julia Caton’s home?’
A battered gathering of hardback and paperback books by the bedside. The Holy Bible NIV. Malleus Maleficarum. St Augustine’s Confessions. St Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Thomas à Kempis. Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake.
Rosen touched his throat.
‘Insight, Father Sebastian – what is your insight into the killer’s motive?’
‘These are copycat killings, I suspect. Does the name Alessio Capaneus mean anything to you?’
‘Should it?’
‘Not really. He’s a fairly obscure figure, remembered by few. It’s my belief, I’m afraid, that he’s at the root of these abductions and killings.�
��
‘Who is Alessio Capaneus?’
‘Was. He’s dead.’
‘Who was Alessio Capaneus?’
‘He was alive somewhere around 1265; his date of birth is not certain but he died for sure in 1291. There’s no doubt about his demise.’
Rosen was suddenly visited by the notion that he’d seen the priest before, that he knew his face, but couldn’t fix it in a time or place.
‘Who was he?’
‘He was a necromancer, one who conjures up the dead to learn the secrets of heaven and hell. He lived in Florence.’
‘In the thirteenth century?’
Because it was officially his day off, Rosen couldn’t charge the priest with wasting police time, but he couldn’t help his desperate disappointment showing in his slowly sinking shoulders.
‘David, you’re looking at me as if I should be in a psychiatric unit, not a monastery.’
‘No, I’m . . . I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’
Was he one of those vague rambling men who used to haunt the day room when Sarah was ill in hospital? If so, thought Rosen, I must be kind to the priest, and patient, not let my disappointment show.
‘I’m sorry, Father, you were saying.’
‘Very little is known about him. He abducted and killed six Florentine women and removed their babies from their wombs.’
‘That’s why you said he’d take one more woman after Julia Caton?’
‘Exactly. There is one telling detail: the audacious manner of abducting his fifth victim from her home by breaking into the house next door. It’s my view that Capaneus was pouring contempt on the Florentine authorities and cranking up the terror. But so little else is known. It’s as if the human race made a decision long ago to wipe the memory of Capaneus from the face of the earth. A fragment here, a mention there in a footnote. Some scholars – the ones who have heard of him – even deny his existence, claiming it as a medieval myth, one of many designed to control and suppress women.’
‘If there’s any information about him, it’s bound to be on the internet,’ observed Rosen.
‘We don’t have the internet here. Or TV. We do have a radio. This is how I learned of the murders in the capital.’
‘I have a laptop. We could look him up on the internet, before I leave.’
‘We’d have to OK it with Aidan, he’s in charge.’
Rosen searched Sebastian’s face for a smile, a flicker of irony, but he was deadpan.
Sebastian picked up the picture that had fallen onto the floor and looked at the image, showing only the blank side to Rosen. He placed it face downwards on the pillow.
‘Aren’t you going to put the picture back on the wall?’ suggested Rosen.
‘This afternoon perhaps.’
Rosen wanted to know which single image the priest would exhibit in the confines of his cell and said, ‘No time like the present.’
‘Then I’ll have nothing to do later on today.’
‘Coffee. Let’s have a coffee.’
Rosen suspended the interview, shut down the dictaphone and followed the priest out of the poverty of his narrow room.
12
The kitchen at St Mark’s was stone-built but warm from the iron ovens, and full of the aroma of bread and coffee. A great hideout from the world, thought Rosen.
Aidan stood at a distance that professed a lack of interest in the internet but at an angle that allowed him to see the screen.
‘There was a time,’ said Sebastian, ‘when you had to get into the British Library to see anything like this. Have you been to the British Library, Aidan?’
‘I’ve never been, Sebastian.’
‘OK! We’re in business.’ Rosen ran his index finger over the mouse pad as Aidan placed two mugs of coffee on the plain wooden table on which sat the laptop.
‘Thanks, Aidan.’ Sebastian moved the cups to a safe distance from Rosen’s laptop and asked, ‘Not joining us?’
Aidan raised a glass of water to his lips and shook his head.
‘Type the name of the person in the box,’ said Rosen, an unconfident speller.
With one finger, Sebastian typed the words Alessio Capaneus and asked, ‘What now?’
Rosen rolled the cursor onto the search button and clicked. Just 0.73 seconds later 1,400,000 matches had been found.
‘Wow!’ A sigh of heartfelt wonder escaped Sebastian.
‘Don’t get too excited. They aren’t all actually about the man we’re investigating.’
Rosen scrolled down the first page and, after the sixth reference, direct references to Alessio Capaneus went cold. He skipped to page two and found a reference that replicated one from the first page. Page three, nothing. Four, five, six, seven, blank. Nothing.
He came back to the first page.
‘You’re going too fast for me,’ said Sebastian.
‘You were right. He is obscure.’
Of the six sites found, three were one and the same. The fourth and fifth site contained a one-line reference to ‘Alessio Capaneus, thirteenth-century witch’.
‘But he wasn’t a witch,’ said Sebastian.
‘Which gives you a clue as to how reliable information on the internet can be.’
‘You mean there’s no editorial control on the internet?’ Sebastian sounded astonished.
Rosen didn’t know what to say, or where to begin explaining, so he just said, ‘That’s correct, Father Sebastian. There is no editorial control on the internet. It would be like trying to create order in grains of desert sand when a windstorm was raging. Didn’t you use the internet when you were at the Vatican?’
‘Grains of sand?’ replied the priest. The sixth site merely listed Alessio Capaneus among other known Florentines of the period. ‘The internet was just about coming in when I left Rome for Kenya.’
‘What were you doing in Kenya?’ asked Rosen.
‘The Lord’s work. What about these three at the top?’ asked Sebastian.
‘It’s . . . the same three.’ Rosen clicked onto the top site. ‘It’s a directory of the occult. Look.’ He scrolled so that the single paragraph referring to Alessio Capaneus was visible on screen.
Alessio Capaneus, thirteenth century, precise birth date and parentage unknown, Florentine street child, taken into the home of Filippo Capaneus, White Guelph (who gave him his family name), as penance for pederastic abuse.
‘Tshhh!’ The sound escaped from Rosen’s lips, steam from the valves of his heart. ‘Brilliant. Punish a paedophile by making him take in a vulnerable child.’
‘You have a child, David?’ asked the priest.
Rosen looked at the priest and then back at the laptop screen.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘No, no . . .’
‘I thought you were going to say, “Yes” and then you said “No” . . . three times.’
Rosen tapped the screen and began reading aloud, ‘Alessio began having religious visions, which became more and more disturbing, evoking violent reactions from the teenager.’ The almost invisible footprint of someone from the depths of history started mattering to him. The boy who was Alessio Capaneus was no doubt driven mad by the attentions of a sexually perverted stepfather. He continued to read:
Exiled from Florence, he returned – incognito – with esoteric texts from the Middle East and Africa. He was arrested, tried and hanged for the abduction and murder of six pregnant women, notably Beatrice Ciacco, fifth victim, a neighbour of the Capaneus family. Capaneus broke into his family home and into the Ciacco house to abduct Beatrice. Foetuses were removed for an obscure Satanic rite. Under torture, Capaneus refused to testify. Following moral panic, his execution sparked a riot in which his body was torn down from the gallows and ripped asunder so that no vestige of his earthly existence remained.
‘That’s why I asked Aidan to contact you. That’s why I told you he’d take another woman after he’d destroyed Julia Caton and her child.’
‘What else do you know about Capaneus?’ Rosen tried to hi
de the hunger in his voice.
‘ To be honest, I’ve learned a great deal simply from looking at this account on the internet. This is positively encyclopaedic. I didn’t know he was a street child, I assumed he was a blood member of the Capaneus family. His name and his crime and the time and place he lived in: that’s the sum of my knowledge.’
‘There must be other information about him out there.’
‘I haven’t seen anything other than two references in articles about the Florentine legal system.’
‘Can you recall what the references to Capaneus stated?’ asked Rosen, without much hope.
‘Something about a book he’s alleged to have written, or a pamphlet.’
‘What’s the book called, Father Sebastian?’
‘It’s speculation, hearsay from the trial.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think such a book exists.’
‘No one’s going to copycat on such meagre pickings. There’s got to be more meat on the bone to inspire a copycat.’ Rosen moved up a gear.
‘Then it’s down to you to find it, Detective Rosen. The meat and the bone.’
Outside, a blackbird gave up her song and an ascending plane made the sky moan.
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Father Sebastian, how did you get to be a papal adviser on the occult?’
‘I gained a PhD in Anthropolgy from Cambridge. My thesis, “Beyond The Golden Bough”, required me to research magic and ritual.’
That’s how, thought Rosen, with the ache of a boy who’d never quite caught up in class.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to add, Father Sebastian?’
Sebastian shook his head. Across the length of the kitchen, Rosen read the crease in Aidan’s brow.
‘Nothing at all?’ Rosen pushed the priest but looked directly at Aidan.
‘I’ve told you everything I know.’ A flicker of thought made the priest’s expression quizzical.
‘What is it, Father?’ asked Rosen.
‘Can you look up anyone on the internet?’
‘Just Google the name. Want me to do you?’