The Orpheus Trail

by Maureen Duffy

  ‘Don’t be late.’

  ‘Is it another boy?’ Hilary asked.

  ‘I suppose so. He didn’t say. Just that it looked like the same lot.’

  ‘Jack must have been involved in some way.’

  ‘We’ll never know that for sure.’

  ‘I don’t want to believe it.’

  ‘I know. Neither do I. I’ll ring you as soon as I’m back. My chairman won’t like this. It’s much too close to home again.’

  So I set out up the A127 towards London, passing the prince’s grave site and the end of my own road. Had Caesar come home yet? I couldn’t stop to find out. Leaving the old London arterial I turned north through Rayleigh to cross the River Crouch at Battlesbridge, and then drove north-east towards the Blackwater and the sea. By now I knew Bede’s history almost by heart and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle since the prince had so clearly become part of my life, so that even I knew that this is an old landscape stamped with the footprints of the dead Saxons and Vikings battling it out at Maldon.

  Minds shall be stronger, hearts shall be bolder

  Courage shall be more, as our strength grows less …

  The exhortation of Byrtnoth, the Saxon commander, as his remaining warriors rallied round him for a last stand, could have inspired a Henry V or a Churchill. This time though it hadn’t been enough. They were all cut down.

  Now I was driving through the saltings of the Essex marshes where Mehalah was drowned by her lover in the bestselling romance by the local vicar, Sabine Baring Gould, collector of folksongs, author of such religious hits as Onward Christian Soldiers and Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow, and contemporary of Thomas Hardy, an Essex Tess of the D’Urbervilles. ‘One of your lot,’ Hilary would say. Bradwell is on a hunched back of land between the Blackwater and the cold North Sea, a place of wheeling gulls and solitude, apart from the pilgrims and picnickers.

  The entrance for the car park was blocked by a police barrier, manned on either side by officers in luminous yellow jackets. I pulled up and wound down my window as one of them stepped forward.

  ‘The chapel is closed to the public, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Chief Inspector Hildreth asked me to meet him here.’

  ‘I see.’ He thought for a moment, staring hard at my face as if he could see through to my black heart and lying tongue. ‘Do you have some ID with you sir?’

  ‘Driving licence?’

  ‘That would help.’

  I fished in the glove compartment and handed over the green form in its plastic jacket.

  ‘Alex Kish?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The other officer had been busy on his mobile phone. Now he came over.

  ‘Alex Kish?’ The first one said.

  ‘That tallies with the number plate.’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Hildreth hasn’t arrived yet. I suggest you pull over there in the car park and someone will let you know when he’s ready for you.’

  ‘Thank you, officer.’ He handed back my driving licence.

  ‘I expect the traffic is bad getting out of London,’ I said, feeling some need to prove I was a normal, rational citizen. Then I drove carefully to a corner of the car park where they could keep an eye on me from the barrier and switched the engine off. It wouldn’t be seemly to play the radio I decided, so I got out the leaflets on the chapel that I had picked up from our display shelves, which included material on all the local places of interest tourists and natives might want to visit: Colchester Castle, Thaxted Windmill, Ingatestone Hall: the tangible fabric of Essex history.

  The two leaflets weren’t glossy affairs but single folded A4 sheets, with black-and-white prints and line drawings, giving the history of the chapel, proudly called ‘the first cathedral in England,’ and its founder, St Cedd, who had built it in 654 during the second attempt, this time by the Irish, to christianise the heathen Saxons. Cedd had sailed down from Lindisfarne where he had been schooled by St Aidan, who in turn had been taught by St Columba on Iona.

  Cedd had looked for the wildest place he could find to found his mission church and had used the remains of a Roman fort built to defend the Saxon shore as, legend said, St Antony, reputedly the first hermit, had done in Egypt. A line of saints stretched back from Essex to the North African deserts and the sphinx’s smile.

  I remembered paintings of the temptations of St Antony, of the haggard face of a man beset with demons in every shape and size, embodying all the conceivable weaknesses human flesh is prone to. Nowadays he would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic, suffering from multiple delusions, rather than an epileptic like Paul. But he had started a worldwide movement of monastic retreat that Cedd had still tried to follow, thousands of miles away and over three hundred years later, not just for his own spiritual satisfaction but, through the men and women he gathered around him, a mini-welfare state, a community of education, health care, food and safety until corruption and violence overwhelmed it.

  Now his chapel lay between the abandoned nuclear power station and the wildlife preservation area of Dengie to the south, home to a million migrant seabirds.

  ‘Dirty mags, Alex?’ Hildreth stuck his head through the window I had left wound down to reassure his colleagues.

  ‘Descriptions of the chapel and its founder.’

  ‘You can tell me as we walk. I gather it’s quite a hike.’

  ‘This was the Roman road to the fort before the church was built,’ I said, airing my newly acquired knowledge.

  ‘You’re not religious are you, Alex?’

  ‘No. Why? Are you?’

  ‘I was brought up a Catholic but the wife and I lapsed after our two kids were born. We thought that was enough. They sent me through some pictures on the computer before I left. That’s why I had to ask.’

  ‘Cedd used the tiles and stones from the fort and straddled the old wall with his new building. Hence the name, St Peter-on-the-wall. Apparently it’s much the same, that is the nave is, as when he left it to go and found another monastery in Yorkshire where he died.’

  ‘You’ve been here before?’

  ‘Once, a long time ago.’

  After about a half-mile walk, we came out from behind a hedge beside the path. A meadow of wild flowers and grasses waved between us and a small grey stone building with little windows like arrow slits set high up in its single storey. Beyond, the water glinted, very still, waiting. At high tide, the leaflet said, two thirds of the old fort is covered by the sea. I wondered briefly how it would manage the rise in sea level as the ice caps melted.

  A uniformed policeman stood by the door. Behind the chapel the sky was a high, luminous, pale opal as if there was nothing beyond but the edge of the world.

  ‘They won’t like having to carry the stuff all the way from the car park,’ Hildreth said motioning to the guard to open the door. ‘Come on.’

  Inside was a heavy curtain he pushed roughly aside. There was a pause while Hildreth felt around for a switch. The small windows high up in the rafters let in very little light. The smell of damp stone, slightly acid, mingling with a salty tone, as if the essence of the sea was trapped within the walls, gave me a sense of being entombed in a stone coffin. As my eyes grew more used to the gloom I could see a few patches of coloured light at the far end that must be a bigger window with stained glass. Then the light went on.

  ‘Good god!’

  ‘You see why I had to ask if you were religious.’

  At the far end on an altar, a single stone slab resting on three stone pillars, a boy’s body was propped upright fastened to a wooden cross, quite naked except for a chaplet of glossy leaves round his head. Holly, my mind supplied unconsciously.

  ‘You see what I mean?’

  I followed Hildreth as he walked towards the figure.

  ‘Who found it?’

  ‘Some woman who came in to do the flowers. There’s a service tomorrow. I haven’t, of course, spoken to her yet, she’s in shock, but I doubt if there’s much she can tell us. What do yo
u think?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ I stared at the strange scene, shocked to find myself unable to be horrified. Perhaps so many carved or painted crucifixions had dulled the senses after nearly two millennia but I could only see a macabre beauty in the still childishly soft skin, the closed bud of the penis drooping to one side like a wilting unopened peony, echoing the head slumped towards the left shoulder with the pointed chin resting on the jutting ridge of pale collar bone above the rack of ribs. And then the light from high up in the roof was caught on the small square of metal at the boy’s throat.

  ‘You’re right of course: it is the same.’

  ‘It could be a copycat.’

  ‘No,’ I said pointing at the figure, ‘there’s the lost piece from our stolen amulet.’

  ‘That’s it. The signature this kind of killer so often can’t resist. Except that until now they’ve been dead beforehand. We shan’t know about this one until forensics have a go at it. Come on, there’s nothing more we can do at the moment and I have to let the team get started. Let’s find a pub. This place gives me the creeps.’

  And yet, I remembered, when I had been here before it was filled with light, flowers, music, living people. It had seen death many times before when the Vikings ravaged this coast, then as a chapel of ease. Its tower had been a beacon for ships, then it became a barn. Through all the mutations it had kept a secret life of its own as if it had been waiting for this moment, a passion play in stone.

  Hildreth pulled back the curtain and we stepped out into the grey afternoon. I was glad of the sudden gust of wind and walked on ahead while he stopped to talk to the policemen.

  ‘The rest of the team has arrived. Where can we find a pub? All that cold and damp has made me want to pee.’

  ‘There’s a village…’

  ‘Now,’ he said when we were safely settled with drinks and sandwiches from the bar, ‘what’s it all about?’

  ‘Why do you think I know any more than you?’

  ‘Because it started on your patch and it’s something to do with your field – history, museums…’

  ‘Jack Linden would have been more use to you.’

  ‘Ay, but he’s dead, and that may be part of it. All I’ve got is you and what facts we can piece together. I feel, I know, in this case, facts alone aren’t enough. I need to know why, what’s behind it, what it means, if it has a meaning, before I can go after whoever’s doing it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll be more precise. What’s all this religious stuff? Explain that to me.’

  ‘I’ll try as far as I can understand it myself. Right then. The finds in the amulet that were stolen from us had two parts: a square of gold leaf with writing on it, folded up into four, so it made a smaller square the size of a postage stamp. It was very old. Jack said it was pre-Christian. The writing was Greek. Instructions to the soul on what to do after death.’

  ‘So where does this crucifixion bit come in?’

  ‘The other thing in the amulet was a round disc like a coin. Jack thought it might have been a Roman coin that had been altered. It had the symbols for several religions engraved on it: Mithraism, Orphism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Jack said the owner must have been hedging his bets, making sure all possibilities were covered.’

  ‘For good luck?’

  ‘For good luck after death. That’s how it ties in with the small gold plate. And it was found in a grave. But there were also two small gold crosses probably laid over his eyes so maybe he, or whoever buried him, thought Christianity gave him the best chance.’

  ‘Okay. I follow you so far. How does it tie in with the killings? I suppose this one’s obvious but what about the others?’

  ‘I’m not an expert but Jack thought the first boy on the pier had something to do with Dionysius because of a legend that included the toys that were found with the body.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The second in the glass egg was apparently Mithraism because Mithras was born from the cosmic egg.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Part of an old creation story like God moving on the face of the waters and taking six days to make the world.’

  ‘I think I can just remember that. Go on.’

  ‘The third one was Orpheus because of the severed head still singing.’

  ‘You said the gold square that was stolen was divided into four bits.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we’ve had four deaths so is that the end of it? No more bits; no more deaths? But what do the bits mean? Just a signature?’

  ‘You’ve forgotten the coin, the clue to the deaths,’ I said. So why didn’t I go on to say: ‘I’ve got it locked in my safe. I’ll tell you all about it’? But I didn’t. Again I held back. An idea was forming in my mind: that I would go and see Stalbridge again, confront him with the whole thing.

  Suddenly Hildreth said: ‘No, we can’t assume that. It’s too risky. They don’t stop like that, this sort of crime. They get a taste for it; they have to go on. Maybe they know what we’ve worked out and hope we’ll drop our guard: if there’s really all this religious stuff mixed up in it then we’re not just dealing with your ordinary paedo like Brady or Huntley, funny by the way they’re both called Ian. No, this is someone, or more than one, very sophisticated, probably contemptuous of your ordinary copper. He doesn’t know I’ve got you for back up.’

  Oh yes he does, I thought, but it had passed the point where I could blurt everything out, like not being able to remember some important official’s name at a function or a conference and having to pretend because it’s too late to ask and admit your failure. And maybe they didn’t know, only about my visit to Stalbridge. But then they had watched the house, taken Caesar, maybe even followed me here. I had to assume they knew about Hildreth and our meetings as well, even if it had been only by coincidence that they had seen me at the British Museum when they were really following Stalbridge.

  ‘I don’t see that I can be of any more use now,’ I said. ‘I’d better get back to work.’ I was thinking that if the news had already got out the chairman would be on the blower, no doubt holding me personally responsible.

  ‘There’s not much I can do either until forensics and the others come up with some results. The days of Sherlock Holmes snooping for clues with his magnifying glass are over. Now it’s all teamwork, technology and psychological profiling.’ He ran his fingers through the short black curls and heaved himself to his feet, downing the last of his lager. The tough Geordie mask slipped for a moment and I saw the strain on his face. Then he smiled and put out a hand. ‘We’ll keep in touch, Alex. Let’s hope this is the last but we still need to unravel this mess. They mustn’t beat us.’

  As I had feared, the next morning there was a call from the chairman.

  ‘Have you seen the papers, Kish? What’s all this about?’

  ‘What’s that, chairman?’

  ‘This, this thing at Bradwell. Too close, it’s too close.’

  ‘I’m just opening today’s paper. I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Soon as you can.’ The phone was slammed down.

  There it all was. The woman who had gone to do the flowers and found the body, telling her story; the police not commenting ‘at this stage of the enquiry’.

  Last night when I reached my house after a long crawl through the homebound traffic into Southend, and armed myself with a whisky and dry ginger, I had rung Hilary.

  ‘I wish you were here.’

  ‘So do I. Are they sure it’s another one like the others?’

  ‘He had the last piece of the amulet round his neck. That clinches it rather.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it does. When can we meet?’

  And suddenly I thought that if they were really watching maybe she wouldn’t be safe either. ‘I’ll have to hang on here for a bit after today’s little outing in case Hildreth blows for me again. I suppose I should feel flattered that he seems to think I
can help him. I just wish it would all go away. But you can’t refuse a Detective Chief Inspector. He might think I’ve got something to hide.’ Even to me my excuses didn’t sound convincing.

  ‘Hell hath no fury like a Chief Inspector scorned.’

  ‘Something like that.’ She had made a joke of it but I detected the hurt in her voice. ‘I miss you,’ I said and it was true but I couldn’t explain, and anyway I knew she wouldn’t accept an explanation that involved her own safety.

  ‘Do you, Alex?’

  It was a painful end to my call and again I wished irrationally that the whole bizarre train of events had never begun but then I might never have got to know Hilary.

  I dialled the chairman’s number hoping he wouldn’t be there.

  ‘Well you took your time. So what’s all this about? Is it anything to do with us?’

  ‘Not directly, of course. Bradwell comes under Colchester.’

  ‘It’s still Essex. I see what you mean though. People may not make the connection. Bradwell’s pretty out of the way; almost in Suffolk. So you think we’re in the clear?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Not quite. The police think it’s the same person, or persons, doing all these things.’

  ‘Murders you mean. Say what you mean, Kish.’

  ‘They’re not sure. It’s certainly a series of deaths but they’re keeping an open mind about murder.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about what the police are thinking.’

  ‘The inspector in charge asked me to go to Bradwell yesterday.’

  ‘And you went?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they do think it’s something to do with us, otherwise why would they want you?’

  ‘There are certain aspects to do with the historical background that they think are important.’ I sounded like a real prick.

  ‘Why don’t they just get on and find these people rather than flapping about? I don’t approve of one of our staff being involved in this way.’

  ‘I could hardly refuse the police.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not blaming you, Kish. It’s just that they should do their own dirty work, what they’re paid for. Any more requests of that nature you refer them to me.’