The Truth

by Peter James

  ‘It would be a shame to lose Susan Carter.’

  ‘It would, I agree, but that’s not our priority.’

  There was a pause, then Mr Sarotzini said, ‘You will bring her into the clinic the moment you sense any danger?’

  ‘Yes, I’m monitoring the situation very carefully and Stefan Kündz has a private ambulance on permanent standby – we can’t risk her being whipped off into a hospital.’

  ‘Good. You will keep me informed?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Chapter Forty-five

  She hadn’t intended to take the books home. But the cheerful young salesgirl in the shop had been so insistent. That was what the books were for, she’d told Susan, you couldn’t really get an idea of how any of them were going to look until you held them up to the walls in your home. Susan found herself kneeling on the floor of the smallest of the spare rooms, surrounded by pattern books of baby and children’s wallpaper, and half listening to Kaleidoscope on Radio Four.

  It was Monday, 18 March. She was more aware of the date now, in her pregnancy, than she had ever been before in her life, and almost daily she compared her condition against the calendar in her book, seeing how her swollen abdomen compared to the illustrations, making sure everything corresponded. She knew that Bump was covered in vernix, according to her book a greasy, cheesy material that stopped him becoming water-logged from his constant immersion in the amniotic fluid. The book told her also that if born premature, his chances of survival would be 95 per cent; this was a 5 per cent improvement on a fortnight ago. He – or she – was about thirty-seven centimetres long and weighed about nine hundred grammes.

  She had told Bump all this.

  It was going to be a long week. John was away until Wednesday night on business up in the north of England and Scotland. She didn’t mind being in the house on her own, but she was going to miss him, and miss having her days broken up. She was going to the cinema tomorrow with Kate Fox, and she’d offered to take Caroline Addison out for lunch on Wednesday, but Caroline wasn’t sure whether she’d feel up to it.

  The doorbell rang.

  Susan looked at her watch, slightly irritated. It was just after four thirty. She wasn’t expecting anyone and the afternoon short story, which she always tried to catch, was broadcast at four forty-five. She’d been particularly looking forward to today’s as it was by an author she knew. On the other hand, she was pleased to have a visitor, any visitor, to relieve the loneliness, even if it was Jehovah’s Witnesses with whom she could get into an argument, or a youth with a speech impediment selling dusters.

  It was Fergus Donleavy.

  He stood on the doorstep, the collar of his jacket turned up against the acid wind, hands in his trouser pockets, anxiety in his face.

  ‘Susan, you got my message?’

  She was both surprised and pleased to see him. ‘No, what message?’

  ‘On your machine. I rang this morning.’

  She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, God, I’ve been out. A doctor’s appointment, I completely forgot to check my messages. Come in. Would you like some tea?’

  ‘I was on my way back into town – is it convenient?’

  ‘Yes, it’s nice to see you,’ she said. ‘Actually, this is good timing, I have some queries on the manuscript, on chapter twenty-three. I was going to ring you.’

  They went through to the kitchen and she put the kettle on.

  ‘So how are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, fine, I guess.’

  Susan could see from his expression that she hadn’t fooled him. He paced around the kitchen, looking restless. While the kettle was coming to the boil, she got out a mug for Fergus and a glass for herself and opened a tin of shortcake. Fergus sat down at the kitchen table and munched a piece. Then, looking out of the window, he asked, ‘Is that a cherry, that tree?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘A flowering cherry – or do you get fruit from it?’

  ‘We didn’t get any fruit last year. I think it must be ornamental.’

  He took another piece of shortcake, and held it without eating it. ‘Did you ever go to the blossom festival in Washington? They have it every May.’

  ‘Washington DC?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shook her head. ‘I never went to Washington DC. I keep feeling I ought to one day, pay homage to my nation’s capital.’

  He nodded, abstractedly. There seemed to be something on his mind, but he was taking his time getting around to it. He looked out of the window again. ‘I didn’t notice the cherry tree before.’

  ‘It was here last week.’

  He smiled, bit in half the shortcake he was holding and stared at the segment that remained as if it were an object of art, or a relic of immense importance. When he had finished chewing, he cleared his throat. ‘How are the pains?’

  ‘They’re OK.’

  He studied her face with concern. ‘You still don’t look right. You’re seven months’ pregnant, you should be glowing. Five to seven months is meant to be a woman’s best time.’

  ‘I know, I read the books.’

  ‘And your obstetrician, Miles Van Rhoe, is happy about your condition?’

  ‘He says the cyst is shrinking. Actually I had a bit of a ding-dong with him last week.’ She poured water into Fergus’s mug, then began prodding the teabag with a spoon to speed up the steeping. ‘He’s adamant that I have a Caesarean. I want to have the baby naturally. Do you take milk in tea? My brain’s going, I can’t remember.’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Look, it’s your baby, Susan, if you want it born naturally, that’s your right. You tell him that’s what you want, and if he doesn’t like it, then you’ll go to another obstetrician.’

  She poured herself some apple juice, brought the mug and glass over to the table and sat down. ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Susan blushed.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m out of order,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re not. It’s just –’ Her voice tailed off. She picked up her glass and sipped the cold juice.

  Fergus looked out of the window again. Susan’s eyes followed his gaze. The robin was hopping around on the lawn, looking for some crumbs she had thrown out earlier that he might have missed. Then Fergus said, ‘When we had lunch, before Christmas, you mentioned the name Sarotzini.’

  She tried to sound off-hand but it didn’t come out that way. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t know what the connection is, and if you want to tell me it’s none of my business, that’s fine, I’ll shut up.’

  ‘It’s none of your business,’ she said.

  In the silence that followed, she was surprised at herself. Her reply had come out spontaneously and she felt a little embarrassed now. She fiddled with her cup, tilted the tin of shortcake towards Fergus. ‘Have another?’

  But she could read in his face that this wasn’t going to go away, and part of her didn’t want it to.

  He was staring at her. His hands slid to his jacket pockets and pulled out his cigarettes and lighter. ‘How do you find Miles Van Rhoe?’

  ‘I like him.’ She paused. ‘He’s very thorough, very kind. Well, I did like him up until last week. Now I’m fast going off him.’ She smiled. ‘He has a rather sour nurse, but I do think he’s brilliant. Why?’

  ‘Scotland Yard have a file on him.’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘A file? What kind of file?’

  He stirred his tea, although it didn’t need stirring. ‘Scotland Yard have an occult investigation team, as part of their porn squad. It’s main purpose is to monitor satanic and black magic organisations, covens, seeing which ones are involved in child pornography, checking out rumours of sacrifice, that whole arena. It’s the child abuse angle that’s their main focus.’

  A cold ripple shimmied through her. ‘What does Miles Van Rhoe have to do with this?’

  ‘The team raided a black mass in North London about four years ago, afte
r a tip-off that a new-born baby was going to be sacrificed.’ He set down the spoon on the table, then looked her straight in the eye. ‘Miles Van Rhoe was at that mass.’

  ‘Miles Van Rhoe?’ The room felt odd, suddenly, as if she was viewing it through a distorting mirror. The walls seemed narrower, the ceiling higher. ‘My Miles Van Rhoe?’ She did not want to believe this.

  ‘The society obstetrician.’ He raised his eyebrows at her for confirmation, saw her anxious nod, then went on. ‘They didn’t find anything. But they reckoned that was because the coven knew they were coming, they’d been warned.’

  ‘And Miles Van Rhoe was there? Are you sure?’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’

  He gave her a look that she immediately understood. Fergus had a lot of friends in high places. ‘I had lunch with the deputy police commissioner on Friday – in a private dining room at Scotland Yard, which was rather smart.’

  She smiled distractedly in acknowledgement of this. ‘So what happened after this raid?’

  ‘One of the guys from the Yard leaked the titbit about Van Rhoe to a reporter on the Evening Standard, called Ben Miller. His editor wouldn’t go with it – probably nervous of a libel action. Miller decided to take it to Private Eye. Rang up the editor, arranged to meet – but he never got there. He threw himself under a tube train on his way.’

  Susan swallowed, her mouth dry. ‘What are you trying to say to me, Fergus?’

  He held up the cigarette packet. ‘OK if I …?’

  ‘Sure.’ She got him an ashtray.

  He pulled out a cigarette. ‘Do you know much about the occult in Europe in this century?’

  ‘When I started at Magellan Lowry, I was an editorial assistant on a kind of history of the occult.’

  ‘Is there any one name that stands out in your memory?’

  ‘Aleister Crowley?’

  ‘Why him?’

  ‘All the legends about him, I guess. Wasn’t he called the Wickedest Man in the World?’

  ‘That’s what he styled himself, yes. Your book didn’t mention the name Sarotzini?’

  ‘No, I’m sure it didn’t.’

  ‘No books ever do. He was too smart ever to let his real name get printed – even to let his existence get known outside a privileged inner circle – and he used a raft of aliases. A lot of people reckoned that Emil Sarotzini was the Antichrist. The Devil incarnate. When Crowley styled himself the Wickedest Man in the World, Sarotzini was his role model. That’s who Crowley wanted to be like. How old is this Emil Sarotzini that you know?’

  ‘Late fifties, perhaps. It’s hard to tell.’

  Fergus lit his cigarette and drew on it. ‘Emil Sarotzini is alleged to have died in nineteen forty-seven, although that may have been a ruse to avoid a war crimes tribunal.’

  ‘How old was he then?’ she asked.

  ‘Sixty, perhaps older. He was pretty good at reinventing himself and hiding his past.’

  She thought briefly about how difficult it was to pin an age on Mr Sarotzini, but, doing a quick calculation, this would put him at a hundred and ten. No way. ‘It can’t be the same man,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  She sipped enough apple juice to moisten her mouth. She felt deeply uneasy but, at the same time, there was something surreal about this conversation, as if it were some game Fergus was playing, rather than for real. ‘Fergus, are – are you trying to tell me that Miles Van Rhoe is planning to use my baby as a sacrifice in some kind of ritual? Is that what you’re saying?’

  He stared at her with an air of desperation. ‘Susan, look, I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know why I’m here, putting these crazy thoughts into your head, worrying you. I shouldn’t have come, it was wrong of me, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m doing it, why I’m telling you all this.’

  But he did know, he knew exactly why he was telling her this, although he still could not really believe the situation himself. There was a mistake somewhere in all this, a terrible mistake, and he was going to end up with egg all over his face, looking an utter fool for jumping to conclusions.

  But what else could he have done but come here?

  The inside of Susan’s head was just a mass of confused data. It was like a billion busy little creatures in there all running around, all carrying jumbled-up bits of information, looking for the right places to put it and for the right sequences to put it in. She did not know why he was telling her this. But she kept thinking of Harvey Addison, couldn’t get him filed away, and the name of Zak Danziger, the composer who had given DigiTrak grief last year, was floating around in all that chaos too. And a conversation she’d had at lunch with Fergus last year.

  So you think few of us ever fulfil our destiny, because we are not aware of it? she had asked.

  And Fergus had replied, You will. You will fulfil yours.

  And the thought rose up inside her, like a bloated corpse rising through black water, Mr Sarotzini and Miles Van Rhoe are going to sacrifice my baby.

  Impossible. Absurd. Ludicrous. Miles Van Rhoe was the most famous obstetrician in England. And the evil Mr Sarotzini had died in 1947, and even if he hadn’t he’d be at least a hundred and ten years old now. She closed her eyes trying to visualise Mr Sarotzini, to see whether there was any remote possibility through clever surgery, diet, vitamins, whatever, that he could be that old. But there was no way, she figured. With brilliant plastic surgery you could maybe knock a decade off your looks, but not half a century.

  Fergus Donleavy had been working too hard on his book. All the wiring inside his head had gotten crossed, it was shorting out. That probably explained the embarrassing pass he’d made at her. He couldn’t handle the pressure of the deadline he was under. The poor guy was losing it.

  And Bump rolled over contentedly inside her. Bump agreed.

  But there was a dark unease riding inside her, and guilt was nagging at her. She wasn’t being honest with Fergus. Not that her secret would make any difference, but she wanted suddenly to unburden it to him. She wanted to ease his mind.

  And she wanted him to know, so that he could give her some confirmation, some reassurance that all was OK, that Mr Sarotzini was really a kindly, caring man, that the Miles Van Rhoe who was a satanist was a totally different Miles Van Rhoe from the one Fergus had mentioned. She wanted him to know so that all this crazy nonsense could be buried totally and utterly. Once and for all.

  She wanted something to staunch the fear that had begun as a small flutter of doubt in her heart, but was now turning into a drumbeat inside her chest.

  ‘Fergus,’ she said, ‘there’s something I haven’t told you – I haven’t told anyone this, OK? Not even my parents.’

  He tapped a column of ash off his cigarette and changed his position in his chair, looking at her expectantly.

  ‘If I tell you this, it doesn’t go any further, OK?’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘This baby – my baby.’ She hesitated. ‘John isn’t the father.’

  Fergus did not move a muscle. He didn’t even blink.

  ‘I’m having a surrogate baby for Mr Sarotzini. We agreed to do it to stop John’s business going bust, and losing everything – including this house.’

  She suddenly felt a huge sense of release, as if a massive spring that had been wound up inside her, day after day for months on end, had now, finally, been released. She was telling someone her secret! She was sharing it with someone. At last.

  God, it felt good to talk.

  Fergus said nothing. He watched her, smoked another cigarette, listening, nodding in agreement that Susan and John had had no choice and that anyone might have done the same in her position.

  When she had finished, she was floating on a high from her sense of release. Then she looked at him with a guilty smile. ‘John and I made a pact that we wouldn’t tell anyone, now or ever.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve told me, Susan,’ he said, feeling even more dee
ply troubled now than when he had arrived. ‘I’m very glad.’

  He needed time to collect his thoughts, unsure what to say to Susan. He was out of his depth here and needed to talk to Euan Freer, urgently.

  He left, having said little more.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Mr Sarotzini said that all things must lose momentum and stop, this was a law of nature, this was entropy. Kündz understood this law.

  Mr Sarotzini taught Kündz that Gautama Siddhartha believed that the quest for truth was like a wheel that required a fresh push every twenty-five centuries. The year 2000 marked the passing of twenty-five centuries that had begun at 500 BC. A new push was required. Mr Sarotzini told him it was coming. He told Kündz he should be proud that he was a part of it, and Kündz was proud.

  And the photograph he held in his hand of Susan’s sister, Casey, also made him proud. He thought of the Thirteenth Truth. All true gratitude is borne from punishment.

  Susan was going to be grateful. But she would have to wait to feel this gratitude, there would be time for this, there would be an occasion. Now was not that time. Now he had a problem on his hands, and this problem was called Fergus Donleavy.

  This was why he was sitting in the darkness in Fergus Donleavy’s flat overlooking the Thames, with a heavy bag on the floor beside him. In the bag was a 12-volt car battery and a set of battery clips.

  He watched the river through the open curtains; it was a fine view, much better than the one from his flat in Earl’s Court, which only looked out on to the rear wall of the building behind. He could see the hull of an empty lighter riding at anchor, dark as a silhouette; there was a heavy chop tonight, a fast tide. The orange glow from the street lighting shimmered on the water like plastic wrapping.

  The telephone rang. Four rings, then the answering machine kicked in. Kündz dropped his eyes to his watch; it was nine fifteen p.m. He heard Fergus Donleavy’s recorded voice apologising for being out, a series of clicks and beeps, then a rich, soft-spoken voice. ‘Hello, Fergus, this is Euan Freer returning your call. I’m sorry not to have got back to you sooner. Call me at home tonight, it doesn’t matter what time, or else I’ll be in my office tomorrow.’ There was a click, then Kündz listened to the sound of the machine resetting itself.