The False Virgin

by The Medieval Murderers

  Malenkov took the box and carried it to one of the windows. He tilted it so that he might see the object inside more clearly. Then he eased a hand under the object and lifted it right out. In his palm he was holding another hand, a hand that had been severed violently from its arm, to judge by the jagged, splintered stump. The hand rested comfortably in Malenkov’s own wide palm. If you’d been asked to estimate the height of the owner of the hand, you might have said that he – or she – would have been about three feet tall.

  The hand was made of wood painted a realistic pinky-white, although the paint was thin and flaking in places. But the most striking thing about it was that in the cupped wooden palm there rested a butterfly, also carved out of wood but enamelled and perhaps studded once with jewels, for there were regular little pits on the butterfly’s wings. The carver had done a fine job, for the hand and the insect seemed to be composed of quite different materials, one thick and fleshy, the other thin and airy.

  Boris Malenkov looked at Michael Deverill, still standing on the other side of the table. The young man was gazing at him, waiting for his reaction. His long fair hair flopped over his ears and the collar of his jacket. Boris thought he looked worried.

  ‘You have done well, Mikhail.’

  Again, for a moment, Michael looked not reassured but more uncomfortable, but he quickly said: ‘Thank you, Mr Malenkov. There’s something else.’

  Deverill drew another item from the bag and walked round to pass it to the Russian, who took it while continuing to clasp the butterfly. This second item was much smaller, no more than a fragment of wood. In it was embedded a piece of what looked like rock crystal, which, in turn, contained an unidentifiable scrap of greyish material. Boris Malenkov peered and puzzled over this. He turned to Deverill.

  ‘What you are seeing is a piece of human skin. It belongs to our saint, Beornwyn.’ He paused, gratified at the Russian’s response, a start of surprise amounting almost to fear. It was as if Malenkov were to suddenly glimpse a familiar face in the street, an old friend – or enemy – he had long thought dead. Boris moved away from the window and placed the items – the severed hand cradling the butterfly and the fragment of rock crystal – on the table. He stood back and gazed at them with his hands folded respectfully in front of him. Michael Deverill picked up the thread of what he had been saying. ‘We believe it belongs to St Beornwyn, my father and I. The quartz, the crystal, was most likely embedded in one of her feet, I mean the feet of the statue depicting her, and which served as her reliquary.’

  ‘Reliquary?’ repeated Malenkov after a time. He had difficulty saying the word.

  ‘A container for a saint’s relics, objects such as a bone or a phial of dried blood, a shred of clothing or piece of skin. It’s normal for reliquaries to take the form of a box or chest, but sometimes a statue may be used. The image of Beornwyn herself has been lost, apart from these two pieces.’

  ‘Where did you find them, Mikhail?’

  ‘Of course, you do understand it was not we who found them, Mr Malenkov. All I can say is that they were unearthed somewhere in Nottinghamshire, from a place where the cult of St Beornwyn was very strong in the days before the dissolution of the monasteries. That was during the reign of—’

  Boris Malenkov waved an impatient hand. He did not want a history lesson. But there was something he needed to be sure of.

  ‘St Beornwyn, she does not come from Notting-ham-shire?’ Boris broke up the name of the county into its component parts. ‘She comes from north?’

  ‘From Northumbria, yes,’ said Deverill, who had done some research into Beornwyn so he could talk with authority on the subject. ‘She was the daughter of a local king.’

  ‘My wife, she came from that part of the country too. Not the daughter of king, no, but daughter of Russian, yes.’

  Boris smiled to show that he was making a bit of a joke but there was pride in his voice too. Deverill knew that one of his reasons for collecting Beornwyn relics was because of the association with his wife, Anesha, whose Russian father had married a woman from Newcastle. Anesha Malenkov and St Beornwyn came from the same remote, northerly area of England, though many centuries apart, of course.

  Michael Deverill continued: ‘The strongest evidence that these Nottinghamshire relics are connected to your saint, Mr Malenkov, is not so much that they were found together near this site which was once holy ground, but that the hand cradling the butterfly – rather a finely wrought carving, wouldn’t you agree? – confirms the link with Beornwyn. Consider how, after her martyrdom, her modesty was preserved by a cloud of those beautiful flying creatures. And of course the crystal containing her skin, her pale flayed skin . . .’

  Michael Deverill put the slightest emphasis on ‘flayed’. Then he paused. He was a good salesman. He knew that the most rewarding results came when the clients did the work, persuading themselves of the value of what they were looking at rather than having to be persuaded of it by others. In any case, he did not want to go into too much detail on this fine early afternoon in the house in Eaton Square. Michael Deverill was in a hurry, a desperate hurry.

  He needed to wrap up a deal quickly and return to the flat in Wimbledon that he shared with his father, Patrick. Together they had to catch the 18.50 flight from Gatwick to Malaga and thence to their bolt-hole outside Cordoba, a villa that had been bought long ago in anticipation for just such a day as arrived last week. On the previous Tuesday, to be precise. It was then that the Deverills, father and son, heard that one of the clients to whom they supplied objects of interest – pictures, manuscripts, small pieces of furniture, relics even – had grown suspicious of the provenance of a certain item. This caused the client to query a couple of other items he had purchased through the Deverills.

  Unfortunately for Patrick and Michael, this client was like Boris Malenkov in only one respect. He was Russian. But, unlike Boris, Vladimir Zarubin was genuinely rich and genuinely ruthless. He travelled with a palisade of bodyguards and stick-thin blondes. He had a dirty reputation, even in Russia. Vlad the Impaler was one of his nicknames. The nickname was not altogether a joke. Michael had warned his father against dealing with Zarubin but Patrick asked what harm there could be in something as insignificant as a Sheraton commode, followed by a little-known Rossetti painting and then a second picture, this time by the pre-Soviet artist Larionov. To a billionaire like Vladimir Zarubin, the sums involved were piddling. Besides, he was so pig-ignorant he couldn’t have told the difference between a Constable and a Kandinsky, let alone between a carefully wrought fake and the real McCoy.

  Unfortunately for the Deverills, father and son, Zarubin employed people who could tell the difference. And when they finally got round to checking up on the commode and the Rossetti and Larionov and some other items, they smelled a rat. Word got back to the Deverills that Vladimir was intending to pay them a visit himself as soon as he returned from a business trip to the Ukraine. He was returning to England that very night. By then, Michael and Patrick planned to be on Spanish soil and inside their Cordoba villa, where they could live happily on the back of several Swiss accounts.

  Therefore Michael Deverill needed to conclude his business with Boris Malenkov as fast as possible. Needed this amiable old man to buy the bits and pieces relating to St Beornwyn, so that he, Michael, could scoot off and collect his father.

  Boris was still looking at the butterfly-in-hand carving and the fragment of crystal. There were two key features in the legend of St Beornwyn. One was that she had been flayed, a detail that gave a frisson to even the most minute scrap of her skin. The other and more attractive feature was that her poor, despoiled body was discovered shrouded in butterflies. Did Boris Malenkov believe these items to be relics of the cult of Beornwyn? Michael himself did not know if they were genuine, whatever ‘genuine’ meant when it came to a saint’s relics.

  The main thing was to get the business over with, fast. Patrick Deverill hadn’t told Michael to make a rapid transaction, to take what
he could and then get out. He hadn’t needed to. Nor had he told his son where he obtained the hand and the crystal. Michael preferred not to know. In the past his father had proved himself an adept faker, though on canvas rather than with wood or stone. Patrick Deverill possessed real talent. That talent and the training at the Slade meant that he could have earned his living as a painter. But something in the Deverill blood pushed him down a more winding path.

  Michael coughed slightly, a signal that Boris Malenkov should say something. Do something. Preferably buy the Beornwyn relics right now.

  As if reading his thoughts, Boris indicated that Deverill should follow him into a smaller room that led off the dining room and that was next to the kitchen where Eric Butler produced the meals. With another gesture Boris directed Deverill to bring the wooden hand cradling the butterfly and the crystal containing the scrap of skin. The inner room, unlike the larger one overlooking Eaton Square, contained only a handful of small icons. It was a place where business was done or might once have been done, with a small table, a couple of upright chairs and a filing cabinet. On the table was a computer and near to it a monitor screen, which Boris used to keep an eye on the ground floor of the house. Both were switched off. There were sets of worry beads coiled on the table. Or perhaps, thought Deverill, they might be rosaries.

  Once both men were inside, Boris shut the door and went towards a picture on the wall. This picture stood out, not because of its subject matter – like the icons, it was religious in nature – but because it was a small gilt-framed oil depicting the Madonna and Child. Malenkov carefully detached the picture from the wall and placed it on the surface of the table. He noticed his visitor’s appreciative stare.

  ‘The work of Lorenzo Gelli, the Florentine,’ said Boris Malenkov. ‘Is good, no?’

  Better than good, thought Michael Deverill, and wondering who this Gelli was before realising that the Russian had mispronounced the name by using a hard ‘g’ rather than a soft one. Lorenzo Gelli, of course. The name of that minor Italian master of the Renaissance was familiar to him. So, too, was the picture itself now he looked at it. The face of the Madonna, especially. He must have seen it reproduced in some catalogue. He stooped to look more closely. Through an arch behind the round-faced Madonna and the plump Child on her lap was a delicate landscape composed of hills and rivers, hamlets and little scattered figures. The sky was a delicate azure deepening in colour towards the top of the arch. Altogether, it was a very attractive picture.

  But the function of this Western Madonna was not so much decoration as concealment. Set into the wall behind where it hung was a safe. Without troubling to conceal his actions from Deverill, Boris Malenkov twisted the dial and opened the safe. He reached inside and took out several items. These, too, he placed on the table top.

  They were: a fragment of manuscript encased in protective plastic together with three boxes, one about six inches long and the other two small and square, all covered with velvet. Malenkov opened the boxes, flicking at hasps and catches with his thick fingers. Michael Deverill had seen the contents before – indeed, he had been responsible for supplying one of them to the Russian. The smaller boxes held a single bone or piece of bone, from a finger or foot perhaps. The long one held what looked like most of a rib. The fragments nestled in velvet, their yellowish pallor contrasting with the purple material.

  The common factor to these relics was their connection to the sainted Beornwyn. The piece of manuscript was part of a poem by the medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer, who composed a poem about St Beornwyn, to be recited at the court of John of Gaunt. Nothing of the poem survived except this fragment, whose very subject might have remained unknown had the writer not mentioned Beornwyn by name in the first dozen lines. The story went that the scrap of manuscript had been unearthed during excavations at Aldgate, one of the old entrances to London.

  Michael Deverill deposited the reliquary objects, the butterfly in the hand and the skin in the crystal, beside the bones. Absently he picked up from the desk a string of worry beads or rosary and poured the chain from hand to hand. Boris walked over to the single window in the room. He stared out across more trees and rooftops. Deverill wondered what was going through his head. Surely Malenkov would agree to purchase these sacred treasures? He still had the means, hadn’t he? Although Deverill had heard stories that the Anesha Foundation was running low on resources. Certainly, the Eaton Square house felt very empty now compared to when he’d made earlier visits. Apart from large Sonia down in the reception area and a man who passed Deverill as he was on the way in, he’d seen no one. For sure Boris was not one of those ultra-rich oligarchs, he was not even a proper multimillionaire. He had no yacht or private Boeing, he owned no football club in London or estate at Cap Ferrat. What he possessed was a driving desire to take Russia back to her spiritual roots. Somehow, Michael assumed, the amassing of these relics and objects connected with a virgin saint was going to help in that task.

  Michael Deverill liked Boris Malenkov, certainly by contrast to Vladimir Zarubin, for example. Malenkov was not intimidating. Indeed, there was something almost benevolent about the podgy man.

  ‘I can’t offer you any money,’ said Boris. ‘I have cash-flow crisis. Next month maybe . . .’

  Next month was too late. The next day would be too late. Somehow Deverill wasn’t surprised by any of this. He said: ‘But you do want those things of Beornwyn, don’t you?’

  If Boris noticed such an off-hand way of referring to the relics, he didn’t mention it. Instead he said: ‘I am ready to do exchange, though.’

  ‘Exchange, Mr Malenkov?’

  ‘The Madonna on desk, the one you are admiring. By Lorenzo Gelli.’

  ‘The Lorenzo Gelli,’ said Deverill, taking care to pronounce the name correctly (Jelly). ‘Well, it is a fine piece of work.’

  ‘A far exchange, as you say.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Deverill. He didn’t bother to correct Boris’s mistake over a ‘far’ exchange. He glanced at his watch. He had to finish the business with Boris and return to his father. They had to catch that Gatwick flight in the early evening. More worrying, much more worrying than any to-do over relics and pictures, was the return of Vladimir Zarubin from the Ukraine. Through Michael Deverill’s mind there flashed the image of burly brutes picking their way through the flat in Wimbledon, looking for evidence of fakery and fraud. No, not picking their way through, but smashing things up. Not just things either. Yes, yes, take the painting. Get out of here. Get out of town. Get out of the country.

  So it was concluded. Michael Deverill left the Eaton Square house with the Lorenzo Gelli unceremoniously wrapped in the same cloth in which he had carried the Beornwyn relics, inside the same plastic bag.

  When Michael returned to the flat in Wimbledon, his father was cramming things into a last-minute case.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Did our Boris go for them?’

  ‘Yes. But he had no money – no ready money, at any rate. I had to take this in lieu.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  When he saw the Gelli, Patrick Deverill let out a sound between a groan and a laugh.

  ‘One of mine,’ he said. ‘From the old days. This isn’t a genuine Gelli. No more than the woman in the picture was a real virgin.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody sure, Michael. The model for the Madonna was your mother. Oh, but it’s nice to see her again.’

  Michael wasn’t sure whether his father was referring to the Madonna or to his mother, who had been dead these many years. He said: ‘I thought her face looked familiar.’

  ‘And the baby is you. You were the model when I did it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Michael.

  ‘You could say,’ said his father. ‘Too late to return it to Boris now.’

  ‘Perhaps Vlad the Impaler will take it instead.’

  ‘That’s a joke, right? We are not staying to find out.’

  Patrick Deverill dithered for an inst
ant before stuffing the Lorenzo Gelli into the case. He did seem pleased to be reunited with the old fake. Minutes later, the taxi arrived to take father and son to Gatwick airport.

  Meanwhile, back in Eaton Square, Boris Malenkov was casting his eyes over the collection of Beornwyn relics, picking up one, now another. He considered that he had got the better part of the bargain. That painting by Gelli he never really liked it. He had bought it in his early days in London through a dealer who later introduced him to the Deverills, father and son. But he had never believed in the Mother or Child in the picture, to him they looked false. There was something bourgeois about their features compared to his beloved icons, there was no real suffering or spirituality to them. So, obtaining the butterfly and the crystal was far exchange. Boris paused for a moment. A far exchange . . . was that the right expression? Anesha could have told him. And downstairs in reception Sonia Davies was preparing to leave the house in Eaton Square. It hadn’t been much of a day. Half the sudoku book finished. One visitor. That bloke, Michael Deverill was his name, he’d left in a hurry still carrying the Sainsbury’s bag he arrived with. Hardly paused to say goodbye to Sonia. Otherwise no callers. Not even Eric coming back. But he had sent her a text. Rather a naughty message, as it happened, combining food and sex. So now what she was looking forward to was a takeaway from that new Thai place round the corner, followed by a good session with Eric Butler. For a moment she wondered what the old man upstairs would make of that. A tiny part of her was concerned by Boris’s opinion. Then she shrugged. No virgin she.