The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  ‘The gun was a Glock,’ said Jess. And three male faces turned her way. ‘My uncle is a gun nut. In Utah, I used to vacation on his ranch. A Glock’s a pricey gun for a local criminal. Glock 23, .45-mil, five hundred bucks minimum.’

  Jay gestured in frustration. ‘Which means?’

  ‘I don’t know either!’ Jessica sighed. ‘But this wasn’t some average cane farmer with a grudge. Where would they get a smart gun like that? How?’

  Larry suggested, ‘A haquero, then, like I said?’

  Dan answered. ‘He wasn’t interested in new finds, new tombs. He just kept asking, me the same f— the same damn questions. Endlessly. With that gun.’

  ‘What questions?’

  ‘What we were doing here. What we’d found, stuff like that …’

  Jess walked around the lab, pacing, thinking, thinking hard; she paused by the first large jar, and turned. ‘He was asking you about a man. Wasn’t he? I overheard it.’

  ‘Did he? Yes. Yes, maybe he did. I was so damn scared. But he did … yes, he did.’

  ‘Did this guy have a name?’

  ‘Something odd. Something strange. Yes. I remember: Archibald McLintock.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘McLintock.’ Dan repeated. ‘Ar-chi-bald Mc-Lin-tock. He said it precisely. What did I know about … Archibald McLintock. Such an odd name – that’s all.’

  Jay looked at Jess and at Larry. ‘So who the fuck is that?’

  Larry snorted. ‘Does it matter? Someone just tried to kill Dan.’

  Jessica raised a hand. ‘I think it matters, I think it matters a lot. It’s gotta be linked.’

  ‘To what?’ Larry’s voice was verging on angry. ‘Jess, what the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘The truck. In Trujillo. That slammed into the garage.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Her voice was almost as passionate his now. ‘Think about it. First an explosion, then a gunman. Can it really be coincidence? All this violence.’

  ‘Sorry, Jess, no idea.’

  ‘Maybe, in Trujillo, it wasn’t the garage they were aiming for. Maybe it was Pablo himself, Pablo and the museum. Maybe someone is hunting down people who are connected with the Moche.’

  ‘Where’s the evidence?’

  Jessica insisted, ‘I remember him saying, Pablo, the day it happened, that he’d had people in the museum – asking questions. He said they were … unpleasant people. Knowing Pablo, they could have had guns and he would call them “unpleasant” – isn’t that just a bit strange? And now this. Here. A gunman.’

  A silence. Dan looked at her long and hard. ‘So you reckon that whoever they are, they are coming for anyone – anyone who knows too much about the Moche?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  The only sound in the room was the buzz of the fridges. Containing the smiling Moche skulls in their soft collars of yellow foam.

  20

  Mornington Terrace, Camden Town, London

  DCI Mark Ibsen was standing in the scruffy beer garden of a large London pub near Regent’s Park. It was a frigid afternoon in mid-December; the beer garden was deserted. But he wasn’t here to drink, he was here to watch.

  Larkham came into the garden with a couple of plastic coffee cups. He handed one over to his boss, then sipped from his own cappuccino.

  Ibsen stayed silent, and staring. Larkham followed his superior officer’s gaze: which was directed over the wall of the beer garden, to the curtained sash windows of 74B, Delancey Street, a first-floor flat in a long, early Victorian terrace, which diagonally faced this pub across the road, and also the deep railway tracks that led down to Euston Station.

  Larkham frowned, and swallowed his coffee. ‘What do you think, then, sir? We haven’t got a warrant yet.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Not that always stopped you in the past.’

  Ibsen chuckled; but his mood was as sour and cold as the day. They were tracking down all the people they had seen in the photo with the tattooed man. Most of them had been located: more rich kids, all with the same boring story. I can’t remember that guy. He was probably a friend of Patrick Klemmer. No, I don’t know anything else.

  Only a couple of people in the photo were yet to be traced and interviewed. And one of them was Imogen Fitzsimmons, twenty-five years old, an aspiring TV researcher, who lived here in Delancey Street. She was known as a party girl; she was a purposeful socializer. Yet she hadn’t been seen for two days. No one knew where she was; she hadn’t called in sick to work; she did not have a holiday scheduled and she had missed several professional and social engagements. Her close friends said she was maybe out of town with a secret boyfriend – could that be the tattooed man?

  Ibsen stamped his feet against the cold, staring at the closed and curtained windows of 74B. ‘Larkham. Tell me again about the secret boyfriend. How secret? If he’s secret how come her pals all know about him?’

  Larkham opened his notebook. ‘They don’t know for sure. Could be they’re just guessing. Her best friend is Lucinda Effingham, also in the photo. We interviewed her this afternoon. Effingham told me that in recent weeks,’ Larkham tilted the notebook to read better, ‘“Imogen had been acting strangely. Going off in the evening, not telling me where. We all reckoned she might be having an affair, she seemed happy, but she was furtive, and evasive. We speculated that she maybe met a married man at work.”’

  Larkham closed the notebook. Ibsen tasted some of the rapidly cooling coffee, and put the cup down on the beer garden table. ‘Neighbours not seen or heard anything?’

  ‘Not in two days.’

  ‘Her phones …?’

  ‘Going unanswered. Landline and mobile. We will have a warrant by tomorrow. The landlord has keys and we can pick them up tomorrow morning.’

  DCI Ibsen scowled. ‘No. This is wrong. This is giving me the collywobbles, Larkham. I think it’s the damn curtains.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘They are just too bloody shut. Look at them.’

  ‘Too … shut … sir?’

  ‘Yes, too bloody shut. When you go away for a weekend you don’t close curtains with such emphatic exactitude, do you? I think someone is in there, someone who wants to be in the dark.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Come on – sod the warrant. This is a life-threatening situation. Call for some back-up.’

  For the third time that day they asked the downstairs neighbours at 74 to open the external door, profusely apologizing as they did.

  Larkham and Ibsen ran up the communal stairs to the flat on the first floor. 74B. They paused on the communal landing.

  ‘Armed response will be here in a few minutes—’

  ‘I don’t think she’s going to be armed, Larkham.’

  Ibsen stepped back and vigorously kicked at the door; it nearly gave at the first attempt; Larkham kicked it a second time and the door swung open without protest, the lock cleanly snapped.

  The flat was black as midnight, made very deliberately dark. And yes, Ibsen could sense a human presence: someone was either here or had been here, very recently. A slightly poisonous fragrance – of something ominous – hung in the stifled air.

  Larkham punched the lights on and they gazed around.

  The first thing they saw was the blood on the hallway floor, and on the opposite wall. Little seasonings of blood, like sprinkled cinnamon: blood spatter from a serious wound.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Larkham.

  There was more blood in the living room: it was smeared on a white china mug, daubed in childish fingerprints on a magazine, and on a TV remote. Most bizarre was a mouth-shaped splodge of blood on a mirror at head height; as if someone wearing far too much scarlet lipstick had kissed the glass.

  ‘So,’ said Ibsen, ‘where is she? The blood is contained. She’s in the flat. She must be. She’s still here—’

  They searched the bathroom and found trailing smears of blood on the shower curtain and dark crimson blood drops in the toilet bowl. The bathroom fl
oor was oddly clean.

  The kitchen revealed something worse: a sink covered with blood, as if a small mammal had been crudely slaughtered over the plughole.

  Larkham pointed with a pen. ‘What is that?’

  It was a sliver of flesh, lying on the bottom of the metal sink, surrounded by thick gobbets of blood. Was the flesh human? It was so mangled it was impossible to tell.

  Ibsen didn’t know whether to feel sick or scared. ‘Larkham – the bedroom – she must be in there.’

  The bedroom door was at the end of the landing. They pushed against it, but it seemed to be obstructed by a rucked carpet: a second, heavier shove got it open.

  Ibsen didn’t know what he had expected to find in the bedroom; he didn’t care to imagine it. But he certainly didn’t expect to find nothing.

  Yet there was no one in the bedroom. No body, no suicide victim, nothing. The bedsheets were liberally marked with blood, a white cotton T-shirt was also rusted with drying blood. The room was in chaos: a mirror was smashed, a TV was lying on the carpet, drawers had been flung open and clothing scattered, as if a fetishist had been seeking underwear, but there was no one here, and no one in the bedroom. Lots of blood but no body?

  The flat was empty.

  ‘So what happened?’ Ibsen gazed at his own crazed reflection in the shattered mirror. ‘The guy came here and took her? Why did no one see this? Or hear anything?’

  Larkham was opening the floor-to-ceiling wardrobes. The wardrobes were big; the whole flat was large and airy. This was a rich girl, yet another rich kid, with her own flat in a pricey part of town and lots of nice clothes, and she was very probably dead and yet her body had disappeared.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jesus …’ Larkham’s voice was uncharacteristically choked. ‘She’s here, sir.’

  Ibsen stiffened his resolve, and came across the room. If Larkham was shocked by the sight of the body, it had to be pretty bad.

  It was far worse than pretty bad.

  Imogen Fitzsimmons’s body was huddled in a corner of her own wardrobe, kneeling on the floor staring at the expensive coats.

  In her stiff, blood-caked left hand the girl clutched an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, stained with blood.

  The body was clothed: she was wearing tight skinny jeans and white socks. And a black T-shirt with a small Guinness logo. The blackness of the T-shirt made the body look almost normal – from the neck down. It had evidently absorbed a lot of blood but the redness didn’t show. And before she died, this young woman had obviously used the razor to progressively mutilate her face.

  Ibsen closed his eyes as he felt the vertigo of nausea hit him. He calmed himself with two deep breaths, then looked again at poor Imogen Fitzsimmons’s face.

  It was difficult to work out quite what she had done to herself in her final hours, so elaborate was the cutting. She seemed to have sliced off her own lips, which gave the horrible impression that she was grinning fiendishly: like a skull. She had also cut open her nostrils, or at least tried to. The damage was too complex to see which parts of her nose remained intact. The earlobes were missing: drools of blood trailed down each side of her neck.

  Most disturbing was the way she had diligently sliced out the flesh of her cheeks, as if she had been trying to skeletonize herself. The skin and flesh had been so drastically cut away that the teeth and the bone were partly visible through the holes in the side of her face. She was half pretty young woman, half bleeding, horrific skull.

  Larkham was pale and perspiring. ‘How could anyone do that? To themselves?’

  It was too much. The two officers gazed at the corpse. Helpless, dwarfed, and mute.

  Then, as they stared at the white face of Imogen Fitzsimmons, the girl’s head tilted, and she blinked, and a trickle of blood ran from her lipless mouth, as she desperately tried to mumble a word.

  She was still alive.

  21

  The Angel Inn, Penhill, Yorkshire

  It would have been an idyllic setting, Adam thought, if they hadn’t come here to discuss the terminal illness of Archibald McLintock.

  The pub was timbered and earthy; a huge log fire roared at one end in a baronial hearth, a dog snoozing before the flames. Two farm-workers sat in a corner, nursing pints of Theakstons, conversing away the gloomy winter afternoon. The bar even had a buxom and giggling maid. She served the farmer, William Surtees, who returned to their table with a tray.

  ‘You didn’t have to buy the drinks.’

  Surtees returned his change to the watchpocket of his mustard-coloured waistcoat. ‘Nonsense. Least I could do. I should learn not to be so – gah – indiscreet.’

  Nina took her pint of Guinness and Adam his half-pint of orange juice. Surtees sipped at a scotch and water, then said, ‘Now, please, what can I tell you? How can I redress things?’

  ‘Start at the start. How did you know my father?’

  ‘He first came here ten years ago. Researching the Templars. The preceptory is on my land. Most people who come sightseeing just jump the gate and have a gander, but your father very graciously asked permission to visit the site, in person. Subsequently, we became acquainted. I saw him about once a year, sometimes more: he would stop over if he was driving down to London. We’re just twenty miles from the A1, though you wouldn’t know it. Darkest Yorkshire!’

  ‘He never mentioned you.’

  ‘We weren’t boon companions! But definitely friends, in a distant way. I would look forward to seeing his old car pulling into the farm, that Volkswagen you were driving.’

  ‘He gave it to me last year. Bought himself a big shiny new one.’

  Surtees nodded. ‘Well. That’s why I stopped just now, when I saw that car. Hold on, I thought, that’s old Archie’s car. And of course I knew, from the terrible … from the … ah … from the ah … that he couldn’t be driving it. Most perplexing. But here we are. The Angel Inn. You know there are often Angel Inns wherever there are Templar sites? Archie told me that.’

  Adam interrupted. ‘So when did you last see him?’

  ‘July last year, I believe.’

  ‘July 24th?’

  ‘Yes, quite possibly.’

  ‘Is this when …?’ Adam paused and looked at Nina; she urged him on with a fierce but subtle nod. ‘Is this when he told you he was dying?’

  ‘Yes. He stayed over, at the farm. My wife was away and he and I stayed up late and had a few jars. He liked a drink. And then it just— Well he just confessed. He said he had terminal cancer, had a year or two to live at most. Awful. But he was keeping it quiet. As many do.’

  Silence. The dog was staring at Adam, for no reason. Baring its fangs. Surtees elaborated, ‘The strange thing was he didn’t seem that downcast. He was of course upset. But more for his children, for you, Nina, and … Hannah, is it? Working in London?’

  ‘Yes, Hannah.’

  ‘It was your future that concerned him most. The girls. He worried about you, your financial future and suchlike. But other than that he wasn’t perhaps as depressed as one might have anticipated. Actually he was quite enthused. Gloomy yet enthused. An odd mix.’

  ‘Enthused about what?’

  ‘He said he had some startling new theory. Relating to the Templars. A radical new departure. Wouldn’t tell me more. Probably would have gone whoosh right over my head anyway! But, yes, that’s what he said, he was intellectually excited by it. Very sad, in retrospect. Did he ever publish anything?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Adam. ‘That’s one of the reasons we’re here. Following up clues: we’re trying to find out what he was researching.’

  Nina added, ‘We’re going to Temple Bruer next.’

  Surtees grimaced. ‘Temple Bruer. Ugh! Went once, can’t stand the place. Too spooky, all those legends! Your father would chide me for this, for believing in ghosts!’ He paused then asked, ‘So, the other reasons?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said you had other reasons, to be here?’<
br />
  Adam stayed quiet, waiting for Nina to answer. This was her call.

  Nina said, ‘It’s the suicide. I still don’t believe my dad committed suicide. Even if he was terminally ill. It just, ach, wasn’t his style. And he didn’t even leave a note! It doesn’t make any bloody sense.’ She glared at Surtees. ‘And I want to prove it. Somehow. Just somehow.’

  The waistcoated farmer looked at Nina with an expression of sincere sympathy, but also curiosity. ‘I must say Archibald McLintock didn’t strike me as the kind of man to take his own life. He was not a bolter, not a coward. He squared up to the world. But if not suicide then what? Perhaps the cancer spread to his brain? Sorry, awful to speculate.’

  ‘Nope. He was lucid and fine at the end. Happy even. As Adam can vouch?’

  Adam nodded, unsurely. Nina continued, ‘I really do think he was murdered. Or at least intimidated in some way. Forced? Hmm. I don’t know.’

  Adam winced at the word murdered. It felt a little insane. But the farmer was looking at Nina, his expression anxious, yet knowing. ‘Miss McLintock. It may be irrelevant but … there is … something … just possibly …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something rather peculiar.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Three weeks ago, I spotted two men in the field by the old preceptory. They were staring at those little stone graves. These chaps seemed so out of place I went to talk to them.’

  ‘Out of place?’

  ‘Their clothes were … rather odd. This was November. In the Dales. But they were wearing thin leather jackets. And city shoes! I was walking the dog, but I saw them over the gate, and they struck me as conspicuous, abnormal. So I went to have a chat, say hello as it were.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘I’d say they were in their thirties, or so. And they were swarthy, if one is still allowed to say that! Italian or Spanish looking, I mean.’

  He paused, staring gravely at his glass. ‘And, they were hostile, positively menacing.’