by Tom Knox
An efficient little crackle, like a throat clearing, brought the radio to life. ‘He’s up. We’re out. On the surface.’ It was Kilo 1. ‘We’re at the Angel, sir. Angel Tube.’
Just four stops away. Ibsen signalled to his driver. ‘OK, Kilo 1, Kilo 2, keep following him. We’re here for the whole ride.’
‘Sir. Walking up Upper Street.’
Kilo 2 kicked in, ‘He’s stopped, sir. By that weird low building …’
‘Antique arcade.’ A more authoritative voice, crackled through. I’m just parked across Upper Street, sir. He’s stepping inside—’
Ibsen shot back, ‘Larkham? You’re there? How did you know?’
‘Took a guess, sir, followed the Northern Line overground north.’
‘Good man! But I know that place.’
‘Yes?’
‘If he goes in there we can lose him, a warren of old gaffs, all those lanes outside!’
‘He’s gone in.’
Ibsen barked, ‘Kilo 1 follow.’
‘I’m inside, can’t see him – wait …’ His pulse rate was now 125, 130.
‘Kilo 1? Can you see him?’
Silence.
‘Kilo 2? Can you see him?
Silence.
‘Kilo 1? Fuck sake, Kilo 2?
A breathless voice. ‘He’s running, sir.’
Running?’
‘He’s sort of running, and – and these little alleys are filled with shoppers – all the snow – it’s chaos. Maybe he knows we’re here …’ The policeman was panting. ‘I can just see him, the snow is so heavy, Sir … is that … wait … I can’t …’
They were going to lose him.
Ibsen waited for half a second. He waited for another half a second, Pulse maybe 140, 145, 150.
Kilo 1: ‘I’ve lost him. No visual contact. Repeat, no visual contact.’
‘Kilo 2?’
‘Me too. Lost him. Sorry, sir. The bloody snow …’
‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’
Ibsen slapped the dash again. He had one last hope. His brilliant junior, the one man he could rely on, his go-to guy for not utterly fucking things up all the fucking time.
‘Larkham?’
‘Same here, sir. I got a glimpse. Then he just— You should see the snow, you can hardly see your own …’
Ibsen let the bitterness seep into his conscience for another half a second, then switched into a more professional gear. ‘So he’s gone to ground. But he’s somewhere around. Who saw him last, and where, precisely?’
Kilo 1 answered: the antique parade; Kilo 2 agreed. Then Larkham said, ‘Think it was me who saw him last. He was jogging up Islington Green. Just a glimpse, through the snow. I could see his head, then nothing.’
Ibsen closed his eyes for a second. Repressing his anger and guilt. ‘Just stay there, patrol discreetly, and keep your eyes open, we might just get lucky again.’
Ibsen knew they weren’t going to get lucky. The suspect’s last movements were all too indicative of a professional criminal who was aware he was being followed. He watched the delicate star-clusters of snow fall and melt on his windscreen, in prolificity and profusion; like lemmings, killing themselves on his glass, and melting into nothing. Suicidal snow.
The driver pierced the silence, jolting Ibsen from his reverie.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘I’m fine. Bloody furious, but otherwise fine. So we lost him. We still have a lead. He must have had a reason to come here in the first place What is it? Why has he come to Islington?
27
Temple, London
From Temple Station they walked briskly up a steep narrow street lined with venerable buildings, made somehow more scholarly – and picturesque – by their new, white, lawyerly wigs of snow.
They were at the Temple Church, an eight-hundred-year-old survivor. It looked impossibly beautiful and quaint, the arched windows and golden buttresses surrounded by Christmas Carolly scenes of snowbound gardens, and liveried beadles, and eighteenth-century doors decorated with green wreaths of berried holly.
Nina opened her rucksack with shivering hands and recited: ‘“The London Temple was one of the three administrative centres of the entire Order, along with the Paris Temple and their headquarters in Jerusalem. All the Templars’ British wealth was held here, in the London Preceptory, in a treasury so renowned for security that the English king stored the Crown Jewels herein.”’
Adam said nothing. A face was peering at him from behind a large sash window. The curtain fell.
Nina went on. ‘“At the time of the Templars’ fall from power, this reputation for hidden wealth gave rise to the rumour that the London Temple was the storehouse for the Templars’ “secret treasure”. Over the years this notorious treasure has been variously reckoned as the Ark of the Covenant, the True Cross, the Turin Shroud and the Holy Grail. In truth, there was no such secret treasure; these absurd rumours of secret wealth rose arose simply because the Templars were the first bankers of Europe, and their vaults were filled with noble loot, held as surety, or deposited for safekeeping.”’ She finished, and shrugged.
Adam sighed. ‘Your father was a sceptic. We know. The question is: how did he go from all that to believing that there really was a deep Templar secret?’
A secret that gets you killed? Adam baulked at saying it. Instead he looked at the exterior of the church. He had no need of a guidebook to tell him about this. From research on earlier articles, from simple sightseeing as a young Aussie in London, he knew that most of the exterior of the famous church was twentieth-century work, cleverly restored following the dreadful damage of the Blitz. Only the west porch remained from Templar days. So they could be pretty sure Archie McLintock didn’t come here to admire the exterior.
Which left one choice.
They entered the church, through the low side door. The building was empty and hushed. Slender candles twinkled; the blonde wooden pews were empty; winter daylight striated the floor. The old church was beautiful and sad, and vacuous. There was no sense of mystery here, no sepulchral clue, no air of intrigue that might imply what Professor McLintock had found. It was an echoey cenotaph, laid with effigies.
Frustrated, he strode around the circular nave with its grotesque gargoyles. Here was a man screaming, with his ear being bitten by a creature. Why?
Nina was crouching beside a gravestone, reading quietly from her father’s book. Adam took some photos: of the delicate black marble pillars, then the elegant circular colonnading, then the effigy of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, laid out in full battle-kit, chainmailed, a sword in his hand. Ready to fight violently for Christ, even now.
‘This bit dates right back to 1200,’ said Nina, standing and gesturing at the clean golden arches, the chevrons of wood in the ceiling.
‘Still looks new,’ said Adam.
It did look new. Too new. As if it had been recently restored. Adam thought about the evil ambience of Temple Bruer. What linked these two places? Somewhere very old and dirty and pungent with atmosphere, and somewhere cleaned and spruce and empty.
Adam stepped to the side where there was a table stacked with helpful pamphlets, advertising opportunities for charity work in West Africa, and schedules of festive carols in the Wren Churches. He heard voices. Nina was talking to someone a gowned man, the verger, or the vicar maybe. Adam knew nothing about church hierarchies. The man had a fusty, middle-aged, churchly air and a black gown over his shoulders. Walking across, Adam extended a hand, just as Nina’s conversation with the man dwindled to silence.
‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian.’ It was a lie, he’d been sacked; but he didn’t care. He wanted information, and saying you were a professional seeker of information just sped things up.
The man had strange eyes, as if he was wearing tinted contact lenses. A hint of livid blue. The word restored was a continuous bass organ note in Adam’s mind, waiting for the treble, the tune, the harmony, as the man swivelled.
‘Name�
�s Baldwin. I’m the churchwarden. I was explaining to your friend that I never met her father. The name doesn’t even ring a bell. Sorry.’ His accent was northern. Perhaps Yorkshire.
Restored?
‘She tells me he were a great expert on the Templars! But that he recently … passed beyond?’
Nina was trying again. ‘You’re sure you never met him ever? He came here last year, two days in a row.’ They knew this because of receipts from Caffe Nero, on Holborn.
The churchwarden gazed at Nina as if she was mad.
‘Miss McLintock, I don’t meet every tourist, even famous ones! We have so many visitors. Anyhow, I wasn’t here last summer: no one was. We were restoring.’
The lock yielded at last; Adam turned the mental key. ‘Do you mean the whole church was closed?’
‘Yes. Exactly.’ The man’s smile was sincere and bored. ‘The whole church were locked for, ooh, eighteen months. We allowed no visitors. Not a soul. It were the biggest restoration we’d had since the Blitz. Cost millions, but the Corporation were very generous, the large legal companies, and so forth …’
‘All visitors?’
‘Yes! We had an iron rule. Anyway, I must be getting on … Tempus bloody fugit. If you want to make donation, the offertory box is near t’exit.’
The gown swished and the churchwarden departed through an interior door. Nina looked with mystification at Adam.
‘I don’t understand. So Dad didn’t come here. Why come here, twice, if you can’t get inside? Did he go somewhere else?’
‘The exterior!’ Adam grabbed her hand. ‘It must be. We know he came to the Temple, but if he couldn’t get in – that means he must have been looking at the exterior. And there is only one bit of the exterior left—’
The excitement was mutual. Not pausing, they rushed outside to the West Porch: a large, dark door, filigreed with ironwork and iron studs; and surrounding it an intricate stone jamb, with a semicircular arch, semicircles within semicircles, like ripples of stone. Decorated with peculiar and significant sculptures.
The sculptures were all of Green Men. Dozens and dozens of Green Men, faces of the pagan past, wreathed in stone ivy and tendrils, grinning at him. Adam yelled with excitement. ‘This is it. Must be it. This is it! This is what he came to see. This. It’s our first real clue, Nina, this is it: Green Men, just like those at Rosslyn. So we know he was on to something, and we know it definitely is linked to Rosslyn. He wasn’t mad, he wasn’t joking; he really was unlocking a puzzle.’
She smiled – anxiously and worriedly – but she smiled. ‘Well done. Come on, let’s go see my sister. She’s been doing her own research; we need to compare.’
They ran through the alleys out on to High Holborn and Nina hailed a taxi. ‘Thank you,’ she nodded at the taxi driver, as they climbed in. ‘Thornhill Crescent. In Islington.’
28
Mercado de las Brujas, Chiclayo, north Peru
The condor stared at her. It was dead, and hanging upside down. Next to it was the dried foetus of a llama, its eyeball poached and screaming in the skinless carcase.
Jess spat the taste of the rough nylon hood from her mouth. The hood now lay crumpled on the dirty floor; it had been whipped away by a lustrously dark, luridly tattooed man, with a necklace of shark’s teeth and an Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt. The man was barefoot and muttering and smoking a spliff of dark jungle tobacco, and tightening the bonds that strapped Jess to the chair on which she had been forced to sit.
She knew immediately where she had been taken: because they hadn’t gone far, and the environs were distinctive. Evidently, she had been dragged into the witches’ market, a corner of the town market where shamans and curanderos and brujas came from many miles around, to trade potions and spells and malevolent juju. Ironically, the Mercado de las Brujas was where she had been headed. But now she was here as a hostage.
Jess struggled. ‘¿Qué estoy haciendo aquí?’ What am I doing here?
The man ignored her, and just kept muttering. ‘Ñqupaykunaq yuyay champi … ’
These words were Quechua. The man in the little stall, shielded from the rest of the market by plastic sheets and curtains, was speaking Quechua. Probably he didn’t even understand Spanish. Nonetheless she tried again. ‘¿Por qué? ¿Por qué me has secuestrado?’ Why have you kidnapped me?
It was pointless. She heard a small voice behind her, in the gloom. Jess caught a glimpse of other dark faces in the background; staring at her and whispering.
The man in the sweatshirt smelled of condor. And dung. And rainforest. And sex. As if he hadn’t washed in several weeks. It was a primal smell of jungle and mountain, Quechua and Inca. He was obviously a curandero, one of the mountain shamans, down from his Andean village to do his weekend business, hawking talismans and voodoo dolls to the local wizards.
Jess tried to pacify her terrors, to rationalize them. She knew these people: the real Peruvians, the country-folk and mountain-dwellers, the descendants of the Moche and the Chavin and the Cham Cham who believed and practised the ancient magic. They were not usually killers. If anything, they were all too inert and passive, ruefully resigned to the terrible forces of nature – drought and El Niño, white men and dictatorships.
But her rationalizations only got her so far. And then they gave out entirely. Jess was terrified.
And now something was happening. The curandero in the Abercrombie sweats had reached into a smelly plastic tank – to pull out a large wriggling lizard, almost a foot long.
The lizard writhed and yawned in his hand. With the air of someone who had done this many times before, the man took a lazy puff on his foul-smelling cigarette, shifted the butt in his mouth, exhaled pungent smoke through clenched yellow teeth, then stuck a knife in the animal. A pitiful, wheezing cry emanated from it. The curandero lifted up the lizard, which was now bleeding copiously from the half-gutted belly.
Hamuy kayman llank anaykita ruway!
The tone was abrupt: it sounded as if he was ordering someone into action. A boy stepped nervously from the shadows, and reached around Jess. She flinched at his touch. The feel of his grimy infant fingers on her tee shirt, under her denim jacket, was chillingly unpleasant. The boy lifted up her T-shirt, exposing her naked stomach.
The curandero hoisted the thrashing lizard over her stomach and dribbled copious warm blood from its riven gut so that the blood fell on her bare skin, like drops of melting red wax from a candle. The urge to clean it off immediately was unbearable.
‘Para, por favor. ¿Qué estás haciendo?’ Stop. Stop. What are you doing?
No reply. The shaman had his eyes closed. He circled the dying, writhing lizard, sprinkling its hot reptilian blood on Jess’s arms and thighs now. Then he vigorously squeezed and twisted the creature as if he was squeezing the last drops from a wet rag, flicking tiny drops of darker blood all over her breasts and her belly. At last he flung the dead reptile to the dirty floor.
‘Stop …’
Her voice was weak with fear. The curandero bent down and blew cigarette smoke over her chest and face, talking and muttering as he did, blowing more smoke on the lizard-blood pooled in her navel; then more hot smoke in her face, chanting and smoking, and blowing, his breath soiled with the smell of green soup.
Her attention was diverted to her own legs: Jess gazed down in horror.
The little boy was doing something down there. Rolling up her jeans, to expose her ankles. She gazed in urgent terror as he reached up and dipped his fingers in the blood on her stomach; then used it to draw lines around her ankles, like a surgeon marking the lines of incision.
Were they going to cut off her feet at the ankles?
Jessica screamed as loud as she was able.
The curandero sighed, took a fetid cloth and rammed it in her mouth. Jessica screamed, but silently now, muffled and helpless. The curandero’s boy had finished drawing blood circles on both her ankles. Straining against her bonds, Jess tried to cough out the cloth, but it was no good
. They really were going to do it: they were going to cut off her feet, like the mad and terrible Moche.
Lifting a tobacco-stained finger, the curandero ordered the boy back into the shadows. Then he took up the long vicious knife he had used to gut the lizard.
Jessica rocked violently back on the chair, trying to fling herself away, without success. She was stuck here, in this terrible shack, stuck with the painted caiman skulls, the meek little statues of Jesus, the bowls of raw coca paste.
She felt the first touch of the blade on her ankles. A shy and tentative gesture, explorational. Jessica closed her eyes and waited for the driving pain as the metal cut into her skin.
And then her bones.
29
Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London
Hannah McLintock scrolled through the page on her laptop. The room was getting dark, as afternoon declined into twilight; her blonde Celtic hair was illuminated by the glow of the screen. Adam sat back and watched as the two sisters leaned nearer to the computer on the kitchen table.
The older sister spoke. ‘So the porch at the church was covered with these Green Men? Like tiny gargoyles?’
Adam nodded. ‘Yes, and there were about fifty of them. And it’s the only chunk of the ancient Temple left, on the exterior. We know your father went there to look at the church. But he couldn’t get inside. So that’s what he must have come to see. The Green Men in the porch. There are, of course, Green Men at Rosslyn too.’
Hannah nodded, distracted. And scrolled down her screen a little more. Then she sat back, with an air of et voilà! ‘Here it is, in Wikipedia. The Green Man.’
‘Read it out,’ suggested Adam.
Hannah obliged. As she did Adam glanced around the dimly-lit kitchen. The fridge was large and brushed and steel. Fashionable cookbooks filled a shelf, next to tall glass vessels full of obscure pasta. The selection of olive oils was intense. A glamorous party invitation was stuck by magnets to the fridge door.