by Simon Toyne
Gabriel reached over the body and hauled two black canvas bags from the back of the boot. He laid them on the ground and unzipped the first. Inside were two large plastic bottles of bleach. He tipped the entire contents of one over the body, making sure to douse all the areas he had touched to destroy any trace of his own DNA. The second bottle was destined for the car’s interior. He wrenched open the rear passenger door.
Lying in the footwell, partially buried under the driver’s seat, was the bag Liv had been carrying when he’d picked her up. He lifted it out and dropped it on the ground before pouring bleach over anything she might have touched. Then he turned the key in the ignition and hit the window buttons. Three slid down all the way. One was already blown out. He poured the remainder of the bottle over the steering wheel, the gear stick and the driver’s seat, then dropped the empty bottle back into the boot. He took his silenced SIG P228 from his shoulder holster and put a 9mm round through the floor of the boot, then closed the lid and put another round through that.
He scanned the forest floor for a branch, snapped it in half and brought it over to the Renault. He depressed the clutch and slipped it into first gear, then pushed the stick against the throttle pedal until the engine was revving gently. He jammed the other end against the seat, making sure the steering wheel was centred and pointing straight ahead, then released the handbrake in a single fluid motion and stepped away.
His weight shifted from the clutch, the car dropped into gear. The front wheels started spinning on the soft ground. For a moment the car remained stationary, until each tyre caught hold of the stone beneath the mat of rotten mulch and it lurched forward. Gabriel watched it pick up speed. The wheels found air and the Renault tipped from view. He heard it strike the quarry wall then there was a slap as it hit the water, silencing the whining engine for ever.
Gabriel walked over to the edge and looked down. The car was on its back, drifting towards the centre of the pool and sinking as air escaped from the open windows and perforated boot. He watched until it disappeared beneath the surface of the water, leaving nothing behind but a weakening stream of bubbles and a small patch of oil. He cocked his head to one side like a bird of prey.
In the silence he could hear ripples slapping against the walls below him, getting softer as the memory of what caused them began to fade. It was finally so quiet that the phone ringing in his back pocket sounded like a siren. He snatched it out and flipped it open before it could do so a second time, glancing at the caller ID.
‘Hello, Mother,’ he said.
‘Gabriel,’ said Kathryn Mann. ‘I was beginning to wonder where you were.’
‘There was a problem at the airport.’ He glanced down again at the green water. ‘After the girl arrived, someone else showed up. I’ve had to do a bit of housekeeping.’
There was a pause as she took in the information.
‘Is she with you?’
‘No. But she’s not with them either.’
‘So where is she?’
‘Safe. She’ll be with the police by now. I’ll be back in Ruin in about twenty minutes. I’ll find her again.’
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
He hung up and slipped the phone back in his pocket.
He kicked the mulchy ground flat again where the wheels had churned it up, then walked over to the second canvas bag. He unzipped it and took out two wheels, several black tubular components and the engine of the portable trail bike he had been using for most of the summer on the Sudan project. Both the frame and the 100cc engine block were aluminium, which made the machine very light, and it folded away so neatly you could strap four of them to a pack horse and take them into some of the most inaccessible regions of the world. It took Gabriel a little less than five minutes to snap it all together.
He took a black crash helmet from the bag and replaced it with Liv’s holdall and the other empty bag. He zipped it shut, slung it over his shoulder and hopped on to the saddle, bouncing the springs to loosen them. It took a couple of kick starts to work fuel into the engine then it roared into life. Anyone listening would have mistaken it for the sound of a small chainsaw. He swung the bike round, dropped it into gear and headed back down the tyre ruts the Renault had made on the way in.
Chapter 53
Liv woke with a start, her heart beating wildly in her chest as if someone was trying to kick their way out of it. She’d just had one of those falling dreams, where you tip forward and jolt yourself awake before you hit the floor. Someone once told her that if you ever fell the whole way it meant you were dead. She’d always wondered how they knew this.
She raised her head from her arms, squinting against the brightness of the interview room.
A man was sitting in the chair opposite.
She jerked back instinctively. The chair creaked against the bolts in the floor that kept it firmly in place.
‘Morning,’ the man said. ‘Sleep well?’
She recognized the voice. ‘Arkadian?’
‘That’s me.’ His eyes dropped to a folder lying on the table between them, then back up again. ‘Question is, who are you?’
Liv looked down at the folder, feeling as though she’d just woken up on Planet Kafka. Next to it was a bag of bread rolls, a full mug of black coffee and what looked like a pack of wet-wipes.
‘Closest thing to a shower and breakfast I could rustle up at short notice,’ Arkadian said. ‘Help yourself.’
Liv reached for the bread, saw the state of her hands, and grabbed the wipes instead.
‘Now, I’m a fairly trusting man,’ Arkadian said, watching Liv scrub away at the dried mud and grime between her fingers, ‘so if someone tells me something, I’m inclined to believe them, until something else comes along to persuade me otherwise. Now you gave me a man’s name when I called you up, and that name checked out.’ He glanced down at the folder again.
Liv felt her throat tighten as she realized what it must contain.
‘But you also said that man was your brother – and that’s what I’m having a problem with.’ His brow creased, like a patient and indulgent father who’d been badly let down. ‘You also turn up at the airport in the middle of the night talking about people being ambushed and people being shot, and this also tests my faith, Miss Adamsen.’ He looked at her with sad eyes. ‘There have been no reports of any car shunts near the airport. No reports of gunfire. And, so far, no one has found any bodies lying on any roads. In fact, as of this moment, the only person claiming any of this happened is –’
Liv dropped her head and scratched violently at her mud-caked hair, going at it with both hands like a frenzied dog rousting a flea until a shower of what looked like tiny diamonds began to patter down on the tabletop. The frenzied scratching stopped as suddenly as it had begun and her green eyes blazed from her grime-streaked face. ‘You think I always carry bits of shot-out car window around in my hair, just in case I need to back up a story?’
Arkadian looked at the tiny crystals sparkling across the scarred surface.
Liv rubbed her eyes with cleanish hands that now smelt of baby lotion. ‘If you don’t believe I was nearly kidnapped, fine. I don’t care. All I want is to go see my brother, have a good cry, then make all the no-doubt tedious arrangements to take him back home.’
‘And I’d be more than happy to let you. But I’m not yet convinced that he is actually your brother and you’re not just some journalist looking for an exclusive on the big story.’
A look of confusion clouded Liv’s face. ‘What big story?’
Arkadian blinked, as if something had just clicked into place in his mind. ‘Answer me one question,’ he said. ‘Since I first spoke to you, have you seen a paper or caught any news reports?’
Liv shook her head.
‘Wait right there.’ Arkadian rapped on the window. The door opened and he disappeared.
Liv grabbed a bread roll from the bag. It was still warm. S
he devoured it while she looked out at the scruffy open-plan office through the crack in the door, heard the hum of phone calls and conversation, saw the edges of desks piled high with paperwork. It made her feel strangely at home.
Arkadian returned just as she was washing the first roll down with the coffee and reaching for a second. He slid yesterday’s evening edition of the newspaper across the table.
Liv saw the picture on the front page. Felt something inside her break, like it had on the lakeshore in Central Park. Her vision started to swim. She reached out to stroke the grainy image of the bearded man standing on top of the Citadel. A sob wrenched itself from somewhere deep inside her and tears finally began to fall.
Chapter 54
Dawn drew everyone back into the great cathedral hall for Matins, the last of the four nocturnes, to bear witness to the death of night and the birth of a new day. Because it carried with it so many powerful symbolic overtones of redemption, rebirth, deliverance from evil, and the triumph of light over darkness it was compulsory for everyone in the Citadel to attend.
Only today, something was different.
Athanasius noticed it when Father Malachi was in the middle of one of his rhetorical flights of fancy from the pulpit, and he glanced absently across the lines of red-cassocked guards standing in front of him. Despite the strictness of the rule that all should attend Matins, one of them was missing. At six foot five, Guillermo Rodriguez usually stood out, quite literally, from the others. But today he wasn’t there.
He remembered the sixty-two personnel files he’d delivered to the Abbot’s chamber the previous day. Sixty-two red files for sixty-two Carmina. He turned his body slightly as if listening intently to the sermon and conducted a silent head count.
The trapped air of the cathedral cave shook with the deep sound of every voice in the Citadel chanting the final doxology in the original language of their church. ‘Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name forever and ever. Blessed art thou, O LORD: teach me thy statutes.’
Athanasius just managed to finish as the lines of the congregation started to disperse. There were fifty-nine guards. Three were missing.
As the sun rose, the great windows lit up above the altar; God had opened his great eye and was gazing down upon his loyal congregation. Light had, once again, defeated darkness; the new day had begun.
Athanasius filed out of the cathedral in the crush of brown cassocks, his mind filled with the possibilities of his discovery. He knew a little of Brother Guillermo’s past and guessed now at the reason the Abbot might have singled him out. It was a thought that troubled him greatly. He had always prided himself on his ability to curb the Abbot’s impulsiveness. The fact that three of the guards were now missing made him anxious – not just because he feared the Abbot’s response to Brother Samuel’s death, but because he’d had to discover it for himself.
By revealing the prophecy to him in the forbidden vault the day before, which seemed to foretell the end of the Sacrament and a new beginning, he thought the Abbot had demonstrated a thawing of the crippling secrecy that he believed kept the Church frozen in the past. Now his suspicions suggested quite the opposite. Far from looking forward toward an enlightened future, he feared the Abbot might be returning to the medieval behaviour of their dark and violent past.
Chapter 55
Liv sat in silence in the harshly lit interview room.
She continued to stare at the picture on the newspaper while Arkadian gently filled her in on the details. When he finished he laid his hand on the blue folder by his side. ‘I’d like to show you some more photographs,’ he said. ‘We took them prior to the post-mortem. I realize this may be difficult and I’d fully understand if you don’t want to, but it may help us understand more about Samuel’s death.’
Liv nodded, wiping tears from her cheeks with her hand.
‘But I need to clear something up first.’
She looked up at him.
‘I need you to convince me that you’re really his sister.’
Liv felt exhaustion settling upon her. She didn’t want to get into her entire life story right now, not the way she was feeling, but she also wanted to know what had happened to her brother. ‘I only found out the truth myself after my father died.’ The things she had discovered eight years ago began to surface, things she usually kept locked away. ‘I had some pretty fierce identity issues on the boil. I’d never really been sure where I fitted. I know most kids go through a stage of thinking that they aren’t really part of their family, but I had a completely different name from my dad and my brother. I never knew my mother. I asked Dad about it one time, but it just made him go quiet and withdrawn. Later that night I heard him crying. In my over-imaginative teenage state I assumed it was because I’d picked the scab off some shameful family secret. I never asked him again.
‘When he died, my grief, or sense of loss, or whatever you want to call it, seemed to settle on this one unanswered question. I fixated on it. I felt like I’d not only lost my father but any chance of finding out who I really was.’
‘But you did find out,’ Arkadian said.
‘Yes,’ Liv replied. ‘Yes, I did.’
She took a deep breath and sank back into her past.
‘I’d just started my freshman year at Colombia. I was a journalism major. My first big assignment was a three-thousand-word investigative piece on a subject of my choice. I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Dig into the big family secret. I caught a Greyhound to West Virginia, to the place where my brother and I were born. It was one of those towns that could be listed under ‘Americana’ in the dictionary. One long main street. Stores with awnings stretching out over the sidewalk – most of them closed. It was called Paradise. Paradise, West Virginia. The Founding Fathers clearly had high hopes.
‘The summer we were born my mom and dad had been travelling all over, chasing work where they could find it. They were organic horticulturalists, ahead of their time in many ways. Mostly they ended up working regular gardening jobs, a few municipal positions here, some farm labouring there, anything to earn enough money to tide them over for when the babies came. They checked in whenever they were passing some local medical facility, but I think taking blood pressure and listening in to check on two little heartbeats was about as far as it went in those days. They didn’t have ultrasound scans. Mom and Dad had no idea there was anything wrong – until it was too late.
‘The “hospital” I was born in was a medical centre at the edge of town. When I went back it was standing in the shadow of a huge WalMart, which was no doubt responsible for all the empty stores on Main Street. It was one of those rural facilities whose main function is either to patch people up and ship ’em back out with a jar full of aspirin, or refer them on to proper hospitals. It was rudimentary enough when I found it, so God knows what it was like when Mom and Dad fetched up there.
‘I got chatting to the nurse at reception, explained what I was doing and what I was looking for. She showed me a storeroom stacked high with boxes of old medical records. It was a mess. Took me an hour just to find a box from the right year. Inside, the documents were all mixed up. I went through it and dug out the birth records and read through them. Mine wasn’t there, so I wrote down the names of all the staff who’d been around back then and convinced the receptionist to put me in touch with one of them, a nurse who’d worked at the centre in the eighties – Mrs Kintner. She’d been retired a few years but still lived locally. I went to see her. We sat on her porch drinking lemonade. She remembered my mother. Said she was beautiful. Said she’d fought for two days to give birth to us. They couldn’t see what the problem was until they took us out “the sunroof” as she described it – emergency C-section.’
She rose slowly from her chair.
‘I was born Sam Newton,’ she said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘My brother’s name was Sam Newton. We were born at the same time, on the same day, to the same parents. We’re twins.’ She turn
ed to her right and pulled her shirt from the waistband of her jeans. ‘But not ordinary twins.’
She lifted her shirt.
Arkadian saw a scar, white against her pale skin. A crucifix lying on its side. Identical to the one he’d found on the monk’s body.
‘Lots of brothers and sisters are described as being joined at the hip,’ Liv said. ‘We really were. Or joined at the side, at least. Our three lower ribs were fused. It’s what the supermarket tabloids luridly describe as Siamese twins. More accurately, we were what’s known as omphalopagus twins, where two infants are joined at the chest. Sometimes they also share major organs, like the liver. We just shared bone.’
Liv lowered her shirt and sank back on to her seat.
‘Nurse Kintner said it caused quite a stir. There’d never been a case of fused twins being different genders before, so the doctors got quite excited. Then, when my mother worsened, and so did we, they started to panic. She’d lost so much blood trying to give birth to us, suffered so much internal damage delivering an awkward-shaped double baby, that she never regained consciousness. I suppose they realized that they, or the hospital at least, were responsible, so they hushed everything up. She died eight days after we were born – the same day Samuel and I were surgically separated. It was only then that they discovered only one birth certificate had been issued. They quickly issued a new one for me, giving the date of our separation as my birth date. I suppose, technically, it was the day I became an individual. It was my father’s idea to name me in Mother’s memory. Liv Adamsen was her maiden name, the name of the girl he’d fallen in love with and married. That’s why he never wanted to talk about it.’
Arkadian took in the new information. Held it up against what he already knew, searching for any questions it still hadn’t answered. ‘How come your grandmother’s name was different from your mother’s?’